This Wide World

a city and its buildings

2007-10-16T14:52:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, I was in Chicago. It's a lovely city. Q has two observations:

1. Corrupt and absolute leadership gets things done. (Downside: corrupt and absolute leadership has few checks on the kinds of things it gets done, however.) This helps explain many of the nicer elements of the Loop and environs. (It also helps explain many of the seedier and downright immoral practices of the current government.)

2. Things would be even nicer if the broad avenues of Chicago--originally designed to be be-treed and full of pedestrians and possibly horse-drawn carriages (I'm imagining here)--were actually green and peopled, instead of conveniently converted into 8-lane highways. It must be said--Chicago is the only dense city I've ever met that is an extremely reasonable place to own a car, crisscrossed as it is by wide, multilane, unjammed roads.

Chicago has some beautiful architecture (and the city is well aware of that fact). Buildings there are not just stylistically interesting--they also fit together, as a general rule, which would be a great thing for architects the world over to remember. (Take a gander at Frank Gehry's dancing house in Prague, for example, and notice how obvious the architecture is, without being simpy striking or elegant. It hits you over the head precisely because it's strange. It doesn't fit. As a result, the building takes away from the surroundings rather than drawing them together or adding to them, even though on its own it is interesting enough and perhaps even quite clever.)

In Chicago, there are many beautiful office buildings and public spaces. It's easy to overlook them, though. Even the Sears Tower--difficult to overlook in any light, given its immense height--does not necessarily capture the attention right away. This is in part a great success of construction: one of the world's largest buildings manages to be neither obviously enormous nor completely overbearing. It complements the smaller buildings beside it, rather than merely overshadowing them.

This does not mean that the tower is not compelling when you do look at it. It's asymmetry is both an extremely intelligent design (and a functional one which is easily modifiable if ever more space is needed) and really a fine aesthetic choice. One great feature of the bundled-tube plan (the thing idea behind the way the tower unevenly narrows towards the top, an informative video sponsored by the History Channel informs me) is that it artificially foreshortens everything; photos of the Chicago skyline from helicopters make the tower look huge (as it is), but from the ground where most viewers stand, it does not actually look disproportionate (as the photo to the left hopefully makes clear). The tower's dark, reflective walls are also particularly nice: they set the construction apart from other buildings but also mirror those very buildings on its exterior. If ever something was designed to fit in and stand out at once, this is it.

The Sears Tower is just one of many beautiful buildings--from different eras, of different styles, and all well-integrated--in downtown Chicago. I haven't seen very many of them myself (except, of course, from the top of the tower itself). Nonetheless, I'm already pleased and impressed. I confess I like the exercise of having to stop and look to see what's great in a place, rather than to have it stand out so far from the surroundings as to make it an eyesore. I love that when you look up, you can see intriguing friezes, fitting statuary, even innovative parking garages.

This isn't to say that there isn't stand-alone, fantastic public art or architecture out there in Chicago that you wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for it, however. The most obvious example of this is Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate (which Q informs me is more popularly known as "The Blob" or somesuch thing) in the lovely Millenium Park. The sculpture draws people in; when we were there, crowds had gathered in, under, and around it to enjoy the multiple reflections (in the inside especially, where you get a never-ending tunnelling effect), the distortions, the way it expands the sky and blues up the city, and generally the unbelievably clean lines and smooth shape against the backdrop of the city's buildings. Yes, this sculpture does hit you over the head. You can't miss it. It isn't like the buildings behind, nor even is it much like the park on the lake side (though it is not aesthetically inconsistent with either). Nonetheless, for all its difference, this sculpture is nothing if not reflective of the city around it; indeed, that's kind of the point. Yes, it's curvy, edgeless, seamless, and largely sky-colored (whatever color that may be at the moment)--but it also shows on its surface the boxy, corniced, windowed, brick-and-cement buildings right behind. Again, the size of the thing fits well with the sizes of the buildings on the one side and the amount of open space on the other, as well as with the size of the average person who might want to approach it and experience the sculpture as an interactive work. (It really is cool, by the way--this is no theoretical interaction, but the practical exercise of locating one's own reflections or shouting an echo into it.) The Cloud Gate offsets its surroundings in a way that is completely different from the way the Dancing House offsets its own surroundings. So yes, you won't miss it--but no, it isn't jarring.

Well done, Chicago.

she's back!

2007-10-09T14:33:00.000-04:00

So here I am back in the United States and, after a long hiatus, what do I choose to blog about? Well, baseball, of course!

Anybody who's been following the postseason of this greatest of all sports will know that, barring a miracle (or a disaster), Joe Torre, longtime manager of the Yankees, is now out of a job. This follows the fact of the Yankees' loss last night (and after a beautiful game of small (ish) ball on Sunday, too - more on that below).

Here's a thought. George Steinbrenner, the Yankees' owner, is a big wuss. To tell Torre that he's out of a job if his team doesn't win the NEXT THREE GAMES--which is the precise equivalent of saying on Sunday morning that the Yankees have to progress to the American League penant series, when the team is sitting down 0-2 in a 5-game elimination series--is ridiculous. I mean, no matter how good or bad your team is, it's always a bit of a crapshoot when you take a sample set of that small size; it's no surprise that baseballers are such statisticians. The crapshoot angle is not precisely a bad thing in my opinion, either; Sunday's Sportscenter commentators were suggesting that these postseason series should all be seven or even--gasp!--nine games long, "because there is such an element of chance in the five-game series." I, however, tend to think that a bit of chance keeps things interesting. If the postseason didn't allow for the wildcard to at least make it into the penant game, than what's the point of having a wildcard team in the first place? And if we're trying to eliminate the element of chance, then why even play the postseason games? Why not just run the numbers and declare a winner on day one?

So I don't think an injection of chance--less than afforded by a three-game series, but significantly more than one might find in a nine-game series--is a bad thing in the contest to the Fall Classic. Nonetheless, though, I should point out what Steinbrenner surely already knows: this element of chance means that it's grossly unfair to tie Torre's job prospects to the outcome of a three-game back-to-back stint.

This is not to say that I think Joe should keep on. He's been faithful and successful, but it may well be that his time has come; in the last few years the Yanks really have not been doing as well as their budget and players would seem to suggest they should do. It's also not to say that there's no circumstance in which the three-game ultimatum would make any sense; if the fans were defecting and there was a reasonable thought that they'd stop being as profitable if the team didn't make it to the World Series--and, additionally, if there was a reasonable thought that these same fans would maintain their loyalty if they saw a managerial switch if the hoped-for victories did not happen--then an owner might have a good incentive to oust his manager. Steinbrenner might reasonably say, "Look, Joe, I know a lot happens out there that nobody can control, and I know you personally cannot to anything to guarantee victory for the next three games no matter how good you and your boys are, but if we don't move on to the next round then I'm going to have to oust you because the fans are demanding your head and I'm worried that nobody will buy tickets next year. It's not fair to you, but there it is."

This is not a worry in New York. With Joe, without Joe, people will buy tickets. So this is no good reason to suggest to Joe that his job is on the line with respect to three particular games.

My real objection to the whole thing is that it seems to me an abdication of Steinbrenner's responsibility for the decision to fire Torre. The "get to the next round" test is not a good one for keeping--or ditching--Joe, because there's too much chance involved in that. It's like rolling the dice on the question of who should manage your baseball team (even if the dice are loaded a bit). Steinbrenner should just have fired Torre outright, or else not. If the issue is that the team isn't winning enough, then Steinbrenner should have the guts just to say as much--and take the consequences from the public as they fall. Instead, Steinbrenner allows it to look like Joe brought the end of his career on himself, in the space of two days, by not managing to win a particular three games. Surely Steinbrenner knows this is not fair; if Torre did bring his own career to an end, it must be because of a much longer-term underperformance, and it must be that it is Steinbrenner who did the analysis and decided that was so. It's no good throwing question of Torre's career to a significant amount of luck, wind conditions, the light on Monday night, and the abilities of this or that sometimes-fallible umpire.

And what if the Yankees DID win their series? Would that really have convinced George to keep Joe? Surely not. Surely Steinbrenner knows that the ability to win a particular three games is not that telling. And if he doesn't, if he really thinks this series actually made an important difference when put up against a season that comprises 162 games, then he is basing his decision on all the wrong things.

***

But let's talk small ball for a minute. My Yankees almost never play small ball.anymore. They pay the big bucks for the big hitters and just swing for the fences. But the single best moment of Sunday night's singularly beautiful game, for me, was Doug Mientkiewicz's perfect, perfect bunt in the 5th. It was gorgeous. It's a travesty that that bunt counts as an out and brings down Mientkiewicz's batting average; it was a perfect hit, doing exactly what it was supposed to do! We've got to do something about how those things are calculated.

And then Johnny Damon came to the plate! He hit a much-needed home run. What I love, though, is that his three-run long ball was in fact an attempt to do a long fly to right field. It was perfect-bunt (one out, advance runners) to sac fly (two outs, run scores) which went awry because the long ball was just too darned long! It was great! THAT's how you should hit a home run. Carefully, knowing that if you fail, you've still done something productive in advancing the runners and pulling down an RBI in the process.

Watching the game Sunday night was full of this sort of smart play: the Yanks were placing their balls for once, hitting to the opposite field when it made sense, pulling to right when trying to advance runners in scoring position, swinging for left when trying to get somebody on base... Jeez, it was like they were playing as a team, with sense in them and an appreciation for the skill of the game, not just the individual at-bat.

The problem is that I'm not sure this style of ball actually wins games in today's big-hitting atmosphere (though it certainly worked wonders Sunday night). I do love to watch it, though. Small ball is such a CLEVER game, such an INTELLIGENT sport. You could watch Hughes (the fantastic rookie pitcher who threw a 95 mile-per-hour fastball and a 70-mile-per-hour breaking ball--ouch!--that broke a foot and a half!) trying to play his batters, because he had such great control. You could watch the batters trying to play him, too. You could see the Yankees THINKING about where their hits should go, and adjusting for the field. And the Tribe--they, too, were playing this way; the shift for Matsui was RIDICULOUS, the right fielder so close to the foul line that it looked sometimes like he was just backing up their first baseman (actually, I think this was a little TOO ridiculous; he didn't need to be THAT far right I'm sure). What a good game! I was so psyched! You could see that people were THINKING. This is how I remember baseball years ago.

But most of this is dead today. Oakland a couple years ago--that was a small ball team, and they looked great (but never made it to the World Series). Big hits do well in today's game, and so of course managers and coaches and back-room strategists respond; as Q points out, some people think the game is about WINNING, as opposed to, say, being beautifully and intelligently and skillfully played. Moreover, the big hits sell tickets in a way I only wish the more nuanced sac flies and pitcher-batter duels did.

But I do hate what the home-run mentality does to the game. It means that our best teams are full of brutes instead of thinkers, and our strategies are thuggish instead of patient, determined, and clever. It means that anybody with a shot at a homer is told to swing for the fences, instead of having to learn the art of pulling to right when trying to advance a man from second to third, bunting well when trying to advance a man from first to second, placing the ball in the field when trying to get on base, and generally playing a skilled, careful, tight game. If baseball once brought out all the virtues of a great sport well played, a combination of strength and skill, individual and team, it now leans much to far to the strong-and-individual for my tastes. I miss small ball.

So here is my solution. I think we ought to start playing with a denser ball, one that doesn't fly so far when it's hit. If we make it harder to hit for a homer, then everybody would HAVE to start thinking about where to hit their balls, how hard to hit them, in the air or on the ground, and what for--advance a runner? score a run? hit the man with the bad arm in center field? or what?

Also, let's get steroids out of the game. Not because they're immoral. Not because Congress says so. And not even because they're bad for the health of the players. Simply--because today's boys can hit much too hard for the sport.

-meta-

2007-09-20T13:28:00.000-04:00

I've decided to keep up this blog, though obviously the focus will change a bit since I'm no longer off on my peregrinations in this world of ours. We'll see where it goes. Those of you who were familiar with NYDiary know that I have occasionally managed a blog even without the constantly-changing scenery, so hopefully things will remain interesting.

Next real blog to come soon...

Rome (finally)

2007-09-17T11:52:00.000-04:00

Hi, everybody! So I know I haven't posted in ages and ages--sorry--but Italy was fantastic, really a whirlwind of goodness, and I just loved Rome in particular. I absolutely must go back. In the meantime, here I am in New Haven, where I have unceremoniously become a student once again.

But let's talk a bit about Rome, that eminently walkable city where pizzerias serve just around the corner from grandiose and spectacular ancient ruins; where every church is graced by paintings by Tintoretto or sculptures by Michaelangelo; where public fountains still give drinking water and where kids fish coins out of the Fontana di Trevi in order to go buy gelatto.

The people in Rome were great. One gave me a bottle of his favorite wine--a particular instance of the dashed odd, sparkling, sweetish Brachietto d'Acqui (I'm not a great fan)--while another, a priest named Paolo, gave me a personal tour of the funerary chamber underneath St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. (Yes, that's right. I was the NINTH person into the building of a Sunday, and a youngish Vatican priest made friends ("Are you a Roman Catholic?" "No." "Cool, let's go do something awesome."), took me underneath into the public mausoleum where all the Popes and many other illustrious folks are buried, told me stories about many of the people who were there, and then walked me past the security barrier and the friendly security guards--who knew him--and right up to Saint Peter's glass-encased bones. No kidding. It's unbelievable, in retrospect.)

Oh, also, because it was a Sunday, I got to watch (and hear) services. Holy goodness. Can you possibly imagine being the organist at Saint Peter's? No, no you can't. I can't either. I could not imagine a more awesome (in its older, original sense) job.

I also watched a Swiss guard faint from standing too still for too long, and I noted to my chagrin that the Sistine Chapel was not open (one good reason why I must go back to Rome, and soon).

The Vatican City was really very beautiful, with a quite attractive sense of proportion and symmetry. (Tangent: may I please say that I hate that pyramid by I.M. Pei at the Louvre??) Indeed, all of Rome is like this, full of amazing fountains and churches, building facades and beautiful old bridges.

For me, though, the best architecture in the whole city was the Pantheon. All the baroque ornamentation of much of the rest left me--well, a bit overwhelmed, and with the sense that it was a bit overwrought. The Pantheon is both simple and majestic. It has long-since been turned into a Christian church, and while this might have been done badly it has instead kept the building in perfect repair through the ages, without obscuring much of its original sparse decoration. What paintings and liturgical devices have been added fit very well in the space, and the whole is extremely beautiful both inside and out. I should like to be there on a rainy day (which is apparently, and quite believeably, something incredible to see).

I danced to live music in the Piazza d'Espana, drank cappucino, and saw many McDonaldses with homemade gelato counters. I ducked into more churches than I can name.

Oh, yes, and I was hit on, many times, by many smooth Italian men.

This begs some comment, because it was notably nonthreatening and understated. In most of the world, this sort of thing is extremely unwelcome and uncomfortable. The Italian reputation, however, may well be completely deserved: they are shameless in their intentions, but not rude or crude, and very happy to back off the moment you say anything to indicate your disinterest. Roman men, I found, came off as more complimentary than desirous. If the rest of the world cannot suppress its urge to hit on various foreign women--which really would be the ideal eventuality--then at least they ought to learn this distinction. As a lone woman, I have to say, it made a huge, huge difference. I hated the shameless Egyptian men; I bear no hard feelings towards the Italian ones.

***

A word of housekeeping: I have decided to keep this blog up, though its function is sure to change since I myself am going to me much more place-bound than I have been for the last many months. So continue to check back here in the future.

Italy!

2007-08-19T02:13:00.000-04:00

Those of you who are obsessive about checking this blog and insanely observant may have noted that my sidebar updated yesterday to show me in Italy.

Italy? I hear you cry. Weren't you in Morocco? How did you get to ITALY?

Fair question.

I'm exhausted, sniffle-nosed, broke, and soon to start grad school--all reasons that I chose to cut my trip short and come home a bit early. The problem is, my ticket home was from Rome. Easy! I thought. There is a two-day Mediterranean cruise from Tangier to Genoa. What a lovely way to end the trip.

Except. Booking online turned out to be nearly impossible.
So I went to Tangier.
And it turned out the cruise, and the ferry (not as glamorous, but still awesome), were both booked out months in advance.

Well, how to get to Rome in 5 days, then?

Good question.

Here is the answer:

Take the ferry to Algeciras (Spain).
And the bus to Perpignan (France).
And another bus to Bologna (Italy).
And the train to Foggia (Italy), but only because after three days on buses I must have been extremely tired, because I had meant to get on the train to Rome.
And then, finally, the train to Rome, free of charge because two nice train conductors conspired to help this exhausted, dirty, gross, single American girl stuck asleep on their train.

All that said, here I am in Rome! And it is AWESOME, surely the best of anything I've seen. There's just so much here--it's so much more than anyplace else. Today is my first full day here, so I had better go make the most of it.

But first! A few observations:
1. The north of Italy, far from Rome, is just shockingly beautiful. I would like three months and a car just to explore this country, not for historical or archaeological value, but just for its natural aesthetic qualities.
2. The Italians really do eat really well. It occurs to me that I shall miss food when I return to the United States. Other nations know how to take meals, know how to sit and enjoy what they're eating. Here in Italy, you just can't buy Kraft cheese--you have to buy a proper yummy cheese. You can't buy hot dogs--you have to buy real salami or dried ham or something. It's so, so good. Even fast-food pasta is extremely tasty.
3. Except pizza. I am, on the whole, unimpressed by the pizza here.
4. And wine is cheap! Unsurprisingly.

That's all for now. I'm off to see the city!

And I'll be home soon, all. See you soon!

The New World Must Have Invented City Planning

2007-08-13T10:36:00.000-04:00

Rabat is a wonderful city. It's glowingly modern, beautifully aged; urban, but full of great beaches; worldly, but very Moroccan as well. I spent quite a long time there--and for good reasons. This city, like Vienna and Krakow before it, seems to meld the old and new, the uniquely local with the desirably global, extremely well. Whereas in Jerusalem the walls separating the old and new cities are not merely physical but also metaphorical, in Rabat one can sometimes pass through them without even noticing (depending on the direction one comes).

Some might think this is a shame. Intricately decorated, expansively imposing walls are MEANT to be noticed, you might say. But in fact, what I see in city after city as I travel is a planning nightmare for the modern cities that have grown up around the old ones. How do you unite a city that is divided by forts, rocks, and walls--structures that were, in fact, never meant to do anything BUT divide? When you put the business district outside of the old city, the old city often becomes nothing but a tourist attraction, separated from the "real" Prague or Beijing or Athens. If, by contrast, you encourage growth and modernization too much in the oldest part of town, then you lose both its obvious charm and its history--Delhi may have had glorious civilizations built there over and over again through the ages, but despite the existence of an enormous red fort it is nigh-on impossible to tell what any historical Delhi might have looked like.

I really like those cities that manage to split the difference successfully. It is nice when modern people actually live and work in the old cities--and nice, too, when it nonetheless remains recognizably linked to its history. Modernization without destruction is difficult--indeed, we build our buildings these days in order to be easily and unthinkingly destroyed when we feel the need. But it isn't always so hard, either; there's a big difference between the souqs of Fez, filled almost exclusively with items for the tourist to buy, and the souqs of Rabat. The latter are located in the winding streets of the medina, to be sure, and still inhabit crowded cobbled lanes, with men and women calling out to attract customers and advertise their wares. But what they are selling, on the whole, are the sorts of things that modern Moroccans are buying: jeans, t-shirts, jelabas, teacups, sandwiches, running shoes, clocks, fans, notebooks, and soap all vie for space. It's not as glamorous, in some ways, as the spices, leather goods, and handicrafts of other Moroccan souqs. It is, perhaps, much more viable. And to me, it is much more desirable to wander the streets and see them filled with modern Moroccans of all stripes, out to buy the latest CD by their favorite band or something.

Which brings me to another fun thing I did in Rabat recently, and about which I completely forgot: I went to a rock concert.

This was awesome. Think heavy-metal baseline with the fluid Middle-Eastern melodies of the muezzin on top and you begin to get some idea of how it sounded. The whole thing was high-energy, in the middle of Rabat's biggest street, late at night. It contrasted with American rock concerts in one notable, and desirable, way: the crowd was extremely mixed--not just men and women, but also teenagers and middle-aged men, girlfriends and little children up long past their bedtime. It was great.

Jemaa el-Fna at night

2007-08-06T08:16:00.000-04:00

If Casablanca is the business center of Morocco, and if Fez is the heart of the tourist industry here, than Marrakesh is the soul of the country. It is, of course, moneyed. It is, of course, touristy. But Marrakesh is beautiful and interesting and, even more, it is full of modern Moroccans enjoying an old, traditional Moroccan way of life.

The first thing I noticed on getting off the bus in Marrakesh was that there was green. The old medina is full of and surrounded by beautiful parks, lush and lovely and filled with fruit-bearing trees. There are flower parks. There are even parks with palm trees. I find I am most fond of parks you can eat, full of orange trees and pomegranites, grapefruits and date palms and avocados and peaches. But all of this greenspace is attractive; all of it is unlike most everywhere else I've seen in Morocco.

What's really neat about Marrakesh, though, is the Jemaa el-Fna, the main square in the medina. As dusk falls, the square turns into an Orientalist's delight. Henna painters and fresh-squeezed orange juice sellers are there all day long, but the drum troupes, snake charmers, and food stands only open later. There are carnival games on the square. There are storytellers. There are many, many people selling folk remedies and lecturing (with diagrams and books wide-open) on the magical causes of and remedies for various illnesses; they show off incense, potions, oils, and strange mythical beasts (lizard wearing a tortoise shell, for example) to help ward off one's various maladies. People sell gold-embossed copies of the koran; people eat snails in a bowl and boiled lambs' heads (see last post); people sing and dance and clap their hands. An enormous amount of smoke rises from the square as the cooking gets going. Tourists take to the tops of nearby restaurants in order to watch from something of a sane distance.

But Benton and I loved seeing everything from ground-level. The square was always a mass of activity, an enormous heaving heap of people getting soup or charming snakes or having their fortunes told. Food was cheap and tasty, and seeing the extraordinary goings-on just couldn't be beat.

It is interesting that we encountered people who thought all of this activity was for the tourists--and, too, we encountered tourists who avoided all of it because they thought it unsafe or unhygenic, only for real Moroccans who could speak the language and deal with the crowds. The truth must be that the foreign wonders of Marrakesh are both of these things. The henna artists on the square, the snake charmers, the vast numbers of orange juice-sellers out during the day--these people, surely, make their money off of interested, disbelieving, hot and thirsty foreigners. But just as surely, storytellers talking in Arabic, snake-oil sellers explaining the supernatural causes of rheumatism, and the many food-vendors who serve an almost exclusively Morrocan crowd cater to the locals first and foremost. The Jemaa el-Fna caters to whoever is there, foreigner and local alike, and the jumble of people on top of one another means that it also caters to them both.

I really liked it. Some people hate it. But for me, this place was the heart of a way of life that no longer exists in Morocco's other big cities. It might not be sustainable in many of them, but it is, I would say, desirable.

47 weird foods we have eaten in Morocco

2007-08-03T08:50:00.000-04:00

1. egg, potato, and eggplant sandwich
2. potato, eggplant, and enormous chili pepper sandwich
3. huge round flaky bendy grease bread
4. chicken tagine
5. meatball tagine
6. veggie couscous with raisins, because those are vegetables
7. yogurt in a glass
8. enormous rotisserie chicken dinners with fries, rice, lentil soup, weird sour vegetable soup with olives, hot sauce, and bread
9. Hawaii drink
10. Poms drink (the weirdest, most undesirable apple juice you will ever try)
11. Schweppes lemonade, which is yummy
12. fake Fanta
13. 5 or 6 kinds of Moroccan bottled water
14. meat sandwiches that we ordered, so the guy went to the butcher shop next door, bought the meat, cooked it, and then made our sandwiches
15. lots and lots and lots of fresh orange juice
16. bad croissants with very small amounts of good chocolate
17. fake crepes with honey--kind of yummy, but the "crepe" was definitely made of something thick, heavy, and chewy
18. weird melon
19. half-moon dessert pastry which was not nearly as good as the melon
20. tomato soup with lentils, pasta, and weird spices
21. halava
22. very strong coffee
23. tuna melt with cabbage in it
24. cheeseburger with cabbage on top
25. deep-fried chili peppers which were HOT
26. deep-fried eggplant
27. donut without sugar, served on a string
28. boiled sheep's head, including brains
29. honey tea
30. mint tea
31. cactus fruit
32. snails (soup?)
33. peach milk drink
34. avocado milk drink
35. banana milk drink
36. fig-avocado-banana-peach milk drink
37. whole fried fish, bones, head, and all
38. bony fish finger
39. little tiny sausages
40. orange flavored ice cream
41. yogurt flavored ice cream (NOT frozen yogurt)
42. lemon flavored ice cream
43. nougat flavored ice cream
44. weird-ass sesame pastry that tasted only like sesame-sugar
45. fake animal crackers
46. bread dipped in lamb's head oil
47. frosting sandwich

Hasssan II Mosque

2007-08-01T11:14:00.000-04:00

The best feature of Casablanca is the Hassan II Mosque. It's awesome, a new and thoroughy modern construction with retractable roof, escalators, heated marble floor (in witer), and titanium doors. But it's also an incredible masterpiece of traditional craftsmanship: 10,000 Moroccan craftsmen worked for 6 years, 7 days a week (in shifts, of course) to finish the inlay-work, plaster-carving, gold-leaving (leafing?), and the other fine touches that cover the mosque. The whole is extremely inviting and impressive. All credit to Hassan II for getting it done.

That said, the mosque was built largely by public subscription, and individuals and businesses proudly display their certificates showing that they gave money to the project. The huge and beautiful space functions as a public park, as well, and it is common to see families out for a stroll or children playing in the enormous square in front of the mosque. The building also backs onto the sea, and people swim in its shadow.

I think that it is relatively rare in this modern world of ours that we build such impressive things as the Hassan II Mosque. My brother offers the Eiffel Tower as a counterexample, but that is not so new after all, and not nearly so impressive aesthetically as this mosque is. Construction on the mosque began in 1989 and only finished in 1995--and it is a thing that was built for modern worshippres, but also for postreity. People might visit this in a thousand years' time; whatever the aspirations of the French, I would be surprised if anybody ever visited the Eiffel Tower them. The difference, perhaps, is that the mosque is not only impressive and grandiose, but it is also a funcitonal building and--most important of all, I think--it is a thing of beauty. the builders cared that the roof was made of gold-leaved cedar wood; that the walls were covered with mosaics; that the speakers were hidden in the capitals of the pillars within. Cost-effective was sacrificed for gorgeous, and it shows. The space is one of the most beautiful that i have seen anywhere, and it is likely the most beautiful religious space I have ever seen. If King Hassan II wanted to build a testament to Islam or to Morocco, or both, then surely he has succeeded.

5 Degrees of Separation

2007-07-25T15:56:00.000-04:00

I confess, at first I didn't think I liked Senegal. It seemed expensive, difficult to navigate, and without much in the way of interesting attractions of either the monumental, historical, or natural-beauty varieties. Sure, some of this first impression had to do with the way that Kenya Airways lost my brother's bag in transit--possibly in Johannesburg, or in Nairobi, or maybe in Bamako--and the way that the Senegalese office of Kenya Airways could neither deliver the bag to us at any address nor notify us of its arrival--all of this meaning that we were constrained to staying in an expensive hotel near the airport and shuttling in every so often to see if it had arrived yet. We spent our first two days in a (quite nice) hotel and in the (much less nice) baggage facility and waiting area of the Dakar Airport (which is, I hasten to mention, 17 kilometers outside of Dakar).

But, having retrieved the bag, retired to our rooms in a lovely Senegalese home, and figured out how to navigate the extremely useful public transport system here, I find that Senegal is growing on me. What before struck me as an extremely high cost-of-living relative to the infrastructure and facilities of this nation now strikes me instead as a sign of one of Africa's few legitimately stable, thriving economies (coupled, perhaps, with a largely-desirable dearth of tourists, meaning that there's not much in the way of cheapish hotels geared towards travellers instead of high-flying businessmen). The endless tangle of sandy streets, loud-mouthed taxi drivers, and all-pervasive roadworks has become only a minor annoyance now that we're settled in a suburb that we're growing to know well, and now that we've figured out the most convenient local bus route and the normal fare for a shared cab. Senegal's lack of impressive sights long since gave way to the more subtle joys of beautiful beaches, cheap and excellent fruit, and truly lovely people.

There is a story here, a story to do with finding accomodation and meeting people in Senegal.

Consider my brother, staying in an expensive (if nice) hotel far outside Dakar, unable to speak French,* and in need of a more cost-effective place to sleep.

So there's my brother. He's been wearing the same clothes for 80 hours straight, because Kenya Airways lost his bag. He doesn't speak any of the languages here. He slept on the roof of a hotel a few nights ago, in order to save money so that he could stay in a room in the same hotel the next night.
Well, my brother knows me.
And I know V, a friend from college.
And V knows M, a work colleague who lives in Yoff (one of Dakar's suburbs).
And M knows N, a lovely lady who lives just up her street.

And N, it turns out, has two empty bedrooms that she'd love to fill for a very modest sum.

In fact, when you get down to it, it turns out that N would love to provide three excellent (excellent!) meals a day and free laundry into the bargain (which, let me tell you, is a generous offer when somebody has been wearing the same clothes for more than three days straight). And N likes to sit outside and read, and eat, and chat with her houseguests (which is to say, me, since the brother is not so much a member of le monde francophone). And she has a lovely family, all the members of which are also extremely personable and nice. And--a big bonus for my brother--she lives extremely close to one of the cleanest, clearest-watered beaches I've ever seen.

So Benton and I are coming to enjoy Senegal quite a lot after all. We like the beaches. We love the bustling markets of Dakar, though in some ways the city itself is so recognizably just a city that it is unremarkable to tourists like us. We love, love, LOVE the food.

Let me talk, for a moment, about the food here. Mangos cost 10 to 20 cents and are to die for. There's a strange sour fruit called a mad (said more like "maw" than like the synonym for "angry"--recall that this is a French-speaking nation with an extremely non-Parisian accent to boot and you'll get the idea a bit better); one opens it, mashes up the pulp inside with a few blocks of sugar, and eats it like the Sourpatch Kids you can buy in movie theaters.** There are oranges, apples, and pears in abundance. The baguettes are as good as any I had in Paris (and oh-so-much cheaper).

But it's the hot food that really stands out in Senegal. Even extremely simple dishes are tasty--grain in a spicy peanut sauce comes to mind (and yes, even my plain spaghetti-loving brother likes these things). Unsurprisingly for a coastal town like Dakar, almost all of the other main dishes are fish-based. We've eaten fish-balls with spicy pasta and fresh bread, fish and carrots and potato and eggplant and lime and sauce over rice, and fish with rice with N and her family. All have been excellent, a bit spicy but nothing overwhelming, slow-cooked and tasty all-round.

The ritual of eating is interesting, too. Benton and I are served a daily breakfast of fresh bread from the bakery outside and coffee, but it seems that le petit dejeuner is literally a foreign concept here. Lunch and dinner are the big meals, both taken a good bit later than we take them in America. Eating is a communal activity: we spread a piece of cloth out on the floor, sit (either on the floor or on stools, according to preference and status, it appears), each get a fork (or spoon, depending on the meal), and dig in. Food comes in a single big bowl or heaped steamingly onto an enormous shared plate. You eat whatever is in front of you. The lady of the house (or the eldest daughter who is present--N has occasionally been out praying when suppertime rolls around) is in charge of distribution; she drops a bit more fish over here, makes sure that everybody gets a potato, and redistributes the sauce as the group eats. (She also has the power to favor guests or anybody else sitting around the plate, though in point of fact it appears to me that only N ever does this; her daughters seem to have a more Western-style sense of fairness rather than N's more old-school sense of honor and particular respect for elders, men, and visitors.) When somebody has finished eating, it's a simple matter of laying down the fork (or spoon) to indicate satisfaction before wandering off to do something else. Others can stay behind for as long as they like to eat, though of course this gets a bit of de facto regulation since nobody wants to hang out and eat alone after everybody else has left.

It's all extremely satisfying and very nice. Perhaps--perhaps--this describes the whole of Senegal itself, after all.

*I take this back. My brother can say, "ne parle pas Francais," (omitting the subject of the sentence, however, which he means to be "je") and "certainelement," which is not an actual French word. (He also manages a few actual useful phrases which he has remembered, quite accurately, from high-school French--but I won't mention those.)

**Benton, upon review of this post, points out that he would have rather eaten the mad "with nine more sugar cubes" mashed into it. He elaborates: "The first bite I had, when I stuck a complete sugar cube into my mouth at the same time, that was the best by far." I will reiterate that I thought this was a tasty fruit just as we had it (which is to say, with five sugar cubes in it already).

Victoria Falls

2007-07-20T15:53:00.000-04:00

"It's like Heaven." That's what Benton said upon seeing Victoria Falls.

He's right.

To be more specific, it's like Heaven as painted by Gainsborough, or as conceived by the makers of the The Lord of the Rings movies. Victoria Falls is enormous, surrounded by an ethereal mist, punctuated by lush green islands and covered in all directions by rainbows. The updrafts are so well-balanced that one can watch water droplets simply suspended in air, small globular things that swiftly rise and then hang unperturbed for several seconds, long enough to seem completely surreal, before they are again whisked away to the left or the right but, unbelievably, never downwards. The rainbows are doubled and tripled, incredibly intense in the weighty, water-filled air, and they appear at all angles: vertically, yes, but also horizontally against the ground, at a slant in the gorge, everything but upside-down.

This is like heaven, yes, but it is also like the edge of the world. Standing on the rocks on the edge of the falls sometimes is like looking into an abyss, more the end--the edge--of the world than anything I've ever seen. This is not because of the chasm yawning before you, or the power of all that water tumbling so far in such quantities, but something much more primeval: in some places, where the fog from the suspended spray is particularly thick, one can stand on the edge and look out and see nothing. Everything is gray and cold. You can't see the chasm, or the falls, or the verdant islands in the middle of it all; all you can hear is the white noise of the falls (which one can hear dimly even from miles away). Standing on a rock at Danger Point in Zimbabwe and looking out and down and across towards what one knows to be the Horseshoe Falls not all that far away, one can see only formless cold grey-white nothingness. One can hear only static, too much information to glean anything useful. Shouting back at my brother 10 feet away, though, he certainly could not hear me.

And that's what it's like. The falls are awesome, powerful, not-to-be-missed. Looking at them from a reasonable distance yields a beautiful sight, rainbows and sheer cliffs and tumbling clean clear water, forests and moss and shafts of sunlight over natural swimming pools with palm trees behind. Looking from close-in yields something else, not exactly ominous but certainly much more sobering: a cutting off of sense, with nothing to see, nothing to hear, and only a wet cold wind to touch if you reach your hand out in front of you.

However you stack it, it's impressive.

plants, animals, people, and a beautiful starry sky

2007-07-16T12:12:00.000-04:00

Here I am in Zimbabwe! I think I love Zimbabwe. In my first 24 hours here, I rode 20 kilometers in the back of a truck along with my brother, my pack, and 10 other (Zimbabwean) passengers, exchanged money on the black market, sat around a campfire under an impressively starry sky, and saw a shocking amount of big game while just walking around. It's great.

This is how one imagines deepest Africa: single roads through (genuinely) lion- and elephant-infested grasslands, in the back of a pickup speeding down the dry highway to the only town in miles and miles and miles. Money is a bit of a conundrum--the government-mandated exchange rate does not reflect reality at ALL--but the people are fantastic and the scenery even moreso.

My brother (who is with me in Africa) and I are doing the whole nine yards here, too. Yesterday we rafted down the mighty Zambezi River, upending our boat on one of the rapids, much to our delight. (We later took another rapid deliberately hanging on to the outside of the raft, and I jumped out and went down another solo, though my brother held off as a result of the chill.) The hike back up out of the canyon was beautiful, as well, if demanding.

We also took a horseback safari, seeing everything from the ants that build those giant anthills and warthogs to elephants shaking fruit out of trees, impalas, gazelles, bush deer, and drunk babboons having sex. On another walk one morning, we also saw the local buffalo.

There is more, so much more, but I've run out of time on this computer. Perhaps I'll have the chance to post again soon...

Egypt, ho!

2007-07-16T11:46:00.000-04:00

Egypt is a conundrum. It is full of amazing tombs, pyramids, and temples, but the population is at best indifferent to this cultural heritage and at worst a bit embarrassed by it. The country makes an enormous amount on tourism, but the land is alrgely inhospitable, the museums are ill-kept, and the hawking is so pervasive and invasive that it is truly maddening (enough to turn this tourist off from returning to many of the main sights). Unemployment is high and incomes incredibly low, but in cities it seems that the vast majority of the male population spends its days in coffeehouses drinking coffee or tea and smoking the sheesha. (This would not be a bad way to spend one's days if one were unemployed, but it should be noted that such pastimes actually cost money to indulge.) There is a broad sentiment that western women are easy and western men are lascivious, but I've never encountered anything like Egypt's unwelcome touching on American streets; our men obviously have a much greater sense of self-control--and for that matter, our women will not simply marry the men their fathers choose, which in some ways makes us anything but easy.

I enjoyed some aspects of Egypt very much. Old Cairo, still boasting medieval buildings, was fascinating as we wandered the little streets and ducked into beautiful mosques. The 7th-century Coptic Hanging Church was magnificent, though the surrounding area disappointed. I loved the aesthetic of sitting outside with a coffee and a sheesha, though this was not an activity in which I actually indulged; I enjoyed very much our friendship with Ahmed, a young Cairene from our hostel; boating down the Nile was great.

I can't escape the feeling, though, that most of Egypt's Big Monuments are undermaintained, overhyped, and overpriced. This does not mean to belittle the amazing colossi of Ramses at the Temple of Luxor or the magnificence of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, but it does mean to point out how badly the entrances to both have been built (in modern times), how little there is to the pyramids except their size (which, I certainly grant, is extremely impressive), and how much the current sightseeing protocols at the Valley of the Kings is damaging the tombs there. Seeing the amazing items at the Egyptian Museum--desperately in need of a complete overhaul--brought home to me an interestin point: Egypt is trying very hard to repatriate artifacts from museums the world over but, regardless of who stole what from whom, maybe this is a bad thing.

I think of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and I can't help but think, Here is this magnificent construction, in a climate-controlled, humidity-controlled room, with walkways laid out to do as little damage to it as possible as viewers come through, well-signed and with all its interesting features explained, prefaced by a curatorial statement of its place in history and in art--all in stark contrast to the artifacts exhibited at the Egyptian Museum. Of course we don't want to steal whole buildings and relocate them to Manhattan--there is something fantastic about seeing the Temple of Luxor in Luxor, after all, and knowing that the Valley of the Kings still contains tombs of kings--but I'm not sure this argument can be extended to objects already in museums, and destined, if repatriated, for other museums. If Nefertiti's bangle or a statue of Amenhotep have already been removed from their original site, then what difference does it make whether they are in Cairo, on the one hand, or New York or London or Paris, on the other hand?

Okay, here are the answers to that question. It makes the following differences, the first two of which come down on the side of sending back to Egypt, and the second two of which come down on the other side altogether.

Pride. It matters to Egypt--and for that matter to the Met Museum--whether they have this obelisk or that bangle in their permanent collections. They want to be able to say they have 18,000 bangles or whatever, some of which are this old, others of which are that valuable or interesting.
Playing by the rules. It makes a difference whether an artifact was stolen from some foreign country, if only because we hold rightful ownership of property to be deeply important.
Preservation. It matters that in London or Paris or New York, these objects may well last much longer now that they've been unearthed than they might last elsewhere, because of everything from humidifiers to lighting to the amount of money that can be spent on them.
Study. Western museums have the money and mission to learn about the objects that they house and then to share what they find with the public. Whether or not this is the mission of the Egyptian Museum, they are clearly not as successful with it.

That's all for now. I'm not a big fan of museums anyhow--I find them all to be big collections of stuff that are underappreciated simply because the collections are so big. But if I had to pick, I think I'd pick big museums in the developed world to house my treasures--fair or not.

Fondue vs. Raisins-in-the-Bread

2007-07-08T16:22:00.000-04:00

I've always thought of modern Jerusalem as a town populated by Jews. I thought I had some sense of it: men in black hats or yarmulkes, women in long sleeves and long skirts, secular Jews reminiscent of those in Tel Aviv.

I think I was pretty much right on in my impressions of Tel Aviv, most of which I gleaned from the TA in my Hebrew class in college. The population there is, by and large, a big jumble of secular, arty, beach-bumming Jews, with a small smattering of more religious types mixed in.

But Jerusalem? Nope. I had no clue.

The Old City, which is really where I spent almost all of my insufficient time, is divided into the Arab Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Armenian Quarter. These aren't just names with historical roots, either; we stayed in the Arab Quarter, where we were surrounded by headscarved, mosque-going Muslim Arabs. And of course I knew that Jerusalem was a holy site for each of the big three monotheistic religions, but I was insufficiently prepared for the numbers of Christians and Muslims I saw there on pilgrimage. The close-walled, closed-rooved streets are bustling with trade and food and crafts and junky tourist souvenirs, and Jews with earlocks push past Muslim men and girls in tank-tops in order to buy their daily fruit or shampoo.

Don't get me wrong: the Old City is segregated, and the Muslims in the Jewish Quarter and the Jews in the Christian Quarter and all the other people in the "wrong" places all go home at night to their respective parts of town. Nevertheless, the mixing is ubiquitous, extremely colorful and attractive, and apparently unproblematic (at least within the walls of the Old City).

This ties in, perhaps, to something I noticed distinctly upon crossing the border from Jordan to Israel, and that is the easy coexistence of people of many different races and ethnicities--sort of--in Israel. This may be unexpected. After all, if any place in the world is a flashpoint for ethnic tensions or a textbook tale of the difficulties with peaceful coexistence, it would seem to be Israel. The Palestinian problem is a big problem, and it does not make Israel look all that successful as an ethnic melting pot.

But nowhere else that I've been, with the exception of America itself, has such a varied population as Israel. I really found there to be something familiar and, indeed, good about suddenly seeing not just Czechs, or Arabs, or Russians, or Han Chinese, or Uzbeks, or Uighers on the street, but rather a jumble of people. In Jordan, everybody looks the same, has the same roots, looks at someone who looks different as an outsider. This is even true in multiethnic France or, to a lesser extent, England: sure, there are lots of North Africans or South Asians here, but they aren't really French then, are they? For all that America has real racial tensions, in my experience this does seem different. Nobody thinks Italian-Americans, or Chinese-Americans, or African-Americans, or whoever, aren't Americans. There aren't many Americans who aren't SomethingOrOther-Americans. (Again, don't take this as my saying that all ethnic groups are treated equally in our country today, but travel really has impressed upon me how much more this is true in the USA than in the vast majority of the rest of the world, even despite all our difficulties.)

Israel is like this, too. There are people of Eastern European descent on the streets. And Iberian descent. And African descent. There are American immigrants who have long since forgotten where their great-great-great grandparents came from. There are people who are black, white, brown, and everything in between, and all wearing the same God-awful tan army uniforms. This is something I noticed right away, and then again and again in bus stations and across Israel.
My cousin A, who is Israeli, was telling me that there is extremely little crime in Israel. Everyone owns a gun, and nobody ever gets shot on the streets. Far more than us, then, it appears that Israelis have managed to make this big mess of different people work.

But I qualified my description of these people (they are of "different ethnicities") with a "sort of" a few paragraphs back. This is because there is one obvious difference between Israel and, say, the United States--and that is that the vast majority of Israelis outside of the Palestinian Territories are Jewish. There is an obvious link between Jonathan from Ethiopia, Jonny from America, and Yonatan from Russia--and that difference definitely isn't just the name. So, yes, the ethnicities are different, but only sort of. Jewish heritage--if not necessarily Jewish practice--definitely does provide the flame that lets the melting pot, well, melt.

And this brings me back to the Old City in Jerusalem. What's great about this place, and different from the other bits of Israel that I've seen, is that it's not the superficial "Gee, we look different" that is overcome here. Nor even is it the much less superficial, "Gee, the way I grew up was completely different than the way you grew up--but at least we share the same basic principles and some of the same points of reference." Rather, in the Old City, one finds truly different people--people who look different, behave differently, believe different things, dress differently, were raised within completely different cultural paradigms--who all depend on one another and live with one another (and, indeed, on top of one another) in a way that is extremely successful and interesting to watch. I've never had more fun standing on a street corner crowd-watching than I have in Jerusalem.

But you know, what I like best about the Old City is not actually all of that. I noticed the mixing immediately, and found it interesting and desirable. But what I actually like best is nothing more than the constant bustle and noise of life in action in this too-small city still bounded by the walls put up by Suleyman the Magnificent. At night, as shops start to close up, there's a mad rush in the streets as people buy their last ingredients for supper. Little side-streets are packed with practical shopkeepers selling toiletries right next to gaudy tourist shops selling yarmulkes and cruxifixes and "My boss went to Jerusalem and all I got was this crappy T-Shirt" shirts side-by-side. Also in those packed little side streets are the tefillin-toting tourists making their way to the Wailing Wall, large groups of pilgrims walking the Stations of the Cross, children riding tricycles, men in corners smoking their shishas, and a general jumble of interesting things going on. It's really fantastic. I'll definitely, definitely be back.

rocks

2007-07-04T13:20:00.001-04:00

Petra. Is. Awesome.

You know that part in Indiana Jones, where Indy sees the facade of the Treasury at Petra through the crack in the rocks? It seems all big-blockbuster-filmed up. But it isn't. In real life, it's not every bit as good as in the movies--it is, in fact, much better.

I loved Petra. I loved it. You can crawl all over everything, walk in the rooms, touch the walls. You can sing chords into the incredibly echo-chamber-like temples. You can scramble the passageways and climb the mountains to the holy high places. You can play on the whole thing. And you still can't figure out how the Nabataeans managed to make this thing.

I mean it. I just don't know how you can carve a facade so high up. Ladders? Steps in the rock which you later carve away? Both seem insufficiently dependable.

Also, it is an inspired move to think that one might build absences. We build structures: a house out of bricks there, a wooden shed over here. But the Nabataens saw mountains and thought, "Hey, that's perfect! Let's carve out the insides and decorate the front bits." It's incredible, and an unusual and inspired idea.

Here is one other unusual thing about Petra: nobody was there. I mean, very nearly nobody. My father and I went hours without seeing anybody else. I don't believe there was a single other person in the Al-Muthlim scramble when we trekked it (this being an alternative entrance to the city, which was built originally as an enormous drainage system to divert floodwaters). Getting off the beaten path just a bit meant that we were alone, save the occasional Bedouin. It's a travesty.

So, final analysis: Petra is awesome. You should go. And you should do it before the tourist rush.

Things in the Desert

2007-06-30T14:40:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, we went to Mount Nebo, just north of Madaba, here in Jordan. This is the Biblical Mount Nebo, the one from which Moses saw the Promised Land and the place where he died before ever getting to enter it. That part of Jordan is the Biblical Moab, where Moses took his Moabite wife. It's all very religion-and-history laden.

See Deuteronomy (the bit I quote is from Deuteronomy 34, but Nebo makes several appearances in the book):

1And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the LORD shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan,
2And all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea,
3And the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.
4And the LORD said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.
5So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD.

As expected, the views from Mount Nebo are fantastic, showing everything from Jericho to the Dead Sea, the Jordan River and Hebron. On a clear day, one is supposed to be able to see not just Jerusalem's Mount of Olives but all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.

Here is one difficulty, though. I know that thousands of years have passed, but I have to say that it is simply non-obvious that this barren desert and salty, unliveable sea should be the Promised Land. Looking off this mountaintop, who in their right mind would say, "Ah! Vast desert as far as the eye can see, plus one river to the west! Surely this shall be the land of Dan, and that of Benjamin, and that bit further out can go to Naphtali. Surely we shall have plenty to eat here, next to the sea without fish and in the desert without trees. It was sure worth wandering the desert for 40 years to get here to this land of plenty..."

The most striking thing about the mountain is not what one can (or cannot) see from it, though, but is rather what one can see on it. Mount Nebo houses a beautiful church, most of which was built in the 6th century AD (though bits remain from an earlier, 4th-century foundation on the same site, and the roof is modern). The church is beautiful, with absolutely mind-blowing floor mosaics, mosaics on the walls, pillars, and an old and lovely altar. It is of a perfect size for the space. There are (modern) ingenious stained-glass windows that open to let the breezes through.

I have written a lot about great monuments and striking historical sites that are beautiful or awe-inspiring even--or perhaps especially--in their decrepitude. I have written about coming to appreciate the Romantic movement that built ruins in well-kept unruined gardens, and about appreciating real ruins that I've seen even when they weren't attached to an Acropolis or Great Wall of China or otehr Big Monument. I've written about the debate between restoration and preservation, both of which presume that the thing one wants to keep around is a remnant of some time past (even if in restored form). Now, though, I want to write about the flip-side of all this. That is to say, I want to write about the beauty of use.

Mount Nebo is kept by the Franciscans. It is a bit unsettling to see all the signs welcoming the visitor to a great Christian holy site--given the obvious relevance of the place and of Moses to, say, Judaism and Islam--but it must be said that the Franciscans keep the site extremely well. More than that, though, it is wonderful to see the church atop the mountain still in present use. There is today a monastery on the mountain. The church has been fitted with modern fans--and this has been done well and tastefully. There are modern penches inside that serve as pews. There is a lectern; there are kneeling pads; there is a sign reminding visitors that this is an active place of worship.

All of this works. I really like the live church. Part of this is some sense of continuity with the past; we have travel documents written 1500 years ago by people who visited this very church (though of course in a different state of its construction), and who prayed in much the same way and read much the same words that the monks and pilgrims do today.

But it is more than that. I have a strong belief that items from the past ought to be used in the present insofar as possible. These things were made to be used, were meant to be practical or informative or enjoyable--and we should feel free to use or learn from or enjoy them today. I feel this way about old books, too: I think we should hold them, and read them, and let others do the same. Will this hasten their demise? Of course--and this is the case even if we continually rebind and reglue them. But books, like churches, are by nature perishable objects. They are meant to be read, and ensconsing them behind glass walls so that viewers can see two pages seems to me to be an even greater travesty than wearing down the bindings through continued (responsible) use. What good is an instrument unplayed? What good is a book unread? What good is a church un-prayed in?

Of course, each of these hold some good. The instrument may be a work of visual art, too, which is being held in a museum so that a much larger audience can view it. Perhaps keeping the book in a similar state allows us to preserve knowledge of some binding technique which might otherwise be lost. Perhaps making the church a secular and sterile site allows more people to appreciate its architecture or history.

But, in a broad sense at least, I find these uncompelling. I like the live church at Mount Nebo, and I like it because it means that the 6th-century building is not just another ruin in this ruin-laden region. The church's continued use--and the attendant continued sense of some sort of sanctity--seems extremely appropriate, and it makes me feel like I stumpled upon something really different from all the other ruins in this age-old holy land. It's great.

***

In other news: we went to Machaerus, Herod's mountain fortress and the place where Salome beheaded John the Baptist, among other things. It is awesome. Nobody else was there (at least, not until 6 Bedouin brothers showed up to see what we were doing and to chuck stones off the mountain--stones that went truly unbelievable distances, twice as far as anything I could throw--and they were doing it underhand.) The whole thing is surrounded by rock-carved cave-houses, which we explored (of course). There was also an extremely deep cistern (?) and a rickety old ladder down into it, which of course we had to descend.

Standing up there, it is hard to see how anybody could have taken this mountain-top stronghold. And again, the views were fantastic, featuring above all the Dead Sea.

***

Finally, today's adventure took us to Karak. Karak is a crusader stronghold from a thousand years ago. If you were to enter and walk to the top, you'd miss the whole thing. It would look like grass with bits of stonework sticking out.

The secret to Karak is that the whole thing is underground. My father brought a flashlight--good idea--and we wandered fantastic passageways, twisted staircases, and dark hallways and rooms in the bowels of the castle. For a dinar, the museum guard gave us the key to an enormous underground chamber and some other passageways that are usually closed to the public. This was a very worthwhile exchange.

Karak is just what you think a castle should be: dark, tortuous stone passages working this way and that over a vast expanse, opening into underground rooms and storage spaces, windows with views over the plain, and windy, cool hallways. It's completely awesome.

Cistern!

2007-06-24T16:59:00.000-04:00

There are many awesome places in Istanbul. Zq remembers the spice market. SW "remembers" the Hagia Sophia to which he has never been. I think my dad will remember the magnificent Topkapki Palace most keenly. Me, though-- I am most taken by the cistern.

Yep. That's right. I like the cavernous underground Hagia Sophia water supply. Weird, I know.

But awesome! The cıstern ıs enormous, stıll wıth clear water (and fısh) ın the bottom, and wıth all sorts of ınterestıng nooks and crannıes and thıngs to notıce. When ıt was full, the water came to the tops of the pıllars that hold the vaulted roof up (though today the water ıs perhaps only a foot or so deep). Everythıng ıs dımly lıt (and therefore atmospherıc), and, because the cıstern ıs underground, ıt ıs pleasantly cool as well.

The best part of the cıstern, though, ıs ıts constructıon. The thıng was buılt prımarıly from old Greek and Roman pıllars, theıved ın Byzantıne tımes from out-of-use pagan temples. For thıs reason, there ıs no unıformıty ın the pıllars as there ıs ın all the temples that one vısıts around here. Some are sımple Dorıc columns, others have flowery Corınthıan capıtals; some are thıck, some are thın; some are placed atop pıeces of others or have been cut short ın order to keep the roof of the cıstern at unıform heıght. Two famous carvıngs of Medusa's head have been moved ın to form the bases of (possıbly unrelated) pıllars ın the northwest corner of the cıstern. These are partıcularly ınterestıng because one carvıng has been placed wıth the head upsıde-down, whıle the other ıs turned on ıts sıde.

Thıs ıs why I love the cıstern. There ıs so much to see there, because ıt ıs such a random assortment of stuff. But ıt ıs no purposeless random assortment, eıther; the cıstern ıs actually a magnıfıcent, proportıonal, symmetrıcal pıece of work once you step back and look at the whole thıng ınstead of ıts hodgepodge ındıvıdual parts. It ıs therefore extremely ınterestıng.

I also lıke the cıstern theoretıcally, I guess. Consıder that, ın tımes past, these pıllars held up the rooves of temples and places of worshıp. Now they've been shoved underground as the temples have been dısmantled or pıllaged--and here, ın Istanbul, they are all holdıng up the roof of the cıstern whıch feeds yet another defunct temple, of a sort: the Hagıa Sophıa. ("Defunct" because ıt was once a church, then a mosque--and ıs now a secular museum.) I fınd thıs cycle kınd of amusıng.

Fınally, I just lıke knowıng somethıng of what's UNDERNEATH these cıtıes I'm seeıng. There's a whole hıdden ınfrastructure of cıtıes, and ıt's so COOL to see some of ıt.

Also, to go off on a tangent, I lıke thıs wıth respect to many of the old ruıns I'm seeıng, too. In Ephesus, the rıch houses on the hıll all have pıped water runnıng through the walls (just lıke we do), and one can occasıonally see the water maıns and draınage dıtches and sıde pıpelınes runnıng through the streets of the cıty, too. It's really neat to thınk of thıs place--so old--as so recognızably modern ın thıs way--and to thınk of how much we don't see when we "see" a place.

What I've Enjoyed

2007-06-18T06:29:00.000-04:00

I realize I've lately been writing a lot about architecture and history and that sort of highbrow thing. I suppose Greece rather naturally prompts such thoughts; indeed, just yesterday I was considering writing a post made up of just the many lines that came into mind while ferrying across the Aegean.

Example. Matthew Arnold's

... from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen-- You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles, which the waves draw back and fling
At their return, up the high strand
Begin, and cease, and then again begin
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean...

Example, upon looking at the distant horizon. John Donne's

At the round earth's imaged corners

Example, despite having never read Chapman's Homer. Keats's

Much have I traveled in realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

But here's the thing. The best bits of Greece aren't really these remembered lines that somebody else wrote. For that matter, the best stuff is probably not even the amazing monuments and the great architecture and rich history. Here are the things I've liked best so far:

1. Eating dinner at O Vrakas, a fantastic seafood restaurant in Heraklion. The meal was fantastic, punctuated by locals drunk on ouzo singing along to the music, hawkers stopping at tables to get you to buy this flashlight or that flower, and a power outage that meant that everything ended up lit by candlelight with the harbor in the background. Greeks eat late and long (especially on the islands), and it was one o'clock or so before we finished eating--and dancing, and considering the grilled octopus in front of us, and pronouncing bogue to be a fantastic food fish. Nights on Crete, especially in the walkable city of Heraklion, are a thing to be enjoyed.

2. Standing in the salty wind on the ferry from Santorini to Athens, with spray kicking up in my face and the remnants of a sunset left in the clouds.

3. Actually watching the sun set into the ocean (no the clouds! no the ocean!) while sitting on a rooftop and sipping an extremely overpriced but extremely refreshing lemon-ice in Oia, on the northern tip of Santorini, after a long (13 km?), hot walk around the sheer cliffs of the caldera that defines the island.

4. Dinner at Stamatopoulos in the Plaka in Athens (just underneath the Acropolis), featuring complex rural-style sausages, live music, and a surprising and excellent Pelopponesian wine made from the oddball Agiorgitiko grape--the whole of which was shockingly cheap.

I note that food accompanies many of these great experiences. This is not surprising. Greek food is extremely nice, and Crete in particular stands out gastronomically. Of course, the Aegean Islands are flush with fantastic seafood, and Greeks themselves like to linger over their meals and savor a drink or two afterwards. It's a place made for dining out.

Moreover, although Greece is no longer the rock-bottom cheap tourist destination it once was (as guides are rather overly keen to emphasize), neither is it all too expensive. The range of prices (for all sorts of things, but restaurant fare in particular) seems to have collapsed (or maybe it was just always a less dramatic disparity than one sees in America). It may be true that one can't get a reasonable restaurant meal for less than eight Euros anymore, but it is also true that a very, very nice meal can be had for not that much more. The difference between a 12 Euro meal and an 17 Euro meal is mind-blowing; 20 or 22 Euros, it seems to me, is about where prices top out. Being willing to spend $12 instead of $10, then, makes an enormous difference here. And eating well, in Greece at least, is very much worth it.

Finally-- I love boats. Little tiny taxi boats, speed boats, fast catamaran ferries, big slow steam ferries set to cross the Aegean: all of them. I like riding them, sleeping the night through on deck (which is a heroic feat, I'll have you know), leaning off the railings so the wind whips through my hair, watching the spray, spotting islands off in the distance... everything. It's a shame that Americans are not a maritime people. I come from a country that is an enormous single landmass, instead of a country of several small islands. Sigh. If I lived in Greece, let me tell you, I would definitely come up with an excuse to ferry around all the time. It would be great.

two ways of looking at a palace

2007-06-16T05:18:00.000-04:00

There's no better way to highlight the relative merits and drawbacks of restoration (as distinct from preservation) than to take a quick jaunt around Crete. Knossos--which was reconstructed by the Brit Sir Arthur Evans, the curator of the Ashmolean museum--is now a several-storied, painted, pillared testament both to the impressive Minoan civilization and to Evans' own classically-educated imagination. We get a fantastic sense of the many stories of the palace, the frescoes and the rooms, the passages, the waterworks, and the brilliance of the painting. We also get some strange and surely incorrect interpretations: Evans took this room to be the piano nobile, even though there was little evidence for any sort of large room where it was located; he took that area for a throne room, though in fact now we think it was rather something more like a temple to a goddess.

Evans' reconstruction makes the place vibrant and popular with the tourists, to be sure, but it also acts as something of a cautionary tale. His changes were made with the best material known at the time: concrete. They are, as a result, largely irreversable. Where we now think his interpretations were overzealous, we can nonetheless not change them without destroying the whole thing. While he did the best he could with the tools he had, we now could do much better. We think we know a lot more about the complex than he did 100 years ago (though we may be wrong, which is precisely what Evans shows us).

All of this highlights something which is true all over, though, and interesting. Evans has changed Knossos, to be sure, and in a big way. However, even now, people visit as much for the painted walls and "still-standing" (new) towers as for the original Minoan foundations and the few original pillars. Signs talk as much about Evans and his reconstructions as about the original form of the palace. The visitor therefore gets an appreciation of archaeology and tourism as forces that change the site as much as he gets an appreciation of the Minoans and the way they, too, built up the area.

This is good. It is not so blatant when visiting the Acropolis, for example, that by walking through THIS entrance and circling THAT building, we are ourselves changing the site. The Temple of the Athenian Nike is being preserved at the moment, and has been taken down in its ENTIRETY so that each piece can be strengthened before being put back together. Visitors in ten years won't notice this, won't know it--but we are changing the site as we go, too. Tourism is as legitimate, economic, and social a purpose for the Acropolis as politics or religion; in 1000 years, future academics or tourists may be as interested in us and our use of such places as in the ancients and their uses thereof. Knossos makes that obvious--anyone looking back in 1000 years will DEFINITELY note the changes Evans made and the way that they redefined what the space was to be used FOR.

The obvious foil to Knossos is Pheistos. Here, there is also a Minoan palace, built to the same plan as the palace at Knossos. There is no reconstruction, though--indeed, obvious changes take the form only of a few open-air roofs to protect areas that might otherwise be weather-damaged. This approach is much more faithful to the original, I suppose, if we can talk about a coherent "original" (though of course building on the site went on for thousands of years)--but it is much less vibrant. From Pheistos, it is hard to imagine a four-story entrance court, brightly colored walls, or something that was lived-in and spectacular. The preservation doesn't tell that story very well at all. For all that Evans' reconstruction was in places very much an imagined thing, it also gets at some more basic truth: this was a palace, an impressive thing, peopled with people, painted and big and labyrinthine.

In the end, I think the two work wonderfully well together. Knossos without Pheistos doesn't give us a very faithful picture of the Minoans--and Pheistos without Knossos doesn't give us a very real picture of them.

Oh, NOW I get it...

2007-06-16T05:04:00.000-04:00

I've always disliked the big-R Romanticism that hit architecture (and art, and literature) in the 18th and 19th centuries. This is the misguided aesthetic that had people tearing down well-manicured, carefully tended gardens and nicely symmetrical buildings in order to construct (in the remembered words of Tom Stoppard) "a ruin where there was never a house." Vienna is still strewn with these things--a "Roman ruin" at Schonbrunn, half-pillars in gardens, that sort of thing. I find it, frankly, a bit ridiculous. Better to build a functioning theater than a modern gesture towards an ancient, now-decrepit one.

But coming to Greece finally clarifies for me just what architectural Romanticism was trying to achieve. Walking through the national gardens in Athens, one stumbles across the (extremely poorly marked) "architectural site," a small and legitimately old collection of marble and pillars, with a corner inscribed with the name of Caesar. The whole is untended and overgrown with weeds and vines and such. And the find is indeed picturesque, genuinely exciting and interesting and, in its way, beautiful. Suddenly I see what Wordsworth saw in the abandoned Tinturn Abbey, what landscape architects saw in the weed-infested ruin. Well, there you are. Greece elucidates so much...

2007-06-08T06:09:00.000-04:00

There is something about Greece that makes it unsurprising that cities grew up here ages before so many other places. It's the landscape that makes this so obvious. There's water everywhere, clean and fish-filled and beautiful and blue. There are mountains, remnants of volcanoes that left rich ashy soil all over, explaining the verdant islands. The weather is gorgeous, at least today; I understand something of the draw of the temperate, breezy Mediterranean now.

Of course, none of this is necessarily essential for the creation of complex agrarian (that is, non-nomadic) civilization. I may be overeducated: I see cause and effect where they might not be, just because I know that volcanic loam is especially good for agriculture and temperate weather is convenient for people to live in. Still, if it is not right that these things make ancient civilizations obvious here, they at least make them seem appropriate. As I said in the first sentence--it doesn't surprise me that this rich, beautiful, island-dotted landscape has been so conducive to settled life.

Oh, and also--how come we think of water as such a great divider? Lots of little island are as easily united by water as separated thereby. The water-border seems non-obvious from here, too.

Some Things That Make Uzbekistan Airlines Different

2007-05-29T10:17:00.000-04:00

1. All flight attendants are at least trilingual. They speak Russian, English, and Uzbek. Of course international flights originating in America give announcements in at least two languages, but it is very rarely the same attendant who speaks both of them fluently--and I've never before been able to presume that any given flight attendant can answer your question in THREE languages.

2. Despite flying in a nice big Boeing 767, hand luggage is not allowed. This is for reasons that are entirely unclear. We flew with an absurd amount of empty space in our nice big overhead compartments.

3. Non-smoking flights mean "no smoking in your seat." Luckily, one can go back behind the lavatories into the flight attendants' area. If you pull the curtain, nobody can see you. This makes it an ideal place for smoking. Apparently, behind the curtain doesn't count. (And if somebody on the flight points out that people are smoking in the back, the flight attendants laugh and say, "Duh, of course, this is a no-smoking flight! That's why we force them all to go back there.")

4. Upon landing, everybody claps. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate a successful non-crash landing as much as the next guy. It's just that I happen also to think that maybe this sort of landing should be taken for granted on a major commercial airline. Clapping to me indicates a certain especial job well done. Frankly, I think a decent airplane landing ought to be seen as the normal state of affairs, in no way anything unusual or extraordinary. But that's just me.

The Uzbek Roundup

2007-05-24T12:16:00.000-04:00

An Uzbek joke:

A man hailed a taxi in Tashkent. He noticed that, as they neared an intersection, the driver floored it and went whizzing through the red light. The man said, "What are you doing running a red light?" The driver said, "Look, I'm a real man. I'm not afraid of anything. I run red lights just for the fun of it."

The man was considering this when he noticed that they were coming up on another intersection. The light was green, but the man noticed the taxi driver slowing down anyway. When they had come to a complete stop at the green light, the man asked, "You went whizzing through the red light because you're a real Uzbek man, but now you're stopping at the green light. What gives?"

The taxi driver turned around and said, "Well, there might be another real Uzbek man coming up to this intersection."

Uzbekistan is a fantastic country. The Uzbeks seem to have a joke for everything; in Samarkand, for example, our guide regaled us with Nasruddin Hodja stories while we bussed from place to place. What's interesting about the above joke is that Uzbekistan is also clean, orderly, safe, and full of good drivers who tend to follow traffic rules with unexpected diligence. The joke is not descriptive of the general state of affairs here.

I've really enjoyed this country. I can't begin to do justice to the great blue domes of the Temurids, the enormous medressas of Registan Square and the tilework at Shah-i-Zinda--I really mean it when I say to you, all of you, that this is one place that you really should just come to yourself. The scale of everything is truly amazing.

Being here, I notice in myself a certain conditioning with respect to religious monuments, though. At Shah-i-Zinda, in particular, I was overwhelmed by the scale and ornamentation of the whole complex. This place, essentially a Temurid Mausoleum, was built around the tomb of one of Muhammad's cousins, a real holy man who had come to Samarkand to spread the word. I would venture to say that the work at Shah-i-Zinda was significantly more impressive than that at Notre Dame in Paris, and far, far more impressive than the Abbeye Villers-la-Ville in Belgium. But the thing is, I was impressed by the size, the incredible workmanship, the colors and the preservation and really the overall aesthetics of this place. In France and Belgium, I was also struck by a tangible sense of the RELIGIOUS significance of the sites I've mentioned. I am not particularly religious, I think it's fair to say, but my wonderment at Notre Dame was in part the sense that this was an awe-inspiring construction--even if, in the final estimation, I might think of it as at least as great a testament to man as to God. It struck me, at Gur-e-Emir (which was across the street from our hotel), that there were pilgrims here, and people praying. At Shah-i-Zinda, there was a mosque and there people were sitting reciting the koran while others listened, prayed, and even kissed one of the coffins. Yet my own experience of these places was that of the interested tourist, or possibly that of the historian or the art critic. This sense of awe--so appropriate, I maintain--was somehow missing. I worry, for the first time, that drinking too deeply from the well of Big World Monuments may be somehow dulling my senses. There comes a point at which one is saying, "Oh, look, yet another impressive cathedral. How like so many other cathedrals that I've seen in the past."

As a general statement, I don't really think I'm at that point. I'm really keen on travel, and really interested in everything I've been seeing. But I do want to keep thinking that what I'm seeing is as amazing as--well, as it is.

Back to Uzbekistan.

Modern Uzbekistan is pretty impressive, too. This is a country surrounded by Kazakhstan to the north (which is basically a sketchy Russian buffer state), Tajikistan (recently torn by civil war) and Kyrgyzstan (backwards, as we've established in a former post) to the east, Afghanistan to the south (war there, obviously), and Turkmenistan to the west and south to round out the list. You'd think Uzbekistan would therefore be somewhere between war-torn and culturally inclined to kidnap women, with a good dose of modern Russian politics and a post-Soviet complex to boot. In fact, though, this place is lovely, as are the men and women who live here. Talking to Dilshod, our tour guide through the country, has been an interesting exchange of modern politics. Where I am deeply suspect of the slight totalitarian bent of Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov and especially of his moves to run for yet another (currently illegal) term of office, Dilshod is deeply impressed by his ability to bring order and prosperity to the state. Where I am worried about the lack of a viable opposition party, Dilshod is pleased that the radical Islamic element has been banned in the country. I think both sides took something away from our exchanges (some in a group and some just between the two of us); I, at any rate, have come to see the strong argument against the Islamist opposition. Dilshod (a strong supporter of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan) describes the pre-9/11 situation as essentially awful, with Taliban and Taliban-backed terrorists attempting assassination, blowing themselves up in crowded areas, and generally wreaking havoc across his country. I am convinced, ultimately, that there is a very great justification for a certain amount of intolerance when it comes to letting these groups run an opposition party. Yes, it might be real political opposition. But it might not be decent opposition, and it might not be good for the country. (For his part, Dilshod ultimately seemed to see the good in real political debate, though he suggested that his own country, independent since only 1991, might still be too young for such a thing--which I find problematic.) Dilshod seemed to admit the precedent of disregarding term limits was a bad thing, since it could pave the way for bad leaders as well as good ones--but I also could see firsthand much of the truth in what he said about Uzbekistan's stable economy, low crime rate, and general safety and security. Quality of life here seems broadly good. Everything is pleasant and well-run without being over-managed. It's a true good.

Anyhow. Uzbekistan. Don't think of it as just another post-Soviet -stan! It's the meetingplace of the world! Khiva! Samarkand! Tashkent! Great old architecture! Caravans! Silks! Carpets! All of 18th-century Romanticism brought to life!

And a modern 20th century country as well. How about that.

Kyrgyzstan

2007-05-17T14:09:00.000-04:00

I've spent the last few days following trade routes through western China and across mountain passes into Kyrgyzstan. I slept one night in a yurt; got detained at the Chinese border (though, to be fair, that was really somebody I was travelling with who got detained); gazed upon real live no-man's-land; discovered the awful Kyrgyz "folk tradition" of kidnapping wives; and learned how to buy jeans in the Bishkek markets. It's been fascinating.

Kyrgyzstan is difficult to understand. It is far less glamorous than it first appears. The first thing to strike a traveler entering from the Turgut Pass is the natural beauty of the place; on the one side of the mountain pass is stark brown Chinese desert, and on the other is rolling green snow-capped Kyrgyz grassland, flush with marmots and dotted with colorful red ducks ("red duck" is the actual name, not a mere description), hawks, and the occasional nomadic herdsman on horseback watching over sheep or horses. Guides say that people call Kyrgyzstan a second Switzerland, but in my opinion this does a disservice to the Kyrgyz mountians. The scenery is truly idyllic.

But there is a much darker side to Kyrgyzstan's mountainous countryside, too. Yurts, which are nice to look at from the outside, are generally not the plushly decorated, carpet-and-pillow-filled habitations we imagine from all the made-for-TV Genghis Kahn movies. We slept in yurts that were chilly (though, it must be said, not cold), smallish, and simply appointed. Of course, each yurt is only one room; there isn't therefore much in the way of privacy or facilities.

Alcohol is, traditionally, a ghastly fermented mare's milk. Roads are awful.

And then there's wife-kidnapping. This is billed as a "Kyrgyz tradition," but don't let this appellation fool you into the belief that there is anything routinized or ceremonial about it. This is real, kicking-and-screaming, dragged-out-of-the-house-and-into-a-getaway-car, forced kidnapping. And it's still quite common, though technically illegal (maximum sentence: five years). Our (woman) tour guide had been kidnapped, but knew ahead of time it was going to happen and informed the police (she didn't marry the boy). Her mother had been kidnapped by her father (and, obviously, she stayed). In the countryside especially, this seems to be a common way of life.

Girls can, ultimately, leave the house to which they have been taken--just as a practical matter, you can't force someone to stay and live with you forever. But there is great shame in leaving, and if she stays for the first night she would have to leave her community forever in order to leave the (now de facto) marriage. Those who do not stay are subject to pointed curses and what I would characterize as extreme psychological intimidation (though, after much physical and psychological struggle, they are eventually allowed to walk out). The whole thing is shocking and grotesque, made all the worse by the role the women in the communities play in intimidating and coercing girls into these kidnap-marriages.

Bishkek, home to one-fifth of the country's population, is a modern city, however. Wife-kidnapping, we are told, is rare here. Streets are good. Bishkek is flush with institutions of higher education, a fascinating history museum, and a wealth of trendy clothing and expensive gadgets.

I bought jeans at the Bishkek market. The markets are an endless expanse of narrow stalls. To buy, a shop owner looks at you, estimates your size, and pulls down a couple of pairs of pants for you to try. Two friends hold up a blanket (with holes in it) behind which you change quickly. Other shop owners bring over mirrors and comment on the style, the size, the fit. It's all very amusing.

Having finally chosen a pair of jeans, you mark the desired length in chalk and they hem them up for you right there. That's right: they're all too long, by design, and the sales stalls come equipped with sewing machines to make them right.

Cost of a pair of new jeans in Kyrgyzstan: $16.

So Kyrgyzstan is weird, a bit of a dichotomy. The scenery has definitely been the best so far, which in the final estimation I think balances all the weirdnesses of the rural folk out here.

sand, sand, more sand

2007-05-10T10:39:00.000-04:00

Outside of Dunhuang, about two hours therefrom by camel, are the Mogao Caves, a 736-cave complex carved out of sandstone in the desert. The earliest cave is from the fourth century, though they range in date of origin all the way up to the Ming Dynasty. These caves are AWESOME.

The first cave we saw featured a carved Buddha 46 meters high. Remember, the cave was chiseled out around this figure, the perfect realization of the jokey injunction to "carve away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." (You all know to what I'm referrig, yes?) In each cave, the cielings and walls are carved and pained, sometimes gold-leafed (leaved?) and otherwise decorated. I found this reminiscent of the Caves Monastery in Kyiv and the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow (at the Kremlin). It's interesting how travel highlights similarities around the world...

The caves in Dunhuang are nominally Buddhist, but, though Buddha features prominently (VERY prominently) in each of the 10 caves we were allowed to see, the minor decorations were decidedly heterodox. Identifiable figures included Ganesh, Pegasus, a Garuda, Vishnu, Diana (as the moon, with hunting dogs), and an animal that features in Taoism (the name of which I can't remember). The very knowledgeable guide (all visitors are required to have one) pointed out borrowed Christian motifs, as well (Buddha-as-Jesus, with a Christian-style halo and crosses in the background, for example).

Adding to all this is the discovery of the Hidden Library Cave, which was either lost or else deliberately hidden in the 11th century. Inside were some 50,000 texts from as early as the fourth century A.D.--mostly in Chinese, but also in Tibetan, Hui, Uyger, Arabic, Sogdian, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. Most texts were religious and, of course, most were Buddhist. There were thousands of non-Buddhist texts, too, though. Our guide knew of Taoist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Manichaean, and Nestorian documents that had been found in the cave.

I would have loved to see some of these texts, but they've scattered across the world. The British Museum has more than anybody else, followed by the Louvre and only then by the Beijing National Library. Russia, the USA, and Turkey each also have significant collections (ours are held by Harvard).

All of this gives one the strong impression of Mogao-as-world's-meeting-place. This is largely a correct impression, as travelers and traders the world over really did come here. Indeed, the caves were built by those who had just finished the most difficult part of their Silk Road journey, in order to honor Buddha for his protection... and by those who had not yet commenced the desert crossing, in order to assure that the same protection would be forthcoming. They are Buddhist, then, but they are much else besides.

I mentioned a camel ride. I did, in fact, ride a camel. It was fantastic! Several of our group shelled out (a very modest sum) to hire camels and a guide who took us through the enormous Singing Sand Dunes to the Crescent Lake, a tree-lined and lush oasis in the desert.

Camels are easy to ride, comfortable and broad-shouldered such that one might even be able to sleep upon their backs. Their normal pace is slow and plodding, but dealing with wind-whipped sand and trying to see through the desert and adjusting one's face mask and drinking water and all that makes their plodding something of a comfort rather than a slow annoyance. I much enjoyed this mode of travel.

I also really enjoyed being in the desert. All the difficulties were nonetheless dwarfed by the amazing, vast landscape, and the thought that people spent WEEKS doing camel-back desert crossings in times past. It seems an extraordinary feat.

Then, this morning [written some days ago], there was a sandstorm! The entire city of Dunhuang was covered in what looked like fog, but was in fact particulate, cutting sand blowing about at, I don't know, very roughly 17 trillion miles per hour. Thank goodness for long sleeves and facemasks (which came in handy on the camels, as well)! I'm glad we weren't somewhere in the Singing Sand Dunes for that, I must say.

A Beautiful Wasteland

2007-05-10T10:09:00.000-04:00

I am on the road in the Hexi Corridor (aspirate an H and then say "shee"), just north of Jaiyuguan [though the whole post was written several days ago]. To the north are the Black Mountains; to the south are the snowy Qinlian Mountains; we are heading west across the strikingly beautiful Gobi Desert.

Jaiyuguan is a "small town" of some 90,000 people, notable today almost exclusively for its steel industry. In the past, however, Jaiyuguan was the gateway into China, an entrepot between east and west through which all traders and travelers had to pass. Here is the westernmost end of the great wall (which I visited and up which I walked--quite a trek, actually) and a well-designed fort.

As you can see from the picture, the Hexi Corridor was just about the only way into ancient China, making this an interesting place indeed.

But I said above that it is strikingly beautiful here, and it is. The land is stark and barren, with high snowy peaks reminiscent of the Alaskan Range rising in the background. I would like to live here, for aesthetic reasons, but surely one would die: it is freezing at night, but the days are exceedingly hot and the sun is nearly unbearable. This is the first time that the burqa, so out of place in the west, seems a sensible item of women's wear. I've bought a scarf to cover the head, the neck, the face (for sunburn, but also to keep the blowing sand out of my nose and mouth). It would have been stupid not to do so.

I do love it out here, intense sun notwithstanding. The sweeping expanse resonates with me, and taps some ingrained sense of beauty. Maybe this is by way of an association with awe, which I think must be a universal human reaction to all this. With that comes, for me, beauty--and for others, left to their own devices in the desert, fear. On the walls of the Jaiyuguan fort, there are amazing graffiti inscriptions left by Chinese who had been banished from their homeland. From outside looking west into the Gobi, things must have seemed hopeless; their leavings attest to an immense sense of grief. Indeed, the desert seems to bring out a vaster, deeper emotion in all people. To be banished here would be hopeless; to come by choice would be beautiful; to build a city would be magnificent.

We climbed up to the westernmost point on the great wall, which is in fact along the northern spit on my brilliant MS Paint map above, in the Black Mountains. The climb is steep and, though it was late in the day, the sun was tortorous. From the uppermost (unshaded) watch tower, however, the view is spectacular. To the southeast is the modern city of Jaiyuguan; to the east is a very small spit of cultivated land, an act of desparation against the desert; to the west are the mountains (and, to the south, the view is also blocked by mountains); and to the north it is desert as far as the eye can see (which is quite far). Somewhere in that desert is the site from which China is operating its Space Program--but other than that, this is a sandy, uninhabited, beautiful wasteland.

Labrang

2007-05-05T09:12:00.000-04:00

As far as foreign cultural experiences go, today has been more full of them than any other day thus far.

Things began with a short drive up to Labrang Monastery, where we had a full tour. There are thousands of Buddhist monks--the maroon robes, the yellow hats, yak butter scultpures, chanting, conch-blowing, young boys and old learned scholars--you name it. We sat in the back and listened quietly to chanting, learned a lot about the 10th Panchen Lama and the circle of life, and saw some beautiful cliche-smashing: very traditional-looking monks playing games on their mobile phones, for example.

Then we visited a nunnery nearby. This was supposed to impress upon us the relative poverty and inequity of women in Tibetan society, but in fact my own impression of the nunnery was quite different. It is true that the living conditions were far inferior to those of the monks, and it is true that the women were much poorer than their male counterparts. The monestary is made up of several colleges in which the monks learn particular skills, from traditional medicine to painting; the nuns have no such colleges and the structured bit of the day is taken up entirely in prayer. Nonetheless, the nuns seemed truly happy.

We'd heard so much from our (Tibetan) guide about the hard, hard life of the women in Tibetan families, and the poverty of those families who sent their daughters off to be nuns (often because they simply couldn't affort to support them, whereas sending their sons off to be monks was usually done for the prestige), that I've drawn my own conclusions a bit. I suspect that, in a world in which they would otherwise rise at 3 a.m., work hard, and be valued little, with little say in how their lives are run, women in the nunneries have an amazing amount of freedom here. They are independent and competant. All are literate (which is untrue of the general population, both women and men). They have close relationships and may come and go from the nunnery as they please, even sometimes leaving for several years to visit the nomadic tribes. If they are materially very poor and popularly nowhere near as respected as the monks, they also have an awful lot of self-determination. There are no young women on the streets in Xiahe--except the nuns. I think that this may explain their smiling, laughing, good-natured interactions (with us and amongst themselves).

I went off alone this afternoon and climbed to the peak of one of the mountains in this beautifully stark landscape. There, I met a girl of sixteen who spoke no English. She was a shepherd up there, and was fantastic. She took many pictures with my camera (which she loved) and brought me back to her family's house (leaving the sheep untended, I note). This, I think, must represent the height of poverty. The house was TINY, with a single room for sleeping and a second small room for preparing food and eating. I'm not sure how many people shared the space, but it was at least five. The conditions were highly unsanitary. Coming down the mountain, the girl filled two buckets with water and connected what was essentially a yoke in order to balance them across her back and carry them down. I felt utterly useless: not only did I tip the buckets when I tried to carry them (with her laughing the whole time), but I couldn't even lift the yoke. I have many skills, but in this kind of existence I would have been nothing but a hindrance who slowed things down. It was amazing. None of my abilities would have been remotely helpful to these people.

Dinner was a very traditional meal with a Tibetan family. They prepared yak-filled dumplings and a strange rice, raisin, and yak-cheese concocton, a tasty noodle soup, and fantastically good fresh yak yoghurt with sugar on top. We were assured that this was a typical poor household in the region. The dinner was fantastic, the family lovely (though we spoke to them through a string of interpreters: Tibetan to Mandarin to English--a fact about which we all laughed), and the conditions sufficiently sanitary to put us at ease--but after my afternoon and early evening, I thought the "typical poor family" story a bit laughable, and I began the dinner in something of a contrarian mood. The house was smallish but not small, the furnishings were lovely and by no means simple, and any westerner would feel comfortable on the nice hardwood floors and the plush couches. Of course this was something of the idea of the thing--we were not trying to have a horrifying or distasteful experience, after all--but at least we might be honest about the fact that this was a family of some income, even if not a very rich family.

Still, the food was tasty indeed, and we had a lovely time. I was thoroughly pleased by the end of it all.

Yak's milk is everywhere here: in the tea, which is a milk infusion (not a water infusion); in all the food dishes (in the form of butter, cheese, yoghurt, or some combination of the first two); in lamps and lanterns (yak butter is the oil of choice); in the alcohol; even in the sculpture (which lasts one season, and which is made of yak butter). This is all very interesting, but it should be said that yak's milk is PUNGENT. I think it must be a flavor one has to get used to. A few of our number liked the yak butter, a few thought the milk tea was good, and most really liked the sour yoghurt (myself included), but as a general rule we all found it difficult to breathe in rooms lit by yak butter lanterns and certainly in the butter-sculpture rooms. The cheese is overwhelming, like an extraordinarily strong smelly cheese from Luxembourg or someplace, and the straight milk is really quite horrible (in my estimation). I personally find the butter decidedly awful, as well.

Eating is an experience as much as anything else, though, and some dishes are fantastic. It's just a very different taste than anything I'm used to.

Green or Yellow?

2007-05-04T06:28:00.000-04:00

Cruise up the Yellow River! The northern Silk Road route from Xi'an to Lanzhou! Xiahe, in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture! Muslims living in houses made of mud! Buddhists buying tea in saffron robes! Mountains, valleys, and lots and lots of desert! It's been an awesome couple of days.

These days have featured a lot of traveling, which comes with a certain amount of sightseeing, but not so much people-watching or actual mixing. This is a good and bad thing. I've seen an awful lot in the way of different people and peoples, been on busses, boats, trains, and even a raft, and watched the architecture and landscape change--but, of course, I've missed out on the interaction which is so nice.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to note, from the window of this or that vehicle, is the conscious greening of northern China. Much of the land I've traversed has been on the edges of desert, and many mountains are steep and bare. Lanzhou is surrounded by green slopes, though, and this is by conscious effort: once a year, millions (!) of people climb the surrounding mountains to plant trees. This is the result of successful campaigns to convince the population that green is clean, good for the air and good for the health. The trees also make landslides less probable if there is a heavy rain, act as windbreaks against dust storms, and reclaim as arable land that right now is little more than dust.

Travelling through Gansu province towards the highlands of Xiahe is a bit surreal. The mountains are, as a general rule, uniformly brown and sandy for the first two-thirds or so of the journey. Nonetheless, here and there one will find a wholly green mountain. These are the result of government programs that plant grass on mountains near villages. (This is for reasons very similar to those cited by the citizens of Lanzhou with respect to their nicely treed slopes.)

At first glance, these programs seem highly laudable. People are trying to eke out a living here on the edge of reasonable habitability--I've already mentioned the mud houses--and anything that increases arable land, holds water in the soil, cools the days, and protects against duststorms seems a very nice way to reach that goal.

But what about the water? Trees don't naturally grow from sand, and as the barren mountains in the background make clear, grass doesn't naturally grow in this part of the Gobi Desert, either. It turns out that water is piped up from the Yellow River (sometimes an extremely long way) in order to maintain and grow this greenery. The amount of power it takes to pump the water up the side of a mountain is often extraordinary--by way of example, I was told of a small power plant whose entire purpose is to power the pumps for the several surrounding greened mountains.

The river is already low. Seeing the water-level relative to the banks is a shocking exercise in environmental change. Many of the tributaries have completely dried up (in this season, at least), which was clear as we bussed through Gansu. When we boarded the boat in Lanzhou, we walked down and down before getting on. As a result, I really can't tell whether, on balance, stabilizing the mountainsides, cleaning the city air, and all those other things I've mentioned above is worth the further depletion of the river--or whether, in fact, this is ultimately a waste of water that is very, very necessary for crop irrigation and for sanitation works downstream.

It's a hard question. Clean air or sufficient water? Fewer dust storms and more arable land, or more fish and a healthier river? Green or Yellow?

One hopes the Chinese government has looked into this carefully. Probably, they have. Nonetheless, the whole project teases out the deep and abiding problems with resource allocation and, indeed, perhaps even with environmentalism (though I am by no means advocating against environmental concerns--on the contrary, in fact).

Of Archaeology and Dumplings

2007-05-01T09:52:00.000-04:00

This has been an awesome day. Here's the rundown.

First, we woke early to go see the Banpo archaeological site, 6,000-year-old remains that they've discovered in Shaanxi Province here in China. This stuff is cool. There are house foundations (and boy are those houses small), tombs (almost all facing the same direction, but with a few perpendicular to them--and almost all human remains buried on their backs and without their hands (which have not been found elsewhere at the site, to date), but with a few buried on their stomachs for reasons that are unclear), weapons, tools, pottery, kilns, baby jars (small children who died were buried in these things), and various other interesting things to look at.

Banpo was a matriarchal society. Though the tour guide did not come out and say it directly, this is clearly a direct consequence of the fact that they were a non-monogomous, free-loving kind of society. The reason women had all the power was the same reason lineage was traced matrilineally: nobody knew who the father was. You grew up with a mother, both practically (in her house) and theoretically (you had a mother, but you didn't really "have" a father). The homes therefore belonged to the women, and so therefore did the stuff inside, and so therefore did the wealth, and so therefore did the power. Men appear to have been largely incidental in the Banpo society (and this is obvious from some of the burial sites, which are divided according to gender). It's all very interesting.

Then to the Terra Cotta warriors, equally interesting and much more spectacular as a sight, it must be said. There are thousands and thousands of these things. And here's something I never knew before: they were all painted bright, lifelike colors. When they were unearthed, the colors were still visible (and there are some great photographs showing this off), but because of oxidation the 2,000-year-old paints disintigrated within an hour of being unearthed. For this reason, most excavation at the site has been halted. Nobody has any idea how many more warriors there might be underground, because China has made a conscious decision not to find out until technology has improved sufficiently to allow their color to be preserved. That's really quite an interesting decision in itself.

Last on the Old Awesome Stuff list for the day were the hot springs used by the emperor and his court during the Tang dynasty. There were some nicely landscaped pools and whatnot (for the emperor, for his wife, for his various concubines, for the princes, etc.), but mostly this was somewhat less spectacular than what had gone before. Ah well.

Then back in time to luxuriate under the full moon on a public holiday (May 1 being a BIG deal over here). We went out for dumplings, which was QUITE the excercise in excess, and which was fantastic. The meal went like this: hors d'oeuvres, tea, beer, rice wine, noodle course, rice wine and tea, 18 courses of delectable dumplings (punctuated at various points by tea, rice wine, or both, and by descriptions in Chinese of what was in the various things we were eating), dumpling soup (this being recognizably wonton soup, but it cooked over an impressive fire at the table and the wontons were small, piquant, and fresh, dumped into the broth right in front of us), more rice wine (which, have I mentioned, is sweet and delicious, not at all like Sake?), dessert dumplings, tea, and finally fresh fruit. It was AWESOME. It took hours to eat (as you can imagine, what with that enormous quantity of food), and I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly. The best dumpling was a long rolled-up one with pork, something green and leafy, something very like rosemary, and a spicy afterkick. It was served with a special sauce and came in a thin, thin, grilled dumpling skin. Runner-up was one of the soup dumplings, which I like extremely even in their poor New York imitations.

Then there was much walking about outside, along with all the Chinese out on holiday. There were songs and dances, public demonstrations, chimes from the bell tower and thundering from the drum tower (which have both been around for hundreds and hundreds of years), street sellers with loads of yummy-looking fruit (that was, of course, entirely inedible for those of us who had just come off a 20-course meal or something), and even enormous telescopes out for public use. Xi'an is such a wonderful city--really alive and happy, and full of interesting things.

And then to the barber, because my hair is too long. Silly me, I thought when they said "wash and cut" they meant "wash and cut." Actually, they meant "head massage for 90 minutes and cut." Of course. Duh.

It turns out this was very, very nice. Altogether, then, it's been a great day.

Blocked!

2007-04-30T06:53:00.000-04:00

The following websites are blocked in China:

BBC News
Wikipedia
Wordpress
Amnesty International

These are just the ones I've noticed in the normal course of looking things up and trying to keep myself informed and whatnot.

(However, anonymizers are not blocked, so with a little fiddling it's not so difficult to route your connection through the UK or something, or to make your URL look innocuous when in fact you're reading--gasp!--the BBC.)

Yam ice cream is the best,
SK

Beijing

2007-04-29T23:45:00.000-04:00

After several glorious days in Beijing hiking around the Great Wall, visiting the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace, Tienanmen Square, and various markets and food stands and universities and such, I am now ready to pronounce the place a true marvel. Beijing, so unlike Vienna in so many ways, reminds me of it in this one way: both cities have a long history and therefore have some impressive and storied tourist attractions, but both cities (unlike many of the Eastern European capitals) are still going strong and are attractive in their own right today, as well. Beijing has a fabulous bus system, vibrant markets selling everything from fish to carvings to dumplings to soccer balls, and the most enormous business district I've ever encountered (full of truly impressive architecture, as well).

I'd like to return there for the 2008 Olympics.

In fact, I think having the city host the Games was an inspired move. If New York had won their recent bid, you can be sure there would have been some new building in the southern part of Manhattan Island, and perhaps even the construction of a small stadium or two, but essentially the Olympics would not have changed New York. Essentially, in fact, they would have been a logistical nightmare for New York. The Games are a small wonder for Beijing, however. Already, there is a brand-new, beautiful, and convenient subway system sporting three working lines; by next year, there will be 13. The city is greener than I expected as a result of a concerted effort to clean it up for international visitors; the "bird's nest stadium" is an architectural wonder of which Beijing can be genuinely proud; the clean-up of signs, tourist sites, and museums is a revelation. (This is all the more obvious when one shows up, as we did, in the middle of the process; some very old art has been cleaned, for example, while other bits are still grimy and almost impossible to make out.) Beijing's people are truly excited to play host to the Games, as well, which stands in marked contrast to the recent controversies in New York and London.

In other news, we went to a traditional tea house in Beijing, where we sampled four very different teas. (We were lectured about the problems with this: we risked getting "drunk" on tea. The pourer, a lady who was very proper about all this, was skeptical about our desire to taste so many in one sitting.)

There is a whole fascinating etiquette of drinking tea here (at least traditionally): there is a proper way to hold the cup for oolong tea (and that way differs depending on whether one is a man or woman), there are smelling cups for certain teas (and different cups for actually sipping the tea), there are long lectures about the various (dodgy) health benefits of this and that kind of tea (think, "no need to take medicines or talk to a doctor! just drink this one!"), and there are particular ways to stir this kind of tea (jasmine tea is stirred with the lid of the pot, rose hips are shaken in the cup, and so on) or wash the leaves of that kind (publicly). We also got to contemplate a 72-year-old pu-er (white) tea, though as for that, the 200-gram disk sold for some 50,000 USD, so touching was not allowed. We were expected to bask in the glory of beholding it, I think.

At any rate, now I am in Xi'an, where surprisingly I find that my hotel room has broadband, cables, and an internet guru who speaks English. I shall very possibly be online for the next few days as a result.

The Great Wall...

2007-04-28T09:13:00.000-04:00

... is great!

Really, really fantastic, in fact.

Today, we hiked a long, long section, and were the only non-Chinese tourists there. In fact, for most of the walk, we were the only tourists there, period. (There were occasional people using the wall as a footpath, playing cards on it, or carrying things, however.)

This was in a remote section of north China, 50 kilometers from the sea and a fair bit north of Tianjing. The mountain views were fantastic. The 2,200-year-old guard towers, moreso.

Oh, and the steps. Man, I walked up (and down) a LOT of steps.

And I'd like to do it again, for a much, much longer way. The whole wall is about 4,200 miles long, with some obstructions and dilapidated bits that get in the way. At the reasonable rate of 20 miles a day, plus a bit extra for the hard parts, I figure it'll take nine months to walk the whole thing and see fantastic views of much of China.

So next time I have a spare nine months...

Getting Out of Russia

2007-04-28T08:27:00.000-04:00

I believe that today [written several days ago] I was more frightened than I've ever been on my travels anywhere. I'm not sure that was an entirely rational fear, of course, but it was there nonetheless.

Here's what happened.

Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, none of which were my fault, I didn't fly out of Russia on the evening of the 24th (as I had planned). I got a full refund for my plane ticket, but my visa expired on the 25th, meaning that at 11 p.m. Tuesday night I had to buy a new ticket to fly out the next day (which, as you can imagine, was obscenely expensive). (I should note that the airline from which I had bought my original ticket, Domodedovo Air, was actually very nice and was willing to put me on their next flight to Beijing at no additional charge--but their next flight was not until Friday the 27th, which obviously did not suit my needs.)

This was just the beginning of the fun.

Russian immigration has an interesting quirk. Within 72 weekday hours of arrival, one must "register" one's visa. This is a bureaucratic nightmare that involves paying some money, waiting in long lines, and letting some possibly-corrupt government official know that you're there. Luckily, almost all hotels will register your visa for you, thus saving you the cost and, more importantly, the effort of registering yourself.

I had cleverly planned my trip to last five days, including a weekend, meaning that I didn't need to register my visa when I arrived. Huzzah! But then, having not flied out on Tuesday, I found I needed to register after all. Boo! So, at midnight or so (when I got back from my escapades in buying a last-minute ticket, which required me to go from one Moscow airport to--of course--the other one (where the ticket offices were open 24 hours a day), I went to hotel reception, explained my situation, and asked if they could take my passport to register it.

No! That was the answer!

Actually, what they told me (and I quote) was: "Ooh, you're in a bind!" It seems that it takes 24 hours to get the visa registered, meaning that this would be impossible to do before I left on the 25th (and, remember, I had to leave on the 25th lest my visa expire, leaving me in a much bigger "bind" altogether).

"So what do I do?" I asked.

The receptionist, a wonderful man, looked at me seriously and said, "You bring your cancelled ticket and your refund stub. You explain what happened. When that doesn't work--and it won't--you bribe the border control official."

Gulp.

He and the other lady behind the desk then went over this procedure step-by-step. They told me how much of a bribe would be reasonable. They told me to be sure I had it in 100-ruble notes, in order to make the wad look bigger. They gave me a list of non-obvious-to-me things the official might say to indicate that she was looking for a bribe, and a list of lightly-veiled things to say back when handing over the money. They advised that I show the cash at that point, but only hand it over AFTER I'd heard the official stamp my passport (which was a very smart thing to advise). They explained that, in the unlikely even that I got an honest border patrol guard, I'd have to bribe her superior. This would be far less pleasant and a bit more expensive (here again they gave me numbers), but would be sure to be a fool-proof backup plan: "They'll always give you a few minutes alone with them--this is your time to pay them off."

Armed with all of this, and wholeheartedly dreading the experience, I headed to the airport yesterday evening. Contrary to my usual fashion, I got there very early. I checked in. No problem. I showed that my bag fit into the carry-on size-checker thingy. No problem. (Have I mentioned that I love this fact about my bag? I do.) I waited in line to go through immigration. I got called up to an official. Slight (but inevitable) problem.

The official said, "Hello."

I said, "Hello.

The official said, "Passport and documentation?"

I handed over my passport and immigration card. Obviously, I did not hand her my visa registration form.

The official said, "How long have you been in Russia?"

I said, "Five days." This was a lie.

She said, "Through the weekend?"

I said, "Yes." This was not a lie.

I told you I was afraid. Generally speaking, I'm much more afraid of officials and getting stuck in official channels than of common people, petty thieves, that sort of thing. One can extricate oneself from the latter fairly easily; the former, only with much more effort. Getting picked up by Russian border control was not something I wanted to do--not in the least, no matter how unlikely that circumstance.

At any rate, my hands were literally shaking. I grabbed hold of the podium beneath the agent's line of sight. I do think I sounded reasonably natural.

The agent looked at me. "I count six days," she said.

"It's five days," I replied. (The hotel guy had told me to do this. He said that when you repeat an obvious untruth, you make clear your intention to "pursuade" the official to accept it.)

The official looked at me. She looked at my passport. She typed something, scanned her computer, looked at my passport. Oh man did I hold onto that podium. I was very, very nervous.

Mr. Warren, a sixth grade teacher of mine and the best teacher that ever there was, used to make us memorize and recite poetry each week. I owe to him most of my cultural literacy. I also owe him one big, big thing: he taught us how not to look nervous while doing our recitations. You wrap your fingers around a pen behind your back. (This was my gripping the podium.) You do not look up. you go in with a problem to think about before you begin, or you recite in your head something that you already know easily and well, or you listen to a song in your head before you begin. You do not shift your weight from foot to foot.

This was all meant to make you look composed. This wasn't, "imagine everyone else in their underwear" or "it's stupid to be nervous while doing a recitation." It was merely, "you can look calm and unconcerned, and you should."

I was never really nervous reciting the poem of the week, but I remembered all of this anyhow. I had even gone prepared with a preset problem to think about in the interminable moments of waiting for my passport to be rejected.

The customs agent looked at my passport for a long time.

"Do you have a visa registration card?" she finally asked.

"No," I said.

She looked at my passport. She looked at her computer screen.

She stamped my passport.

I took it and walked out of the border control area before she had time to say anything else. (I think I was expected to stay there, but she didn't say so and I definitely did not do so.)

I walked straight into the bar.

I spent a small portion of my unused bribe money on a shot of good Russian vodka.

Redemption

2007-04-22T11:44:00.000-04:00

In this edition of ShawnaKim Travels the World, Moscow redeems itself in stunning fashion! Also, further thoughts on John's recent question about world news, and we'll be showing a health segment to fill in the extra 8 minutes for which there was no news but for which we're scheduled to be on air nonetheless! But first, business.

BUSINESS NEWS TONIGHT: Moscow is expensive. Food costs slightly more than it does in New York. Hotels tend to cost significantly more than they do in New York. That's all for business, Joe.

Thanks, Tom. Now, our top headline for the night: it turns out that despite dour faces and corrupt policemen, Moscow is awesome after all. This may come as a shock to many viewers, but the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin may be the most impressive thing ShawnaKim has seen in any of her travels anywhere, eclipsing even Borobudur and the Taj Mahal. Oh, and also, ShawnaKim managed to smuggle a camera into the Kremlin, which means she has photographs of all sorts of things she is not supposed to. You can therefore share in some of the awesomeness when she gets home. (To be fair, all the Russians also smuggled in their cameras, which is what gave ShawnaKim the idea that she could do so herself. Unsurprisingly, all the good rule-abiding tourists got stuck having come 4,000 miles and then not even being able to share the most amazing things they've ever seen with anybody once they've left because they had to PAY somebody to watch their cameras while they visited the Kremlin cameraless. I find this hilarious. And the fact that the seemingly so obedient, line-waiting, not-to-be-noticed Russians were all breaking the rules has made me like them more, too.)

The Kremlin is super-awesome. Inside the cathedrals--of which there are many, carefully kept as national treasures by the aetheist Communist government (which, incidentally, did not let the people into the Kremlin to share in the glory of these national treasures, as a general rule, which wasn't very communal of them)--walls are covered floor-to-cieling with paintings. Hung atop the paintings are hundreds of icons sent over the years from all across Russia. There is enough metal--gold and such--that the chandeliers lighting these spaces reflect all over in a pleasing way. And here's one thing Russia has done very well in its move to capitalism: the government allows singing groups to audition, and those who are good enough are allowed to sing sacred music in the churches and then, of course, to sell their CDs in discrete little corners or in the gift shops inside the Kremlin. This may sound gauche, but in fact it is not. It's lovely. Even though they are no longer in use as active churches, these gorgeous spaces therefore resonate with very appropriate, gorgeous music (if you happen to enter at a lucky moment, at least).

But the Kremlin is not all cathedrals, obviously. The 'Kremlin' itself refers to the fort that surrounds the space, and this is itself impressive, a massive red hulk with watchtowers and a walk across a bridge to get in. The arsenal is huge--a reflection of where government power really lay, perhaps?--and there is one canon, the Tsar Canon, which is some 10 feet tall or so and which shoots 890 mm balls. (Stop. Think. 890 millimeters. That is 9/10 of a METER, people.)

Today, the arsenal houses the treasures of Russia, an exhibit that is to Russia very like what the Crown Jewels are to England. The highlights, for me, were definitely the Faberge eggs, which were simply amazing and delightful examples of fine workmanship. I've never much appreciated the practical arts qua art--I like oil paintings, for example, but am less drawn to skilled textile work or well-crafted silver cups--but these may have changed my mind. They were AMAZING.

Also in the Kremlin: splendid gardens, the house where Stalin lived (ick), and, oh yes, the state Senate buildings. These were, ahem, well guarded. The guards were very fond of blowing their whistles if one got within, oh, 300 meters of them.

These guards, of course, are not scary like the more mundane police down below. This is because they could care less if you are breaking little rules (taking pictures, walking on the grass, holding a perfectly valid Russian visa in your perfectly valid passport--that sort of thing). They're looking out for the guy with the explosives strapped to his chest. Nothing I could even remotely consider possibly maybe one day doing in a fit of pique (or stupidity or anger or whatever) would ever ruffle their feathers. This makes one feel happy and relaxed. While looking at the 890 mm canon commissioned by Ivan the Terrible's son.

But this is not all that's awesome in Moscow!

I also went to Red Square--still populated by men with megaphones going on and on about the evils of perestroika and materialism and the greatness of the Soviet ideal (or so it seemed to my Russian-stupid ears) standing right next to the men dressed up like Boris Gudinov or Nikolas II so that tourists might pay them to be in their pictures. Ah, Russia! You are such a paradox.

Red Square is awesome, and huge. If you enter via the colorful Voskressensky Gates (highly recommended), Lenin's Tomb is on the right, St. Basil's Cathedral is directly in front of you--the State History Museum, a massive red thing of impressively, well, impressive, architecture--is behind you, and the podium from which Ivan the Terrible and various other tsars and officials would talk to the masses is forward a bit and to your left. Also--and I never realized this before--Red Square is rewad. I always thought it s Red Square because of, you know, hammers and sickles on red flags and Marx's little red book and all that. But the bricks of the museum, the Kremlin wall (to the right), and even St. Basil's are all convincingly red and make the name more literally appropriate than I knew.

A further word deserves to be said about St. Basil's, the awesome awesome place that features on so many postcards of Russia. Up close, the colored onion-domes are as bright as they are from afar and in pictures--but they are textured, too, in ways that are fascinating and beautiful, and in ways that I don't think pictures can properly capture. The entirety of the inside walls are painted, too. (This seems to be a theme in Russian religious architecture, and one that I've never before seen realized so completely anywhere else.)

I also went and looked at a bunch of old Communist-era buildings, things like the Central Committee Building and the Lubyanka Building (which housed the KGB). These were perhaps a bit more frightening than the grandiose and much-storied Kremlin and Red Square.

But now an interlude: in response to a previous post, John asked whether I am aware of current events as I capital-hop, especially events taking place in the cities I am visiting. Broadly speaking, thus far I have not been very aware of such things, though I did learn from the Vienna press that the Austrian railroads were named the best railroads in Europe while I was there. In Kiev, I actually ran into the Blues on Maydan Nezalezhnosti (the main square, where the Orange Revolution so famously took place a couple of years ago). I spoke to a few--they were out in support of the Prime Minister and Parliament, which had just been disolved by President Victor Yuschenko (spelling?). As more and more came, I moved on (very intentionally). So I saw very little of that.

News sources are, of course, ubiquitous across eastern Europe (including live streaming TV on the Kiev subways), but it seems that American and Western European news make the front page rather more often than local headlines. I didn't see a single things about the Blues on Ukrainian TV.

In Russia, though, things are completely different. To some extent, this reflects the ridiculous preoccupation with Russia itself here--news about the rest of the world, or even acknowledgement thereof, is shockingly rare. (This is also manifested through the history people learn and their cultural education, too. Everybody knows about Nikolai and Faberge, Stalin and Lenin and Marx, Catherine the Great and western front and the building of the Trans-Siberian, Pushkin and Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky--but a wonderful young (and well educated) Russian I met and with whom I've been hanging out really knows nothing about such major world figures as Bach, Henry VIII, Boccaccio, or facts like which cities in Japan got hit by the atom bomb or what the French Revolution was about. We had this conversation. It's amazing, and entirely unrepresentative of the education Russian classes of the 19th century, at least.)

Perhaps in part because of all this, it is happily very easy to glean what's going on around here, though--from local headlines, from news on TV, from English-language expat dailies which are rather more skeptical of the government than one might have thought possible in Putin's Russia. (A note about these: they are free, because charging for them risks their getting shut down. Simply handing them out, however, appears to be no problem whatsoever despite their sometimes deeply critical reporting.) I can tell you an awful lot about what's going on in Russia these days: Ivanov, the favorite to succeed Putin, has visited yet another 'secret' factory where uranium is being enriched (these visits are good for photo ops); all Russian government officials and many Russian businessmen have just pulled out of the Russian Economic Forum in London, and there are strong speculations that this is reflective of an official government position; Pamela Anderson was recently embarrassed at the Russian MTV awards (surprise, surprise); and there is much discussion about the appropriateness of the police response to Kasparov's protest and other smaller copycat protests. Keeping up with the news is easy here.

AND NOW IN WEATHER: It's snowing! Yippee! Snow suits Moscow.

AND TRANSPORTATION NEWS? Oh, yes, also, Moscow has the best subway system in the history of subway systems. This should come as no surprise to anybody who has gotten here through the rest of eastern Europe, where Russian occupation has left a legacy of bitterness, anger, and brilliant infrastructure. The subway in Moscow has more than 150 stops, dwarfing anything I've seen anywhere else, and it is intuitive, cheap, and easy to use. Fantastic.

Finally, a word in health news. Tap water has giarardia in it. In case you were wondering.

Thank you all, and goodnight.

12 Hours Into Russia

2007-04-21T16:27:00.000-04:00

I have spent:

4 hours on the train
2.2 hours in line for train tickets
8 minutes in line for subway tickets
90 minutes not bribing a policeman
1.5 hours in a second line for train tickets
30 minutes in a third line for train tickets
15 minutes getting CRUSHED in a crowd trying to get onto the subway at rush hour

The Russians seem to have an endless patience for queuing. It is maddening.

A German woman I met here suggests that this is reflective of a mere acclimation to such things, a habit of being controlled and lost in beauraucracy all at once. I think she may be right.

In New York, this would never work. We just wouldn't wait in lines like this. On the subway, if people were being crushed such that some couldn't breathe and were shouting out, we would not take this for normalcy and would not accept it as such. MTA officials would open the gates and let people in (for free) to relieve the pressure. Here, though, there were actual entrance gates NOT IN OPERATION. This is normal, daily procedure. Wait a long while, it's a bit painful, but in the end everybody will get what they want.

The same seems to go for train tickets. I spent AGES moving from line to line, shuffling forward, waiting as the '24 hour' windows closed for 'technical breaks.' This would have been less maddening if I could not see that there were 3 or 4 closed window for every open one. The whole thing could easily have been made smoother--and it's not like there wasn't any demand. How odd! And at the same time, people are still being paid for useless jobs, surely a holdover from a 'full-employment' communist past, while these booths are unmanned! I don't understand.

(Useless job interlude: escalator watcher, door watcher, person whose job it is to tell you you may only enter through the lefternmost door (or whichever) even though you are the only one who is entering an obscure and unvisited building, message relayer (as in, it is person X's job to sit at a window and figure out the answer to your question, and person Y's job to sit at the same window and tell you what that answer is, even though you can hear person X say it perfectly well), and many, many more escalator watchers.)

Finally, a note to all the Russian policemen out there. If you tell me (incorrectly) that there is something wrong with my (perfectly legitimate) Russian visa, and if you were to demand $20 as a bribe to let me go, I would surely pay you on the spot. If you were to demand $50, I would hesitate and have to think about it (which probably makes $50 your magic number). If you try to demand $400, however, I am going to fight it. I will fight it even for 90 minutes. I will fight it even for 240 minutes, because at $100 per hour, that is a sum that is definitely worth my time. I will listen to your colleagues, conveniently not speak your language or understand what you want from me, be confused about what could possibly be wrong with my visa, ask you to explain it for me, be willing to wait to call my embassy, ask for an interpreter--whatever (but all very politely and a bit thickheadedly, of course). $400 is not an appropriate sum for this kind of graft.

Case closed. Perhaps I will be a bigger fan of Russia tomorrow. Thus far, I confess that Moscow leaves me unconvinced.

The One Thing

2007-04-21T16:22:00.000-04:00

Many of you know that, beyond handing over some cash for tickets and getting my full compliment of shots, I did very little to prepare for this whole adventure.

Here is the best thing I did do: learn to read Cyrillic.

This is not so hard a proposition as it sounds, and it has paid enormous dividends. I'm convinced that Russian, especially the Russian spoken in the Ukraine, is nothing more than a half-Germanic, half-Latinate melange that is easily comprehensible once you can do the phonics. I can't say a darned thing in Russian--but let me tell you, I can read everything from 'post-impressionism' (seen on ads for a gallery exhibition) to 'train car' (the word is 'wagon' simply transliterated). Not to mention street names, the best boon of all.

Caves in Kiev

2007-04-21T15:05:00.000-04:00

I've finally got internet access and a bit of time, so I'm typing up a few adventures as I wrote them down...

We begin with the Caves Monastery in the Ukraine. In the words of Lonely Planet (not exactly--I'm quoting from memory here) this is the 'cultural and spiritual heart of the Ukraine.' That analysis resonates for me, too, it must be said. The devoted come here to kiss the tombs of Orthodox monks, to cherish relics, to pray in incense-filled, gold-plated, richly-decorated niches lit only by small candles and located deep underground, and filled with modern-day monks who chant and pray and stand guard over the relics. It's an amazing experience.

But first, the place. A description of the physical site can be given in two obvious ways, it occurs to me. We might follow an historical trajectory: the monastery is 1,000 years old, and the oldest bits are the caves which were built in networks underground, down by the Dnieper River. The rest of the very large site grew outward from there, with buildings appearing first directly above the underground caves and then up the hill, finally culminating in an architectural and artistic wonder of cathedrals, fortifications, a bell tower, chambers and offices and various side buildings all on the top of the hill overlooking both the acreage below and the nicely navigable river.

Alternatively, we might follow a more experiential path. One generally enters the monastery through the south gate, a richly decorated, ornately painted wall with doors in it that lead to a courtyard. This is the later bit, with the belltower that is almost Italian to look at to the right, the vast and beautiful cathedral in front of you, and a much older and more impressive (from the inside, understated from the outside) church with Byzantine (or Byzantine-like) decorations from the 11th century covering every inch of the (unphotographable) cieling. There are galleries to the left, and the whole is surrounded by an impressive wall. This part of the monastery still stands, but it is mostly a preserve, a tourist attraction. The faithful cross themselves when they enter the buildings, and of course all the women wear head coverings, but almost nobody goes to these buildings to pray or anything like that. It WAS a holy site, more than IS.

Descending behind the cathedral, though, takes one down a winding road lined by stands where people sell icons, candles, headscarves, and food and drink. My guide advised a buy a candle; I did so.

At the bottom of this road is the active modern-day monastery. This appears to be a series of unremarkable buildings in two distinct groupings, separated by gardens and connected by an elevated walkway that offers superb views of all of Kiev. Monks in their black costumes and distinctively Orthodox head-coverings wander about, and many people bow to them, prostrate themselves, or recieve their blessings. Figuring out which buildings one can enter, and which ones one might want to enter, is a challenge.

It is a challenge that is well-rewarded, though. When you find the right building, you walk in and it is completely unremarkable except for the small sign reminding everybody that cameras are not allowed, only certain clothing is acceptable, and you'll need your own candle. There is a lit candle standing outside a small (VERY small) door, and from this you light the candle you've brought with you. Then you descend the steps (awkwardly--consistent with the small door, the cieling is low) into the expanse of caverns below. This is where the tombs of the patriarchs are kept, where the chanting and incense and people kissing relics are all to be found. It's very medieval, what with the candles and all, and exceedingly cool.

I was the only person I saw there who was an obvious tourist (not in the site above, but the only one who managed to find the caves, or who knew they were there). I was entirely welcome, but I have to say I found myself a bit lost in the intoned prayers from various niches. I also found myself completely transfixed both by the incredibly ornate fabric and goldwork and, even moreso, by the fascinating wall paintings which must have been extraordinarily old. Nobody else took a second look at these. I spent ages with my stupid little candle, trying to get a good look at the incredible paintings.

The other thing which really impressed itself upon me was a curious feature of the coffins in the caves. They were glass. This means that, inside, you could see the (embroidered, richly colored) clothes that wrapped the bodies of the dead monks. Occasionally, you could see their actual decaying hands or other such unsettling things. These were the coffins that so many people were kissing, careful not to miss any of the dozens of them that there were.

On leaving the caves, you emerge not into the light, but into a church nestled somewhere deep inside one of those unremarkable buildings down there. These churches--there are two of them, one for each set of caves--are incrediable, every inch covered in paint or leather or goldwork, stunningly reflective and beautiful. And then you walk out of the building, and it's just a small square house with white paint on the outside. Crazy.

There are two sets of caves, covering a vast area--but rumor has it that the cave network has been cut off and once extended as far as Moscow. I have no idea if this is true.

The whole thing was amazing, and rather surreal, like walking around in one of those books that's half-occult and half-too intellectual to be occult (think The Name of the Rose or something). It was also just incredibly cool, and amazing to think that, even though tourists were welcome, I was the only nonbeliever I saw there. I don't know if this is good or bad, sad or just weird, but probably the best part was how accessable everything was. In Western Europe, we turn these sites into Great Things to See, and wall them off and put them behind glass. Monasteries that once were holy sites become merely tourist sites, and lose much of their meaning and mystery in their preservation. Here, though, one brought candles into the narrow halls; one could touch thousand-year-old paintings (and had to, simply because the walls were too close not to brush up against sometimes); relics were preserved not for their curiosity value but for their sacred content or context.

Of course, this certainly means that the caves are not nearly as well or as meticulously preserved as the stuff that has been moved to the Louvre, for example. But continuing to use the space for its stated purpose nonetheless does make a visit a singularly satisfying experience, even if it hastens its demise just a bit faster.

The Value of the Dollar

2007-04-19T06:11:00.000-04:00

ONE Here's what a dollar cannot buy you in Warsaw:

a bottle of Coke
entrance to the Polish Museum of Modern Art
a used Rubik's cube at the flea market
a Snickers bar

TWO Here is what the number of zloties (zlotys?) one could get for one American dollar looked like as the days in Poland progressed:

2.79
2.79
2.82
2.83
2.83
2.85
2.87
2.88

(Some days have been left out.)

THREE Here is what a dollar cannot buy you in Kiev:

a bottle of Coke
entrance to the Ukrainian Ethnological Museum
a Big Mac
a Snickers bar

FOUR For reasons that I do not understand--because I do not understand Polish, Russian, or Ukrainian--I was required to buy my reservation for the Warsaw-Kiev train on the (very same) train. The ticket agent told me quite clearly that this would cost 51 zloties.

However, when on the train, I was told the ticket cost 70 zloties. I questioned it; was shown very much to my satisfaction that this was what everyone paid and was the correct rate (the steward was a kind and patient woman); and realized that on my person I had only 51 zloties 8 grosche.

There was a moment of panic; the nice steward became not as nice; I gave her my 50 and wondered what I was going to do to get out of this. I said, hopefully, "American dollars?" knowing full well that I was only carrying hundreds and would pay an extraordinary price for this lack of zloties.

She said, "America?" and pointed at the money in her hand. I nodded. She nodded. I gave her a hundred. She took it and left.

A moment later, she came back with 95 American dollars. Imagine that! She not only TOOK the USD--she had change, too!

FIVE In Warsaw, I went out for a drink with a fellow who is cycling from Amsterdam to Beijing. When we went to pay, he opened his wallet, revealing a huge wad of good ol' greenbacks. "Wrong wallet!" he exclaimed.

I paid for the drinks.

When we left, I asked him about the cash.

"When I come to a country," he said, "I don't have the luxury of just getting off the plane or train in a big city. I come in wherever I come in. At night, I have to sleep somewhere. In the morning, I have to eat. I try to change money for the next country whenever I see a kantor, but sometimes it doesn't work. I can't find a single place in Warsaw that will give me Belarussian currency, so I'm going to enter the country effectively cashless. But it's okay. Everyone takes dollars."

This man had never been to America.

SIX

5 x 2.88 = 14.40
70 - 50 = 20
14.40 < 20

(20 / 5 = 4)

Another Word About Milk Bars

2007-04-14T05:50:00.000-04:00

The wikipedia article that I linked to in my last substantive post seems to me to be not-quite-correct. I don't feel that I have enough experience to rewrite it, but I do want to elaborate a bit on the population that one finds eating at a milk bar, because the article makes it sound like everybody there is poor, old, or both.

I've been to three different milk bars now, and I have to say that in my experience this just wasn't the case. I'm a big fan of the free market (and Communism didn't work anyway), but the milk bar seems to me to realize one of the best of the Communist ideals: the people who eat there, side-by-side, often at the same table, come from all walks of life, all ages, all income levels. Men in suits lunch at milk bars. So do road workers in hardhats and reflective gear. So do students, foreigners like myself, old ladies, and poor people. It really does seem to me to be a place where people from all sorts of places come together, talk at lunch, and then go their separate ways again.

And it is a place where people talk to one another. There aren't enough tables at any milk bar to meet the needs of the lunchtime rush if each person gets her own table, so the guy in a suit sits next to the old lady in the corner, and they chat as they eat. Not necessarily, but probably. That's how this place works.

This is really a very interesting phenomenon for me. It's not something that we really have in America. When I worked in finance, I never ate with students, much less manual laborers. This wasn't because I'd have been afraid of them or anything so silly, but rather, we simply don't have a space for that kind of interaction. Where, exactly, would I (or they) have gone where that would not have been a bit strange?

In Poland, it's the milk bar.

Housekeeping #3

2007-04-11T16:59:00.000-04:00

I am soon to the Ukraine, then Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. One suspects that internet access will be rather more spotty than it has been thus far, and I have no plans to spend my days seeking out internet cafes or anything so ridiculous. So don't worry about me if suddenly I stop posting for a while...

We'll see, maybe I'll be surprised by the net's ubiquitousness. I have been thus far.

Some Observations from Warsaw

2007-04-11T15:42:00.000-04:00

1. Nobody EVER crosses the road unless the light is green. Ever. Even late at night. Even if there are no cars to be seen. Ever.

As a broad travel principle, I tend to subscribe to the "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" maxim. I therefore have not set foot in a road in Warsaw if the little green pedestrian light is not lit. However, I confess that this often feels very stupid--as when waiting on the road at 11 at night, with no car in sight, at an hour when the crossroads are closed to vehicular traffic. Yes, I see that all the Poles are waiting with me. No, I don't really understand why.

2. The walls and the barbican on the north side of the old city here are really lovely. I'm tempted to say that they are the best-preserved that I've seen in Europe, but this is a distinctly problematic thing to say with respect to Warsaw. So much of this city has been destroyed and rebuilt that it's not always clear whether you're seeing the "real thing" or a sensitive and loving post-war reconstruction.

This is actually a bit funny, and not in a ha-ha way. The entire old city is written up in travel guides as if it has been around since, oh, the 10th century or so. But most of it was actually constructed far closer to 1960 than 1690 or 1069. The "13th century castle" was rebuilt from its foundations after the 2nd World War. St. John's Cathedral, a lovely thing, is the "oldest church in Poland"--but the narthex shows (incredible) photographs of the site in 1946. The entire street is rubble. Apparently, sappers had methodically and very effectively blown up the cathedral wall-by-wall. There WAS no St. John's Cathedral in 1946.

I like the old city in Warsaw. But I still can't shake the sense that an awful lot of it just isn't, well, OLD. Things were reconstructed very carefully, but in my mind there is still something very Colonial Williamsburg about the whole idea. The thing is, Old Warsaw doesn't LOOK like Colonial Williamsburg. It is no Disneyland; the whole thing fits well, is true to some older form, and is consistent with the (genuinely old) old cities of many other towns in the region. The U.N. has added that part of Warsaw to their World Heritage Site list. I mean, isn't that WEIRD?

I think it's weird.

(Tangentially, I also think the "Old City" that characterizes so much of Eastern Europe, at least, is a bit weird. It leads to a strange division in today's modern cities. The original city, with old and storied buildings, usually on the water, and often overrun with tourists, is (by design) walled off from the rest of the city where people actually live and usually work. In Krakow, the attempt to preserve the old form means that there are extensive gardens outside the city walls, as well. The living city therefore tends to look something like a donut, with this hole of history in the middle. And because the preservation is so important both historically and economically for tourist reasons, practical businesses are actively DISCOURAGED from moving in; these cities always will look like donuts, then, with this weird tourist-and-dignitary area in the middle. It's the pride and joy of Bratislava, for example, to look up to its castle on a hill and down on its cathedral on the Danube, but nobody real lives there, or ever will, because its just an impossible picturesque old cobbled-street neighborhood without any grocery store, laundromat, or parking spaces.)

3. But don't think that Warsaw is obsessed merely with preserving--or reconstructing--its past. By far the most pleasantly surprising thing I've seen here is the FANTASTIC modern art scene. There are great galleries all over this city, with new and very compelling artists showing in them. The scene is thriving, and the artists are, to my mind, quite convincing. Moreover, the city has clearly embraced them. For example, the Convent of St. Marcina (where I accidentally walked into a service by following a tourist group that I thought was going, you know, to SEE the place--oops) has statement-making abstract stained-glass windows against a backdrop of striking minimalism. The altar sits in front of an enormous and ponderous slate(?) rectangle, which quite appropriately emphasises the altar's importance in the church, but which is also emphatic in the lack of all that ornamentation that I've seen so much of in the Gothic cathedrals of the rest of Europe. Pews have smooth curves but no obvious texture, and are carefully lit. Even the stations of the cross in this church are demarcated in extraordinarily stylized and formally simple paintings on the walls, using the same blocked-out shapes as those in the windows and, indeed, in the slate rectangle behind the altar. I've never seen a church like this--it was fantastically beautiful, very modern, but also quite appropriately religious.

Much of Warsaw seems to be like this. There's great art all over, and a lot of it is new art, gracing intersections and churches and public parks and even business foyers. They're not buying random paintings to hang in the lobbies--they're buying GOOD paintings to hang.

I could not have gotten a picture of St. Marcina's anyway, but I do regret deeply that I left my camera in the room while trekking around Warsaw today. I would have LOVED to get some of today's Polish art to show you folks.

4. But back to religion. I've also never seen so many nuns or monks in my life. They're everywhere on the streets of Warsaw. This is not the most religious country in Europe for nothing.

Do you remember when John Paul II was ill, and we saw pictures of the people mourning and praying and lighting candles in the big public square in Poland? Well, guess what? That square is ENORMOUS. I didn't realize that before. That must have been an insanely large number of people. What is the population of Warsaw, anyhow? Because surely that square can fit 40,000 or 50,000 people.

Oh, and there are still candles lit and (fresh) flowers left there, at a makeshift memorial for the late Pope. It's a bit weird, actually, the sort of thing that makes me think of folk religion and the Indonesian countryside rather more than a bustling industrial European capital city.

5. And while we're on the topic of that square--it's right next to the Polish Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Listed there are the names of all the battles in which unnamed Poles have died.

You know what makes Europe different from America?

Well, here's one thing. That list begins with the Battle of Cedynia. In 972.

Yep. The Poles officially start counting the war dead as THEIR war dead before the turn of the first millenium.

Crazy.

6. Finally, a bit about restaurants here.

I love the institution of the bar mleczny, or the Polish milk bar. These are cheap, cheap eatieries, often with fantastic food (and always with good solid filling food). You order everything separately: a piece of meat, golabki (stuffed cabbage leaves), and nalesniki (kind of like blintzes) would be three different orders that together might make your meal. Milk bars are deeply unglamorous, generally sporting plastic chairs and plastic cutlery. You clean up your own dishes (by bringing them over to a window to be bussed--you don't actually wash them) and wipe down your own table. They are unfailingly clean and well-kept.

The milk bar is a holdover from the Communist era, and these places are still subsidized by the Polish government. Still, I think the idea could really catch on in America, especially in university towns (indeed, something about the milk bar is quite reminiscent of a college dining hall, though the food is very different). All this no-frills stuff surely does bring the price down, and man the food is great. I approve.

But, still on the topic of restaurants, what is UP with everything closing at an insanely early hour around here? I'm in a European capital city! What???

This evening, I left the touristy Old Town part of Warsaw at about 5:00 in the evening. Things were open there, but I considered that a) I was not yet very hungry, b) normal Poles must eat somewhere, so surely something would be open in the normal, non-toursit parts of Poland over the course of the next hour or two, and c) there is a reliable student-filled milk bar across the street from my hotel that I could always keep as my fallback option if need be.

But no! About 15 minutes later, I began to realize that everything was CLOSED. Closed! Bars were open, but restaurants were CLOSED. Sure enough, by the time I got home (now about 7:15), the milk bar was closed, too. I checked the times posted. It closed at FIVE. Five o'clock? What? Don't people here EAT?

My hotel has a wonderfully well-equipped kitchen, so I asked at reception where the nearest grocery store is. Guess what? They all close at SIX. Six. In the financial and political capital of Poland.

Desperate for food, I asked what was open. The answer: KFC, McDonalds, and several pizza places.

Well. I can think of one very good reason why American (and American-style) fast-food joints are catching on despite serving not very good food. I can't believe, in the land of pierogis and golonka, I had KFC for dinner. But I did.

And you know what? It was packed. And that's no surprise. If I were a 24-year-old Pole working in that enormous SocGen office I walked past earlier today, not yet married and living alone, hungry, and unable to cook very much (because this really IS a modern city, and young people with financial jobs here are just like young people with financial jobs in New York, except that maybe they go to church sometimes), I'd go to KFC a lot, too. And McDonald's, for variety. And I'd order pizza.

It's not because it's cool, folks. It's because it's OPEN.

Polish yumminess

2007-04-10T04:25:00.000-04:00

My analysis of Poland is: it's GREAT. This place is fantastic.

I like Krakow quite a lot, both the old town with its guild hall in the center and the walled fortress overlooking the water, and the newer town on the other side of the river with excellent cafes, one truly fantastic bookshop, and pleasant residential area that feels clean, safe, and happy.

The best part of Poland so far, though, may well be the Oscypki.

Oscypki is grilled cheese. It is served with a tangy cranberry sauce and is truly addictive.

When we Americans think of cheese, we tend to think of crap cheese. Oscypki is made from an excellent, smoky, juicy, insanely good cheese. You may think "juicy cheese" sounds nasty. You'd be wrong.

Off to Warsaw!

-----------

2007-04-07T14:10:00.000-04:00

Auschwitz.

The name evokes horror. Indeed, the place, perhaps, epitomizes horror in our culture. If you ask somebody to name evil, the Holocaust is basically it, and Auschwitz is nearly synonymous with the Holocaust.

But you know what's worse than Auschwitz?

Birkenau.

It's much, much worse.

Auschwitz, with its terrribly false "Arbeit Macht Frei," was nonetheless primarily a work camp. People died of starvation in the thousands. They were shot and hanged and gassed and otherwise executed in many horrible ways. They were punished by standing for twelve days straight, by getting hung up by the arms, by doing extra hard labor, by losing even their meager food ration. Some suffocated to death in insufficiently ventilated jail cells. Many, many died of predictable and curable diseases. Yet despite all this, Auschwitz was, in a way, where people LIVED.

Birkenau was where people died. It is full of crematoria, purpose-built for killing and nothing else. And it is bigger than you could ever imagine, bigger than you can see in whole from any point (including the watchtowers), bigger than is humanly conceivable without going. Think Monaco. Think Gettysburg.

It is unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable.

Birkenau was also called Auschwitz II, and is near Auschwitz I; I'm sure this is why we think of Auschwitz as the epitome of horror in this context. But we conflate two places: the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate is not at the same site as the tracks where people were unloaded from boxcars, the site where people were lined up in front of the crematoria on a daily, rigorous basis. I learned in school, at least, about Auschwitz AND Birkenau--and in that context, it's Birkenau which should be the most horrific.

There's a big problem in making Auschwitz the name that survives in our memory, but calling Birkenau by a different name. That problem is that NOBODY VISITS BIRKENAU. This is a HUGE fucking problem. The scale of the horror there is just unbelievable, mind-blowingly impossible. And actually there are, to be sure, many people there spread out over the whole huge area--but it's nothing like the packed Auschwitz.

The thing with Auschwitz is, it's relatively small. You go there and you can see how it could have been built, how this might have happened: Germans came in, built a large but reasonably-sized camp, and nobody noticed until it was too late. That's a possible story.

But at Birkenau, you realize that this is the wrong story, that it's an impossible story. You could not construct Birkenau in a night, or a week, or a month. It's not a series of buildings that might have been converted into a camp. It's just inconceivable that nobody noticed this. You'd see it if you flew over from a distance. The area is so large that you'd notice that nobody was living there. Auschwitz makes you think, "What the fuck were the Germans DOING?" But Birkenau makes you think, "What the fuck were WE doing?" It's just unbelievable that we could possibly have let this thing be built, this enormous, enormous, mind-blowingly enormous, regular, well-constructed, purpose-built thing.

And here's something I've never thought about before: we often hear talk about how the Holocaust gets a privileged place in our society, how there are and were ethnic cleansings upon ethnic cleansings both before and after the fact, and how perhaps it's a bit strange that we hold the Holocaust up as evil but don't think of the Rwandan Genocide in the same breath (for example).

This is a bit strange, and unsettling, and bad--don't get me wrong. But there is, I think, a vast difference between a killing field which is a trench that took a day to dig and a killing field which is an enormous, well-organized, carefully-planned, blueprinted, crematorium-filled, railroaded, brick-and-mortar institutional complex. It's just unbelievable, indeed, the sort of thing that's hard to believe even when you're there.

Also, you can take the fucking TRAIN to Auschwitz. There are 16 buses a day from Krakow and still people train in from the same city. The train trip is longer, more expensive, and less frequent. But let us pretend for a moment that the trip was shorter, cheaper, and more convenient. Who in their right mind would take the fucking TRAIN to AUSCHWITZ??? What would have to be wrong with you to CHOOSE that option? There are people who do this because they think it's COOL. Jesus.

Which is about the only response there is to this whole thing. It's to swear under the breath, and not know what to do. Because I look at all this, and I really don't know how it is possible that it could have happened, or what to do now that it has.

Gangs of English Boys

2007-04-06T05:12:00.000-04:00

Prague is overrun by gangs of English boys. (Men, I suppose, though young men.) They are here for cheap hotels, cheap food, and cheap beer. (Consider: 5 pounds for a pint of beer in London, or 50 pence for a LITER of beer here in Prauge.) They present quite a conundrum.

At night, these men walk the picturesque streets of the old town in a drunken stupor. They are brutish, loud, and stupid. They cause a general ruckus and, very occasionally, cause real damage as well (though, a tired Czech barkeeper told me, this is rare). For those of us who want to see the city at night, they rather ruin the landscape with their rowdy antics.

However, these boys, though drunk, are also unfailingly decent, generally good folks. For me, a young Anglophone girl traveling alone, by far the best thing to do if one finds oneself in a dodgy part of town late at night is to attach oneself to a group of (probably loud, probably rowdy, probably drunk) Englishmen. They are nice, they will look out for you, and they speak your language. (They will also offer to buy you a drink, but that's not the goal here.) A group of drunk young Englishmen on holiday are far preferable to almost anybody else out on the streets late at night, at least until you get back into the tourist heart of things.

For the Czechs, these people present a different sort of conundrum. They are funding the resurgence and reconstruction of this city, and the development and infrastructural projects everywhere shows off their value. Tourism is booming here, as I mentioned in a previous post, and this is in no small part due to the English drinking boys. The Czechs seem to find them a bit distaseteful, but are quickly becoming inured to their presence--and, indeed, dependent upon their money.

War and Destruction

2007-04-06T05:01:00.000-04:00

I'm going to Poland this afternoon. Reading my guidebook these last few days, as I've been in Eastern Europe, is like a catalogue of death and destruction. There's a portion on demographics in each place and they all read in exactly the same way:

"Slovakia used to be a very diverse place, but..."
"Prague used to be a very diverse place, but..."
"Krakow used to be a very diverse place, but..."
"Warswar used to be a very diverse place, but..."

The "but," of course, is the Holocaust. There are other "buts," of course. The Soviets did not treat this region well, and that has taken its toll. In not-that-ancient history, all sorts of people have been wiped out by wars and hostile takeovers, empires and armed conflict.

In the end, though, it's shocking the numbers of synagogues one passes here, where there are very, very few Jews. More than anything else, this is striking and heart-rending. I did not realize how obvious all of that would be from the street.

The other side of all of this is the historical sections on these cities. "Prague has a fantastic fort, the largest in Europe, which has been carefully reconstructed" and "Old Warsaw is by far the best part of town, lovingly redone after having been completely leveled and evacuated in the Second World War." Very little has not been reconstructed here, simply because it was bombed to pieces sixty years ago and reconstruction is the only choice. The people who live in Prague, at least, seem generally very pleased to be joining the EU, but I have trouble walking down the streets and thinking that these people are geared up eagerly to join the Germans and the Austrians in this great new venture. It's the way forward for the region, to be sure, but...

Well, but that's an awful lot of forgiving.

Paying in Prague

2007-04-06T04:48:00.000-04:00

Prague is a gorgeous city, no question. I've really been enjoying it. Among other things, I've seen the place of martyrdom and the tomb of Saint Wenceslas (yes, THAT Wenceslas, he of the Good Kingship and the looking out on the feast of Stephen); the window from which two officials were famously defenestrated nearly 400 years ago, setting off the 30 years' war; the garden below into which they fell; far too many instruments of medieval torture (they appear to just be lying about the place); and some fantastic roasted pork-n-dumpling-n-cabbage dinners. The food, in particular, is really above and beyond (though fresh vegetables appear nearly unknown).

There is one problem, though, and that is that Prague is simply THRONGED with tourists. EU accession added to the natural and constructed splendors of the place--and good, cheap beer--seems to draw insane numbers of English, Italians, Austrians, and Germans (though not many Americans, yet).

In itself, this is not a bad thing, though it's always nice to feel that one has managed to find a relatively undiscovered place in the middle of it all. However, the upshot that EVERYTHING is charged for is a bit annoying. Churches, STREET ACCESS, synagogues and shop entrance all have their price (despite all being the sorts of things one would expect to get for free). The Jewish quarter, at least, is honest and straightforward about these things; there is a poignant sign saying, roughly, "This is the old Jewish Quarter. It has lots of irreplaceable things, great synagogues, a graveyard, and picturesque little streets. If you'd like to walk those streets, we'll charge you an awful lot. This is because there are very few Jews left in the Czech Republic today, what with the Nazis and all, and we can't afford to keep this part up. The economical thing to do is to knock down all the buildings and make this a business park. Unless, of course, we charge tourists an arm and a leg. So pay."

Frankly, after an awful lot of not-so-honest trying to get my money, I find this refreshing.

Three Short Stories

2007-04-04T07:44:00.000-04:00

Funny Story #1:

An American, a Hungarian from Buda, and a Hungarian from Pest walk into the bar. The bartender says, "Dobry den."

[This could end here. Punchline: none of us speak Slovak.]

The American looks at the Hungarians. They look at the bartender.

"Do you speak English?" the American asks. The bartender shakes his head no.

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" asks the Hungarian from Buda. The bartender shakes his head no and says [something in Slovak]. Then the bartender calls his young son down from the upstairs apartment.

[Much talking in Slovak.]

The young boy says [something in German].
The Hungarian from Buda says [something in Hungarian].
The Hungarian from Pest says [something in Hungarian].
The Hungarian from Buda says [something in German].
The young boy looks at his father and says [something in Slovak].
[Much talking in Slovak.]
The young boy says [something in German].
The Hungarian from Buda says [something in Hungarian].
The Hungarian from Pest says, "The boy doesn't know the word for juice. Also, what do you want?"
The American says, "Uh, anything. Water is fine."
The young boy says, "Wasser?"
The Hungarian says, "Drei."
The young boy says [something in Slovak].
The bartender gets three waters. We pay however much he has decided to charge us.
We all laugh.

Funny Story #2:

I walked into the Kyrgyz embassy in Vienna one day. "Gross Gott!" I said.

"Gross Gott!" said the man behind the desk.

"Do you speak English?" I asked.

"Of course. Thank goodness, though, because I don't speak German."

Funny Story #3:

On the train from Bratislava to Prague, I met a very interesting Austrian fellow named Amir. He was busy serving his mandatory six-months in the Austrian army. (Don't ask me what he was doing in uniform in Bratislava; suffice it to say that Slovakia has not yet declared war on Austria so I guess it was okay.)

Amir is ethnically Turkish. When asked about the army, he says, "Austria is not my country" and "I am not an army type." But then, Amir is not much of a western type, either. He doesn't believe in democracy; he is anti-capitalist; he doesn't vote. ("Austria has only two political parties and they are both the same, so why should I vote?" he says.)

When I said something-or-other about the American middle class, he replied, "But America has no middle class. That's capitalism."

Despite all this, Amir was a lovely fellow and we passed quite a long while in interesting and fun (and mostly nonpolitical) conversation.

At a random stop, somebody else got on and sat down next to me on the train.

"Guten Morgen," Amir said.

"Guten Morgen," the man said.

"Guten Morgen," I said to the man.

"Guten Morgen, ShawnaKim," the man said to me.

[Something long and involved in German], Amir said.

"He doesn't speak German," I said.

It was the man from the Kyrgyz embassy. He still didn't speak German. And he really did remember my name. (Apparently, I was one of two visa applicants that week, and I was the one who spoke English.)

Amir was a bit confused.

Masses

2007-04-01T14:39:00.000-04:00

Tonight I had by far the most interesting social experience of my trip thus far. Today is Palm Sunday and I went to church here in Bratislava. It was a Catholic service in Slovak, and for both reasons my part was rather more that of an observor than a participant. Nonetheless, I think now that to understand Slovakia one simply must understand Catholicism. This is, to understate it, a deeply religious place.

Before World War II, back when Slovakia was just one part of Czechoslavakia and not its own nation, the population was religiously (and ethnically) very heterogenous. There was an enormous Jewish population, a large Greek Orthodox church, some Islam in the form of Roma who had adopted that religion and subsequently come to the region, and of course quite a lot of Catholicism. Between the holocaust and the Soviets (who razed the last Jewish ghetto to make way for a bridge, which is memorialized in a smallish but deeply moving monument), though, the Jewish population all but disappeared (estimated numbers of Jews in Slovakia today: 800) while the Roma Muslims really DID disappear (nobody even bothers to estimate anymore, because there just aren't any). Today, about 80% of the population is Catholic. Only 3% are non-Christian.

This is an active Catholicism, which people practice fervently. When I got to the church this evening, I thought it was full. People kept streaming in, however. And streaming in, and streaming in, in the HUNDREDS. There were old people, young people, gaggles of teenagers, workers in overalls and men in shirt and tie (though not so many of those). The church was literally standing-room only, with all the aisles full of bodies and ultimately with people streaming out the doors and into the street. When the collection plates came around, people shoved their way through the crowds to be able to contribute their money.

When the service ended, I walked past the church NEXT DOOR. Literally right next door, a different (richer) Catholic church. There, too, people were crowded around the door straining to hear. Clergymen were bringing the bread and wine around to the parishoners on the outside at the time, to make sure they didn't miss Communion.

I have never seen anything like these pushing throngs of people at a church. Never seen ANYTHING like it--and this includes having seen the enormous evangelical congregation at First Baptist, Jacksonville's mega-church. I had previously seen Slovakia as a quaint place where everything is still closed on Sundays (annoying for the traveler), but there is nothing quaint about this shoving, thronging, massively believing, blindly-reciting religion. It is an almost scary mass hysteria, though a truly fascinating thing to watch. I still cannot believe the numbers of people who managed to fit themselves into this unremarkably-sized old Slavic church. It was amazing.

It's hard to imagine how these people could have existed under a (nominally) atheistic Communism. It's hard, indeed, for me to imagine these churches unused when they had this population surrounding it (nor do I know that they were unused--in fact, I doubt it). But then, some of the religious fervor is surely born of this experience. The open and easy practice of their religion is a sign not of bondage (as some might see orgnized religion), but of a certain liberation for the believing Slovaks. They GET to go to church.

At any rate, the whole thing was simply amazing, and very unexpected.

Oh, also, there are no palm trees here. For Palm Sunday, they use an odd flowering plant with long stalks and velvety flowers.

Bratislava, Slovakia

2007-03-31T10:27:00.000-04:00

Bratislava is a horrible city. There is quite a charming old town with a fort and a church on the Danube, but it is the size of a grain of sand in an oceanic and grotesque melange of soviet-style blockhouses and unplanned urban sprawl. I bet most tourists don't see this, but I chose to walk the two kilometers from the train station to my hotel, and it was enlightening and depressing all at once. Clearly, Slovakia is an up-and-coming country infused with new EU money, but just as clearly, the old architecture couldn't be more opressing no matter how massive.

But I mentioned the charming old city. This IS truly charming. I wandered around the castle today and took in St. Martin's Cathedral, where emperors (and the one empress) of Hungary and Austria were crowned over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years. The palace, in particular, is something else, atop a steep hill and fortified with imposing stone ramparts. I liked it.

I was the only one visiting the cathedral, which rather surprised me as it does have quite an illustrious history and some fine stained-glass windows. There was a keeper there washing the windows, though, and he and I got into an interesting (if stilted, because of language) conversation. There is a highway at the bottom of the hill that forms the base of the palace. On one side, of course, is the palace; on the other is St. Martin's. The fellow with whom I was talking--a soft-spoken old man who seemed to know an awful lot and who seemed very pleased to be engaged by somebody--told me that the highway ran where the palace moat used to be. Decades ago, he said, this seemed like a great idea because it allowed the road to run through the old town without disturbing any of the old buildings, and, because it was sunk relative to ground level, it didn't much disturb the pleasant views of cobbled streets and whatnot. But now, it turns out that the traffic is too near the church and is weakening its foundations. Every year that goes by without something being done weakens the foundation further. The keeper is worried that the church won't last very much longer despite a renovation to fix fire damage just two years ago. "I am sure the government will rebuild," he says, citing its importance as a cultural icon, "but I would like them to not let it fall."

Also today, early this morning, I awoke and wandered around fields outside of the city. It was lovely, and I saw (wild) grouse, pheasants or something, and a large canine-like mammal (not a dog, though--it was at a distance, but I'd suggest something like a fox?).

Philately and Numismatism

2007-03-31T02:19:00.000-04:00

What is it about coins and stamps in Eastern Europe? Everywhere I go, it seems that people have an obsession with these things. There are street stands, shops, and bums on street corners selling old or rare or not-so-old-and-rare coins and stamps. There must be a million collectors to keep them all in business.

I suppose Europe makes it easy. So many different nations so close together! There's quite a lot to collect in quite a small geographical area. Moreover, there's a really long history of minting coins over here, certainly much longer than anything we have in America.

And then, too, I wonder if the whole thing didn't get a kick from the EU accession. Ten new countries soon to switch to the Euro surely means people are thinking about whether to exchange that last Zloty or whether to keep it for the grandkids.

These are just hypotheses. But let me tell you, it is VERY WEIRD to see people selling Hitler Deutschemarks in dank little stamp-and-coin shops at the train station.

(Only tangentially related: for me, a post-war kid from the western world, it is also very weird to see the legacy that the war did NOT leave on much of Asia. Indonesian soldiers, who hated and fought against the Japanese, still goose step in formal parades. India, of course, is simply slathered with the swastika (on new as well as old buildings). This is fair enough--they had it first, of course, and it is highly symbolic in a highly positive way in its Hindu context--but I still found it jarring.)

Housekeeping #2

2007-03-31T02:17:00.000-04:00

I'm in Slovakia at the moment. For some reason, all the network providers have blocked whatever mechanism it is that lets me update the cities list in the right-hand frame of this blog, so I'll update whevener I get the chance. I am travelling, though.

Food

2007-03-31T01:54:00.000-04:00

So here is something nice about Europe: fast food is good food.

The other day, I walked into the Friday market near the Naglergasse in Vienna. (The Naglergasse is a little side street off of the Stephensplatz area, near Vienna's largest and most impressive cathedral. It's quite a cool road--an alleyway, really--that is built directly on top of the wall of an old Roman camp. They are putting in new pipes, which effectively closes the street to all put a tiny trickle of pedestrians, but which opens up layers upon layers of history underneath the road.) Here, for 1 or 2 Euros, one could buy fantastic hot food: weiners and casseroles (whose name I didn't catch) and fried potatoes with apples and sausage in them. Beer to go with the meal was another couple of Euros. I can't imagine that it's easy to be a vegetarian in Vienna, but it is easy to eat well on the cheap.

There are wiener stands and wurtzel stands and streudel stands and kebab stands and bakeries and cafes on every street corner and in between the corners as well. Viennese certainly do eat on the fly; at lunchtime, hordes of people are running down the street holding a "hot dog" and a beer while running off to the next place in their business suits.

In New York, there are hot dog stands, too. But the differences are many. First, a hot dog stand here gets its rolls, fresh, every morning from a bakery. Second, there are sure to be at least 5 or 6 different kinds of high-quality sausage to choose from. Your "hot dog" (the English is used--we clearly invented the concept of sausage-on-a-roll) consists of really good bread (at some stands, you can even pick what kind, though there is a standard crusty bread that is the norm) with a really fine hunk of meat inside. If you want guidance on what kind of sausage you might prefer, the stand folks are always happy to advise (if you can bumble your way through a little German: "spicy," "beef," and "with this mustard" or "with that beer" are helpful).

Other fast foods are even better, though. I like the spinach-stuffed bread sold at the bakeries in the subways and am particularly fond of the kebab stands, which serve, for the most part, real, excellent, Turkish kebabs, usually on bread (once again, fresh) with vegetables for garnish (though they go, ahem, quite heavy on the onions). The important thing here is that these are not mystery-meat kebabs. You specifically order what kind you want; a höhnen kebab is chicken, for example. (For "höhn," think "hen.")

There are mystery-meat fast food places, but unsurprisingly, these are American: McDonalds and Burger King are very much in evidence over here. The thing is, Viennese take these to be sit-down places. There aren't any drive-throughs. As a consequence, eating street meat is a far tastier choice (and I'm sure it's far healthier, too).

I have to say, more than anything, real bread is a very, very nice thing. The supermarkets now have a couple of bagged-bread options (which is not something I remember from Belgium and France ten years ago), and I find this an ominous trend in the wrong direction. However, it is still the case that most supermarkets that I've found still exist peacefully with the bakery across the street. Buying food is therefore a multi-shop proposal.

I think it tastes better that way.

Differences

2007-03-28T15:08:00.000-04:00

To turn an American girl into an Austrian girl:
1. Take off the T-shirt and put on a slightly fitted blouse.
2. Pull up the hair, or put on a hat. Not a baseball cap.
3. Replace the tennis shoes with heels, or with something made of leather.
4. Buy anything from a Wienerhaus and eat it while walking down the street.
5. Learn the following words and phrases: "ja," "nein," "grosse," "kleine," "danke schon," "bitte," "dis," "das," "dis ____ ist ____."
6. Be comfortable using the subway system. (Mind you, this is a subway system with instructions in English, so this is not a tall order.)

That's all it takes. Really. Then suddenly everybody will presume you speak German.

Which, for those of us who don't speak German, may not be entirely desirable after all.

***

While we're on the topic of the U-bahn (the Vienna subway, which I presume is the Unterbahn, but I haven't seen it spelled out)-- I just don't get it. I mean, it's straightforward enough to use the thing, but I can't figure out why anybody ever pays for a ride. The way it works is, you go to a machine, pay for your ride, validate and timestamp your own ticket when you get on the train, and go where you are going. The thing is, nobody ever checks your ticket. You don't have to show it to anybody. You don't have to feed a machine. You don't have to go through a turnstile to get to the platforms, or talk to guards, or hand a receipt over to the conductor of the train. You don't have to prove you bought the ticket, or timestamped it, or anything else. What gives? Somebody who knows why we all pay for this service please enlighten me. This would never work in New York.

***

My hostel feeds me free meals three times a day (if I'm there, which I'm not), gives me a room overlooking the city, has a great large yard to play in and walk through, and offers free wireless internet. All this for peanuts on the day. I got lucky, I'm sure, but I'm loving it. This travelling the world gig is not bad at all.

***

I've always disliked Bratwurst. I had one for lunch here, because it seemed appropriate and because it only cost 1.6 Euros from a Weiner stand, which I figured was well within my reasonable threshold of money I could throw away trying something new I'm not sure I'll like in some place I've never been. It turns out the Brat was great. I don't know if it's different or if I am.

Wien

2007-03-28T14:45:00.000-04:00

I think Vienna is the first non-American city that I've ever visited where I've had the easy thought, "I could live here for the rest of my life." Not, "for six months" or even "for ten years," but "for the rest of my life." It's really a glorious place: clean, efficient, and successful in business without being sterile; full of fantastic old music and architecture, church bells specific to particular neighborhoods, and local memory without being provincial or stuck in the past; cosmopolitan without being disingenuous. I love it here.

I think I can sum up the good of Vienna with one particular example. Here, modern supermarkets and hotels exist side-by-side with Gothic churches and statues of Franz Ferdinand--and both fit in easily. Somehow, Vienna has managed to integrate the old and the new with a success that I simply haven't seen in any other European city.

I wonder if that is not, in part, simply because there are fewer tourists here. To some extent, Paris has no choice but to separate the historical districts from the modern high-rises and residential areas, because tourism depends upon a coherent glimpse into the Parisian past with its Champs-Elysees and Notre Dame Cathedral. In Vienna, though, people are really out and about on the old squares. The opera house of Mozart's day is still around and beautiful--and it is still a very necessary building: an opera house, a theater, a tour bus booking office, and other things besides. These old places still exist, but they are still in use, too--carefully looked after, but not oblivious to the needs of the modern people. The tour bus office doesn't seem out of place; it seems useful and appropriate. This makes for a lovely and comfortable city.

I should also mention: I am staying in (a fantastic) hotel in a residential neighborhood far out of the old city. And you know what? It's lovely and comfortable, too. Perhaps that's another thing that has developed well in Vienna: the suburbs that don't have the same history seem nonetheless deeply connected to it, and as much a part of the main city as Stephensplatz or Stadtpark which have been around for centuries. This kind of shared sense of Wienerdom (yes, yes, it is funny, so laugh) just doesn't exist between of Parisiens and their fellow "Parisiens" who live in the banlieus, or between Manhattanites and those New Yorkers who live in the outer boroughs.

Also, the way the Turks and other immigrants here appear to be a natural and productive part of the national identity is refreshing after all the immigration riots in France and the great concern in many other Western European nations.

Jantar Mantar, Jaipur

2007-03-25T07:08:00.000-04:00

Hi, y'all! Here I am on a computer that has just enough speed to allow for some serious imaging capability. Um, if I'm patient. I will be, because today we saw the COOLEST thing I've seen so far (I know, I know, it hasn't been that long... still, it was awesome). I expect that pictures will be handy, or even necessary, in order to explain it. So, to the left is a picture of the Jantar Mantar (literally, "calculating machine") in Jaipur, India. It is truly, truly awesome. Maharaja Jai Singh II built the thing in the 18th century, partly as a hobby, partly as an astronomical device, partly as an astrological device, and, if looks are anything to go by, partly as a playground.

Here in the first picture on the left you can see a watch. The vertical section rises at an angle of 27 degrees (or thereabouts--the important point is, whatever line of latitude Jaipur lies on--say, the 27th parallel--is the angle at which the middle bit rises with respect to the flat ground below). You can see the curved bit behind, as well. This curvature echoes the curvature of the earth. As the sun crosses from east to west, the shadow it casts moves along the curve at an even rate of speed. There are therefore notches evenly spaced along the curved part. This clock can accurately keep time in increments of about 20 seconds, which is (predictably) the distance between the markings on the curved crosspiece (the thing the guy is reading in the second picture). Later on at Jantar Mantar, the Maharaja built a similar timepiece that was exactly the same except ten times bigger. This one (again, predictably) can keep time in 2-second increments.

It's easy to check the time, by the way, and the clock is perfectly accurate. All you have to do is read the time off the clock, adjust for the difference in solar time between Jaipur and Allahabad (since Allahabad is the geographical center of the region and the place to whiche the modern-day time zone is calibrated), and see that it works perfectly. Today's adjustment was 33 minutes. We tested; it worked. (To the right: part of the giant 10-times-as-big clock.)

Next up: a piece of stone that pointed north. We checked against my compass. It did point north. Unsurprising. This is easy to do--it was set to point to the north star. The nice thing about it is, in a world where they didn't have a compass, they did have a permanent marker that indicated direction even by daylight. Eh.

But the next one's pretty cool. You can see the design: there are two circles, each tilted at an angle of 23.5 degrees with respect to the earth's surface. One of the circles faces upwards and one faces downwards. Both circles have a stick coming out of their center orthogonal to the plane.

Because the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer are both tilted at just 23.5 degrees, and because of the perfect north-south orientation of the device, it acts both as a clock (not as accurate as the earlier clock, though) and as an instrument that shows the tilt of the earth with respect to the sun. On any given day, the sun can only shine on one of the two circular faces. It is either high enough in the sky to shine on the one facing upwards or low enough to shine on the downward-face. It will never cast a shadow onto both circles, however. The one face is that of Capricorn (indicating that the southern hemisphere is tilted TOWARDS the sun) and the other is that of Cancer (indicating precisely the opposite). As the sun traverses the sky, it casts a shadow which moves along the edge of these circles, marking the time.

On the solstices, however, the sun is traveling along the tropics. Twice a year, therefore, it leaves no shadow on either of the two faces. Conveniently, the Maharaja also built a device that works only on those two days. The idea is similar: there is a stick in the middle, and as the day goes on, the shadow moves around the edge marking off even increments of time. This device is also tilted at 23.5 degrees, but the shadow is cast by a perfectly horizontal stick (instead of one orthogonal to the face), which is why it works.

Next is this giant metal disk. It stands about five-and-a-half feet tall. The disk is inscribed with curved lines (as you can see in the closeup). If one correctly rotates the disk (which is easy to do if you know the time, the date, and which direction is north--all of which can be found from various other instruments in the Jantar Mantar), the lines point the way to various constellations. Having such an instrument allows one to accurately predict which constellations will be visible at a given time on a given night in the future--useful, of course, for divination.

Okay, y'all, this one I think is my favorite of all the instruments in the Jantar Mantar. You can see in the first picture that there is a curved hole in the ground with various plates lying in it, forming the backbone of a perfect hemisphere. (In fact, there is a second hold just like this one but with the alternate pieces missing. There could just be one, wholly covered hemisphere, but the Maharaja separated them out for ease of reading.) Now, these hemispheres have lines crossing them, as you can see in picture number two. Suspended above the whole thing (where the center of the completed sphere would be) is a disk. You can see the disk's shadow in picture number two, too. The lines and the shadow are the important bits. The lines show the paths of the stars, and because of the inverse curvature of the instrument, they are straight and easily calculated. The disk's shadow will always fall between two of these lines (though which two depending on the declination of the sun and therefore the time of year). This is the crux of the thing: the region in which the shadow falls necessarily tells you the sign of the Zodiac on any given day. This is useful for divination, but more importantly, it is an infallable calendar (on the kind of time scales the Maharaja was worried about, anyhow). Essentially, the tool tells you which month it is.

Once you know that, you can move to a series of other divination tools. Sadly, I can't seem to upload the picture of the big group of them--but you can see them in the first picture of this post. I'm talking about all those yellow things on the left in that picture. There are twelve different but similar structures in this part of the Jantar Mantar. Each is constructed to the same specifications, but their orientations are different. This is because there is a structure oriented properly to capture the motion of each of the signs of the Zodiac. The proper tool to use depends on which month we are in (which we find by looking at the tool discussed immediately above--so we might say that we are in the month governed by Aries right now, because Aries defines the ecliptic that we use for astronomical calculations this time of year, and therefore the shadow of the disk falls into the "Aries" part of the bowl). If you go to the proper tool for this month, at any given moment during the day there will be a shadow on a curved plane, as you can see in the picture. (This bit looks a lot like the curved plane used in the clocks I talked about at the beginning of this whole thing.) Now, I don't know how much old astronomy you know, but one reason the Zodiac is so useful is that it allows us to divide up the sky into 30 degree increments. We pick certain constellations to be a part of the Zodiac because they lign up beautifully on the ecliptic (think of this as a big circle around the sky, kind of like the equator on earth). Importantly, each point longitude of each Zodiac sign on the ecliptic is 30 degrees away from the next--so the first star in Ares is 30 degrees away from the first star in Taurus, which is also 30 degrees away from the first star in Gemini, and so on and so forth down the line. This means we can take the whole circle (of 360 degrees) and divide it down into 12 30-degree segments. Thus the Zodiac.

Okay. So back to the divination tool at hand. This is a tool primarily for astrology, not astronomy (though of course, the two are bound up together for the Maharaja and many other folks throughout history). After determining that we should be going to the particular construction for Ares, at any given time we can look at the shadow cast by that structure and figure out how many degrees off the vertical it is. (Remember that the shadow is cast onto a curved plane which, if fully extended, would be a circle. That means it's easy to divide this plane into degrees. If the shadow is as big as 1/4 of the completed circle, it covers 90 degrees. If it's as big as 1/10, it covers 36 degrees. You get the gist.) But why would you want to know this? Well, remember the whole thing above, about "Taurus is 30 degrees from Ares; Gemini is 30 degrees from Taurus; and so on and so forth?" For purposes of divination, the Maharaja wanted to know what sign was in the ascendent at any given time. To find it, he would look at the right structure for the current Zodiac sign. If the shadow was off by 55 degrees, say, then the sign that was 60 degrees away from the current Zodiac month was in the ascendent (so, in today's case, we are in Ares and Gemini is in the ascendent because it is the sign that is 60 degrees away). (In fact, this tool shows shadows in two directions, which is how we compensate for being only a half-circle, so direction is also important. Gemini is +60 degrees away from Ares, but the Jantar Mantar could also require us to find the sign that is -60 degrees away if the sun were in a different place at the relevant moment. All this means is that we go around the Zodiac in the reverse direction.)

Why would the Maharaja care about all this? Well, we all know that the Zodiac is and was used for fortune-telling. (That's about all it's used for, anymore.) Different signs were and are associated with different character traits--so if an important child were to be born at 10:35 a.m. on March 25th 2007, people would want to know not just that he was born under Aries, but also that Cancer was in the ascendant. This would help astrologers to tell his character and influences and to predict his future (as the belief went).

Okely dokely. Moving on. (I liked that one; can you tell by the length of explanation?) This last bit of the Jantar Mantar is also pretty cool. Here we have a giant circle. (In fact, like the Zodiac sign finder above, there are actually two giant circles with offsetting gaps so that someone can easily enter in between and take precise measurements.) This is pretty much the cumlination of the entire series of calculating devices that the Maharaja built. In one construction, it allows one to find the time of sunrise and sunset, the azimuth of the sun, and (therefore) also the sign of the Zodiac. The general principle is this: there is a vertical pole in the middle of this circle, and the shadow's length increases or decreases depending upon the height of the sun while its direction of projection changes changes as the sun moves. The shadow was measured every day at noon (as determined by the fine clocks that were built in the other part of the Jantar Mantar), and its change in size and position was sufficient to tell astronomers whether the days were getting longer or shorter, when sunrise and sunset for the day would be (and from this one could extrapolate other sunrises and sunsets), and where in the astronomical year we were. Pretty cool.

That's it for now. There are a slew of other pieces at the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, but most are either failed experiments (constructions that worked but couldn't allow a person to enter to record the data they produced, for example), small-scale mock-ups of the things talked about above, or just uninteresting (a compass etched into the ground showing the cardinal points would fall into this category).

Okay, I'm done! I don't really expect most of you to have read through all this. But it really was awesome.

Roads

2007-03-24T13:15:00.000-04:00

A guest post, by mom:

So today I will tell you about traveling by car in India. We left Agra for Jaipur after having visited Taj Mahal. Our plan was to stop at Fatepur Sikri on the way. Fatepur Sikri was great, an architectural and photogenic masterpiece. However, the drive took your breath away. Pretty roadside, farms, cows, brick making, etc. Lovely blue sky with a smattering of white puffy clouds. Singing birds and blossoming flowers. A joy to behold.

And yet, there were a few problem areas. You know how Jacksonville has a little problem with things on the roadway. Well, so does India.

Our 138 mile journey through the countryside, on the highway, going as fast as possible, with death defying speed and recklessness, took us a mere eight hours.

Remember, in India you not only drive on the left side of the road, you have complete choice on which lane you drive in and in which direction. Each side is clearly marked in two lanes but the traffic makes 3 - 5 lanes going in either direction on BOTH sides of the divided highway.

We encountered the following on the roadway - each at least five times, some more than two hundred times, some constantly.

1. A herd of goats led by a boy
2. Two donkeys loaded down, led by no one.
3. A 4 year old beggar girl standing in the road who when offerred a coin continued to knock on the window (while being passed by cars, tuktuks and trucks (oh yes, and a bicycle rickshaw) ) and stated it was not enough money
4. Many many camel rickshaws which p r o c e e d v e r y s l o w l y a n d p l o d d i n g l y
5. Many more camel carts laded with full trees cut in 5 foot lengths which p r o c e e d e d e v e n m o r e s l o w l y a n d p l o d d i n g l y
6. A billion bicycle rickshaws
7. Bicycle carts, both two and three wheeled
8. Donkey carts
9. Horse drawn carts
(Do remember we are on a four lane highway)
10. Tires in the middle of the road
11. Trucks like full of boxes of kleenex, stacked
12. Cement blocks, both all alone, and carefully stacked for later use
13. Dirt piles
14. Bricks (scattered and in careful stacks on the highway)
15. Pigs and piglets
16. Dogs
17. Tuktuks
18. Oh, yes, other cars careening about honking (it is a highway you remember)
19. Policemen not directing anything, just standing in the road
20. Tractors with carts attached, going slowly
21. Buses going extremely fast, always in the wrong direction, beeping constantly in a scream (We happened to meet one head on, our car stopped. The bus DID stop about 3 inches from the car. Our driver carefully turned to make sure we weren't scared. We said we were fine. No problem).
22. Bicycles all over the road, moving as quickly as possible (often quicker than the cars) by swerving
23. People. Carrying things, carrying water jugs, huge balls of grass, newly threshed wheat, other children, dancing in a parade, singing, sitting on the side of the road smoking, talking with friends, running across the road, sitting on the road sifting dirt and pouring it into the other lane, sorting rocks, playing cricket (only little boys did this ON the road, this four lane road remember)
24. Broken down vehicles including about 18 men pushing a semi down the road (in the wrong direction of course)
25. Cows. Sleeping cheek to cheek, one black one white showing a crossing of the cow color barrier, crossing the road diagonally in a very long diagonal, walking, sauntering, meandering, chewing slowly while thinking (four lanes remember)

(This is all still true, and we only went 138 miles in 8 hours)

26. Motorcycles and scooters
27. Buffalo doing mostly what the cows were doing only slower
28. Large piles of cow patties, carefully stacked
29. Large piles of cow and other creature excrement not carefully stacked (however, every car and bus and truck and motorcycle and bicycle steered very fast around them
30. Potholes
31. Oh yes and speed bumps (on a four lane highway connecting Agra and Jaipur, two main cities) - SPEED BUMPS - no one got over 6 miles an hour unless they were going the wrong way when they went 60 to get by quicker (or tour buses screeming their way through and around)

Three additional notes on traffic in India.
1. A city bus holds an average of 80 people, 25 on the roof - rush hour means 90 people on the roof with some hanging off
2. A jeep holds 14 people
3. The standard vehicle for a family of four is the motorcycle, with all four on at once.

We made it safely and with tremendous good fun and laughter. Our new hotel is great and Jaipur seems to be a wonderful vibrant city.

Me again. Let it be said: this is all absolutely true. It felt like we were going 800 miles per hour what with all the swerving and avoiding oncoming traffic and passing the camels and whatnot. But apparently we did something like 17 miles per hour. It took forever and was completely harrowing the whole time, despite having a very able driver.

Taj

2007-03-24T01:04:00.000-04:00

For roughly nothing per night, Lonely Planet (and my mother, who is joining me for the India leg of the trip) sent us to a beautiful, green, peaceful hotel 300 feet from the east gate of the Taj Mahal. It's amazing. Last night, we were sitting under the stars eating fantastic Indian food and watching cricket on TV, just enjoying the place. The one difficult bit has been getting here; because of the corrosive effects of sulpher, no cars are allowed close to the Taj Mahal. Our hotel is close, ergo, we had to take a horse-cart to get to it. Awesome.

As for the Taj Mahal itself, it is simply spectacular. It will be hard to believe, but none of those pictures you see do it justice. The brilliant architectural move of putting the building up 20 feet or so was inspired; it means that you have to look up to see the thing, so the backdrop is always sky. Fantastic.

Here is the story. Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor (actually, the Mughal shah, I suppose) moved the empire's capital from Agra to Delhi, where he built a spectacular red fort which we saw (sorry about no pictures). This is similar in style to a red fort here in Agra, which is mind-blowing in architectural detail and in the level of intricacy both on a small scale (inlaid precious stone, detailed ornamentation, arches upon arches upon arches) and on a large scale (rooms connected by winding staircases, minarets that are visually layered one behind the next, fantastic Persian-style parallelism in the entirety of the construction). Shah Jahan's favorite wife died, though, and she was buried somewhere fairly random (that is, where she died). In mourning for her, the Shah had her bones uninterred and he moved them back to Agra, where he began construction on a great tomb for her. This tomb is the Taj Mahal, easily visible at a variety of angles from Agra's red fort where Shah Jahan would have stayed when he was in the neighborhood.

In the meantime, Shah Jahan's son staged a coup while his father was away in Delhi. The son brought Jahan back to Agra and imprisoned him in a gorgiously appointed veranda in the red fort. For eight years, Jahan lived here, with about the best view of the Taj Mahal that you can get in all of Agra. Apparently, he used to go out in the morning and look at it every day. When he died, his remains were placed next to those of his favorite wife, in the Taj Mahal itself (thus ruining the perfect symmetry, because her remains are in the middle of the crypt and his are on her left side--there's nothing on the right).

So. I like the idea of conceiving of this amazing construction as the world's greatest monument to love.

Though as for that, this was a different time. One did not marry for love, and over the course of 20-some-odd years of construction, I very much doubt that it did not become, at some point at least, a monument to Jahan's power as much as to his love for his (favorite) wife.

Also, it's worth mentioning the rest of the story: in the side galleries, two of Jahan's other wives are buried. No word on whether that was his doing or rather the work of his son.

Himalayas

2007-03-24T00:52:00.000-04:00

Oh man, y'all, you would not believe everything we've been doing. Internet connections are very slow, so I am forced not to bombard you with pictures because uploading is nearly impossible. I'll do my best to explain how awesome this place is.

A few days ago, we made our way up into Himachal Pradesh to the mountain town of Shimla. Getting there is actually a surprisingly easy train ride up and up and up into the Himalayan foothills, so we packed into a tiny little train car and went up mountains and through tunnels all the way to Shimla. Our cheapo hotel had a balcony that looked out over the snowcapped Himalayas (though it was a bit dodgy on the electricity during a rainstorm--ah well, we were in the middle of nowhere). We were up for sunrise over the city, which was lovely.

On top of the highest point in Shimla is a Hindu temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god from the Ramayana. This is appropriate, as the place is simply overrun by monkeys. It's picturesque, obviously, as the mountain peaks make for great vistas.

Also in Shimla: the second-oldest church in northern India. It has beautiful stained glass, but is something of an anachronistic tribute to a colonial past nontheless. Reading the plaques on the walls is an odd exercise in "Here lies John Smith of the 32nd Colonial Brigade, come to make this lovely Indian town a lovely Victorian summer resort. He died heroically while spearing a couple of locals."

Though as for that, the British clearly gave India many things which last and are very good--among them, the train up to Shimla. (Also, the backbone of a decent educational system, for example.)

Past & Present

2007-03-20T11:52:00.000-04:00

There's something weird about the Indian Travel and Development Agency. We stopped in to get help booking train tickets, and they were pointing out all the things we would really want to see. They weren't wrong, exactly, when they pointed to the magnificent remnants of the Mughal Empire that breifly had its seat in this city--but they really did miss an awful lot of what I came to India to see and do. They pointed us exclusively to dead places: old tombs, unused mosques (with one exception, though that was also decidedly historical), Mughal forts and gardens and minarets. All of these were spectacularly cool. So, so awesome. But nobody understood when we said, "No, we don't want a driver. We want to walk around." Nobody could understand that we wanted to take the Metro (which is easily navigable, cheap, and efficient, though I saw no other white people on it at all). And it was telling the things that were not suggested to us at the tourist agency--Hindu temples (which are live, actively revered, holy sites); the Houses of Parliament; the fantastic, fragrant, packed market districts; the beautiful public garden where lovers go to court and where the flowers are still planted in beautiful rows. There is beauty and squalor in all this; there are lots and lots and LOTS of people; there are unsavory bits. But this is real life, and it was great to get a bit lost in the city and to figure out how on earth we were going to get from here to there.

Delhi is clearly a vibrant, up-and-coming city. The public parks and the government district are beautiful and modern; the subway is simply amazing. But no part of this Delhi is sold to tourists. It is a historical district, a remnant (and an awesome one) that we get. Perhaps this is what visitors want to see?

I want to see that stuff, too. The Red Fort is phenomenally impressive, as is Humayun's tomb. Phenominally, beyond my descriptive powers. But eating in the student cafe at the University and getting pressed up against carts and cables and rolls of duct tape as big as a person while in the electric market was also cool. I'm not saying every tourist wants to do all that, but... well, I do. I just want to walk around, you know?

What I've Been Doing

2007-03-20T11:38:00.000-04:00

New Delhi is awesome. The pictures are fantastic (and I don't think you can really get a feel for the sheer size of the population or magnificence of Mughal architecture without them), but the internet connection is ve-e-e-e-ry slow, so they shall have to wait.

In the meantime, we've done an awful lot. Our first day here featured a lot of wandering around. We took the (spectacular, modern, efficient, clean) subway out to the end of the line and found ourselves at the University of New Delhi, where we wandered around and found magnificent gardens, a good place to eat, and a lot of students who were fun to talk to. We visited the Jema mosque (the biggest mosque in India, built by the Mughals out of red limestone, a fantastic piece of work), wandered around the cloth market, and got lost in the jam-packed electronics market (so packed you could hardly move through the streets). By now, we've done a lot more: the Red Fort built by Shah Jahan as his capital in the 17th century (got there so early we were the first non-Indian visitors, and we had the place virtually all to ourselves); Humayun's tomb (nobody there, either, because they were all driven off by a fierce 10-minute rainstorm); the Laxshmi shrine; the Prime Minister's residence, Houses of Parliament, and India gate; and gardens, mosques, and temples all over. It's been awesome.

How to reconcile these two...

2007-03-17T07:53:00.000-04:00

I had a professor at Cornell who taught a class in agrarian history. One of his key points was about taking care not to idealize the rural, agrarian life. "Working the land" is a hard life, featuring backbreaking work, uncertain profit, and often pre-industrial revolution agricultural methods. The academic should take care not to talk in glowing terms about the simplicity and beauty of a life of hardship, we were told.

All of this is quite right. Nonetheless, it's hard not to look at vast expanses of green rice fields, worked by hand by people in pointed hats and traditional dress, and not feel the allure of the rural to some degree. Mountain-draped greenscapes are beautiful, and the pace of life out here is slower. People make their own baskets, grow their own rice, slaughter their own chickens and climb trees to get their bananas. There is an easy narrative of self-sufficiency to take from this, and that narrative recommends itself highly when we start to associate it with the physical beauty of the landscape on which all of this is taking place.

But there is the flipside, and it must be remembered. Big agribusiness and vast monocultures mean that there is more food for all involved. Slaughtering chickens is unpleasant, and having them running all over the village is unsanitary. The people out here live without screens in the windows, without clean water (though they do use filters), and without much in the way of modern medicine. There aren't any jobs at all (much to E's dismay). It is a fine life, to talk to my hosts, but it is not quite the good life. Rousseau liked to imagine a golden age before industrialization; I suppose it would behoove myself, at least, to notice that this was, ahem, unlikely. In many ways, this rural, largely pre-industrial life is more evocative of Hobbes: nasty, brutish, and short.

But then I look at the mountains and remember that this is a beautiful place, though. And part of that is the absence of food processing plants, water treatment centers, and the like.

Instructions

2007-03-17T07:45:00.000-04:00

1. To Eat A Pigeon:

Take a live pigeon.
Wring its neck. Disembowel and pluck.
Fry until crispy.
Serve with sambal (hot pepper sauce), rice, cucumbers, boiled cassava leaves, and cabbage. This is the best simple meal you will ever have, hands down.

2. To drive in Central Java:

Rent a motorcycle.
Drive left, pass right. Most of the time.
Don't buy the gas sold as "bensin" on the roadside. It's often mixed with kerosene. Buy the "expensive" Pertamax at the gas stations instead. Cost: 40 cents per liter.
Honk when you want to pass the car, truck, or bike in front of you.

Afraid of the Dark

2007-03-17T06:45:00.000-04:00

I recently learned that my friend E--like all his brothers, and his parents, and his neighbors--is afraid of the dark. They all think that this is only natural. I have decided I agree (don't get me wrong, though; I still found sleeping in a well-lit room rather difficult).

It is a great luxury of civilization that we can be unafraid of darkness. This seems clearer, I suppose, when one is sitting in a house among a collection of houses, surrounded by rice fields and then by jungle, nestled among volcanic mountains. The natural world is frightening (if, in this case, fantastically picturesque); I can think of lots of animals that are bigger, stronger, faster, and more carnivorous than any person is, for example. Light is a powerful tool that we can use to help balance the scales.

The city is quite a thing to have built. I mean, put a tiger on the streets of New York and it doesn't stand a chance. It'll be dead, or sedated, in minutes. But when you think about it, the tiger is stronger than we are. It would beat any one of us in a fight. Perhaps "civilization" is just the codification, or routinization, of collective action. No tiger will beat eight million people in a fight, after all.

Of course, none of this explains why E sleeps with the light on. Java is civilized, overpopulated, pesticide-filled, largely animal-less island if ever there was one.

Housekeeping

2007-03-17T06:42:00.001-04:00

I have a million things to say about the past few days. I think I'm going to separate those ideas into several different posts to keep unlike ideas apart. That way, if people care to comment, we can keep the threads roughly on topic.

Time in the desa

2007-03-12T21:38:00.000-04:00

I'm in rural Indonesia (not so rural that there isn't an internet connection, I note). It's interesting the way time is arbitrated not by watches or absolute synchronicity here, but rather by the imam and the call to prayer. Everybody wakes at the same hour, but it is an hour chosen by those in charge of the local mosque. I asked my friend E (who I'm visiting in his village) what would happen if the religious authorities woke up late one day. The answer, it seems, is simply that the day would start a bit later.

We just have nothing like that. It makes us far more efficient (which is obvious from looking around here), but almost ironically, it means that we sometimes arrive to pre-arranged meetings at slightly different times (our watches are off by five minutes). Absolute time means that we govern our schedules with respect not to other people and what they're doing at the moment, but with respect rather to the Big Clock in the Sky (or something like that).

That means, of course, that we can organize efficiently on a much larger scale than the people of E's village. But it's a small village anyhow.

Tangetially: Oh man, how I've missed the rich variety of Indonesian fruit!

Singapore

2007-03-11T06:59:00.000-04:00

Many of you know that my first stop is, theoretically at least, a return to Indonesia where I once lived. Well, in actuality I have been grounded with a 12 hour layover in Singapore. As a result, I am about to go out and about with a lovely Norwegian fellow who is studying here at the National University and next to whom I sat on the plane.

The international student community is an interesting thing. If one is young enough to fit into a student environment, this affords instant friends the world over. Among people of innumerable differences--merely the least of which is nationality--there is an easy presumption of similarity, of shared experience (even when the university experience is in fact extraordinarily different for the respective individuals).

I find this all the odder because, of course, I am not actually a student. It helps that I may go to graduate school and can say so; it certainly helps that I am young. Perhaps, however, in travelling parlance "student" is just a shorthand for shared cultural similarity after all--a similarity that entails certain things about age, experience, education, and (in many parts of the world, at least) income or familial background. It is an easy starting point for recognizing SOMETHING the same about the person sitting next to you, or carrying a backpack across the way, or reading in the street--even if that something is not actually shared studenthood.

And We're Off!

2007-03-10T01:50:00.000-05:00

J, K, and L will all be relieved to know that, after seeing my apartment in amazing disarray mere hours before leaving it for good, I did in fact make it to the airport (with a fair bit of help in order to keep me from going crazy, it must be said). I haven't gone far yet, but I do have one great victory in this adventure already: I am travelling around the world with a single bag. Which I can carry on. Pictures
whenever I get my camera up and running.

(Yes, yes: I left with a camera. But it appears that the memory card in it was stolen--since it was there and working fine on the 9th of the month. An auspicious start.)

-on its way-

2007-03-01T20:35:00.000-05:00

Dear All,

I've given out this web address to a bunch of friends, probably including you, but you'll notice I haven't posted yet. Check back on or about 10 March, when my travels will have properly started.

Thanks!