Ades World Tour

Prairie Home Compañero

2006-07-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

After our obligatory stops in the northern coast's two major cities, San Sebastain and Bilbao, Duncan and I decided to rent a car and head west into Cantabria and Asturias, regions known for small towns, beautiful coastlines, cider, rain, and the lushest of greens abound. We'd conceived of this drive with the utmost of optimism, hoping to simply get off at the right exit onto a small road that would lead us straight through the quaint, idyllic towns that we may have very well made up.

This was for the most part foolishness, but we made a good go at it, and this part of the country made driving an absolute pleasure. We stopped briefily in Santillana del Mar, a would-be cute little medieval town, but because of the sickening number of tourist shops selling absolute shit, we decided not to hang around after our tour of the church.

We moved on to spend the night in Comillas, which had the right look to it but felt a bit dead. It was too late to move on, so we found a room above a bar, and went out for a pre-dinner drink. The bar was pretty much empty, except for a couple of older respectable guys who had come in just before us for a glass of wine or two each, which they promptly downed in about ten minutes before moving on. As soon as they'd gotten their drinks, the bartender asked them something I couldn't hear, and soon after produced a plate of about 15 small baguette slices topped with shrimp smothered in what looked like a mayonnaise sauce. After eating a couple each, the guys looked at us and slid the plate over. We accepted, slid the late back after taking one each, and I thanked them repeatedly, thinking they had ordered food for themselves and were sharing. They sort of laughed in a friendly way as if the thanks were not necessary. 'It's just to snack on,' they said, 'it's for anyone, have as much as you want.' My puzzlement deepened when the bartender slid another full plate of the things in front of us and carried dirty glasses into the back without a word. My first thought was, 'Never leave this place.' I mean, peanuts are one thing, but a free plate full of shrimp appetizers is, I mean, that's just something else. We of course chose to ignore that in eating the whole plate we might has well have been chugging from full jar of Hellman's.

The next day in Comillas we visited a small house turned fancy restaurant called Capricho de Gaudi, built by that most famous of modernistas, of whom I knew nothing about at the time, in 1885. It was as weird as it was cool, and unfortunately this picture doesn't do justice to the colors.

From there we took a drive up to the Universidad Pontificia, which was designed by another modernista, and has become a complete waste of stunning architecture and surroundings.

We then took a tour (with what looked to be the Cantabrian Geriatric Society on their weekly outing) of the Marques de Comillas' house, a bewildering Gothic...thing.

Turns out the Marques was not exactly entitled to his...er...title- he was born poor, went to Cuba and married some rich guy's daughter, then multiplied his fortune and came back and called himself the Marques de Comillas. Which really inspired my lifelong dreams of one day proclaiming myself a noble. Marques is a good one, but I think I'd prefer Baron, perhaps Viscount if I'm really feeling saucy.

Before leaving Comillas we purchased several blocks of fresh cheese from a small market in the town's square, and after tasting every one of the cow's, sheep's, and goat's milk cheeses the guy had to offer. Two huge baguettes and a few bananas in the bag, and we had lunch to go. On our way west, we got off the road and headed along a winding road that led, well, up.

We didn't really know where we were going and didn't really care much. That's how the days were- slow, peaceful; if we'd see a road we liked, we took it. After twenty minutes of winding and praying nobody would be speeding around a corner on this particular 'two lane' road, we parked and walked up to a peak to start working on that cheese; the only sights the rolling green hils and the tiled roofs of the distant villages; the only sounds the cool grey breeze, the faint ringing of bells dangling from cattle and sheep collars, and, for twenty or so seconds of natural splendor, Duncan's pee hitting the grass.

You know, it occurs to me that I haven't taken time to properly introduce Duncan to those readers who don't know him, so, let me digress for a moment...
Ladies and Gentlemen, the esteemed Duncan Randolph White:

So, yeah. I think that's good.

After our picnic, we turned back, caught the main road and kept heading west to what would be our destination, lovely Cudillero, a beautiful fishing town that we deemed, for our purposes, Perfect, or at least, Close Enough.

We managed to find a reasonably priced room managed by a sweet-as-can-be old lady and her middle aged son. They informed us of a big festival going on that night in the next town over, about a 2km walk, which celebrated the local patron saint's day. Turns out our timing and town choice was perfect. Excited, we split a bottle of wine we'd purchased earlier, and went down to the local bars to get out night started. Here was our first introduction to Asturian cider. It is served in liter bottles that cost 2 Euro apiece. The cider is kind of tart, almost bitter, so it is poured from a great height into a tipped glass in small amounts, and then drunk immediately so that the foam gives it a fresher, crisper taste. This takes practice (the pouring, not the drinking- the latter I went to college for). The bartenders would reach one arm up in the air as high as it could go, then lower the glass in their other hand as low as it could go, and tilt it slightly. The liquid being poured would fall about four feet and land on a tiny strip of tilted glass, and if the pouring hand oscillated slightly or tilted the bottle more or less (impossible to not do a little), the stream would shift and the bartender, staring not at his top or bottom hand but the moving stream, would move the glass accordingly. The bartender usually pours your first drink, then leaves you the bottle, and if you want more you can ask, or you can try to do this yourself, and inevitably pour half of the bottle all over the floor and/or your shoes. But it's cheap as hell, so whatever. Needless to say, this is an incredibly entertaining way to get drunk.

As advised by everyone, we headed out to the festival at close to midnight. It was a nice quiet walk up a slight incline that we knew was over when we heard music blaring from the middle of nowhere. There, we found a big white tent, and locals of all ages. I mean from 1 to 75, midnight on a Friday, these people were out there. The older men and women danced in pairs the whole night, maintaining perfect rhythm without thinking, smiling or showing any signs of enjoyment. Young kids scurried about, a cheesy band led by a man in all black and a terrible toupee played salsa and pop music, and everyone got wasted. Duncan and I spent our time staring- puzzled- and pouring as much cider on the floor as we did down our throats. Here's us not being very good at it:

So, this whole shindig was kind of bizarre. Maybe it was the giant tent, maybe it was the binge drinking taking place directly alongside the wholesome family entertainment, maybe it was the rhythm guitar version of Sultans of Swing that had no vocals or lead guitar but still brought the house down, I don't know. The most amazing thing was that when we got tired at 3:30 in the morning, the old people were still dancing, the younguns were still scurrying, and poeple were still showing up. I thought we'd made it a late night, but apparently we were the first to go home, because the walk back was deserted. Little town Spain's big night out I guess. Way to go, I say. Way to go.

Eating Feet, Marinating Words

2006-06-05T05:07:00.000-07:00

At midday I met Duncan in Nice, where the wedding he attended took place, and we sat down at a cafe so a French waitress could treat us like idiots. We walked through the town, along the beach (which was made entirely of pebbles, actual small rocks that people were lying on, which, if this is where they go to relax, perhaps explains the French) and up to a nearby waterfall/city view. The town was pretty nice (absolutely no pun intended, it's just really unfortunately the exact word I want to use here), if extremely touristy and gaudy.

We spent the afternoon in the hotel of some of Duncan's family friends and were treated to some luxury- a pool, a nice bathroom to shower in- before heading to the train station that night. On the way, I saw three familiar German looking guys across the street. Unable to think of anything better, I shouted 'Hey Namibia!' The backpacker circuit in full force, these guys had made their way north after Napoli and were going to stay in Nice for a few days. They gave me email addresses and said they could probably help me find a place to stay in Munich, where they would be working.

We took an overnight train to Bordeaux and then another train to cross the border, and a third to get to San Sebastian, which was at the time covered in thick grey fog. This did not suit the city well. Our walk up to the castle and Jesus figure topped hill revealed a long sandy beach backed by boxy ugly modern apartment buildings that were on their way to looking pretty run down.

We were thinking about renting a car to take west to Bilbao and into Cantabria and Asturias, and I saw a rental car sign in an internet place so I stopped in to ask the attractive blonde at the desk about it, and another guy overheard my questions and stopped to listen. We talked for about five minutes in Spanish until she asked if we spoke English because it would be easier to explain, and I said yes and the other guy did as well. Turned out she was American, a graduate from Syracuse, had come to San Sebastian after graduating to learn Spanish, and was an idiot. After terribly misunderstanding what travel recommendations we were looking for, she kept saying, 'if you can pick up a bit of Spanish , you can just ask people along the way,' having forgotten that she was the one who suggested that we switch to English. She said that she came here instead of South America to learn 'real' Spanish, and then went on a long diatribe about how South American Spanish is corrupted by English. She cited as an example the fact that in Spain, they call a computer an ordenador, whereas in Mexico it is a computadora, because in English it is computer. I pointed out that the advent of the modern personal computer took place almost entirely in America, and ordenador is equally similar to the French ordinateur. She found this very confusing. She then repeated that she wanted to learn real Castillian Spanish, not some cheap Americanized version like in Mexico or Colombia. This I loved. I was about to ask her why, then, did she come to the Basque country, where they prefer their own completely non-Spanish language and are decidedly not a part of Spain, have violently sought independence from Spain, but realizing the argument would be lost, I opted for the diplomatic solution and put her head through the ordenador.

Later that afternoon we stopped in a tapas bar, where we ate a little meat stuffed thing, some kind of shrimp salady (using the America version of the word 'salad,' meaning smothered in mayo) thing, and I finished the snack off with a big bite of my foot. When the 50 something friendly carmudgeon sort of bartenders served us our glass of the local cider, and poured themselves one, I lifted my glass towards them and said, 'que viva Espana,' forgetting where I was. After a minute, the bartender said, brusquely, 'this is not Spain.' Not realizing my mistake, and without any idea what he was talking about, I said, 'What?' 'This is not Spain, it is Euskedia' (the Basque word for the Basque country). I apologized sincerely, wondered if Basque terrorists ever pose as aging barmen, and slowly backed out the door.

We met a friendly Spanish couple that night and sampled the local wines, which are cheap and good, and the next day we set out on the bus for Bilbao. The highlight there is the Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry, a building so bizarre and incomprehensible, and yet so sublime that the art on display inside hardly seemed worthy.

Some of the exhibits were very impressive, but others, a 'sculpture' that was a large undecorated steel plate, square on three sides and curved on the other, for example, were of the kind that makes you wonder if something becomes art when somebody hangs it on a wall. And still others- a large spiderweb-like metal cage enclosing a horizontal screen that repeated a 12 minute video of a young Eastern European man receivng electroshock therapy and being held down at the face by a nurse whose right hand had only little stumps for fingers, but he could use the fleshy pads of his mangled or birth defected palmy stubs to grip the screaming and contorting patient's features as necessary- that make you wish all modern artists were content to suspend scrap metal. And then you wonder why you can't stop watching.

On the walk back to our hotel from the museum we were met by a parade of mostly young, poorly dressed (by choice), chanting Basques, who looked like they had been recently been attacked by a mob of disgruntled barbers (more on Spanish haircuts to come), and whose front rank held a white cloth banner that said something in Euskedi about someone named Sandra.

I asked a guy smoking while he watched what they were going on about, and he explained that they were demanding the immediate release of a well known, vocal Basque activist/terrorist, who may have played a leading role in several deadly bombings. I asked how long she had been in jail, and he said, 'she was arrested the day before yesterday. She was brought in to face the judge in Madrid who will decide if there is enough evidence to put her on trial.' 'When will he decide?' 'Tomorrow.' I have to give credit for the spontaneous mobilization of the protesters here, but, um, not to be politically insensitive or anything, but that is just fucking crazy. Shouldn't they be waiting until after the judge decides whether she will even face trial? I imagine their chant went something like 'NO TO TIMELY LEGAL PROCEDURE. RELEASE THE FAIRLY TREATED SUSPECTED MURDERER. NO TO LEGAL PROCEDURE...'

The Basques we met were all very friendly and generous, but many projected their pride on too big a screen for me to find it admirable. Understandably, there is a historical context of language and culture oppression that you don't hear much about these days, but the independence seekers seem concerned with what distinguishes them from the Spanish rather than what unites them. They vehemently cling to their language, which is spoken nowhere else in the world-language being primarily a system of communication- instead of embracing an international language that affords them a connection to a broad global community. I understand that language is also a strong symbol of identity, but the very need to express a distinct identity from those who are so otherwise culturally similar suggests a worldview that is best eradicated. This is indeed a vibrant and warm culture, but one that is disappointingly-because they are educated enough to know better- committed to difference in a way that stinks of regressive tribalism. And now, my hypocrisy: when I meet new people and they ask me where I am from, I always say 'New York' instead of 'America.' When they ask me about Bush and America's political climate, I say that New York is New York, and not America. That revealed, you won't ever see a New Yorker clamoring for independence from the red beast of the middle, or wasting his precious time to blow up anyone from said beastly red middle for said independence. Though perhaps I will be eating these words come November '08.

Cinque Terre

2006-05-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Cinque Terre are five small harbor towns clustered along the Northwestern Italian coast and connected by a footpath. Each town has its own distinct look and feel, but they all share the brightly tackily colored and boxy architecture, that anywhere else would be vomit inducing, but here just seems to work. From the train I got off at the second town from the bottom, Manarola, but was unable to find cheap accomodation. I did, however, find eight or ten hole in the wall joints selling foccacia smothered in olives or cheese or meat or whatever. I am usually good about getting my bags into a room before heading back out to chow, but unable to contain myself, I just flung my bags into a corner of the street and ate my heart out. For the three or four days I was in the Cinque Terre, I don't think I ate a single foccacia unrelated meal.

I was told I could find something cheap in the southernmost town, Riomaggiore, and indeed, as soon as I got off the train, I was stopped by am old woman, who at first glance looked completely insane, but turned out to only be a little batty, and maybe a tiny bit smelly, but a real sweetheart. Her name was Mamma Rozza, and she had a sort of unofficial hostel of questionable habitability, but it was cleanish and cheap and I got my own room, and was able to wash everything I own for free.

During my time in Riomaggiore, I ate foccacia, drank espresso, ate some more foccacia, read, and watched sunsets from the rock formations by the harbor.

One evening I met four fourty something Austrian bikers who bought me a beer and enlightened me on the pleasures of riding unbelievably fast Italian motorcycles on unbelievably windy roads while wearing unbelievably colored jackets. At night I drank at the only bar in town, where an unfriendly bartender became my best friend when I recognized Toots and the Maytals, and then a Clapton cover of a Stevie Ray Vaughn song. He said, 'It's good to meet an American who knows good music and doesn't scream a lot.' I then sat down and chatted with six American college students from North Carolina who asked the owner/bartender if there was a 'real bar' they could go to after and later proceeded to get drunk and scream lots. I guess he had a point. At the bar I made a couple of friends, Gian Lucca and Luigi, who were too cool for me to not go find the next few nights, even though I was supposed to be saving money.

Luigi spoke Spanish, and Gian Lucca kind of spoke English, and this guy took our picture.

The next day I hiked from Riomaggiore to the last town, Monterosso, with a couple of Kiwi sisters I'd met the day before. The walk was stunning and just difficult enough, and in each town we consumed something as if to make the visit official. Gelato here, foccacia there, espresso there, foccacia and gelato there, focaccia and focaccia there.

That night at Mamma Rozza's I met a pair of American girls and struggled to keep interested. (One was about to move to China with her husband to be missionaries, and you can just imagine the plethora of common interests that sprouted from that little factoid, and the other was in her sixth year of undergrad at Eastern Michigan state. Yeah.). I also met a group of Erasmus students, Erasmus being the European student exchange program, who were studying in Bologna. Four Portuguese and a German. I couldn't have had an easier time getting along with them.

We played silly word games for about five hours and talked about whatever. I was impressed by how well the Portuguese spoke English, and found out that they all learn English from a very young age in school. I asked what they thought about that, and one said that he thought that eventually English will be the primary language everywhere, and that it kind of makes sense to have an international standard. I asked how they felt that people from English speaking countries rarely speak another language. They said it's annoying, but they don't mind being taught English. After a while, one, Teresa, said, 'it's nice to finally meet a nice American...' and then added a shrugged 'for once.' I laughed and said I was starting to feel the same way. Teresa then explained that there is an American military base near where she grew up, and most of the Americans she meets aren't great. This I could understand. I would imagine that the troops stationed in Portugal don't have much on their plates, and thus have lots of time to devote to being meatheads.

Later that night, the German guy Nicolas asked if I've felt weird being an American out in the World right now, and it was the first time I'd thought about it since I'd left. The fact is that everyone has been incredibly friendly, and loved hearing that I was from New York. And once I shit on Bush, they let their guard down and open up completely. But even Nicolas, who couldn't have been nicer, said that there really is an anti-American sentiment in Europe, and he wanted to know if I've experienced that. Unfortunately, we are completely underrepresented by friendly open minded travellers, and overrepresented by our military, our President, and tour groups. And none of those makes the best ambassador, it turns out. An individual American is one thing- a welcome thing- America, or AMERICA, is a different thing entirely.

After three days of beautiful weather, fantastic people, and enough bread, olives and cheese to last a lifetime, I set out from Cinque Terre to meet Duncan in Nice and continue on to Spain, for, well, some more bread, olives and cheese.

You're Shakin My Confidence Baby

2006-05-26T14:23:00.000-07:00

When I got off the train at Pollina, the station was empty, except for two station employees. At first they ignored me, so I just picked a direction and started walking off the platform. They whistled behind me and said something in Italian, which I presume was, 'hey asshole, where do you think you're going?' 'Pollina?' I asked. They smiled and looked at each other and waved me over and explained that thought I was technically headed in the right direction, the road to Pollina went from the other way and kind of wound around for 2km before getting there. They also explained six or seven other things about it, but they lost me pretty quickly. Love friendly Italians. They confirmed the presence of hotels there, at least, so I set off on the windy road- meant explicitly for cars, I should add. Six gallons of sweat and half an hour of wondering just what the fuck I was doing here later I got to what looked like a main drag of a street, where everything was closed, it being Easter Monday. The town was plain and unnatractive, far from the quaint and distinctly architectured Sicilian village I'd hoped for. Huh. Interesting. At least it was on the water.

After crossing through the entire town, I finally stumbled upon one hotel, and a sign for another one, and opted for the latter, assuming the one off the main street would be cheaper. I passed by it but was waved in the right direction by some locals, and finally found the doorbell. After ringing, waiting, ringing, waiting and ringing, I backed away and looked around. Nothing. From up above me I heard a woman's voice.
'Sonna, sonna,' she said, and I looked up to a third floor porch where one elderly woman stood, talking to another woman on the third floor porch of the building across the street.
'Sonna, sonna' she said again as she made the push the doorbell motion. I rang a few more times, forcefully now.
Then she started shouting down the street around the corner for about a minute, until she said something to me that implied that it was all taken care of. A minute later and a thin but older woman with a mustache I could only dream of sporting opened the door with a smile. Priceless. The ladies on the porch continued their conversation, and before I walked in, I accidentally dropped a penny and reached over to pick it up, when I saw out of the corner of my eye a Black man walking by eating fried chicken, who was almost struck by a swerving truck driven by an Asian woman, who screeched to a halt right before a soaking wet Mexican hopped onto the flatbed and said, 'need any drywall, meng?'

I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering why I had been sent to this place, but was temporarily entertained when some young (mostly) people rolled a ping pong table out into the middle of the street, started blasting music from a car stereo and began playing competitive mixed doubles with vivacity and joy that I thought was only attainable after 4-12 Natural lights.

It was pretty fun to watch, if only because their energy was contagious. That night I splurged on a Sicilian dinner of Pasta alla Pescatore, which was loaded with so much fresh mussels, squid, and fish that the pasta was gone well before the seafood was. After the wine and the food, I sat and wondered why I was here, and when the last time I had a conversation I understood was. I came up with answers to neither.

But the next day, I figured out that I was only maybe actually in Pollina. In the distance I could see a town on a hill, and there were signs that pointed sort of that way and said Pollina.

Asking my mustachioed hotel proprietor 'Pollina?' and lots of pointing at the ground and at that distant hill helped me understand that they were both called Pollina, or something, and that to get up there, I could take a bus at 2:30. One question answered. At 2:30 a big tour bus packed with middle aged Germans, presumably coming from Cefalu, swung through and brought me up to this awesome little town.

Tiny windy little alleys, a medieval theater and tower, a bunch of old Italian men gesturing and talking about God only knows what, considering they live on a huge hill twelve kilometeres from the nearest tiny fucking town, the place, minus the fifty ill fitting bright colored shirted and white tennis shorted despite the fog and brisk weather Germans, was the small town wonder I was looking for. The whole tour bus thing must be bizarre for the locals- they live in a town of a couple hundred people, but every day fifty Germans wander around for the afternoon.

From Pollina I took the train to Siracusa, which the Lonely Planet described as a highlight of a visit to Sicily, and coming off of two highlights, I was pretty psyched. Indeed, the paltry one day I'd alloted to Siracusa would be completely insufficient, and I could have stayed for weeks. The air was perfect, the scenery perfecter. The night I arrived, I wandered by an open door that had this inside:

In case you can't make them out, those are old peope dancing. I could have stayed there for hours watching, but after five minutes I felt creepy. Still, there is something inherently enjoyable about watching old Italians enjoy life.

The next day I got up early to make the most of my short time. The tourist attractions were split between the island of Ortigia, and the archeological zone across the city. In the morning I wandered through Ortigia, eyes wide and camera poised, unable to stop myself from taking pictures at every turn through the alleys and piazzas and along the coast.

The whole place was a veritable feast of architectural wonder, and I hadn't even gotten to the secondi piatti: Siracusa's extravagant Duomo. When I arrived, the sight was almost too awesome to behold:

Nemesis thy name is scaffold. On the inside it was nice though.

Despite that disappointment, Siracusa was an exercise in retinal orgasmica. After my a'wanderin' I spent an hour at the old castle on the water, and even waited until a large tour group passed by so I could sneak up past a barrier to get a prohibited view from the turret.

The photo was just okay, but the tingly exhilaration of minor mischief was pathetically satisfying, especially after I hopped the barrier on the way out and kind of spilled into the main hall where two people looked up after the thwap-crack of the wooden gate flapping after released from the burden of my weight, and gave me a puzzled where-did-you-come-from? look while I swept the dust off my trousers and said 'buon giorno.' (I feel that dust tends to be swept off of trousers, as opposed to pants).

I then walked across the city to the archeological zone, where they've got Greek and Roman stuff, some cool caves backed by impressive views over the city, and the Ear of Dionysus, a big cave supposedly named by Caravaggio.

Siracusa might be the most beautiful city I've ever seen, and certainly wins the I am a dickhead for not coming here with more time award. Still, with the Cinque Terre on my next day's plate, I couldn't lament for too long.

You're Breakin My Heart

2006-05-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

On the train from Napoli to Palermo I shared a sleeping cabin with a friendly middle aged Italian couple who didn't speak a word of English and didn't understand any Spanish, much like most of the Italians I would meet. This seemed amazing to me, considering I could indeed understand some Italian- at first I thought that they knew they couldn't speak the language they were hearing, so they wouldn't even dare to try. But then I realized it was because they just preferred to do all the talking. Despite my minimal comprehension and puzzled looks, these two people did not stop trying to talk to me while we were awake. This reduced, all too incompletely, the awkwardness of sharing a room with a married couple who would have otherwise been alone.

When I got to Palermo, I scoured the platform for any backpackers who might know of a place to stay. I saw one girl with a backpack who walked up to the coffee stand and tried ordering. She pointed to a sign that advertised a price for a coffee, a juice and a brioche. They guy pointed at the rack of pastries in front of him and responded with, 'brioche alla marmelada?' She looked stunned. She stared, he stared back. She threw up her hands into an exasperated shrug and said, 'sure, whatever,' as if communication was impossible. He did not understand 'sure, whatever.' Half not believing her lak of ability/attempt to comprehend, but delighted, as this was my in, I said, 'he wants to know if you want one with marmelade on the inside.' She said, 'oh, okay, thanks' and nodded yes to him. After the standard introductions I found out that her hotel's manager was coming to pick her up, and she didn't mind if I waited to see if they had anything left. She asked, 'so how did you learn Italian?' I said, 'well, I don't, I just...understood... that... uh... that happened to me yesterday.' When her hotel guy arrived, he said he was totally full but he sort of pointed me towards a place that might be cheap. They were full. The place I found after that was 40 Euros per night, way too much. The full/expensive pattern repeated about twelve times. I found a place about three hours later, sweaty as could be, and it was about as nice as the place in Napoli, but sans syringe drawings, and it was cheap enough, I guess.

That morning I found Palermo to be empty, and relatively drab, but mostly because of the weather. After a snack of a few Arancini, breaded and fried balls of rice and meat and peas and sauce, mmmmmm, I happened upon a large photographic exhibit called The Earth From Above, probably the single best photographic display I've ever seen. The project's focus is sustainable development, and its subjects range from natural and man made wonders, to methods of agriculture across the world, to endangered animal species, to industrial products and by-products. Incorporating informative paragraphs describing each photo, it demonstrates the way humans interact with the environment in both positive and negative ways, and without beating you over the head with its point, shows you what incredible things we are doing and what we need to change. I highly recommend a visit to the website, though the photos are much more impressive when in a huge display instead of a screen. You could still kill a whole work day here: http://www.yannarthusbertrand.com/index_new.htm
I like the Worker Resting on Bales of Cotton from the Cote d'Ivoire.
As I wandered through the exhibits the any Palermitans, as well as the sun, slowly crept out and by late afternoon the squqare was filled with people and shine, and the city began to reveal its beauty.

I found the Sicilians to be attractive, warm, and less prone to stupid haircuts, a relief. However, their bag ladies, and the marketing of their political candidates are puzzling.

For those of you who don't read Italian, the caption says, 'one confused frowning man for Sicily, two microphones for Guido Loporto.'

The city was active and vibrant, but not bustly, and as I continued to walk, stopping at the Quattro Canti, (Due of which I bothered to photograph)

and the Fontana Pretoria

I felt like I could stay for a month. Unfortunately I had dwelled a little too long at the photos and just barely caught the very end of Easter mass at the huge Cathedral, which is supposedly a prime example of Sicily's unique Arab-Norman architecture.

I never thought I'd lament missing church, but, there you have it.

From Palermo I decided to head to a tiny town called Pollina, which had been recommended to me by the Italian girl I'd met on the boat in Turkey. Along the way, the train stopped in Cefalu, a tourist town I'd read about that sounded quite nice, and as the train lingered about thirty seconds longer than expected at the station, I grabbed my bags and hopped off. That was dumb. Cefalu was really nice, but all of the available rooms were way out of my budget. After about two hours of wandering/schlepping, I ate a calzone and walked back to the train station.

Luckily the train came pretty soon, and Pollina was only about fifteen minutes along the coast. Here I learned that on the older, local Italian trains, the doors don't open automatically- you have to push a button. Or, in my case, you have to stand behind a middle aged German couple while they search and push everything circular they see for the first fifteen of the thirty seconds that the train will wait before starting again, while you stand, positive you could figure it out if you could just get in there, cause how many passenger pushable buttons can there be?, and you try to squeeze in but these are some thick, stout Germans, so you back away again and watch as the station starts to move, then you account for the relativity of visual perspective, and the conductor arrives to tell you, Gunther, Ilse, to get off at the next stop and come back on the next train, which will arrive, according to the schedule he produces, in twenty minutes at 14:36, but he neglects to inform you that this is not the holiday schedule, of which you are completely unaware, both the it still being a holiday and the existence of a distinct schedule, which is concerned about as little with your awareness as it is with a 14:36 train; after the conductor condescendingly pushes the button you get off, and sit here:

reading Atlas Shrugged for two hours, while the Germans, after the first train does not arrive as scheduled, set off to walk the supposedly 6km back to Pollina, which you are just not about to carry your bags across, as neither Gunther nor Ilse appears equipped to manufacture English sentences, hefeweizen, or sauerbraten, the only bait within your estimate of their productive capability that might be worth biting, other than a lovely blonde blue eyed Freulein, but that immediately goes back to the productive capability issue, and its theoretical irreconcilability with anything remotely lovely, given the independent but would in this case be combined genes that produced four 16 pound black forest hams for calf muscles that carry these two brick walls posing as friendly humans away, so you wave, and sit, until some friendly Italians arrive to talk loudly, wave their hands about, and inform you of the holiday schedule, but that the train would be coming soon, and yes, Pollina has hotels. In short, you must push the button to open the doors.

Aww, Christ

2006-05-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

The ferry to Bari, Italy left from Patra that evening, and I had to take a few trains to get there. I validated my Eurail pass, which I was pleased to know actually worked, and got on board. Having not been doing much talking- at least not worthwhile talking- since the boat trip, I was hoping to run into some fellow backpackers on their way to the ferry. Sure enough, right across the aisle of the empty train was a young American couple. After listening for a while I asked one of the questions that really just means 'hi, I speak English.' Turned out they were juniors in college on spring break from their abroad program. Great. Well, at least they were travelling. They were also very nice, though very young seeming young kids (as opposed to my many years of wisdom, right?). When I asked where they stayed in Athens, the girl grunted and said, 'oh God, this awful hostel. Athens International.' I said, 'oh that's funny, I was there too. I didn't mind it.'
'Oh well, I guess it was whatever, but the neighborhood was full of prostitutes and junkies.'
Quoth the Lonely Planet "The Hostel is clean and cheap, as long as you don't mind the junkies and prostitutes that roam the neighborhood."
'Oh that's funny I think I read something like that in the Lonely Planet.'
'Yeah we have that too. I don't know...I just thought it was sketch. Also the room's bathroom was so weird...and the shower curtain made the shower so small.'
I had been so surprised to find a bathroom-one with a shower in it, no less-inside the room that I had walked into the hallway in my towel and stared at the doors trying to figure out which was the shower until a staff girl came up the stairs, gave me a puzzled look and took me inside the room to show me the bathroom.
'Huh. I was just happy it was clean.'
'Yeah I guess it wasn't so bad.'
'I didn't actually see any prostitutes, did you guys?'
'No.'
'Oh, I see. You're pretty much a blank slate for others' opinions?'
'Pretty much.'
No but they were good people and I ended up hanging out with them throughout the evening on the ferry, along with another girl on spring break from her semester abroad, who was studying in Copenhagen and seemed to be a real person already.

The ferry was comically nice. It had two bars, a dance floor, a casino (just slot machines, thank god, or I would be writing this from home), and several fancy shmancy restaurants. The boat was also empty, so the couches in the lounge areas were all empty and ripe for sleeping. Except that the staff wouldn't let us lie down there, the heartless pricks. They told us we had to go to the airplane seats, or pay for a cabin. The only place with couches that was dark enough to escape attention was right next to the dance floor, where they were blasting heinous dance pop. Real sick sonsabitches, these ferry people, but I respected the challenge. I ended up finding a couch that was facing away from the walkway to the dance floor, so if I just lay flat enough or right up against the couch back the boat staff wouldn't see me. The music was still terribly loud, but I was content to be prone, and I'm pretty sure I slept through some part of the night.

As soon as I got to Italy, poorly slept and grimy, I felt a surge of pure bliss. This happens occasionally to me on this trip. Often it has to do with arriving in a new place, sometimes it comes from making plans with a person after not meeting anyone for a while, but other times it is completely inexplicable. My three companions hopped in a cab to the train station so they could catch a train, so I just walked into the first coffee shop I saw and ordered an Espresso. In Italian. Not fucking Greek. I could read the menu, I could sort of understand what people were saying, and they were Italians. Life was good. I was the only person to sit down to drink my coffee. Everyone else stood at the bar-I don't think breakfast really exists in Italy. I asked someone for directions and soon found three people trying to help, or just thinking that first guy was wrong and wanting to tell him so. Either none of them knew the way or I could walk in any direction that wasn't water and get to the train station, because they were all saying different things. Well, it was better than the Greeks, I thought. I asked at the ferry office three doors down where they speak everything and, indeed, I could walk in any direction away from the penninsula and I would eventually arrive at the train station. As I walked the three kilometers through the port town of Bari, I hid my shiteating grin frequently to ask people if I was going the right way, thrilled that I could, that they would help, and that I could understand their answers. Fucking Greek(s).

I took a train to Taranto, where I would have to get a bus to Napoli. While waiting for the bus I met three German looking guys who were actually from Namibia. 'Ohhh, cool,' I said, the same way people from the West Coast react when I say I went to Amherst. 'It's just west of South Africa,' one said, either presuming-correctly- my American style ignorance of world geography or knowing all to well the sound of feigned recognition. 'Oh yeah, sure.' On the bus I met an Australian couple- adorably dorky but really nice- and an American guy from California, finally, the first other American I'd met who was travelling for a long time, about five months. He was in a similar situation, having applied to graduate schools to study Architecture before taking off to see some of The World. On the bus we were informed that it might be incredibly difficult to find a spot in a hostel in Napoli, it being Easter weeked. 'Fucking Christ,' I kept to myself, but apparently he heard me: Zach let me tag along on the way to the hostel he had a flyer for, and at the first hostel, the guy told us it was full, and then proceeded to do us the favor of caling every hostel in the city that he knew of, and they were all full. Sweet. After walking around for about an hour finding out all the hotels were too expensive, we happened upon a little one star that was run by some Nigerian women who were more than happy to give us a room and make fun of us in French while we were still present; each and every one of our departures from, and even some entrances to the reception area caused uproarious laughter. It occurred to me at this point that I hadn't seen a black person in months, and no more than four or five throughout the entire trip. I have no explanation for that, but it's interesting.

Our room cost 45 Euro, and was equipped with a sink, a shower, and a bide. That is all. I couldn't explain that one either, so I peed in it. Was that wrong?

On my way out of the room I noticed a simple sign on the wall written on a white piece of paper with a bic pen. It was all in Italian and looked like a bullet pointed list, possibly of the hotel's do's and don't's. Here's the funny part: a huge careful drawing of a syringe was the focal point of the sign, and there was no graphic indication of whether that was considered a 'do' or a 'don't.' Lovely. On our way out, the woman at the desk asked us to leave the key. We looked, um, uncomfortable, with this arrangement. French was spoken. Laughs were had. She said, 'you can't take the key.' Another one of the women said, 'don't worry, no one is going to touch your things.' More laughter. Oh, well, now I'm reassured. It did occur to me on the way out that a few well selected photographs of this place sent to the right people might get me a whole lot of hotel money: 'Dear Mom and Dad, arrived safe in Napoli. I am sharing a room in this lovely crackhouse with some dude I met on a bus today. Please send my freebase pipe. No time to write more, Luigi's fixing me a hit.' Sadly, I forgot to take pictures.

Zach and I had pizza at Don Michele Pizzeria, supposedly one of the best in Napoli, and by extension, The World, as pizza was supposedly invented here. It was very good, cheap, and filling. As for the best in the world thing, I'll leave it at I miss New York.

Zach left for Sorrento the next morning, and since then we've exchanged only a couple of emails. It was one of those hilarious and bizarre acquaintance episodes that can only come from long term travel. Four hours after meeting, we were sharing a room, and the next morning, we were parting ways, probably for good, though we might cross paths in Andalucia.

My train to Palermo, in Sicily, left late that night, so I stored my bag at the train station and went walking around Napoli. My first stop was the duomo, which was impressive, of course.

It's funny how much I enjoy sitting in churches. I guess they build them like that for a reason don't they? As I sat, I lamented over the fact that almost all of the World's most beautiful buildings are religious. But I suppose that it makes sense that secular edifices are not constructed to project that sort of magical aura- who is going to come to take solace while seated in the pews of the Temple of Posthumous Eternal Nothingess or donate their spare change to light a candle before the Altar of Existential Depression?

And then I found the most unfortunate of the modern secular institutions in one of Napoli's large piazzas: a live taping of MTV's Total Request Live.

The place was mobbed by Italian teeny boppers, and the day's special guest was Alessandro de la somethingi, an Italian pop rap star. The action on stage was broken up to fit into the television program, so every five minutes some girls would scream, some dickhead would ask if people were having fun, some more girls would scream, and then everything would stop again.
As I watched I noticed two things. One, the hopelessness of youth culture is not confined to America. Two, Italian men have the stupidest fucking haircuts immaginable. They are comprised of three distinct elements: 1. The mullet 2. Long hair on the top of the head fixed upward using what looks to be rubber cement 3. Bangs. If you're the least bit cool, your hair will combine two of these elements (any two, take your pick), but if you've got all three, you can expect women to throw themselves at you.

I hadn't wanted to pay to store my little guitar, so as I sat this kid came up and asked if he could play it. Right away he asked if I would give it to him as a gift. I said no. He then proceeded to take it around to everybody sitting there watching the 'show' and strum it loudly and obnoxiously in their faces, and then ask for money. I let him do this, amused by people's annoyed reactions to him, but once he took it out of sight I had to go catch him and take it back.

That afternoon I visited Napoli's archeological museum, which featured a tour of the Gabineto Secreto, a display of ancient pornographic paintings found at Pompeii and elsewhere. That the Catholic Church managed to impose its notions of sexual propriety in this place, considering the shit depicted here is utterly baffling.

For dinner I went to another pizzeria considered to be one of Napoli's best, and it was absolutely excellent, and the pizza was too big for me to finish.

Napoli is a cool city: narrow streets and crazy drivers keep you on your toes, absolutely gorgeous women and greasy men warrant gawks of all kinds; it is edgy, raw, dirty and fast paced- almost as much as New York- but it is not without its beautiful spots and historical and cultural significance.

But I was Sicily bound. My overnight train would deposit me in Palermo on Easter Sunday with no place to stay, no map of the city and no tourist office open to guide me. Why do I keep doing this to myself? Well, at least I'd gone to church.

Misery Loves Company

2006-05-16T05:21:00.000-07:00

The girl on the bed above woke up as I came in and put my things down. She asked the time, and then the standard who are you questions. When she got out of bed, I saw that she had the squat, bottom-heavy frame of a garden gnome, and the buck toothed grin to match. After ten minutes of introductory chit chat, I learned that a garden gnome, inanimate or not, would make a far more interesting sightseeing companion as well-especially if Amelie had anything to do with it (though I suppose that visiting Athens with an animate garden gnome would be hard to top). She was a French Canadian (strike one) Au pair (ball one), who hadn't been to or thought about going to college (strike two), and one of her huge chompers was noticeably more yellow than all the rest (slow trickling ground out to the pitcher...As she galumphed back to the dugout, her low pitched voice, which farted words at a pace that suggested a recent donkey kick to the forehead, caused the manager to kick her off the team).

After showering and dressing quickly, I said, "well I'm only here for a day, so I'm going to head off to the sights," knowing that she had two days and wasn't all that into motion. "Okay, well, maybe I'll run into you at the Acropolis," she said. "Yeah..."

The heart of Athens is relatively small, and after a coffee and some spinach stuffed pastry thing at a coffee shop (where a crazy old Greek man, who may have been at the time considering a career as a crazy old Greek bum, sat at my outdoor table and spouted what I presume were words of wisdom, without even the slightest inkling that I had no idea what he was talking about, since he never so much as paused to see if I had anything to say, even continuing to ramble without so much as an incomprehensible farewell or acknowledgement of my presence as he walked away), I began to walk south to the center of tourist activity, where all of the historic sites are clustered. I stopped briefly to stroll through a fish and meat market I saw on the way, a sight that is interesting in every city, usually because it is a good chance to see the locals doing their thing, but this one also because it featured innumerable whole hanging lamb (I think) carcasses.

A few minutes later and I was at the base of the hill upon which the Acropolis stands, pretty excited to see the Parthenon, which I was expecting to be the most impressive ruins I would ever see.

No sooner had I reached the top of the hill and approached the ticket window than a voice behind me, which I could only hope was Eeyore's and not whose I knew it was, said, "oh hello." Great. She took the train here. Well, I had been alone for a few days, so it would at least be company.

The Acropolis was horribly mobbed. Worse, it was mobbed by middle school groups, i.e. loud, marauding bands of uncontrollable hormones, enthusiastic disinterest, and confident irreverance. The rest of the human interference present was made up of American college students on spring break from their abroad programs, okay fine, at least they're trying, and ignorant middle aged Americans from those parts of the country. Yes, you know which parts I mean. I hadn't seen a fellow patriot in weeks, if not months, and the irony struck me as suddenly as the thought: 'fucking Americans.'

The main structures, the entry gates and the Parthenon, were pretty much covered in scaffolding, my new nemesis, and to be honest, weren't really all that impressive. Okay, The Parthenon is really old, and that it still stands- sort of- is impressive. But in and of itself, it fails to project a sort of aura, albeit perhaps because of the eyesore that comes with necessary restoration work, that would make it anything more than a bunch of columns. The picture does it more justice than it deserves.

Next to the Parthenon is the Erechtheion (no clue), whose six Caryatids support its southern portico (and here, my lovely companion demonstrates that she also sucks at taking pictures).

These would have been cool, if they were real. These are instead casts that replaced the originals, four of which were moved inside the on site museum, with good reason I suppose, but, what the fuck? One of the originals is in the British Museum in London, because they stole it way back when...when...I don't know, during lunch one day when all the Greeks were smoking cigarretes and sitting around, and the location of the other one remains a mystery. Not to them, but to me. There were six. One is in England, four are inside the museum. I felt like I was the only one doing the math.

The museum holds many impressive artifacts that I couldn't learn about because the place was a fucking madhouse, and nobody stopped moving long enough to look at or read anything. It was like they were all making their obligatory pass so they could pretend that they learned. Trying to stop and appreciate anything was like trying to hang on to a twig that extended into a white water river of Greek acne and Texas blubber.

From the entrance to the Acropolis, we did get a good view of the Theater of Herodes Atticus, which had been well restored, but completely blocked off so you couldn't get inside, which was crap.

From the Acropolis we began a tour of the other various must see monuments: the Theater of Dionysus, the Temple of Olympian Zeus (which was in fact quite impressive), the Ancient Agora, which included the well preserved Temple of Hephaestus, and the Roman Agora, with its Tower of the Winds.

To be fair, I've never really seen anything this old, and I should hope that some of our modern architecture lasts so long, but I didn't ever feel like the actual visit gave the structures any more significance than would a photograph. What's worse, you couldn't enter or get close to many of these monuments, most of them again with good reason, but it still made appreciation difficult. Plus I kept thinking that the girl with me smelled like diapers. Clean ones, but still. It's an odd smell.

While in Athens I kept a strict diet of souvlaki, which they really know how to do, smothering them in frecnh fries and sauce. This is something that, surprisingly, the Turks really couldn't do. Their kebabs (the sandwiches that is, because in Turkey kebab could mean a platter, depending) were dry, low on fillings, and sauceless. Even if you'd ask, the best they could offer was ketchup or mayonnaise, both unacceptable. But the Greeks generally buttered up the bread before grilling it and tzatzikied (yes, that's the verb form of tzatziki) the shit out of the things, and served them up overstuffed for 1.50 Euros, which for me was irresistable.

My exasperation climaxed with my next day's visits to the Greek War Museum, and the Roman Stadium, rebuilt in 1896 for the first modern Olympic games. After about an hour of trying to find the museum due to that same faulty Lonely Planet map, I arrived, ready to be fascinated by Iliadesque tales of heroic dismemberment and awestruck by the recovered ancient tools of death. The museum was divided into two sections, 'Ancient-1938' upstairs and '1938-present' downstairs. With a quick scoff, I trotted up one flight of stairs, but then stopped, as the section was roped off. I asked the attendant if it was closed, and he informed me that they were fixing the exhibit space, and it had been closed for almost two years, but would be open again next month. It is at this point that I decide to locate and explode the main Lonely Planet office once my trip is finished. But, the attendant informed me, they did have a whole exhibit on the Greek military since World War II. Oh, well yes, I've often heard of the heroism of the Greek Army in the Great War, of the many young men who sacrificed their vocal chords while sitting around kvetching, of the gruesome casualties: the thousands of spilt olives and pounds of moldy feta, of the millions upon millions of cigarretes gone unsmoked. No, wait...the cigarrettes were definitely smoked. In any case, who cares about Greek wars after 1938, or 938 for that matter? Well, apparently not the group of fifty middle schoolers on their way in either. I left immediately.

My last stop, before catching a train to Patra, where I would get the ferry to Bari Italy, was the Roman Stadium. I expected a ruin, forgetting that the thing was really only 110 years old, and found a beautifully rebuilt stone stadium, perfectly clean and undamaged, with a fresh, new rubberized running track.

It was, of course, completely closed off. They wouldn't let anyone walk on the stands to get a picture, or say, run on the fucking track. It was the stupidest thing I'd seen yet. It was simply a massive waste of space and concrete.

Why keep the people out? To prevent it from getting worn down? Worn down by, what? Use????

The monuments of Athens, while I'm glad I saw them, were something of a disappointment, making good photos but uninspiring sights.

The rest of the city was no better, souvlaki aside, as it simply could have been any city. Just a bunch of streets and buildings. I was not going to be missing any ferries out of here.

It's All Greek to Me

2006-05-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Samos at about 9 in the morning- though the ferry from Turkey was expensive as hell, it sure didn't take me very far- and immediately went to look for a ticket out. It was April 10, and I was to meet Duncan in Nice on April 24, giving me two weeks to check out Athens quickly, then make my way over and spend a week in Sicily, and a few days in the Cinque Terra on the northwest Italian coast. It was still a bit early in the season for Greek island hopping, so I just decided I'd come back some other time for that. No more ferries were leaving that day, so I bought a ticket for the 6:30 a.m. the next morning. The guy who sold me the ticket recommended a cheap guesthouse, a ten minute walk away from the port and the town, which indeed usually means cheap. When I got there, I saw that the place was empty and just opening up for tehe spring. As such, the owner offered me my own room for 12 Euro, which I got down to 10. I sat down at the bar for a cup of coffee, which cost 2 Euro and was Nescafe, fucking EU, I started chatting with the owner, a middle aged Greek named Stelios, who was helpful and friendly, pretty much the last hint of either I would find in Greece.

Samos was pretty empty and quiet, but the town featured a nice view and enough souvlaki places to keep me happy. I was in a good mood, happy to waste the day in the cool breeze and sunshine. I asked Stelios if he could recommend me a cheap barber, and he drew me a map to a place that he said was a traditional barbershop so it would be cheaper than the others. I went straight there. Had there been a record player inside, it would have scratched to a halt. The barber, the guy sitting in the corner reading a magazine, and the guy in the barber's chair all turned their heads stared for a second, and then shrugged my appearance off. The barber turned away without offering me a seat on the bench, as if hoping I was mistaken and would leave. A guy walked in the door just behind me and gave me the same look. I sat anyway, and began to wait. When the barber finished with his customer, I expected the guy reading the magazine across the room to get up, but he didn't so I started to. But right away, the guy who'd walked in just after me hopped up and into the chair, and the barber went to work on him. Okay I thought, appointment maybe. This guy's working fast, just another couple of minutes. Another older guy came in, said something in Greek, and looked at me quizzically before sitting next to me on the bench. Then after the next guy was finished, fifteen minutes later, this new old guy gets right up and hops into the chair in front of me. I would have protested, but I didn't speak fucking greek. So I waited, nothing to do anyway. Twenty minutes later, this guy's done, that guy in the corner is just hanging out, and really should be saving what little hair he's got left, must be my turn. But sure enough, as soon as the guy stands, the one in the corner folds the magazine and gets in the chair. I wanted to leave in protest, but I needed a haircut, and wanted a shave from a Greek barber, and had already waited almost an hour, and staying was the best protest I could offer. Finally when that guy was done, the shop was empty, and the barber waved me into the chair. He said something in Greek, which I figured was 'What do you want me to do' so I just sort of used my fingers and signaled how much to take off from where, and he laughed a 'Christ what does this kid think he's getting' laugh' and got to work. Surprisingly enough he seemed to understand, and did a decent job, though clearly putting no effort in. I'd also rubbed my beard when I sat down, so he now rubbed it as if to ask, 'shave also?' I indicated yes, thinking that if a kid in India could do what he did, this guy must be a damn pro. The guy might as well have ripped the hair off my face with duct tape. I was his last customer of the day, at 2:00, didnt speak Greek, and was about 40 years too young to be in here. He clearly did not take his time or use any care, and not only did the actual shaving hurt, but I was bleeding from about 50 tiny holes on my neck and even my cheeks- not from cuts but I think he'd just not bothered to use a fresh razor. He cleaned me up a little and rubbed that painful ass alcoholic after shave on, enough to get me to stand up, and when I asked how much, he wrote down 17 Euros. "17????" It was almost twice what I was paying for a room, and way more than I could afford on my budget. I look up in the mirror again and most of the scraped pores were starting to develop red blood spots again. I tried to ask him how much the haircut cost and how much the shave cost, but he just kept pointing to the number 17 on the piece of scrap paper. I couldn't believe it, but it was my own damn fault for not asking. I paid him with disgust and cursed at him in English, while he responded in kind, no doubt, and I stood there snatching up napkins from his desk to blot the blood off my face while he cleaned the place and picked up his coat to leave. If I'd had any balls I would have just refused, let my face bleed and see what he would do. The whole no Greek thing really made complaining difficult though. Furious, half at myself, I stormed back to the hotel to make sure I wasn't still bleeding, and to tell Stelios not to recommend the place to stupid Americans anymore.

I calmed down over the course of the day and read my book, enjoying a few cheap souvlakis, and consoling myself by remembering that I'd be out of here in the morning and would forget all about it.

The next morning I woke up at 5:45, dressed and left by 6:15, in plenty of time to catch the ferry. When I got to the port, it remained unclear where I was supposed to go, so I walked across the street to the tourist office where I'd bought the ticket and asked where I should get on. He said right out there, but you must hurry, you only have a few minutes. My watch said 6:25, and from what I'd seen that day- these fucking Greeks weren't going anywhere on time, they get to work late, finish early, and take a long lunch in the middle- I wasn't worried, but heeding his advice I turned and walked quickly out towards the the gate. As soon as the big boat was in view, a minute later, I had the strangest sensation that the ground was moving. Except it wasn't me, it was the boat. I rounded the only thing blocking my view, and saw that in fact the boat was already twenty yards off the dock, with the ramp raised and everything, but the engine not on yet, so it must have been floating out for at least two minutes. The fucking thing left early. EARLY. What the hell leaves fucking EARLY? I ran back to the ticket office and pointed at the clock. It read 6:29. I said, what is that all about? He said, 'well I told you you had to hurry.' I said 'It's still not even 6:30, and the thing was moving before I even got here.' In the end, there was nothing he or I could do (not that he really cared). He refunded half of my ticket money, and I bought another ticket for twelve hours later, having turned over my room key and so given up any place I could return, and with not even an inkling of a desire to stay on this fucking island. After three months of this, here I am pissing away money to have someone else cut the hair-and skin- off my face and showing up three minutes before a boat is scheduled to leave (Still, I repeat the word BEFORE).

I spent that day cursing myself, and the stupid Greeks with their stupid beautiful island scenery.

I continued to find most of the people I interacted with resentful, lazy, and visibly distrustful. Still, it was once again a beautiful day, and I killed it with aplomb. I got there a goddamn hour and a half early for the ferry, and tried to find the best spot I could. In the middle of the ride I brought my guitar to the quietest, most secluded spot I could find, which was neither quiet nor secluded because of the wind and the engine and fucking Greeks, but it was away from all of the noise and smoke of the people. At one point, a smiley old Greek man approached me and made the guitar strumming symbol and tried to start talking. We stuggled to communicate between with the few words of Spanish and English he had, and eventually he said 'harmonica' and pointed to himself. I asked him if it was on the boat, and he disappeared and returned with it later. He then spent the next half an hour playing chipper songs that you'd expect froma 1930's accordion player, one of which was Oh Susanna, the rest Greek tunes I didn't recognize, while I tried to sound out the chords, only half succesfully, so I gave up and just smiled and stared. It was hilarious, then uncomfortable, then both, but the guy was a real sweetheart, a nice change of pace. The ferry ride was miserable and long, with cigarette smoke everywhere and nowhere to stretch out comfortably. Eventually people started laying out on the floor between the rows of seats and in the aisles, so I did the same.

We got to Piraeus, Athens' port, at 5:30 and it was still dark out. I asked my way to the metro, which was clean and arrived quickly and noiselessly. I got off and walked around the maze of streets for about 45 minutes until I found lonely planet's recommendation. The guy there told me that he did not know what he would have available, that I could wait until 11:00, or leave my bags and passport until then, and then he'd be able to tell me, if he had anything, what it would cost. It was now 7. I asked him if he knew another hostel. He simply said no, they don't work with anyone else.
'But you don't know of anything-'
'No.'
'So there aren't any others or you won't tell me where they are'
'I don't know.'
'Oh, well my good man, thank you for your kindness, please feel free to go eat a shit souvlaki and die.'

I walked back to the metro, and took it to the other side of the city, where lonely planet said the Athens Youth Hostel was situated, in a lousy neighborhood. I got off the metro, and found that Lonely Planet's map was absolutely horrible. Very few street names were printed, and the ones that were printd were simply not correct. After one spin around the neighborhood and return to the metro station an hour later, I thought, okay, no problem, somebody will be able to help. Every person I stopped on the street seemed intent on getting rid of me as quickly as possible instead of helping me find my way, whether they were walking, standing and smoking a cigarrette or wiping down a window. When I asked the name of the street, Vincent Van Gogh, not too hard to pronounce, they looked at me like I was speaking, well, not fucking Greek. At almost 9:30, 4 hours after I'd picked up my rucksack off the ferry floor, I found the place. It was cheap and clean and had beds. Perfect. And there was what looked to be a girl my age asleep in the bed above mine. Things could finally be looking up.

Ruined

2006-05-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

My trip that night would be tough. My bus to Aydin left at 5, but by the time it would arrive, the dolmuses to Selcuk or Kusadasi, the two towns from which one can visit the ruins of Ephesus, might not be running. Aydin is perhaps the Cleveland of Turkey, reasonably large, but lacking any reason to actually go. So hotels are scarce because nobody goes there. Except me. Indeed, there were no minibuses running anywhere I wanted to go. The Lonely Planet didn't even mention Aydin in passing, so I had no map, no hotels to call, and since tourists don't go there, I could be fairly certain nobody spoke English. Thank fucking God hotel in Turksh is otel. I started wandering, at first led by some kid looking to make a lire or two, which he did, the little shit, but I abandoned him once I realized he had even less of an idea of what I was looking for than I did. I bounced from hotel to hotel praying one of the receptionists would understand the word 'cheap.' I finally managed to find someone who understood, and he pointed me in the right direction.

The dump I found was not equipped with, oh, showers, I would find out, but they did have an infuriatingly complicated and obstinate database program that had to be filled in before anyone could stay there. The young Turk at the reception had about six words of English under his belt, and I had to sit there with him for over an hour, him chain smoking and trying to read what was in my passport, me trying to read the Turkish on the screen figure out what information he was looking for, him waving his fists and cursing violently at the screen in Turkish, me trying to make pictionary a method of communication, and both of us laughing and hitting each other's shoulders in frustration. After a while we both started speaking freely in our own language as if the other understood. It's amazing how hard it is to convey something like 'city of birth.' For some reason they wanted my parents' names, which I wasn't really sure I wanted to give, also somewhat inexplicably, so if Joseph and Esmerelda Ades ever end up in Aydin, someone should let them know they're already on file at the Hotel Marques.

The next day I got lost about four times on my way back to the otogar, but Turks are always willing to point frantically, at least after giving me the 'what are you retarded?' look before they realize I'm not Turkish. I found Kusadasi to be a reasonably sized waterfront resort town that was still empty, the season starting up a week or two afterwards.

After wandering around for about an hour or two, sweating and cursing life, I managed to find the hostel I'd been recommended-these things happen every once in a while- and ended up with a huge dorm room with 20 beds and a spectacular view all to myself. That afternoon I took a minibus to the ancient ruins at Ephesus. AS I walked through the main drag, I started to realize that, for reasons that I'm only beginning to understand, I'm just not all that into ruins. But as far as ruins go, these were pretty cool ones.

The theater was one of the highlights, as it was well preserved and they let you walk into it and sit down anywhere.

As I was about to leave, a woman sort of strolled in playing a flute, standing in the middle of the theater floor. I immediately sat back down, as did everyone else who was on their way out, and when she started in on Amazing Grace I nearly shed a tear.

I continued on, fighting through a few German tour groups, stopping for some time at this library facade.

The biggest problem with the ruins is that all of the information signs, which are scarce anyway, are only in Turkish, so you don't really think much other than, 'well that's old.'

I did, however, find out who the ancient ruin site pee bandit is, as he had apparently followed me all the way from Southeast Asia to India and now to Turkey. I had climbed up on one of the ruined walls of a house or whatever, in order to get this shot of the main street.

The empty square below me was roofless, but the wall was rather high, so the large middle aged Turkish man who poked his head into it didn't see me standing up above. He suspiciously looked left and right, then turned around, facing outwards and did the same. Then, in trots a six year old kid, who drops trow and starts decorating the wall just inside the door while his Dad, presumably, stands guard out front. Poised and ready with the camera, I pointed downward and prepared to catch the culprit in the act, but then thought better of it, because just try explaining that one to the kid's old man if he turns around, plus I wasn't really sure how I would feel about having pictures of a little boy's wee wee on my camera. I did, however, rather pointlessly, take a picture of the empty room after he'd left.

In order to get to the ruins in the first place, I'd had to walk about a kilometer up from the turnoff where the dolmus dropped me. After leaving the ruins, I headed back out and realized once I got there that there was no dolmus stand on the opposite side of the street. Curious. It was a two lane road, but it was the major highway in the area, so cars were flying by at 60 or 70 mph, while I'm standing ont he shoulder praying that I see one of these little white vans coming my way. And I stood...and stood. After maybe twenty minutes I stared to calculate how far 20 kilometers was, and how long it would take me to walk it. After some simple arithmetic, I arrived at a pretty solid estimate of a really long fucking time. Finally I saw a dolmus on the horizon and it slowed when I sort of stood closer to the road to make myself seen. I noticed that Kusadasi wasn't on the sign in the windshield. When the guy opened the door, I said, 'Kusadasi?' He slammed the door and drove away. Guess not. Another twenty minutes later, a dolmus going the other way honked at me and the driver gave me the wait there sign, and sure enough, ten minutes after that, a van pulled up-right in the middle of the road, I might add, while the totally insane Turkish drivers flew by on the other side- and brought me back to Kusadasi. Yet another one of the countless episodes of I have no idea what I'm doing here or how I'll get somewhere I want to be that I've had to get used to, always just hoping that things will work out.

The next morning I got on an early morning ferry to Samos, the nearest Greek Island. Having explored a fair amount of Turkey, that is, crossed a significant portion of its land and sailed some of its waters, visited its most European city, the beach destination of Alanya, Olympos, which is in no way Turkey, and the resort town of Kusadasi, I left Turkey, feeling like I hadn't really seen much of it at all. Once again, I was leaving a place thinking I would definitely have to come back.

To Each His Own

2006-05-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

I spent much of my time on the boat talking to the Spanish girl, the Italian girl, and the American couple, but the psy trance people also frequently made for decent conversation. One day we started discussing antibiotics. Mick, who had actually been an Olympic athlete, and is now a trained 'professional' in natural and herbal medicines, said antibiotics weaken your body by reducing the ability of your immune system to develop. Jim said, with appreciated exaggeration, 'a handful of dirt every once in a while is good for you. Your body needs to build up immunities. I don't take antibiotics anymore. Never touch the things, unless I'm, you know, about to die.' I guess they had a point, or something.

I gained enough trust to become friendly with them pretty quickly, mostly by keeping my opinions to myself-believe it or not- and I spent the second night just watching and listening to them, and slowly getting myself drunk.

They had all taken LSD, and were occasionally snorting something they called Ketamine, which I'd never heard of until Jim described its effects to me earlier in the day. Once I saw their reaction to it, their complete inability to focus on what they were talking about, their dramatically slowed speech, their blissful vacancy, and thought more about the name, Ketamine, I realized they were doing 'Special K,' of which I'd heard little about other than that it is used as a horse tranquilizer and rots your brain like nothing else. Antibiotics? No way-I need my immunities. But horse tranquilizer? Just tell me where to sniff. Throughout the night I had to refuse their generous offerings of chemically induced absentia, with the explanation of 'thanks, but the fresh sea air and the occasional excavating digit are the only things going up this nose tonight,' remaining rather ineffective.

And then at about 11, the captain from the other boat started shouting our way and waving his arms. We woke up our captain and they spoke over cell phones. All of a sudden he and his brother were all over the boat, raising anchor and getting ready to move. They explained that a storm was coming, so we had to do tomorrow's travelling right away. For the next three hours, we rode along in the dark, the boat crashing over waves, the wind blasting, the trance blaring, the drugged hippies gyrating senselessly. I have to admit, it was very fun. We finally stopped at around 3. When we woke up the next morning, the weather was was clear as could be, which we found strange. It also turned out we had passed by several of the scheduled destinations, including Butterfly Valley, and Oludeniz, where I was supposed to get off, because I'd only paid for a three day trip, wanting to be on my way. The other boat didn't have enough gas to get back to butterfly valley, where there are, I presume, butterflies, so all of those people were loaded onto our boat and we started. About fifteen minutes later, the engine snorts and buckles and kind of craps out, so the other boat has to come tow us back to where we were. And we were done for the day. We stood there, and the crewmembers, who were the sweetest people ever, explained in their minimal English that we wouldn't be going to those places because of the engine trouble and the lack of gas in the other boat. And the complaint train said, "toot, toot." Both boats erupted, 'I paid this much for this and that I and I want this and that, and that Rami guy, he's not going to do anything, and we're going to demand blah blah blah.' Meanwhile, I'd never asked what we were going to see and didn't know what I was missing, so I didn't care all that much. Plus, this would be the perfect excuse to get free lodging and free food for an extra day.

And oh the food. Breakfasts were simple: bread, salty white cheese, jam, hard boiled eggs, sliced tomato and cucumber. Lunch was always some sort of rice or plain pasta with zuchinni or eggplant or potatoes and carrots cooked in this fantastic sauce, with bread and salad. Dinner was similar, but always added a meat: fresh whole fish the first night, lightly breaded chicken the second, and Kofte, Turkish style meatballs, the third. But the thing that really did it for me was the yogurt. It was like thick tzatziki sauce, creamy and mild, and I smothered it on everything. Rice, bread, meat, salad, even plain noodles. Yes, noodles with yogurt. It was like creamed crack. I always waited until the end of the meal once people were done, then took some bread and just went to town on the remaining yogurt.

Anyway, people got more and more furious, feeding off each other's gripes, and someone who spent a few hours on the other boat said those people were even worse. I was perfectly happy to sit around, and a group of us swam in the frigid water over to the nearby island to hike up through impressive ruins to the most beautiful view of my entire trip. Camera didn't make the swim though, very unfortunately. The entire rest of the day was spent discussing what we were going to demand from Rami. I can't say I hadn't been thinking about trying to get a concession for the wasted day, but the last thing I was going to do was bitch and moan when in the middle of Aegean paradise.

The other complication was that our boat couldn't move, and the other boat didn't have enough gas to tow us all the way, so thay had to send vans to where we were stuck and ferry us over to the beach in a little motor boat that would have to make god knows how many trips.

This proved less difficult than I'd expected, and by mid afternoon we were in Fethiye. Some representatives of the tour company were there and said they would be providing a free night of accomodation and free dinner to make up for it, and everyone was happy. Except me, as I could't afford to hang around for another day. Rami gave me a bus ticket to Aydin, and from there I could get to Kusadasi, near the ancient ruins of Ephesus, and the port from which I could take a ferry to the Greek Island Samos on my way to Athens. Having on the boat exchanged email addresses with some of the psytrancers, in case my horse ever needs surgery, I bid farewell to the Spanish girl, the Italian girl, and the American couple, all of whom had conveniently come to the company office, the first two because they had to be on their way, and the latter because in the fierce wind that morning, Rob's pants, which had been tied down while he lay in his sleeping back on the deck, had been violently blown forty yards back, off the boat and into the water, and along with them his passport, money and credit cards. That sucks.

After four days of lounging around with everything taken care of, the thought of bus connections and hotel searches was rather unappealing, all by my lonesome, no less, but the opposing thought of the psychadelic trance blasting in the free hotel was enough to get me right on my way.

Psychetraducation

2006-05-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

When Chuck left, his last words were something like, 'have fun on the boat with the hippies.' Indeed, I was very curious/ terrified to see who I'd be spending the next three days trapped on a boat with, hoping desperately that some normal people would emerge from the Olympos forest, and that these trance people wouldn't be interested in a boat trip. As I boarded the van, I met an American couple from California, Rob and Alana, and better yet, Rob had a little travel guitar with him. As I talked to him, I quickly discovered that we liked to play basically the exact same kinds of music, his primary interest being bluegrass, which was great to hear. After the shit I'd put up with for the last few days, I was not expecting to find someone else who liked bluegrass on a boat in Olympos, Turkey. Things were looking up. The girl sitting next to me was a Spanish girl from Galicia, and she was talking to an Italian girl who was living in Barcelona. Both normal, bathed, no dreds.

The guy behind me in the van was a filthy dredded Australian tool, who went on and on about how at Soulclipse he had all of these adventures on his acid trip with his magic glasses, which he passed around and were just a crappy plastic pair of 3D glasses but instead of being 3D they made rainbow colors. Ooooooooooh. Anyway, the guy organizing the boat trip, Rami, was pretty cool and funny, and told us we would stop in a town to get money if we needed, but said, 'please, please, don't buy any alcohol. You aren't allowed to bring any on the boat, so please don't buy any." His mistake was in the asking. Though food was paid for, it appeared they had plans to extort us for booze. I'm pretty sure every single person on both vans went straight to the liquor store.

Further along our way, one of the hippyish dudes started puking out of the window, apparently having had a rough night the night before. After we made a second stop at a grocery store for snacks, I noticed that the van smelled absolutely horrible. I figured he had just not made it out the window with the first heave. No matter, it was only another two minutes to the boat. But God it smelled awful.

When we arrived at dock, we were divided between the two boats, and once on board, they split us into cabins, which we would have to share. I couldn't have cared less who they stuck me with, cause I was happy to crash on the deck, as I was sure most people would do anyway. As it happened, I was matched up with this balding thirty something obese man, and the puking guy, an Australian dude who had a pair of what looked like shirt buttons somehow suspended in the sides of his neck. Sweet, out of everyone I get stuck with fatty and pukey freak. In any case, I just dropped my stuff in there and paid it no mind, I was happy to be on a boat and not have to worry about anything.

And then the complaints started in. Pukey, whose name was Mick, was furious that he had to share a tiny little cabin with two other people, and talk of calling his credit card company and cancelling payment started. Once the complaint train started rolling, everyone got on board, and it was all so ridiculous I can't even remember what they were coming up with. I tried to calm them down by saying we were going to have a great time, we were all going to sleep on cushions on the deck anyway, and we should all just relax and enjoy ourselves cause it was going to be a great trip no matter what,(Can you imagine me saying that?) but they didn't take it well and I figured it was better not to get involved or piss anyone off by being completely and utterly right, as per my usual, heh heh. Rami, having explained the rules, gone over the itinerary, and introduced us to the boat crew, ours a pair of brothers and their sister as the cook, just wanted to get off the boat and send us on our way, so he didn't want to hear it. The complainers took this as a sign that he didn't want to address the problem. I think he just knew none of it would matter once we were out on the water, drinking and listening to (fucking psy trance) music.

And he was right. The first day we went only about half an hour out, where we stopped in a big beautiful inlet and had a fantastic lunch of rice, tomato sauced spiced vegetables, yogurt and salad, during which we played the name game, which was funny and really took me back. Though about half were Soulclipse attendees, they didn't look too new age hippie like and they were all friendly.

We stayed in that spot all day, just kind of hanging out and drinking on the boat, Rob and I went inside and played for about three hours, and everything was just great.

I liked just about everyone, but I couldn't help but notice that the smell from the van was hanging out on the boat somewhere, and knew it had to be coming from someone. After a little while, I figured out that it was the fat guy, and he smelled like absolute heinous shit. I couldn't believe how bad it was, and was looking for someone else to confirm it. But soon enough, I didn't need anyone else, cause I went down into the room to get something and it smelled like a fresh helping of butt soup. I went back up and made a few passes by the guy to sniff him out, and I really, really thought he took a big dirty crap in his fatty bo batty poo poo pants. I've really never smelled anyone smelling quite so foul. A while later, I asked Mick if he'd smelled the room lately, and he said, 'yeah, it's the big guy, he stinks. He must have thrown up all over himself. I think he jacket is covered in vomit.' So as it happened I was stuck sharing a room with pukey hippy whiny and fatty pukey shitty McStinkpants. But still, the sun was out, the air was fresh, I was on a boat, things were great.

Since it was playing constantly, I tried to ask questions about the different trance 'tracks' I was hearing, and the different styles and musical accomplishments of each of the...programmers. The most amazing thing about their answers was that they made as little sense as I would have joked that they would. People went on and on about how at the festival they should have played progressive trance in the morning, and some other shit at night. When I asked, it being morning, so 'is this progressive trance?'
'No, no, this isn't progressive. Progressive has a sort of flow, it doesn't stop, it progresses, you know?'
'Ahhhhhh. So what kind of trance is this?'
'Well, this? It's sort of, it's sort of electronic funk, new wave, yeah it's got a progressive element to it...'
'...'
'I'd really need to listen to it for a long time to be able to understand its flow, you see?'
'Uh huh.'

Poopy McFatpants, who was actually somewhat intelligent, as in, it seemed like he might have a job that involved reading, tried to explain it to me, as he was a relative newcomer to the trance scene, that you really had to hear it on expensive and terribly loud sound systems to really get the effect. I imagine one of countless white powders might also do the trick. But i couldn't stop thinking, if drugs and volume are necessary, then how good can it be, and can I please put on some fucking Tom Petty now? In any case, the shit was all the same. What more, they never seemed to pay any attnetion to what was playing, always saying, oh what's great is this other shit. And then occasionally, someone would hop up and get all excited saying, 'Oh I love this track,' and start dancing wildly, as if the beat they were dancing to-identical to every beat of every other track- had anything to do with the different sounds, albeit pretty cool ones, laid down on top. Their dancing, which consisted mostly of spinning and the flopping and flailing of limbs, also made me think that they liked the music only because it made their complete lack of rhythm insignificant. I'm not trying to slight the difficulty of creating these sounds-I have no idea how they do it. But to call it music, I don't know. It was completely devoid of any kind of expression whatsoever.

The next morning we continued along the coast and stopped at fantastic little town with some castle ruins on top of the hill it was built on.

That afternoon, we visited a slightly touristy fishing town called Kas, which was quaint and cute and had places for us to stock up on beer (they let us just pay a refrigeration fee and bring on as much booze as we wanted since we were going to anyway).

As the time passed, I got to know these psy trance people, and while their choice of music was kinda shitty, and their choice to play it all the fucking time was very shitty, they were good people, and had some great stories stories.

One of my favorites on board, a scruffy 35 year old Australian named Jim, intelligent but dishearteningly committed to underachievement, regaled me with the ins and outs of English squatter laws, as well a tale of 20 police officers bursting into the abandoned warehouse he and his buddies had made home, armed to the teeth and in full combat gear. Instead of plotting terrorists, they found a sorry group of degenerates who were too zonked to even stir when a bunch of heavily armed men descended on them in the middle of the night. While not the worldly young ambassadors I'd envisioned meeting when I left home, these people certainly were different.

The Young and the Filthy

2006-05-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

We arrived at the otogar, or bus station, at about 10 that night. Though the place was huge, containing over 100 offices, most of them were closed or only had limited services still running. We tried to shop around for a cheap rate, but only the biggest and most expensive companies still had buses going to Alanya. While we were walking around, a Turk about my age saw my guitar and made the international guitar strumming motion and tried to get me to stop and play. I shook my head no and walked quickly, trying to make sure we wouldn't miss a departing bus. He actually went as far as grabbing my arm and pulling me towards a bench, harder than you'd think a complete stranger would, but I smiled and yanked my arm away from him and sort of motioned that maybe on the way back, and kept walking. Of course, that office did't have anything, so we had no choice but to go back to the first place we'd visited, and walk right back by the young Turk. The guy wouldn't take no for an answer, so I sat down. All of a sudden he's calling his friends over to watch, and there are now eight young Turks, and one big old fattish guy sitting next to me. And what the hell am I supposed to play for some random Turks? I decide on a simple blues chord riff that is pretty universally recognizable, but they have no idea what that's all about, and are soon getting bored and playing air guitar and laughing and smacking each other and saying things in Turkish. I stop playing and giveChuck the how the helldo we get out of here look when the old guy stands up and gently lifts my elbow so that I get up with him. He sort of turns his back towards me and starts pointing at his right trapezius (http://www.fun-and-fitness.com/mus-zone/upback.html). I look confused, so he points to my hand, and suggests that I hit him there. Now, I know this is a stupid gag, but I have no clue what sort of ramification there might be, a loud stinky Turk fart being my best guess, and I have absolutely no choice in the matter of whether or not to do what he says. So I reach up and hit the guy, and back swings his right forearm, the back of his hand lightly whacking me in the balls. The crowd erupts with laughter. I am shamed. I turn to Chuck for support. He is pointing and cackling and making merry with the Turks. Once they get tired of us, we pass through an endless stream of handshakes and some more feeble attempts to communicate, and go our way to catch our bus. Always a pleasure to meet the locals.

The bus left at 10:30 and was supposed to take 12 hours , but ended up taking 16. We were going to met a friend of Chuck's who was on her junior year semester abroad in Alanya, this small beautiful coastal resort town.

The program had thirteen kids, two professors, and was pretty completely removed from everything and everyone. They ate their meals together, lived in one apartment building, went to classes with just each other, and so were reading allof the same books at the sametime, and did all of their travelling together. It was kind of crazy how enclosed it was, but as opposed to most abroad programs, it seemed like they were actually forced to work and were learning things. But despite being sweet, relatively intelligent, and somewhat adventurous kids-given the program choice- they all still managed to bring an American College World Shelter Bubble with them. After two months, only one of them, Chuck's friend, had managed to pick up a few words of Turkish, and none of them had learned their way around this small town. They had gotten to know zero Turks. The two days were a big sigh for the American education- I remember how apprehensive I was about going to parties at the dorm where all the international students chose to live, noticing that they were different but preferring to just think them weird and forget. The fact that the international students pretty much all chose to live in one place, unified only by their unAmericanness, I suppose says enough. But then again it's not exactly the school's or the program's fault- the choice is there. I'm still struggling to figure out just what it is about growing up in America-and obviously there are many exceptions- that makes us so reluctant to get out of Our World to see what's in The World.

As it was early spring, the water was cold.

From Alanya, we took a bus west to Olympos, a sort of treehouse settlement, or so we'd heard. It was the place to go in Turkey according to some Canadian kid I'd met in New Zealand, where you sleep in treehouses and everyone is merry. From there, you could also take a four day boat along the Mediterranean coast and up into to the Aegean. I expected a peaceful, quiet street lined with elaborate treehouses and a few bars where people slowly got drunk listening to Marley and a Jerry Garcia folk album. We heard on the way that one of the treehouse settlements was having a party that night. Oh, well let's go there, we thought. When we arrived, techno music was blaring, and the place was overrun with dirty ass new age hippies being loud and filthy.

They were all smiling, though, so that was jolly. Turns out it was a Psy-trance, or Psychadelic Trance party. Silly me, and I thought it was techno that was giving me a headache. In any case, we laughed it off and thought, well this will be an interesting way to end our travels together, as the next day Chuck would have to catch a bus back to Istanbul to fly home. We got a bungalow instead of the only treehouse left, which was right above the party floor, and prepared ourselves for the night.

What we had failed to remember before we came, was that a few hours north there had taken place a seven day psy-trance festival, Soulclipse, to celebrate the Full Solar Eclipse. Yes, for four minutes of dark, they decided to get together for a week long drug binge in the middle of nowhere Turkey. And now, those who still had chemicals left to consume decended on Olympos to continue the party. Throughout the day, the entire fucking day, ths music went on and on and on. See that's actually what they like about it. And while the funky electronic noises were always changing, in the end the shit just sounded the exactly the same. But we were curious to get drunk and see what a Psy Trance party was all about.

It sucked. The music just got louder, and a bunch of stinky dirty white people on drugs were dancing, poorly. We played a game of chess and went to bed, lulled to sleep by the pounding ump-ts ump-ts ump-ts that shook the ground. I slept surprisingly well though, and the next morning we wandered through the Olympos ruins, which really were pretty ruined, too much to be in any way interesting, down to the rocky beach.

Preparing to be on my own from here on in, I met some Ecuadorian girls and an Australian guy who sat near us, and at around 4 that afternoon Chuck and I walked back to the treehouse camp so he could catch a minivan out. Naturally, I spent the rest of the day sobbing uncontrollably and self mutilating.

That night, I took a van with the Ecuadorians and a few others out to the Chimaera, these natural gas fires that, well, make fire, out of the ground. I don't really get it either. There's basically, for some reason, this spot, out of which a whole bunch of fires just constantly burn from the ground.

The best explanation offered at the site was that the goat bodied, snake tailed, lion headed Chimaera was defeated by Bellophorus, who rode upon Pegasus, the winged horse, and with a lead tipped spear that melted upon contact with the Chimaera's fiery breath, ran the beast through. And the monster now lies buried beneath the ground in the Turkish countryside to provide ample warmth and and delight for many a dirty hippie, as Bellophorous, no doubt, had hoped all along.

It was all very cool, and the lack of scientific explanation was actually kind of preferable. The Ecuadorian girls, however, were proving to be rather terribly loud and annoying-the thought of suggesting that they try lighting a cigarette in the fires in hopes that one of them might catch their hair on fire did not escape me-and the goddamn new age hippies actually brought speakers to play their inescapable trance music, doing their best to ruin the calm aura of the spot.

Still it was all very nice.

When we got back to Turkmen's Treehouses, I walked around on my own kind of looking at the people trying to decide if I was lonely or just didn't want anything to do with anyone there. Before I could answer that, though I had my suspicions already, I heard a guy playing a Jack Johnson song I'd meant to learn, so I went and asked him to show it to me. I picked up another guitar that was just sitting around next to him, and we ended up there for about five hours finding songs we both knew or could solo over. Nico was on his way to London to make it as a musician, and before the night was over played a few songs he'd written, which were actually pretty damn good, and he had the attractively unnattractive rock star thing going on, so who knows? Anyway, it was good reassurance that though alone pretty much for the first time ever, I'd do just fine. Plus, the next day I would set off on a boat trip, where I would be away from the new age hippies and their trance, dreds and vapid banter.

Where's My Hassle?

2006-05-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

When we got out of the Istanbul airport, we prepared ourselves to be bombarded by drivers. Instead, a young man in a clean button down, ironed slacks and a dark coat leaning against a cab peered over his newspaper, yawned and asked, "taxi?" as if he was hoping we would say no. Stunned that it was even a question, not a shout or a plea, we suspiciously said yes. After we paid the driver-a price that was not worth the lack of hassle, I should add- we snatched our bags up, practically out of the bellhop's hands, instinctively staring him down as if we'd caught him in our pockets. After realizing where we were and who he was, in his sparkling grey vest and bow tie, we set them down, still reluctantly. When we appeared at reception, the man said, 'hello Mr. Ades, we've been expecting you all morning. Your father is in the restaurant waiting.' I whispered to Chuck while the guy checked us in, 'did you tell him who we were?' He said, 'no, you didn't?' We both looked at the man in puzzled terror. When my Dad saw me he said, 'You look like shit.' This was news, though only as is opening the International Herald Tribune to the Headline 'Bush Does Something Retarded.' As we walked around the hotel the staff would open doors and say 'hello sir', and I almost had to stop myself from blurting in response, "NO RICKSHAW."

We had breakfast in the hotel restaurant, which was as you'd expect a Four Seasons restaurant to be. The tables were covered in more silverware and glasses and plates than could possibly be necessary for ten people to eat, much less four. And my parents had already eaten. The food was excellent, obviously, but we couldn't help but feel totally out of place. All of the staff was staring at us expectantly, and I couldn't grasp that they didn't want anything from us- they wanted to serve us.

The first attraction we visited was the Blue Mosque, which isn't really all that blue, but is definitely a Mosque, and is pretty cool. Sadly I have no pictures. Go see it for your damn self. The next was the Hagia Sofia, an enormous ancient church turned mosque turned museum. It stood for a thousand years as the World's largest place of Christian worship after its completion in the sixth century, but the Islamic artifcats and slight alterations in layout make it a perfect representation of Turkey's struggle to define itself in terms of East and West.

I have to admit though that I had trouble focusing on the historical significance of any of what we were seeing. I could barely comprehend where we were. Everything was just so damn quiet. And nice. And just so unbelievably not India.

As we walked through the main tourist area where the monuments and the hotel were, Sulthanamet, occasionally a smiling Turk would approach us and ask how we were, where we were from, if we needed directions. 'How friendly,' I thought. And then he would say, 'when you are finished at the Blue Mosque, maybe you would like to come to my store we have very nice carpets.' And I thought, 'oh you're a tout? What the hell is this? Start pestering me, start following me, start, I don't know, looking needy or something. This is just not going to cut it pal.' Of course these were my Dad's sort of touts, so he would start asking them questions and bullshitting with them about this or that, and pretty soon they would forget that they were out there selling carpets. I started to learn the carpet selling type, and when approached would as soon as possible give them a 'do I look like I can afford or want to buy carpets?' and they would do the most amazing thing: they would go away. Amateurs. Actually, that's not true at all, they would almost always look behind me to my parents and go after them. Touche.

We sat down to a late lunch of kebab platters and soup, and then went to the Grand Bazaar, an enormous collection of shops selling rugs, clothing, jewelry, chess and backgammon sets, sneakers, suits. The interior was clean and orderly, and though most of the goods were repetitive, the stores must have been selling well because this was prime real estate. After some aimless strolling my Dad got my Mom roped into a carpet store against her will, or so you would think from the annoyed glances she was casting as the carpet pusher started asking what kinds of colors she liked; as she explained, she doesn't know anything about the quality or price of these things so she doesn't know how to talk to these guys. More on that later.

After agreeing to meet my parents there in an hour, Chuck and I continued on our way, looking for an English language bookstore so I could buy a Europe Lonely Planet. We got lost a few times trying to follow people's directions, and eventually just sat outside nearby Istanbul University looking out over the monuments we'd just visited, watching the people go. They all wore black or brown, they walked straight, they minded their own business, they averted their eyes from contact. God damn was this not India. It was all I could think. That and, how in the hell is this country not in the EU? This is the most European place I've ever seen.

What we'd seen of the city was cosmopolitan, modern, efficient, clean, and incredibly beautiful.

The answer to that one came a few minutes later, when loudspeakers throughout the city started blaring the fourth of the day's five calls to prayer. Ahhh, yes, Islamic Turkey, Xenophobic World.

After the chants ended, everything was so quiet again, and my mind was racing to find something to focus on, but came up blank. I was...I was kind of... bored. 24 hours earlier I wanted nothing more than to get out of India, but now I almost felt like I couldn't be entertained now that I was somewhere that made sense. My eyes, ears, nose, and wits all knocked on my frontal lobe's door and said, 'boss, what the hell are we supposed to do with ourselves here?' But the answer did not take long: 'relax.' We sat down on a concrete stair railing and just kind of watched people go by and pay us no mind. It was uncomfortable at first, but soon I remembered how pleasing calm and anonymity can be.

When we got back to the rug shop, my mother was standing in a corner of the rug shop holding a cup of tea, directing two shophands to put away the rug they were holding and take out another one, while a tall, bald sleekly dressed Turk stood alongside pointing and describing the rugs, and my father sat on the luxurious couch sipping Turkish coffee in front of a table of already emptied cups of tea. Yeah she wasn't having any fun. As soon as we arrived, the original carpet seller, who had been relegated to carpet holder once the boss arrived and saw that these Americans meant business, offered us tea or coffee or soda, which we accepted and sat down to watch the show. The tall salesman, Dev, was a real professional: he spoke five or six languages, and never stopped talking. The thing he realized that the salespeople in Southeast Asia and India had not was that he wasn't selling rugs- everyone around was selling pretty much the same rugs- he was selling himself. He promised visits to Mexico to show them and all of their friends his best merchandise, he showed us business cards of state senators who were regular customs (though Dad wasn't impressed, I suppose name dropping works on many people), he gave countless explanations as to why he was giving the best price for the best quality around, and he made everything personal. He said, 'I know you can find cheaper rugs here in the bazaar, out there in the city, but they will not be good rugs. If you want cheap, you can go find cheap. But that is not what I sell.' He realized that we were amateurs when it came to rugs, and what he was selling was confidence. Our trust that he was giving us a good deal. And indeed, it was exactly what my parents were looking to buy, having no real way of knowing, beyond what these many salesmen were telling them. But my favorite line of Dev's was, 'we invite you in to sit down, we give you drinks and tea and coffee because that is the Turkish way, that is my way. It is not because I want you to feel bad if you don't buy a rug because you accepted tea. This tea, this is a gift from me to you because we sit and talk and we are friends now. I want you to buy a rug because of the quality, not because I gave you some tea." And of course, by explicitly referring to the sales technique that he wasn't using, he put the seed of guilt or gratitude in our minds, and thereby used the technique anyway. Postmodern salesmanship. I was impressed. However, he wasn't coming down to the price my parents wanted, so I suggested they try to walk out, and see if that would shake things up. After hearing some more minor concessions, they managed to say that they were going to go and think about it. The poor guy looked heartbroken, feeling he'd lost the sale after all that. He knew then that they would go shop around and find a better price. In other words, he failed to make them trust him. As it turned out, he hadn't failed at all: over the course of the next few days my parents went back to another guy they'd met the day before, and checked out a few more places, but all of them were offering high prices or just seemed like lousy untrustworthy people. Before they left Istanbul, my parents went back to Dev with a lowball price, and settled on splitting the difference.

When we got back to our room, we went around giggling at all of the little perks: a bathtub, a bucket of ice, a tv in the bathroom, toilet paper, carpeting, slippers, showering products, windows. I was afraid to sit down on the bed it was so clean. We just couldn't believe where we'd come from and where we were now- that these two places exist simultaneously. As I now can't stop writing about Turkey in terms of India, I could not stop thinking about it as such when I was there. India had made such an impression, the standards of life were so dramatically different, that my view of Istanbul could not be separated from the comparison to India, and I don't think I shook that mindset until we headed south. That is not to say that we did not enjoy the luxury tremendously: I believe we actually toasted using ice water in wine glasses just because they were there.

For dinner our first night we went to a restaurant where you don't really order. The first course was a big spread of little plates, sort of tapas style, and we spent about twenty minutes picking at the various salted fish, cheese, olive, eggplant, cabbage things that they'd put in front of us.

The food was salty and strong, and all of it was fresh and incorporated unique flavors. I can't say I liked every dish, but the ones that I did were excellent. But while trying to decipher what we were eating, we forgot that this was just the first course, so we all stuffed ourselves, even Chuck the garbage disposal. Then the waiter comes back and asks each of us if we want to try the fried squid or the fried bonito fish or the this or the that, and we say, 'you know, that's okay we're all full.' He just stared at us, speechless. 'You don't...? No no, I bring, I bring, no problem.' So he goes of and just gets an assortment of these fried seafood things, which were delicious, but I was going to burst. And then he comes back and says, 'and for the fish, what would you like, we have-"
"Oh God, no, that's okay, we don't need any more'"
"..."
"Really, we're finished, we've had plenty."
"..."
"All right, fine but just a little bit."
"Okay I bring some of each and you try."

The next day we took a ferry ride up the bosporus strait, and continued learning wrap our minds around down time.

From the castle ruins at the end of the ride we watched the solar eclipse.
It got kind of dusky up where we were, and through the glasses someone lent us, we could see that indeed, the moon was in front of the sun. Rah. I heard the full one, visible from the southern coast of Turkey, was kind of cool, but even from the most enthusiastic descriptions it didn't seem like much to write home about.

On our last day with my parents it rained. When I first looked out the window I didn't understand what was happening. It had rained twice throughout our entire trip, and not since Australia. We made a day of it anyway, visiting the Topkapi palace, the impressive archeological museum, and the Basilica Cistern, which was a big dark wet place.

The Palace featured an impressive tour of the Sultan's harem. The women at the harem were guarded by Eunuchs who were purchased, raised, and trained in Africa. Oh and let's not forget castrated. How much would that suck? You're this little African kid, and you get sold to these rich Arabs. You're scared, you don't know how thay're going to treat you, but they start to feed you well, they train you and want to make you strong and healthy, they educate you to make you refined, and make it clear that they will take care of you for the rest of your life. Wow, what a sweet deal. And then two years after you hit puberty, they chop your balls off, ship you to Turkey, and make you spend all day watching over the biggest sorority of sex starved- as well as conniving, meddlesome, power hungry, and backstabbing- women the world has ever known, and its your job to keep them from fucking anyone. Talk about a shit deal.

At the Palace we learned a fair amount about Suleyman the Magnificent, considered the greatest of all of the Ottoman Sultans. The most interesting fact we learned about him was that in order to prevent the typical war of succession, his father killed off every single one of his potential male heirs except for one of his young sons, who later became Suleyman the friggin Magnificent. How about that for dumb luck?

My parents left early the next morning, abandoning us to the terrible state of relative prosperity, and we spent the day wandering around Beyoglu, the modern part of the city.

That afternoon we went to a movie, V for Vendetta, which pretty much sucked, but I found amusement in the fact that they had an intermission here too. In India the movie was over three hours long, so it kind of made sense. This flick was less than two hours, and the movie just cut off right in the middle of a relatively tense scene. Since we were just sitting there, I got up and went to the bathroom, which was empty. What is the intermission for thenm if not to go to the bathroom? When I walked back into the hallway, I saw that every square inch of space not taken up by a human was filled with cigarette smoke. When I got back into the theater, which had been almost full, there were only about six or seven people sitting there. I guess the Turks really need their smoke break.

Parental comforts once again a thing of the past, we headed to the otogar to catch an overnight bus ride that would put us on the southern coast of Turkey and afford us a dip or two in the mediterranean.

Enough is Occasionally Enough

2006-05-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

Photos for this post and the previous one may not be available. Please ignore all references to them.

Our last day in India had all the makings of a terrible one. We had to see the Taj Mahal before leaving, so our plan was as follows: wake up at 5 and take a four hour train to Agra, drop our stuff in a hotel that would let us store our bags for the day, go see the sights: spend the day visiting the Taj, the 'Baby Taj,' the Amber Fort, Akbar's Tomb, whatever else looks interesting, at 6:00 get on a three hour train to Delhi, take a taxi directly to the airport, wait around for six hours for a 4AM flight to Istanbul, which would put us there at about 9, just in time to start a full day of sightseeing. There was, however, the benefit of my parents being the light at the end of this long miserable tunnel, with a nice clean comfortable room in the Four Seasons.

Agra developed as an industrial town where all sorts of harmful to everything but efficient chemicals were used for a long time, and after their use was banned, the local economy plummeted before the Taj became the tourist attraction that it is. As a result it is a shitty, shitty place. As the host of India's premiere tourist destination- and here I use the word tourist with every bit of sneer imaginable, though fully conscious of the double standard I use to distinguish myself as 'traveller' as opposed to 'tourist'- it was sure to be full of touts, since the venture was sure to be more profitable here considering the midwestern fatties that pour rupees from their turquoise fanny packs without a haggle. Still, I mean, we had to go.

Della had recommended a place that would take our bags for the day and was right by the Taj, so when we got off the train, we took a rickshaw straight there. The guy wouldn't let us just pay to store the bags, but he did offer us a relatively shitty price for a room for the day, but it was cheap enough and left us the option of showering before getting on the train before the plane. The major complication of the day would be spending exactly the amount of money we had left. Taking out more meant bank charges and losing some on the exchange back to valuable currency. Unfortunately the Taj Mahal entry fee is probably the most expensive thing they have in India at 18 or so dollars. Supposedly, however, the entry fee would get us into the other minor sights, which would each have cost 2-3 dollars.

We went straight to the Taj, and it was well worth the visit. It was built by Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his second and most beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child. Beloved indeed. It is probably the most beautiful building I've ever seen: immaculately white, tastefully decorated, perfectly symmetrical, or so they say, and built up on a platform so that its entire background is blue sky. Despite the many people there, the large grounds were serene and quiet, in part because so many of the people are too awestruck to be talking, but also because the light breeze muffled the voices while cooling the air inside. It was as if Shah Jahan had constructed an invisible bubble to shield the monument from the chaos outside. And, of course, there was neither cow poo nor rickshaw driver in sight.

Also present were Indians from all over the country (their entry fee was 20 rupees, ours 750), and the cultural quirks were everywhere. The first one I had noticed several times previously, but we finally got some evidence: Indian men hold hands. I don't mean long handshakes, I mean it is very common for two men of any age, when walking together at any speed, to hold hands. It is not, I think, an expression of sexuality, but I am sure it stems from the way sexuality is expressed, or not expressed, in India. Most people don't have any kind of romantic contact until their marriage, which is still frequently arranged by family. Physical contact with the opposite sex, as far as I can tell, just doesn't happen until marriage. As a result, the only place for young men to turn for any kind of physical affection is to other men. But it is different in India than it was in Southeast Asia. There they handle each other like we might handle a pet, a mix between roughhousing and affection, and I don't remember seeing it done by adults. Here it seemed more formal than that, and I only noticed it between post-pubescent males. I suppose this is a sort of harmless result of what I would consider sexual repression. And then of course they get married and screw like rabbits and have six to eight kids to add to the gross overpopulation of the country. While two straight men holding hands while on a stroll through the park is no more than a bizarre sight for a foreigner, it was one of the first things I noticed that made me think that this place could really benefit from a heavy dose of sexual liberation and contraceptives.

The other quirk we noticed was somewhat related and something we'd been looking out for the whole time. We'd often been told of the way Indian men treat western women- a mixture of awe, lust, and condescension. Supposedly, from what they've seen on television and in movies, they view foreign women as whores who will sleep with anyone because they have sex before marriage. We hadn't seen much of this first hand, but Della told us that men would constantly stare and take pictures of her, and we'd heard second hand reports of them actually reaching out and groping, believing western women simply won't mind. We never saw anything like that, but at the Taj we did watch as a group of seven Indian young men approached two Japanese women, young but not particularly attractive, and asked to take a picture with them in it. The girls didn't understand and thought the guys were asking the girls to take a group photo. Instead, each of the guys, one by one, took turns posing in between these two girls, who posed for seven identical photos having no idea why. Rather than objects of sexual harassment, they were novelty items. The strangest thing about the episode was that the guys had this one pair of flashy orange sunglasses between the seven of them, and as each one stepped out of the picture, he handed the glasses to the next subject, who carefully put them on, stood between the two girls, and beamed a smile like the girls were movie stars. I only wish we'd thought of taking one of the pictures.

We walked into the Taj, which was not nearly as impressive from the inside, just because there's not much there, and wandered into one of the Mosques built on either side. There we met a group of young Indian men, who crowded around us like we were celebrities ourselves, and were thrilled to pose in a picture with Chuck. I couldn't believe it: either these guys were locals and come here all the time, in which case they were in a place where Westerners flock by the busload, or they were tourists from elsewhere in India, in which case they were more interested in us than the fucking Taj Mahal.

After another hour and a half of awesruck staring at the Taj, we reluctantly walked out, and I recovered the items that I had checked that I wasn't allowed to bring in: my mini camera tripod, my trusty lighter, and my wooden travel chess board. All of which are clearly dangerous to the Taj's sanctity.

The rest of the day was pretty much a waste. We hired a rickshaw to take us to the Baby Taj and some other thing, but neither of them held our interest at all after what we'd seen. Plus, it turned out that the Taj ticket only took care of one part of the entry fee for the others: 10 of the 110 rupees. Sweet. Thanks.

Nearly broke and exhausted, we went back to the hotel, not before our rickshaw driver lied about the price we'd agreed on and I paid him an extra thirty rupees with an expression of pure disgust (as if his desperation was his fault, but still, it was annoying). We ignored the hounding on our way to an early dinner, which was pretty lousy (Chuck gave up his last opportunity for Indian food, having had enough, and got a Pizza, wise decision). We were done. I don't think it was as much the country being overwhelming- maybe Agra was, just because it was uglier, dirtier, and hasslier than the rest- as much as we knew we were close to leaving, also cranky and tired, and the mental preparation for leaving kind of makes you want it to happen. In short, after only 12 days that flew by like two, and while wanting to come back again later for much longer, both of us were ready to go. Heh.

We got to the train station about twenty minutes early, but the train wasn't there yet. It left a half an hour late, was packed full the entire way, and took six hours instead of three. When we got to Delhi, it was strangely cold outside. Eh, no matter, we were going to be in a taxi anyway. Except that it was now midnight, so the taxis were now charging about six hundred rupees to go to the airport. I tried haggling with the driver who caught us as we were leaving the train, at least to get him to use the meter, which he wouldn't do. Since he wouldn't bring the price down, we said we would just go to the official stand. He tried to stand in our way while saying that the stand didn't dispatch taxis, only rickshaws, and rickshaws don't go all the way to the airport. Of course, he didn't want us to go find out for ourselves, so we were suspicious, in addition to being so not in the mood to deal with this guy. Chuck waited and pushed through the mob of people trying to get to the stand while I haggled and argued and stood there, cold. Eventually, Chuck got to the front and sure enough they gave us a Rickshaw for 150. This seemed all wonderful, until the thing started moving and the freezing air started blowing in from both sides. I sat with my rucksack in my lap trying to block the wind while chuck pulled a thin sheet out of his and shivered underneath it for the 45 minute 30 mile an hour ride to the airport.

We finally got there at about 2, checked in by 3, and took off by 4. Throughout all of the excitement, noise, stink, beauty, puzzlement, and hassle of the last twelve days, neither of us had had time to learn a thing about Turkey. But what we did know was that Mama and Papa Ades were waiting at the Four Seasons.

The Middle Class

2006-05-04T13:09:00.000-07:00

Pictures for this post will be added shortly. Please address all complaints to Chuck at cbclinton@gmail.com

From Jodphur we took an overnight train to Jaipur, called the pink city because most of the walls are painted a sort of tacky orangey peach that I guess resembles pink. We arrived at 5:30 in the morning and stumbled away from the train station to find a hotel that would take us right away so we could nap. The cycle rickshaws were already out and about, and I must have said the word no about 100 times before we found the right turn off for the hotel we were looking for. It turned out that the only currently empty room was booked that night, but they let us sleep there for a few hours before moving to another cheaper room that would be vacated a few hours later.
We woke up a little before noon and had breakfast on the roof of our hotel, where we ran into Della, the Canadian girl we'd met in Delhi. We made plans to meet up for early dinner and a Bollywood movie that evening, and then went on our way. We walked around for a while, but then realized we weren't in any part of the large city that was worth seeing. But before we even turned to the street much less raise a finger to flag a rickshaw, about six of them appeared behind us as if they knew when they woke up where we would be, and started after us. But the strange thing was, they didn't really say anything that was the least bit distinctive. In general, the drivers just kind of shout at you and wave you towards their rickshaw, but dont try to seem nice or smile or offer a lower price than the other guy. They just elbow each other like kids at an ice cream truck and try to make the most noise. And maybe this makes even less sense, but we both decided sort of telepathically that we wouldn't hire any of them if that's how they were going to be. 'No ice cream until you boys calm down.' We started walking away, pretending that we didn't want a rickshaw after all, hoping that one wouldn't follow us and we would reward him with with our fare. Of course they all started chasing after us. I'm not sure how we ended up picking one. Maybe one of the ones in the back who had done the least elbowing, as if we were trying to reverse the social darwinism that was too freakily apparent for us to accept. But the strangest part of it was that once we decided on our guy, the teams changed. All six of them started lining up and when he named his price of 300 rupees to take us to the Amber Fort and back, they all chimed in like Jaipur Local Rickshawers Union Chapter 134, "good price, good price, 300." And they never start off with a good price, so we tried to bargain, but because the six of them were there arguing with us, he had the strength numbers to not come down (of course his were some of the weak elbows, so he wasn't really saying anything himself). In the end we figured it was probably not far off, because they wouldn't come down at all, and it was about 4 bucks apiece for a driver for two or three hours. We asked him to take us to the post office first so we could buy some stamps for some postcards.

The post office was a hilarious mess, just a shitshow of papers and people and lines, and when I bought my two eight rupee stamps with a twenty cent coin, the guy didn't have four rupees of change. The fucking post office. He tried to give me the leftover in stamps, but I stubbornly refused, mostly out of disbelief that in the entire post office of a major city, there were not four rupees (a dime). The guy angrily slapped the empty change tray against the counter and mouthed off at me in Hindi for not accepting stamps that I couldn't use, then just folded his arms and stared at me as if he wanted me to come up with a solution. I think I let the guy behind me make his transaction and with that the change was there. A post office without a dime. Who would've thought?

While I was fighting for pennies, Chuck checked the lonely planet and saw that we had been grossly overcharged for the trip, so we decided to give haggling a shot now that the guy was on his own. We came out and pointed to the book like it was the Quran, saying that the roundtrip cost to go to the Amber Fort was supposed be 150 rupees. He refused to haggle immediately and vehemently, and I guess rightly so, considering we'd fixed a price already, albeit a total ripoff. I apologized and told him we'd pay him for the ride to the post office and be on our way. I figured he would start haggling instead of losing a major fare way out to the fort, but he charged us 20 rupees, definitely twice the price for the one minute drive to the post office, but I wasn't going to argue for 25 cents (tee hee), and he basically told us to go away. I think he was just pissed off that we had broken a verbal contract, and that because of it he didn't want anything to do with us. Ifso,itwas the first thing resembling scrupulous behavior I'd seen.
We ate a samosa because they were there and found a guy who would take us for 200; we saved 80 rupees, or a buck apiece. After ten days in India our cost perspective was splattered on some road next to Chuck's bottle of piss.

The Amber Fort was pretty cool, though very empty. There was no art, and little decoration, but the place was a veritable maze of passageways and staircases and whatnot. The concubines' quarters were the most interesting part, if only for the complexity of the hallways leading to each of the many rooms. Kind of made me wonder if the Sultan ended up in the room he'd intended every night.

Apparently the history of the place isn't appreciated by all, as this place was as littered with urine as the rest of the country. Every time we would wander down a series of obscure passages it would end in a room that stunk of piss. I'm not sure if it was the guards who weren't allowed to take breaks while on duty and just knew where people were unlikely to go, or visitors who got lost back there and were just dying, or others still who were looking for the most remote place to drain, but it was in no way confined to one or two rooms. And this actually wasn't just India: a number of the temples at Angkor in Cambodia were similarly aromatic. Now I can't say that I've never peed in a place I wasn't supposed to, but this just seemed a little much. Many of the walls had also been defaced with graffiti. Finally, the structure was not well preserved, and many of the rooms had random pieces of wood and concrete blocks sort of strewn about, but not in a way that suggested that it was an aesthetically conscious decision. I did have a lot of fun just kind of wandering around the various winding ramps and stairs and passages, but I have to admit I wouldn't be too upset if they just decided to scrap the remaining historical significance altogether and turn it into a paintball arena, or laser tag or something. It'd be better than a toilet at least.

From there we headed back to the hotel to meet Della for a dinner of Thalis at the hotel, more than we could eat. Della had a Veggie burger, having gotten sick on her third day in India while in Agra, and still unable to handle actual Indian food. Not an easy way to be, and with just a couple of days left, we both had our fingers crossed that we'd make it out without a similar occurrance.
Della had offered to go buy the movie tickets and due to the women only line had no problem. The theater we went to is supposedly one of the premiere spots in all of India to go see movies. Indeed, for the first time we felt like we were getting a break from the chaos. The seats were assigned, and there were ushers with flashlights to help show us the way. The theater was clean, the people moved in an orderly fashion, and there were, no joke, garbage cans. I was actually surprised that people knew what to do with them. I realized though, that for some reason, our visits to tourist sights rarely allowed us encounters with the middle class. I suppose they were out there, but whenever we might have seen them we were being too hounded to notice them casually walking to and from work. But here they all were, without a rickshaw in sight...as long as you didn't look out through the front door, in which case you would see an army preparing to lay siege.

The movie we were watching was in Hindi and had no subtitles. This we knew going in. But I was excited for the breaking into song nonsense I'd heard about. Unfortunately, this was a comedy and only had one such episode. After watching for a little while I realized it was an adaptation of Waking Ned Devine, the movie about an old guy who dies after winning the lottery and a small Irish town comes together and endures folly after delightful folly to pretend before the lottery representative that a different guy is actually Ned so they can all share the money. Now, they changed the story to make it culturally relevant, but the main gags were there. I couldn't really tell, but it seemed like a few of the actors actually had a decent amount of comic timing, and delivered what looked like clever asides and sarcastic remarks with the skill you would hope for from a movie star. But what really got to the crowd was the slapstick. And it brought the house down. I've never seen so many people go so apeshit over the guy getting clotheslined on a tree branch while standing on a moving vehicle gag. After that one the place just roared. And then of course, several other guys were dragged on ropes by the same moving vehicle, and the howling began again in full force. Someone really needs to get Bugs Bunny over to those elementary schools, stat.

After the intermission, yes intermission, this lighthearted comedy made a bizarre turn. At one point it looked like the young heroine wasn't going to end up with the man of her dreams, so she oh, you know, went into her room and locked the door and hung herself by a rafter. Her family burst in to her room to reveal her dangling legs squirming as she struggled for life and obviously managed to save her, but this was literally five minutes of screen time after a guy falling into some mud brought tears of laughter. Ten minutes after the girl kicks the stool out, a guy was banging around in his skivvies with pots on his feet and the crowd was going wild again. The three of us were just stunned.
Once the movie ended, we started shuffling out, but at one point I turned and looked back at the rows of people behind us. Every face was turned up to the screen as each member of the large cast was shown in silent outtakes dubbed over with music. I've never witnessed such a display of pure and identical delight: every mouth turned upward in a slight, comfortable, natural smile, eyes wide, bodies 45 degrees from the screen, chins tilted upward over their front shoulders, frozen between walking right and looking left- an elementary school class photographer's dream if I've ever seen one. I stopped Chuck and Della and the three of us turned backward and watched the crowd with the same childlike pleasure with which they watched the screen behind us.

Our introduction to the middle class continued the next day when we went to McDonald's for lunch. Now, you might think less of us for going to McDonald's in India, and if you do, go fuck yourself, sometimes it's just got to happen. Actually, what prompted the visit, other than the decision weeks before that we should try a McDonalds in each country, was our connecting of two dots: 1. McDonald's prides itself on consistency in every restaurant 2. You can't eat beef in India. How the hell would they resovle that one? How can you have a Big Mac without beef? You have the Chicken Maharaja Mac. Quarter Pounder with Cheese? McVeggie Burger with Cheese. The standard, irreplacable double cheeseburger meal? McAloo Tikki Burger. I think we stood in the middle of the place guffawing and beating our chests after reading every menu item. Some of the chicken items and of course the filet o' gross remained the same, but aside from the jewels above some other menu items that tickled us pink were:
Paneer Salsa Wrap
McCurry Pan Shahi Paneer
Veg. Surprise
Veg. Pizza McPuff

Naturally we both went for the Chicken Maharaja Mac, and it if I hadn't been told it was chicken I never would have guessed. It wasn't bad, but it did have a hint of utterly repulsive. That same repulsive you feel five minutes after eating regular McDonald's, but in this case during. The fries were great though. Interestingly enough, this turned out to be our most expensive meal in all of our time in India, almost four bucks. We also noticed that the staff was extremely devoted to providing good service, more of the female customers were dressed in jeans instead of full saris, the kids looked healthier and more outgoing, and the place was absolutely spotless. This was without a doubt a middle class treat. McDonald's. Go figure.

We took a walk into the old city, the part that is painted something sort of like pink, but most of the shops were closed because it was a holiday. So that sort of sucked. The bustle of Jaipur is probably the main reason to go there. Luckily one of the tourist sights, the Jantar Mantar, was open. Della had told us that it was pretty cool and that we should get a guide to explain everything. When we arrived, we paid our entry fee and found six guys sitting under a tree with a wooden sign nailed to it that said 'GUIDES' and listed prices for one person, two people, three people, four people, and sixteen or more. The two person price was 75 rupees. I asked the older serious looking guy right under the sign if he was a guide. He said yes. I said, we are two people, so 75, right? He said, no. 100. I pointed to the sign and he said, 'sing is no good.' Ah...my mistake.
'Well, okay, 100 rupees.'
'No no, you have to wait for more people, big group.'
'But you just said 100 rupees for two people.'
'Yes. But you wait for big group.'
'You are all guides here?'
'Yes'
'And the sign says you can guide two people?'
'Yes.'
'But none of you can guide us now?'
'No. You wait. Go inside and look, we come find you when big group.'

I was too confused to keep trying, so we walked in and looked at these big astronomical devices, having no idea what they did or how they worked. It was hot and this was boring. After about fifteen minutes, I saw a big group go off with a guide.

'Was that a big group?'
'Yes, group.'
'But you didn't tell us?'
'You want guide?'
'Yes, I just-'
'There is guide, blue shirt.'

I turned around and a nicely dressed young man was walking over, and as I looked back at the older guy, he just waved me towards the young guy and leaned his head back at the tree and resumed his staring. I think they just didn't want to go out into the sun. Anyway, the young man's name was Ahmed, and he was a really nice guy and had the whole routine down pat, but he did get a little confused when I would screw around with him. Half of the large stone structures were time telling devices built by Maharajah Jai Singh II. When he showed us the biggest and most accurate clock, he said that the time was 28 minutes off of official time. He then explained that official time is for all of India, but that local time reflects the position of the sun in relation to Jaipur. I asked him if maybe Jai Singh just screwed up and built the thing six inches to the left, and he said, 'no, this is local time.'
'You sure the Maharaja just didn't know what he was doing?'
'Maharaja Jai Singh'
'Local time?'
'Yes, local time.'

The other half of the structures were entirely devoted to determining a person's horoscope sign and some other astrological garbage that depended on what time the person was born. Granted, the things were pretty cool to look at, and I bet were not easy to build, but didn't this guy have some other things on the agenda besides build huge clocks? Some Muslims to persecute or something? I guess in the end this was a more constructive outlet for his gobs money and free time.

We spent the rest of the afternoon just sort of killing time around town. Jaipur is a busy, dirty, noisy city, fully worth a visit, but it would be hard to say that it is 'nice'. The desperate were everywhere and the touts relentless. One kid, maybe 12 or 13, followed us on a cycle rickshaw for almost half an hour, even though we gave him no indication that we wanted anything from him. We were just walking. After we said no six or seven times and kept walking, and he kept pursuing, we started laughing when he would appear out of nowhere, and this new reaction was enough to give him hope and make him keep following. He was saying '10 rupees, anywhere..five rupees.' He was nowhere near the most poverty stricken of these people we'd come across, but he spent a full half an hour chasing us so he could maybe drag us across a big city for absolutely nothing. And he was smiling at us while doing it. That is what made India the most difficult but fascinating place we'd been: the constant hassle was no worse than that. You don't feel unsafe or threatened, you feel bother, exasperation, curiosity, disbelief, frustration, surprise, amazement, confusion, and even delight when doing something as simple as walking down the street, every time you do it. With our departure form India just one long day away, we would soon find out whether we really wanted someone to just turn it all off.

Samosa Heaven

2006-05-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

The bus we took to Jodphur, the blue city, was a local bus, not that such a thing as a tourist bus exists, which meant that the trip would at least be somewhat uncomfortable and rather interesting. After we bought our tickets they made us put our rucksacks in a compartment in the back of the bus, and then the kid who opened the back asked for a ten rupee luggage charge, 'to make sure everything would get there okay.' Sweet. I almost refused, just on principle, but then realized it was 25 cents and the principle of I need my bag was a little more relevant. Still, once aboard I couldn't help but worry that as the bus was leaving, the bags were staying behind. Of course, if we'd seen them out the back of the bus, they might not have been to hard to recover. The bus was nearly empty when we left the station, but for the first half hour of the drive we were going about 5 mph with the door open along the side of the road, the driver honking his horn along the way, and people occasionally appearing out of nowhere and hopping on. Soon enough the bus was so full that people were crawling through the window separating the driver's compartment from the rest of the seats to sit on a little bench behind him. Every once in a while we would stop in a small town to pick up and drop off people, but there was never anything resembling a bus stop. It was usually just a collection of food stands- at one of which I purchased, through the bus window, a newspaper fashioned cone full of masala peanuts, spicily excellent- but sometimes not even that. The ever changing cast of characters was entertainment enough for the four hour ride.

We arrived in Jodhpur just after dusk, which would make finding a particular hotel a bit difficult. Even more confounding was the autorickshaw driver comission that hotels pass on to customers if the driver brings you to a place. We therefore had to get our driver to take us close to a hotel, but not close enough so that he would know where we were going. The central Clock Tower made a good destination, but before our driver would agree to take us there, and again when we motioned for him to stop there, he asked us three or four times which hotel were going to. Eventually he realized we knew the score and he gave up.

We found our lonely planet recommended spot easily enough, and it featured an impressive rooftop view of Mehrangarh fort, where we had a dinner to be forgotten-I finally decided to have a mango lassi, sort of a milkshake but made with curd, which makes it chunky and quite revolting, my chick pea dish was dry and plain, and the dessert I ordered to make up for it all was sickeningly sweet- though it might have just been a case of bad ordering. (I now realize that I forgot to mention an excellent meal we had in Jaisalmer, only our second foray into meat eating while in India, where the place looked nice enough to take the risk, and after several mutton filled Tibetan dumplings and some Chicken Tikka Masala, we'd forgotten all about the misery of standing around a train station for hours). The room we'd chosen was pretty spectacular, but at this point our standards were rather skewed. Spectacular means you don't have to wrap your pillowcase in a t-shirt to prevent potential head lice, the furniture looks like it could have been originally purchased for this room or perhaps only one prior location. It does not however mean that the shower is in a distinct stall from the rest of the bathroom (a luxury I came to find not just unnecessary but rather useful, preventing the occasional circumstance of having to get out of the shower to pee, an interruption I find particularly unpleasant. The soaked bathroom floor, however, is a significant downside to this arrangement...if only someone could find a happy medium-urinal built into the shower perhaps...(why don't rich people ever put urinals in their homes?)), or that the outer door lock is any more than a padlockable bolt, such that a vigilantly helpful hotel staff member can confuse an intentionally left open door with an accidental one, and slide the bolt closed while Chuck is still inside, in the bathroom, unaware that he has just been locked in the room, and upon this discovery has to stick his head out the window and shout upwards, hoping that I, waiting impatiently on the roof to order a much needed dinner, can hear him from up there. That night we just took it easy, completely exhausted from the safari and the bus ride.

The next morning I went off in search of an internet cafe. It was a bit early to find anything open, but as I walked I got to watch Jodphur wake up. I hadn't heard quiet or seen an empty street in over a week, so the sights of the lone workers making their ways and a pocket of school children playing on the corner were calming and normalizing. I finally found an open internet place, but with only twenty or so
minutes before the note I'd left Chuck said I would be back. I quickly took care of the online necessities, but on my way back was wooed by a pile of fresh looking Samosas whispering sweet nothings to my empty belly. All of the Samosas you find along the streets are slightly different, varying greatly in shape, size, ingredients, and levels of spiciness, but not much in price: always cheap. This would be my first of many that day, probably the spiciest I had in India, and the best up to that point. As I ate it I made my way back up towards the hotel, and though I was fifteen minutes late, the only thing keeping me from walking all the way back to get another was that I wasn't sure if my tongue could take another one.

I washed it down with a mango shake on the roof, with Mehrangar in the background, while Chuck had a tasty looking pancake and we split a big pot of Chai, so much that the waiter laughed when we ordered it and didn't believe that we wanted it (indeed, we didn't).

From there we went to check out the fort, whose entry fee came with a fantastic audio guide, of which I am generally a fan.

The fort was enormous, fascinating, and provided a number of impressive views over the blue city below.

The blue walls were originally intended to signify a residence of a holy man, but eventually the practice became more widespread. Anyway it looks cool. The fort is comprised of an extensive network of gateways, courtyards, palacial quarters, and what are now exhibition spaces all connected by winding passageways. It houses a large selection of Mughal art, and is apparently an excellent example of Mughal architecture, not that I could really tell you why.

It has been the focus of a massive restoration project undertaken by the current Maharaja, who retains an honorary post (and a massive fortune) but is the first to have never had any government power. Despite his potential to be a useless pampered cricket playing waste of a figurehead, from his comments on the audio guide, he does seem to be knowledgable and deeply committed to the preservation of Rajasthani history. But, as with most information dumped into this brain over a short period of time, very little now remains (see the night before every exam taken in college). I do remember being amused by the elaborate carriages that the Maharaja's wives used to be carried around in by 12 or so unfortunate men. They were specially built so that she could see out, while she was protected from the lustful gaze of men. I for one, without a fancy one way vision carriage to obstruct me, didn't find myself casting too many lustful gazes in any particular direction: perhaps it was actually the gazers who were being spared.

We stopped at the fort's cafe before leaving, and I had my next two samosas of the day, these two filled with ground lamb. From there we took a rickshaw to the nearby White Temple.

It was truly impressive, but after so many temples, it was hard to continue having the feeling of 'impressed.' I like forts. On the way in, we saw these two young kids doing some sort of traditional dance while their father played that lousy instrument, but played it well.

The energy of all three of them was inspiring, especially considering they started the routine over and over again as each group of tourists approached. They would watch out for pictures being taken and pose accordingly, and knew when to ham it up for the real wallets without breaking out of the routine.
With nothing much left to do, we decided to spend the rest of the day walking around the market, and though it looked rather similar to the others we'd seen, it was the best people watching, adventure finding space available.

After a few minutes of wandering I started talking to a guy who, naturally, had a brother who lived in New York, but he seemed too nice and not selling anything to be selling anything, so I didn't just walk away. Eventually he got to the point, and asked us to come check out his spice store. I, in the spirit of habitually blurting words that would be ripe for eating in the not too distant future, said, "okay, but I'm telling you now, you're wasting your time because we're not going to buy anything." Within five minutes this guy has us drinking Chai, then this special tea made with fresh saffron and some other stuff, and then starts going on about all the other spices and hsowing us email orders that other Americans have made after buying from him, the whole deal. But of course he's our new best friend. He also really wants to sell us this winter tonic, a sort of natural viagra shall we say. To confirm the potency of this stuff, he shows us a notebook supposedly filled with words of praise from former customers, but the one he shows us about the winter tonic was either writeen by the stupidest American ever born or this guy himself. "'I try your winter tonic I go home and have all night with my lady friend and she say go buy more winter tonic because best for stay all night with lady,' -Ryan Smith, Strasbourg New York" or some shit like that. Anyway it was hilarious. chuck bought some of that as a 'gag gift' for his girlfriend along with a bunch of other cooking spices, and I got some Chai stuff and some Tikka Masala spice. I have very little idea what to do with it when I try to use it. Words were as good as eaten.

Speaking of, it was once again Samosa time, so I asked our spice guy to recommend us a place, conveniently, some eleven year old kid was standing right outside and offered to take us to the place. We got a few of these samosa like things, also called samosas but not what you would think of, that were rounder and flatter and were filled with a small amount of something. These particular ones were made of dhal, fried lentils with tomato-ey sauce, and were umbelievable. The kid just stood there while we ate, but declined when we offered to buy him one. This seemed strange, until he whipped out a business card and asked us to come check out his textile shop across the street. Eleven, tops. Curious, and thrilled with the food, we obliged.

When we got there, his sixteen year old brother took over, bringing us upstairs and sitting us on a couch while he took out the picture of the store managers and Richard Gere, who had come here months or years before to buy textiles. Of course, this wasn't the first we'd heard of this, as textiles are pretty big in Jodphur, and the coming of Richard Gere seemed to be a Christ-like event in the history of Jodhpur, though we didn't know we would end up in the particular store where he did his purchasing. So the older brother, still a kid, began laying out piece after piece, draperies and bedspreads and duvets, and with each one beginning a short lesson on how and where each was made and the artistic history behind the designs. He was probably the best salesman we'd encountered. Of course, this was all in vain, since we had no need for textiles, and were only there because we were full and looking for entertainment. Not to mention the fact that his helper, another kid who worked at the store, couldn't stop laughing. After a while, it became uncontrollabl, so we had to ask what he was laughing at. The saleskid responded by asking the significance of my t-shirt, a green shirt that says 1972 in yellow on the front, which I believe commemorates Brazil's victory in the World Cup that year. I explained. He then said that his friend was laughing because that year has some kind of significance in the gay movement in Rajasthan- there was some kind of festival or something. I responded that I didn't know that there was even a gay movement in India. I asked how gay people were treated, and he said that nobody treats them badly and that there are many gay people. "But," he added, "they don't do sex with each other, they just don't like girls. They do, like, traditional dance and things." Uh huh. I don't know much about the country, but I was pretty doubtful about an open gay movement in India in 1972, and even more doubtful of his explanation of what gay people are. (Subsequent efforts to google this topic proved unsuccessful when searches for things like 'Rajasthan gay 1972' turn up things like 'Gay man looking for hot dating in Rajasthan.'). This of course doesn't matter because even after explaining that my shirt has nothing to do with whatever it is they think it does, his assistant has so much trouble containing his sporadic chuckles that he has to be replaced with someone else to hold up the textiles. Chuck and I must have shared a dozen bewildered looks. Eventually, the guy gives us prices of each of the pieces and they are pretty cheap considering the complexity and apparent quality(neither of which I know anything about), but are still way out of the question for us to buy, and they are still drapery things. We kindly thank him, tell him we will send our mothers here if they ever need anything to drape on something else, and ask for a business card before heading back to the samosa place for round two, or four, or whatever. And it is then that I proceed to eat the best samosa I've ever eaten or will probably ever dream about eating in my life. There it is, right there:

Man was that good. The only solid food I consumed that entire day was samosa, in total they all cost me less than a dollar, and it was one of the best eating days I can remember.

Unintentional hiatus, not for much longer

2006-05-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

To those actually still reading this page, despite the growing lapses between posts, I apologize. The higher cost of internet, and the surprising lack of access at all in the small European towns in which I´ve been spending much of my time have made catching up difficult. I am currently in San Sebastian on the Northern coast of Spain/Basque country (hopefully no separatists reading over my shoulder, car bomb in hand), after ten days in Turkey, a quick pass through Greece, a week in Sicily, four days in the Cinque Terra on the northwestern Italian coast, and the last week driving around with Duncan White along the northern coast of Spain. So, I will be heading straight down to Morocco over the course of the next two days. From there I will hole up in an internet place for a day or two before doing anything to catch up before I forget everything I've done, and will publish the products every two days so two or three of you remain interested. From there, periodic posts should be easy enough. Hope you're still around.

Ades of Arabia...err India

2006-04-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

From our hostel, we'd booked what was supposedly a sleeper bus, which neither of us had heard of, but it wasn't too expensive and they would take us directly from Pushkar to Jaisalmer, the Golden City, on the western edge of Rajasthan. When we got on the bus, what we found was that there sere seats like any normal bus, but above them, instead of luggage racks, were fiberglass enclosed compartments on either side, one of which we would have to share. It actualyl wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as you'd expect, not spacious exactly, but we both managed to sleep. The curious thing, though, about this bus, was that despite the fact that it would last more than ten hours, there was no bathroom, and it made no bathroom or food stops as the long overnight buses in Asia did routinely. Luckily by the end of the day you tend to be terrible dehydrated, so I didn't have a problem with this, but at one point I did wake up to Chuck reaching over me to poke his head into the bus and look both ways, then shut the door. Though confused, I just ignored it and closed my eyes again. But I guess a minute later I looked over to find Chuck facing the window and squatting. In the midst of terrible but deep enough sleep, the best my brain could muster was, 'gee, it's be a buzzkill if he fell out while pissing.' Turns out he was using a water bottle as intermediary between bladder and outside, which I guess made sense. You might find the idea of a bottle of urine lying on the side of a road rather unlpeasant, but I would advise against such thoughts, for two reasons. One, I know from personal experience that a bottle of liquid explodes fantastically when defenestrated from a rapidly moving vehicle (prior instance involving a gallon of milk and a winnebago, if you don't know, don't ask), so this bottle's former contents were no doubt well distributed, and the bottle itself is no more. The second reason is of more significance: both urine and plastic are deposited in all parts of India with reckless abandon. I've already discussed the urine part in a previous post, but let me focus on the plastic here.

Littering was unbelievably commonplace, but surprisingly hard to get used to. Indeed, there is not only no such thing as a public garbage receptacle, but there isn't even a designated garbage area. That is to say that people don't sort of agree on a particular location to sort of sacrifice to assignment as a 'garbage pile.' In short, everywhere is a garbage can (as well as toilet). And despite witnessing countless instances of people finishing with some form of food or drink and simply tossing the paper or plastic in stride, I found it incredibly difficult to do so myself. At first I would ask the person who sold me the product, 'where can I throw this away?' He would always, always, look at me, then the object, then at me again, take the object, and drop it on the ground at his side without a word. For some reason I continued to do this, inexplicably feeling less guilty about the indirect contribution to the problem, despite memories of the Law and Order accomplice standard lingering in my brain. After several days, I started to find an already accumulated pile of trash on which to deposit my own, and finally, by then end of my time I managed to straight up litter twice, but even then did so with visible reluctance. As you would imagine, the garbage is as ubiquitous as the cow shit. It was the ultimate disaster of modernization hitting a place harder and faster than its social development and rampant overcrowding could possibly handle.

In short, Chuck threw a bottle of piss out the window, and there really isn't much wrong with that, in and of itself.

We arrived in Jaisalmer the next morning, surprisngly refreshed, having slept in a fiberglass box, and asked an autorickshaw driver to take us to the fort. Jaisalmer's prominent feature is its huge sandstone fort, the only one in India that is still inhabited. We deflected a bunch of drivers who wanted to take us to a certain place, because they usually demand a steep commission from the guesthouse they choose, and the guesthouse in turn simply jacks up the price. But so as the driver is pulling away from the pack, he slows, and a guy gets on, and starts telling us about his guesthouse and how he'll give us a room inside the fort for 200, even though it should be 300. We agreed to take a look, despite our suspicions. The place was incredible. The hotel had a spectacular rooftop view, and inside our rooms were two separate beds, a bathroom with hot water, and a little window balcony with a beautiful view overlooking the old city outside the fort.

Our room was literally built into a rampart. And did I mention the guy's name was Papi? Reason enough, no?

Jaisalmer is also famous for its camel safaris, and for the unscrupulous guesthouse owners who kick you out of your room if you don't sign up for their safari. Papi assured us he was not one of those types, and offered us a Safari, which we hadn't planned on doing, for a price of 850 rupees per person for four meals, blankets, our own camels, and the jeep ride to and from the starting/ending point. What more, he had just booked four swedish girls to go the next night, and we would be spending the night out under the stars in the middle of beautiful remote sand dunes. But of course, we would have to let him know right away, before walking around the fort (and comparing prices). Still given what the lonely planet was telling us, the price was pretty fair. He'd also said we couldn't tell the swedish girls what we were paying, because he'd charged them 1200. He also said that cancelling our train tickets for the next night would cost us ten rupees apiece and would take five minutes. Eventually we agreed, and set off to explore the Jain temples located inside the fort, and sort of just wander around.

On one of the outer ramparts we found a perfect spot to be idiots.

From there we went outside the fort to wander around the old city and check out some of the havelis, mansions owned by descendants of rich, I don't know, mansion owners.

They were pretty cool from the outside, but the tours offered of the inside weren't worth the cents they charged. Jaisalmer is a visually stunning place, literally everything built from golden sandstone, and many of the thin winding streets open to views of the majestic fort towering above.

Plus the fort was just fucking cool. I mean it's a fort, and people live in it, and cows shit in it. I don't live in a fort, do you?

That afternoon we went to the train station to cancel our tickets. There were at least four people and three computers behind the window, but only one guy was doing anything. The rest literally just sat there. There were about 20 people in front of us, but then occasionally a woman would show up. They've got this rule in India that women can go immediately to the front of any line. Men can piss anywhere and women can cut. Make sense? Anyway, it took us more than two hours to cancel our tickets, and it cost 100 rupees. Fucking Papi.

The next morning we got up early and met the four swedish girls, who turned out to be a Spanish couple, albeit a very friendly pair. They drove us in a jeep for about a half an hour out, well, into the desert. The Thar desert, that is.

I was having trouble putting into words the experience of camel riding, until I stopped in a local library here, and happened upon a book of Pablo Neruda poems, uhhhh, conveniently in Spanish, so I thought I'd give him the floor (I did my best with the translation, but it's not perfect):

Oda al Camello

Bestia Maravillosa, te pregunto,
cual es mas feo,
la cara o el culo?
Sin la avalancha constante de pelotas de
popo
cayendo detras, me parecerian iguales.
Bestia maravilosa, obediente,
sigues caminando, sin intentar de
evitar el rio de mierda de sus amigos adelantados.
No te importa el peso de mi cuerpo,
mi comida, la tuya.
Tu pene triangular apuntado atras,
orinas sobre tus piernas, no te importa tampoco.
Ni te importa cuando le dan a Lucky,
Rey de los camellos,
Una bolsa enorma de pasto,
y a tu un montoncito para compartir con tres otras bocas.
No formas una revoluion socialista
ni organizas un coup d'etat
militar. No,
te quedas contento
sentado, comiendo la tuya.
Contento,
mierdas en las piernas.

Ode to the Camel

Marvelous beast, I ask you,
Which is uglier,
your face or your ass?
Without the constant avalanche of pellets of
poo
falling behind, they would seem about the same.
Marvelous beast, obedient,
you keep waling, without trying to
avoid the river of shit of your
friends up ahead.
You're not bothered by the weight of my body,
my food, yours.
Your triangular penis pointed back,
you piss all over your legs, that doesn't botehr you either.
Nor does it bother you when they give to Lucky,
King of the camels,
an enormous bag of grass,
but to you a small pile to share
with three other mouths.
You don't form a socialist revolution
or organize a military
coup. No,
you remain content,
seated, eating yours.
Content,
you shit on your feet.

It turns out you can find out everything there is to know about riding a camel for two days in the first fifteen minutes:

1. They are slow
2. They trample through trees, taking you with them
3. Your groin hurts.

At first the scenery was pretty disappointing. Actually, for the entire day the scenery was disappointing. Far from the soft rolling dunes we'd hoped to traverse, most of the Great Thar desert is actually rocky and ugly, with weeds and pathetic vegetation occasionally sprouting up. After about an hour, we stopped in a tiny village of mud huts that might have been inhabited by 50 people maximum.

A few children came out to beg and look at our strange possessions. Most of the men were gone and the women paid us little mind. It was a pretty surreal place. I couldn't believe that people actually lived here on god knows what kind of income. They didn't look like they were starving at least, but they were unbelievably poor.

We got back on and rode for another half hour. The rest was unbelievably necessary and rejuvenating, but after ten minutes back on, the groin pain had steadily shot back up from tolerable to pretty uncomfortable I can't wait to stop. Soon enough we did, at a hilariously unremarkable location: under some random tree.

There, our camel drivers, Rollah and unpronouncable built a small fire to cook a nice little meal of cauliflower and chapatis. The chapatis were actually quite good, much better than the ones I'd had before, and the food was really quite tasty and plentiful considering the equipment, just a few small pots and a small pan. After we ate, we just kind of laid there for like two hours. Not the rough and tumble adventure I'd expected, but I'm never one to complain about a nice lay around. Once the hottest part of the day had passed, we got back on and road through the late afternoon. By now my groin was stretched beyond feeling, and the ride actually was more comfortable. We stopped in another town to water the camels, and seven people ran out behind one guy who carried everything they had to sell us: a bottle of Pepsi and two warm Kingfisher's. Blech and blech.

Now this must all sound pretty horrible, but it really wasn't that bad. The discomfort usually didn't start up until the last few minutes of each leg, and though the scenery wasn't beautiful, it was dramatic. Plus I got to sport my nifty t-shirt turban.

At the end of the journey, we finally did arrive at some dunes, and they were unbelievably impressive and made the entire thing worth it.

We spent the sunset drinking chai-delicious, far better than the shit you get in the states-with the camel drivers and watching sand beetles make crisscrossing tracks every which way, but mostly towards us. Bad sign for the sleeping outside thing, but good enterainment. Rollah and unprounouncable fixed up some dhal, some rice, and some chapatis, and this time I asked for some of the spicy shit they'd made themselves to add to mine, and it was simply excellent. These guys really were impressive.

When it got dark, it got dark, and there was nothing to do but sleep. We amidst the dunes under blankets, tired enough that we forgot about the sand beetles that seemed so interested earlier. When I woke up there were about a million tracks completely surrounding the rectangle of blankets that had been laid out, and I'm guessing they weren't just doing laps. Best not to think about.

Rollah fixed us a breakfast of toast and jam and boiled eggs while Unpronouncable went off to recover the camels, who had slowly meandered off into the distance, eating trees and shitting throughout the night. W wanted to get back early because we'd cut time form our next destination, Jodhpur, to come on the safari. Papi had promised we would be back by 10, but then again, where exactly where were those swedish girls? He also charged the Spanish couple 1200 rupees apiece, promising a chicken barbecue, cold beers in the evening, and a whole host of other little luxuries. So we were worried. We asked Rollah when we would be back, and he said, "4 o'clock." Sweet. That meant overnight bus to Jodphur, spend the day there, and then get on an overnight train to Jaipur. Fucking Papi.

As it turned out, at about noon a jeep came speeding across the desert and parked next to us as we prepared to sit down for the midday lunch and lay around under a tree. They asked if two of us were supposed to come back early. They apologized and said they didn't know where we were, and had spent all morning driving around looking for us. The poor Spanish couple didn't want to ride any more either, but there was no room for them in the car, because for some reason they brought three guys out to get the two of us. Relieved that we'd make it to Jodhpur that night, we cruised back in the Jeep while these guys blared some funky Indian music, until a guy waved us down and spoke to the driver for a minute. Out came an old man holding a baby and with them an adorable 8 year old girl. The old man and the kids got in back, while the man squeezed into the front seat. They explained that the baby was sick. I wasn't sure if I should feel sympathetic or if I should start trying to break up my malaria pills and snort them.

In any case, we got back to the hotel at about 1, with Papi nowhere to be found, obviously, and they let us shower in the hotel before taking off, one of the few promised that held up. I was sad to leave the Jaisalmer fort and the golden city for a second time, but glad to be aboard a bus and not a fucking camel.

Defender of the Faith?

2006-04-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

We lingered on the train platform for a while because our train wasn't there yet, watching the people go by, watching a dog climb a pile of boxes, watching a filthy man try to sleep amidst the noise, tossing and turning on a box and under a thin dirty cover, somehow making the homeless of America seem pampered, but managing to sleep nonetheless.

At about 10:30 we realized the train was just further up on the track, so we went from car to car, trying to make sense of the words printed on the cars and the lists posted by each doorway. Eventually we found the right car, class 3AC, which means air conditioned and three tiers of beds, and found our spots. We then realized how exhausted we were, though we hadn't done anything, really, in the two days we'd been there. But Delhi is just constantly tiring. There are just so many things going on at once that your mind is just constantly being drained of the energy to process it all. Anticipating a 6am arrival in Pushkar, we wanted to get to sleep as soon as possible. We stumbled into our car, loosely packed with people, both loaded with our big bags and me with my guitar, sore thumbs always in India, but now two exhausted clumsy clueless sore thumbs. When we found our beds, the bottom two of the stack of three relatively hard and covered in blue soft plastic but barely adequate sleeping spaces, three Indian men were sitting on the bottom bed opposite ours, the middle bed on both sidesdangling down from the wall to allow passengers to sit upright. We bumbled about trying to find places to put our things, struggling to affix the middle bed to allow lying down, and just generally not knowing what the hell we were doing, until one of the men started explaining everything and helping us out. That's when we found out that Chuck's water bottle had a faulty cap, so when he bent over to stuff his backpack under the bottom bed, the cap popped off and water started pouring out on the floor from the mesh bottle holder on his shoulder bag, and since he couldn't see it, the bottle spilled until I could, in my confusion, get out the necessary full sentence to get him to stand upright. The three men started laying out newspaper while we pressed it down with our feet and those 'Want to get away' Expedia(or whatever) ads flashed through my brain.

Eventually we managed to settle down and catch a few hours of sleep, though I tried for half the night to sleep with my shoulder bag next to/under my head to avoid theft, which was utterly paranoid, until I just got fed up and stuffed it under the bed by Chuck's head. And then someone pulled the rip cord in the nasal passages of the friendly man across from me, and the noises coming out of him were not to be believed. It was like someone built a driveable lawn mower out of a truck engine and managed to pop it into neutral, silently push it on board, park it on his upper lip, and then suddenly gun it up and into his sinuses just as I closed my eyes. For a few minutes I thought the man's face was just going to explode. It got so bad I started allowing myself to laugh audibly, just to see if anyone else was awake and listening. After what felt like an hour of this, I finally managed to get some sleep.

We arrived in Ajmer early in the morning, where we would have to catch a bus to Pushkar. This proved to be very easy and very cheap, the bus leaving just after we got on and costing only 8 rupees, about 17 cents. When we left, the bus was pretty much empty, but it frequently slowed to pick up waiting passengers in towns or out on the road somewhere, and by the end it was totally packed with people who seemed to be so sure that we were from another planet that some pretended we weren't there in order to preserve their world view, while others would not stop staring. The former were generally older, or female. More on the gender thing later. The bus dropped us in Pushkar half an hour later, though nobody told us where we were, and finally when we asked and started to get off, we had to fight through a swarm of women in Saris trying to board the bus, unwilling to relent their attack of the bus to let anyone off.

From the bus station we made a wrong turn, my fault, and ended up walking the complete wrong way for a while, but when we found our way back to the land of Lonely Planet recommended guesthouses we were greeted by a friendly guesthouse manager who wore what looked like a monk's sort of toga thing, and offered us breakfast at the rooftop restaurant while we waited for a room to be made up for us. The cook was the manager's brother, named Haiman, and he basically hung out in the covered patio of the restaurant watching cricket and occasionally making pancakes for the guests. A few times I came back to the guesthouse to look at pictures from his travels in India, watch cricket, eat cashews he's gotten in Goa, and learn about him and his family.

After breakfast I set out on my own to explore the town. Pushkar is a holy pilgrimage site, so no alcohol, meat or eggs are served. I found a bustling little center of clothing shops, fried food stands, internet cafes, money changers, reataurants, and guesthouses, all situated around the holy Pushkar lake. And of course, the touts and hawkers were out in full force. I stopped outside a small store selling paintings and drawings of vazrious sizes, looking for something to paste into my journal, and the storeowner invited me in to see what else they had inside, which I instinctively turned down. He smiled and said, "looking is free, don't worry," so I agreed. Once inside, he left me alone, which was a nice surprise, while I looked at the smaller colorful drawings. After a while, he asked where I was from and all the usual jazz, which I answered cordially and responded with my own questions. He was a casually but well dressed man of about 40, and spoke very good English. After a few minutes of talking he introduced himself as Sanju, offered me a cup of chai and a chair, and we carried on chatting. The chai was delicious by the way. He spoke for a long time about his travels, about a guy who he'd met from Italy who turned out to be heavily into organized crime, about this and that and the other thing, and we were both having a grand old time, and it seemed like he didn't want anythign from me. Eventually I started asking about his work, since he'd told me he was just watching this store for his friend, who was elsewhere for the morning. he told me that he worked for the family business, which primarily did real estate, and we talked about that for a while. Then he mentioned that the company also does this and that other thing, and they also make jewelry. Eventually I asked about all of these things, and finally I started asking about the jewelry business. Well he went on and on, describing where they get the stones, where and how they make the rings, how they distribute them. Ah. How they distribute them. He started talking about how they usually have to find Americans and Canadians that work for them that they can trust, who will take a whole bunch of this jewelry into the states and bring it to a representative there, who will pay them for their services, offer them a ticket back to India if they want it, and bid them farewell. "Well, why, Sanju," I asked, gullible mark that I was at the moment, "can't you just bring them yourself since they're so valuable?" He explained that they need to avoid the import duties, that it is much more expensive for an Indian businessman to transport jewelry, that an American can bring in up to a certain value without paying taxes. And here's where I realized why this guy was talking to me and how good he was. We must have been talking for 30-40 minutes before jewelry was mentioned, and twenty minutes later and he still hasn't asked me for anything. But then when I realized what was going on and said I had to be on my way, he kept trying to get me to promise I would come back so we could talk for ten more minutes about the things I was asking. This guy was going to try to get me to give him a credit card deposit of a few thousand dollars for a whole bunch of rings, supposedly worth a 20,000 payment, which would turn out to be worthless once I got to the States. Delighted to nearly be part of a gem scam offer, I thought about hanging around to wait for it to happen, but then decided it was best if I just took off then, so I told him I had to go find my friend, which was conveniently true. I could tell he was disappointed when I got up to leave; he must have thought, after all the questions I was asking about the jewelry business, that he had a real sucker on his hands.

I met Chuck back at the guesthouse and we went for another stroll. On the street a casually dressed fifty year old man asked us the standard tout questions, but he so nonchalantly smoked and meandered that I figured he was just generally interested in two white faces. Then he reached out his hand to give me a flower bud. I'd read about these guys in the lonely planet, they lead you through a prayer and then try to extort money out of you, so I turned it down. He smiled and said, "no problem, you take for bring to holy lake." And all of a sudden it was just in my hand, and he was reaching out to Chuck to give him one. I said, "how much?" He laughed and said with a smile, "no problem my friend, you pay what you like." Sweet.

So he leads us down to the lake, which is surrounded on all sides by 52 bathing ghats where people come to cleanse in the holy water of Lake Pushkar. Indeed, there were people, all men I think, spread out around the lake in these rectangular pools built just off the lake, wading in the water and dunking their heads.

So this guy shows us to one of the ghats and introduces us each to our own holy man. Mine was maybe my age and was dressed in, guess what?, slacks and a plaid button down. Real fucking holy. Least the extorting sonofabitch could do is put on a fucking orange sheet if no robes are available. Anyway my guy sits me down along the inner wall of one of the ghats, and Chuck is seated around the corner, but my guy takes good care to make sure that I can't see him without turning around. He sits down facing me, with the big beautiful lake adorned with hundreds of temples of various size behind him, and a 15x20 foot ghat leading to a set of granite steps, more temples, and the town's main street off to my right. It's a beautiful day and I'm ready for some spiritual hootenanny.

And it all starts well and good. He says some shit in Hindi, sometimes doing a little call and response action, and then he says it all again in English. He's got a little set of supplies by his side, and before you know it he's rubbed a line of red ointment down the center of my forehead, which is a hindu symbol for 'tourist putz.' Then he asks for my flower, takes few petals off, does some more 'praying,' has me drop some petals ina silver tray with some holy water and some yellow powder. To be honest I don't really even remember what he was doing, I was just giggling my way through all this, delighted at how much they go through to sell this as a religious practice. Eventually he starts explaining the Brahma-Generation, Vishnu-Operation, Shiva-Destruction thing, yada yada yada, I'm having fun but mostly trying to figure out how much, or how little I can get away with paying this guy. And then comes the scam I read and heard about: he starts in with the family members, and they tell you at the end that you should 'donate' something for each blessed relative.

"How many people in family?"
"Three"
"Papa?"
"Yes"
"Mama"
"Yes"
"Brother"
"No"
"Sister"
"Yes"
"Wife"
"No"
"Girlfriend"
"No"
"How many people in family?"
"Three"
"No, six."
"The fuck you talking about?"
"Papa one, Mama two, Sister three, Brahma four, Vishnu Five, Shiva Six."
"Oh so everyone's part of the gang now, eh? You sure you're not in there somewhere too?"
"You have Grandmama?"

And it's at this point that I think I should start lying, because you want I should tell you what happens if Paulette Ades catches a whisper about her grandson in India paying for blessings from Vishnu, who's now part of the family, can't wait to see him at passover? I mean, Uy.
But so then the real absurdity starts.Petal dropping, silver trays, holy water, fine. But now he takes my hands and cups them together facing upwards, and puts a whole coconut in it.
"This is holy coconut."
It is at this point that I lose my shit. I'd been giggling the whole time, enjoying the experience, whatever. But now I'm just hardcore laughing at this guy. And he's dropping petals on the coconut, the holy coconut, excuse me, mixing some more powder, sprinkling some holy water, and every time he says "holy coconut" I go apeshit.
And then the negotiations start. He explains that I should conrtibute something for everyone in the family so they will receive a blessing, and then asks, "so, how much will you give."
"100 rupees."
But here, instead of bargaining, he goes right back into more prayers, as if extra work will be the thing that does it. Now he takes my hands together in his and starts shaking them as says something in Hindi and then starts to call and I respond(but I'm not even there anymore, just looking around to see what Chuck's got going on, and wondering if I can sprint the hell out of there without falling into this holy water):
"Happy Papa"
"Happy Papa"
"Happy Mama"
"..."
"Happy Mama"
"HAppy Mama"
"Happy Sister"
"Happy Sister"
"Happy Brahma"
"..."
"Happy Brahma"
"..."
"HAPPY BRAHMA"
"Happy Brahma"
"Happy donation"
"Pffff HA HA HA HA HA"
"Happy donation"
"Whew, (uncontrollable laughter) happy donation, that's a good one man"
"Happy DONATION"
"Yeah, (struggling to contain laugther, wipe tear from eye), okay, happy donation"
"How much you pay?"
"Look I told you befor, 100 rupees."
"No, no, this is not enough. Most people they pay that much for each family member, this is good amount for blessing."
"Look, my friend-"
More prayers.
"Happy Papa"
"Listen-
"Happy Papa"
"Yeah, happy Papa"
"Happy Mama"
"LISTEN. You're doing a great job here and you're working very hard, but justlisten, you're not going to get more than 100 rupees from me, so you might as well stop trying."
That finally did it. Oh no, he tried this one:
"You see how much your friend pay and you pay same."
"You think I'm going to leave it up to a gentile? You should have seen how much he paid for his shoes to get fixed. Now he's holding a holy coconut and has red paint on his forehead."
"Happy donation."

We both got ribbons tied on our wrists, which were actually quite useful in deflecting other would-be holy men throughout our time in Pushkar. Chuck dropped a nice 250 on his family prayers, but got to pose with a holy cow afterwards.

I'm only mostly kidding about the holy cow. Cows are actually holy animals, which means that, instead of being killed and grilled, as they should, they are allowed to roam free. And what do they do? Well, they wander aimlessly, the get in the way of everything, they force you to decide between walking into a big dirty cow or stepping into oncoming traffic, but most of all, they shit. And do they ever shit. It's just simply everywhere. Everywhere. And it's not like a little dog poo that might just get on the bottom of your shoe. We're talking big soft hot mounds that would swallow your foot. Lcukily we both escaped without stepping in any, but there were certainly close calls. And while I'm going on about the cows, here is a little list of some of the things the cows in India enjoyed eating or licking:
-Newspaper
-Cardboard
-Painted steps
-Stone platforms
-Fabric scraps

Once I went out for the day and saw one cow lying down in a huge pile of newspaper scraps, while one of his friends ate around him. When I came back, hours later, the cow was still lying down, and the friend was still eating, except the only paper left was directly under the one lying down. It is here that I write off Hinduism entirely. Perhaps I will revisit when they reconsider their choice of holy animal.

What most interests me about this experience was my part as a visitor in this community. Many people condemn the tourist waves that supposedly dilute the culture. Indeed, many o the shops that line this town only exist because of the tourists. This faux religious ceremony is an economic institution that has sprung up because they realized that it is a way to take money from the people that have it. And that makes me wonder just who is damaging the sanctity of the culture here? These 'holy men' are the ones bastardizing this faith for the sake of profit. But at the same time, if I wasn't showing up day after day and week after week, this capitalist institution would not exist. Who is really to blame for this blatant misuse of deeply held beliefs?

In the end I decided that fault is irrelevant and all this talk about preservation of culture is absolute bullshit. These people are destitute, and the benefit of attracting people with means far outweighs the cost of this supposed dilution. Religious fundamentalism, after all, at least of this sort, tends to keep people in crippling poverty, and isn't social and financial integration the only thing that can change that? I suppose this is all coming from a staunch advocate of a secular life, but anyone who would argue that the people of Pushkar are better off without the tourists is just nuts.

That afternoon I went for a barbershop shave, which cost less than fifty cents and left me with a baby's ass for a face. Guy did all kinds of face and forhead rubbing and all that...great stuff. Then I made faces at this little munchkin while Chuck went to an ATM.

While still waiting, I met a kid playing one of these instruments that can sound anywhere from tolerable I guess if played well to god fucking awful if played poorly.

But he was a good kid, and we agreed to come back to let him take us up to one of the nearby temple topped hills for the sunset.

The site was beautiful, and we watched these crazy monkeys kind of come out of the woodworks and sit there five feet away watching us as intently as we were watching them.

They did all kinds of cute human things with their hands. Ramlal was a pretty cool kid, having learned English just getting involved with tourists, and he was the eldest son in a fatherless family, so the 250 rupees we gave him afterwards meant the family's biggest source of income. he also had to rent a bike from his Uncle for 20 rupees a day. Some Uncle eh?

At the top we met four girls, well, three girls and one middle aged woman, who were teaching English in a small village near Jaisalmer.

They seemed nice enough, so we agreed to join them for dinner. The restaurant was painfully slow, each person's food coming out one by one, and throughout this marathon dinner, we realized that these girls (see above) had terribly little to offer, and were amazingly unable to cope with the constant demands of India. They'd been there for six weeks already, but they still reacted to the people like they were bloodsucking lepers, whtether or not the person wanted to sell something or was just being genuinely friendly. But so this dinner is taking forever, and we're well out of things to say. And then one of these fucking girls goes and orders dessert, which causes us to sit there for another full hour, only wanting to go to sleep, while we wait for her damn pie. Granted, it was delicious. On our way back to the guesthouse we saw a big thing going on in the main sqaure, so we popped into a nearby restaurant with a terrace to take a look.

Drums were banged. This ceremony was in celebration of Holi, which I don't know what it is: lonely planet says it celebrates marriage, I also heard it celebrates the coming spring, but all anyone seems to talk about is the colors.

And oh the colors. The next afternoon, as we'd been warned, the town erupted with a procession of camels and elephants with costumed riders, a group of very cohesive drummers, and a mob of males aged 7-18 armed with bags and bags and bags of colored powder. We'd heard all about it, and put on our shittiest clothing to go see what was going on. I'd had my worries during the morning: what if we miss it? where will it be? will i know where to go? We walked for five minutes towards the center of town and as we rounded a corner a group of maybe twenty kids, coveredfrom head to toe in paint and powder saw us, and sprang. Wet painty hands were rubbed all over our faces and necks, camel riders bombed powder from above, and within literally five seconds, we looked like this:

Once covered, nothing mattered anymore, so we followed the procession, half dancing along with the intricate drumbeats, sometimes lifting little boys onto our shoulders at their request and dancing around, grabbing handfuls of powder from the supply carts whizzing by and tossing them in every direction as those on board the cart literally filled the air with colored powder, so much that you couldn't see for a few minutes afterwards. It was a blast. I wish we had pictures but the camera ruining wasn't worth the risk.

After showers and some waiting around to make sure the paint throwers had had their fill, we set off separately on walks around the lake. I met a group of 18 year old Indian guys who had come, as their leader said, "to meet some girls." I chose not to inform him that the town without alcohol hardly seemed the place. Some gypsy women approached me; they are darker skinned, ornately dressed, and often just grab your hand to start drawing on you with henna. Having figured out how to get rid of them, I told them up front that I didn't like henna, but one sat down just to chat anyway while her friends kind of lingered. She was simply gorgeous. The gypsy women are an odd sort though, in a way I can't even begin to describe. Their rules are just different, I guess.

From there I saw a huge white marble temple that just begged to be approached, and when I got closer I saw thatit was still being built. A man standing on the second floor noticed me, and I asked if I could come up and he said yes. He pointed me around to the other side and told me I needed a head cover. There were two old men in turbans there, and there wasa basket full of colorful beaded scarves: hardly turbans. There wasn't much English going on there though, so I pointed and they kind of sort of nodded, so I geabbed this ridiculous gold scrap of fabric, just utterly absurd, but it was in my hand, and what was I going to do, fish for a stylin' turban? So I pop my flip flops off, place this thing on my head and try to wrap it so it stays on, which the increasing wind is not facilitating, and I ascend to meet the guy who waved me in. He tells me it is a Sikh temple, hence the headscarf, and that he is the carpenter. The thing was incredibly beautiful, just absolutely pure white. So he kind of leads me around and up a few flights of stairs, while I cling this hilarious shimmering cloth to my head, fully aware that no discussion of context could sav me from ridicule from anyone. My friends would laugh and the Sikhs would frown. But the pure white marble and the intricate carvings were just to impressive to pass up, and the thing stood elevated with a view of the lake.

Meanwhile Chuck was busy nearly getting roped into his own gem scam, and though he escaped at an early stage, we would later run into the hawker and consider accepting his offer of a beer at his place (curious enough, considering the location), just for shits and giggles, but decided not to complicate things with a bus departure in a few hours.

Pushkar was a fascinating place, quieter and slower than Delhi, but the constant barrage of sales and questions and implied desperation was no less.

Can I have some fake India please?

2006-04-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

I am about to begin writing about my time in India, which ended about two weeks ago, unsure of where to start. There is so much to say, but I don't know if anyone will be able to understand any of it without having seen it firsthand. So I guess I should start with the most important thing I could possibly say: Go. You'll love it or you'll hate it, but it will be unlike anything you've ever seen, and your sense of where you come from and its place in The World will never be the same.

Throughout much of our time in the countries we've visited we wondered about whether we were getting to see a real slice of life there, since tourist destinations often change a place, or are just packed with tourists and those locals involved in the tourist trade. We learned very quickly, and were reminded with every step, after every blink, that tourism or no, there was no avoiding The Real India.

We flew into Delhi at about 7 in the morning and shared a cab with two Canadians, Della and Rick. The cab ride experience, prepaid at a taxi stand, would be the easiest and most peaceful experience of the entire 12 days. The morning was cool and quiet, and when we arrived in Pahar Ganj, where most of the cheap hotels are located, most of the storefronts hadn't opened. The road was dirt, individual cows and a few people went about their way, and a man made fried samosa-like patties in a huge oil filled wok. I would be back for those. Since we hadn't slept in, well, days, and eaten in many hours, we went to man with the wok, who sold us two of these fried things and served it in a dried leaf made bowl willed with a little bit of potato curry. Delicious. Then we made a plan to meet Della and Rick for dinner, and passed out for six hours.

When we got up we got our first taste of Delhi. Walking out of the alley from our hotel we were met by the distinct smell of hot urine; indeed, at the corner there were three outdoor 'urinals.' Not that there needed to be: it seems men can just piss pretty much anywhere they like. We walked to a corner restaurant where they gave us rice and chapatis, a sort of unleavened naan, with some vegetarian curry, the subsistence staple meal of the Indian diet. It was pretty good, and dirt cheap. We walked across a crazy intersection of people, autorickshaws (tuk tuks without the onomatopeiaic significance), cycle rickshaws, cars, buses, cows, motos, and hand drawn carts, into the train station, and up to the international tourist office, where we decided to book our first and last train, since we were sure about the schedule of those. On our way out we saw another urinal stand in the parking lot, which turned out to be a twenty foot long tiled wall that simply esconded the people pissing on the parking lot wall, which was also lined with tile, had broken planks that connoted stalls, and had one drain-if the word drain can be defined liberally, then I define it so here. Naturally, it smelled like roses. When we came back the next day, don't ask me why, someone had taken a crap at one end.

It was already too late to really do much that day, so we decided to take an autorickshaw to Connaught place, the center of modern Delhi. There we met a few guys who were very friendly, but were also trying to usher us to a friend's tourist office so the friend could rip us off on a train ticket. This would be a trend. I bought a portable wooden chess set that came down from 500 to 250 rupees in about five minutes. We were going to walk to the Jantar Mantar, but a guy stopped us, telling us he wasn't trying to sell us anything because he works for the Official Ministry of Tourism, and then started telling us that we shouldn't take the train to go through Rajasthan, because the train is lousy, despite being the way everybody in India travels. Instead we should rent a car, which he conveniently had for rental five feet away.

Our first mini adventure came when Chuck let some guy convince him that a very slightly broken piece of his shoe needed mending, which, granted, it could have used, but by no means was this necessary. So this shoe cleaner/repairman starts working at Chuck's shoe while I'm standing there, and a shoe cleaner friend of his starts trying to convince me that I need my shoes cleaned.

Granted, they were kinda dirty, but whatever. Also the guy's gums were corroted and, like, bloody, I guess, but not bleeding, which is, I don't know, scurvy, right?, and that kind of bugged me out and made me not want to talk to him anymore. But so finally he just starts going at them with a soapy toothbrush, saying he would just show me and that I didn't have to pay, so I just let him go ahead clean them. Thing is, he wouldn't let me set a price while he was doing it. He just said, "you pay what you like." I didn't know what that meant, so I went along with it. After ten minutes, he'd done a nice job, so I offered him 100 rupees, a little more than two bucks, which may seem like nothing but was way more than this type of labor goes for, and he tried to get more from me, but not by asking for it, but by saying, "you happy, I happy...okay?" I really had no idea what that meant, so I just said that was all he was getting, since I didn't even want the shoecleaning to begin with. Then he tried to get me to agree to pay whatever Chuck agreed to pay, and who the hell knew what Chuck was coughing up, so I just said that was all he was getting and after a few more "you happy I happy"s, he left me alone. Of course, I'd probably already paid a ridiculous price, but it still took me longer to get rid of him than it did for him to clean my sneakers.

That night we tried to go see 'The Dances of India,' a one hour performance that would have been good to have been able to say to our mothers that we had seen, but it wasn't on that night, despite the pamphlet saying 'Performances Every Night' (I was starting to think that the rickshaw driver just told the guy to tell us it wasn't on, because then we were stranded and we'd have to pay the driver to take us back, but probably not), so we just went back to the hotel. The hotel owner recommended us a place to get Thalis, an assortment of vegetarian dishes that comes with rice and chapatis, and it was excellent, and way too much food, and cost 2 dollars. Our company was also good: Rick, who was a photojournalist on his way back to Afghanistan, and Della, who was intelligent enough, and more so than most of the travellers we'd met. Though I'd committed myself to abstaining from meat and alcohol while in India, the former for health and the latter because it was worth a shot, as soon as Della suggested a drink that second one went to shit. I immediately regretted this decision, as Kingfisher kind of sucks. After that I managed to resume my abstinence plan for the rest of the twelve days.

The next day we went to book the rest of our train tickets, because the guys touting the tourism offices told us we should book well in advance, and seemed to be sincer about that much. Though the process had been difficult to figure out the day before, now we knew exactly what we were doing and got right in line with our little application forms. The guy who was helping us was a short pudgy balding man of about 45, wearing the standard middle aged Indian man garb of a plaid button down and navy pants, and was a real sourpuss. I mean, this guy was just not happy to help us, we could see right away. I tried softening him up with the best universal middle aged person humor I could muster up, and it was damn fine cheese let me say, but he just wasn't going to break. And then, something happened. His colleague to his left was a younger man of about thirty, friendly, cheery. He was helping two seriously muslim dudes-white gowns, little white hats, full beards- from Jordan who smiled at us and tried to speak english but just couldn't, so instead wiped some of this aromatic lotion on Chuck's hand without saying anything. This freaked us out initirally, but it smelled good, and they laughed and gave me some as well. Anyway, a third ticket office clerk, a Sikh wearing a bright lavender turban and matching silk button down, came over to our guy and tried to give him some rupees for something. Our man pushed his hand away and started getting testy with him in response. They argued a bit. The young guy got involved, smiling and trying to convince our guy of whatever the Sikh was saying. The argument escalated steadily, all in Hindi, but looked just like a normal argument between colleagues. But they went on and on, them trying to give him this money, not very much, and him pushing it away and getting more and more worked up. After a while he was really getting angry: he had that way about him where he wouldn't look at anyone when he got mad, he just stared off into space with fiery eyes while getting louder and more obstinate. At this point, three women, who were dressed in colorful Saris, as most of the women in India do, appeared behind us, and got involved in the argument, and were clearly against our guy, while he stood up to shout back at them. At this point, we're looking at the two Muslims, who have absolutely zero in common with us, I would imagine, and shrugging, not knowing how we should react. Half of the tourist ticket office employees were arguing with this one guy. And then, I saw it, slowly building up in the corner of his left eye, then it was audible in his choked throat, then another glimmer in his right eye,then two streams down his face. Yup, the man started crying. Six coworkers, five tourists behind us waiting, the two of us right across his desk, and this guy starts crying, though still shouting at the rest of the office. He rubbed the few tears away while the young guy tried to calm him down by patting his shoulder, but our man ust went on yelling and choking up, yelling and choking up. It looked like that was the end of it, but then the young guy wheeled his chair over, put his arm tightly around his neck to kind of hug him, and then gave him a big man kiss on the cheek while laughing the "oh pudgy angry man, youre so silly" laugh. At this, the man just exploded. Burst into tears. Screaming at everyone through the fountain spewing from his face. Chuck and I dumbfounded. The Muslims winking at us while shrugging and smiling, then turning back and pretending to be serious. I thought maybe this little nebbish was going to start foaming at the mouth, he was so angry. After a good two minutes of hardcore sobbing and yelling and weeping and screaming, the young guy and the Sikh kind of escorted him into the back mini-office where only we could hear the muffled cries, and the Sikh sat down in front of us to finish with our reservations. He didn't say a word about it. What I'd give to have been able to understand what it was all about- of course, because this was the international tourist office, I'm pretty sure nobody but the people involved knew what was going on. Unless there was that random Hindi speaker in there.

Scheduled to leave Delhi that night on a sleeper train, we set out about getting to aw many of the tourist stops that seemed worthwhile. We caught an autorickshaw to the gate of the Red Fort, but first went for a walk through the Chandri Chouk, the main bazaar in the Old City. The main street was selling all kinds of crap that we weren't interested in, but the mass of people going in every direction, drink chai on the street, pedaling cycle rickshaws, the touts from every shop trying to drag us to their place to sell us saris or shirts or whatever, brought us to the point of sensory overload that we would have to get used to.

At the end of this market we found the spice bazaar, which added aroma to the attack. We bought some fresh cashews from one of the many shops and hired a cycle rickshaw to pedal us back to the other end of the market. The driver weighed maybe 120 pounds and dragged our lazy asses all the way back for about fifty cents, and was glad to do it. Of course, I felt so guilty about this guy's job, that I didn't take another cycle rickshaw for the entire time, though these guys were everywhere, begging for fares, and often just begging when we would turn them down.

The Red Fort was pretty cool, a massive red sandstone structure built by Emperor Shah Jahan in the mid 17th century, and inside were a number of lavish marble structures, but it was mostly enjoyable as a quiet, toutless respite from the chaos outside.

Even more impressive was Humayun's tomb. Humayun was another Mughal Emperor, and if there's one thing the Mughals were really into, it was building absurdly beautiful tombs for their dead dads.

In a garden outside Humayun's tomb, which was also separated from the madness, we sat to just relax, when a few 9-12 year olds approached us and showed us their makeshift cricket ball, an irregular mess of leather and string. After exchanging a few questions, they invited us to play with them, probably expecting us to be English or Australian and therefore good at cricket. The word that we were playing got out immediately, and all of a sudden fifteen kids were runnignf rom every direction to join the game, excited to see what we could do. Chuck's first bowl to me went whizzing by behind my head, so I, naturally, did the standard drop the bat and approach the pitcher move, which they clearly didn't understand, because about six kids ran up to grab the bat and take my place. Once they realized we were terrible, their interest sort of dwindled. But before that they made us team captains and had us draft teams. We sort of played for a little while, but it was a total joke, and all of a sudden they all tore off after someone coming out of the tomb to get a look at the guy, who turned out to be a professional Australian cricket player. Though our shittiness had already pared down the interested crowd, a few lingered to teach us how to bowl properly.

From there we took a long walk through some random part of Delhi, always on the verge of being lost, but eventually found our way to the India Gate, a sort of cheap knock off of the Arc d'Triomph (not going to bother to look up spelling) where we watched a group of young middle class Indians play an actual game of cricket in the nearby expansive park while the afternoon sun began its descent.

After another dinner with Della and Rick, this one also excellent, we made our way through the mess of Pahar Ganj at night- earlier here I'd made the mistake of turning my head to examine something hanging in a shop while moseying and was soon met by the wet slime of a cow's face slobbering all over my arm as it bumped into me as if I wasn't there- and off to the train station.

The train,also our bed that night, would take us to the Hindu pilgrimage town of Pushkar, where our introduction to the religious smorgasbord of India would begin.

Any Side of Paradise

2006-04-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

Our time in Southeast Asia dwindling, we decided to head back to Thailand to check out her southern beaches instead of continuing on to Phnom Penh, the biggest city in Cambodia. Veronica had only eleven days and wanted to continue seeing something other than sand and water, so she stayed in Cambodia and we hopped on an early morning minibus back to the border. (We looked around for some flatbed trucks offering extortion, intimidation, and bottom abuse, but they were all booked). At our guesthouse we'd paid for transportation straight through to Bangkok, which would involve a minibus on the Cambodian side, and a real coach bus on the Thailand side. Oddly enough, though we were inside a vehicle and sitting on seats this time for the Cambodia leg of the trip, it was about six times more uncomfortable. They piled four too many people into this thing, along with four too many peoples' bags, and then drove to another part of town and put four more people, bags, in. The scorching sun made a mockery of the antiquated and in no way opaque curtains that hung pathetically from the windows and usually didn't stretch out properly. The air conditioner technically worked, as in, you could tell that colder air was being exhumed by the vent, but it made no difference when sandwiched between the bosoms of a sweaty, testy, tank-topped Brit and an obnoxious Frog. While I'm on the topic, let me take the opportunity to express my fervent belief in the veracity of one particular stereotype about the French, that is: they are dicks. However, though this guy blatantly rejected every single person who attempted to make conversation with him throughout the trip (except when he wasn't sure where to catch the bus connection and lobbed the question at me, which I gleefully ignored), he did form a cute little bond with a young Cambodian who hopped on board when we stopped for lunch. This is also something great about the Cambodians: they are always willing to help each other out. The guy who hopped on didn't seem to know any of the bus drivers from before- there were three drivers, though only one drove and the rest just kind of crammed themselves in the front seat bench, which was piled high with about 10 backpacks- but they just let him hop on and sit on some of the bags because he needed a ride to the border. But so anyway, this little Cambodian guy was on top of three bags in the doorwell, and didn't really have anywhere to put his right arm. So he kind of just rested his arm on the Frenchman's leg, and his hand ended up kind of lightly handling the guy's bare mid-thigh. Now at first, the Frog was a little surprised, but this sort of thing is very natural for the Cambodians- actually all of the people from these three Asian countries that we'd visited. They tended to be very comfortable with homogendered, asexual physical affection. We would often see two young men of the same age slumped over each other sleeping on the bus. One would lean forward against a seat and the other would lean on his back, or shoulder, or whatever. So when the Cambodian first put his arm there the French guy kind of jostled at first, but then the Cambodian just smiled and tapped the French thighs like a bongo, then actually did a few rapid massage squeezes. With this, the Frenchman relaxed and demonstrated an understanding of the cultural differences (whatever, still a dick) and they both fell asleep like that for the remaining three hours of the drive, which was totally horrible and sweaty and cramped and I would have paid much more to get on the back of a truck, near death and sore ass included. Still, we thought we were on schedule to get to Bangkok in time to hop on that evening's twelve hour overnight bus that would take us to the ferry that would take us to the island of Ko Phan Ngan.

We made it to the Thai border in about five hours, and walked through the various departure offices, past the casino, which looks even more bizarre during the day, and onto the Thai side. Here we were met by hundreds if not thousands of people who were standing there waiting for something. Turns out the Thai prime minister was heading to Cambodia that day for some political nonsense. We ignored all of this and continued on to find the bus, which, given our history of transportation post border crossing, I would have been surprised to find in existence. Along the way, I saw some white people with similar stickers to the ones that had been placed on us to signify our belonging to this supposed bus group, but they were going the other way-a good sign nonetheless. I asked them where they got off their bus and they pointed us in the right direction. Two of the girls said they were just there to renew their Thai visas by leaving the country and re-entering, but I didn't care so we went on our way. Eventually we found our bus. Except it didn't go anywhere. Various stories and rumors floated around the passengers as to why we hadn't left and when we would be, so I decided to go right to the source. I started bullshitting with each of the bus operators until I found the one who spoke reasonable English. He explained to me that two girls were just going to cross the border to renew their visas and then come back, and they were heading back to Bangkok on our bus, so we were waiting for them. I asked when we would leave, and he said about fifteen minutes. Bad answer: everything for a Thai person takes fifteen minutes. So I figured I had enough time to walk around, pee, get some food, blah. On my way I passed by the two girls I'd spoken to earlier, who were just sitting there with the crowd waiting for the prime minister. I went up and confirmed that they were the ones getting back on the bus. Then I asked why they were just sitting there. They told me that the border was closed until 5, and then they would be allowed to leave the country, walk the 2km to the immigration windows, get on line, and re apply for new 3 month Thai visas. It was 3:30. We were going to wait for a bare minimum of an hour and a half before setting off on the 5 hour drive back to Bangkok. I clarified what they were telling me as I deliberately arranged on my face a look that could only be interpreted as "I wish your death," but they were too stupid and oblivious to see it. They asked, "Why?" I explained that the entire busload of 40 or so people was waiting for them to do this, amany of whom were tryig to make connections that evening. They chuckled an 'oh well' chuckle and said, "sorry," with a shrug. I said, "Oh ha ha, yeah," and went along my way to find a hamburger and a nice dull bludgeoning instrument. My hamburger was gross and all I could come up with was a board with some rusty nails, a bit sharp for my preference but I thought the tetanus would make a nice touch, but unfortunately they'd relocated by the time I finished eating. But, guess who stopped me along the way: tout number 1 from a few days back on my way into Cambodia. He said hello like we were good friends, the sonofabitch. Still I didn't have enough hatred to share at the moment, so I kept my lookout for these girls on my way back to the bus. But, so, we waited, filling water bottles with urine and carefull collecting dead and hopefully avian flu ridden birds to throw at these girls when they arrived. I just couldn't believe it. I've never heard of anything like this. A bus full of 40 people waiting for over two hours waiting for two obnoxious (and ugly, I should add, they were just ugly, sub- and supra-epidermally) girls. And people barely complained. I mean, yeah we were all annoyed, but in New York I could have come back and announced that I'd found and executed the two girls we were waiting for so we could just leave now Mr. bus driver, and everyone would have cheered and applauded enthusiastically. Except that in New York that situation would never have come about in the first place.

So, of course we don't make it to Bangkok until 10:30 and there's no hope of making a bus at that time. So we get a shitty room on Khao San, and head back out amongst the tourists and the ambiguously gendered. The night ended up being fun, and I wound up hanging out on the curb with a belgian girl, her morroccan friend, and their two chilean friends, fiveor six thai guys playing songs on their guitars and signing while a canadian semi thug got really into their music and, though he was exceptionally friendly to everyone in the group, got absurdly violently enraged when any passersby threatened to get in the way of their playing.

The next day we spent struggling to find a flight to India for a few days later and bus tickets down South. It took us the whole day of wandering around in the miserable Bangkok steam bath, but we managed both. That night we got on the bus, the next morning got on a four hour ferry to Ko Phan Ngan, and then a song tao (basically a tuk tuk but on a truck instead of a motorcycle) and then a half hour long boat ride to Bottle Beach. Now why, did we go so far, dare you ask? Well, because this is simply the greatest place on earth, I answer. I've never been so plainly content with everthing and nothing as I was on bottle beach. I didn't meet a girl, didn't try anything new, didn't explore any new terrain. I simply forgot about everything. We got a bungalow right on the beach and strung a hammock up out front.

The days were a bit hot so I spent them in the shade of the porch until about 3, then hit the beach. The water was orgasmically warm, and the beach might as well have been made of dove feathers wrapped in toasty warm silk.

At 4:30 it got cool enough for some beach volleyball, which we played with a regular daily crowd of 10 people until it was too dark to see the ball. Then we'd sit down for a three dollar meal, served by one of the friendly and partially insane staff members at our bungalow/restaurant establishment.

All this, mixed with some reading, some guitar playing on the porch, some fooling around with the weird local beach dogs, repeated daily swims, many many fruit shakes, and some chit chat with those occupying surrounding bungalows made the most relaxing time I think I've ever had. Ever.

On the second or third or fourth night (who can remember?-within a day I felt like I'd been there for weeks), our restaurant had a big barbecue, where you chose your meat or fish and they served it with cole slaw and salad and potatoes and fruit. It was a little pricey at $6 for a full meal including a huge piece of fish caught about 100 yards away, but, oh, worth it I'd say. I had the Kingfish, kind of like swordfish, delicious, and Chuck had Red Snapper, which was served whole with some kind of amazing sauce. He ate for about twenty minutes without talking, then flipped the fish over and found the other half completely intact. Then they lit a bonfire on the beach and started setting off those primitive hot air balloons made out of paper and something flammable in the middle.

We spent the night getting trashed on cheap Thai whisky- of which careful examination (reading the label) revealed to actually be rum, though everyone calls it whisky- with Kai, the zaniest and smartest of the restaurant staff, who had basically organized the whole barbecue, and was finally able to sit down for an hour of his own. He was hilarious and a ton of fun, and within an hour a big bottle and a small were gone, and Kai was just a mess. Then we sat with the other guests and hung out by the fire for, I don't know, six hours, while people spun fire on strings and Kai ran around being drunken Kai.

The night ended with me, chuck, and this friendly German guy Phil, our bungalow neighbor, the only three people still awake, walking down the beach in order to very thoroughly kick sand onto fires that were well on their way to dying out naturally, completely surrounded as they were by totally inflammable material. If a single hint of still glowing wood made an appearance, all six feet would resume its rapid fire barrage of sand all over the area. Then we'd walk down the beach looking for another fire and repeat. I still can't decide if this is particular episode constitutes an argument for or against alcohol abuse. Then I tried to balance myself on a wood cart that had one big bike wheel on each side, trying to keep the front and back of the cart in the air. Upon contemplating my endeavor, Phil and Chuck, in a moment of simultaneous understanding, without saying a word to one another, decided to hop on and see if we could balance all three of us. This resulted in several in depth discussions of the best method of size distribution and fot placement, the same number of failed attempts, and about three wasted hours of life.

But let me finish with the staff. These guys were priceless.

Kai is the one on the right, and really was the gem of the Bottle Beach Bungalows 1. He spoke pretty good English and learned more every day, and was hilarious and weird and all over the place. One minute he'd be running a huge tray of food out, the next he'd be standing up on a banister shouting at incoming boatmen, and the next he'd be tackling some customer on the beach. The one sitting up above us to the left I think was called Nam, and was a perfect example of bridled insanity if I've ever seen one. His rules just didn't mesh with anyyone else's. It might have been because he was stoned out of his mind all day, but only maybe. Once when he came to take my order, he sat down on the table with his pad and just stared at me with a shiteating grin. I told him what I wanted, and he just kept staring, then started mumbling some kind of gibberish that I am all but sure was not just him speaking in Thai. Then I tried ordering again and getting him to acknowledge what I'd said, but he responded with more gibberish and a lot of hysterical giggling. It was the kind of interaction during which I could turn to Chuck in the middle and ask, "do you have any idea what the hell is going on right now," without the guy hearing or noticing. After a good five minutes of this, with us laughing now, he eventually wrote down our orders and we somehow ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted.

This little episode aside, they might have been the worst waiters I've ever encountered. When they gave you the menu they would just sit there waiting for you to order, distracting you and asking you questions about other shit just to practice their English. Then when you ordered, they would go to another table and fuck around with those customers before actually bringing your order to the kitchen. Their favorite mistake was to forget which table ordered things and then be forced to carry the item(s) around to each table, asking until someone said yes. Sometimes food was fast, sometimes food was slow. You might think this all would be infuriating, but where the hell were we running off to? We were in paradise already. And I couldn't deny that they were working hard-all day every day. Kai drank a bit too much at the barbecue and passed out on the wood floor of the restaurant's lounge area at about 3, and by 7 he was up and running, getting the kitchen ready for breakfast. When I asked why he didn't just go to bed, he said because he had to make sure he would wake up for work.

The only one single time I was not happy during my time at bottle beach was when I left the beach on a longboat for three hours to check my email. No news from anyone can be good news when you're in the best place ever, is what I realized. I came back cranky and disappointed with people, specifically and generally, but twenty minutes and a strawberry shake made everything all better again.

Now, we'd decided not to go to Phuket and Krabi and some of the other supposedly more beautiful beaches in part to avoid the serious package tourists, but also because every month a full moon party takes place on Ko Phan Ngan's main tourist beach. These things were rumored to be unbelievable, with 10-20 thousand severely drugged people in attendance every month. This was to be our last night in Thailand as well. Kai organized a speedboat to shuttle everyone over to Had Rin for the party and to pick us up the next morning at 6. We got there at about 11, still early, but there were people everywhere. Neither of us were feeling all that great, unfortunately, but we struggled through a 'bucket' while watching an unbelievable demonstration of fire spinning conducted in an enormous circle by about five or six guys who all had different flaming contraptions and all nearly set themselves ablaze about twelve times. We walked down the beach, just people watching mostly, got some beers, and wandered in and out of some of the clubs. I think the full day in the sun kind of killed my drinking ability, or it's just really hard to keep up with 10,000 people on ecstasy, or whatever else. It was an impressive sight, that's for damn sure. The tacky lights were kind of nauseatingly beautiful, flashing along with the eight different sources of techno music blaring from the bars and clubs lining the beach.

The whole thing was also really filthy, as you might expect. Beer bottles and empty buckets were everywhere, the shallow water was a line of guys, often including yours truly, pissing into the ocean, individual people passed out in what looked like a nice open area, then other people passed out near those passed out people, figuring that was the pass out spot, though once the group collected it was often about twenty yards from a mass of hundreds of people furiously dancing the chemicals away. But most people were too intoxicated to notice how kind of weird it all was, that is, until the sun came up. Ahh the brutal honesty of daylight, when that pretty girl you've been grinding with for hours doesn't look quite as pretty, or quite as girl, the light stubble of the cute boy you met scratching against your neck reveals itself to be a full beard esconding 48 years of wrinkles sagging 8 inches beneath a slightly askew toupee, or that nice soft sand pillow you thought you'd been drooling on was actually the corner of someone's toilet a few hours ago. Indeed, for the drunk it was nothing all that new, but for those still amphetamined unfortunates, the only ecstaticity was reality's swift kick in the junk. It was as if the entire beach simultaneously groaned, "Awww, sick, that's what we're doing?" and then headed for the water to find the boat that brought them from one of many beaches on this and other islands. I kind of wished I'd rested a bit better for it, or been able to stomach a few more Red Bull M-150's, but in the end I'm pretty glad I got to see it. In the dark, that is.

We slept for a few hours that morning but then had to check out of our bungalow, so we spent our remaining few hours of bliss under the shade of a palm tree with our friends Carmen, from the Netherlands, and Talia, from Israel, who we'd met a few days earlier and did us the lovely favor of spending almost every minute of every day sunbathing topless twenty feet in front of our bungalow, despite the boyfriends back home. At about three we caught our longboat to our song tao to our ferry to our bus to Bangkok, where we would arrive at 8 the next morning and spend the entire day in an internet cafe waiting for our flight at 2 am. Granted it was the nicest internet place I'd ever been in anywhere in any country, but it had been 48 hours since a regular night's sleep, and would be another 24 before the next one. At the very least, I was too exhausted to think about how much I didn't want to leave Southeast Asia.

Angkor

2006-03-26T05:01:00.000-08:00

We were staying in Siem Reap, about six kilometers from Angkor. On the first day, after sleeping off the previous night's adventure, we moved to a hotel closer to town, and each got our own room for three dollars a night. While in Siem Reap we ate well each night, absolutely splurging with five dollar meals, including drinks. It was a cool little city, lots of tourists, lots of restaurants, and many friendly people. Indeed, once we got over the ordeal of getting there, most of the people we encountered were great.

Our days devoted to cultural activities, we sort of minimized the idiocy at night, so there aren't too many stories from our time there. One night Chuck and I went out for a beer and were seated next to a middle aged potbellied white guy in cut off denim shorts and a t-shirt. Clearly he was there for the atmosphere. After about fifteen minutes we saw a young Cambodian stop his motorcycle, and the white guy smiled excitedly, walked up to him, and they started laughing and shaking hands affectionately. He hopped on the guy's bike and sped away. So let's see, whore or drugs? The waitress left his half drunk beer on the table, so we at least knew we'd be getting an answer. Five minutes later the guy was back at his table sipping his beer, so we figured drugs. Nope. Soon after, what was barely recognizable under six pounds of make up as a Cambodian woman looked around the front of the restaurant, focused on him with little trouble(I guess they good at picking out their clients), asked if he was who she was looking for, and then sat down, very very close. She laughed when he spoke and leaned in as if he was charm and wit embodied. Unfortunately it was too loud to hear their conversation. Hmmm, maybe it was incredibly fortunate. The most remarkable thing, though, was how long the conversation continued. Chuck and I got into a heated debate about the progress of race relations in the U.S., and two hours later, they were still sitting there, talking about, oh, something a little different perhaps, I would, you know, venture to guess. I wouldn't have thought the guy was interested in doing much talking, but I suppose that's all part of the, errr, chase? Eventually, we left before they did. I guess this was love at first exchange of currency.

We spent three days in Siem Reap and the whole experience was simply wonderful. Our first day we hired a tuk tuk driver to take us to Angkor. On the second, we rented electric bikes and visited a number of smaller temples as well as the Bayon. The days were so hot and humid that the rides were as enjoyable as the sightseeing. On the third day we were nearly templed out (Veronica wasn't, so she got up early and did the job right), so Chuck and I slept late and eventually went to one of the distant smaller temples, which featured beautifully intricate bas reliefs, but was hard to appreciate in comparison to the immensity of Angkor Wat and the Bayon, and the veritable jungle sprouting out of Ta Prohm. For sure the way to visit the place is to start from the less impressive-though of course all are pretty amazing- and work your way up to the big boys.

The temples were a kind of impressive that makes description futile, despite the significant decay that's taken place. Most of the temples are decorated with bas reliefs depicting battles involving impressive methods of death and dismemberment, some performed by mythological beasts and Gods. Those with many arms seemed to fare well. I imagine being able to fire an arrow and sever several heads simultaneously makes for an entertaining superexistence.

Cambodia, politically and historically, is all fucked up. In the mid seventies the Khmer Rouge began a communist campaign of evacuating the cities and committing the population to peasant life, during which an esitmated 1.7 million people (from a population of 7.1 million) died of starvation, and from the mass execution of educated people and anyone linked to the previous government carried on by the Khmer Rouge. In 1978 Vietnam invaded and took over until 1989, when they just sort of got tired of trying to rule it and pulled out (which, when Vietnam says 'fuck this I'm out,' makes you kind of wonder, no?). Democratic elections finally took place in 1993, but political violence continued throughout the nineties. Over the nearly 30 years of violence and instability, landmines were the popular terrible thing to do. Indeed, one of the most difficult parts of our time there was getting over the number of amputees, some with multiple limbs missing. They were simply everywhere, and most have to resort to begging.

The country is only starting to boom with tourism once again, since things have only calmed down in the past two or three years. As a result, the tourist infrastructure exists, barely, but the people are still learning how to deal with foreigners. The temples of Angkor are overrun with child touts selling water, postcards, and useless crap, but they are prevented from crossing certain boundaries, thank god, cause these kids are persistent, adorable, hardworking, impressively capable, and most of all poor. We found one kid who could count from one to ten in about eight languages, and he was maybe six years old. On our way into Angkor Wat, a ten year old tried to sell me water and postcards, but when I showed him my full bottle he asked me my name and asked if I would look at the postcards on the way out. Sure enough, as soon as I got to the end of the bridge to the parking lot, a full two hours later and surrounded by hundreds of other tourists, I hear this kid shouting, "Daniel! Daniel!" and running towards me. I bought ten postcards and some water. On our last day we went to see one distant temple, and we walked around it taking pictures and admiring bas reliefs for maybe 45 minutes. When we got back to the street to find our tuk tuk driver, a kid was chasing me, holding out a ceramic plate with a photographic image of me somehow printed on the center and paintings of various temples around the sides. I still don't know how they did this. I was too freaked out to buy it, though I immediately regretted the non-decision once our tuk tuk sped off. But while these kids were impressive, they got annoying very quickly, requiring at least seven no's before backing away.

If the pestering of the touts weren't enough, we repeatedly encountered another infuriating impediment to enjoyment: the Japanese. This has nothing to do with individual Japanese people. But you simply don't ever find an individual Japanese person. They are bison hoards that trample anything in their way, not out of predatory maliciousness but because when there are forty of you, you don't tend to notice anyone else. A quiet isolated corner can instantaneously become a mob of snaps, flashes and chirps, and your choices are to wait through the seemingly endless rotation of photographs, identical in all but human centerpiece, or move ahead to the next spot, only to be trampled once again. I would also complain about the complete lack of English and thus inability to communicate with anyone, but, American egocentrism aside, the only Japanese I've retained from my nine days in Tokyo a few years back are hello, thank you, and all you can drink.

As Angkor is a place that just has to be seen, I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.

ANGKOR WAT

(The second half of one group of Japanese, all over fifty)

BAYON

TA PROHM

MISC.

Toto, this sure as fuck ain't Bangkok anymore

2006-03-24T07:34:00.000-08:00

Having left Chuck, fetal, I set off to the airport to meet my sister. For those of you who are unfamiliar: Veronica; 28; Brooklyn; Doctor; OB/GYN; delivers peoples' babies with (startling) frequency; only thing she can do I can't; inferior progeny of Lee and Alicia Ades, despite doctorate, actual contribution to World, society at large, anything, if you will; bratty older sister.
Now that the introductions are out of the way, err, introduction singular, I left Chuck, fetal, groaning, watching some godawful movie with James Spader (godawful and James Spader generally being redundant, I realize), to head for the airport via public transportation, my day's little adventure. I took a 4 baht (ten cents) bus ride to the train station, and a 5 baht (do the math yourself) train to the airport. I was thoroughly pleased with myself for having found my way without tuk tuks or taxis, though about six people volunteered help without my asking, I guess because I looked lost, and I almost missed the airport stop while buried in a book on the train. Though the trip was relatively uneventful, my presence was entertainment enough for the locals for their stares to be entertainment enough for me. I bought some really weird snack food that was advertised as BBQ flavored, but tasted like honeycomb cereal and spiced cardboard. After some miscommunication at the airport I found Veronica and we took the train back to the city. Chuck was alive and starting to recover, and the lone English channel's evening lineup featured Braveheart, followed by Robocop, so I knew he would pull through in the end.

We went out for dinner, getting lost looking for a lonely planet recommended place and ending up at the restaurant ten feet from our hotel, but on the way back found a huge fucking elephant on our street. I wasn't even paying attention so I almost walked right into its trunk like a jackass tourist, but, I mean, my finely tuned New Yorker street sense isn't exactly wired for big fucking elephants in the middle of Bangkok's shopping district. But so anyway I bought a bag of sugar cane stalk from the elephant keepers for 20 baht and the thing grabbed them one by one from my hand and ate. It was cute, and only moderately stinky relative to expectation. It seemed to smile too, though I'm guessing that was because sugar cane is like elephant crack rock, and in twenty minutes the thing would once again be yearning for euthanasia.

The next morning we decided to take the impressively clean and efficient Skytrain to the weekend market, which hosts approximately 15,000 stalls selling a whole bunch of cheap shit. I was expecting a bonanza of desirable goods, but found a whole bunch of mostly crap. Still, I bought some, crap. I got a leather shoulder bag to replace my day pack- which, the convenience of being able to zip onto my big bag just isn't worth it when you factor in backsweat issues- some new sneakers- italian, second hand, comfortable as all hell and cheap- and a puma warm up jacket, all for thirteen bucks. And this was in a relatively shitty market. Actually, I take that back- it was big and good and exciting and all, but I'd kind of blown up my expectation of the product variety, and didn't find the bootleg DVD's and original sports jerseys that I was going to give, well, you. Some of you anyway.

But so we made our way back to the hotel to pick up our bags and set off for the Northern Bus Station to head to the Thai-Cambodian border. Though this took a ridiculous amount of time, getting to the bus station, we were lucky enough that a bus was leaving in just enough time for us to eat before getting on board. Sitting in the food court, where literally every single Thai person was eating KFC and only the three of us were eating the Thai food was when I realized that the gender ambiguity issue was way out of control. I found myself squinting at the neck of a gorgeous Thai woman (don't get me started), a pretty ideal though a little too skinny for my personal taste, maybe could order an appetizer a little more often, but otherwise ideal specimen of feminine beauty, and there I was squinting at the center of her neck, trying to make out an Adam's apple. And I'm not making any statements about particular body parts, particular personal attraction to, blah blah blah, that wasn't the sort of neck looking I'm talking about. But so anyway when someone is scrutinizing your neck while you're eating KFC, sexual reassignment and fast food guilt factors aside, you tend to make a face that no language barrier will prevent said neck scrutinizer from understanding means, "what the fuck?" And so I realized that things had gone too far.

Anyway, we boarded the bus, the nicest non-tourist bus we'd seen in Asia, which brought us to the Cambodian border where we would cross into Poipet. Now, the bus left at 2:30 and took about five hours. Once we got through Thai immigration it was 7:30, half an hour before the Cambodian immigration office actually closes. And of course, we're still 3 to 5 hours from Siem Reap, our destination. So what all of this means is that it is dark when we cross the border, and there are no other white people crossing, because they all decided to avoid the trip in the darkness. And what that means is that getting anything we wanted would be a huge pain in the ass. But we were pleased to find that the office that could grant us entry to Cambodia was open for Business. Business indeed.

To begin our troubles, there was a man with no uniform standing outside the visa office, and he insisted that we transact with him instead of the Cambodian official. This seemed odd, but the officials behind the window weren't getting involved so we sort of agreed. Though the sign above the Cambodian visa office indicated a price of twenty dollars, this man said 1000 baht, which is twenty five dollars. But what were we going to do? This guy is the way they take their bribes. He accepts the money, then pays 800 baht to the official behind the counter, and everybody splits the proceeds. Plus the Lonely Planet said we might have to pay more than the posted rate. So we fork over the baht, and he takes our three passports and application forms and asks us to wait in the sitting area ten feet away. While we wait, some Cambodian touts that had begun haggling with us for a ride to Siem Reap when we crossed the border resumed their work. The book told us five bucks a person was a reasonable price, and I'd managed after some initial shmoozing to get one of them down to 300. More on that later.

After a few minutes, the shady man walks over to Veronica and explains that she has no completely empty passport pages for them to paste the visa. She tells him to use the addenda pages at the end, but he refuses. I find a page that has only a U.S. stamp, which is essentially meaningless, so I tell him to cover that one, but he says that they are not allowed to cover any other stamp, law-abiding World Citizens that they are. Then he tells her to come with him. I follow, and back in front of the visa window, he says that in order to use one of the extra pages, she will have to pay 200 more baht. Being an Ades, and already ticked off by the government condoned or at least ignored price scheme, Veronica obstinately refuses, while I'm already scrounging my pocket for money, ready to be on my way. In her defense, at this point neither of us have figured out that this guy is totally in cohoots with the visa office- we thought maybe they just let him help tourists fill out the forms for a commission. So we take her passport and appeal directly to the window. Bad idea. The angry, uniformed, and perhaps armed (with weapons no doubt manufactured and distributed by the good old U.S. of A. back when we were up to all that good stuff in Southeast Asia) officer says that he can't use any of the pages, as we've already been told. I ask, "is there any way you can help us out?" He says, "we told you how we can help you, but it was up to you. So, now you can go back to your ambassador in Bangkok and tell him about it." Realizing that Chuck and I had already paid and been granted visas, I replied, "Ahhh, so that's your firm grip on our (1/3 figurative) testicles I felt tighten just a moment ago." So we turn back to shady bribe man, for whom the word obsequious, tripthong or no, is of no import. In fact, when I approach him again, he continues shuffling papers for at least 30 seconds before even acknowledging me with eye contact, and even then simply returns to his shuffling before asking what I want. When I tell him, he informs us that the price is now 300 baht. I laugh and start gathering money from my pocket, while Veronica is outraged, perhaps less sensitive to this form of glandular squeezing. I point out that we have absolutely no choice, and that 300 baht is like seven bucks, so we fork it over, and they reluctantly betray their scruples for the benefit of weary and helpless travellers who sure as shit are not going back to Bangkok tonight to talk to any Ambassadors.

Okay, so now we're allowed in the country, everything should be smooth. I'll pause the story here to try to describe Poipet. In Poipet there is a huge neaon light Vegas style casino where the minimum bet is $2,500. In Poipet there are also extremely wealthy Asian businessmen. 2 plus 2 generally being accepted as equal to 4, I presume that all else Poipet has to offer are hookers that I could not afford, should I be so inclined. We did not want to stay in Poipet.

From the Visa stand we had to walk under the casino's street spanning arches to the immigration office, so our touts reappeared and I started trying to work the other guy, saying that tout number 1 offered us 300 baht per person, so if tout number 2 wanted us to go with him, he could offer us 250 and we were in. My mistaken assumptions were multiple:
1. Western notions of economic incentives apply in Cambodia
2. Cambodians engage in competitive pricing
3. Those two guys have no vested interest in joining forces to screw me and every other me that crosses the border every day
Immdiately after I tried to pit one against the other, one went up to the other and revealed that they were already pitted against me. Naturally, the price became 400 per person after we finished our business at the immigration window.

So here we are in the dirt road intersection past the Poipet casino, which lights the whole "city," blinded by motorcycles, tuk tuks and cars whizzing by, trying to look for other pick up truck drivers who aren't associated with these two touts. No such luck. Here is the scam: these are the only two guys around at this time of night who speak English. The drivers can't understand what we say, so they don't trust us. So they rely on the touts to organize a price, and the touts try to get us to pay part of the fare up front, which of course we don't, though I'm sure some do, so the drivers pay them a little commission there and then take our money when we get there. I should also mention that these pickup trucks are already loaded with no shit 25-30 Cambodians, packed as tight as a pickup can be, Cambodians just cramped into any spot they can find on this flatbed. So eventually we agree on 400 rupees per person, which is terribly exhorbitant but once again what choice do we have, and we cram into the back seat of the circa '94 ford pickup with all of our luggage on our laps- there's so much stuff that arms are going numb and the thought of moving legs is just a total joke. (We could have also paid 300 to ride on back with the others). Before we leave, the driver makes us punch 1200 into his cellphone, which oddly enough is MUCH nicer than mine, so he knows for sure how much we're willing to pay, because he doesn't trust these sonofabitch touts either. So but fine, we've got a ride, we'll make it to Siemp Reap tonight, it's an experience, and that's someone's foot hanging over the side outside my window. Oh but we've only just begun.

We start driving on this dark dirt road, traffic whizzing by on both sides, often simultaneously, limb-feeling rate 75% at best, giggling and joking because of the hilorableness of this all, four people crammed into the front seat, two of whom are driving (guy on the way right is working the gas, while guy second from the right is doing the steering). After about an hour and a half the truck stops in front of a restaurant in this one street town whose name I still don't know, and all of the Cambodians get off. We stay in the back, assuming this is a food or bathroom stop, and we are just feeling better about being inside here than out there, and also hoping that this is not Siem Reap, because this place just sucks. After a few minutes, the driver gets back in and we think, oh great, just the three of us the rest of the way, we can put our bags on the back and stretch out. But no. He pulls about 70 meters away to an empty parking lot and backs into it next to this other truck, loaded with about 15-20 Cambodians. Some guy pokes his head in and tells us to get out, we need to switch into another truck. So we get out. This new guy then tells us that our driver isn't continuing on, and that in order to go on to Siem Reap we have to pay more and go in his truck. Fucking great. But luckily here we still have some chips, albeit a small stack. Relatiely fed up, we tell him to tell the driver that we agreed on 1200 total, punched it into his cell phone, and that's what we're paying. He says our driver isn't going there tonight, and that he had thought it was 1200 to this place. But this new guy would be willing to give us a ride for another 1200. We try appealing to the driver, but again, he doesn't speak English, nor does anyoe else other than this menacing of face but not that large shithead. We ask the driver to take out his cellphone again, and the guy translates, and I can see a little doubt and guilt about the scam in the driver's eyes. Still though, we're now in the dark, with the restaurant and town and light and women and perhaps last sight of anything resembling civilization about 70 meters and 20 Cambodians away. We realize that these negotiations would be much better carried out over there. So I tell the guy that we're hungry and we're going to eat over at the restaurant, and when our truck is ready to take us, we'll talk. He says, "No you're not." Though I both hear and understand these words, I say, "What?" He repeats, "No, you don't go over there." I suppose I should add that we're all laden with big backpacks, shoulder bags, and I a small travel guitar. I should also mention that many of the Cambodians are fascinated with the guitar and even more with the fact that I let them hold and strum it (Though I don't let it get too far away, as I am already pondering the most effective way to kill multiple people with a travel guitar. I figure the first hard smash over the head would make a sharp piece of wood out of the fretboard that could maybe stab 1 or 2 necks). After about ten minutes of us arguing with him, then him translating to the driver, some of the spectators start getting involved, I think realizing that they were trying to screw us and not really being all that cool with it. So this new guy starts yelling back at them, clearly feeling like he's losing control of the utterly controllable situation. Once he started getting upset at them I realized that he was really just an amateur of intimidation, and the other people just an audience interested in some white people, so I just smile and say, "listen my friend, we agreed on 1200, and there is a guesthouse over there, and we are hungry. If he doesn't want to take us for that much, he will get nothing, and we will wait until tomorrow when many people will take us. But we are going to be eating over there if you want to talk to us." And we walk back to the restaurant. Quickly.

Back at the lit portion of this town, about 100 people are crowded around the three or four storefronts, kids running around playfighting, people eating, bikes and motos occasionally passing by. Now this is the middle of nowhere, as far as I'm concerned, but for them it must have been something of the local metropolis. Now that death is slightly less of a possibility, we're a bit more confident and immediately try to find someone who speaks English. We find some fifteen year old kid and he starts trying to negotiate with our driver, who has by now shown up, but this kid is equally commission hungry, and keeps trying to get more money from us. The way it works in Cambodia is that everyone is together with everyone else trying to get as much money out of us as possible. Even if they don't get a cut, as long as it ends up in a Cambodian pocket, things are better for them. Things are getting heated in the conversation with our translators, who aren't so much helping us but trying to cheat us, though luckily that other guy realized he'd lost and was staying away, and now a few more of the financially aggressive Cambodians try to get involved hoping for a cut.

But at that point I realized that everything would be better if we looked calm, so I started noodling at some blues on the guitar, which distracted at least four of the less trust-inspiring Cambodians, and we continued to wait (no trucks are going anywhere anytime soon, that much is obvious) for a better option. Through I don't even remember whom, we repeat that we're not paying anything more than 1200, and if our driver won't take us, he'll get nothing, and we'll wait until morning. He now understands that the scam the guys in Poipet pitched to him- you take them halfway, they pay you 1200, you come back early- wasn't going to work, but it is also clear that he doesn't want to make the drive all the way to Siem Reap. Eventually someone arranges for a slightly older chubby guy who speaks not a single word of English to take us, but this time on the back of a truck with maybe six other people, because the inside is already full. My new leather bag that I was so happy with takes this wonderful opportunity to snap at the strap and fall to the ground, less that 12 hours after purchase. I guess that's what four dollars buys you.

Once we're on board, the two drivers old and new, surrounded by ten other interested Cambodians, start loudly negotiating our delivery price. This takes at least ten minutes, but eventually it gets settled, our new driver pays off our old driver, and comes back at us and smiles. It is not reassuring that he is dressed in what look like fatigues. Furthermore, he has just effectively paid for, well, us. Still, I continue riffing aimlessly at very happy peaceful consonant major scales to keep the few guys still concerned with us distracted, and the driver seems amused as well. Part of me will be much happier when we just get out of this town, but the other part is not sure I want to get to where we might be going.

We were there for a total of an hour and half of arguing, negotiating, nearing death, and being sold into slavery, but eventually we set off, sitting on the flatbed of an ancient pickup with a grooved bottom and six Cambodians in the back with us. Luckily three of them were children, so our nerves were somewhat pacified. And then we started driving. This guy was absolutely tearing down this terrible dirt road, bumps and divots galore, one lane bridges, lights flying by on both sides depending on which side of the road looked flatter to each driver, and from both directions (though mostly at us, as our driver was not all that into defensive driving, and few people passed us). Dirt was kicking up off the road from the back wheels, so looking backward was just not happening, but the wind roaring over the top made looking forward equally impossible. Eyes closed seemed like the way to go, except that then you couldn't see bridges coming, and bridges always meant a big bump before and after, which meant tailbone-flatbed separation, followed by gravity induced violent reunification and the subsequent sharp then dull pain. Every once in a while we would stop to let someone off, now really, without a doubt in the middlest of nowhere I've ever been, no a sign of anything anywhere, for the driver to smoke a cigarrete and smile his chubby face at us, and once to stop at some little tiki hut for a gas fill up from a plastic container.

When the children got off, though we now had the flatbed pretty much to ourselves, we got a little more worried about potential machete death, but at one stop there was a group of younger people, including some women, and our driver's rounded cheeks, pillsbury dough belly and attempts at communication were comforting, don't ask me to explain why. Still my ass and back hurt like hell, and I was totally caked in dirt.

At about 2 we arrived in Siem Reap, no clue where to stay and so covered in dirt that our driver had been giggling every time he checked on us. After stopping by a tuk tuk driver who tried for twenty minutes to get us to go to his guesthouse, and waiting while we repeatedly refused him, our driver finally dropped us off closer to town and we wandered toward a lonely planet recommendtion, Smiley's. Before we found it we saw a cheap room rate advertised, and as we read the board a dog inside the gate started barking violently. Ordinarily this might be construed as a 'bad sign,'but we just kind of stared at this flipping out dog, too tired to think, and soon after a still-sleeping Cambodian appeared and told us he had a room for three people for eight bucks. This place was a palace. I mean, everything in the halls was spotless and marble, or fake marble anyway, our room had three separate beds and a TV and a shower and was far cleaner than I could have hoped for.

It took me four scrubs to get the dirt off myself, and still more came off on my towel.

Now that it was all over, having not eaten since 1:30 that afternoon, backs sore, nerves slightly shaken, we all three agreed that we wouldn't have paid a penny more (or less) to have come any other way.

The Dirty City: Part I

2006-03-16T09:09:00.000-08:00

We arrived in Bangkok at about 5:30 in the morning, before the sun came up. Despite the New York upbringing, we'd been told so many times about the perils and deceit of Bangkok that we trusted no one and instantly deflected every one of the fifty taxi offers that met us upon our exit from the bus. We were deposited about a block from Khao San road, the notorious tourist center of Bangkok that had been made to sound so detestable by the lonely planet that we wanted nothing to do with it. We instead chose to take the lengthy tuk tuk ride to Siam Square, near to where our plans for the evening were, or so we thought, and which our aforementioned travel bible described as having a piece of everything of Bangkok. We haggled with the driver and settled on a price that still seemed exhorbitant but he was not thrilled with it either so we accepted. Turns out it was a fair distance, so I don't think we were ripped off that time. When we arrived at the street where our LP recommended guesthouse was, we found all three mentioned in the book and all three were full from the night before and wouldn't have a room until noon. The prospect of six hours sitting on our bags dying to sleep was simply not an option, so we checked into the Star Motel and paid a ridiculous price (fourteen dollars) for a dark, though cleanish, cave of a room with a bathroom and a hot shower but no windows, not that light, natural or otherwise, was really necessary at that point. We also figured we were actually getting two nights worth of sleep for the price of one, is how we justified the price.

After our second awakening in Bangkok, we stumbled around Siam Square looking for food and Ratchamdoen stadium, where that night the supposedly best Muay Thai (Thai boxing) matches of the week would take place, a perfect way to celebrate my 25th. To give you an idea of how popular this sport is, every week in Bangkok there are six or seven nights of fighting in the various arenas, and each session is comprised of ten to twelve matches. At any given time there are approximately sixty thousand professional Muay Thai fighters in Thailand.

We soon discovered that Siam Square was much like Times Square: gaudy shopping centers, huge billboards, wide-eyed tourists and people in suits. And so we realized that coming here was a mistake. But before that we stumbled across a sign for a food court that boasted a four and a half dollar buffet of "high quality postmodern chinese food." We went down the escalator to find that the place was a nearly empty but fantastically fancy looking restaurant, and sure enough the buffet only cost 180 baht. This was, however, an absurd amount to pay for food in Thailand, so until I saw the spread, I was reluctant. This was however 'postmodern' Chinese food- all of the waiters wore nametags that just said 'Waiter/Waitress' and when we asked what kind of soup we were looking at, the guy simply shrugged and said, "it depends on your definition of kind" before tossing his pad in the sweet and sour pork, sitting down at an empty table and putting his feet up- so we exercised some cost perspective and sat down. (The nametag part is true, by the way). There were at least two staff members for every diner, and before we were given plates, the two managers personally accompanied us to each covered hot plate to remove the lids and explain what each of the twenty or so items were. My only lament was that the hot days had taken their toll on my appetite so it was disappointingly soon before I had already hurt myself eating.

We then walked to where the stadium was, and after about an hour of being unable to find it despite the fact that we were right there on the map, we took a closer look and found out that what we were looking at was not the stadium we were looking for; the stadium was in fact located about five blocks from where we had been dropped off by the bus that morning. Despite our lunch in the air conditioned sanctuary of a postmdodern establishment, our walking around had rendered us both completely soaked in sweat and cranky, so we then argued for twenty minutes about whether to suck up the loss of the room payment and just pay for a cheaper place in backpacker central. After a pause in the discussion, we started up again and realized that we'd switched sides and our argument was not a result of either of us caring, but both of us being annoyed by our own mistakes. We decided to just go out earlier and simply stay out instead of traversing the city repeatedly. So we changed into jeans and clean t-shirts- what we call dressing up- and waited until the boiling humidity of midday turned into the boiling humidity of late afternoon, and hopped in an air conditioned taxi to check out Chinatown.

Chinatown was enormous, and if hadn't known it was Chinatown already I wouldn't have known the difference from Thailandtown. We wandered though the alleys lined with merchants, but at my first attempt at perusing and haggling I was told that I was in a wholesale shop, and I would have to buy twenty pair if I wanted to buy one. Feeling silly, we neglected to ask about anything else and contented ourselves by weaving through the crowd and just looking and smelling. We tried to find what was called the Thieves Market, which began as a center for stolen goods but may be more legit now that it's well known, but to no avail. We'd left the bible at home, not wanting to lug it around while assaulting our brains with cheap whisky that night, so we didn't really know where we were.

Instead we found a temple that had a Chinese Buddha, the first of its kind that I'd seen. A friendly guy in uniform started talking to us, and recommended that we go right away to a Tourism office to book our bus to Cambodia i we wanted to go in a few days, and he helped us find a tuk tuk driver. Upon arrival at this office, I was instantly skeptical: the people were all in uniform, spoke excellent English, and gave us packaged water just for sitting down. Felt like a tourist trap, and obviously our uniformed friend was working for them. Luckily we knew the real prices of everything we asked about, and when we were quoted at three times the price, we knew to politely refuse. The woman also told us that there was only one bus a day to Cambodia, which wasn't true, and that the border closed at 4 so you can't leave any later than 8:30am, which wasn't true, and that it takes an hour and a half to get your visa, which definitely wasn't true.

So instead of making necessary preparations we immediately left for Khao San road to find a little food and a lot of booze in preparation for the Muay Thai, still entertaining fantasies of suit clad Asian men screaming and waving money like in 80's kickboxing movies. And Khao San turned out to be pretty cool. The street was packed with mostly tourists, and lined with food vendors, store windows, massage parlors, and people selling t-shirts, jeans, hats, bags, etc.

I mean, this place was cool. Lonely Planet, at times, has a huge stick up its metaphorical ass when it comes to tourist centers. True, it is anything but 'real Thailand', but a. it was also filled with tons of activity and old fashioned street entertainment, and 2. what the fuck is 'real Thailand'? After a brief wander and some untintentional haggling over goods we weren't in any way interested in, we sat down at a restaurant and ordered a large bottle of whisky (700mL) and two cokes, which cost eight bucks. Painful though the night may be, it would at least be cheap.

While we were sitting there beginning the damage, I got up to go to the bathroom, only to find right behind me my friend Moishe who I'd met in Chiang Mai, sitting with a Canadian girl who I'd later find out was killing time before heading to the airport. I said hello and when I returned from the bathroom found them sitting at our table. We soon invited Moishe to the Muay Thai, but in the meantime continued drinking, unfortunately with no assistance on the whisky from our guests, while we played the ever popular and surprisingly difficult Bangkok favorite "Guess the Birth Sex Organs of that Waitstaff Member." (See earlier post "Country Boy?", circumlocution of) This game is only slightly more difficult than its cousin, "Guess the Current Sex Organs...", but both were frighteningly inconclusive. One by one the ambiguous servers pased by, and with each pass making me change my answer and sending me into a deep fear of sexual rediscovery. Pretty soon I thought everyone looked like a man in various states of remission. It was at this point, halfway through the bottle, that I chose to take the precaution against Chuck's big plans for me that night by writing on my hand in black marker "NO SEX WITH MAN-WHORES" but decided that my specificity was dangerous, so I added on the right "NO SEX WITH WHORES OF ANY GENDER, IRRESPECTIVE OF QUESTIONS OF INTERNAL SEXUAL IDENTITY, NATURE VIS A VIS NURTURE, GENDER NORMS AND SOCIAL IMPOSITION OF-" and when I ran out of room decided I looked like enough of a freak to dissuade even the most persistent merchandise.

We managed to split the bottle in about 45 minutes, and right away set out for the stadium. Turns out we'd already missed most of the matches, but what we saw was enough. It was cool and all, but most of the fighting involved the two guys hugging each other trying to knee each other in the kidneys and/or groin. It also became clear that the most effective way to hurt someone is to punch them in the face or stomach, as most of the matches just devolved into regular boxing. I should also note that I don't really remember leaving the stadium, and that these pictures are wonderfully accidentally accurate representations of my perspective on the whole thing.

Despite the whisky and the huge beers Moishe bought, though, I have to say, my outward appearance at this point held strong at 'relatively coherent, I guess'.

The night ended up surprisingly tame, if only because most of the whisky kicked in all at once, right after the last fight, soon rendering me a vapid zombie animal composed of no more than vacant stare, said animal with whom I know many of you are familiar. We returned to the same bar/restaurant, I think, and met a couple of guys who were really into the whole Bangkok prostitute thing, and in that spirit coerced Chuck into buying me a 'bucket', a devilishly ingenious concoction involving whisky, ice, coke(a-cola), and M-150, which is like red bull but there is something in there that is illegal in the U.S. Because I really needed more booze at that point. But so we tired of the whore cruising duo, that or their proximity and potential contagiousness made me nervous, so we moved over to sit with a couple of pretty (I think) Thai girls (I think). I'm sure this was my idea, but I doubt I was doing much of the talking. After a while, the prettier (see above) girl (Ibid) asked Chuck, "What's wrong with your friend?" His response: "Oh nothing, it's just his birthday." I imagine they were confused. Luckily I put myself to bed before anything too bad could happen, at least to me. When we left the bar, some guy was really intent on punching Chuck in the face, for reasons unclear, but after a minor scuffle his friends pulled him away.

Unfortunately, violent retards were not Chuck's problem that night. At some indeterminate time, I woke up to the sound of Chuck puking in the bathroom. Still wasted, I just smiled and manifested some enlgihtened synapse firing along the lines of "brgahhh learn how to drink, bitch, grrugh," and went back to sleep. But then I heard him get up to puke again later, and again, and again, and then it occurred to me that something wasn't right. Indeed. When I found him the next morning he was stone dead on the bathroom tile. Dysentery, they said. We held the service at a massage parlor the next day. Nobody spoke, but we all understood. The hookers sprinkled pad thai over his casket for good karma.

All right, enough of that silliness. I don't know anything about dysentery, other than that people used to get it on the Oregon Trail, and that some combination of hunting buffalo and caulking the wagon and floating it across generally prevents it. If you didn't get that joke, please, please don't worry about it.

Anyway, Chuck got really really ill. Which is strange because we ordered the same food and drank the same drinks all night. I spent about an hour waling to the various places to get a room with natural light and room for three since my sister would be arriving that day. After finding the room, packing up all of our stuff- due to Chuck's inability to do anything except vomit and groan- and making two trips to bring each of our bags, I went back for a third trip to get Chuck himself. When I told him it was time to go, he looked at me like he wanted to tear out my voice box with his bare hands but only lacked the strength. But when he arrived at the room, the air conditioned warmly lit clean room, as opposed to our sweaty pukey dungeon, having luckily held off a spew on the way in and up the stairs, he looked as if he could have died happy right there. Indeed I wasn't sure that he wouldn't when I left to meet Veronica at the airport an hour later. With our plans to spend twelve hours the next day on several buses en route to Siem Reap, Cambodia, I think death might have been preferable.

Country Boy?

2006-03-15T21:28:00.000-08:00

We had spent only a week passing through the serene river jungles of Laos, but had been so thoroughly impressed that we were unprepared for the shock of leaving. Ignorance and New Yorker egocentrism combined to preclude me from expecting Chiang Mai, a city of which I had not previously heard, to be such a thriving metropolis, especially when compared to the not so distant thatched roof villages from which we'd come. Before coming here I expected Thailand to be a poor and undeveloped country with Bangkok the lone exception. Instead we found in Chiang Mai a busy, bustling center of culture and city filth, and at first, all I wanted to do was leave.

We arrived in the early evening with a guesthouse recommendation from a Canadian girl I'd met in Pakbeng two nights before while I was drying my journal- two nights earlier, a water bottle exploded in my bag about an hour after I had been foolishly praising the style of bottle they have here because the cap is permanently affixed to the bottle on one side, making losing it impossible. Of course, the other side is not always so inclined to adhesion- with a candle that Lai had given me when he saw me using a lighter and burning my finger repeatedly. Doing visibly bizarre but purposeful things like waving a candle in front of a book is often a good way of meeting people, I've found. Anyway, she recommended a guesthouse in Chiang Mai but it was full. We returned to the street and whipped out the lonely planet, struggling in vain to ascertain where in this terribly organized and uncomfortably large city we were, when an English girl asked if we were looking for a bed, and pointed us in the direction of the guesthouse she worked for which had an available room. I've also found that when anyone reasonably honest looking offers you help or advice, taking it will always get you what you want, or at least make things interesting.

After checking in we sauntered off in the direction of food, both starving after our third straight full day of travel. We found a lonely planet recommended restaurant, which looked like the nothing special that usually means good food- cheap plastic chairs, incomprehensible menus, blinding fluorescent lights. The food was good, it being food and all, and Chuck ate twice. After dinner we decided to stroll through the much revered night market, though our last activity in Lao had been to visit a similar one. We figured this one would have different goods entirely: cheap brand name products and pirated media instead of distinctively Lao goods. On our way we stumbled across a market that had the one thing available that our intended destination would surely not: women. as we rounded the corner on the main street we were met by a veritable army of attractive at worst, stunning at best thai hookers lining the entryway to several streetside bars. Their uniform was a short black miniskirt and black top and a little too much make up, and as we walked passed they stood up one by one as if we were in Yankee stadium trying to get a wave started, immediately casting a barrage of greetings and invitations. After turning to the street to see if there was a nearby slowboat heading back up the Mekong but finding none, we bee lined past them, still bruised by the smack of culture shock, and afraid that eye contact meant a contract of service. As we continued, we passed several distinct spots of urine smell, dodged speeding motos at every corner- forget about alternating street lights- and ignored outstretched hands begging for change. Though Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world right now, we had not once been asked for anything in exchange for nothing, and despite Thailand's relative prosperity, we stumbled into signs of desperation within hours and repeatedly.

A few blocks down the street we found the night market. Not as sublime and bazaar-like as the one in Luang Prabang, the market was a thin corridor of stalls wrapped around a long city block, lit by an familiar blinding light, exhibiting a repetitive succession of Lacoste and Polo shirts, Puma sneakers, CD's and DVD's of every kind, Diesel jeans, baseball caps, dress shirts, bags, purses, satin sheets, wallets...basically everything. Almost all of it looked great, and all of it was dirt cheap, even before the haggling. What's amazing is how much of this stuff was crammed into such a small space, so much so that within a twenty meter strip you'd inevitably see just about all of the merchandise available throughout the market. It made me wonder how each individual shopowner manages to sell anything when his products are exactly the same as those of the next guy over, and why he would choose to sell in this market. I guess they find that converging together attracts enough customers that they all do better as a result than if they were to simply spread out over the city and each claim a separate corner. Still, they say the same things as you pass by, and must rely on chance to catch the customer's fancy and make him approach after passing so many others. Tired and simply not in the mood for this, we left after just a little while, assuming we would be able to find all of the same things in Bangkok for even less money. Oddly enough, the whore parade was even more depressing on the way back: grouped together in one spot instead of each claiming her own corner, dressed identically, calling out the same things, almost all looking great and all costing little (presumably this time), even before the haggling, having to rely on chance to attract the customers' fancy.

The only comfort of our arrival in Chiang Mai was the price of our room, a whopping $3. It was rather dingy, but had separate beds and a bathroom- no hot water, but none was ever necessary. (In April, northern Thailand's hottest month, a huge water festival erupts in the city, usually lasting a full week in Chiang Mai, in which everyone in the city starts projecting water at everyone else using any method available). Despite the rather shocking change of pace from Laos to Chiang Mai, our activity list over the next few days provided us an ample supply of excitment to quell this odd city anxiety.

The next day we woke up early and, more importantly, hungry. We were picked up by a young man who looked twenty but was in fact thirty five, and the owner of Smart Cook, a Thai cooking school. He brought us to the school, a beautiful one walled mahogany structure that was basically a large dining room with three long tables, one of which was of the 'sit on the floor with your legs asleep and your back aching while you feel cultural, you inflexible jew' style. Naturally he led us to this one to serve us tea and coffee while we waited for our instructor, Nim, to arrive. She arrived shortly after, a tiny little woman who spoke impressive but hilarious English, heavily accented and often surprisingly exact while at other times primitive- typical of someone who'd learned comversation through a very specific trade, ie teaching cooking classes. She first gave us each baskets, not without and air of importance of basket possession, and walked us to the local market to show us things we would use, and other things that we wouldn't. Oddly enough, her assistant showed up a few minutes later and took the baskets away, filling them on her own and only returning them to us when we were ready to leave. At the market we were taught all kinds of things about all kinds of produce that I probably don't remember, but were fun to learn anyway, especially in slightly broken and mispronounced English. I did discover that the smell of frying chilis tickles your throat something awful.

When we returned we began preparing the five dishes we'd selected at the regular tables and in the kitchen in back of the dining room, beginning with pad thai, spring rolls, and coconut noodle soup.

After making and devouring all of that, we took a break to finely chop and grind in a mortar all of the twelve ingredients to make panang curry paste, which is just red curry with peanuts ground in. That preparation took a welcome hour plus, as I was already stuffed. After that we made the curry and a sweet and sour chicken dish, which I was barely able to finish. It was all amazing, and we walked away with a recipe book with the dishes that we made and the ones that we didn't. I suppose I'll have to see if I can find any of those ingredients home and remember how to do any of it.

We got out of the cooking class at about 3 and wandered off to buy a ticket and take care of stuff: haircut, internet etc. The haircut cost me 90 baht, about $2.25. The woman was ecstatic when I gave her 100 baht and let her keep the change, a whopping twenty five cents. While Chuck finished his internet business, I sat down to have a beer and was approached by a young Canadian guy and invited to play some card game with him and an Israeli guy named Moishe, but that game soon became texas hold 'em for toothpicks. I ended up hanging around with them for a few hours until their bus to Bangkok left, and through them met another pair of Israeli guys with whom we made plans to meet up with for drinks later.

After showers and pizzas-fault me though you may for eating pizza in Thailand, sometimes it is just necessary- we met them and were instantly dragged as they had some other friend who was going to soem other bar. Always open to following what comes, we walked with them and a group of four or so, three Australians and an Asian American (I feel weird using that phrase, seeing as how back home, he would just be Asian) about fifteen minutes away and across some river to a blues club that had several ambiguously gendered members of its waitstaff (please note circumlocution of terms waiter and waitress).

We sat around a corner table drinking from a large beer stand thing listening to a skinny long haired dirty mustached Thai dude and his band absolutely fucking wail on blues rock classics, occasionally throwing in some Neil Young, which I'm sure we were the only people in the crowd appreciated. This bar was, in short, perfect.

After a while, two of the Australians, a couple, of which the guy was hammered and the girl was at the point between amused and exasperated, left, but the third, the girl's sister, Michelle, remained. A little while later we decided to move to somewhere closer to where we were all staying. I walked outside with the Michelle before the others and we started walking back, assuming the rest were right behind us, but after about three more minutes we realized they weren't, and started to become unsure if we'd gone the right way. The walk wasn't too long, and we were both up for it, so when we saw them speed by on a tuk tuk, we were encouraged and kept going. What we didn't see, however, was that the tuk tuk turned left just after it passed from our sight, so when we got to that point, we kept going straight. Fifteen minutes later and we're totally fucking lost. Now, I've been in worse situations that stranded with young blonde Australian girls, but this wasn't exactly the place for it. We kept walking and happened upon a juntion of two rivers, which we took as a good sign and tried to figure out which river was the one we'd crossed earlier and which way we should go. We chose, and kept walking, when we passed by a field of grass with two young thai guys sitting in the middle playing guitars, and thought we could ask them. We sat down and tried to sign language our way to getting directions, but these guys didn't understand a thing and were absolutely shitfaced. In fact, when we sat, one of them grabbed one of the unopened beers next to him and began opening it by putting one end of a heavy metal pipe under the cap and pounding on the top of the bottle. This resulted in the top of the bottle smashing right off. With this end, he seemed fully satisfied, and he handed it to the girl with a big generous smile. Michelle's eyes widened as we both looked at their bottles as they chugged away and we saw that theirs were jagged at the top as well. I discreetly eeked out a "be careful with that" between closed teeth, as if these guys could understand anyway, and she responded in kind with an "I know," raising the bottle to her lips and pretending to drink. She passed it straight back to them, but sure enough it was handed my way, so I did the same. Luckily they were too wasted to realize that the bottle was still full, minus whatever had splashed out of the broken part of the neck. Michelle whipped out a business card of the her hostel, which had a map on the back, but these guys were just not understanding anything, so we gave up. Luckily a lone tuk tuk sped by the bridge and we flagged him down and were brought back to the bar lined street where we'd started five hours earlier.

Meanwhile, as I would learn later, Chuck was still with the Israeli guys at some bar featuring people doing things with fire: spinning fireballs on strings, spinning a large stick lit at both ends, breathing fire. This is inside a bar, mind you. He said the highlight came when some drunk white guy tried to spin fire but accidentally let one of the strings go, setting some spectator's pants ablaze. In terms of a city with interesting nights out, Chiang Mai certainly passed with flying colors.

The next day we set out to explore the more cultural side of the city, which is extensive. Chiang Mai is littered with temples and craft production operations, the former which we intended to see, the latter which we would see regardless. We walked to the biggest temple, which was impressive, mostly because of the huge gold Buddha and the large stone intricately carved stupa in back.

Outside, we met a tuk tuk driver who said he would take us around to the other sites for 40 baht (one dollar)an hour, and he was very nice and had a book of praise in which he showed us a comment written by a girl from New York, so we agreed. He took us to the oldest temple in Chiang Mai, which featured two famous Buddha images that were too small to be all that impressive, but did feature another entertaining painting series that told the story of a Buddha incarnation who made Prince Wetsantara look like J.P. Morgan.

After that, our driver offered to take us to the lacquerware factory to show us how they made all of the lacquered things we saw in the temples. We agreed, not sure how many more Buddhas of decreasing size and shimmer we could take. For the next few hours, this guy took us to all of his friends' shops, which were certainly impressive, but still, we were right in the middle of a tourist trap designed to take our money away. Fully realizing this, we nonetheless happily forked over our baht for various crafts, but did get to see things being made firsthand.

The most notable stop was called some sort of exhibition that we'd been recommended by some other tout, but was a massive sale of expensive jewelry, and we were hilariously out of our league in dirty t-shirts and cargo shorts. As soon as we approached the steps, the doors were opened for us, and rows of beautiful uniformed Thai women greeted us. As we were clearly on the low budget end of the scale, two of the least attractive ones were assigned to us, and mine followed me around as I looked over the jewelry that I had neither the means nor intention to buy, but she smiled, made every joke she knew and tried to sell me everything I saw. I walked towards the repair and production counters and she explained what each jeweler was doing, which was cool. Every single potential customer had someone following them; the bigger the pockets, the prettier the girl. After five minutes, we got the fuck out of there.

After a few more unwanted stops, we finally asked our tuk tuk driver to stop taking us places, and he agreed, but two minutes later asked if we could make one last stop right on the way at the cashmere and silk store because they give vouchers for gas if tuk tuk drivers bring tourists. So we agreed to do the guy a favor and walk around another store for five minutes. This was quite a favor. The storeowner was an unbelievably intense middle eastern guy who who would immediately tell you what you were looking at and why you should buy it. The guy had one of those uncontrollably loud voices, so we were essentially being shouted orders to buy things every time we looked at anything. This trait is common in asia: salespeople don't let you just browse. If you show interest in anything they show you ten things like it and don;t stop talking until you start haggling; if you touch anything they offer you a price and tell you how good a price it is and offer a discount before you have time to convert the original price to dollars in your head. As a result you have to look at everything out of the corner of your eye to avoid being hassled. Either someone really needs to teach these people proper salesmanship, or everyone else in the world needs to stop responding to that shit. Because it made me simply stay away from every single store window unless I knew what I wanted and where to get it. But what was different about this guy was that he was loud and intimidating, instead of desparate and submissive. "THAT IS A STONE ELEPHANT. BUY IT. GOOD PRICE. FOR YOUR MOTHER. NICE GIFT. I'LL CUT YOUR THROAT IF YOU DON'T." I tried to make a solid effort at pretending to actually browse, but when I looked behind me after a minute, Chuck was gone and the owner just glared. I managed to endure another three of being shouted at, now alone, until I thought the driver had gotten his voucher, and then fled when the owner paused to shout at someone else. When I got outside, Chuck and the driver were both poised and ready in the tuk tuk, and as we drove away the owner ran out throwing rocks and screaming his intention to eat our first born children.

Chiang Mai revealed itself to be an incredibly impressive city in terms ancient architecture, nightlife, food, and crafts, and there is a wealth of activities that we missed, including Thai boxing classes and treks that visit nearby hill tribes (featuring women who extend their necks with rings) and include rafts down rivers and elephant rides. That evening we departed our guesthouse headed for our bus to Bangkok amidst a farewell shout from the gallery of "have fun in the dirty city." Indeed.