1:54 PM MCO 12/16

To say I’m late to the airport would be accurate, but would imply a set of facts I’d disagree with.

The first is that I’m worried.

The second is that my lateness is the result of poor planning or circumstance.

Neither of these is true, I am late because I planned to be very early and consumed every moment of that buffer doing things I knew would put me behind.

I’m not “late,” what I am is deeply on time. On time to the point where any further delays could result in me missing my flight.

Fortunately, my years of travel have taught me to be prepared for just these eventualities, and I’m already half naked.

2:11 PM MCO, Screening 12/16

TSA Pre is amazing, except when you don’t get it.

I didn’t get it.

So for now I wait, and hope that none of the minor human miseries of the airport, delay this process any further.

On the bright side, the only things between me and Scotland are a screaming baby, 200 warm bodies and the Atlantic Ocean.

T minus one hour until the gates close.

2:19 PM MCO 12/16

There is an animated Santa flying across the gate sign, which I think is meant to be cheerful, but only serves to remind us that it’s nearly 80 degrees out, and any hope of a reprieve is hiding behind a few hundred ordinary, human lives.

2:45 PM MCO, Tram 12/16

Did it!

2:51 PM MCO, Group 5 12/16

A fascinating tale of sorority fears is unfolding in front of me. Traveling to a new school, learning where you fit in, Instagram stalking, going out, Barbie dolls and stereotyping.

There is a fascinating CW series in here somewhere.

Revise: I was being pat, there is something interesting happening here, I just don’t have the software to process it.

I hope this girl gets what she’s looking for, and I hope what she’s looking for gets her.

2:56 PM MCO 12/16

I’m off to Scotland where I expect to find ghosts, castles and rain, preferably in that order.

But first Newark, where I expect to find … New Jersey.

3:22 PM MCO, United 12/16

Protip – When boarding late, put your carry on in the first available bin, even if it’s a few dozen rows ahead of you. When the bins fill up and people are milling around wondering whether they’ll need to throw their socks off the plane for weight, you’ll thank me.

6:20 PM EWR, 12/16

If there is one really nice thing about the Newark airport it’s that he feels believably like the Christmas season here.

Jackets, hats and pitch black by 5PM. I couldn’t be happier.

Revise: I love visiting Winter. It’s a nice change of place when you live in a place with only one and a half seasons. I’m pretty sure actually *living* in Winter would get old pretty quickly.

8:28 PM 30,000 ft 12/16

I always wonder who the temperature on planes is meant to be comfortable for. We are in a box 30,000 in the air, where the ambient temperature is -47 degrees. Odds are cold air isn’t what most people are looking for.

The nice Scottish family to my right are having headphone troubles, which on a 6 hour flight without other clear sources of entertainment, can tend to balloon rapidly. I can only hope things work out.

1:20 AM 30,000 12/17

The flight map is broken, which is one of the most flatly disorienting things I’ve ever experienced on a plane, especially since I’ve been passing in and out of consciousness regularly for the last two hours.

I could be anywhere between 15 minutes and two hours away from landing.

Here is a question, since I’m getting into Scotland at 7AM, will my hotel room be ready? Something to think about.

8:10 AM Edinburgh, Black Cab 12/17

Edinburgh is lovely, in the subtle pervasive way that turns grey and fog into a feature rather than a liability.

Low stone walls and gnarled, knobby trees line the road, giving the bumper to bumper traffic a sense of rustic character that highway traffic sorely lacks.

Most interestingly for me, everyone speaks better English, which is how I will refer to the lilting Scottish brogue that runs like Whiskey through the native’s speech.

I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do when I make it to my hotel 7 hours before checkin, and I wish I had some kitschy Gaelic phrase to explain it to me.

Fun facts – Black cabs take credit cards.

9:04 AM The Dunstane 12/17

The Dunstane is baldly and unashamedly charming, with the high roofs and tiny rooms to match its Old World elegance.

They also have a surprisingly loose policy on check in times. Instead of having to spend my morning as some kind of cyber hobo in their gorgeous lobby, I was lead right up to my room.

12:36 PM W Coates 12/17

Planning. Check.

Nap. Check.

Now off to Edinburgh Castle.

1:02 PM Castle Wynd South 12/17

A surprising number of pizza places, including Mama’s Traditional American style pizzeria.

Revise: no seriously, the love of pizza is intense here. I’ve passed at least a half dozen pizza places in a quarter mile.

1:16 PM Edinburgh Castle 12/17

Getting to a Castle is surprisingly difficult, but what a gorgeous view.

1:25 PM Edinburgh Castle 12/17

It’s funny to think that cannon emplacements are probably the best places to find stunning views.

That which you want to see, you may someday fire a hundred pound iron ball at.

2:01 PM Edinburgh Castle 12/17

The castle served as a prison for many years, during the War of American Independence and the Nepolenic Wars among others.

Hard to get into, hard to get out of.

2:16 PM Edinburgh Castle, Great Hall 12/17

A brilliant great hall was built in 1503, turned into a barracks by Oliver Cromwell and restored in 1887.

It reminds me of nothing more clearly than the fact that people were tiny, oh so tiny a few centuries previous.

2:23 PM Edinburgh Castle 12/17

During WW2 the Scottish Crown was his away for safe keeping beneath the medieval toilets next to David’s Tower.

This history of Scotland resemble nothing more clearly than Game of Thrones, for reasons that are both obvious and still interesting.

The Stone of Destiny was a thing, the Brits stole it, which might be the saddest story ever told. 1292 (John Balliol)

2:58 PM Edinburgh Castle 12/17

The sword, the scepter and the crown. The Scottish Royal jewels are worth every second of the walk.

The scots even name their stairs. This is a magical place.

3:15 PM Scottish National Museum 12/17

The Scottish National Museum is free (a first for me in Europe), funded by the National Heritage Lottery. Thank you gamblers of this great land for your service.

4:26 PM Near Waverly 12/17

Santas are on the March. I’m off the the portrait gallery.

8:24 PM Royal Mile 12/17

I’m waiting for a murder tour and might just be able to catch the lighting of the Royal mile — sponsored by Virgin Money.

Luck be a ghost tour, tonight.

That being said, it might be a touch difficult to sort the tour folks from the rolling mass of Christmas cheerers, let’s see how this turns out.

Revise: Either I missed them or they missed me, neither would surprise me at this point. But seeing as I came out here to see ghosts, I handed ten pounds to the nearest person in white makeup and now I’m going to explore some vaults. The should be a hoot.

7:40 PM Vaults Below Royal Mile 12/17

On the way to see a vault where children were farmer I passed a church of Scientology. They were offering personality tests for free!
These concepts aren’t related.
You can keep a cannibal in your basement, as long as you keep him chained to a wall. That’s a law here. Yup.

Ghost. Check.

7:27 AM Dunstane 12/18

Mornings are hard. Off to the Highlands…maybe.

8:31 AM Bus 12/18

Scotland wants me to miss my tours, but with a bit of data and a tactical phone call I made it from the odd, empty alley I had wandered down to the tour bus.

Almost the wrong one…

I’m not sure where the bus full of Chinese tourist would have taken me, but it wouldn’t be Sterling and Dundain.

My bus has 5 people, two from China, two from Sydney and little old me.

Fun facts

1. Edinburgh was built up, because the wall forced them too.

Unfortunately the top levels were made of wood, which led to a wee fire that charred the old city.

2. Edinburgh’s nickname was Auld Ricky “old smelly”

3. They use to tax Windows.

4. One of the first countries with universal education, 75% were literate in the 1700s.

5. 1 in 4 are privately educated.

8:41 am new city 12/18

Edinburgh is quite possibly the most consistently pretty cities I’ve ever had the pleasure to be in.

8:52 am ferry road 12/18

Fun facts

1. Queen Margaret brought Roman Christianity to Scotland, and setup a ferry service to help pilgrims. 11th century.

Added buttons to suit sleeves to keep scots from wiping their faces.

2. Scotland has 5 million people, Edinburgh 500,000. Explains a lot.

3. The highlands are basically infertile. All crops are grown lowlands.

4. They’re building two aircraft carriers, one will be immediately mothballed and the other cant afford planes. Tax dollars at work.

9:09 am outside of Edinburgh 12/18

The Scots love Scotland in a way I find deeply charming. Except for taxes, they aren’t big fans of those.

Revise: Al (our tour guide), let me know that Scots just really don’t like taxes, something about tea parties and representation.

9:29 road to sterling 12/18

1. William Wallace was the second son of a noble, man at arms, probably would have gone into the church.

2. Wallace was a low lander, wouldn’t have worn a kilt because they didn’t exist in the 12th-13th century.

3. Wouldn’t have painted himself blue (piktie).

4. Wallace was 6″6′ maybe taller.

5. Scotland ran out of direct line of nobility, 13 nobles were in contention for the throne, Edward king of England was called to arbitrate. He wanted the Scottish nobles to pledge fealty. Eventually they agreed. Edward does some unpleasant stuff.

6. Edward ceased the castles, marched in armies. Edward picks John Bailel to be king of scots, a puppet King.

7. 1294 Edward asks for a Scottish army to take France, Scotland denies him.

9:55 am sterling castle 12/18

The key to Scotland.

10:03 am road to Doune 12/18

Scotland is just peppered with fairytale villages.

Fun fact

Doune castle was in Monty Python and the pilot episode of Game of Thrones.

10:27 AM Doune Castle 12/18

Castles were not built for people who are 6’4″

So far two near concussions.

11:07 AM away from Doune 12/18

73% of older scots voted to stay with UK, 71% of 16-17 voted for independence.

Scotland was promised more power if they voted “no”. Didn’t happen.

Highlands of Scotland are the same mountain ranges as Appalachians.

When you think of the cultural touchstones of Scotland (tartans, bagpipes et al) you are thinking of the highlands.

Callander, a small town, became a Victorian tourist trap when Victoria and Albert decided to visit and wrote about their experiences.

11:20 am highland boundary fault line 12/18

Black mail has its origin in Scotland, Rob Roy had a highland cattle protection racket, which he was quite successful at.

11:34 am Loch Lubnaig 12/18

What’s the difference between a Loch and a Lake? Language. That and Loch sounds cooler and sometimes have ancient sea beasts.

The highlands look uncannily like the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s sort of amazing.

“Scots have been brought up on a diet of oatmeal, that’s why we’re so healthy… And regular. ” — guide

12:15 PM road to Inverness 12/18

I’m super sleepy.

12:58 PM road to Inverness 12/18

Rain. Check.

The highlands are this odd combination of Appalachian mountain ranges and marsh. The damp cuts to its roots and seems as much a part of it as the grey of the sky and the green of the Earth.

It’s also hypnotizing, and combined with the jet lag left me half asleep for the story of the Jacobites and Stewart Kings of Scotland — which I think is some kind of tragedy.

Inveraray not Inverness. Words are hard.

Scotland has a “right to roam”, so you can hang out on someone’s land for 24 hours as long as you leave it as you found it.

2:32 pm inveraray 12/18

Had lunch with a lovely Australian couple. We talked about healthcare, gun control, and ghosts. It was stellar, and my ambassadorship to the US holds strong.

Pro tip (and I’ve heard this before) – Apparently it’s cheaper for Australians go vacation in other countries (Bali, Thailand), than it is for them to go to their own vacation spots.

They also have a reality television show (Embassy) about when they need to call the Australian embassy to work out the trouble they’ve gotten themselves into.

Revise: their names are Jason and Marob.

Fun fact -

Australian Barristers (who are different than solicitors) wear powdered wigs during trials.

2:56 pm road to Edinburgh 12/18

Sheep for three miles.

3:50 pm road to Edinburgh 12/18

1. Wallace is on a fishing trip, British soldiers ask for taxes or a fish. He offers them one, they want both, salmon fight breaks out and British soldiers end up decapitated.

4:17 pm road to Edinburgh 12/18

“You can’t walk through Scotland without tripping over a head.” -Al

William Wallace might have been a longbow man.

5:23 pm road to Edinburgh 12/18

In and out of consciousness.

Reminder: don’t step on the heart of Lothian.

7:00 PM The Dunstane, restaurant 12/18

I’m still working up the courage to try the Haggis. How does one know whether one likes something stuffed into an animals digestive track?

8:20 am Rabbies Cafe 12/19

Off to learn a little bit about Roman Scotland, apparently only one other person is making this trek with me — which is just about perfect.

Not only do I get an impromptu private jaunt, but the weather is holding up beautifully — grey rather thank wet — which for this time of the year is basically tropical.

8:48 road through Midlothian 12/19

Fun facts

1. Has some of the highest concentration of MS patients.

Ally has more energy than any your guide I’ve ever met.

The other person on the tour is from Perth western Australian, originally from Glasgow.

Maggie Thatcher joke. Broken noses. Authors. Coal mines. 25k pound hand bags.

9:03 am east Lothian 12/19

I feel like I’m in middle earth, if middle earth had wind turbines.

The only problem with having a fun tour guide is that you’re notes end up looking like a jazz riff, I think I’m just going to embrace it.

Salters road, rolling hills, green and brown under a canopy of grey blues. Sheep dyed blue and pink.

2. Scotland is powered 35% by renewables, the hope is to be 100% by 2020.

3. Apparently using your middle finger as a pointer finger is a thing here. Pro tip.

9:14 am road through Midlothian 12/19

Thomas the Rhymer.

Predicted the future, had a fairy lover. Cool dude.

9:39 am nearing Scottish border (Jedburgh) 12/19

Ally is part stand up, part radio DJ, part political commentator. Truly wasted here.

Now Listening: traces by Corrine pulsworth (?)

10:20 AM Abby of Jedburgh 12/19

I’m becoming a big fan of audio tours.

10:32 AM outside the Abby 12/19

Jedburgh Justice – hang first try later.

Sue is the other person on the bus with me — a hard cursing, hard smoking spitfire of a Western Aussie. I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but between her and Ally, it’s bound to be interesting.

10:57 am English Border (north Cumberland) 12/19

I think I just survived a hurricane. Or a double hurricane or whatever it’s called when a 200 pound guy is almost blown across the plains Dorothy-style.

11:19 am road to Hadrian wall 12/19

If you ever see a marked sheep in Scotland, it’s pregnant. Say congrats.
Green for triplets, blue for twins, red for singlets.
It could also mean they’ve been vaccinated, but they’re probably preggers.

Ally is doing voices now. Purely brilliant.

Now Playing: Lanterns on the Lake, Lungs Quicken.

Sue is so damned Australian. Like fake Australian as if she were an actress sent from a secret government agency to teach me about Australia through the power of brilliant dramatization.

11:31 am North Cumberland 12/19

Over the hills and through the woods to Hadrian’s wall we go.

3:42 PM road to Edinburgh 12/19

Lessons for the day

1. Vindolanda is one of the more interesting collections of Roman “things” I’ve ever run across.

2. Northern British mud is slippery.

3. When you have two sprained wrists, trying to brace yourself after falling on Northern British mud is a lost cause.

4. The Romans really loved importing stuff for their dread fortresses — France, Mediterranean just about everywhere.

5. Number try to jump a fence when you have two sprained wrists, when if the fence is locked, especially if you can see the latch and easily open it.

7:41 PM The Dunstane 12/19

The Dunstane is busy tonight. A Christmas party? Discussion of accent confusion, present exchange, merry making and Christmas cheer.

In any corner of the room, couple enjoy quiet meals — behind the bar, subdued Christmas music plays — rather than the Frank Sinatra that filled the room the last few nights.

As for me. I’m about to try Haggis. Wish me well.

Revise: Haggis is pretty great. While I am fairly certain I got a particularly upmarket version of the dish, it was absolutely lovely and was honestly one of the tastiest things I’ve had here.

11:05 am The Dunstane 12/20

Of course for my last morning in Edinburgh the sun decides to make its appearance. A wily devil that one.

Now to spend the next day or so sitting in airports. Fortunately, I’m mostly charged and I’m sure I’ll find at least one plug between here an Newark.

11:17 AM Taxi to Airport 12/20

I can go Edinburgh to find Castles, rain and ghosts. I found all three and also discovered that Scotland is an amazing, beautiful place.

No matter what I was doing, where I was going, Edinburgh just felt right. If I had another week here I couldn’t begin to scratch the surface of what the place has to offer.

I love it so much that it has reduced me to travel speak and empty platitudes.

What I can say for sure is this — there are a vanishingly small number of places I’ve visited that I would consider living in (Tokyo, Montreal to name two more) and Edinburgh is one of them. It’s warm, inviting, hip and a little bit weird.

Scotland I will miss thee.

(Insert Gaelic Phrase I will likely not look up)

4:44 pm Edinburgh Airport 12/20

Apparently Aer Lingus doesn’t open their gates until two hours before flights, which means it’s another hour of listening to Tom Waits, drinking hot chocolate, and reading Ready Player One for me.

Life is tough.

9:43 Pm Dublin Airport 12/20

The one nice thing about a 12 hour layover is that you get to catch up on your reading. Just finished Ready Player One, now onto the next.

7:27 AM Dublin Airport 12/20

Finished A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab, would recommend. Next on the agenda, Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone.

Protip: The Dublin Airport is quite an ordeal. They did a passport pre-check before checkin, regular security, and then a US Customs pre-clearance — now the door leading to my gate is closed until further notice.

They really, really want to keep passengers wrangled.

Arrive early. The night before if possible.

3:58 PM I-75 North, FL 5/18

The car is packed with food and water and just enough clothing. For the moment, we’re heading north, with plans to hit Tennessee before nightfall. Plans to cover 6500 miles in 10 days, half of which will be at night.

We’re going to see America, full stop.

Unfortunately, the first thing we see is an accident, what looks like an explosion, that stopped traffic for nearly an hour and twisted the median into macabre art.

6:54pm Johnstonville, Georgia 5/18

We pass by Johnstonville in the wake of a state corrections bus. Less than 100 miles of gas, the sun hangs cool orange.

It’s time to take a break.

We choose Woodbury, the home of the Walking Dead and not much else.

7:39 PM Spalding County, GA 5/18

I have a tire store here.

Enough said.

8:01 PM Woodbury, GA

We came in time to see them setting up for a walking dead shot. Insane.

Crew vans and police cars, across from a small crowd of lucky residents.

3:03AM Tennessee 5/19

So much fog. So much fog. By now we should be eating ribs, but so much fog.

10:04 AM Arkansas, Pig Trail 5/19

Driving the pig trail in Arkansas. There are no pigs, but there are a pile of curves and gorgeous farm houses dotting the verdant hills.

11:19 am Fort Smith, AR 5/19

Off road to Fort Smith, at the edge of the Arkansas river and the beginning of the trail of tears.

Off to see a Gallows, where hanged men and cannons once cried out into the afternoon air.

There are storm clouds overhead, and below the ghosts of the dead mix with water and low grass.

On a bench a woman with blood, red hair smokes a cigarette and speaks of broken families, violence and rebuilding a life.

Tears of another kind, even today.

2:12 PM Oklahoma, Henryetta 5/19

Ate at the Classic Diner.

Had a blazing burger.

Tried the pickle bar.

Welcome to the Midwest.

3:22 PM Road to Oklahoma 5/19

The sky falls on the road to Oklahoma City. Flood advisory in effect.

4:55 PM Hydro, Oklahoma 5/19

The storm clears and we’re left with the wind farms, spinning monoliths stamped against they gray.

6:34 PM McLean, Texas 5/19

Now the fog and rain have come together on the roads of Texas in goulash of pure unpleasantness.

7:14 Pm Outside Amorillo, Tx 5/19

The sky clears and we’re level with the clouds. The highly is a sweeping emptiness punctuated by coppers and cows. A rusted train stretches out into the distance as we drive towards Pullman.

Next stop, Cadillac Ranch.

8:08 PM Cadillac Ranch, TX 5/19

The fog chased us to the ranch. In less than 20 minutes the graffiti soaked hunks of upright American steel disappeared behind a blanket of chill and damp.

We made the best of it, wading through the mud for pictures and watching as sky grew dark.

The tire pressure light is on.

8:46 PM Amarillo, TX 5/19

Flat tire.

11:32 PM Outside of Amarillo 5/19

The fog is still here but the tire is gone, now we’re limping toward Albuquerque in hopes of finding a new one.

The desert is a wasteland — intense nothing matched with semi-trucks and the occasional rabbit.

6:16 am Albuquerque 5/20

Out of the Mazda 5, into grand Cherokee. We didn’t die.

9:15 am Road to White Sands

New car, new day, the death fog has left us for now, and we find ourselves heading towards White Sands.

New Mexico is gorgeous, brown-tinted gorgeous.

12:51 PM Road to Carlsbad 5/20

Driving through Hondo, on the way to Carlsbad Caverns. What happened to White Sands? Well, it’s a bit further away than suspected so we are visiting second.

New Mexico is all ranches and hills and little, squat villages.

2:30 pm Roswell, NM 5/20

Went to Big D’s Downtown, had cucumber water and a turkey burger. It was delicious, except for the part where it hurts when I bite down.

Three Aspirin and a nap.

4:54 PM road to white sands 5/20

Hills and mountains and valleys oh my.

6:08 PM white sands 5/20

Bleached sands, a cluttered moon scape stretching out for miles.

The dunes are brilliant white, peppered with beetle tracks, short grasses and yucca.

The sun beats down from a cloudless sky — a dry, sweat-less heat.

The mountains in the distance are painted busts, fingers reaching out towards the vast blue.

This place is a miracle.

8:14 PM road to the Sheraton 5/20

We were stopped by customs at an automated checkpoint between White Sands and the rest of New Mexico.

There we learned that we are all American citizens, and that there is a really cool natural hot spring about 10 miles away, “$15 per hour.”

Something new every day.

10:30 PM Sheraton, NM 5/20

Barely conscious.

2:45 PM four corners, nm, co, ut, AZ 5/21

Drove through 3 hours of unborn postcards to make it to the Four Corners.

Navajo selling baubles and fry bread.

The mountains sweep into hills into plains into scrub.

The wind blows in a gentle rain, mixed with sand.

There should be more souvenir stands.

4:29 PM SR 160, Kayenta 5/21

There was a cloud of deep red, spinning dust and rain into it’s core.

We were driving into a sandstorm.

From a distance it was majestic, from inside of it was majestic and terrifying — blocking out the sky with swirling orange earth.

It was like being a bit character in some kind of Mad Max fan fiction.

6:15 PM Sunset Crater, AZ 5/21

On the way to Flagstaff we happen upon a volcano, long dormant and covered in a carpet of long cooled magma.

Trees, which I’ll call ferns because I know nothing about trees, spring up out of the landscape – creating a vista midway between a bomb blast crater and a Christmas postcard.

11:32 PM Williams, AZ 5/21

At a campground outside of the Grand Canyon.

Sky full of stars.

7:26 AM Road to Grand Canyon 5/22

The sun is shining, the air is clean, the canyon is on the horizon.

12:05 PM Grand Canyon 5/22

Thoughts.

The Grand Canyon is, in fact, grand. To give it any other descriptor is an aggressive understatement.

1.5 miles down is much, much different than 1.5 miles up.

Rain, cold and dehydration can happen at the exact same time.

1:34 PM road to Utah 5/22

Controlled burns and rain storms.

Do not report.

8:39 PM road out of AZ 5/22

Three Landmarks

1. Going to The Wave requires a permit from the department of land management, which makes sense only when you realize that it’s located on an unmarked path eight miles into the Arizona desert.

Bring a compass.

2. Both the upper and lower Antelope Canyons, a pair of slot canyons right outside of Page, AZ close at around 5PM, and require guides who have been variously described as lazy, uninterested and downright bad.

We ended up skipping it.

3. Horseshoe bend is strikingly, wonderfully strange — rocks stacked like Crepes frame a turquoise loop of the Colorado river.

Canoes drift idly across it’s surface, on their way to the Grand Canyon.

Tourists approach the the edge like pilgrims on procession.

8:52 am Yellowstone National Park 5/23

Fall asleep in Arizona, wake up in Utah.

Fall asleep in Idaho, wake up in Wyoming.

Brush teeth, eat Oreos, keep driving.

Anatomy of a road trip.

First thing this morning we’re on our way to see just how faithful Old Faithful really is.

10:21 am Yellowstone 5/23

On the way to Mammoth Springs, the cars stopped for no apparent reason.

Then the reason became apparent, a stampede of Bison making their way down the road.

2:28 PM Yellowstone 5/23

Bear spotting! 3x.

2:19 am Montana 5/24

Montana has differential speed limits for night and day, tricks and cars.

Montana has a lot of casinos.

12:19 PM glacier national forest 5/24

“The roads are closed until later.”
“Oh yea, when?”
“June”

Most of the park is frozen over, but the parts that aren’t are a collage of frozen peaks, brilliant lakes and fairy -tail forests.

7:24 PM road to South Dakota 5/23

Glacier conquered, ankle only slightly tweaked.

Saw a moose, saw a mountain lake so vast and beautiful that representing it words feels like a sin against those gods of beauty that judge these things, saw a woman with a woman with a swastika tattooed on her left ankle leading a group of children through fire marred forest, saw a real life glacier from a real world distance, saw a nice park ranger who reminded us that speed limits exist even here.

Saw a waterfall, where I got this new ankle of mine.

Saw it all, at least those parts not so frozen over that they resist sight.

7:36 PM 89 to South Dakota 5/23

We find ourselves on a Long, barren road with nothing but rolling green on either side.

Epic in its blandness. Oppressive in its sheer lack. Cows, barns and horses are the only things to convince you that your brain hasn’t frozen.

3:30 am Ashland, Montana 5/25

Wake up somewhere in rural Montana, groggy, a little injured and needing to use the facilities.

Your gum still hurts from the peanut incident from a week ago.

Find yourself in a Native American. gas station off the side of the road, patrolled by two beat up white vans pretty obviously looking for no good.

Try to use the facilities.

Find that they’re locked, probably for good reason.

Fill up the tank.

Hop back in the car.

Get the Hell out of town.

3:55 am chain removal area, Montana

Drive through a bank of fog, enter a graveyard for semi-trucks, silent and cooling for the evening as their masters rest.

Still no phone signal.

4:35 am 50 miles outside Alzada, Mo 5/25

You enter a tiny strip of a town and see a neon sign hanging in a window wishing you good luck.

You laugh, smoke and mirrors, portents etched in noble gasses, the opening act to a horror movie that hasn’t quite found it’s footing.

The sign was right.

You forget to take a right, the right you need to remain on 212 East to wherever.

Instead you end up on some horrible patch of nothing, rain beating down as you drive 10 mph through three inches of mud and darkness on a road that seems to have consumed all the light around it.

You have 3G.

5:51 am entering wyoming 212 E 5/25

You pass a dead deer, limp and moist and pathetic, sprawled on the side of the road.

Welcome to Wyoming.

You have no service.

5:34 PM leaving South Dakota 5/25

South Dakota just won’t quit us. Spent some time in the Badlands, watching tall grasses and prairie dogs, and much more time on the road, watching the highway roll on by.

7:08 PM Somewhere in Iowa 5/25

Before leaving Dakota we saw a corn palace, which turned out to be a multi-use convention center covered in corn husks and ephemera.

The road is endless, and endlessly bizarre.

9:46 PM Gainesville 5/26

Driving through a tropical storm, we made it home with 5500 miles on the car.

2:59 MCO, Airport Security 5/6

A middle aged woman walking with her middle aged husband asked whether silicone breasts count as a gel or liquid. This is a surprisingly profound question, one that I have no answer to.

I mean, common sense would dictate they do not, mostly because it would be difficult to remove them to place in the available plastic baggies, and reinserting them would be a distracting nuisance at best for an already harrying experience.

Still, I’m not entirely sure this is fair, why should someone’s breasts take precedence over someone else’s toothpaste. This is a questionable double standard.

Security is always a little strange though, Today they seem particularly adamant about the fact that we are walking through a metal detector and that these detectors do detect metal. Apparently enough people have had difficulty with this idea that it’s become worthy of by the minute repetition.

3:19 PM MCO 5/6/2015

An afternoon flight to Guatemala City. The plan is to seeing a volcano, then a pyramid, then do some writing without being brutally murdered. The first stop is Miami international, where the plan is to charge my phone, send some emails, and avoid being brutally murdered.

In general, wherever I travel, remaining unmurdered is a very high priority.

3:35pm MCO, food court 5/6

A larger gentlemen wears a Mickey Mouse hat two sizes too small, in another life he could be Kevin Smith, and I could be sitting in the middle of a treatment for a clever romantic comedy about missed connections.

4:26PM 3000 Ft and Rising 5/6

The flight to Miami is empty, creepily so. Entire blocks of seats are abandoned, grave markers to cups of orange juice and cheap wine that will never be.

On my left is a tattooed man reading a book on digital marketing, he’s currently on a section about Facebook Ads. There is some tiny part of my brain that wants to engage him, but it’s quickly overruled by the much more substantial parts of my brain that would prefer to enjoy Regina Spektor in relative, beautiful peace.

5:33 PM MIA 5/6

There is a small child in small shoes crying and spitting and kicking his much older sister. He’s dressed in red and blue and carrying a spider man dressed all in red and blue.

His mother feeds him Greek yogurt and he quiets, meanwhile his younger brother sits silently, peacefully, eating lavender licorice whips.

6:45PM MIA Runway 5/6

Protip: Just because your seat is 25D, doesn’t mean you are leaving from Gate 25D. Often, it means you are actually leaving from 41D, on the other side of the terminal.

After a semi-slightly-mad-capped dash across the airport, I find myself sitting on another surprisingly empty plane. A plane where I am fairly certain I am one of less than ten people not from Guatemala.

Apparently, Guatemala City during the rainy season is a less happening tourist destination than I imagined.

7:31 PM (subj) GC Airport 5/6

The people to my left are spectacularly drunk.

In other news, it looks like Central American countries all use the same customs form. Go figure.

Finally, the airport is either spectacularly closed or spectacularly empty or both. This is starting to look like a pattern.

8:19PM (subj) Villa Toscana 5/6

At the airport I see a sign with my name on it. A man with much better English than my Spanish leads me to an unmarked car with deeply tinted windows. I hop inside. I assume the tinting and the lack of markings helps to throw the bandits off the scent.

It’s only about two tenths of a mile to my hotel, but I am extraordinarily happy that I sprung for the car. Everyone else I run into seems happy of the same.

The first thing you’d notice about my hotel if you drove up to it, is that it’s behind a giant gate complete with armed guards. The second thing you’d notice is that it is actually behind two gates, the second one, while unguarded, does sport razor wire for effect.

The third thing you’d notice is that beside the security, everything is quite lovely, and the owners clearly care. The room itself is nice, though it does take more than a few notes from the Japanese school of interior design — which is to say, build everything to be about the size of a postage stamp and hope that the charm makes up for it.

So far, it does.

P.S, there doesn’t seem to be any air conditioning to speak of.

P.P.S. The streets of GC are empty, save for a few random children, a handful of yipping dogs, and some motorcycles on their way to anywhere else. Apparently, around here, the ghosts come out at night, and everyone knows it.

8:42 PM (subj) Villa Toscana 5/6

I’ve heard a nearly endless stream if 80-90s American pop music since I got here.

Elton John, Savage Garden, Jesse’s Girl…Sweet dreams are, in fact, made of these.

Villa Toscana is kind of like inverse Istanbul. Whereas most of my time in that city was spent trying to avoid being turned into a mark, every interaction with the desk clerk here devolves into a battle where he attempts to prove that he isn’t running a scam.

When I checked in, he showed me the math he used to generate the invoice. When I ordered food, he brought out a calculator. He’s asked me if I understood charges on no less than three occasions. He is intensely interested in making sure I don’t feel robbed, and as strange as it might sound, I find his persistence in the face of my ambivalence deeply comforting.

9:07 PM (subj) Villa Toscana 5/6

Around here you don’t go out to eat at night, you order in, even from
McDonalds. The gate might have something to do with it, but honestly I thinks it’s just that ordering in after sundown is the sanest of all available option.

7:41am (subj) villa Toscana 5/7

Orange juice and then a 2 and a half hour hike up the side of a volcanoe.

Daylight does this place good.

7:57am car to Pacaya 5/7

Two Fun facts

Most of downtown GC was farm lands until the 1950s.

GC is broken into zones.

One observation.

There are few pedestrians, lots an lots of cars, and a surprising amount of razor wire.

8:02 am road to Pacaya 5/7

Browns and greens and golds, faded pastels and red bricks; rusty whites and pale blues, these are the colors of downtown GC.

This is not a pedestrian city, it’s a city of goal-focused motion. Those people who are on the streets are going somewhere, and each is in a rush to get there as quickly as their legs will carry them.

8:09 am road to Pacaya 5/7

Walls and cameras and razor wire. Walls and cameras and razor wire. Walls and cameras and razor wire, punctuated by armored guards with high powered rifles.

Downtown GC has a sort of commercial beauty born of colors and contrast. It’s a portrait rough painted, where light

8:24 Am road to Pacaya 5/7

Me: “Is the volcano active.”
Guide: “It’s one of the most active in Guatemala.”
Me: “Oh? Wow, when was the last time it erupted”
Guide: “Earlier this year…”

Apparently when it erupted the airport was shutdown for three days, 5cm of ash will do that, I suppose.

Guatemala is broken into regions – the Pacific on the west, then the volcanoes, then the highlands and then the lowlands. The Mayan civilization moved from highlands to lowlands for 1000 years.

Then They collapsed

48% of GC population is of Mayan descent. The Mayan civilization didn’t collapse, they just moved back to the highlands.

8:36 am road to Pacaya 5/7

What happens if your god-king tells you it’s going to rain and it doesn’t? (Theory one of Mayan collapse)

What happens if you need to burn limestone, but you have no more trees due to lack of rain. (Theory two of collapse).

8:56am road to Pacaya 5/7

Quick facts

Lots of corruption
There are 28 languages spoken in Guatemala, 32 (27?) total Mayan languages.
While the Mayans are 48% of the population, they have limited government representation.
This is changing as the government moves to provide education and stipends to native populations.

9:23 am Pacaya national park 5/7

Pacaya is a veggie, pacaya is one of the three most active volcanoes in Guatemala. Pacaya is weird. 2 km to go.

They’re building geothermal plants to tap the volcanoes, and hydroelectric to tap the rivers. Unfortunately native populations can’t afford the power (which is exported) but can afford the pollution.

10:18am Pacaya trail 5/7

Dogs on the trail, trails on the dog, delicious halved oranges topped with crushed pumpkin – courtesy of a young Mayan woman beneath a shady oak.

10:35am Pacaya 5/7

Volcanoes are amazing. I thought the path to one would be like walking on the moon, but most of it is like bushwacking through a forest.

Giant birds, rocks made of knives, an enormous, burning maw. It’s Mordor in the day time.

Mordor in the day if Mordor let you roast marshmallows in it’s heat vents.

11:30 am the trail down 5/7

I judge a place by how they choose to sell you things, by that measure Guatemala had been amazing. Everyone here is incredibly friendly, even when not a soul would notice if they weren’t.

The lava store near pacaya was created after the 2010 eruption to help the people who were displaced by the tons of molten death that slid down the mountain that day. Coconut and silver inlaid with volcanic stone, there is a beautiful sort of synergy there.

12:12pm road to villa toscano 5/7

Off the mountain, back to the razor wire.

12:23 PM road to villa toscano 5/7

Lanes are for people without giant cars.

Guatemala City proper is a very functional city. Purpose (albeit a gaudy kind of purpose) without flourish. Cars and doors and a smattering of dusty ground.

12:45 PM traffic jam to villa toscano 5/7

There are 30,000 police officers in Guatemala, there are 100,000 private police officers in Guatemala.

A child stands in an intersection juggling knives and spinning a soccer ball with a pencil in his teeth.

Just yesterday a pile of children in a public square were held by bandits for random.

37 years of civil unrest.

This is a complicated place.

6:35pm Villa Toscana 5/7

The sun sets; dogs bark; night falls over the city.

5:06 AM Tag Lobby 5/8

Flying to Flores from GC via Tag, all in service of making it to Tikal.

Tag’s waiting area has about 30 seats total, which leads me to believe that their planes have about 30 seats total.

There is a Russian couple, a small contingent of Guatemalans and a single, skittering beetle making small, deliberate circles on the heavily waxed floor.

As they call for us to check in, the beetle meets his end.

6:13 am TAG waiting area 5/8

Prop planes and helicopters and two-engines oh my.

7:25 am Flores Runway 5/8

Landing in Flores is a little like landing on a tropical island, which is to say it’s very pretty and very empty — a couple of air stripes in the midst of a vast sea of green.

Also, when you call boxed Apple Juice “nectar” it adds an indescribable air of class to it.

7:58 PM road to Tikal 5/8

From Erdu,

For the morning tours in Tikal (not sunrise tours because the sun fails to show as often as not), you have to take guide because, “There are a lot of Jaguars, and they will eat you.”

8:27 PM road to Tikal 5/8

A lake shaped like a crocodile in a village not shaped like a crocodile, the road through Flores has that beautiful rural charm that is all the more charming when you’re only visiting it.

I step inside a gift shop where along with overpriced jade, and properly priced nick knacks, are several books on Apocalypse that never was, still wrapped neatly in manufacturers plastic. Three years later, just outside of a Mayan stronghold, that is probably the best thing I’ve seen today.

8:54 am road to Tikal 5/8

Horses and dogs, acres and acres of green, food cooked in the open air on stoves of stone, colors deep and rich — everything with the unshakeable air of bucolic niceness — utterly divorced from the grime of the city. if Guatemala wanted to show it’s best face, it would start with Flores.

9:08 AM Tikal 5/8

Turkey crossing… Jaguar crossing… Turkey crossing… Deer crossing… Snake crossing … More Jaguars crossing… Opossum crossing… No passing…Tikal.

9:59 PM Tikal 5/8

A jungle different than the last and even more beautiful.

It’s jaguars season.

10:17 am Tikal 5/8

9 monuments. 9 months to birth. Mayan calendar year. Birth. Death. Cycles.

From the east monument every 40 days you will be able to see the sun rise over a different monument in the west. Great way to keep a calendar.

Different temple sets at different elevations.

Stella are both for astronomical purposes and for worship.

Leaf cutter ants make highways through the brush.

11:20am temple 4 5/8

I’m on top of the sky.

Trees like grass.

A place of worship looking out over an endless wash of green and blue . It’s no wonder that a man, standing at these heights, nearly tasting the clouds, would consider himself at the doorway to his god, its more of a wonder that same man, knowing what it took to build this, would not consider themselves gods in their own right. .

11:41 am Tikal pyramid 4 5/9

Protip: when sitting on top of the world, bring sunscreen.

1:10pm Tikal pyramid 2 5/8

A plaza cut from time and wrought in stone. Majesty cast in grey and palm. A handful of children play games at the pyramids base, probably not dissimilar to the ones played centuries ago.

Orange and yellow leaves carpet the ground, Stella’s like tombstones keep their silent watch.

Here, power and beauty ride in the same handcart.

Also, apparently these temples took generations to build.

1:20 PM grand plaza 5/8

Random thoughts

The sun as weapon of worship.
It’s easier to carry a priest than a limestone block.

10:10 PM Jungle Lodge, Flores 5/8

Horseflies or their meso-american cousins are the weapon of choice in a Tikal bungalow.

4:15 am jungle lodge 5/9

I woke up under a mosquito net I probably didn’t need, but probably would in three weeks time, in the bathroom is a bug the size of my fist, outside is what I can only describe as the sound a herd of velociraptor would make if they were being consumed by a much more dangerous herd of velociraptor.

I’m off to have breakfast with a Mayan priest, and then watch the sunrise over the pyramids.

Howler monkies. It was howler monkies.

5:51 am Tikal pyramid 4 5/9

Step into the sacred.

Dozens of people sit silently on the top of the world, no sound.

No, there are sounds, but only the monkies and the birds and the sky.

Fog rolls across the blue.

The spires of the three temples cut through the canopy.

9:07 am jungle lodge 5/9

“Make sure your yes is yes and your no is no.” –Carlos

“Never spit against the wind, never pee into the sky.” — Carlos

The priest we were going to eat breakfast with hasn’t arrived and may not arrive, which is a shame, how often do you get to break bread with a Mayan shaman.

But, as is the case with most things, an opportunity lost opens the path to another. In this case, I had an opportunity to have a fascinating conversation with Carlos, who owns and operates the jungle lodge.

Carlos who loves nothing more than drink and woman and life and his French-Guatemalan Mayan Shaman… friend Colette (Isapop) who is, if I were to make a guess, at least a small handful of decades his junior.

A relationship I find at once beautiful and fascinating and a touch bizarre.

The conversation itself was brilliant.

As it turns out, in the 70s Carlos was an electronic engineering at the University of Florida, where he stayed until the early 80s. He was there during Apollo 13, living with a host family.

He has an archeologists mind and an open heart and is generally one of the more fascinating characters I’ve run into in my travels.

2:20 PM Tikal, Jaguar Inn 5/9

We met a man named who I will call Caesar in the restaurant at the Jaguar Inn.

A nice guy who has spent about 25 years here and another 20 or so living in New York.

He listens intently when my traveling partner Bruce explains his cosmology – feathers and fire and a little bit of magic.

He seems excited. Really excited about it all, and tells Bruce there is a great place in park to do the fire ceremony he had recently picked up in the Guatemalan highlands. The only problem is that normally you can’t get access to it, and the only time to do it is when the park is closed.

In the end, he tells us to meet him in the park at 5:30, when he’s finishing up a tour he’s running. He wants us to bring a “tip”for the guard and oddly enough a flute.

All he asks for in return is sage, he says it reminds him of his time in the southwest and his mother – which makes a certain amount of sense…actually no, it doesn’t.

Because if it did, that would mean we just setup an chance to raid a ruin after dark in exchange for a bundle incense.

I can’t believe I just typed that.

There is something amiss here.

6:05 PM temple plaza 5/9

Now I understand.

The sun is falling over Tikal, and my traveling partner Bruce is playing his flute for a group of tourists in the ruins of the grand plaza. Our new co-conspirator, Caesar watches on with a not so trivial amount of satisfaction.

You see Caesar had followed through on his promise to get us into park to put on a fire ceremony, what he didn’t tell us is that the actual cost was that Bruce would have to play for his porridge. This we concluded just about the time we saw his entire tour group looking down from temple 2 (?), ready for something to happen, and it became obvious that the something was us.

The rest of the plan came into focus when I saw Caesar videotaping the scene, a video I have a good feeling will end up as promotional material on YouTube.

The best part of all of this is that the whole scheme combines the finest parts of bribery with the finest parts of good marketing. Caesar gets musical accompaniment for his tour, a free lesson in Native American world craft for his guests, and a few extra bucks in his pockets from the tips, and I get to wander around the the park after closed – enjoying the majesty of the temples at night, and Bruce gets to do his ritual in the place where these things are actually done.

Bruce also gets to become an international musical sensation, but that’s a story that is still playing put.

A fantastically weird way to cap off a day in Tikal.

9:30 PM Jungle Inn 5/9

The night truly ends over dinner with a couple from Colorado who are on the second leg of a three part trip between Belize and Guatemala.

We share war stories, travel stories, over chicken and steak.

Early this morning Carlos told me to enjoy myself, that this was paradise. All evidence points to the fact that he was right.

5:58 am Leaving Tikal 5/10

Tikal is magnificent, in just about every day a place can be magnificent, including the shotgun toting guard who greets you at the front gate.

Heading towards Flores all I can think about is how this place managed to take all the best parts of Guatemala and stir them all together into a melange of pure meaning.

It’s what all tourist destination should hope to do, and I am going to miss.

12:12PM MCO 12/13

Passport out, random kitsch stuffed in carry on, no checked bags (this is key), and of course TSA Pre.

The effective traveler is the prepared traveler, especially when you are very, very late.

I was very, very late.

Fortunately, I was also prepared.

My lateness, which is rare since I became too old to revel in the two concourse sprint, is especially conspicuous today because my final destination is Munich, a place that abhors tardiness to such a degree that the shuttle service I pre-ordered to take me to my hotel sent me an URGENT (their emphasis, not mine) message requesting my flight details 10 days ahead of time.

In either case I managed to make it through security in 15 minutes flat, which has to be some kind of record in the usually disastrous Orlando airport.

12:30PM Runway 12/13

As I stepped onto a plane bound to Boston, a kindly flight attendant with silver hair and smart, square glasses told me, “watch your head oh tall one.” I have decided to take this as my guiding metaphor for this trip.

Oh yea, remember that “prepared traveler” thing from 15 minutes ago? It only works if you also check your boarding pass. As I was typing this in my otherwise empty row, I was greeted by an eight year old wizard, who informed me — alongside his mom — that I might have misread my paperwork.

Leave it to a wizard to upstage me when I’m trying to look cool.

1:07PM 30,000 feet up 12/13

One of the relatively few disadvantages of being tall is that large, titanium air boxes — along with some countries (looking at you Japan) — are not built to suit your needs.

This is especially notable when the person in seat in front of you decides to be the only person in the cabin to test out the recline feature on his seat.

There is a novelty postcard in here somewhere.

3:54PM BOS 12/13

Stepped off of the plane.

Read my email.

Discovered that some undisclosed mechanical difficulty has lead to my shuttle in Munich being cancelled.

Ironies stacked on top of ironies.

On the plus side, Logan has a Fudruckers, which pretty much makes up for anything.

5:05 PM Delta Lounge, BOS 12/13

I have a rather complex relationship with airport lounges. For many, a Delta Lounge is a place to go for the spectacularly easy and cheap access to an open bar.

While this is lovely, as a non-drinker, I think that people focus just a tiny bit too heavily on this, and miss the true glory of the lounge experience — where else in the entire airport are you going to find a completely empty, practically unused bathroom? When you’re on a 16 hour trip, this alone is a luxury well worth the $29.

They also have “free” food. Everyone loves free food.

6:41 PM Runway, BOS 12/14

Second leg of the trip is about to begin, sometime tomorrow morning I’ll be in Amsterdam. For now, I find myself sitting in the middle of the center row trying to learn a few words of Dutch from the safety video and wondering whether the power outlets at my feet actually work.

7:39PM Runway 12/14

Our plane was too heavy to take off, which is a surprisingly long ordeal.

10:14PM Over the Atlantic 12/14

People on planes are at least 15% more interesting than people not on planes.

It might be the oxygen deprivation, or the fact that when trapped next to a perfect stranger for eight hours, the only options you have are to be interesting or to be silent.

Tonight, I am sitting next to a MIT Finance guy named Julien, who just so happens to be writing an admissions essay for a second degree in Technology Policy.

Besides telling me about a half dozen utterly unpronounceable German places I am now incredibly excited to visit, we managed a conversation the swung between nationalism and technology, politics and Wurst.

Why? Because that’s the sort of thing you get up to when lost in the black.

8:27 AM (Subjective) Schipol Airport, Netherlands 12/14

Unconsciousness is the new consciousness.

9:01 AM (Subjective) Schipol Airport, NL 12/14

It’s warmer than I thought it would be. It’s warmer but that is more likely the result of the crush of people stacked on top of each other in the tiny, glass gate we have been herded in.

Schipol is a lovely, simple airport and more importantly still, it is unselfconsciously English, which while not surprising is a welcome discovery as my brain works to compensate for the time zone.

Fun fact: MIT makes it’s business students get business cards.

Funner fact: It should be taken as read that if you try to take a photo anywhere near a security checkpoint in Schipol, one or more polite gentlemen will appear out of nowhere to inquiry about your hobby.

9:28 AM (Subjective) Runway, Schipol 12/14

The woman next to me has a partially faded henna tattoo covering the better part of her right hand, which stands in stark contrast to just about everything else about her.

It’s spectacular, like finding an orchid in the ocean.

9:33 AM (Subjective) Runway 12/14

“This is a non-smoking flight, which means you’re not allowed to smoke at any time.”

“When leaving the airplane, high heeled shoes must be removed.”

A couple of gems from the KLM safety video.

I might be slightly delirious.

10:32 AM (Subjective) 336 MPH 12/14

From the sky, Bavaria is an emerald set in blue.

11:22AM (Subjective) S8 12/14

I’m on a train.

I’m not really sure I have a ticket for this train.

What I do have is a piece of paper with a number of German words circled by the nice women at the DB Bahn desk, and I seem to recall paying about 10 Euro 50 for this paper, but beyond that I have very little certainty.

In related news, the nice British women I mistook for some kind of official train person, who is in reality a tourist not unlike myself, is at least partially convinced I’m in the right place, which is something.

If all goes according to plan, I have about 5 stops and a bus between me and my hotel.

11:35 AM (Subjective) S8 12/14

The Bavarian country side is gorgeous and green and full of light.

In front of me is a man in a fantastic hat, having a series of what sounds to be fantastic conversations on his phone — switching fluidly between Spanish and German as he goes.

12:06 PM (Subjective) Englachalking 12/14

The good news is I made it to where I am supposed to pick up the bus. The bad news is that I have less than half a clue where that bus is.

I seem to have been deposited in a pleasant residential area. Everything cast in browns and pale yellow.

For now, I’m walking.

12:45 PM (Subjective) Sheraton Arrabellapark 12/14

Munich is lovely and quiet and charming and pretty flatly brilliant in ever way.

Next time I walk it I hope to not be carrying 20 pounds of kit.

In any case, I have arrived.

Now to very temporarily pass out.

1:19 PM (Subjective) Sheraton 12/14

A bottle of sparking water without a bottle opener, a room full of outlets where only two actually draw power. Thus far, the Sheraton is a puzzle to be solved.

2:55 PM (subjective) Richard Strauss 12/4

Bikes and dogs, dogs and bikes, Munich is a sleepy city, balanced between old world charm and the opening signs of new world construction.

All that being said, Munich’s Metro is kicking my butt. It’s painfully simple, don’t get me wrong, but knowing no German means I’m purchasing tickets at random and hoping not to be arrested.

From what I can gather, 6 euros 30 will get you a day pass for all trains going towards Feldmoching in the North, Aubing in the West, Haar in the East and Hollriegelskreuth in the South. Just under 9 Euros will get you just about anywhere else.

How these tickets work, only time will tell.

3:35 PM (Subjective) Lehel 12/14

The theme of this journal is my infinite capacity for error. I mentioned that Munich was sleepy, well, then I stepped off of the train and was struck full force with Christmas and trees and throngs of people. Here, Munich is quite spectacularly awake.

3:47 PM (Subjective) Andescher am Dom 12/14

Delicious.

Andescher am Dom is delicious.

Oddly, instead of coffee, tea or a mint, they offer after meal cigarettes (unless my translation is very confused).

Considering Europe’s casual relationship with the world’s favorite carcinogen, I’m surprised this isn’t more common.

4:27 PM (Subjective) Weinstrabe 12/14

I step outside again and everything changes. Again.

Now hairy beasts and horned creatures roam the streets. Kettles rattle and drums beat.

The avenues are filled with devil masks.

Devil masks and stalls selling wurst and sweets and a universe of tiny baubles.

There are children everywhere, laughter and smiling.

There’s contradiction here, glorious contradiction beautifully rendered onto the Bavarian landscape.

I think I’ve found the Christmas Market.

6:02 PM (Subjective) Kardinal-Faulhaber Str 12/14

Wandering the streets of Munich.

Cue Accordion music.

No, really.

6:26 PM (Subjective) U3 Platform 12/14

I finally learned how to use the subway tickets, apparently there is a small, unguarded stamp machine before walking onto the platform. You just push your ticket in and get a stamp.

Who checks the stamp? No one! But it seems to be the thing to do.

7:25AM (Subjective) Sheraton 12/15

Munich is like living inside of a Christmas card, complete with all the joy, warmth and mild inconvenience that being confined within a 3 by 6 sheet of heavy card stock entails.

It’s one of the most unrepentantly charming cities I’ve ever had the pleasure to visit. It’s also a city that gives you bottles without bottle openers, and train kiosks with just enough English to make you feel like they shouldn’t be totally inscrutable.

Munich is a host so ready to think the best of its guest, that sometimes it fails to account for the fact that most of its guests will be blithering idiots.

This is in stark opposition to a place like Tokyo, that assumes that each and every one of its guests are clueless and accommodates them accordingly.

Now, to make my way to Central Station. Today I’m leaving Munich for Nuremburg.

P.S. They really, really love their dogs here.

7:50 am (Subjective) Arabellapark 12/15

Drip, drop, drip.

It’s not supposed to rain today, but that doesn’t mean it can’t try.

8:52 am (Subjective) Train to Nuremberg 12/15

My luck remains unbroken, there are usually 20 people on this tour, today there are four.

I’ve finally solved the mystery of the Munich Metro.

According to Jason, the tour guide, the reason the subway system is so confusing is because it’s managed on a spot check system. There are not turnstiles, there is hardly any oversight at all. Dated or single trip tickets should be stamped, but almost no one does.

9:06 AM (Subjective) Train to Nuremberg 12/15

Somehow Munich manages to make even the graffiti look orderly.

10:00 AM (Subjective) Train 2 to Nuremberg 12/15

This train is filled to capacity with children, school groups headed to the Nuremberg Christmas market.

It’s as loud as I’ve ever seen Bavaria. Teenagers translate with a pretty high degree of fidelity everywhere.

P.S. A much, much smarter version of me would have brought an umbrella. It’s not supposed to rain, but based on the drizzle, any rain that does happen will be freezing.

11:07 AM (Subjective) Nuremberg 12/15

I slept my way into Nuremberg.

11:35 AM (Subjective) Nuremberg 12/15

A scattering of things I learned about Nuremberg:

1. Sandstone great for building, bad for growing food. Granaries help.

2. Much of Nuremberg was destroyed during the war, apparently wood burns which didn’t bode well for the city.

3. Albrecht Dorer is from Nuremberg, and Hegel lived here.

4. (One) difference between Nuremberg and Munich is that the former accepted the Reformation.

5. There are lots of are dialects, some within 15 minutes of each other.

6. 1/5th of the world’s pencils… Nuremberg.

7. Adidas and Puma…Nuremberg.

8. Accordions and dogs! Nuremberg has dog assisted Accordion music, With a costumes to tie it all together.

9. Nuremberg’s clock will put your clock to shame, and teach you the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

10. 200 years of poverty preserved Nuremberg, while Berlin and Munich modernized.

11. Siemens is the biggest employer, go figure.

12. German towns are known for their small manufacturers, “every” town has a little cottage industry located in its outskirts.

1:52 PM (Subjective) Posthorn 12/15

I had the best lunch with an older German women and her friend from New England.

After talking about in laws, traveling alone, and international dietary habits, I learned a few things about German culture:

1. Having your hands in your lap when you eat is impolite, resting your wrist on the table is peachy.

2. There is a big difference between German and American sauerkraut (American kraut is way more sour)

3. The American instinct to ask “how are you?” can be read as impolite. In Germany and in Europe more generally, you only ask if you *really* want to know.

4. Finally, “sine bitte” is how you ask for a check.

As a bonus, bitte in German is roughly equivalent to Prego in Italian.

3:00 PM (Subjective) Nazi Rally Grounds 12/15

The Nazi Rally grounds are quite simply the most bizarre architectural feat I’ve ever witnessed. Designed more as a film set than as a practical space, the rally grounds modified, borrowed, and built over everything in it’s path to give the German people (and international audience) the illusion that the Reich had magically recreated all of the glories of western civilization in one, grand swoop.

They were building a Congress hall in the style of a Coliseum, except bigger, much bigger.

The area was abandoned completely at the beginning of the war, and now only it’s bleached bones stand as a reminder.

7:08 PM (Subjective) Central Station 12/15

Dogs, right?

7:24 PM (Subjective) Central Station 12/15

Sometimes bathrooms are a much more elaborate affair than you expect them to be, and you spend 20 minutes walking around a train station looking for one.

At least during these times Belgian Waffles often become available, so starvation isn’t typically an issue.

7:46 PM (Subjective) train to Arabellapark 12/15

You have a black leather jacket, partially shaved head and a devil may care attitude. You’re sitting on the U4 line heading towards Arabellapark and looking lovingly at an equally leather clad gentlemen with a near identical haircut, who just so happens to be talking to a lovely lady and eating a slice of pizza (pepperoni).

My question is, when is the next time you buy pizza?

It took me just under an hour to find a bathroom and eat food in Central. There is a massive bathroom and about 50 food stands there. Odds are better than average that I need sleep.

9:21 am ( Subjective) Sheraton 12/16

This morning Munich is cast in gray.

If the forecast is to be believed, there is a 30% chance of rain throughout most of the day.

This seems appropriate considering that in about an hour I’m stepping on a train to Dachau, the concentration camp that took the lives of scores of people not one century ago.

10:07 AM (Subjective) Radius Tours 12/16

There are quite a few more people here today than the double handful that showed up at the height of the Nuremberg trip, 32 (or is it 35? There is some kind of discrepancy that they’ve decided to ignore). The mood is surprisingly jovial, like we were all heading off to a West End show rather than, well, a concentration camp.

There are pockets of sobriety, but they are, by far, the exception.

Which leads me to wonder, exactly what prompts you to take an afternoon out of your vacation to visit a concentration camp? My initial theory, it’s the same reason you visit the Eiffel Tower or a particularly large ball of twine, some things need to be seen to be believed.

10:20 AM (Subjective) Train 21 12/16

Our guide today has the world’s greatest (English) accent and solid comic timing besides, “I’m going to carry this banana here so you can see where I am, and then once I’m on the train, I’m going to eat it!”

…

“I need a runner to come with me to help [stop the bus so we can get on], any runners out there?” A moment passes, ” What’s your name?”

“Dylan.”

“Thanks for volunteering so readily Dylan.”

10:51 AM (Subjective) Bus to Dachau 12/16

Dachau is surrounded by a strikingly normal looking residential district. I’m not sure why I expected something different, but I certainly did expect something different.

11:01 AM (Subjective) Dachau 12/16

The greatest tour guide skill is the ability to take a good head count.

11:55 PM (Subjective) Dachau Gas Chamber 12/16

Prisoners were hanged in front of the furnaces where they would be burned.

The Nazis never could seem to do anything by half measures…

1:20 PM (Subjective) Dachau Prison 12/16

Human beings have a near infinite capacity to do violence to one another.

I walk through a prison within a prison, treading on ghosts. I’m cold in my scarf and jacket and gloves. It’s impossible to imagine being here in less than a t-shirt starving, beaten, sometimes forced to stand for days or weeks at a time.

2:30 PM (Subjective) Train To Munich 12/16

What makes you visit a concentration camp? I still don’t know.

4:45 PM (Subjective) Pinakothek Der Moderne 12/16

Herre is “Men” in German.

Things you learn from almost embarrassing bathroom moments.

Also, Munich museums are enormous and they don’t like you bringing in umbrellas. Fortunately there are lockers available for two Euros. Euros you will get back upon gathering your stuff. A useful incentive for the casually forgetful.

1:33am (Subjective) Sheraton 12/17

For reason that are not entirely clear to me, I decided that the best way to to ensure I get to the airport on time is to stay up all night watching Bob Ross on mute while listening to an audiobook on George Lucas.

6:21am (Subjective) Sheraton 12/17

Jazzercize followed by a historical biopic that opens on a herd of sheep, Alpha, you never disappoint.

8:50 am (Subjective) Munich Airport 12/17

If nothing else, the fact that I made it here on time proves unequivocally that I managed to master the trains of Munich!

There is, however, quite a bit else. When I first arrived in Munich I thought it was just a charming city with slightly wonky public transit ticketing. Now I see it’s a city that balances layers of history alongside the unrepentantly modern.

Nuremberg and Dachau only served to put a finer point on this, showing two very different lenses that Germany can be viewed through — the golden age of late medieval power and the depths of 20th century human deprivation.

While not nearly as strange as some other places I’ve visited, it doesn’t seem to want to be. Instead, it embraces simplicity, practicality and comfort and invites us to ride a bike, enjoy some wurst, and maybe bring along a dog for good measure.

9:03 AM (Subjective) Munich Airport 12/17

About 20 minutes ago I was waved into the fast track lane along with a half dozen other passengers by a staff member of the major US airline I find myself on today. It made sense, the line to customs was enormous, and the flight to Atlanta was about to board.

Apparently, the customs agent didn’t see it that way, and what followed was a first for me — a shouting match between the German police and the airlines staff.

Ultimately we were all (grudgingly) let through, and the officer (grudgingly) washed his hands of the entire situation.

Yet another victory for expediency over security.

9:37 AM (Subjective) Runway 12/17

People in my section seem 10-15% more stressed out than seems reasonable based on the fact that our flight has, thus far, gone off without a hitch.

6:27 AM MCO 6/4

“Cell phones contain metal.” When you can’t help but be late to airports, especially an airport like Orlando International, this is the sort of thing you expect to hear. Lines leading to lines leading to lines, many first time flyers, all a bit confused, you learn to cut people a little slack. The metal thing though, I hadn’t considered that this might be the revelation, but then again I’m usually all but undressed by the time I hit the boarding pass check, so I might be a special case.

A morning flight to Hong Kong. I haven’t bothered checking how long, about ten hours in it won’t really matter. What is interesting is that the usual low hum of half-charged laptops and layover despair has been replaced by the crooning of children with light sabers and Nintendo DS’. This demographic shift is likely the result of our first stop at JFK. Either that or Hong Kong is a much more exciting vacation spot than I give it credit for. There is one other guy reading a book on China who is likely in it for the long haul, in tshirt and jeans he has the sort of interested focus reserved for those mentally prepared for spending the better part of the day at 30,000 feet. I wonder if he brought an umbrella, I brought an umbrella, it’s going to rain.

9:27 am JFK 6/5

Grey and miserable in JFK. I spent most of the trip here sleep walking, all my normal electronic distractions no real match for the fact that I had skipped out on sleep for the past while. I plan to be here again in a month for a more extended stay, but for now…terminal one and breakfast.

9:58 am JFK 6/5

There should be a phobia associated with the recognition that this might be the last US toilet you see in a while. There’s one for being out of mobile phone contact…

The bad thing about being groggy while trying to navigate an airport that has the gall to force you outside of security and onto a train to get to another terminal is that you tend to get lost. I wouldn’t know anything about that though…

12PM JFK 6/5

Charge phone, download Cantonese primer, read Wikitravel, find choose your own adventure game books on tablet, ponder options chains, stare longingly at Turkish snack stand. Check.

1:38 PM Tarmac (Japan Airline) 6/5

Stepping onto my flight, I realize that each attendant on Japan Airline is in a heated battle to see who can be the most fastidiously polite. Smiles and bows and thank you’s flow over me. A welcome change from JFKs strikingly boring terminal. Unfortunately, I also realize that I have a middle seat, which for a person my height on a flight this long is bound to lead to some fantastically awkward moments. It could be worse, it could be the window. People like window seats for some reason, those people have no clear understanding of rest room politics.

3:14 PM (Subjective) 10,000 FT 6/5

Something, something, something, baggage delay. Finally, we are in the air. New York recedes under a thin layer of clouds. Sunlight streams in. The journey begins in earnest.

4:44 PM (Subjective) In the sky 6/5

When given a choice between chopsticks and a fork you must always choose the option that, through it’s very inconvenience, makes you feel like a more authentic participant in the culture. When seated next to another American traveler, this choice becomes all the more imperative, because nothing says, “I am an urbane man of the world” like trying to pick up a strawberry between two pieces of wood.

5:15 PM (Subjective) the sky 6/5

The biggest danger of travel is to cast everyone you meet in the role of object lesson, designed by the Universe to teach you something about living. It’s a surprisingly seductive position to take, and I think most of us find ourselves defaulting to it at some point. The real lessons, I have to believe, are found in recognizing the fact that everyone has somewhere to be, some quest or another that they are trying to accomplish, and that you are just an incidental set piece in that story. There is richness in piecing together tiny pieces of those missions.

10:32 PM (Subjective) 59:52 N 165:32 W 6/5

It’s either 10:33 PM or 11:33 AM depending entirely on your frame of reference. In fact, where I am right this second it’s 6:33 PM. Time travel is complicated because looking out the cabin window it looks like the middle of the afternoon, yet despite the report of my senses, my brain is convinced that I’ve already done this today.

5:04 PM (subjective) Narita Tarmac 6/6

We are late. My flight boards in 50 minutes. The race is on. In other news, Narita is made of fog.

5:40 PM (subjective) Narita Airport 6/6

And by race I, of course, meant relatively leisurely stroll through Narita’s efficient terminals, and arrival just in time for a 20 minute delay.

6:05 PM (subjective) Narita Airport 6/6

Western business man traveling to Hong Kong to visit factory. Discusses at length with stranger. Wife not amused.

7:28 PM (subjective) the air 6/6

A cloud like a slab of concrete, dark and and oddly dense, hangs motionless in the sky, backlit by a hard line of dark orange. If you told me that you could stand on it, that it was some hidden sky bound outpost, I would believe you.

The sun sets over somewhere.

11:16 PM (subjective) roads of Hong Kong 6/6

Hong Kong officially boasts one of the most organized Taxi systems I’ve ever had the pleasure of participating in. Instead of the hundred or so strangers screaming at you to get in their car, Hong Kong has lines and complaint cards and something that resembles orderly progression. That being said I apparently picked the hotel not served by my prepaid voucher, which sort of defeats the purpose when all is said and done.

From the road, Hong Kong is very tall. It’s built unapologetically skyward, aggressively so. All tall buildings surrounding central waterways.

1:18 am (subjective) Hyatt regency, Kong 6/6

The good news is that the Hyatt Regency at Sha Tin is a spectacularly nice hotel, one of the nicest perhaps I’ve ever been to internationally. The bad news is that it is about 12 miles away from Central Hong Kong, which means the first order of business is figuring out how the Public transportation systems works.

8:23 am (subjective) Hyatt regency, Hong Kong 6/7

It’s rainy reason in Hong Kong through November, which can be distinguished from non-rainy season by the 70-90% chance of rain extending ad infinitum. With what shall have to pass for the sun up the view outside my window becomes a brilliant tapestry of contradiction with mountains rising in the distance, high rises spreading out to the south, and a gaggle of tourists playing out by a hotel poll beneath my feet and the MRT whizzing by.

9:39 am Kwun Tong Line 6/7

People, people, people, people, trains. British voices, Cantonese script. University to Yau Ma Tei in an hour or less.

Like all trains before it the MRT houses crushes of bored people cacooned in the warm glow of their smart phones.

mTrip is still not interested in believing I’m in Hong Kong.

10:10 am Tin Hau temple 6/7

Hong Kong is a sweaty city. Ten minutes of walking and it’s already dripping off of me. I visit a temple in the middle of skyscrapers. It’s a temple and “community rest area” which means older Chinese men playing Go and younger men smoking, a few wheelchairs, a smattering of low key vendors.

The air of the temple itself is filled with incense smoke, so much so that the people working inside wear masks. The incense is alive within its walls, tendrils of living smoke bringing prayers into the ether.

11:05 am Hong Kong history museum 6/7

In many way Hong Kong feels familiar, not so much as a place like Singapore but certainly moreso than Tokyo. Hong Kong’s history museum, complete with chattering students, and English narrated videos elucidating on ancient rock formations, would not seem out of place in New York City or even Orlando, Florida.

Three quick facts: salt seems to be the currency of early Hong Kong culture; there were groups of people who lived almost entirely on boats, known fascinatingly enough as Boat Dwellers; except for the museums of art, history and heritage, Hong Kong museums seem to have fantastically poor ratings.

Three more: Hoklo marriage rituals include a dragon dance, salt is made in a series of evaporation ponds and Hong Kong has a startling amount of English.

12:54 PM Hong Kong history museum 6/7

The Hong Kong history museum is breathtaking, scenes from Hong Kong history are recreated at scale in many places. You step through the past as you learn more about it.

2:58 PM Cameron road 6/7

Indonesian lunch at Bali, quick subway stop, The sun shines. Inbound to the Avenue of the Stars.

3:31 PM avenue of the stars 6/7

Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and cargo ships sponsored by the Mega Events Fund. A dragon boat race backed by drums. The air smells of salt with weak traces of sewage. And as it turns out Janis Joplin described herself as a weirdo among fools, and was voted as “ugliest man” in her highschool.

Hong Kong is a polluted city. This is no more apparent than when you look out over the water and realize the fog went away hours ago but the haze remains.

5:00 PM Tsim Sha Tsui Station 6/7

Bought what I thought was Green Tea, turns out it was Ginseng and Honey, which is surprisingly intense, especially when you think you’re getting Green Tea. After getting hopefully lost, I made it to my train. Hong Kong vending machines seem only to want to take coins, and it’s about 92 degrees out, so my new mission is to squirrel them away as ward against dehydration.

5:35 PM central 6/7

Welcome to Central where the skyscrapers get taller and more beautiful, and the Porsches and expats come out to play. I just shot a picture at an angle, which I am fairly certain represents appropriate, regional hipster cred.

The worlds longest escalator. Unsure where exactly it goes, but it goes there for quite sometime which makes it deeply satisfying. As it turns out the mid level escalators lead to some sort of expat oasis called Soho, restaurants and stores stuffed to the gills with English speakers.

6:05 PM somewhere in central 6/7

The weather hits it’s sweet spot. This close to the financial district the game becomes Beamer, Porsche or BMW. Porsche is winning by a hair.

Up the stairs and across the bridge, into the parks I go. And apparently into a Cathedral as well. Hong Kong is a different place in the evening, without the swelter. It’s a place at peace.

7:13 PM peak tram line 6/7

Hundreds of people waiting to see the cities highest point. As night falls and taxis move through the street in earnest, the throng pulses. There is beauty here, a kind of glorious human beauty of shared purpose.

Also a film crew, I apparently forgot to mention the film crew.

8:18 PM sky tram 6/7

Up and up we go.

11:28 PM Hyatt Regency

With 10% battery life left on my GPS I made the executive decision to conserve it, especially since the most notable part of the trip down from the peak (which was a brilliant carnival of people and neon and smart phone camera clicks) was a girl who had decided that screaming at her mother for 20 minutes was the very height of comedy. The patience I witnessed there was something to behold.

Hong Kong is alive. There is poetry to this city. Part of it, I imagine, is the tension between its western and eastern influences. I eat food that I’d see nowhere else, visit temples to deities I’ve never heard of, learn history from a perspective that is totally alien to me and yet if I squint hard enough I can imagine that I am in almost any major, western city. It’s a fascinating dichotomy, one I hope to explore further when I visit Lantau island in the morning.

Also, I found a 7/11 100 yards away from my hotel.

7:36 am University Station 6/8

I’m finally becoming used to public transportation here, which is swell considering I’ve had just under 7 hours of sleep over the last 72 hours. It’s a game I play with myself to avoid jet lag, I figure if my body has no idea what time it is at any given location it can’t get confused when it goes back to the States. This theory has yet to be proven out, but it does buy me a handful of extra hours to futz with my tablet.

It’s not quite raining yet, but it really wants to.

8:27 AM Middle Road, Tsim Sha Tsui 6/8

3502. Thanks Dave.

8:41 am bus 3502 6/8

The relative level of plush chotskies found in Chinese vehicles is incredible. I’m not sure if this is a Hong Kong thing but I haven’t seen more Iron Men, Snoopies, Donald Ducks and Angry Birds since, well, ever.

9:00 am Bus 3502 6/8

Our final motley consists of 7 people including myself. Two of likely UK extraction, two likely of Indian. Two who seem undecided, instead spending this initial leg of the trip looking out the window as we pass by Hong Kong’s hazy skyline on the way to the ferry.

The rain changed it’s mind, at least for the moment, the morning is gorgeous.

9:26 am ferry to Lantau island 6/8

There are two main classes of travelers I’ve come across, the solipsists and the communtarians. I would say they are split fairly evenly across the population. Solipsists travel as a mediation on their own reality. They tend to travel alone or in pairs. They’re quiet. The exist slightly outside of the space they inhabit, and their primary conceit is to uncover how this world reflects back onto them. How it changes them. How they, in some small way, affect it.

Communtarians travel to experience somewhere new in the context of people. Whether it’s the local population or their own friends, family, bar mates, or consorts doesn’t really matter. They travel in packs. They make friends, ingratiating themselves with everyone around them. They exist deeply within every experience, driving them forward and stamping it with something entirely their own.

On the far ends of this spectrum you tend to find the same thing, selfishness.

Where do I fall? I’ll leave that one to you.

9:59 am (subjective) ferry to Lantau 6/8

Little children sitting next to you on ferries with their parent remind you of how important a sense of awe is.

10:24 AM (subjective) Lantau Island 6/8

Lantau used to be a farming and fishing island, then it wasn’t, now cows and water buffalo roam and they have a new airport.

Lantau Island, local population: farmers (former), fishermen (former), monks, nuns and prisoners (current). There are four prisons on Lantau island and about 100 monasteries.

Fun fact: once you are done eating one side of a fish, you shouldn’t turn it over or you might make a ship capsize.

Fun fact: The religion of the island — finding how to overcome troubles — anger, jealousy, vexation.

Fun fact redux: Silent houses are private places of worship.

11:25 am Lantau Fishing Village 6/8

Tourism is a bizarre. Visiting this village is like dragging a boat through someone’s backyard, in fact, it precisely is. There is a mild perversity to it all, humanity as spectacle. Life as sideshow. I saw a couple of tourists snapping pictures from what at one point was someone’s home. They waved at us. We waved back.

At the very least we leave them a sizable pile of cash in the bargain.

11:47 am Lantau Island 6/8

Our tour guide has a poetic cadence to the way that he presents information. He makes a point and then repeats it once, twice, a third time but just when you think you could plucks the words out of his mouth he tacks on a totally new point and everything changes.

Taoism. Confucianism. Buddhism.

Balance. Relationships. Emptiness.

12:13 PM (subjective) Latau Buddha 6/8

There is nothing so certain to drive a child to throw coins than a sign explicitly stating not to throw coins.

Humidity may have just passed 500%.

There would be a substantial business in importing foreign specific beverages put out by major brands like Coke and Pepsi. I’d pay quite a premium to be able to find Minute Maid Peach in the States (at least a version with actual Peach)

1:17 PM Po Lin Monastery 6/8

I pulled a big stack of Jokers this time, as it turns out I was totally wrong, everyone was from Oceania. Four Aussies and two New Zealanders. Two are on stopovers from France and two are on a grand tour of Asia. Lovely people one and all.

2:09 PM Po Lin “Village” 6/8

Hint: it’s a shopping center.

Also, it is quite nearly too hot to think.

Finally, umbrellas as heat protection are strongly in vogue.

3:17 PM (subjective) bus to Kowloon 6/8

The cable car from Lantau is an absolute wonder, not only because it gives you a Birdseye view of the island, but it also traps you in a small glass box with your tour mates, where you can discuss the intricacies of aboriginal health care, the joys of the Hong Kong prison system, and why Chicago should never be experienced in Winter.

I am fairly certain school children are riding our bus.

4:40 PM (subjective) central 6/8

I wonder if it is pure coincidence that the holistic medicine museum is at the very top of about 150 steps.

6:42 PM (subjective) harbor city 6/8

It’s a mall.

A poorly organized mall.

A poorly organized mall I might be hopelessly lost in.

This might be a function of diminished mental capacity borne of lack of sleep, heat exhaustion and hunger. After further consideration I retract my previous statement.

Harbor City is a mall.

8:13 PM harbor city 6/8

My headphones died today. I now have Hong Kong headphones, may they live on longer than their Korean brothers.

8:40 PM Hung Hom Line 6/8

Couple gropes on train. They may or may not be children. Nonetheless they are tiny. Girl who is likely not a child stands between cars, staring longingly. Woman who is certainly not a child has an animated conversation, leaning near the door. These headphones are quite lovely. Time to head home.

12:04 am (subjective) Hyatt Regency 6/8

“Is Sha Tin Apple Pie worth putting on pants for?” a question worth asking in your hotel room at midnight.

Answer: sort of.

8:57 am (subjective) YMCA 6/9

Hong Kong has a fantastic public transportation system, I know this because of my extraordinary ability to get hopelessly lost. Despite every cell in my body wanting to put me on a ferry to Mainland China or cast myself out into some dark alley never to be heard from again, the MTR manages to keep me relatively secure.

Today is the Land Between Tours which explores the New Territories. That much I know, the rest I’m a bit fuzzy on.

9:19 am bus near harbor 6/9

$20000 per square foot, what it will cost you to live on the harbor.

Sue is a pro.

We are now listening to an educational tape, which I will say is a first. Well done Sue, well done.

Things to remember: Evil spirits fly in straight lines, thus slanted temple roofs. In the 80s most toilets were open fronted, and many Chinese were curious of westerners, hilarity ensues. Burn a Benz get it in the next life.

Sue was Mongolian in a past life, teaches yoga currently, is looking for a millionaire, and spent seven years or so traveling through Asia.

10:09 am on the bus 6/9

Unsorted facts written in B minor:

Hong Kong has 6 of the most popular McDonalds, blame Snoopy. Hong Kong also has the most millionaires per square miles. The relationship between these two facts remains uncertain.

The PLA now live where the British soldiery used to, the difference is the PLA can’t leave their barracks. Trees in full bloom on the Chinese New Year bring wealth and good luck, they are pretty serious about this, which makes horticulture a bit of a gambit.

Cars are used as a status symbol because all apartments look the same, 4% of people own a car, there is a 110% luxury tax, and that’s why there aren’t any cars on the road and the ones there are are BMWs, Benzs and Porsches.

11:09 am Pang family village 6/9

If you want to understand the wealth of someone in Hong Kong look at their cars, not their homes, extraordinarily modest housing (that doesn’t necessarily have running water) can on occasion hide extreme wealth. There is a lesson here.

Man does Tai Chi with umbrella, zero irony, he does not look the least bit silly, in fact, he looks quite fierce. There is a lesson here.

11:52 am Hakka Village 6/9

On the way to Hakka village. They are farmers who immigrated to Hong Kong hundreds of years ago, and are being displaced as traditional farming practices die.

The also are not to keen on having photos taken of them. The game, taking pictures of the village without stealing anyone’s soul.

12:15 PM (subjective) Hakka Village 6/9

The Hakka village is mostly empty, the older men have died and the younger have moved away. Now, it’s mostly manned by older women. It’s the most deeply peaceful place I’ve visited in Hong Kong.

1:07 PM somewhere on the road 6/9

Spoke about economic development with an Australian gentlemen, chatted a bit with a Russian women living in Singapore who speaks German.

Three hours a night of sleep eventually catches you around the throat. I’m wading through my afternoon in a light haze, which is quite relaxing but does make it hard to think about thoughts for more than fifteen seconds on a stretch, Sue keeps us awake with stories of her travels on the Transcontinental railroad and backpacking across China. The taped voice she puts on afterwards offers a fine opportunity to nap.

1:30pm near Hong Kong harbor 6/9

“And we did take it in a Opium War.” Sue on returning Hong Kong island past Boundary Street when the British government didn’t necessarily have to.

“To be slim, use 2B” context withheld.

3:00 PM harbor city 6/9

Two Australians, a Canadian, an American and a British Ex Pat all walk into a dim sum restaurant in Hong Kong and decide to talk politics. The punch line is obvious. It was probably the most interesting conversation I’ve had in ages.

4:23 PM page one, harbor city 6/9

This is how long it took me to find the book store in Harbor City. The Bookstore I passed four times less than a day ago.

5:26 PM science museum 6/9

Despite it’s relatively low ratings on mTrip the Hong Kong Science Museum has two major advantages: first, it’s air conditioned; second, it’s really, really close to harbor city which is also air conditioned.

6:06 PM (subjective) Space Museum 6/9

“This is English Channel” I fully retract any negative statement I might have made about the Space Museum. Where else can you see an IMAX production called We Are Aliens in Cantonese while wearing giant headphones and the largest 3D googles I’ve ever seen? There is a part of me that thinks this getup was designed to make their point.

6:38 PM (subjective) Space Museum 6/9

I fell asleep…

7:05 PM subway outside science museum 6/9

Tricycle falls.
Little girl doesn’t.
Violent tears fill the air.

Free government wifi, that’s cool.

7:45 AM Cab to Airport 6/10

Hong Kong is a hot, crowded, polluted and unmistakably lovely city. While it’s not as dense with cultural signposts as some places (I’m looking at you Rome), it’s the type of city that rewards you in more subtle ways. It’s a living city, not a theme park for tourists, and as such what you take out of it is derived from living in it alongside it’s people — from pushing your way onto a train and sweating in the streets and eating some dim sum.

I’m going to miss Hong Kong more than most, and considering the next gift it offers me is a 19 hour layover in Narita, that’s saying something.

8:22 AM (subjective) Hong Kong Airport 6/10

Items prohibited in Hong Kong: tear gas, knuckle dusters, and stun guns. There goes that idea.

1:46 PM (subjective) 0:52 minutes outside Japan 6/10

Feverishly trying to devise a way to get into Tokyo to wile away my 20 hour layover, without setting myself up for a missed flight. This should be interesting.

3:55 PM (subjective) Narita Airport

Narita has sunshine, what strange omens are these?

5:23 PM (subjective) Skyliner Train Station 6/10

I’m officially off the reservation.

I’ve never taken a train in Tokyo, but after Hong Kong I’m feeling fairly confident. And the suns out, which is practically a miracle. Add to that the fact that I have a hotel now, and my immediate condition is nothing to sneeze at.

I’m heading to Akihabara (sort of), the route for anyone keeping track should be the number one train to Ueno with a transfer Aoto, from there take the train to Misaki-guchi and stop at Asakusa-bashi. Things from there get hazy but it involves walking.

This train moves more slowly, not as far as actual speed on the track goes. In all likelihood it is much, much faster than any train HK can muster, but it stops for substantially longer and even has a real, live human being manning the door.

I always forget how green Japan can be.

7:49 hotel 6/10

I always forget how Japan Japan can be. I find myself in a 10 x 10 box, complete with a hot plate and a lovely view of the side of a building. On my TV is a commercial for a television show which, from what I can gather, is about filming women on the street and commenting on their breasts. Oppai!

9:13 PM Gundam Cafe 6/10

Mission one accomplished, eating at a restaurant modeled on Gundam Wing. If that isn’t super exciting to you, consider yourself a reasonable adult.

11:58 PM (subjective) sotobori-dori 6/10

Tokyo is quiet, cool and mostly closed. The last trains are running and I’m heading home. What did I do? Mostly hung out in giant, smoky arcades playing fighting games with Otaku.

6:02 AM (subjective) Hotel Yanahibashi 6/11

I need to shave, badly.

In other news I don’t think I have cellular service anywhere in Tokyo. Curious.

8:05 am (subjective) Skyliner towards Narita 6/11

I bought a reserved seat on the Skyliner to Narita, I’m not entirely certain I wanted to do either of these things, but the train is absolutely lovely and quite a bit less crowded than the transfers I took to get here.

Fun fact, leaving Tokyo is as easy as getting to Nippori Station, how you manage that is the adventure.

11:20 AM (subjective) Nirita Airport 6/11

In the air.

11:59 AM Boston Logen Airport 6/11

On the ground.

Time travel, you’re a lovely mistress.

7:23 PM MCO 12/13

I feel overdressed. This isn’t as difficult as it may seem when you’re flying out of Orlando where the temperature, even in the middle of December, is hovering around 80 degrees. Overdressed, yes, but not for long. I’m on my way to Istanbul via Frankfurt, Germany where the temperature promises to be 50 degrees cooler.

The big difference this go around is that I find myself on the wrong side of the red eye. It’s 8PM rather than 8AM so instead of barely conscious corporate zombies praying for a complimentary upgrade for their rent-a-ride, I’m faced with the manic energy of nascent vacationers faced with what is most likely the first leg of a journey that will, depending on the vagueries of time zones, take them into the middle of tomorrow afternoon.

As I settle in, my first order of business is explaining the difference between a Samsung tablet and a Samsung phone to a pleasant woman of indeterminate mid-Asian origin, and my next is a race against time to collect as many Turkish language podcasts as I can until I’m rendered WiFi-less for the next 8 hours. Meanwhile some small part of my brain is trying in vain to parse the idea of going to Istanbul. The thought smells of cinnamon, and feels like the breeze of the Mediterranean.

8:11 PM Runway 12/13

The star of Luftansa’s safety briefing looks a lot like a slightly younger, substantially more computer generated Martin Sheen. One of the many pleasant surprises so far on this flight so far, alongside free blanket, pillow, headphones and legroom (I’m looking at you U.S. Airways).

3:21 AM 30,000 Ft 12/14

Metal utensils for dinner, plastic utensils for breakfast. The vagueries of inflight economics never cease to fill me with wonder.

Luftansa is one of the few airlines I’ve been on in recent history that hasn’t seemed to subscribe to the theory that it’s passengers were just mildly annoying and misshaped cargo containers that it was economically viable for them to carry.

10:30 AM (Subjective) FRA 12/14

Touchdown Frankfurt, it’s grey and rainy and time travel is working against me. My brain keeps thinking it’s 4:30 AM, mostly because it’s 4:30 AM, Germany just seems unable to believe this.

10:57 AM (Subjective) FRA 12/14

The bathrooms in FRA are broom closets, no, I’ve been in broom closets before and they were quite a bit more accommodating. It does provide an amusing distraction from the half-mile walk to my gate as I watch a half dozen people try to squeeze themselves and their baggage into a room that they quickly discover was designed for two.

Otherwise FRA has a sort of sterile, industrial beauty that perfectly compliments the iron grey sky…

5:23 PM (Subjective) Turkey Airport 12/14

Traded war stories with a traveler from Oklahoma. She told me about Argentina, I told her about Budapest. She told me about cattle, I told her about Fencing. Both of our siblings are lawyers, and we both agree that Florida is best described through the lens of Dexter. Now I’m waiting in line for a Visa, cash only — where cash is Lira, Euros or Dollars. Istanbul is dark, smells of sweet tobacco and I am tired.

6:16 PM (Subjective) Turkey Airport 12/14

WiFi can save your life, or get you a car service. In this case I need it for the latter. Since most of my short term memory is stored in the cloud these days, the lack of wireless Internet left me relying on modestly informed conjecture when the car company asked me about my return flight (to arrange a pickup). I imagine this little embellishment will eventually come back to bite me in the tuckus, but for now I have a ride to my hotel which is more than I could save for about 20 minutes ago.

Fun fact – According to a nearby sign now that I have landed in Turkey, Sbarro is the only thing that can complete my journey. I respectfully disagree.

6:46 PM (Subjective) Istanbul 12/14

All modern cities have the same roads. All western-ish democracies have at least one radio station that plays nothing but American music from the mid-90s. The Mediterranean is a beautiful sight even at night. A small child on a bicycle almost gets hit as he flies out in front of our shuttle. One of these things is not like the other.

7:20 PM (Subjective) Ambassador Hotel 12/14

Rule One, don’t drink the water. Rule Two, like most major cities if you happen to have a pre-existing heart condition avoid the shuttle and taxi drivers. Rule Three, tip. Rule Four, tip. Rule Five, Turkish hospitality is intense.

9:04 PM (Subjective) Adonin 12/14

Istanbul, at least the tiny snippet of the place I’ve seen from the vantage of this little jewel of a cafe is a lovely and eclectic mix of old and new. The only analog I’ve been able to come up with is Rome, which is apt considering the cities parallel histories. While Palaces and Mosques have replaced Colosseums and Churches the spaces between are still dotted with the same trendy restaurants and up market shops that you might expect from a thoroughly modern city.

This does alter the way that I explore though. I rarely shop and I only eat a rather standard number of daily meals, so much of why I move about a city is to take in the differences. In Istanbul, those differences are of degree rather than form. Like London or Paris, and unlike cities like Toyko or Cusco what you’re exploring is the culture and the people rather than the highways and the byways.

12:00 AM (Subjective) Istanbul 12/14

30 seconds out the door and a guy who claims to be from Kajikstan asks me to follow him to a bar (a common tourist scam, which ends in me paying hundreds or thousands of Lira I didn’t want to on drinks). He asked where I was from, I said Canada. He kept talking. I claimed to only speak Italian. He continued. I said in pigeon English that I was meeting my Canadian friends a half mile away. He nodded and walked away. I’m too tired for this.

7:40 AM ( Subjective) Ambassador 8/15

Sitting on the roof of the Ambassador hotel, watching the sunrise over the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul is a different city. The question that cuts through my sleep addled brain is whether this scene of soft light and squawking gulls the “true” Istanbul, or is it the crush of crowds below? Neither I suspect and both. When you stay in the tourist quarters you live by the distortion that such placement imposes. You are seeing a city with its best dress on, both more real, more distinctive and more full of artifice. You’re seeing the glories of history played out as theatre. There is truth here if you know what to look for but to understand it you have to see it interpreted through lens.

Today I sail the Bospherous and get a chance to widen my focus point ever so slightly.

8:11 AM (Subjective) Road to Takim 8/15

A row of people fishing off the Galata Bridge, skyscrapers and graffiti and the Italian tourists sitting behind me on the bus. If I’m right I’ve just crossed from Europe into Asia. I’m very likely wrong.

8:55 Asian Side

I was, in fact, wrong. What my guide has taught me so far. Turkish people like Soccer, and cheating at Soccer. The best team is on the Asian side. You can’t cross the bridge into the Asian side by foot, too many people jumped. You work in Istanbul and live on the Asian side. Apparently the Bospherous is dangerous for boats and likely for people but that’s just me.

Turkish Soccer Weekend: Beer, Match, Throwing Things, Fight, Police, Sleep. Repeat. Your odds of being arrested are directly proportional to your team.

9:42 AM (Subjective) Camlica Hill 12/14

Geography is a fascinating thing. I’m standing on Camlica, the highest hill in Istanbul . In front of me Europe, at my tail Asia, separated by a few hundred meters of steel and concrete bridge, pretty impressive stuff yet from here it’s all the same melange of browns and greens and blues, parks and houses and cigar-shaped boats. Two continents in one extended moment.

Geography does have one very concrete consequence, real estate prices. If you found yourself so disposed you could own a house at the edge of the Bospherous for between 5 and 100 million dollars.

The Malaysian woman asked Ali our tour guide why there are so few women wandering the streets of Istanbul. After a brief pause to contemplate, Ali’s response was that they are at home making (and taking care of) babies. His more considered response was that about 50% of Turkish families are “traditional” with the men working and the women rearing children. It colors the city as much as any architectural flourish.

11:49 AM (Subjective) Road to Spice Market 12/14

Palaces teach us how spectacularly modern life has become. Even the nicest rooms in the nicest palace is an order of magnitude less comfortable than a cheap side apartment. Less gold though.

I’m also starting to learn that the joke to speech ratio of the average Turk is somewhat higher than average, laughter and truth ride in the same carriage.

2:04 PM (Subjective) Spice Market 12/4

The spice market is an auction house, where the first lesson is that not all Turkish Delight is created equal, and the second is that everyone is your best friend when they want your Lira.

One day I will learn conversational Estonian and finally be immune to street peddlers.

3:33 PM (Subjective) Bospherous

Istanbul is an Ottomon city. It’s architecture is Ottomon, it’s history is Ottomon and you understand it best when you consider it first from that perspective. As I float across the Bospherous I wonder what it might have been like to sit at the heart of an empire that stretched across three continents. It certainly would increase the number of forts I had to maintain.

Our tour guide let me in on a secret that I’d begun to suss out earlier after my hotel manager was kind enough to inform me of the Jacuzzi in my room that didn’t actually exist. What is it? That truth in Turkey is an airy and complex thing. This theory holds for taxi cab drivers who forget where you live, restaurant staff who may forget what you ordered, and tour guides like Ali who take great joy in informing some of his clients of his secret lives as professional speech writer and heirs to great fortunes.

5:12 PM (Subjective) Ambassador Hotel 12/15

I’m convinced travelers are, as a species, the nicest people in the world. Today I ran into an Egyptian Professor, an Italian family on holiday, a Malaysian PHD student working on Aircraft Surveillance and oddly enough a couple from Jacksonville. All of them lovely. All of them adding proof to my theory that broadening your perspective is a psychologically ennobling experience without compare.

7:23 AM (Subjective) Ambassador Hotel 12/16

7AM never changes, regardless of whether it is actually an indeterminate time in the morning and/or afternoon on the east coast where my brain still wrongly believes that it is. While sunrise over Istanbul remains beautiful, I’ll be happy to miss it tomorrow in order to get a few more hours of sleep.

Note – I will never be able to hear the word “beautiful” again without thinking of the American woman at the Kebab House last night who referred to every, last scrap of scenery she set her eyes upon as “beautiful”. The appetizers were beautiful, the meal was beautiful, the restaurant was beautiful, hell the pita bread was beautiful (though this was actually quite true, it comes steaming hot and puffed up in a wondrous mound of starchy goodness), I couldn’t quite figure out whether she had simply forgotten other adjectives existed or whether beautiful just seemed, in all cases, to be the only descriptor that could fully capture the majesty of the scene.

Second Note – In Turkey Kebab means something very different than it does in America, there are dozens of different kinds and they are all delicious.

Final Note – The best sign I’ve seen so far was a small shop advertising it’s “Giant ‘Chritmas’ Sale” spelling error aside, for a country that is purportedly 99% Muslim and does not, from what I’ve seen, have even a Christmas light to speak of, this is and endlessly fascinating selling point for a store to hang its hat on.

11:52 AM (Subjective) Grand Bazaar 12/16

“Viagra Tea”. Yea. Welcome to the Grand Bazaar, a brilliantly designed system for extracting Lira from tourists in exchange for generic kitsch and fake rugs.

You learn to be rude. If you stop moving someone will sell you something. The trick is to hunt like an apex predator, find what you want and what you’ll pay for it. Zero in on it and press forward. Ignore distractions, ignore everything but the prize. Capture your prey, pay your Lira, move on. If they don’t give you your price, move on. You can get the same product 500 meters further on. There are 5000 shops after all, all selling the same 200 things. The odds are in your favor.

Confusion, distraction, indecision, weakness, all of these can be expensive mistakes. That being said, if you stop for the right pitch, you’ll probably get some pretty decent Apple tea (which is more like Apple juice than tea) out of it.

Headphones help, especially if you’re like me and you make a little too much casual eye contact.

Pro-Tip – if you want to tell whether a Turkish rug is handmade, check to see how it reflects light. Hand stitched rugs have a bias so that they will always look dark from one end and light from the other. Machine stitched rugs have no bias and so will reflect light identically no matter how you look at it. The affect is obvious and dramatic (especially when dealing with expensive, silk rugs) and understanding this will save you some heartache. This fun fact comes curtesy of Matis, a pleasant little rug shop in the outside section of the Grand Bazaar.

Second Note – Ceramic tile glows in the dark if you mix in some moonstone. They knew this in the 17th century, I imagine it was a pretty wicked affect. Still is.

1:20 PM (Subjective) (Typical) Turkish Restaurant 12/16

Met a fantastic Indonesian couple, in Istanbul on a stop over from
Hanover where they were taking part into a novel treatment program for Diabetes. The husband is an accountant, used to work for Arthur Anderson, so there’s that.

I take tours for the same reason I play Blackjack, you run into some great people at the table.

Note – The food at the typical Turkish restaurant is neither typical not necessarily Turkish. Then again, I couldn’t say as I have yet to get someone to give me a straight answer as to what “typical” Turkish food is.

4:03 PM (Subjective) Topaki Palace 12/16

I’ll never get used to guards with automatic weapons. Also, Topaki Palace would be the first place raided in a Global Holy war. It has the sword of the prophet David, Moses Staff and pieces of the Prophet Mohammad’s beard. This isn’t even mentioning the gold, jewels and giant diamond.

8:37 PM (Subjective) Mozaik 12/16

Should I consider it strange that every restaurant I’ve been to has a 4 1/2 star Trip Advisor rating with an identical plaque letting you know all about it? Nah, gotta be a coincidence.

11:29 AM (Subjective) Outside the Sophia 12/17

It’s sunny out. A far cry from the grey and rain of the previous two days. The city glows.

The economics of scam “tours” at the entrance to Hagia Sophia is complex. Rule of thumb 1 Euro = 2 Dollars = 4 Lira (as of writing). So your 30 Euro “tour” is 120 Lira, about five times the price of a ticket and the same price you’d pay for a professional tour including lunch.

Rule of thumb, don’t buy tours at the entrance to museums.

That being said, the Hagia Sophia is magnificent.

12:30 PM (Subjective) The Tile Museum 12/17

If you walk around the Old City, your first lesson should be that you are little more than a pile of Lira, your job is to keep as many of them in your pocket as you can while dancing around every species of vendor, peddler, swindler that has ever existed.

I’ve taken to pretending that I have an uncertain grasp of Turkish and English and French and well every western language that is thrown my way. It shortens conversations substantially.

5:33 PM (Subjective) Kayikci 12/17

So I was planning to eat at Adonin, when I saw the Italian hostess that I’d run into a few nights ago standing at the restaurant next door. I was a bit confused, so I went over to check that I wasn’t at the wrong restaurant. As it turns out, I wasn’t, she was.

This, along with the Trip Advisor sign that adorns the wall, and the delicious but identical pile of pita bread, leads to a theory I’ve been working out about restaurants at the core of the Old City. I think they are all run from the same (or very similar menus) with the only difference being a few flourishes, the interior decoration, and the prices. I’m no food critic but everything I’ve had here as been universally lovely but functionally identical.

6:05 AM (Subjective) Airport Shuttle 12/18

Empty streets, American lounge music, a shuttle I’ve confirmed three times is, in fact, the one I ordered from Expedia — that can only mean that I’m leaving Istanbul.

I’ll miss it, mostly. Istanbul is an oddly contradictory city. A place of history, hospitality and mercantile excess where you can find some of the loveliest people in the world many of who just happen to be equally interested in extracting every last Lira they can separate you from. True, you could say the same for any country, but in Istanbul’s Old City you can feel this tension as strongly as I ever have.

Biggest lesson? I’m glad I took tours, Istanbul is best experienced with someone who knows how to navigate its contradictions.

8:10 AM Istanbul Runway 12/18

Turkish airlines has the world’s best safety video, including instructions on loosening your tie, unbottoning your collar and removing your heels (as appropriate) as a method of preparing yourself for fiery death. Afterwards, Turkish models teach you how to inflate your life vest, a life vest illuminated by gloriously CGI’d lens flares. It’s practically perfect.

11:34 AM Dusseldorf Airport 12/18

When traveling through Dusseldorf be sure to set aside an extra 30 minutes to participate in their traditional document checking ritual. You’ll have the pleasure of having your passport looked at once when you leave the plane, once before they check your bags, once as you step into your connecting gate and once as you’re about to step onto your next flight. They are as interested in knowing who you are and where you’re going as Bogota Airport is in determining whether you just got back from muling 15 kilos of high quality cocaine. The extra time will also come in handy as they have the strangest gate directions I think I’ve ever seen, a quarter mile of green lines on the floor with the odd tendency to branch and dead-end at random intervals. It’s like a poorly designed video game. All that being said, it’s one of the friendliest airports I’ve ever been to. Seriously. They are frighteningly friendly, even the people at the money changing kiosk who, use to dealing with all manner of horrifying human specimens, typically stare at tourists with the cold, dead eyes of mildly predatory zombies.

6:35 PM (Subjective) 36,000Ft 12/18

Yup, Luftansa is pretty much the best airline ever.

3:15 PM EWR 12/18

Newark currently has a startling creepy pseudo hologram greeting people at the International terminal, welcome home!

10:09 PM Road to Gainesville 12/18

Every single time I said “Mediterranean” earlier in the trip, it should have been either the Golden Horn or the Bospherous. Feel free to mentally find and replace my idiot geography. This is why we travel, I suppose, to get fractionally less contemptible perspectives on the world. Which reminds me of the most interesting thing I heard on the trip, it came from the Indonesian gentlemen I had lunch with. He traveled to the U.S. often and said the only person he met who knew anything about Indonesia, who could even point to it on a map was a shoe shiner at the airport. I don’t know whether that says something very good about shoe shiners or very bad about the rest of us. In either case it’s worth more than a momentary thought.

8:38 am Gainesville 8/10

“Going to Peru to hike the Inca Trail,” which sounds like the punch line to a joke I don’t know the setup to yet. I guess I have until next Thursday to figure it out. For now, I’m zipping towards the airport with my life for a week packed into a single, green backpack — having forgotten my sunglasses, along with quite a few other things I haven’t gotten around to remembering.

Thought: I spend a lot of time daydreaming about the audiobooks I’ll force my future children to listen to with me in the car so that years later they’ll think I’m cool. There is a contradiction of terms in there somewhere.

11:47am MCO 8/10

When I fly in the morning, even out of a major airport like MCO, there is this overwhelming sense that I have joined the ranks of a particularly rare and desultory breed of zombie that has, through inaction, run out of grey matter to occupy its attention and has instead fallen into a deep fugue state to conserve what’s left of its unlife.

When, like today, I fly in the early afternoon I feel like cattle. Moo.

A man at gate one is unselfconsciously practicing a Capoeira hand stand. At gate three a little girl begins using the arm rests as balance beams before being led away by her mother. Nearby, I listen to Ke$ha and daydream of Bogota.

12:33 PM MCO 8/10

When going to Colombia it is good to remember that gate security is very, very interested in knowing who you are, why you’re going and how long you’ll be staying, lest they discover that you are exactly the sort of person who should not be going anywhere near Colombia, and who they’d very much prefer stayed in a dark corner of a security substation under their watchful eye.

2:41 PM 35,000 FT 10/8

Two things I find to be especially interesting at 35,000 feet up: One, the amount of concentration flight attendants must muster to maintain a smile that both never touches their eyes, but also never leaves their faces. Two, the odd and modestly disconcerting recognition that it takes approximately the same amount of time to fly to San Diego, California as it does to Bogota, Colombia.

Here’s a bonus for playing — don’t paint your nails inside a tiny, precariously hovering metal box while piled on top of 80-100 other people, some might consider it mildly inconsiderate.

3:44 PM (Subjective) Bogota 10/8

Welcome to Bogota, where I will be spending the rest of the evening. Scratch that. Lima, I’ll be spending my evening in Lima.

Speaking of Bogota, the Bogota international terminal is quiet, the kind of deathly quiet that makes you want to wear headphones just to break up the silence. The quiet only serves to punctuate the sterile beauty of the terminal, it’s the intense clean of a movie set — all done up in a stark, futuristic gray and black that belies the gaudy richness of the gift shops that line the corridors, I almost want to buy something just so I could better describe it by counterpoint.

Also, free WiFi.

4:48 PM (Subjective) Bogota 8/10

I’m drinking a cafe mocha at a place called the Juan Valdez Cafe, which in the middle of the International Terminal is about as close to authentic Colombian coffee that I’m going to get tonight. It’s good and at least all the signs are in Spanish. I really should have brushed up on my Spanish. Hindsight…

It’s already getting dark, geography is a funny thing.

I’m watching Captain America in Spanish at an American Bistro called “Orleans” right across from the Madrid Gate. I ordered a Po’Boy. It was OK. This might be one of my saddest moments. Based on current evidence, I can now only assume that Colombia is best known for its cafe mochas and Cajun themed sandwiches.

10:56 PM (Subjective) Lima 10/8

I don’t remember the last three hours, it’s a haze of pressure changes, ham and cheese sandwiches and a rather dramatic immigration. I forgot to pick up a customs form. This might become a problem. At least a problem in the relative sense, I’m in Lima until 5AM, it’s not like I’m going anywhere.

11:43 PM (subjective) Lima 10/8

As it turns out the form I saw everyone carrying wasn’t a customs for but a migration one, and through a bit of wishful standing I’ve managed to acquire my own. Too bad it didn’t come with a pen. I almost checked my backpack for one even though I distinctly remember not packing anything resembling a writing utensil. Somehow it seems reasonable to me that I might find one if I rifle through it enough. Immaculate Penception and all that.

The immigration line is one of the great tests of a tourist populations patience, thus far the Peruvians are troopers.

I want to start a publishing company called Immaculate Penception. We’d only publish religious tracts created through automatic writing.

12:27 AM (Subjective) Lima 8/11

Lima’s airport has a magical button that tells you whether your bag has to go through customs. I found the fact that I got the green light and others did not profoundly satisfying.

12:53 AM (Subjective) Lima Airport 8/11

A security agent asked a Ukrainian woman to tell me that apparently I can’t go through security until 2Am. Neither of us was exactly sure why, and the security guard wasn’t telling. That’s OK, that just means I get to eat at Prados Chicken, which may or may not bare some resemblance to what Peruvian cooking is like. It couldn’t be much worse than the McDonalds next door.

Also their sign says “Export Concept” in bold letters to the right. I haven’t determined whether this is a statement of fact, a poor translation or a challenge to potential investors. Language is funny like that.

2:37 AM (Subjective) Lima Airport 8/11

So I’m going to admit something. I don’t feel all that great. For the last few days I’ve been having this weird breathing thing, I’m guessing its the last dregs of a cold I picked up in San Diego and didn’t bother to take care of. Combine that with the extreme lack of sleep and general confusion of travel and I could use some rest in a big way. Just one more leg to go. Tora, tora, tora.

3:13 AM (Subjective) Lima

A man waits in line with some British tourists at 3AM for a cancelled plane to Cusco, he’s sick, tired and massively confused. What does he do? Bonus points for solutions that involve neither violence not tears.

Travel teaches you that life is farce or at the very least a spectacularly persistent parade of dramatic irony.

Now for the million dollar followup: a man’s shuttle is set to bring him from Cusco Airport to his hotel so that he can take a well deserved coma, to motivate this outcome he sent the hotel shuttle service his flight information, that flight information is now null and the shuttle driver has no way of knowing. What should he do? Note the man his no WiFi or cell phone service.

Solution to both – put the man on a flight that leaves out five minutes later than his original. Have him wait in line for an hour to find this out. I think I was right about the farce bit.

8:46 AM (Subjective) Cusco 8/11

I’m living in an attic down an alley near the center of Cusco, a city the color of burnt orange rinds situated at the lowest point of a wide expanse of hills that stretch out in all directions. It’s a clay and stucco place, all browns and beige’s punctuated by flares of near fluorescent yellows and blues. It’s also a place located over 11,000 feet in the air. Altitude sickness. It hasn’t quite hit yet but I’m pretty certain it’s coming and when it does all that stands between me and a really bad time is a giant bottle of water and my steely, steely will. I’m in trouble.

1:25 PM (subjective) Los Portalles

We ate at a restaurant with really good chicken. 5 people tried to sell us the same 10 totally unique paintings. Fascinatingly, although the art was the same, the signatures in the lower left hand corner were always different. There is a certain beauty in that. In either case, Bruce bit and the scammer almost bit back, offering us the paintings along with an opportunity to meet a friend of his right outside of town. He’d even bring his car! I mentioned the distinct possibility that we would be mugged and murdered — we decided not to go. Interestingly enough another entrepreneur offered to sell us the exact same works of art for 1/100th the price.

Oxygen deprivation makes strange bedfellows.

9:35 PM (Subjective) Los Aticos 8/11

Cusco is a constant battle with altitude sickness. It determines where you go, what you eat and how often you run to the little boys room. Makes sense when you think about it, It’s not often that the air slowly attempts to drown you.

Fun fact – Pollo Brasse is the Peruvian KFC, where it’s important to note that if you order a Combo Two you will receive the Combo One, twice. The profundity of this has not been lost on me.

From my attic hideout I hear the sounds of a nearby birthday.

5:20 AM (Subjective) Los Aticos

5 AM is still 5AM no matter where on the planet Earth you happen to be. Here the usual discomfort is joined by dizziness and headaches and cramping as my body tries to pull a little more oxygen out of the gossamer thin air. My dream of living in the Andes is permanently on hold.

5:39 AM (Subjective) On the Road 8/12

One hour to the train that will lead us to Micchu Pichhu. Packs of dogs everywhere punctuated by morning joggers. As we make out way out of the city, homes turn to shanty town, trash and graffiti replace kept boulevards and clean walls, there is a sense that the mild poverty of the central city is a mask hiding something much darker.

On this road there are no personal cars. None, at all. Tour vans and official looking pickup trucks are all you see. That and police vehicles, filled with hard men in fluorescent vests idly waving cars by as they wait for whatever action a road like this sees.

6:06 am (Subjective) Outside Cusco, 8/12

A woman in traditional Incan garb struts down a hill, braced by the sun which casts fire over a ridge of snow capped mountains. The road is empty and endless, and on my right a vast valley stretches out, a valley that from this distance, a distance that denies the existence of the shanties, the packs of wild dogs, the poverty and the daily deprivations that this tour van is blissfully immune to, the world is as stunningly beautiful as it has ever been.

6:32 am (Subjective) Outside Cusco, 8/12

How long does it take you to forget that you live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth? My wide mouthed gawking acts as a counterpoint to our guide’s idle, disaffected conversation in Catchewa.

Maybe they understand something that I don’t, that Peru is always a question of distance, a diamond which can only be appreciated through a jewelers glass, up close, close enough to understand the specs of blood that went into making it.

More dogs, nicer homes, a rusted iron horse and a curious brand of covered motorcycle.

9:10 am (subjective) Inca Trail 8/12

Just stepped on the trail. Altitude sickness gone. Bathroom concussion new problem. Peru is built for short people.

11:47 am (subjective) Inca Trail

I hate stairs, especially century old stairs. Bruce almost fell off a mountain, which is a lot funnier than you might believe. Apus means “holy”. Peru is the only place I can think of that builds hydroelectric plants next to sacred sites. The mountains are vast. The trail is long. I am tired.

As I approach a sacred inca site, momentarily alone, I realize that there is nothing in the world like exhaustion to refine your sense of awe.

12:24 PM (subjective) Inca Trail

A waterfall is natures way of telling you to stop and gawk. I’ve decided that I’m not so much tired as utterly unmoored. The trail seems to me as one, continuous expression of an idea, that the journey embodies the meaning. To go Machu Picchu without the journey is to know the notes without ever hearing the music. As our guide is paraphrased by me, the value of the site itself is embodied by the pain and sweat required to get there. A similar thing can be said about the beauty.

Butterflies and breeze, snow covered mountains higher than the clouds.

3:19 PM (Subjective) Inca Trail

Water.

4:16 PM (subjective) Inca Trail

Majesty.

8:07 PM (subjective) Aqua Caliente 8/12

I’m having a hard time putting into words the fact that hiking 12 miles over hills and dales, mountains and valleys, rocks and a lot more rocks is difficult and rewarding and amazing, so instead I will tell you that at dinner afterwards we learned that a pair of 60 year olds and a 14 year old child had been doing a similar hike for four days at altitudes 50% higher than ours and were ready and rearing to keep going. We’re lame.

10:25 am (subjective) Machu Picchu 8/13

I’m a functionalist. I walk around Machu Picchu and ask myself how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. How do you create perfectly hewn stones without complex tools? How do you create a near perfect compass without complex mathematics? How do you tame the Sun, and use it to predict the planting season with nothing but pure reason and experimentation as your guide? It’s not a mystery, each of these questions has it’s answer but just because it is not a mystery doesn’t mean the questions are not worth asking. Doesn’t mean that the answers are not another note, another movement in the opera of birth and death, destruction and creation that is the human experience.

I’m a sensualist. As I walked the trail the question I asked myself over and over again is what would this mean to someone making the pilgrimage? If the Inca trail is a path of purification which areas would be most cleansing? Which parts of the trail were pure function and which were plaintive offerings to the Earth that gave them life. To appreciate the destination you have to understand the path. Form is nothing without context.

7:09 PM (Subjective) Cusco 8/13

Back in Cusco. The streets are alive, the hotel is alive, the air is rich with music and laughter — outside my window the hillside is ablaze with lights.

Also, on a more pedestrian note my altitude sickness has decided to take a sabbatical.

I could have sworn when we left there were three beds in here…and a space heater.

1:01 PM (Subjective) Mercado San Pedro’s 8/13

When compared to the Plaza de Armes with its rich variety of swindlers and craft peddlers, the Mercado San Pedro’s is a dream. All stalls and meats and crushes of human life. It’s a place frequented by foreigners for the obvious bits of cultural detritus that ennobles all travel stories, and by Peruvians to pick up the meats, corn, potatoes and other staples that run the engines of their lives. The food court there, and honestly what else could you call it, is sort of brilliant in its lack of pretension — where the air is peppered with spices, meat is cooked in huge vats, menus are in Spanish and you sit pressed up against a half dozen other diners in a makeshift cafeteria.

When shopping in Cusco it is best to make certain that your beautiful, traditional Peruvian leatherwork was not actually crafted in a wallet mill in China.

11:37 PM (Subjective) Lima 8/13

Gate assignments in Lima are really just suggestions, not even particularly strong suggestions at that. The same goes for boarding times, and flights…

12:35 am (Subjective) Lima 8/14

Apparently there is a strike. At least that’s what the comforting , heavily accented Peruvian pilot said. The wider implication being that on occasion aircraft ground crew somewhere between here and Bogota just stop working, and the result is 100 people sitting in a chilly box with a pair of complimentary headphones and no scheduled take off time.

5:50 am (Subjective) Bogota 8/14

Sunrise over Bogota, the final leg of the race.

5:17am JAX Jun 22nd

When traveling for any extended period of time I always check my door at least ten times. I never really mean to, if I were fully in control of my obsessions the number would be more like three or four but without fail it is ten, even if that means checking it seconds after I am absolutely, unequivocally certain I’ve locked it.

You can learn everything you need to know about a person from the distance between them and the nearest outlet in an airport.

Hip marketing trends inevitably drift towards becoming hammers in desperate need of a nail.

Airports are a wonderfully rich arena to observe the casually miserable.

I never get tired of watching dogs play with their humans.

7:10am 15,000 feet Jun 22nd

In my experience, the thing people forget most about travel is temperature. The inescapable fact that no matter what temperature you think it is, or that the weather channel implies, at 30,000 feet the real forecast is 0% humidity and cold. I’m on my way to South Korea through Houston and 17 hours later Tokyo and all I can think of is that I really wish I’d decided to wear my sweater.

We should be in awe of the fact that we can wake up any day of the week and hurdle ourselves across the world in a steel cylinder.

You’re writing a chapter, the important one, the one were the hero decides finally to take up his sword and ride into battle.

9:47 (Local) Houston Jun 22nd

There is no good way to prepare for the flight from the US to Tokyo other than doing so in advance. For me, I load up on books. Dead tree books for take-off, digital books for the long haul and audio books for all the walking in between. I am sitting around thinking about books because 20 hours without sleep is making it tricky to think of anything else.

11:44am (Local) 35,000 feet Jun 22nd

3 Thoughts

You never really get over the experience of seeing clouds from above.

It’s impossible to capture an experience, so we capture moments and hope for the best.

He was strangely comfortable with the fact that the only thing standing between him and freezing decompression were 4 inches of hardened plexiglass.

4:35pm (Local) Narita Japan Jun 23rd

Gate 33

A young Korean couple veritably dripping off one another, the lime green in her dress perfectly matching the lime green in his pants, you have to wonder whether they coordinated in advance and if so, was it just for the trip to the airport?; an athletic Western woman in her early twenties, unselfconsciously going through a complete yoga routine on the floor of the gate, one of those rare humans who feels no shame in showing the world her downward facing dog; A middle aged middle management type with a defensively shaved head, staring numbly into a wall sporting a stylized samurai, hoping that by doing so he can avoid even unintentional interactions with the unwashed masses; And me, a slightly frazzled looking coma patient in a muted brown polo and a not entirely intentional 5 o’clock shadow, which I desperately hope makes me look like some subspecies of travel journalist but more likely only serves to be aggressively forgettable. Each of us trying in our own little ways to deal with the fact that we still have 3 hours left in the air and trying to decide whether it’s Friday or Saturday.

9:10 (Local) Incheon Airport Jun 23rd

Should I find it strange that South Korea greets me with a ten foot LCD of Robert De Niro trying to convince me to go to a Casino?

10:16pm (Local) In Transit Jun 23rd

Every major city looks the same from the highway, Seoul is no different but that doesn’t make it less beautiful.

My bus driver wouldn’t start driving until I put on my seatbelt. It’ll be days before I know whether he was more concerned about my safety or about avoiding the vanishingly small but salient risk of having an American tourist splattered across his immaculately clean vehicle.

1:30am Seoul streets Jun 23rd

I just saw a teenager wander out of a subway line and pull down his pants. While he didn’t appear to care about the piles of traffic, he did seem really concerned as I walked by.

It’s 3am and an older woman at a Korean BBQ just spent the last 20 minutes trying to teach me how to eat properly. Despite her best efforts she was only partially successful.

11am (Local) Plaza Hotel 23rd

Traveling over over any great period of time will teach you that the culture of really nice hotels, regardless of location, is universal.

One great measure of a hotel’s quality is the technical complexity of it’s toilets relative to your own.

1:25pm (Local) Normen Park Jun 23rd

Korean Parks are spartan and tall. You climb and climb and climb in hopes that there will be something to see. The trick is that the more you’re willing to climb the more impressed you get.

1:30am (Local) Various Jun 23rd

Korea in 15 seconds.

You want to go to North Seoul Tower. Take shortcut through Namesean Market. You get hopelessly lost and end up in Namnen Park, lots of climbing. Lots of exercise equipment. It only gets more beautiful as you make your way up. What’s up, You get mire lost and discover it’s north Seoul Tower. Kung Fu, loud music, it’s far too hot outside and everyone seems to know it. Snap pictures and push through tourists, who are busy snapping pictures and pushing through you. Climb down wrong side of mountain, pass by wall. Refer to iPhone. Discover it’s history. Snap pictures. Get lost. Cartoon museum. Realize you don’t know any Korean Cartoons, and that the museum is designed for children, or office workers. You aren’t sure. Lots of locked offices, few exhibitions. At least it’s not Belgium where museums are another name for pubs. Sort of wish it were Belgium. Back to City Hall. Korean War Vetereans Rally. You guess this because there are a pile of veterans and a rally. You should learn Korean. Hotel room. Decide to climb Imageon to see a shrine. Promise yourself you’ll take a nap soon. Calfs burn. Realize that crossing the street in Korea occasionally takes you a quarter mile out of your way. Take a shortcut through apartments. Night fall. More climbing. Temple and fertility shrine. Try not to look like a tourist. You look hopelessly like a tourist. Calfs lock up. Wince. More climbing or maybe it’s falling. There was a fire here sometime, that’s what the sign would tell you if you could read Korean. Back to the hotel. Pass out.

1:03pm (Local) Subway – Anguk Line Jun 23rd

A subway is a pretty clever place for a product pitch, and in the fastidiously clean Korean subway system it even has a ring of professionalism.

The most powerful technological law ever to exist is the law of unintended consequences.

COEX mall is warm and sprawling

You’ve never been lost in a mall until you’ve been lost in COEX

Never confuse life for romance, both are necessary but they often run counter.

If you exist with limits you are bound by those limits.

The market might be one of the few universals that civilization has felt compelled to give us, and the mall is it’s finest expressions. It’s a place where above all else our desires to consume and to watch others consume are given their truest, most magnificent expression. No matter where on the planet Earth you travel it’s the same, throngs of people, pushing and shoving against each other to sniff, taste, feel and occasionally even buy objects of meaning. COEX is all of that if you turned down the air, scattered the foodcourt across the expanse and added an aquarium. COEX is all of that, and it is beautiful.

10:05 (Local) Train Station Outside DMZ Jun 26th

The only interesting way left to live is to be spectacularly and unapolgetically yuourself.

If your only goal is to be rich, don’t become an entrepreneur, it won’t happen and you’ll never understand why.

The DMZ is war as a tourist attraction, in a way much more profound than any memorial or museum I’ve ever seen. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps the only way for our society to understand war is to package and commercialize it. To popularize it and make it palatable. To allow 4 year old children to crawl through infiltration tunnels rigged to flood in case of a North Korean invasion. To have throngs of people pushing and clawing against each other to get the merest glimpse at a country responsible for untold abuses against it’s own population. Maybe tourism is the only way we are really capable of drawing a box around any this, and transforming it into something more than a sound bite on the evening news.

Museums are lonely places when they’re empty. There is something about observable artifacts that reduces them when they are not being observed.

I walked 45 minutes to buy a Korean, fast food hamburger at a place called Lotteria. It was a lot like all fast food hamburgers, the meat was a little dry, the bun was a little wet, and somehow you felt that you were managing to get plenty of carbs and fat without in a scrap of protein. I walked for 45 minutes to get to this place and in the end, it was totally worth it.

We long for a more heroic age while failing to hear the klaxons in our own backyards.

Science needs more art and art needs more science, the best of each have been both.

11:45 (Local) SFO Jun 27th

12 hours in SFO.

All airports would be made better with the introduction of a mildly inebriated mime.

7:34 am JAX 12/12

“Is that ‘squishable’.”

When preparing for a long trip you’re always searching for something, anything to set the tone. A little mental bookmark you can later pull out of the pages of your adventure and point to screaming “a ha,” when finally some observation (usually made while wandering down a back alley, listening to an audiobook and trying to read a sign in a language you only started learning on the plane ride over) transforms it from a random set of word noises you happened to latch onto, into yet another example of your deep personal insight and general worldliness.

“Is that ‘squishable’” – the first coherent English sentence I’ve heard since arriving in the airport, short of a TSA agent’s request to pat my tush in search of whatever bits of contraband people are apt to store in their back pockets, is as good as any for a week long trip to Budapest in the dead of Winter. I expect quite a number of back alleys to mull over it.

9:49 am 28,000 feet 12/12

A missing piece

As I was struggling with the relative merits of passing out immediately versus the significantly more heroic option of passing out after a futile but courageous attempt to stay awake , I heard something interesting enough to cut through the encroaching darkness.

The captain was casually informing us that something wasn’t quite -working- on the plane. He ensured us that the component, which he was careful not to name, was purely redundant and that after a smidge of FAA paperwork we’d be just fine to fly. Since he seemed quite certain that we would not be spiraling out of the sky because of whatever widget had just decided to take a day off, I made the only decision left to me. I passed out immediately.

There is nothing quite as funny as a big man with a tiny tablet.

10:45 am CVG, Kentucky 12/12

When sitting for a seven hour layover in the middle of Kentucky it is a good and righteous thing to have a full charging station to yourself. The gods of travel smile upon me this day.

1:14 pm CVG, Kentucky 12/12

Every good thing in the world is easier to do in an airport — reading, eating, staring blankly into space as marginally sub-sonic tin cans whizz by. The airport was built as a temple to mankind’s finest impulses.

6:05 (local) 28,000 feet 12/12

Bathroom politics

On an international flight there are only two places on the entire plane worth sitting – the very back or the very front. Your trip and ultimately your life will be made better in direct relationship to your proximity to one of these key areas.

The reason for the front goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) giant, reclining wonderseats and unlimited drink service goes a long way toward soothing pre, post and during flight jitters. Obvious or not, to really understand why the back of the plane is nearly as good you need to look no further than what else would come in useful after a few free mamosa’s, namely, the bathroom.

Sitting near the back of the plane grants you the key to one of the most precious commodities on a multi-hour flight, a restroom without a line. The closer you are to the back, the more you might be able to convince yourself that this little bastion of peace and serenity belongs to you alone. It’s a secret you won’t find in any travel guide and the moment the airlines discover it we are all in trouble.

8:16 am (local) CDG, France 13/12

The nick of time

Priority number one when stepping off of a flight to Europe is figuring out exactly what time zone you happened to blunder into. It’s surprisingly easy to lose an hour here or there, which wouldn’t be such a big, hairy deal if airports were a bit more accommodating about the difficulties implicit in properly setting ones timepiece.

These difficulties being highly compounded when said traveler spent the last several hours of the flight drooling all over himself rather than looking at the infinitely useful travel data console.

Additional note: Paris security checkpoints are, on average, 127 times better than their American counterparts – this is driven by the fact that in Paris they are not yet under to the rather odd belief that your average traveler’s feet are constantly primed to explode.

2:24 pm (local) ??? Feet 13/12

I’m not sure if the egg sandwich I just had was Hungarian or French. My guess is French. What does a Hungarian egg sandwich taste like? Sleep…

4:00 pm Highway, Budapest 13/12

The road leading to Budapest reminds me of some of the smaller towns you find littering the northeast, with the subtle additions of quite a bit more Hungarian and a relative preponderance of billboards of lingerie models. Otherwise, identical.

Weather or Not

I don’t think I’d ever get used to it getting dark at 3:45 every day for four months, though I’m sure the Hungarians might have something to say about it being 78 degrees in the middle of December, so for now I’ll call it a draw.

10:00 pm (local) Budapest / Buda 13/12

The right gloves

I have these gloves that let me use my iPhone. I have these gloves that don’t let me use my iPhone. Both are in my bag. The difference between them, for a person who relies entirely on his iPhone for navigation in foreign countries is the difference between spending hours basking in the radiant beauty that is Budapest after dark, and spending an hour wondering how quickly frostbite will set in before hobbling back to the hotel and collapsing in front of the heating grate. Small lessons.

11:37 am (local) Budapest 14/12

Budapest is a beautiful city, made more beautiful by night when the dull brown and grays of its streets are lit up by richer oranges and neons, and the biting cold of it’s winters seems like a feature rather than a mild impediment to the sorts of wandering that I prefer to do.

Also I am certain, though without any proof, that the ladies of the evening, who seem so pleased to meet you (in six or seven languages depending on how fastidiously you ignore them) as you wander through Pest in search of a late night Cafe do quite a bit better under its cloak.

12:49 pm Buda 13/12

A couple kissing passionately on a ledge, the bones of a church laid bare, an overlook into an ancient city torn apart and rebuilt by war, a tiny dog and a busy road. The sun is finally out. Budapest is alive.

The Hungarian National Art Gallery is one of the most spectacular exhibitions of creative wok I’ve managed to have never previously heard of. The bottom floors are filled with photorealistic portraits and scenes which are, at their best achingly beautiful, and even at their worst jarring and discomforting in the best possible way. The top floors, well, the top floors are pretty darn Metal.

3:18 (local) Cafe Dumas 13/12

I’m eating at a French Cafe in Buda where people are speaking a mixture of heavily accented English and German, to complicate matters further I had come looking for a Hungarian goulash (which is nothing like goulash in, say, Russia) and been met with pain au chocolat.

6:36 pm (local) Pest 13/12

As they prepare for a performance of Handel at St. Stephen’s Cathedral and street performers dance their slow dance through the outdoor market, the square blazes to life with Christmas lights, and suddenly a gentle snow begins to fall…

8:26 am (local) Highway / Budapest 14/12

My tour guide Bolage has discovered my little secret, that secret being that the cold scares me almost as much as nuclear Winter and the entropy death of the Universe. He’s made the kind concession of turning the van’s air conditioning from Tundra right on up to sweltering to stop me from flailing around in my overcoat. What he has yet to discover is that tours typically scare me just as much. There is something about being pressed up against other sweating, salivating tourists like myself, pointing at things and yelling from the back of a bus that always feels a tiny bit inauthentic. Fortunately this is a van, not a bus and for the moment I’m keeping the drool to myself.

Why the tour? Between the fear of dying alone in a Hungarian snow drift, my total inability to read Austrian train schedules, and a general disinclination towards dealing with logistics more complex than my walking path, this seemed like the best possible way to explore Vienna.

9:14 am (local) Road to Vienna 14/12

Europe is strange. It’s a little less than 200 miles between Budapest and Vienna, two cities, that while sharing a storied history of war, conflict and all the sorts of social detritus that make good History Channel Specials fail to share a language, a culture or even a currency. This is strange because 200 miles represents a similar distance between Gainesville and Orlando, which while marginally different at the ragged edges still manage to accept the same bits of green paper for products and services.

When you are on a 5 hour road trip with a perfect stranger you must manage your stupid questions deftly. Use them up too quickly and you can expect hours of awkward silence and phone fiddling in your future, use them too slowly and he is likely to think that you are a particularly dour alien. A good rule of thumb is that every twenty minutes or so you should say something, anything and then smile like an arse for a while until it’s safe to stare into your phone again.

Thoughts

I think “petrol station” is a much better phrase than gas station.

The border of Hungary and Austria looks like the parking lot of Epcot, with fewer funny hats.

10:27 am (local) Highway in Austria 14/12

If the outskirts of Hungary looks like Connecticut, the outskirts of Austria more closely resemble Illinois or Philadelphia, with the faintest dusting of Old World flare. Smokestacks and factories framed between windmills and farmland, all shot through with the wet and grey that makes up so much of the European experience past October.

Vienna happens slowly, as the dust and grime of those factories are polished away what you are left with is a city that feels somehow both grander and more plain than central Budapest.

My guide spoke to this point, saying that Vienna and Budapest are both beautiful ladies, Vienna is simply wearing her makeup. He meant tp convey the fact that Vienna has several times the per capita income and thus can afford things that Budapest simply cannot, what i don’t think he fully appreciated was that I’ve always preferred women without makeup.

1:41 Pm (local) Vienna 14/12

A crush of people, the smell of paint and Christmas like an edifice binding it all together. Museum hopping in Vienna has the stressful air of pushing your way through Disney World in August.

4:00 pm (local) Vienna 14/12

I lost my headphones, it’s the grand tragedy of this trip but not a wholly unexpected one. Not unexpected because I have about twelve pockets that I am constantly fiddling with, along with an utter inability to maintain focus on all of them in novel, complex environments such as being hopelessly lost in search of my tour guide in the streets of Austria. As a result, there is a greater than average chance that I handed it over to the guy at the souvenir shop along with my fist full of Euros. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if those hadn’t been the headphones I’d bought in Seoul, to replace the ones that I’d manages to destroy there.

P.S. It’s strikingly difficult to find a Hungarian man, standing in the middle of a shopping district in downtown Vienna, especially when said man is holding an umbrella during a mild but persistent rainstorm. Difficult, yes, but quite artistic.

5:40 pm (local) Hugarian Rest Stop 14/12

Let’s say you’re stuck in the cold, outside of a Hungarian petrol station and you are unsure where your tour guide has run off to. Around you are several people selling the latest in Apple electronics boxes, and you have no way of retreating back inside because you failed to get a receipt and would prefer not getting thrown in Hungarian jail for shop lifting. Let’s also say that you’re tired, bitterly tired and don’t feel compelled to engage in verbal sparring with the local near-do-wells and that overall you are feeling like a bit of a muppet. You, my friend, might just be the perfect candidate for my –

Pan handling defense strategy for the exhausted: when approached by a scruffy gentlemen of indistinguishable foreign origin who appears to be preparing to launch into a pitch which will end in him requesting large quantities of your hard earned currency, follow two simple steps:

1. Begin gesticulating wildly (this will give him the impression that you are both confused and perhaps a tiny bit crazy).

2. Pretend like you don’t speak the language that he is making his initial request in. In fact, pretend like you don’t speak any language with any degree of fluency. When he switches from whatever language he has pegged you as speaking (they are quite good at this), continue to feign ignorance. Even if that language is your native tongue, some broken stammering and a bit of flailing should be enough to dispel the illusion that you are useful to him. If you are English like me, you likely only know 1.12 languages to begin with, so this shouldn’t be exceptionally difficult. Add to this a harried, confused expression and a bit of pacing, and you should be free to go about your business in a matter of moments.

Tonight’s weather is very Japanese, or should I say very English…?

7:52 (local) Art’otel Budapest 14/12

After discussing the relative merits of tax and education policy with my new Hungarian friend, I am left feeling that tax dispersion is complicated and as such is not the domain of mortals. Corruption and general fiscal unfairness, however, appears to be universal.

12:15pm (local) St Gellert, Budapest 15/12

Budapest is fog. Deep, rich, all encompassing fog. Fog that is more presence than weather. Which leads inexorably to today’s quest, to climb to the highest point in the city and try to see above it all. On the way I meet the first native English speakers I’ve seen in this country, a pair of Asian women (Indian and Chinese respectively) who are either from the UK or some particularly English sounding area of Australia, they want to find the Cable cars, which I think means they want to go to Buda Castle. I’m likely right, at least I hope so or they’ll been none to happy with the American guy who sent them hunting wild geese for a half mile.

P.S. topography makes a hell of a difference when determining the difficulty of a hike. A half mile forward is quite a bit different than a half mile up.

2:30 pm (local) House of Terror, Budapest 15/12

The cells are tiny, box-like and identical , except for the one with padded walls; God only knows what that was used for. Pictures of the dead and imprisoned line the walls in this building that stands as a tomb, a burial place fir Hungary’s long history of pain and persecution, first under the Nazi’s and then even more terribly under Stalin’s Communists. Standing here in a prison cell I could barely fit into lying flat on my back, I hear the faint sound of running water coming from a grate to my left and wonder about the dozens of others who stood here, on this spot, contemplating their fate…

And then the gallows. And then the graves…

3:30 pm (local) Spinoza’s Cafe, Budapest 15/12

Overheard: goulash means “herds men” or “cow men.” Apparently the titular Hungarian stew was named that because it was made of these herdsmen’s hard earned meat, making its rather odd disconnection from the more common conception of goulash a bit more understandable. (via The British family sitting behind me)

Spinoza’s is a Hungarian Jewish restaurant located down a back alley and a stone’s throw away from a sex shop with the rather evocative name, Tutti Frutti. It’s mixed culinary tradition means that it’s one of the few places in the world where you can find goose liver and hummus on the same menu. It’s also much cooler than it would like to admit, with a theatre, an art gallery and a coffee shop located under the same roof. The entire city of Seattle wishes it could be this trendy.

P.S. I don’t think I’ll ever understand Hungarian currency. In reality all you need to do is divide by 100 and cut the number in half (to get to USD) but I’m still constantly unsure of how much I’m spending and who, if anyone, is ripping me off. Back in Cafe Dumas, for example, I happily handed the waitress $100 when I had meant to give her $10. Luckily the Hungarian’s I’ve met seem to be reasonably honest people, or at the very least they have some depth of warm feelings for the obviously challenged.

P.P.S I have a terribly American sense of food timing. I have a hard time understanding that in Europe meals are meant to take quite a while, during which most of the restaurant will be puttering about as if no one, anywhere had anywhere important to be. There are moments I want to claw my eyes. This feeling finds its root both in a deeply American sense of entitlement, and an inability to understand that food, the process of eating it, and all the moments of calm in between are meant to be enjoyed. It’s a problem I should work on.

5:15 pm (local) Art Gallery, Budapest 15/12

Children on leashes never cease to surprise me. Not quite as much as walking into an art exhibition featuring a man standing stock still in a burgundy robe, becoming completely naked, walking up invisible stairs and leaving behind the robe, which floats in mid-air for a moment, then proceeds to fall into the box below. But almost nothing surprises me as much as that.

7:30 pm (local) Budapest 15/12

A well dressed man of unclear European extraction seemed to be tailing me as I left the Art Gallery in Hero’s Square. I wasn’t -sure- he was tailing me, mind you, but as an always exhausted and perennially paranoid traveler if someone keeps pace with me for more than ten steps I always assume the worst. This person also didn’t appear to be your usual pan handler, so instead of taking strong evasive maneuvers, I simply took stock of my valuables and kept walking.

Then he was next to me.

I shall relate the rest of this story in the present tense, as I ultimately wish I had written it on the spot but I figured it might be a bit rude.

I slow a pace and turn to look at him, he’s smiling and clearly trying his best to get my attention. I remove one earbud and nod in his direction.

“I have this strange feeling that we’ve met in another life…” He croons in extremely serviceable, albeit heavily accented English.

I blink. Once. Twice. He seems neither insane nor dangerous, which means he could very well be very much of both. How do you respond to that? I stammer something about how “strange” that is. I smile, perhaps a little too grimly. He nods and mumbles something I can’t quite hear over the other earbud. He smiles now, the beatific smile of one who knows something that another does not. He continues to keep pace with me and I explain how it is unlikely that we have met in this lifetime or the last as this is my first week in Budapest. He keeps smiling. I keep nodding. I wish him a good evening. He returns the sentiment. I return my earbud to my ear and take a few quick steps out of his orbit, checking that my valuables are intact after a few dozen paces. About a minute later when I finally look back, he’s gone.

Oddly, all I could think of for a full minute afterwards was, “is that ‘squishable’?”

8:00 am (local) Airport Transfer Bus, Budapest 16/12

I’d meant to stay up all night. That way I could make absolutely certain I wouldn’t sleep through my bus, which was scheduled to leave at 7:45. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite work out. I passed out, rather unceremoniously at about 3 am (local) without setting an alarm.

More fortunately, the fickle but mostly tolerant gods of travel were smiling down on me and I woke up with 30 minutes to spare, just enough time to pack, repack, make certain I was packed, and check the room a half dozen times for things I’d forgotten to pack (I probably left something behind.)

Driving out of the city I saw a billboard for the Budapest Business Journal (“It’s all about your money”). For reason’s totally inexplicable to me, they decided to use a picture of Abraham Lincoln to sell it.

Budapest you are a fine, fine lady, makeup be damned.

Airport, JAX, 5am est

Newark isn’t a popular place to visit at 6am on a Monday. Newark isn’t a popular place to visit ever, but I have a feeling that Monday makes it far worse.

As it stands, the Jacksonville airport is like the waiting saloon at a post-modern funeral. Tom Waits plays a gin-rimmed ditty in my ears as caffeine fueled businessmen in cheap suit jackets ponder what manner of providence lead them to be sitting here waiting for a plane to take them somewhere, to do something for a person whose favor they hold dear primarily as an expedient to getting their Beamer notes paid.

I swear to you, this sort of human suffering playing out around me would have been really, profoundly troubling to me on any other day. I’m a very deep person – really I am, ask anyone. As it stands though, I’ve slept for a grand total of one hour in the last twenty four, so this latest recognition, like so many others, gets stacked like cord wood onto the pile of increasingly hazy perceptions that make up my waking life.

And so I sit and wait and watch and Tom Waits, well he plays another tune…

Runway, EWR, 8:17 am

New Jersey looks like a postcard from 5000 feet. Before you get too excited, understand that every State does. I haven’t decided if this says more about postcards or about air travel. Either way, I sleep like a baby on planes and this one was no exception. Swaddled in the warm, rocking embrace of a multi-million dollar steel pigeon I dreamed the dreams of the exhausted – which are, interestingly enough, mostly colorless and completely forgetable. Unfortunately not even sleep was enough to get me to forget that I will be spending the next few hours in New Jersey where the number one tip offered up by Foursquare (and just about everyone else) is, “get on a plane and go somewhere else.” A suggestion, I might add, I am more than willing to take.

I really hope there is a power outlet soon. Power is up there with food, fresh water and a long and fufilling life on my list of necessities. Even though most of the telecommunications devices I need powered will be all but useless the instant I step out of the country.

So I sit and pray for a nearby outlet and in my ears Tom Waits plays another tune.

Airport, EWR, 8:35

Supplementary:

Airport hygiene guide

An iPhone makes a great vanity mirror.
Running water, a toothbrush and mints (all readily available in airports) are enough to make most people seem like reasonable adults.
The real sport is finding a bathroom that still uses paper towels.

24,000 feet, Somewhere in the Northeastern US, 11:35 am

I don’t understand time anymore. I thought I did, but clearly I’ve spent 25 years cultivating a lie.

You see, a flight to Narita, Japan takes something like 13 hours. You’re traveling due west along the curvature of the Earth (which doesn’t seem like west at all if you’re looking at a map) at close to 600 miles per hour. This route takes you over most of Canada, parts of Russia and a healthy chunk of the Pacific Ocean. Typically, this is also a journey back in time as you pass from eastern to central to mountain and finally to whatever weird schedule The left coast runs on. This time, however, through some alchemy I wont pretend to understand without Wikipedia, when I arrive, the flight will have taken much closer to 24 hours.

This would be disorienting enough without the fact that it will also be the middle of Tuesday instead of the end of Monday, it will be raining cats and dogs instead of unseasonably sunny, and for whatever reason everyone will be speaking Japanese, which could be really neat (in an Epcot sort of way) if I knew a word of Japanese.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I imagine Einstein or Aristotle or whoever it was that dreamed up time zones and date lines laughing at my angst.

Elsewhere I realize neither of those men had anything to do with time zones.

Gawd I wish I had Wifi.

34,000 feet, Somewhere over Saskatchewan Canada, 3:17 pm (subjective)

Planes are cold. If a plane had singular nature, an existential state to call its own, cold would be it. About ten inches of plastic and steel carapace separate me from the outside world, which at current is -56F. At that temperature my blood would be frozen in my body in well under a minute – not that I’d be conscious long enough to worry – the air is so thin up here that I’d be rendered almost immediately unconscious, blissfully unaware of being flash frozen. I draw a great deal of comfort from this fact.

Inside, it is a little better, but not as much as you’d hope. Thankfully, for a few more years at least it still makes economic sense for the airline to provide us with blankets, otherwise I’d be warming myself by the thin light of the iPhone. I definitely do not have the battery life for that.

Between shivers and bouts of unconsciousness I’ve been trying to learn Japanese. By trying I mostly mean listening to a Japanese101 podcast I’d hastily downloaded in Newark. The host, who must have been a carnival barker in a previous incarnation, takes a joy in teaching me how to see, “How are you?” that I find to be frankly unsettling. I guess if I were trying to sell hundreds of dollars worth of “learning tools” to lazy English speakers I’d be able to muster a little more motivation too. As it stands, I imagine I’ll pick up 5-6 phrases that I will use sporadically and poorly throughout the trip. Thanks to Western cultures nuclear strike on the rest of the free world, that will probably be enough.

Meanwhile, I have nine hours (objective) left in this trip and my immediate challenge is not freezing into my seat.

36,000 feet, Somewhere in Western Alaska, 6:44pm (subjective)

People do fascinating things when they are trapped in a box for 13 hours.

Mostly though, they fidget.

They fidget with their luggage, with their food, with their screens and with their gadgets. They fidget in hopes that simple acts of locomotion will make time tick a little faster. Unfortunately, they quickly run out of things to fidget with and then the fidgeting becomes self-conscious, which is bad because self-conscious fidgeting has been clinically proven to be the quickest path to insanity. That’s just science, I don’t make this stuff up.

They fidget and they sleep.

I have been staring unapolgetically at people who have been asleep for the last eight hours. Add to that the 6-10 hours they picked up before stepping onto the plane and some of them have spent the better part of a day (subjective) blissfully unconscious. Do I blame them? Not hardly, you can only stare at clouds and watch bad movies for so long before the thought of disappearing for a bit into your head starts to look better than the creeping madness of a perfect boredom.

They fidget, they sleep, and they wait in line at the bathroom.

I don’t know what it is about a plane, but even though the beverage cart is as likely to come by as a wild Platypus, every hour or so everyone seems compelled to make a pilgrimage towards the rest rooms. I found this pretty confusing until I realized rest room breaks are the only legitimate excuse you have to get up and stretch your legs and the only place on this bird you can ensure a few moments of privacy.

What do I do?

All of the above. I fidget, I sleep, I read, I write and generally I wile away the hours appreciating an opportunity to be truly unreachable. Every so often, there is nothing quite like a perfect boredom…

Someone let me off this plane.

“I’ve just done a significant bit of time travel, when I look outside the sun will be poking its head out like it doesn’t know why that’s weird.”

Bus, Somewhere outside of Narita, 3:35 pm (objective)

Being suddenly mute is a profoundly strange experience. Especially for a person who loves nothing more acutely than the sound of his own voice. I’m mute in a way more profound than i have been in any non-English speaking locale I have visited. Unlike Italy or Montreal, where most people gave a wink and a nod to their “lack of English”, here in Japan everything, everywhere is designed to reinforce my inability to communicate.

What’s strange, really strange is that even without language, communicate I do. Despite having no idea what anyone is saying I’ve managed to get a bus ticket and directions, get through customs (where they do speak English) and generally navigate the normal social transactions that seemed up until an hour ago to require wordy exchanges. Body language, gestures, smiles and single words (not to mention the miracle that is the iPhone) have taken the place of piles and piles of words. It’s exciting to see this work and frightening because somewhere in the back of my mind I wonder how long I can keep this game up for and what happens when it inevitably breaks down.

As a gentle rain falls and the endless traffic of Tokyo proper comes into view, this question can’t help but bring a little smile to my face.

“I live in a shoebox, a shoebox with a pretty nice view of the city. Designed, I’m convinced, for some complicated breed of midget.”

KKR Hotel, Tokyo, 11:36pm (objective)

I wake up confused. Not because I don’t know where I am but because I don’t know where I’m going.

My hotel room looks like a train explosion, since it’s about the size of a train car this is highly appropriate comparison. Before passing out, I bumbled through the rain to Akihabara, which at dusk was like some anime addicts wet dream mixed into a blender with a Sega Genesis that just happened to sound like a teenage girl giggling. For a place with more than it’s share of “adult entertainment shops” it didn’t seem so much seedy as plain old fashioned weird, with crushes of American expats wandering around Japanese girls dressed as Maids with cat ears, absorbing the culture like I’m absorbing the culture, through the oddly fetishized lens of anime imports.

Now it’s time to get out at night, I’ve decided that walking is the only way to travel so the real question becomes, how far do you want to go at 11:40 at night when you know you’ll need to walk back at 1am.

I hear Tokyo has some pretty friendly park benches.

Every city in the world smells vaguely of urine, Tokyo is no exception.

Heated toilet seats really make a guy feel special.

After midnight taxi cabs outnumber people 10 to 1.

Roppongai is Tokyo if it were designed by Vegas for expats.

It says something about culture that almost every anime in the video store is also available on Netflix.

Apparently Groping is the universal language of commerce.

Walking Back From Roppongi, Tokyo, 3:50 am (objective)

Sleep, yes, sleep.

Ginza, Tokyo,9:37 (subjective)

Ginza is a little like downtown Chicago but with a lot more kanji. Train lines, book stores, mega sized buildings, and a generalized sense that there are people alive and breathing and willing to invite you to their Pacchino Hall.

I still can’t get over all the rain, it’s like Seattle and Florida had babies and sent them to boarding school across the Pacific. At least it never seems to get hard enough to outpace a pretty standard umbrella.

-japan smells nice, like a mix of light cigarette smoke and cinnamon.

Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, 12:55 (objective)

The mist interesting thing about the Tokyo National Museum is that about a quarter of it is shut down, “to conserve electricity”. Sign of recession? Museum troubles? Or is it that electricity in Japan is so expensive that it makes sense to shut down any exhibit that’s not raking in the yen. I also notice a distinct lack of air conditioning in about half the exhibition rooms and can’t help but feel it’s related.

Strangely, not being able to read a character of Japanese hasn’t diminished my enjoyment of the exhibits. Go figure.

KKR Hotel, Tokyo, 6:01 pm (objective)

I think I may have just walked 20 miles. The last five of them through the rain. On the plus side I saw more of Tokyo than I could ever hope for with half a day still left on the clock. Now to pass out for a bit, and let my body stitch itself back together for the next round.

Man, I don’t think there was a single analogy in that one. I must be losing it.

Road To Somewhere?, Tokyo, 1:31 am (objective)

We are all ruled by certain immutable laws of thermodynamics. The most important being that the energy that leaves a system may never exceed the energy going into it. This implies that of you walk several dozen miles over the course of a couple of days with very limited sleep and a brain that doesn’t fully understand what time it should be, something weird is going to happen. In my case, I passed out for six hours, which is how I found myself sitting here, in a kimono at 1:30 in the morning preparing to go exploring.

Things I learned today:

Rain here is serious business.
The Japanese know this and are very prepared.

I don’t and was partially prepared.

Foreign tourists like to wander aimlessly through temples like they were standing in line at Space Mountains.

I’m a foreign tourist, but at least I recognize and partially mitigate this flaw in my personality.

Every country has a place where you can buy awesome tourist crap to take home with you, today I stumbled into Japan’s version.

Maybe I should try to track down the full scale replica of the Eiffel Tower I saw yesterday (the Japanese love Paris). Before that, vending machine dinner.

KKR Hotel, Tokyo, 4:42 am (objective)

I spent the last 3 hours watching Japanese television.

I’ve seen an infomercial for “Orange County Sunscreen,” Sumo wrestling, a gameshow where young women have to impress three judges dressed as Samurai or be force fed wasabi, a teen dramedy involving Kimonos, and more J Pop than you could shake a stick at.

Conclusion: I love this place.

Goodnight.

Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 10:55 am (objective)

The Japanese are a terribly accommodating people.

Here’s a question, why is it that about 70% of the school aged children wandering the halls of this museum are little girls?

Korakuen Garden, Tokyo, 2:06 pm (objective)

You can’t walk 100 yards in Tokyo without stumbling across something beautiful. I went to see a theme park and ended up in Korakuen Garden, where for about $4.00 I get a near endless supply of water Lilys and cherry blossoms.

Akihabara, Tokyo, 7:48 pm (objective)

I don’t think there is anywhere else on the planet where you can find 8 stories worth of anime.

Walking Home, Tokyo, 1:45 am (objective)

Idle thoughts edition:

1. This is probably the 20th time I’ve confused a taxi cab for a police car. (Near the Imperial Palace)

2. I wonder when they switched from doing their graphetti in kanji to doing it in roman characters. (at the edge of Chiyoda)

3. Tokyo is the only place I can think of that would make a more than full scale, glowing model of the Eiffel Tower and put it next to what appears to be a Shinto temple. (right outside of Roppongi)

KKR Hotel, Tokyo, 10:51 am

I think the two things I will miss about Tokyo the most are the wonderful, wonderful vending machines and the terrible, terrible soap operas. That and the fact that taxi cab doors close by themselves.

Narita Airport, Tokyo, 3:00 pm (subjective)

We had a fire drill in the airport. I really don’t know what that means, but basically no one went anywhere and they came over the loudspeaker and said a bunch of stuff in English. I’m guessing if there is a fire, it’s our role to sit quietly inside the building, pretending nothing bad is happening and politely aphysiate.

Two more hours in Japan, and then back in the air to parts unknown. By unknown I mean Singapore, which is unknown to me at least because unlike Tokyo I did not even bother to buy an iPhone based tour guide.

Luckily I have Jared, who is kind of like an iPhone. I guess.

Meanwhile, I have a new favorite type of restaurant. It is a Sushi bar where the food comes to you on a conveyor belt. I’ve never learned quite as much from a stepped up food trough. For instance, did you know that by adding hot water to one of the weird tinctures at your table you can male green tea?

Also, the Japanese are almost ludicrously helpful to foreigners. Twice I was saved from post-industrial, conveyor induced starvation by the intercession of one of my Japanese neighbors. We would do well to take this example as our own.

Now for Singapore, where hippies used to have to cut their hair before entering.

Woodland, Singapore, 9:15 am (subjective)

More than anything what surprised me as I stepped off the plane is how western everything is here. The signs are in English, the products seem English, and the people speak English albeit an interesting dialect which at least so far has been more than easily translatable. After Japan, I feel like I stepped off the plane into a particularly Eastern section of San Francisco. I wonder how long that particular illusion will hold up.

Oh yes, and the humidity remains stable at 130%.

Bugis, Singapore, 4:30pm (objective)

Singapore is about the size of a postage stamp. This is barely a superlative. From one side of the country to another it’s about 30 miles, with the main “city” taking up a fraction of this land and the rest being made up by row after row of government subsidized apartment complexes and light industry. The entire country would fit snugly into a corner of New Orleans.

Even so, it’s one of the most diverse and interesting places I’ve ever been to. Singapore ‘s culture consists of influences from China, India, Malayasia along with piles and of artifacts borrowed from the West. There are row after rows of ultra modern malls packed around street vendors, interspersed among temples consecrated to Vishnu and Kali. As you look around though you can’t help but feel that you are in some particularly Asia-centric corner of America. Everyone speaks English, almost nothing about the city could described as less than ultra-modern and unlike Japan most of the T-shirts make sense.

The only time I’ve really been convinced that I am 6000+ miles away was when I wandered through Little India. A thriving, bustling microcosm of India culture deposited wholesale in the south east of the country. I was also treated to stumbling upon a rehearsal for India’s independence day (August 5th and 6th) complete with military helicopters, marines and several metric tons of fireworks.

As a counterpoint tomorrow, if everything goes according to plan, I’ll be visiting Hell. Which is conveniently located a few metro stops away.

Woodland, Singapore, 8:04 am (objective)

Yesterday I tried to go to Hell but the power was out, so instead I crossed a bridge into a rain forest and saw the hero from a PS3 game with guns strapped to her shoes. I climbed up a mountain and saw from one end of the country to the other, climbed down a mountain and ate meat on sticks. Still disappointed at being denied Hell I took a taxi to a tram and watched Tigers playing in front of me.

Changi Airport, Singapore, 6:21 am (objective)

Dislocation is the word of the morning. Dislocation most clearly defined by the knowledge that by the time I arrive back in the United States it will be earlier than when I left.

But that, while profound, is not nearly the story.

On a trip like this, dislocation can be drawn from everywhere:

Dislocation from having to finally process this marvelous, strange, exhausting experiment in travel that I’ve been participating in.

Dislocation from realizing that while all cultures are different in wild and wonderful ways, the world is becoming smaller and more translatable by the year, the month, the hour.

Dislocation, the kind that only comes when excitement and exhaustion meets and you realize it is time to go home.