Reinhart the Greek Gaijin 外人

So, you want to ride a motorcycle around a tropical paradise island in the Indian Ocean?

2011-11-14T22:39:00.006-06:00

Mentally prepare yourself for a head on collision with a tanker truck going 85kmph on a one lane, gravel road in the pouring monsoon rain. Stare down the high beams from a 4x4 passengered and driven by piss drunk 18-year-olds on a terrorizing joyride. Swerve too far in panicked desperation and nosedive into the meter-deep aqueduct, or worse, into a volcanic gulley. As the late Hunter S. Thompson would say,
"Whammo. Game over. Meet the sausage monster."

If at some point your nerves resign to take a break on some village road, dont hit the chickens or the children criss-crossing the path. If you mistakenly park in front of some Bali-hound's territory, stare him down, slowly get on the bike then rip on the gas because its a contest of acceleration. Once your off, its a day at the races and the mutt doesn't distinguish between your right calf muscle and a frightened hare.

The road is only traveled alone. My short-lived Mexican com padre didn't understand that there is no such thing as a "Wrong Turn". This is the most vital wisdom to possess when setting out on a motorcycle journey in a foreign land. If you are equipped with this info:
put on a helmet, you cocky maniacs
fill up with $1.20 worth of Petronas
and
Punch it.

Other pieces of advice:

Avoid the templed; just like in most places in the world they are hives for cheats, scam artists and villains.

Steer clear of monkeys. They are shameless thieves with razor incisors and rabies, and they move shadow quick.

Go fast, but never rush. Those in a rush are blindfolded, straight-jacketed comatose cannonballs on a mindless bullet's-route to the grave.

If you are a circum-navigator, days are long, but bear in mind that 12 hours on a saddle is a creampuff latte frappe cake-dance compared to endless clicks on a smoked-out Chinese bus in the hinterland.

Jalan

Jalan

I'mashyo!

Harvest

2011-11-09T08:56:00.006-06:00

I've lived a life of discipline
I've lived a life that's free
of all the must's and have to's I thought were chaining me

The wind of chaos blowing
muffled twirls of sand
you cannot build much anything
on such a shifting land

We've heard the word
called "entropy":
that in the end, you lose.
but movement is necessity
up or down: you choose

~~~~~~So, in misty Bali days

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ as warm seas lazy roll

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I choose the life of discipline

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ its my world,

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ after all.

---

---

I wandered into a dull and lonely place
the empty warmth of passionless womb
where acid fires sobered down to warm coals

Sharpness rounded off into uninterested, heavy stones
dragging themselves around with no real zest to amble

It was not lack of answers
I've always found a way to overcome and enliven and progress
once I have a question

These sullen windless days of travel
it was a lack of questions that stilled the air
where your body moves
but you don't go anywhere

The guardians stepped in

as they did in the beginning

and sparked my life with wonder

Archetypes
Perception
Mayans
Nature of man
Physicas
Language learning
Music theory
Emotions
Subconscious

I've dug up grist for the mill.
Now I can travel with a purpose again.
And see these wild Sumatras with intention.

Thanks to a Mexican Castenada
the moon under mystic seas
the wrong season
and Mescalito

---

Terima Kashi!
Suksmon!

---

These psychic nations I visit are somewhere along the physical route I trace. Burning across China, sloshing through muddy and slow Sumatra and hopping to Bali - It all becomes something in the ventricle factories.

"How to live"
has been the unmistakable central point of my voyage
It's not so difficult to see anymore
I witness before me the new and vast battlefield of the mind
that requires a constant effort

I can share little of value with my future self other than to canonize the hard-wrought principles that have transformed my decisions:

1. Simplify
2. Purify
3. Let Go
4. See Objectively and Analyze

and principles that have increased my joy of life:

5. Make Music
6. Meditate
7. Connect

and Buddha's three marks to witness everywhere:

8. Impermanence
9. No Self
10. Suffering

And that's it. All this time these 10 things have consumed my psychic energies for good or for worse. The more energy I put into these 10, and the less I waste on the twirling dance of hedonism, chaotic questioning and future-past quagmires, the more effective my life is and the more full of a human I feel.

Brief Thoughts on a Long Time Gone

2011-11-05T06:07:00.006-05:00

Its a puzzle how the future becomes the past, or more appropriately, doesn't. I sit here writing this, conjuring up how I felt sitting in my friend Joe's apartment in Osaka looking over maps of the Middle Kingdom before I took the slow boat to China; the mind was so tied up in a future that never came to pass. I'm laughing. I see it as extra potent in this very moment because here I am again, tying and untying the future with my mind, in a similar fashion as I have done so many times just substitute the name of the country.

Its nothing like I thought it would be
and it never is - that's the mystery
one step at a time
I get ahead, or stuck behind
like a candle unto my two feet
I see what you want me to see
the future
remains open to me
the mystery
it sets me free

To know it and to live it; it is a slow development I've witnessed throughout the course of my journey. I can only hope one day to truly have no worries (mate).

---

After all, everything worked out in China...

More or less.

Speaking of which,

Less is more,

especially when dealing with the barrage of noise, pollution, and violent foreignness of China. It is, for any accurate measures to be taken in relaying the feeling and the observation and analysis, a different planet.
But I won't be able to describe it. Who could really describe the subconscious impact that the Great Civilization of the East would have on such an isolated, unawares and sheltered Midwestern boy?

I don't understand what happened or how what I saw and felt will change me as it gestates in my deep subcortum. I know many times I wanted to get out, to fly away, but that I took China like medicine. It was too much for me, and I sought shelter often. At the end of two months, I still didn't feel like I had a handle on it, even in a slight regard. China is another life.

And Tibet is another China.

Wild, massive and dangerously hungry dogs make there presence known around every (wrong) turn. Big skies you can touch with your gritty fingers. Dark flocks of vultures ripping human flesh from a corpse on the frozen tundra, 4000 meters above the world. Salt and fat boiled in a tea, mud houses, yak, bus rides through eternal fields of low, hard ochre and mossy green plains. In the barely breathable air, pink yellow sunrises hang on loosely to the rarefied mists. Time begins in the morning and ends at in the twirling indigo galaxy of your spacious mind. Tushi dey leh.

Tibet made me realize, just now in my recollection on its wonder, that I cannot realize how magic life is while im in it; it still requires me to reflect to see just how unbelievable and fleeting the magic of the world is.

It is so hard to be where we are, to live right above our shoes every day, especially when discomfort, fear, malnutrition and fatigue cloud my eyes, but these demons that haunt the road less traveled are no more ferocious than routine and boredom. I must uncloud my eyes. The world is so real, sparkling, even in the evil mud of Sumatra. My insignificance and smallness is so apparent when I get out of the way and the universe cuts through the clouds on strange lucid days.

---

Inukai Farm

2011-07-31T00:07:00.010-05:00

We`ve got peaches! And lots of weeds!

Welcome to Inukai farm, easily accessible from the forested hills and just a hop skip and a jump from the craggy river bed. We`ve got peaches, rice, apples, strawberries, zucchini, eggplant, onions, garlic, leeks, potatoes, watermelon, sunflowers, pears, peanuts, soy beans, grapes and tobacco all within a five minute bicycle ride. And weeds!

I met Shigeru Inukai two years ago while he was busking with his contra-bass in front of a downtown city bank in Matsumoto (Japan) on a starry Sunday. We played music together in a coffee shop and in his music studio. Often, his very talented pheoncae will play her ukulele too. When I was preparing to leave Japan for my trip through Asia he invited me to come back and live on his farm for a while if I found the time.

So here I am, up to my neck in mud and weeds, surrounded by a green dream. He doesn`t use chemicals or plastics so we have to fight extra hard against overgrowth. Tired, full of green tea, My mind is easy as the clouds floating though the shallow valley. Clean country air is slowly washing away the metro smell that was stinking up my life.

--

Shigeru and his family live on a piece of land formerly used to operate a sizable mushroom factory. Their family mushroom business was driven out by a conglomerate a few decades ago and the former storage and processing shed became a store room for generations worth of odds and ends. In the former factory are several large walk in coolers, each approximating the size of an average bedroom. Two have been transformed into music studios for rehersal and recording. Awesome and diverse musicians play there and I get to hear them all (whether I like it or not!). I`ll take a recording next time and put up a video.

Even with the development of the two rooms, there is still tons of space just collecting clutter. He allowed me to transform two of the rooms formerly used as offices into living space. I even got to use tatami (!) for the floors. He has everything in that factory...somewhere. The other day he pulled out a bucket of miso paste, a gallon of homeage plum wine, a table, a mountain bike, an electric guitar and some plastic bowls from some dark corner. Anyways, here is the living room, the bedroom is just a tatami floor with my futon and clothes.

And the pantry:

Shigeru is quite busy with a full-time job, keeping his veggies at market and playing with two performing bands so it is nice that I can help out with some of the more time consuming chores (i.e. weeding the jungle AKA `kuso kusa` which is my pidgin Japanese that translates to: `Shit...weeds.`) Its really a great place, and the farming pace is so healthy. Rising early, eating fresh vegetables, sleeping when it rains...

I will spend the rest of my time in Japan based here with a few possible trips to the Japanese Alps. It`s an oasis for my spirits, the boost I needed after the grey and dreary soul-sucking outlet mall of Metropolis.

I`m charging my engines for another flight across the equator coming up midway through August when I`ll be headed back to Oceania.

Nothing deeps to say :) I`m just happy to be here.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
That`s kind of the feeling.

Visiting Memories

2011-07-12T19:16:00.006-05:00

I draw from the well
whose diminishing returns
soon has me thirsting
before it`s dry

And so it seems I`ll live my life:
a finger-food diet
grows hollow bones
with which to fly

-

Visiting memories is like hunting ghosts. You can feel them there, but always just out of reach. I don`t feel this hollowness when visiting people because most are running along side of me at a relatively equal pace. It`s the places, these intricate settings for my personal drama, that bring a strange empty feeling - like I`ve gotten on the wrong bus and ended up too Far East.

Its the external memories of a place that are most haunting. I never took the energy to infuse my brain with full accounts of the moments of life, but the places - like some subtle archive - have scripted small and detailed memories into their very molecules. Stone walls are inscribed with feelings of release, bamboo is etched with gallant independence and university chalkboards are streaked with purpose and fullfilment ~ memories that reinvigorate my direction and purpose.

A revisit is like a diagnostic meter. How is the engine running? How many miles have you registered? How often have you hesitated, which grinds your faith away like break pads? I`m here for a tune up. I remember where I was, I more clearly see where I am and things lost in the doldrums have resurfaced as distant flags just within sight. I feel reinvigorated, juxtaposed with the past, to continue climbing and descending the dune landscape of the future.

I struggled at first with not being the same as I was during my first visit to Japan. I still burn but without the molten heat of early twenties optimism and recklessness.
After three months I`ve found my adaptation uplifting and a signal that I`m on a road; whether it`s the right road or not, I`m going somewhere. I think somewhere is better than nowhere, which is where I may have been heading if I never left home. I disagree with the statement, `whatever doesn`t kill you only makes you stronger` in favor for `whatever doesn`t kill you can either makes you stronger or weaker depending on how you deal with it.` (I know it doesn`t have the same ring, but poetry, too, must bow before prudence.)

Echoes of the past still hum between the tatami fibres and thin Japanese walls. I feel gifted with an external memory as vast as the world, with each alley I`ve taken, each mountain I`ve climbed and every sacred place retelling me my own story. The seasons cast their familiar frame upon the chaos with which I have grown so comfortable. And here we go.

--
Home is where I want to be
so I have to go where I want.

A Cry Through the Night to the Edge of the World

2011-05-11T01:50:00.008-05:00

Its been a long time...how it slips away
like a little tuft of snow
gently dropping from a frozen ledge
and sitting silently in the cold
waiting for the sun

~Tabibito Shimizu

Tokyo.
Nothing really changes my pace like Tokyo.
Every minute is valuable and everone is valueless.
Herds of autocrats storm through human-sized hamster tunnels
like polite wildebeast in stampede
single mindedly slicing off seconds from their daily commute
and without passion or hesitation
jumping on and off magnetic elevated high speed transport pods.

Filling the nights with blazes of neon red
as blue waves of sound call undirected feet into alleyways
or behind closed doors
where the jazz that rotates around the insides of this plaster mask
finally cracks the glaze and washes out
~

Australia is gone...left alone with its imagery of kangaroos and eucalypt breezes, with baby blue skies on the edge of the world. After all, thats what I decided Australia is: a desolate shore on the edge of the world. Penguins go there. And people with nothing much else to do.

In ways its a haven; the pure dream of societies now far behind with population and economy problems. Few people, vast resources, strong currency.

And the white bristling sand
makes its arch on the bay
under sprinkles of stars that not many see
and the poly-petro chemically glued glass panel wall
protects red skinned Britons from the sweet salty seas
as they eat pork-mutton meat pies
in designer jeans

-

and now filtered by distance and a sprinkle of time
my sieve gently sifts through the good and the bad
and I`m forced to re\read all the writings I have
to find any meaning in my abrupt flight

and there is one I love there
whose hair like the down on a black swan
would sit gently on my arm
as we lay in peace through the silent days
at the edge of the world

A dove who I left
with her broken wing
and my inability to do anything
to help her to fly or get back on her feet
sometimes this free life
is so bittersweet

Divided into two
I am collecting my pieces
my heart is so cold in the rain
Japanese
the river, the bull-thrush, the chorus of green
as bamboo-ish whispering of six unknown trees
pull me back into Asia
180 degrees.

Quid pro Quo

2011-03-27T03:47:00.005-05:00

Kangaroos and boomerangs...these are the mantle piece above the complex economic and social phenomenon of a sunburned land. The proportion of first generation immigrants making up the work force of this extremely wealthy and strategically rich mineral land echoes of the great era of American history; a time when the United States was a land of opportunity. Pakistanis drive the taxis, Indians run the convenience stores, Lebanese work in factories, Irish dig the trenches, and seas of Chinese keep the university education industry afloat. Currently the Australian currency is 1:1, if not slightly stronger, than the American dollar, but worker wages are roughly 50% higher than American jobs of equal demand (e.g. a job paying $12 hourly in the US pays $18 here). Construction & demolition workers take home $1000 per week, even after a 29% tax, and up to $1500 weekly with a specialization ticket such as scaffolding, rigging, or asbestos certification. The unions are very strong, providing high wages, scrutinizing work-safe standards and limitations on work hours to make sure we, "don't work too hard, mate". An ecomnomic pilgrim would be hard pressed to find a land more rich in clean and maintained infrastructure, healthy working conditions and abundant opportunities.

Australia's major buouy keeping it afloat amidst the sea of financial crisis flooding the bank built world is a vast quantity of strategically important ore. Australian iron is top quality and has an infrastructure allowing efficient extraction and sale. Vast stores of premium uranium, including the uranium used in the Japanese nuclear reactors recently melting down all over the news, is also mined in Australia. Workers in these mines earn a base of $100,000 annually. The Chinese and Indian nations, both surging forth and fast becoming nations of formidable power and promise as global leaders/superpowers, purchase Australian minerals to construct their ever expanding infrastructures and commercial blocks. It is whispered that Australia may be enveloped in a financial union, ala the European Union, in aliance with the great industrial potentials of Asia. Australasia is not a term to be taken lightly. Australia is Asia.

Australia is Asia when I walk downtown Melbourne and pass three Han Chinese for every 'Aussie'. Australia is Asia when I speak pidgeon English, akin tot he English I use in the English as a Second Language classroom, more often than I speak a relaxed dialect. Australia is Asia when I use Japanese to assist a customer at the grocery store in buying bulk dog food. Australia is Asia when I drink Taiwanese bubble tea with a Japanese translator in front of a Thai restauraunt in Chinatown (which is 5 a five minutes walk from the main train station in the center city.) Australia is Asia when Chinese New Year is a spectatular event full of dancing dragons, clouds of incense and fireworks smoke and road closures throughout the main financial district of the city or when the horse race course is overrun by Indians throwing paint and colored dye at one another for the Hindu festival of Holi.
However, the Aussie's seem to have some grip at the top of this pyramid. Even the 'lower class' Aussie, known as a 'bogan' or 'yeow-boew' is often disgustingly rich. Imagine Cletus the trash man pulling 80k a year...what would he spend it on? Thus emerges a new social class, the tacky-wealthy. Low rider trucks painted neon green with liscence plates that read "SHR3K" buzz too and fro from dart bars, gambling pubs and TGI Friday's where. Idiots in $300 dollar wetsuits walk barefoot through marble floored malls. Women sporting 50k worth of silicone and botox bounce around from matinee movies to super Targets in UGG boots and Puma sweatshirts. But despite all the excess, they are no where near as fat as Americans.

So why all the economic talk? In the history of this blog, topics and interests have ranged from history, escaping reality, cultural enlightenment, renunciation, psychology and spirituality. I suppose if it had chapters, this one would be 'money'.

The most different I have been in the two years away is the time between arrival in Australia and now. I used to fear that I was losing whatever magic was enchanting my life during my travels in Asia. That money and image was corrupting my wander's spirit. Now the fear has subsided; I have finally submitted to becoming a chameleon in my surroundings. An excerpt from my journal, which I keep on my person at all times waiting to catch the tiniest drop of insight or prose, reads "I've sold my soul." Not the most poetic, hardly original but undoubtedly the most devestatingly true thing I've written in six months.

I'm in the doldrums, comfortably wrapped in a blanket of plenty.
the same old delusions arise from the incessant voice of culture
to earn and spend
to progress
and I see them as the lies they are
as the chains of bondage they are designed to be
yet wander listlessly into their arms
talking naps in the bosom of greed and selfish wealth
weakly hoping I don't fall asleep for ever
pressing snooze with every paycheck
and closing my eyes for just five more minutes...

A Traveller's Prayer

2011-01-05T19:00:00.004-06:00

A prayer to focus on what is real while dreaming routes to otherlands.
O'so far from here
I skip ahead
scouting deserts in dusty dreams

I pray for endurance of spirit
and fuel for my fire to wander

May the body travel for good purpose bringing loving light
carrying the flame from one knotted knoll to deserts blazing with snow

May I not forget Now
even when roaming North on a compass magnetized by the carefree polar caps of a life thoroughly undefined

May joys and ambitions check sorrow and laziness

May the feet remember "right goes thus"

May the chest take that long breath that turns blindness into awareness with peace and respect

May nothing come of this save the glorious throbbing moments of life
and the knitting together of a constellation of souls threaded by some wrangling route over the clod

As another ant sets out to traverse this teeming ball,
may his eyes see without greed
and without fear of Winter

May the glories and defeats pass as ghostly as mountain winds through bleached bones

and may the many faces living in this burning shed dance to foreign tangos as the sea of fire flows ever'on

Many Moons

2011-01-05T18:48:00.002-06:00

Another cycle through the calendar - from moons to harvests and on to Hallmark holidays and fiscal years; isn't it fun to measure time in neat little boxes! Even among the most cynical (oh, they are out there), a New Year is reflective and hopeful.

I am here, under the burning sun of the side of the world where the pale skin 'rang-gers* wear thongs** and budgie-smugglers*** in January. What foul and fragrant memories dance before me when I shut my eyes in the Australian afternoon? Here are a few reflections on a year enroute:

The lesson underlined and repeatedly drilled and quizzed by the strict tutor-of-travel is unpredictability. There is a limit, not far from the tip of my nose, to which my plans and forecasts cease being useful and begin being hopelessly flimsy. Largely due to internal changes that occur only moments down such a winding and foreign road, my perspective dances and twirls in the kaleidoscope of the newly-known. How can "I", now, make decisions and plans for "him", then?

The answer to this riddle of hopeless unpredictability is not a refinement of my predictions, or a hardening of will, an increase in effort or a subscription to Astrology magazines; it is an internal change - adaptability. This, my most prized gift from the silent teacher of life, is the crest jewel on my hemp-woven crown - the passive ability to adapt and release my rigid hopes and expectations.

In respects to my current life in "The West", the culture shock of the profoundly different cultures and minds in Asia hit me harder than I realized. While I was a part of the economies, societies and backgrounds of lands beyond my dreams, I could not see that there were parts of me being destroyed and re-crafted to fit in an environment full of different standards and different values. I held on to what I was for a while, threw it off radically, and went through some psychological instability as I pieced together whatever it was that resulted from my incessant jarring and slugging with the ball-hammer of a question: "Who Am I?"

The key realization, that I am many things, none of which reign supreme, has melded into the skill of adaptability. The myth that self-discovery is found out there is half true. By being out there and watching the transformations in here, identity issues clarify. What a dazzling multi-faced quartz!

This observer being transformed into the environments he observes.

Primary knowledge through the rich and infinitely circumstantial events and experiences of a real life must be the root of cultural and intellectual understanding. Secondary sources, books about life, are pen drawn maps of a flat world full of sea-dragons and missing continents. The hard thing to let go of is that a book about life can be finished. Editing on a criminal level underlies even the most thorough treatise on the throbbing vein of the modern world. The purity and fullness of every small moment is accessible through attention. Knowledge is not the resource that must be accumulated for intellectual growth, attention is. To pay attention to all the elements and broaden ones intellectual eye is to see the 'big-picture' reflected in a small concentrated globule; the universe reflected on the satin skin of a ruby pearl of blood dripping from our planet's on-flowing artery; "the universe in a grain of sand". Knowledge changes incessantly, but the skill of observation and analysis sharpens on Time's churning wheel.

I find contrasts between the big and the small peppered along the route. "Important" and "unimportant" (for what?). Is life unbearably light, freeing me to wander, or heavy and rich, a bitter-sweet molasses. What is the PLAN and what am I actually going to do next. Who am I and who am i. What is Life and what is life. In harmony, the two work like dance partners, the strong and rigid leading the flowing swan. The experiencing and the remembering me; which am I living for?

Purpose, ever illusive, is nourishment in a box-less world. But, as Dave Matthews sings, "it all adds up to nothing" - "one big nothing...one big nothing at all" - "for soon we will all have our lives swept away". So what am I, on a new year? What decision has reflection brought me too? Am I going down the wrong path, the right path, the only path? Is there something I hope to find? someone?

What am I but a man (?) defined by the stubborn trait of never turning back, even on the narrowing road much less travelled by.

---
Appendix of Aussie English
* the term "rang-ger" from Orangutan; from the auburn color of the hair; AKA "ginger".
** a thong is not a floss, its a flip-flop.
*** the endearing term "budgie-smugglers" [a budgie is a parakeet] otherwise known as speedoes.

Still Life With Muslim

2010-11-16T09:00:00.005-06:00

I got punched in the head by a drunk aboroginie, I stock laundry detergent at a grocery store from 9pm to 5am, spend my free time dancing in the streets and playing a celtic harp with a gypsy-dreadlocked brit who recieves signals from aliens. Wither that or eating Vietnamese soup with a cross eyed Japanese copy-paste artist, I'm at home with my control freak Lebanese landlord and two fawning beauties from India and Pakistan. Who needs to travel the world when you live in Melbourne.

Grey days are just as grey - silver bells of prior lives chime and fade through the stone-chambered cathedral of my airy mind. It turns out not where, but who you're with that really matters.

Emptiness of muchness - quite a quandry
hatching my blasphemous plans to undue
the writting on the wall
in crimson and blue

Melbourne is multiethnic but in a pure way - not a blended brown of perverted cultures and skin deep ethnicity. People here work to accomodate foreign culture, to keep it rich and living and to enjoy eachothers differances. There is less pressure to Australianize than there is to Americanize.

Yet racism burns the hearts of drunk train passangers on the Frankston line (a nefarious train route, full of junkies, from city center to the veritable warzone of "Frankstanistan"). Try your best not to get sucked in to "political" rants by the violent hag, burning with hatred and resentment, who curses all races and even the lives of her own children. All of life's problems are clearly someone else's fault, the only step to addiction recovery is acceptance, public announcements that one is an addict will gain you respect, anger spices words with an eloquent ring that convinces even the dullest and most unimaginative college graduate: these are a few lessons I learned on the 7:16 express.

Knife threats usher from a roguish baghead towards a city funded film crew making a 'documentary' on the real people of the metro and what they think - unfortunately they found them and they think in steaming stinklines of B.O. and wretched withdrawal. His pitbull, claiming a whole row of seats is "a seeing eye dog - so (he) can kill you in the dark".

A cocky head scratcher gives sporadic hugs to shaking passengers announcing that he is having a baby - with a woman he is currently taking a train away from at express rate - a child that will never know a father because he is moving across the continent tomorrow to avoid "a life (he) can't control".

A gang of Aboriginals, run by a matriarchal queen bee, sit on a dark corner in the centre of the polished glass city. She sends a thug to rob and attack a group of three strolling friends - a thug too drunk to remember what he is doing - he punches one in the head then goes and sits back down with the jabbering mob.

So the sunshine meets the shadows as drugs blot out the light emanating from the richness of diversity. And the halogen days hum to reruns of Christmas carols as 9pm to 5am crawls along through aisles 8 and 9.

WTF Mate?

2010-10-23T07:24:00.003-05:00

a've you any idea how many peeps rite a travel blog? basically mate, its more lumps than a stiff necked geeza takes at a wallaby's match, eh. ya want some?

I'm in Australia...wtf mate. An Asian tint has covered my world for 18 months. I've been he and they and a bunch of wackos in between. It's only from outside the madness I can recognize the mess of an identity that stumbled from culture to culture over the past year and a half. But in three days, I'm back! Sort of! For Christ's sake, my pants didn't even have buttons!

Australia seems just like home except the birds seing different songs, the spiders in the toilet can kill you and people speak awesome. It feels like I've been at therapy and I just had a major breakthrough and I remembered something cruical; I'm a WASP!

Melbourne is a tattoo of a city. Indy rockers living in victorian mansions making bank and throwing blow-out music fests. I'm me again, the me you know; the me I know. Meanwhisles, he's looking for work, finding friends and scratchin' 'is head when someone asks "whaja wan fa tee ay tum?"

More to come, when it comes. I'm gunnin' to be domestic for a bit and scratch some dough.

Fallacies and Phallicies

2010-10-13T08:03:00.006-05:00

Vanity! Vanity! All this is vanity!

---

You're still here? Maybe I can remedy that.

Water is hot in the sun and cold in the night, lagging behind the light in a reluctant cooling and heating circle that leads nowhere.

On the other hand, an egg once boiled can never be unboiled.

Is my 'me' a cup of water or a boiling egg?

Turbulence and peace have passed through my body as waves churn a melting pot. When 'i' write this now, 'i' write about who 'i' used to be so 'i' can read it later when 'i''ve finally found whatever it is that 'i' am looking for and 'i''ve the time to reflect on 'my' life; it turns out that 'my' life is not actually 'mine' but, when examined closely, is actually the life of this mysterious and dangerous character named 'i'. That bastard!

Would you believe that these long streams of abstract reflections can be clean and clear with a peaceful mind? Interconnections between thoughts and actions as between the past and present become apparent. The fiction of the future is exposed as pulp magazine dreams. When the mind is open and strong - unbelievable things happen; i still don't 'believe' them.

So i ascended a height of discipline and reached a zenith momentum as a temple dweller in Thailand. i saw a bunch of giant phallic symbols spanning hundreds of years of Asian history from the rocky temple schwangs of the Khmer Angkor temples to the Siamese kingdom's Ayuthaya stone schlongs to modern Kuala Lumpur's titanic glass and steel shafts. Now i'm in Malaysia chopping up the past with a keyboard and tugging at my gnarled chin hairs in an attempt to make something of this writing. It is no history, but a slice of time in the real present that is valuable to me; a photograph of my mind at a certain moment. And you may read it, or you may not(!) because you are interested in this 'i'. A deviant stream is trickling meaninglessly over dry rocks instead of flowing safely within the mighty river banks. i'm interested in him too!

---

The great gem of this recent trip is that he now realizes one secret: the Wheel turns. The miracle of one day is doom for another but the light, light air of life loses nor gains an ounce no matter how flurried or calm.

Carefree is the spirit in the morning air
without memory
when he rise.
Azure is the color of his future where
he is heading
blurry eyed

and he was asked, most jealously, by a haggard old Dylan,
"Robinson Wayfield! Where are you going? Where are you off to this time on your own?!"
to which he responded,
"to Southern Australia! to pick fruits and berries and find my new home!"

-
i

The Viper and the Tea Leaf

2010-08-27T09:54:00.005-05:00

The Jungle is not a place for humans. Nothing really prepares one for the hot passion of death floating in the green air of thick jungle. The mountains of Northern Laos stink of wild existence - viscious life is bursting and writhing out of the fecund earth like a legion of merciless maggots devouring a 4 day corpse.

Thankfully, I am not alone. An 18 year old guide and I are on a ravine route to a 400 year old tea plantation nestled deep in the forested bousom of the lolling hills. The leeches...(shiver) - waving their clinging bodies like the thumbs of seedy hitchikers at dusk invade my mind. The boy is stopping me with a soft arm movement, slowly pointing at a bee hive the size of three footballs just on a tree nearby. Gazing at the silent hive, I am being grabed, softly but strongly, by a mahogany arm. As I am pulled towards him like a dangling climber, he slowly relaxes his stretched expression, pointing again, just at my ankles, where a deadly viper sits in a springing coil. Drawing his thumb across his neck, Hollywood style, he says "dead for sure. poison too much. town too far" and beaming a white smile we are trudging on.

In my deepest moments of relief, I return to God - resurrecting him momentarily - if for no other reason than for having someone to express my gratitude to at a level beyond words.

--

An Akha tribe lives and works the tea plantation and has been doing so for generations. Wandering the gravel paths through the lichen rich trees, I recieve a handful of seeds from an elderly harvester for propogating my own plantation (in Marty's basement). I learned a lot about tea, about how to pick the best leaves, about how good it tastes after not dying in the jungle, and how it can still ones nerves for things like returning to the jungle.

--

After our return from the hills and through a terrifying thunderstorm in Phongsali, I pack up. The only way to describe the air in that town was desperate and evil. The people were good natured but there was a sort of darkness, a burned out hollow that moved through the streets like an angel of death.

A bit further down the road, 16 hours by bus, I find a bit of relief in an old heritge rich city called Luang Prabang. Filled with orange clad monks, tourist vendors and cradled by the Mekong river - a good place to drink tea and put on some weight with fruit smoothies and chicken baguettes. Sometimes it's not so bad to be effortlessly on the beaten trail. From here on through the rest of my time in Laos, I took the road most traveled by.

Still, after this, an emptiness lingered in my idle mind. I needed something to reignite me, to remind me...something...for the next post.

Laos Time

2010-08-03T03:11:00.006-05:00

Do you know what its like to have your bamboo shack firebombed...three times? Neither do I, but an uncanny amount of Laotians do.

Laos ("LA-O") is the most bombed country in the world (blue ribbon for the #1 man-made-crater-state). During the "Secret War" that the American government waged on the Communist forces of SE Asia during the Vietnam era, Laos was target for heavy bombardment due to its use as a supply route for VC forces. There are still dangerous amounts of UXO (unexploded ordinance - bombs and landmines) that still cause casualties when accidentally perturbed by a child, wanderer, off road vehicle or trekker.

Despite this, and, in a sick way, possible because of this, it is an absolutely pristine and beautiful country.

The population density is one of the lowest in the world. Picturesque villages line narrow mountain highways; indigenous peoples go about their business (...poppy seed muffin anyone?); karst landscape pocked with caves and jutting marble towers divide remote villages; 8 hour boat rides are necessary to reach some of the furthest villages. However, things are changing away from this eco-paradise; the Lao government is taking initiative (with pressure from China) to modernize infrastructure and serve as a "crossroads state" (reminds me of home...). The Chinese need to get resources out of Laos, mainly timber, and to get their goods to markets in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

From approximately four years ago there was one ATM in the entire country. Now there are...well, slightly more than one. When I first arrived from Vietnam, and the bus dumped me on a river bank with the town on the other side, I knew I was unprepared and inexperienced in the challenges this country would offer. After ferrying the river I intended to stay in the small river-harbor town and take a boat upstream to the Chinese border the next day. The only problem was there was no ATM so it was necessary to travel onwards to a town "just down the road..." four hours to use theirs.

The Chinese trade town of Udomxai has an ATM! It was thrilling at the time. It has an ATM (did I mention it works 24hr?) and... a lot of Chinese people and Chinese inns, Chinese restaurants...you get the picture.

The next day, after a roach-party in my hotel room (301...there is a picture of the inviting door in my Picasa album), I returned to the river town to take the boat North. An ebony skinned Asiatic with a pot-belly an iron kettle would envy informed me "No boat...Tomorrow you come 9o'clock".

Life trickles along in this small world. A sense of overwhelming privilege and the sense of freedom filled me as I lay by the crawling banks - it was a golden joy - when I realized I could leave; when I realized my life is so much larger. The joy was accompanied swiftly with empathetic despair on behalf of the people who would make these doldrums home from their first infant cries until the anticlimactic gasp of death.

I felt like an Eagle in a warbler's nest. A whale in a frog pond.
This was a sentiment that lingered throughout my time in Laos.

---

Five hours up the river in a longboat, passing village shanties, dropping off local Laotians in the jungle so they could continue home on foot through the bush, checking the boatman's fish traps as we went along, I began to slip into the fabled "Lao-time";It's related to Einstein's Relativity.

Finally, after docking and taking a 'tuk-tuk' (a flatbed truck converted into a snazzy taxi) up the mountain, I entered my Shangri-la...and began to uncover a truth about myself and my travels.

---

In a race with no finish

2010-07-22T22:33:00.006-05:00

Beaches and palm trees....boring. Just assume a lot of that kind of crap happened.
For a month life was sweating in degenerating old colonial offices turned into coffee shops or communist cement blocks, playing guitar near moldy-slow estuaries, motorcycling through endless stretches of rice fields, and being sandwiched into buses. Glamorous. Lots of tourist junk, marble mountains rising out of the ocean, caves of pearly light beams, rides on old boats...

I was questioning myself, what kind of crap was I wasting my life doing? A savior came in the form of a little town deep in the mountains near the Chinese border.

The first morning, after the night long bus, the sun finally began to tear apart my mental muck, cutting crystal lines on vast verandas of emerald rice terrace. As my bus stopped, right outside the window were three guys playing guitar - I almost kicked the window open to get out. Israelis, Canadians, a Brit, a Belgian and an Italian (stirred vigorously with one American) are apparently ingredients in a soul-salad.

Leaving my hilltop villa one late morning I found myself drawn into a strange social circle of 14 year old Hmong girls and an Armenian. HMO?NG!!! What the hell is a Hmong? Within a day I had an entourage - and it was awesome.

The girls spend all day selling handicrafts on the streets to tourists. That is as much as most people will probably ever know about them. I feel blessed to have been sucked into the gravity of their unseen lives. Their homes, families and minds are otherworldly. One reason for this is probably that they live in a completely other world.

Surrounded by perfect weather, under the shadow of Indochinas highest mountains, nestled amidst fertile rice fields and abundance of hemp, the Hmong of the region are self sufficient. They spend their days making and dying their own clothes and their own clothing materials, drying their own tobacco, making their own musical instruments, forging their own steel farm tools and knives, distilling their own liquor, building their own homes, milling their own grain, and of course growing their own food. The handicrafts they make in excess are sold for cash in order to buy consumer goods like rubber sandals (called "speedcars" - alas, they don't make a size big enough for me...), market food and cell phones (...).

Yet despite the beauty of this proud and sustainable life, the Hmong live uncomfortable close to misery. Suicide is freely talked about in relation to broken love and also easily accomplished (eating a small dose of an abundant roadside plant). The conditions for the very young are despairing...but perhaps only from my perspective. I aim to not interject my values on their culture but seeing little girls sleep outside in the rain with a handful of unsold key chains makes me question whether morality can really be all that different from place to place...can it? In a place where you can take care of everything in your life on your own, total self reliance, why do little girls have to sleep in the rain? This made all the more disturbing by the fact that some of these little girls who fall asleep outside, or wander around by themselves at an inopportune hour find themselves with a one way ticket to China to start new lives as wives...or worse.

--

In the end, I had to leave this Eden. I think this was the closest thing to original paradise I've seen - in all its horror and glory. It is a life before the fear of death and the shame of poverty. They are free because they do not play the 'winner's-loser's' game with the same cutthroat audacity as we do. Even the mildest pot-head in Indiana has Alexandrian ambitions compared to local sentiments in this constellation of mountain villages. Although the world is big (bigger than I'd hoped...I need to start believing in reincarnation to satisfy how much I want to do and see) I have found a home of sorts. Unfortunately, it may not be there when I return with the lambasting pace of tourism development currently underway. Travel, as with everything, relies on time and location.

Saigon!

2010-05-30T02:38:00.007-05:00

After the bittersweetness, a last drink at my crystal well and a walk in the rain, Matsumoto is now finally the golden dream it was fated to become. During my time there I remember waking from dreams - dreams in which I was back in the US or anywhere but Japan - and being frantic to the point of despair until I realized I was still under the rising sun. The truth of my separation is not as violent as I had feared. Truthfully, the editors of my memories may make my time there more pure and holy than it actually was. Perhaps they have already begun their work.

--

After a short layover in the modern marvel of Taiwan's Taipei airport, I landed in a thick hive of life, a city thriving in the jungles and silts of the Mekong River Delta - Saigon. My mental space has often wandered into this land of aroma and fruit and I finally took the steps to bring my physical space into alignment. In a way, that's how I view my own 'success' as a human - my mind sets off in its dreams and wanders into a mental space time and time again, begging me to fill in the minimalist sketch of my dreams with the vibrant color of authentic experience.
Here I am, pallet in hand. Its not following my dreams that guides me, its taking the time to saturate them with detail that gives me the drive.

Saigon is a buzzing swarm of motorbikes and slum shacks nested between hot rocks and lush greens. There are spots of French colonial history and a few temples but mostly it is shops and street vendors. The food is alive and fresh - butchered and sold in one clean sweep. They arrange their goods shops in an interesting way: instead of having one major area where everything is available there is one street that only sells faucets, then one street sells cell phone covers, then one sells photocopiers, then one sells photocopier paper...its like the whole city is one enormous WalMart. There are some signs of major commercial development on the skyline but in general, business is conducted very differently from anywhere I've been.

I have met a few amazing people through CouchSurfing.org (check it out) and dove right into a local life.

We've been seeing amazing live music: a jimihendrix style jam band complete with wailing solos and a shredder on a modified 7 string electric bass, a flamenco troupe that played in a Spanish grotto bar complete with stone walls and candlelight decor, and tonight, a famous Tokyo jazz singer. I met the son of the jazz singer at a massage parlor, an eccentric Japanese crocodile skin salesman named Ken...

"Everyday is a holiday! ***k it...my life, presented to you...TAXI!" is a common segment of the constant stream of well aligned neuroticism. Sitting in the eucalyptus steam bath awaiting our body massages he told me "they are going to make it extremely difficult to say no...but we are men, we produce like 17 billion and we need to set some free...Free Willy...so just go nuts. Anyways, its only like 5 bucks". He was right, they do make it extremely difficult to say no, or to say anything, but I didn't give in. Unfortunately, I don't think I can go back to a massage parlor without feeling like a spiritual fraud.

Waving madly out of the window of a cab - thickly reminiscent of Benicio DelToro in Fear an Loathing in Las Vegas - Ken lassos life just to pull it to the ground. I can't wait to meet his mom and listen to her sing.

Vagabond Preparations

2010-04-25T04:45:00.005-05:00

"No, I don't know for sure...it's wind man, it blows all over the place!"

I've been lying dormant - just null enough in comfort and laziness. Sometimes the hardest step is from zero to one and the help of an external force is all it takes to get the ball rolling. The earthquake at GEOS got something moving in me. A combined laziness/energy has been awakened - a force willing to work really hard to not have to work. Like a shark catching the first sniff of fish blood, im in a change frenzy.

The first night after the mass-firing I packed all my suits and other clothes worth keeping in two big backpacks and put them in the tub for shipment back to the US. I cut up a few of my ties with scissors, threw my leather shoes away at a convenience store trashcan and made a hood out of one of my suit coats.
I sewed some secret pockets on the interior of my jeans and began the process of cutting down on possessions.

I feel a sticky greasy weight, frustrated like the smeary dirtiness of pubescent pores, all caused by having all this STUFF all around me. I can't get rid of it soon enough. On the train back from Tokyo I made a sketch of my baggage allotment for the flight out of this world: one burlap shoulder bag and a guitar case; one pair of clothes, sandals and a few plastic cards.

The shift was extreme and sudden. In the morning I was planning lessons and was thoroughly prepared to work in a calm and standardized environment for another half a year. By the evening I was tearing my life limb from limb in search of the cool breeze of freedom. Once again, the bell rings for me somewhere out there - a Siren's death lure most certainly.

And the dream is still alive, to push it further and further into unknown limits until I undoubtedly fall over the edge of whatever I currently am.

More details as they become existent. Right now, it's a race to shed this snakeskin of a life and begin anew washed in the comforting winds of chaos.

---

I've been having these short dreams, right after waking up.
I look at my hand and I can see right through its flesh into the dead matter. I look up into the sky out of my window and whisper to myself "you are going to die". And for a brief second I really know it.

Yet, in this dream of reality - in it I am dancing.
Dancing, somehow - insignificant and underwhelming.
Dancing only as long as the music lasts,
and if I have any power in me as a man,
I'll be movin' to my own tune.

"Why do they always teach us that it is easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It is the hardest thing in the world - to do what we want - and it takes the greatest kind of courage."

Borderless Experience

2010-01-11T06:07:00.025-06:00

New Years was a blue moon over ice caps, frozen in the silent sky. A silver crane floated through the stillness. The joy of quiet was filling.

Around the shrine near the center of the old town people had built a bonfire and were shivering together awaiting the end of 2009. In the fire were all of the broken dreams of the past year, the pain, and disappointments. Embodied in charms and dolls imbued with wishes, the smoldering faces of unfulfilled dreams reminded me New Years is a time to burn the past as much as it is a time to seize the future.

Once the new year struck, everyone formed a line to be the first to offer their appreciation and pray to the temple god. A strong tug of a giant rope rings a basketball sized cat-bell dangling from the eaves of the temple entrance and a prayer is silently given. At the alters entrance, you can barely see into the eerily lit privacy of the god's living room. The divine ambiance adds salience and depth to the heartfelt hopes for a new year.

New charms and wish-dolls (Darumas) were sold to replace last years burning ones and the cycle of hope and reality repeats itself - painfully. Having your dreams broken is a good a way to humble oneself to the true power of the unforeseeable future.

The above was written on January 2nd, 2010. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. Plastic words.

So where am I? A few have asked me where the blog has gone, why I am reluctant to write, and I think the answer is a combination of laziness and fogginess. I'm not sure where I am, what is important anymore or where I am going. It makes it difficult to write when you are seeking the purity of authentic experience. A communicative sensitivity causes me to feel a deep itch unless things are said just perfectly - only the thickness of true expression can relieve me from this tourettic need for balance and precise expression.

I am not a reporter, I am not an adventurer, I am not an entertainer,
I am not aware what I am. Without this frame, without this character for whom to write stories about, there is a lack of depth. As before, I can do my best to use words to communicate my experience and how it has steadily lead to transformations of the person you think you are reading about-

I can tell you of my meeting a depressed and neurotic jazz pianist who has been crushed by the rigidity of Japanese culture; a man who would otherwise be a gemstone of musical creativity suffocated by the plastic bag of conformity and bland minded consumerism; of my views on his frustrated quirkiness and how it lead to the obsessive booby trapping of his apartment in preparation for bandits; of his misinterpretation that toy military vehicles are as frightening to others as they are to himself; of his sad and lonely withdrawal from society

-

Or I can tell you about carrying a hand crafted shrine on my shoulders, wearing skin tight workers pants and marching laboriously through clear frost; of carrying the cross of divine judgment, showing willingness to work for joy and praying to the gods to help me in my self-motivated quest for goodness and purity
-

of hours spent mesmerized by intense waves of sounds composed by a Brazilian jazz guitarist and amplified through four jet engines

of my meeting a robot dog
of my widening perception, deepening knowledge and metamorphosing brain; of the purple vibrations of light that accompany the broadening of my peripheral vision, of the shocking clarity of a red mountain apple when viewed in silence, of sitting naked outside in 0 degree weather under the slow trickle of geothermal warmth, of my growing relationship with a soto zen nun, of my release from the grips of intoxicants, of the texture of real space -

of fearlessness, of sleeplessness, of true friendship and the words that reveal it, of the transmission of consciousness between minds, and most importantly, I can tell you of the futility of language,

or I can just show you some pictures.

Ashes to Ashes, Grapes to Grapes

2009-10-04T07:46:00.016-05:00

A caveat: writing, like everything else in life, does not conform to the bell curve...there is no average amount to expect from me.

--

The rain and the gray had me sinking deep into myself and my marshy thoughts. Halogen bulbs, square-box mindsets, rule charts, soulless reptile romance, and routine were chipping away at me inner motorcycle-gang leader. Then the missing element, so obvious in retrospect as most important truths always are, ignited that wild horse inside of me again.

I was invited to a local festival by one of my music groups and happened to have enough spirit left in me to bike up the hill to the "hot-tub" district (no joke). I never know what to expect anymore...so I just showed up. Within five minutes I am covered in soot, locking my bike to a guard rail (saying a quick prayer that I will find it again), and joining a labor team of drunk and genie clad Japanese. I am eternally grateful for being included in this rare celebration, and I think they appreciated the help; it never hurts to have biceps when it comes to being picked for a team.

Our official task was to carry a 300lb bail of flaming and smoldering reeds up a 2km hill to the temple at the top. the unofficial task, and the one everyone took much more seriously, was getting drunk and dirty enough to make our appearance before the local god. Our team consisted of 10 men, 8 of which lifted at a time, 3 flame-ball-groupie-chicks that followed us with a cooler and kept us fueled with peach flavored sake and beer, and an old drunk-master with a whistle, a can of kerosene and a vision. Every time drunk-master blew his whistle 3 times we gripped into the coarse, reed-binding ropes with our black charred hands and let our a "Wa--Sha-I!" battle cry which, from what I understand, means "ugh... this is heavy". Between bouts of effort and strain, face blinded and singed by smoke and flame, we smeared ash all over each others faces and dared to grab and hurl flaming embers at one another from the cindering heart.

At the top, the drunk camaraderie finalized in a 1,2,3 heave-ho of the bail into a giant bonfire. Children were beating enormous drums with giant batons, chanting and shouting. Everyone was pushing, stumbling, backslapping and black with char.

Sorry about the videos being 90 degrees off. I just started using this video function and I wast sure which way to hold the phone...just tip your head sideways.

This amazing routine is a harvest festival sigh of relief for a bountiful crop. It is a burning of the worries, a kindling of the community, a rare and primal delicacy, and like most holidays, a good excuse to drink.

--

The following night some old-school musicians were getting Shinto under the full moon. The music is not describable in the common way we describe music, there is no plot, no development, no pre-conception of an emotion that is later transmitted through means of an orchestra. There seems to be only one great composer of this atonal, arrhythmic, non lyrical 'twang fest - the ebb and flow of a brook. It goes on and on, taking small and meaningless detours, bouncing and rippling, fast, slow, colliding with other currents and pushing through the disharmony and irregularities of a stony creek bed.

For me it solidifies that there is a fundamental difference in the deepest psyche of these people and myself - they must actually be perceiving something different. Maybe it isn't about hearing at all. They are not just sounds with the greater goal of altering moods/thoughts in one way or another. The act and nature of making music itself seems to be but an element of the natural human world that further completes the atmosphere of the moment. Like the crickets accompany the full moon on a cool reed lake, the human tribe twangs and piccollos from the polished wood decks overlooking the landscaped lawn.

---

This Sunday I went grape and apple picking with some of my students at a local vineyard/orchard. It was a day so perfect and full of innocent fun and joy that it made me aware of a deep black pit in my stomach: man-made trouble in paradise. When I developed what started as an innocent thought, that "this isn't such a bad place to live...I like it here", I felt a dull digging in my gallows. A pinprick of a thought caused the opening of a gaping abyss into which my heart swiftly sank. I am now living with the fear of finally having found a place that I know will be a mistake to leave and from which I know I will eventually be driven from by my unquenchable thirst for knowing what is on the other side of the mountain (I just want to see what I can see). This is not some trick of rhetoric, I really have a physical uneasiness when I think about how long this country and it's people are going to have a hold of me.

Either way, I miss most of you more than you will know.

Sincerely,

TRL

A few shots from around town...the quality is low because I broke my camera and I'm using my phone.

...and the Iceberg Flips

2009-09-07T01:13:00.021-05:00

An illusory stability, under a quiet stillness, the majority of the ice float lies submerged: this is an overused metaphor, I know, so I'm not using that one. I am using the one where the iceberg, due to just the right meltage/freezage ratio, flips over in the ocean and creates a massive amount of hydrological power in the frozen salty sea. I was wandering, rambling, without a destination, and now here I am, still as the morning in a routine made of cast iron. This shift has caused a bellowing forth of unyielding energy, but in an entirely different realm of my life. Before we get to that, I will fill you in on the basics.

A short spliff on my current living situation: I have my own cozy studio apartment in a nice smelling mountain town in the center of Japan. The air is fresh, the water is clean, the sun is always shining and the women are natural beauties. Living situation, check. Work: I am the sole teacher at the sole branch of a floundering extra-curricular English school for children. I am not sure how dire the financial specs on the company are, so if you receive a postcard from me with a little dollar sign in the corner, it means to wire me money so I can fly home...or to fly to Thailand ;). KIDDING! I am (semi) confident that it is a stable position. I work from 12-7 Tues-Sat with a ton of free time, maybe four hours of free time during work every day but Saturday.

So, here is where the iceberg flips: I have taken the energy I used to expend in motion and transformed it inward into study. I have been spending 4-5 hours A DAY studying neurology, Zen, Japanese, guitar and Facebook. I never knew this kind of potential was there. Anyways, I feel like this new direction will definitely leave the travelogue high and dry, since this routine will last the better part of a year (circumstances pending). So, I decided to put a little paper to pen and give you a few snapshots of the signposts on my inner journey. Keep in mind the conjoining elements. But first: some photos!

--

Social Grammar and the International Mind:

Social grammar is a phenomenon closely related to linguistic grammar. The way a language is structured reflects/effects the way the social world is structured. This occurs because the linguistic circuits have a primarily inter-relational social function.

Like most things cognitive, it is a two way street, where the inner contents affect the outward actions and the outer world manifests itself in the neural circuits. In a very literal way, the brain is a mirror that receives what it can and attempts to reflect those incoming messages with suitable reactions. Most of our mirrors are clouded by beliefs, past experiences or habituation (i.e. over-learned linguistic structures).

Neurological fact: with the outstanding exception of Zen like thoughtless awareness (a sufficiently large and completely separate topic that will be clarified in its place), we can only use what we have already experienced to view the world of incoming chaos. A large portion of what we have spent our formal education programming/experiencing is linguistic categorization and structure. For the majority of us (the non-enlightened ones, AKA me and probably you), a large slice of the way we view the world is based upon what language we speak/read. This has three interesting implications:

1) the more skilled at a language you are, the more detail of hue you can actually perceive in the world: this is not metaphorical; there is actually MORE reality coming through to you because you have a higher capacity to process it in detail. However, it is not a potentially unlimited increase in perception (and you will see why I make that clarification soon). However, it does serve to offer a taste, which we can all relate to, of how perception effects out experience.

Some examples to hammer the point: A rock isn't just "rock", it is hard, abrasive, rough, porous, a dull gray granite chunk of cool stone, gently accepting the morning's soft light, with glittering flakes of pink-pearl marble embedded in its subtle contours (isn't that second 'rock' more real? More unique? closer to encapsulating the ACTUAL 'rock' that is sitting outside my apartment?). On the other hand, take for example the word "love", it just doesn't quite do the job, does it? No matter how poetic, even Shakespeare cannot reach the high note that we attempt to wrangle with our damp and heavy linguistic-lassos.

2) Different languages, especially ones with completely different grammatical structures, open a new world of perception vastly different than what one may have experienced in their native tongue. For example, the Japanese language doesn't have some of the same VERBS as English! How can that be?! Do those actions exist in the Japanese mind?..., perhaps, startlingly I know, they do not. Some things do not exist here that exist in the West, and it isn't because of the soil, it is because of the lingo-cultural environment.

Consider the core of Western Philosophical thought: Plato convinced us that the world is full of the potential for being and non-being, things are horses or they are not horses, depending on the eternal definition of horse, the 'Form' of horse-ness. But (and this is my favorite example) there is no basic verb TO BE in Japanese. The closest thing is 'aru' which basically means 'it is in stock' or, in some cases, 'I've found it! or eureka!'. Everything only exists in relation to the topic it is being connected with. Nothing 'is', is and of itself; things 'are' only next to something else, used by something else, spent, owned, cut etc. So, if a tree falls in a Japanese forest when on one is around, does it make a sound? Only if it hits the ground!

A sub-point in this concept is the Japanese way of life in general: the respect for concision, brevity, leaving things as they are, nuance, simplicity, stark contrast and the way they view themselves in relation to the world is all reflected in the lexicon and grammatical form of the boldly syllabic and stylized language. Everything is a symbol for something, not the thing itself. I sometimes forget that an apple is only an apple because I call it one. We have all experienced the phenomenon of saying a word so many times in close repetition that it actually loses its meaning. In this phenomenon is the heart of Zen: things are not the labels we so tightly cling to for understanding. In this phenomenon, we sense the emptiness of the word, and it then becomes only a string of phonetic contortions. If you haven't experienced this, it is a simple way to test my above hypothesis...but do it alone so that people don't think your nutters.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."
~ Lewis Carroll ~

3) Remember, the topic is that different languages change how we see the world: Different languages offer unique views of the same world, this is undeniably interesting and true as I am experiencing the seasons in a new-found respect and passivity, tonal nuances and phrase choices have made priory indescribably social situations more clear, and details within brevity have emerged. However, although it is different, it is still a limiting factor. If we can eliminate language from our perception we are one step close to actually viewing pure reality.

This is not some mystic's midnight creed, this is the nature of perception: the brain is equipped with filters, floodgates, and magnifiers for selectively perceiving and acting on a violent and chaotic world; adaptive, yes, but filters none the less. Consider: We own a commercial semi-truck that has been (as if often the case) outfitted with a max-speed restrictor: we are cruising down the highway of experience with a governor on the engine that only lets us go 55mph; optimal for gas and safety but its not the true potential of the vehicle. Any skilled mechanic knows how to rip one of those bad-boys off, (but an unskilled mechanic might blow up the engine). Again, this isn't a metaphor: the brain is the engine of our mind, of our whole world, and it has real working parts that can be welded, bent, sharpened, grown, and re-routed. Hence, I have been dedicating myself to the destructive and reconstructing exercise of concentration meditation. There is no belief structure underlying this decision other than a belief that the brain is capable of physically transforming, changing my experience along with it. (yeah Leslie, here it is again...haha)

---

We draw lines in the sand of what "is" and "is not"
and by these rough lines, we abide
the great lie is that what "is" always "has been"
life is the breeze and death is the tide

21 Days of Vagrancy

2009-08-12T07:11:00.018-05:00

Backpack contents:

wad of cash
combat knife
hippie pillow
ukulele
neuroscience textbook
suspenders
mp3 player loaded with 2pac
socks

Mission: survive 21 days without paying for accommodation and floating objectively though Japan's Westerlillies, bum-style.

I left the comfort of the red-light district, hopped a midnight bus and woke up listening to the rose that rose from concrete singing about 'my ambishunz az a ridah'. In the old Western capital, Kyoto, my first two days were spent washing myself in the river of history that flows from the countless temples, manors, pavilions, pagodas and shrines. It was a history overload that was nicely complemented with my nights spent in a riverside rain shelter. Kyoto has a modern center that vibes and flows like any of Tokyo's busiest streets but maintains many islands of classical culture; a perfect archetype of the overarching theme of contrasts that is developing in my conception of the Japanese way of life. However thick the culture, I was really itching for something less mainline after two nights.

The wanderer's route took me into the rugged stone forest prefecture of Wakayama. Down, down along the coast, I made calm beaches my home and mountain tops filled my days. It was a lonely and rugged time where the depths of some overdue thoughts were released in the nightly silence. I spent several days on top of a holy mountain in a Buddhist village, sleeping on temple floors and walking the torchlit nights in the pure silence of the cultivated mind. A lot of pain and a lot of healing is only possible alone. Living off of tea and tofu, my mind was bent by a fast intended to wring out my soul like a sopping wet towel. I was purely at peace and sat, cold and empty, like a porcelain vase. However, even peace has its limits. Dedicated to extremes and driven by road, it was only a matter of days until I arrived at the southernmost and scathingly hot tip of the peninsula.
Kushimoto town, the little settlement at the crux of the mainland and two wooded islands became my food resource as I set out on a challenge to circumvent the two islands in a meditative hike. In the early morning smoke, razor rocks rose like knives of giants and cast their darkness and power over shallow tide pools and black sands. The cliffs were severe; the solid throbbing heat and dense weight of the scenery raged like the bulging pulse of a tiger in a life or death struggle. This same pulse beat through two young lovers as they threw themselves off a jagged ocean cliff to a shared, gruesome end. It would happen that I was approaching the outcrop as these two heavy birds flew without wings. The red pulp of bodies floated in the churning tide as the whomping beat of a rescue helicopter swooped over the scene. The bodies were covered and, undoubtedly, flown to the morgue. I was planning to camp here...decided to move on through the night.
Sometime in the next few days I am picked up by a pleasant millionaire sweatshop owner and introduced to his lonely wife. We drank aphrodisiastic (and as tastes go, un-fantastic) poisonous viper liquor. We ate whole fish, drank whole bottles, laughed with our guts, inhaled the air like a hallucinogenic smoke and sang and danced to the hentai beat of twisted Japanese desire.

Pried out of the doldrums of solitude by this crazy couple, I moved towards a neon bordello, dreaming of the Osaka sun. I spent a few days bumming around a popular beach, playing my ukulele in a sideshow of a love-hunt. It wasn't long until I had a wingman pick me up as an asset. Together we swept the beaches, me with my ukulele and him with...well, the ability to speak Japanese. It was too easy; we nightly escorted piles of bikini's to evenings of beer filled restaurants. We were dynamite-fishermen in teaming seas.

Too much sun drove me into the dark caves of metropolitan all-nighters warmed by litres of souchu and sake. The bizarre and dark heart of 3am Japan is rich and thick like the sweating of blood; I was swept up like a cell through an unbearably powerful artery of hedonism. Dingy, hole-in-the-wall freak shows. Moonlight sake fountains. Sleepless skateboard hooligans. Raunchy bums. Passed out business men. The search for a quiet corner to sleep. Osaka's finest.

The local train back to Tokyo with work on the other end...it was justly drawn out. 12 hours of scenery from mountain passes to vibrant rice fields to the monster of Fuji and finally the familiar buzz of the Tokyo commute; time to get to work.

Tom Vs. the Volcano

2009-07-17T06:03:00.016-05:00

I threw on my pack, waxed my Mohawk, adjusted my suspenders and started trudging up Japan's largest pile of hot black rocks. It took four hours of marching through volcanic sands to reach an elevation above the clouds...with four hours left to the summit. Most of the climb is monotonous, steady, and tiresome but the end result is a feeling and a view of unparalleled magnificence. From the symmetry to the pacing, this mountain represents the Japanese lifestyle.

An American individualist at heart, I bypassed the last station that offered lodging and warmth and camped on my own at the mountain's apex. I pushed to the summit just before sundown. The gale force winds were whipping me into the red rocks around the last hundred meters before the crate's edge. I felt a vendetta against me as the cold, altitude, and bursts of air tempered my spirits into steel and stone. It isn't the most physically challenging ascent but the mind is on a thin cable after seven and a half hours of high altitude desert hiking.

As I was pitching my tent under the twilight shadows of the tori gate, two twinkling headlamps slowly approached my site. A Japanese man and an Indonesian had also made the summit in one day but had not checked the hotel closings at this particular site. I offered them a place to sleep with me in my little tent and they gratefully accepted. It was about an hour later, when I was on a call of nature, that I realized the far side of the crater had an lodge. I told the two and they were on their way after a five minute bout of gratitude. I, once again the proud fool, chose to stick it out in the cold and wind atop this igneous demon.

The night that ensued was a hallucination at best. After I ran out of bottled oxygen and the altitude sickness took strong hold over my malnourished and sleepless brain, the torrents of wind tore my mind into vast audio and emotional fantasies. At one point I was shouting orders to my crewmates to "MAN THE STARBOARD BASTION! HOIST THE REAR JIB! HOLD MEN! HOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooolllld!" as I lashed the two-pound tent to boulders and held the support beams in frame with my arms and legs extended. I slept zero as the dragons maw of Fuji blasted terrifying balls of air against my teflon home. I spent the night sitting erect rubbing feeling into my feet and legs between wrestling matched with the wind. And then the unexpected came...morning.

The sunrise cut the layer of nimbus clouds from the wispy cirrus above and painted the bleak darkness of night with a new hope of returning to sanity. Slowly, the surrounding regions began to glow as the sun painted details across the landscape. Lakes and foothills emerged out of the darkness and I was finally aware of my own presence atop Japan's highest altar. I didn't know what I had achieved until I looked out from the highest peak over the altitude I had conquered and watched the darkness and cold of my evenings torment recede into the warm pink-orange of the sun.

The decent was an elation. I ran down a mountain, my fatigued calves jumping forward in bounds down a slope of pebbles and dust. It took eight hours to summit and two hours to return to the base of the mountain. Every postcard, every decor in a cheesy sushi restaurant, every overpriced dorm-room poster of Fuji will bring me back to the relief and respect I felt during that descent.

I was met at the base by a grandmotherly woman making mushroom tea in a wood cabin. She helped me fold my clothes and repack my tent, gave me a cup of tea, and endured my broken Japanese recounting of the trip. I wanted to tell her and to have her understand what a goat that mountain was.

A Day In The Park

2009-07-17T05:49:00.006-05:00

I once again have the reigns on the chaos that accompanies international living. My contract is finished, my apartment is clean and I am all set for a three week romp through the western provinces. Now, a bit of back logging:

Weirdness has a heart, a buzzing hive of pink punks and ukulele gangs. The "park" is more like a chaotic talent show with sword fights, break dancers, a-rhythmic clapping parties, and swing danging greasers littering the otherwise pristine greenery. A "Where's Waldo" shirt and a red Mohawk fit in perfectly. The park is a place where youth parades recklessness and passion. It was overwhelming how much random culture was pouring out into the atmosphere of Tokyo's Yoyogi park; NYC has a thing or two to learn.

The difference in expression between an adolescent/young adult Japanese and an adult is as clear cut a distinction as water and ice. The condensation of the free spirited youth into business suit wearing office workers occurs overnight. The Japanese treat the phases of their life like the change in their seasons; the change is abrupt and extreme. One of my students who commonly wears neon tights, random charms and sports multicolored hair showed up to class with straight black hair, a gray suit and a plain white bag because she got a job. That's the end and they know it, and I think they like it!

Until they reach that endpoint, the city has no shortage of kitch boutiques selling everything from authentic American civil war flags to Bob Seger vintage concert t-shirts to decorate the scattered identities of Tokyo's 20-somethings. I got some red suspenders and a black leather steel-studded wristband. My friend bought a t-shirt out of a giant plastic tube. We enjoyed our eccentric purchases over a cup of Bolivian coffee in a French cafe called the "Snob's Heart". Until I lived in this city, I never fully realized the extent of comfort the completely random offers my soul.

In The Thick Of It

2009-07-01T09:13:00.013-05:00

Time has locked itself into the expressway of routine; I hadn't even noticed that nearly a month has passed since the last entry. I'd be lying if I said not a lot happened but I am not far enough removed from it to make a clear judgment on the full significance.

The power of culture shock moves silently, like the angel of death, seeping into the crumbling old self image and killing it at the very core. The stages of this phenomenon are startlingly accurate: there is the honeymoon phase where everything is in a golden hue, the negotiating phase where sacrifices are noticed and positives and negatives are weighed against one another, then there is the adjustment phase in which a person either assimilates completely (10% of expatriates), rejects completely (60%) or creates a self-selected mixture of virtues (or vices) and shuffles oneself into a new being (30%). Of course, in the spirit of this whole experiment, I aim and hope to be in that golden 30. My self transformation has been rocky at times, however, and I have faced large waves of cultural hardship over the last month and reacted in...interesting ways.

Most of my gripes are so small they seem like banalities, but the deep irritation they cause me is like red to a bull. I cant stand the rotating air conditioners on the subways...every time it blows on my head I snap and punch through a window. People swing their umbrellas when they walk and block large sections of thoroughfare... rage. The word for "welcome" is so spleen-splittingly annoying it makes me want to scurry up a chalkboard with my fingernails. It is the small things. It is also the small things that I love: smiling carrots, Engrish misprints, My hometown printed on plastic cups, pink haired freaks, monks on the metro, people passing out standing up, the little-old-lady-bikes everyone rides around; These are the elements that make and break me.

Most of the last month has been daily life: shopping, commuting, and working.

Work is by far the most interesting of these three. The general level of fear in my classes is quite funny. My students are afraid of the sun, afraid of pig flu, afraid of mistakes, afraid of train doors, afraid of the mohawked American maniac that forces them to imitate mowing the lawn and shoots them dead with his fingers when he has had a long day.

My contact with my students (aged 18-24) is enlightening. I have learned a lot about culture and picked up some common Japanese. The students are strange, by and large, and have some awkward quirks that can only be described as perversions. The interactions in class are priceless. A few of my favorite moments:

A: I want to touch golden-haired girl's hips on the train...how should I?
B: Swiftly

I am God; sorry for making you so unlucky

A: I have cuts all over my wrists
B: stop doing that

A: will you loan me 10,000 yen?
B: for what?
A: long vision glasses (aka binoculars)
B: for what?
A: ...never ask, never tell

A: please forgive me
B: why?
A: for this mess I've made in your wife

A: What did you do this weekend
B: I went skiing with no shirt
A: What was the brand of the shirt you wore not?

A: You stole my girlfriend!
B: We can share! Hotels will be cheaper!

Turtles commonly support turtles(what?)

Ahhh.....I yearn for that life...(about my life)

A: my girlfriend left me...what do you suggest I do?
B: I suggest you cry

The interior of animals makes me sad

I want to be a cat. Do you mind?

(I walked into this one)...and then the poor homeless woman, her son, and their dreams starved to death in the dark alley rubbish bin...

And my personal favorite:

It is a bad idea to come (onto*) on a crying girl

Yes my friend, yes it is.

I am moving on, however, as much as I love the psycho-queerness of the 20 something veterinarians to be. My new job, starting in August, will be teaching little kiddos. I am going to be moving into the mountains to a town that boasts the cleanest water in the country, majestic ski slopes, hiking trails and untouched forests. It will be a welcomed change from the polluted and dark metro mind-clogging mess of Tokyo commuting.

I will be taking a three week traveling holiday to some far regions of the island major sites and will surely have more to write. thanks for the patience.

Yours newly,

Thomas

Whiting-In

2009-05-31T01:47:00.012-05:00

Lush and orderly gardens of trimmed shrubs and bamboo stalks separate this space. The spiritual ecology of the Kamakura great temples transforms those who enter with vespering mist that surrounds and awakens participants into a hyper-lucid green-dream. I whited-in while blanketed in the shadow of a lumbering pagoda, a silver polished pond rimmed with neon moss deflecting the pin-drops of rain all around me. My hippocampus was overloaded with the novelty and sheer magnitude of these multidimensional monuments. The peace I found on the meticulously maintained temple ground came in part from the reverence of human accomplishment of harmony in the face of a chaotic and cruel world. The resident monks’ daily chores were testaments of patience, ability and skill, all the while the non-action of massive temple structures plainly stated the capabilities of diligence. It was overwhelming. I took a nap on the stoop of a monastic dorm.

The shrine and the temple are two very different things. The temple is a place of self cultivation, community and purity; the shrine is a playground for superstition. Accessible only through a narrow tunnel entrance, a rocky grove encloses an assortment of colorful, odorous, quirky, and sensual Shinto activities. A maze of wooden Tori gates leads to an icon adorned with various ornaments to whom people offer money and prayers. A red bridge crosses a small pond, home to an albino coy-king and his consorts who are fed by passerby and housed by a spouting waterfall. A fish, not knowing life above water nor realizing his utter dependence on it darts fro’ and to’; a small hole in a rock, five meters above the pond’s surface, serves as the source of his aquatic realm and of his very life. From above us the water falls and through us it courses. We never know from where it flows and we never need to. Who or what feeds us is a benevolent mystery.

Large iron pots filled with the dust of burning incense sends plumes of smoke intocarved out hollows in the rock. On the walls of the cave are strung countless rainbow paper cranes and on the floor in a trickling spring people squat and wash their money for luck in wealth. Small white candles are lit for whichever purpose one desires and placed in reverence, prayer, or meditation into a grotto of flames. Wooden boxes offer divined fortunes and advice. Paper bows and cork-board wishes are ties to metal wires hanging from racks. A scribe delicately brings his black brush to stroke and form intricate kanji. Charms, pendants and wards are sold in satchels for a variety of ailments or wishes. It’s a one-stop-shop to satisfy all mystical desires and to fatten persevering beliefs.

Then, as though polarized in silliness by the lighthearted novelty of the shrine, I had a moment where my heart froze as my breath burst in my guts. The colossus of the iron Daibatsu (Great Buddha) is beyond my expectations. Not kitsch or over-commercialized, the iconic enlightened one emanates a hard aura of metaphysical persistence. The clear skies overhead coupled with the rock solid signpost to clarity of thought was like a tide of hot alkaline water washing the gunk of dispassion and laziness from my eyes.

On a different note (in that order):

It is fun being different here. Red is my new favorite color. I have red pants. I don’t feel that this place has changed me per-se, it is more that I have always been a black sheep and am only given the freedom to enjoy my out-standing-ness fully when I have no other option. I couldn’t blend in here if I tried for the rest of my life.

As the wind blows the trees rustle, the rocks clank and tumble, the valleys bellow and the wings flutter. The reeds of different length whistle different notes and together this grand orchestra enlivens the universe. A melodic harmony is achieved through variation in pitch and voracity. We understand the different sounds made by the pipes of earth but cannot grasp the animating fact that the winds are the pipes of heaven. Only by the silent blowing of the wind can we hear the tangible variations composed by the eternal maestro.

Memory Maelstrom

2009-05-24T15:26:00.011-05:00

For those of you who know me well this will be merely a reiteration of a theme that, if you still communicate with me, you must enjoy. I have a sort of penchant for the random, which, I am beginning to realize is why travel and especially Japan seem to offer me up the world of my dreams on a silver platter. Carving out a little niche in my own little corner of subtropical metropolitan jungle, the number of times my awareness is centered by the purely abstract and absurd is a gift.

Necessarily In nonsensical chronological disorder, the recounting of May 22nd-24th is only possible due to a series of random tape recordings, ala the style of the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. I white’d in (the opposite of blacking out, although to be fair, it was more like a graying-in) next to an Indian elephant. This matriarchal mammalian mastodon, was moated (the verb form of the noun moat) into a flattened desert plateau merely twice her body size. It was a great way to reenter awareness because the contrast of our two lives could not be more vivid. Although it sounds a bit lacking in compassion, which I assure you is not true, seeing this beaten and hopeless shell of a great beast was energizing; I am free and they ain’t broke me yet! Elephant stories always seem to be sad ones.

A unified “Ha!” followed by a short round of clapping drew me into the woods. A line of pre-pubescent boys, standing in an open faced dojo, were shooting arrows into targets 25 meters away as two girls were clapping and collecting the spent arrows. A glimpse of a white tower standing over the trees acted as the next gravitational force. Inside the castle were various specimens of hardened steel and ferocious Samurai masks and battle armor from the shogun era. Naginata, long poles with belly-blending blades at their ends, were especially vivid to imagine in use. I was drawn into contemplation of the outcome of a battle between feudal Japanese and feudal Western armies. The style, the whole mind behind the machine, is of such a different constitution that it would be the closest thing of an interstellar war between two alien species.

The quiet of the freshly moped concrete made my presence uniquely outstanding. Using my cheap 2nd hand umbrella, I received my first kendo lesson on a train platform awaiting the train to who-knows-where from a veteran kendo fighter and very friendly neighbor. His spiritual explanation of the matter, the idea of gauging force and ability through the slightest contact of swords, of defeating the mind, made my suspicion even more concrete: I and they think even less alike than a suspicious person would think (chew on that). Although I was easily twice his mass he would have whipped my ass up and down the train platform with his umbrella. I received the nickname “Buffalo Beef”.

I white’d in on a beach far from home, the end of the line, the beginning of a new region of the island; a place where black sands and the white hair of weather beaten fisherman blend in a dance with the blue of the Pacific. Fisherman cast their poles into the shallow waters near the breakers as a contented homeless man worked on his rusty old bike. I slept on the oil-sand beach until my face burnt into a panda-eyed mask and the tide washed my backside. David Byrne sang “same as it ever was” as I poked my head into a market selling alien sea-pods; I couldn’t have found his comment less accurate.

The red lights of Roppongi lit the dark black skin of the Nigerian hustlers as I stumbled through the timeless hours of a bottle of souchu and a mega-vitamin B (8000% DV). Clubs lit by flashlight wielding hostesses had dancers on every bar had me standing in some Coyote Ugly Asiana edition audition. Strong-7 beers from the 7-11 paved the road towards the beacon of the Tokyo tower. On the morning train I got off at the wrong stop because my travelling companion woke up and, startled, woke me up and we got off the train with no reason to think it was the proper city. After a 20 minute split screen story, both of us somehow winding our way back to the terminal, I popped in through closing doors right before the train left the station.

A massive sushi-go-round shot toy prizes out of a tube if you won the video game challenge match. I know. It was this random for me too so I am trying to give you a fair treatment. They serve blended crab brains.

Breaching the last step of a stone-shod mountain path a massive iron kettle of incense filled the air with a purple smoke. A chorus of chanting echoed in the acoustic halls of a Buddhist temple. Monkeys clamored in a nearby cage as my favorite tree species, the Japanese maple, showed its full watermelon-colored array of leaves. Behind the temple stood a simply marked path leading up a wooden stairway into the woods. I climbed these stairs for 30 minutes. The violent winds atop the meditative mountain whipped the thin paper ribbons into a flutter as the steel dragon spat spring water into an opaque pool. A neon jogger in full spandex buzzed by.

In the foothills, I checked into one of my beloved onsen resorts. The sulfurous hot pools felt good on my leech wounds. As I scrubbed myself clean before entering the tub I noticed the little bloodsuckers all over my feet and between my toes. It was a blood bath, literally, as I smashed and pulverized the resilient parasites so gorged on my blood. It was out of some horror film as the little monsters edged quickly towards me over the sudsy tile floor after been flicked off. After liquefying them with my shampoo bottle I was surrounded in bright red pools of my own blood. Time for a bath. Totally naked except for my silver ring, it too was transformed by these remarkable waters. Emerging from the spring fed tub my silver band had turned a luminous red-gold; I just kept staring at it and hoping (a hope bordering on prayer) that it would start to show bright red Elvish writing.

I awoke to write this as four men in a Honda minivan pulled over a sign advertising the local massage parlor and sent smashed glass into an otherwise peaceful 3:30am.

There is a café that is full of cats as the theme. There is a cartoon porno section in the newsstand. What the hell am I doing standing between them?

There and Back Again

2009-05-13T18:10:00.009-05:00

Geysers bursting, thick plumes of sulfur billowing into the air,
Booming mountains reverberated in my heart under the shadow of Fujisan.

I headed west towards the beloved Japanese icon of Mt Fuji. Azalea lined train tracks brought me into a world of romantic natural beauty just 40 minutes from my home in the volcanic crater of Hakone. A funicular cable car carried me over the smoking sulfur pits of the Owakudani crater and to the top of a ridge of mountains that surround this remarkable diverse region. Black eggs, boiled in the sulfuric water pools that bubble and churn with geothermal gasses, are a delicacy here and prescribed for health and longevity. They taste pretty good too…not quite salty and not quite poison; a pretty good balance. After catching my breath at the first glimpse of Fuji on the horizon it was up the mountain.

The first trek was to Kamiyama, or “god-mountain”. The first leg was by far the most unique mountain path I have ever traveled due to its eruptive nature. Gasses and thick white waters flowed and hissed from sores in the burnt earth. Under the rickety wooden bridges toxic marshes and landslides were the norm. The soil was brittle and scorched. All around this acidic wasteland was hellish place with the power and beauty of an armored horse.

The route soon turned green and lush as I ascended out of the active pit. The trail, quite vertical at times, swiftly placed me atop a bulbous peak with a startling view of the snow-capped giant in the distance. Atop mount-god was (surprise) a shrine with stone markers and other weathered statues and icons. The descent was through a tunnel of subtropical biomass and a slick slide down reddening mud on the wet side of the mountain.

As the incline flattened out I came upon a stark blue lake. Mount Fuji, ever present, loomed over this oasis for fishermen and holiday seekers. Sailboats and men wearing rubber pants churned the otherwise perfectly placid lake Ashinoko. Along the shaded lakeside a path of mossy stones laid at the base of 300 year old cedar trees. These botanical gargantuan, whose girth was humbling to even the most confident twenty-something, had the worn smell of misty generations in their gnarled bark. Off to one side a huge red torii gate stood solid in the shallow mirror of water like the entrance to some long sunken water temple that, if I chanted the right words, would arise from the depths in a violent rumble.

Further down the road were set the remnants of feudal Japan’s most oft’ tread highway, the Tokaido (East Sea Road) which once served as the artery between Edo (modern Tokyo) and Kyoto. Once a major thoroughfare for all types of travelers, this historic route served as inspiration for countless poems and anecdotes from Japan’s Shogunate era. Its crooked stones, original and broken, made for much more difficult passage than most of my earlier terrain. As it must have been way back then, the traditional sake, tea and food station, Amezake Chaya, served unbelievable (and previously unheard of) bowls of hot, sweet rice-liquor-pudding. Invigorated to continue, the last three hours were fueled mostly by the desire to reach the final destination.

Arriving after a long days travel, the Japanese onsen, or geothermal hot-spring, was a heavenly reminder of the primary joy of hard work: the release from it. First all clothes are removed in an outer chamber. The body is thoroughly washed and scrubbed with a bucket and soap at a satellite location from the main tubs. Getting any soap into the actual hot-spring is a horrible taboo so the body must be completely clean and rinsed before entering. Everyone used so much soap that we all looked like a bunch of sudsy titans newly risen from some frothy hell. After a good 30 minutes of concentrated exfoliation and washing I entered the piping hot pool. The steaming waters were on a rocky outcrop overlooking a ravine with a flowing river below. I let my tired muscles melt into the subtle consistency of my surroundings: the trickle of the spring, the tweet of the day’s last sparrow. The trees whispered and hissed like fine rice paper in the wind as the sun set over the foggy hills.

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I added one new album (“Tokyo 2”) and updated the “Hiking Japan” album (Sooooo many more pictures) on Picasa.

Hope to update again soon.

T

Enter the Gaijin

2009-05-04T19:01:00.007-05:00

Hello, everyone. Back to it I suppose. Hopefully my sautéed octopus breakfast will prove energizing fuel for an informative entry. By the way, "gaijin" means "foreigner" in Japan.

A lot has happened in the last few days, which have felt like months. I really hit the ground running here and haven’t stopped since. By now I have been here five days and have: set up and stocked my apartment with the necessities (wasabi sauce, a giant knife, a teapot, etc.), established my bank account, my alien registration card, my commuter pass, underwent a two day orientation, planned my first lesson, climbed a mountain, explored my city and visited downtown Tokyo. I am still spinning a bit from the completely sudden lifestyle and, although I am ecstatic, I'm whistling like the wind up bird.

First off, my apartment is amazing. It is like a futuristic life-support chamber outfitted for extended comfort. It is centrally controlled by a computer in the wall which speaks to me in Japanese when I make mistakes punching the interface with my blunted fist in frustration at not being able to get the hot water to turn on. This computer controls everything from the sink temperature, the light intensity, and the motion sensor settings, shower fan heat and duration, the front door, the door locks, and…the toilet is really one of those electronic singing ones…I shit you not. It is small but it has everything I need (kind of like Japan?). I call my restorative capsule the “Enetron”. Unfortunately it doesn’t feed me and even after a good night’s rest I am still hungry…

Shopping is quite an experience, as you might have guessed, but I have adapted a new philosophy which I hope will make it easier: toss things blindly in a bag then feast on it later. I think this might be the only feasible way to decipher what the hell it is that I am actually eating. Today I plan to have yellow squares and some red sticks with a bowl of ramen flavored with *&^%. The food is pretty amazing any way you slice it but slightly expensive for Western standards. I have really been enjoying the loose leaf green tea and the tuna filets. I also went out with my company contact, Mr. Sano, for a sushi meal and finally learned how to eat the stuff properly, which does actually make a substantial difference in the experience all around.

Sano has been a lifesaver. While the Japanese bureaucracy is quick and efficient, the general English level is prohibitive to any sort of errorless transaction. That said, I have never been so amused in a city hall office. The workers smile with huge grins, bob their heads in anticipation and flit around like busy bees from one station to another getting through customers faster than humanly possible and at the end they hand out everything with two outstretched arms and a bowed head. Even at the restaurants the staff seems to be buzzing across the room with intent. In general the people seem to be quickly moving from place to place but it doesn’t seem stressed. They move swiftly across roads, through shops and even up mountains but I don’t sense any urgency or worry.

I went with a few of the other teachers at my school to explore some nature reserves and we struck gold on the first try. We found our way to a mountain nestled hot spring house with a hiking trail into the mountains and valleys of Kanagawa. The mountain we climbed was magnificent. There is a Shinto shrine at the top and panoramic views of Tokyo sprawled below. It is about 20 minutes by bus from the Enetron and I am positive I will be going back frequently. It might be a necessary relief after the long days ahead.

The mountain were nice but central Tokyo is a wilderness all its own. Dazzling seizure-inducing displays illuminate the expanse of polished glass and concrete like some massive outdoor casino floor. People of all sorts, punks and suits, dart from place to place under the neon towers of this futuristic landscape. Extended bridges of white steel carry pedestrians through the treetops and over the river of cars below. Monolithic temples rest their stones aside the indigo glow of the skyscrapers. Seas of green parks abruptly intercede in the madness to bring fresh air into the chaos of a booming orchestra of movement and transaction. Everything is clean. Everything works. I spent all last night wandering the cybernetic streets of this harmonious techno-human settlement. Those are the initial impressions…wait and see how they change!

The work orientation was blah. I did learn a lot about the company, specifically, that the president has a hilarious sense of humor and, well, let’s say ultra-high self confidence. I met teachers from other campuses at the workshops who live around the city and am actually going to visit some of them today right after writing this. Which reminds me, I have a week off before I even start teaching! Because of the swine flu there is a delay in courses starting so I have to fill a week in Japan somehow… should be interesting.

I posted the photos from my historic first five days on Picasa. Sorry for the shorty…I’m not quite collected yet.

Thomas

Intermission

2009-02-02T19:04:00.004-06:00

...

What cold shocking return to the land where I unwillingly understand strangers in public, where I can order a large and finish it at peril to my health, where televisions and SUVs reign supreme. Frozen to the tip of the longest freshwater lake in the world, living comfortably amongst these half-civilized winter apes, I'm home.

Plowing through the snowbanks while driving on my perfect grid of county roads, reminiscence of warm Mediterranean nights draws my mind elsewhere. I push through this phase like a car accident victim in slow recovery, biding his time at the hospital; "will he ever walk again?"

I have suffered a profound strike to my pride by my own hand. Egos concerned, there are fates worse than destitution and loneliness. Return is the cardinal sin. And like a wave lapping up minerals it stretches out in its futile jump ashore, I'm a salty corsair in a fresh water pond.

Sister, brother, father: enjoy me. Here is my great intermission:

Pyramids are nice...

2008-10-02T20:26:00.006-05:00

Pyramids are nice; we’ve all seen them. The pyramids, along with the dozens of 5000 year old temples and relics of this massive desert nation, are merely a remnant of a culture long dissolved into the sands of time. Without the accompanying culture that produced these colossi of stone, these monuments, in all their massiveness, feel empty. Egypt (Misr in the vernacular) is now occupied by an entirely different breed of life from the original Egyptians much like a hermit crab usurps the shell of the mollusk.

The majority of Egypt is now ethnically Arab and religiously Muslim. The modern culture is still intimately related to the relics of the old kingdoms but in an entirely different way; modern Egyptians’ association with the ancient wonders is purely and unabashedly commercial. They have no claim to the creation or honor that these timeless piles of stone have given to Egypt yet they cling desperately to their “Egyptian” heritage by painting pharos on papyrus, carving gods of antiquity out of stone, and making little stone pyramids to sell on every street corner to the clueless souvenir hunter. The “Egyptian” heritage seems to bypass the Islamic taboo against art displaying any sort of imagery and, more directly, the creation of idols, which go for 1-3 dollars each if you have any haggling sense (which I now proudly do).

The marketing of Egypt as a cultural destination is quite pathetic, frankly. Imagine going to friend’s house expecting to catch up but, instead, all he talks about is how his house used to be owned by Mel Gibson. He then proceeds, for the entire day, to show you where Mel sat to eat, where he read the newspaper, where he watched TV…etc. and then expects to be paid at the end! This is the tour of ancient Egypt. It is given, by and large, by people with less information than a weekend special on the History Channel who speak little or no English. The true culture lies behind this prop and I was disappointed in how hidden it was. Pictures of common people where met with unpleasant shouting and hand waving and discussion of Muslim culture, home life or current issues were rejected forthright.

So forget King Tut, this is the new cultural identity of Egpyt: Arab Muslims selling stone cats in temples, tainted water, pre-chewed camel food, romanticized piles of stone, and people crawling over filthy cities lying through their rotting teeth.

I recognize this may be one of my more ignorant sounding cultural explorations but, as I have now discovered, travel does not always make you appreciate a culture more. In this particular case the image painted by my ignorance was much more noble and understanding than the cynical one that the true culture sandblasted out of my naivety. So, that being said…

They are MUS-LIM. No joking around here. I can’t believe that Egypt is one of the more liberal Muslim nations. I could not imagine the lives of a conservative Muslim population such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Iran. The Friday “sermons” over the loudspeakers scared the bejeezus out of me. I don’t understand the language but I am a master of intonation and it was not a pleasant vibe. I felt on edge after big mosque assemblies because of the aggressive tone of the mullah being blasted over citywide PA systems. They don’t have clean water but they have a loudspeaker system that sends reverberating readings of the Koran into every dark corner and alleyway. Everyone goes to mosque when there is a calling and 90% of women wear full body coverings. The busses pull over for prayer time, the shops close, and five times a day, every day, I felt like the only person in a 50 mile radius.

They don’t like us (White Europeans/Americans/Australians). I know this first hand. It is also clear second hand as I was following a concurrent news story of several tourists kidnapped in the Egyptian desert. If you followed this story, the kidnappers were shot dead after a high-speed desert chase. Well, I wasn’t kidnapped but I definitely felt the anger. Aside from the constant swindling attempts I received countless evil eyes and jaunts. I began speaking as if I had a poor grasp on English and claiming obscure Eastern European lineage to avoid the well crafted sales pitches, begging, jeering and slyness that these people have honed over a lifetime.

So, my trip itinerary:

I spent several days in Cairo seeing the sights (Pyramids, tombs, etc.), batting off swindlers, growing distrustful, and learning the ropes of how to behave, how to get around, what to eat and where to avoid. I went to the bazaar and got my haggling down to a tee before going out into the wider world. The prices, after obtaining some skill in dealing with these people, can be dramatically cut on an average of 75%. I never paid more than 50% of the original asking price and often paid significantly less. The main trick is nothing you say because these people can talk circles around auctioneers; the real trick is really not caring if you buy the item or not. These merchants can sense if you might actually walk away from their shop or if you are really set on purchasing the item at hand. If they genuinely sense the potential loss of a sale then the prices tumble. My favorite trick was merely to ask “howa maach?” (in my obscure accent) and then to act astonished at the insulting offer and walk away listening for the price to drop with every footstep. This works on anything from mango juice to alabaster vases. Some vendors feel principally opposed to lowering prices for an American and would rather lose the sale, hence the necessity of my Borat-esque dialect. The sad truth is that these people have little food and an abundance of statues, pictures, and genuine junk, which they cannot eat. Because of their hard position, given the opportunity to transform their little sculptures of Anubis into some money for food, they will even take a loss on a bad day. Good fun exploiting the poor (but probably not as much fun as they have exploiting the rich).

After Cairo I took a bus to the Bahariya Oasis in the Western Egyptian Desert (which is the easternmost region of the Sahara). In the desert there were three main geographical features…sand, sand, and sand. The first type of sand was black and full or an iron ore giving it menacing heat reflecting capabilities and a generally unwelcoming look. The second, and smallest region of my trip, was pink sand with lots of crystals and salts in it. The third, and by far the most enjoyable, was the white sand region which was decorated with thousands of windblown limestone towers that resembled mushrooms. This place was surreal and, under the waxing moon, I have never felt or heard silence and stillness so complete. My mind began to hallucinate sounds to compensate for the genuine lack of stimulus. That is why I am still not sure if the Japanese people I caught sneaking around in the dark with flashlights were phantoms of my imagination. Regardless, the phantom Japanese and I ended up making a fire and swapping language in the sand under a big blue moon. I impressed them with my action photography of the illusive desert fox I had baited with some food.

Leaving the desert with my trusty machine gun wielding escort (necessary for all US citizens due to the danger to the tourist market and the grief it would cause the Egyptian government if an American were abducted) I headed on a long train south to the Sudanese border. Here I visited the manmade Lake Nasser, a big dam (boring), a floating temple of love, and the massive temple of Abu Simbel which depicts four kings (actually the same king just in different degrees of being pissed off) sitting on thrones carved out of the mountainside. The temple appeals to me because it is like a big “beware of the dog” sign, warning those from East Africa coming up the Nile into the pharaoh’s lands that he wunt’ nuttin’ to mess wit’.

More escorts, paperwork, blah blah stuff and then I boarded a cruise ship to take me up the Nile to Luxor. This was relaxing and I was happy to be out of the desert. I was on a ship with ALL (100%) French people so that was a little island of culture. We stopped at another island with the temple to the evil crocodile god. I was really excited to see some Nile man-eaters until I learned that the stupid hydroelectric dam chops up all the crocodiles that try to swim upstream (pretty cool but not as cool as seeing a crocodile eat a swan). The cruise served tainted food and I received the worst food poisoning of my life. I didn’t sleep for over 48 hours because of constant dry heaving and bowel-blasting. I was so dehydrated that I was afraid I would have to get medical attention. Luckily, some of the Frenchies who had taken a liking to me had some emergency electrolytes and vomit-stifling medicine. That was an experience.

When I arrived to Luxor, hallucinating from lack of food and sleep coupled with the stress and exertion of titanic bouts of vomiting, I did more sight-seeing (yay). The Valley of the Kings had some well preserved murals with bright colors and whatnot, temples, statues, etc. FINALLY, I was done with all that crap and then I boarded a 17hr bus to Sinai.

...

I put two spaces between these paragraphs in deference to the bus ride, that unholy beast. Riding that long on a little bus is one thing, riding it with a bunch of smelly, loud, Arabs listening to atonal sitar-flavored-ringtones and watching “musical” films full of screaming people on little buzzing televisions - quite another. My patience is sage-like after being tempered in this hellfire of annoyance.

I arrived sometime in September to a little town called Dahab on the Sinai Peninsula. You may think that Dahab sounds familiar and that may be because it was bombed two years ago killing several locals and tourists and injuring dozens more. I, happenstance has it, stayed in one of the hotels rebuilt after being bombed in 2006, and it was nice! It was so nice, in fact, I can only think that the fanatic bomber was just jealous that people could live so nice while everything thing else around it was crap. Dahab is a diving town full of people earning dive-master certifications. The atmosphere of holiday makers, dive bums, windsurfers, and sunbathers was a world away from the rest of Egypt. I was here for a week and snorkeled the gulf of Aquaba up and down. Just below the surface of the harsh Sinai terrain lies a spectacular aquarium of sea life and coral formations straight out of Finding Nemo.

On a break from the sea a few of us climbed Mt Sinai during the middle of the night in order to reach the top for sunrise. It was a fairly easy climb culminating in 700 stairs up the rock face to an Orthodox Greek chapel on the summit. Pictures of the scenery from the mountain are on Picasa along with other bits and pieces of the trip.

All in all, Egypt was not what I expected. The front that lures so many is really nothing more than empty dazzle. Even the pyramids in all of their gigantic oldness are just a bunch of stones. As Mr. Sorg foresaw: big freaking deal. They are old, they are stone, they are big. Once I made peace with these simple facts and realized that there was nothing much more to expect from these big old stones I was freed from a misconception that seeing these old monuments is enriching or helps me become cultured. The fact is these cultures are dead. You would never get to know someone by visiting the graveyard (albeit you may form some opinions about how loose or frugal they were with money by the size and design of their headstone, how pompous or pious they were by the epitaph, and so on). Likewise, getting culture out of ancient monuments is attempting to transmute bones into flesh. It was an important last trip for this reason: I no longer travel with reliquary in my crosshairs but rather take the current living culture as the focus. It was also just displeasing enough to really make me respect home. Europe, in many ways, was more comfortable and pleasing than home, thus my perspective on the quality of living in the US waned. Visiting Africa was really the widest perspective I have ever achieved as far as understanding the implications of poverty, corruption and fundamental differences in social and religious culture. I would rather live with Barbara Streisand than live in Egypt.

I WENT TO BRANSON! (special guest author!)

2008-09-05T06:14:00.018-05:00

Prague, Amsterdam, Egypt... who needs it? I mean, really, what is the BIG F'N DEAL here?? I just got back from a day trip to Branson (Missouri).

Here is a list of things that Tommy won't find in during the course of travels afar:

WORLD'S LARGEST BANJO!

THREE TIERD GO-KART TRACK!

36 HOLE PUTT PUTT GOLF COURSE! (Don Clayton designed and certified)

ANDY WILLIAMS, LIVE... WE THINK!

THE LEGENDS! (impersonators of Elvis, Beatles, Temptations, etc... a tough ticket to get)

TRIBUTE TO THE LEGENDS! (impersonators of the impersonators... tickets can be had during the slow season)

LEGENDS OF THE TRIBUTES TO THE LEGENDS (impersonators cubed... free to local residents!)

THE TITANIC!

THE ANDREA DORIA! (just kidding... well, maybe coming soon)

ACROBATS OF CHINA!

JUGGLERS OF INDIA!

PLATE SPINNERS OF SARDINIA!

SPEAR CHUCKERS OF ZIMBABWE!

RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT WAX MUSEUM!

AUNT MARTHA'S MUSEUM OF WAX! (where you can learn that wax has a melting point above approximately 45 °C (113 °F), which differentiates it from fats and oils)

DICK CLARK'S ROCK AND ROLL THEATER! (Dick and Brian Wilson sing a great duet, "Hellllup Neee Wonduh")

3RD BUSIEST WALMART IN THE U.S.!

ROY ROGERS AND DALE EVANS MUSEUM AND HAPPY TRAILS THEATER! (see Trigger stuffed and mounted... see rare home movie of Dale mounted and stuffed!!!)

VETERAN'S WAR MUSEUM! (world's largest bronze war sculpture depicting 50 life-size soldiers storming a beach)

ANTIQUE TOY MUSEUM! (featuring the "cardboard box" and the "pot and spoon")

SILVER DOLLAR CITY!

STEAL YOUR DOLLAR CITY!

DOLLY PARTON'S DIXIE STAMPEDE & DINNER SHOW!

THE GRAND PALACE!

BOB'S BIZERKO PALACE (you don't have to wear a clock around your neck to know what time it is there!!)

MORE OLD MEN IN A HAT DRIVING A BUICK AT 15 MPH PER CAPITA THAN ANY OTHER TOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And, so I'm supposed to be impressed with the pyramids?

-Chris Sorg

Land Hoe!

2008-09-01T10:49:00.020-05:00

Amsterdam port city - you’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy…or a more serene setting amongst interesting and tolerant people. It was a trip to sin city- the European Vegas- but also a stroll in the romantic “Venice of the North”. There are wide and beautiful canals and dark alleyways, brothels and duck ponds, museums and live sex shows, tulip bulbs being sold by the kilo right next to stores selling copious amounts of marijuana. It is the city of many faces, Janus’s capital on Earth, and the contrast never gets boring.

Before the juicy stuff, a point of clarity: the Dutch live in The Netherlands. Holland is the westernmost region of the nation in which the city of Amsterdam resides. To add to the confusion, all three areas (NL, Holland, and Amsterdam) have individual flags. The flag of Amsterdam is “XXX” but, oddly, it has nothing to do with porno. It was originally a sign that Dutch knights from the middle of the Netherlands would chalk on their armor to identify themselves to countrymen. Nowadays it is exploited as a symbol of sex with a fortuitous historical connection.

XXX aside, this city has a lot of history as one of the major centers of maritime Europe. Since the establishment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, Amsterdam has been a major port for global trade and a hubbub of international culture. The Dutch themselves enjoy a rich history (and hearty bank accounts) from their pioneering efforts in reforming merchant excursions during the European imperial era. The VOC (a Dutch abbreviation for the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or Dutch East India Company) was the world’s first multinational corporation and the first company to issue public stock shares. It also had authority to wage war, mint coins, draft treaties, and establish colonies under its own flag. The brilliant idea, although simple in retrospect, to share the risks of long overseas voyages made the VOC profitable as well as safe for investment. Sharing risk increased investor confidence in turn creating a demand for investment that was met with the issuance of stock. It was a failsafe endeavor, often doubling investor sums within four years, paying average dividends of 18% annually. A large part of the unwavering success was the 21 year monopoly on Asian trade which allowed the traders to charge whatever they wanted for products, like silk, that were relatively cheap and easily obtainable for the Dutch but completely foreign to other Europeans. The VOC succeeded in many areas where other trade empires could not (trading with Japan, for instance) because they took a wholly secular approach to trade. It turns out that being upfront about the intention to profit and not trying to smuggle religion in with their goods impressed the Asiatic nations and set them at ease for trade agreements. The modern result of the VOC’s influence is the Dutch East Indies and maritime metropolises like Amsterdam.

The Dam at Amstel River (Amsterdam) is organized in a series of concentric half circles that surround the central port/train station. It is built on over 1,200 separate islands interwoven by innumerable bridges. Being the cultural and financial capital of The Netherlands, it also houses some of the great European works of art, such as the largest collection of Van Gogh originals in the world.

Van Gogh was an interesting dude. He had some weird relationships, went through a few bouts of depression including a self-imposed stay in a nuthouse, and was part of a small group of artists who revolutionized art. His major contributions include working with lighter backgrounds, experimental color combinations, unorthodox brushstrokes (smaller and disconnected, letting the color draw the picture together rather than the line and form) all the while maintaining basic themes (rural life and portraits). Van Gogh, widely viewed as a failure in his own time, painted a lot of portraits of himself because he couldn’t afford a model. It may have been a blessing (for the art world) that Van Gogh was never rewarded with money and fame because that gave him the freedom and drive to experiment and change. It also fueled his depression which inspired him to cut his ear off, shoot himself twice in the chest, and paint some of his more powerful pieces (in no particular order):

On my visit to the museum, I felt a bit strange about enjoying art inspired by insanity and depression but overall thought it was “neat”. Details of Van Gogh’s history are rich and thoroughly analyzed by very smart people…it doesn’t interest me beyond what I already said so look it up on Wikipedia.

The architecture in Amsterdam is practicality meshed with experimental engineering resulting in a cluster of cartoonishly-proportioned toon-town buildings. The houses in Amsterdam are constructed up and back rather than width-ways. There are two major reasons for this unique styling. First, space is extremely limited and valuable since most of the city is built on land reclaimed from the ocean through countless fierce struggles at the levees. Second, there was a width tax but not a square footage tax so building narrow pencil thin houses became the obvious loophole around paying high taxes. One extreme example is a house about eight feet across, forty feet deep, and six stories tall (imagine living in a giant slice of bread). One consequence of this style of architecture became immediately apparent to me (keep in mind I have moved a lot of furniture): how in the hell are you going to get a couch up there? The answer, as it turns out, is that you build a hook on the top of the building, throw a rope around it, and use the pully-rig to move goods and furniture into these narrow floors through the gigantic, wall-sized windows. But wait, the fine tuning of this procedure is a bit more complicated: imagine pulling a lacquered armoire made from premium Indian Mahogany up the side of a brick building; it would scratch the pulp out of it. The Dutch solution (get this): BUILD OUR HOUSES SO THEY LEAN FOWARD! Never mind building hooks on arms that reach out in front of the house, lets intentionally make the entire city lopsided so that we live our daily lives teetering stories above volatile waters and narrow streets. The final notable point in this conundrum is that the houses are all built on unstable soil and shifting silts so many of them lean unpredictably anyways in addition to their engineered crookedness. Now we have tall, leaning, pencil thin houses with hooks on the ceiling that are built on quicksand with giant windows…I wonder if pot was legal before or after the architects drafted this scheme.

That brings us to our next point: marijuana is legal, as well as any other “natural” or unrefined drugs (i.e. hashish, psychedelic mushrooms, peyote) and can be purchased in numerous "coffee shops" throughout the central port district. Cocaine, heroin, LSD, methamphetamines, barbiturates, and any other synthetic drugs are technically still criminal to use or possess in any quantity. But, when you give a mouse a cookie…it is going to want a glass of milk. In this case, when you give a bunch of people weed, they are going to sling crack on the street corners. No joke. There are more crack dealers than pigeons in certain areas of the city. Remarkable though, the police and the underworld have found a symbiosis of sorts; the dealers and thugs stay in a certain region, the red-light district, and the police stay out. The rest of the city is relatively clean and safe, save for a few wanders and vagrants, whereas the central port is a hive of thieves and criminals.

So enough about the architecture and depressed redheads: this is Amsterdam. People are high on drugs all over the place, wandering like the living dead from “coffee shop” to “coffee shop” to buy their substances of choice and then to other designated buildings to smoke and relax. The evenings burst to life in a neon volcano of porno and prostitution. Girls line the streets on all sides, standing behind large

pane glass, luring passerby with an arsenal of disturbing and enticing techniques (go see for yourself…I’m blushing just thinking about it)

One has the constant excitement of playing with fire when wandering the red-light district. Unfortunately, when playing with fire there are inevitable burns. I was mugged by two crack dealers at semi- gun point (there was a gun involved, I just wasn’t at the point of it).

Near the end of my stay the novelty of full immersion in the forbidden had worn off exposing an underbelly of desperation and sadness. I wanted Sting to come along and bust out into an all acoustic version of Roxanne, singing his soul out that, despite its legality, “you don’t have to turn on the red light!”

The paper thin façade associated with the drug trade is laughable. I suppose that pretending not to see it is a helpful tool for tolerating it; the police and locals merely look the other way and pretend that the “coffee shops” are actually selling Starbucks. This is part of the Dutch attitude: if it makes money, we’ll tolerate it. I have dove deep into liberal-capitalism, and it was a bit murky at the bottom. However, for all the drug freedoms and scandal in the city center the local people seem to live extraordinarily healthy and active lifestyles. There are more bicycles than people, tons of young and old on rollerblades, joggers aplenty, and generally beautiful and healthy looking folks everywhere. The parks are very well kept, equipped with modern fitness equipment, and are numerous. The grocery stores have the healthiest and widest selection of foods I have seen in Europe. It was a pleasant week and a wonderful chance for me to absorb a wholly different social vibration from that of Eastern Europe.

Picasa has a new web album. There are no pictures of me (aside from one of my feet) because I was suffering from a severe case of red eye. However, there is a picture of a giant windmill (yay)!

Hope all is well. It may be over a month until the next posting, but stay tuned; it’s going to be a big one…

Thomas

Soaking In Hungary

2008-08-16T10:13:00.014-05:00

Budapest: once the seat of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, a big bathtub.

Nested on the banks of the Danube River in central Hungary, Budapest is unique as a major city in three notable ways:

1.) It is the only major city built over an extensive cave system

2.) Modern Budapest is actually the result of three cities merging (Buda, Obuda, and Pest)

3.) It is situated on a hotbed of geothermal activity and boasts dozens of classical and medicinal bath houses.

The third quality inspired me to make the 7hr bus ride down to Hungary. Due to a Turkish occupation of 140 years and an abundance of natural hot springs, Budapest has some of the world’s most developed and luxurious thermal and mineral bathhouses.

My first visit was to the Rudas bath. Originally built by the Ottomans and subsequently restored, this gem of a bathing center was like a trip back in time. When first entering the main bathing hall the unmistakable odor of sulfur plunged down my throat. The sulfur is found naturally in the spring water sourcing the pools and is purported to be cleansing for the skin and good for digestion if consumed in small quantities. Fortunately, I became accustomed to the smell and was soon delighted with the flavor it added to the air.

The layout of the Rudas is simple and classical. There are four corner baths, each receiving a constant flow of mineralized and slightly radioactive water of a specific temperature (32°, 36°, 38°, and 42° Celsius). The center pool has a perfect combination of minerals and temperature that simulates weightlessness; when I waded there extensively it caused me to lose track of the limits of my body. The ceiling is a dome with dozens of heptagonal pieces of stained glass hewn into the construction. Sunrays passing through the glass create beams of colored light that take full form in the warm soggy air. Innumerable colored patterns refracted off of the water dance on the brownstone pillars in this solar lightshow.

The sauna was Turkish (unfortunately so because Finnish saunas are much more rewarding in my opinion, being smaller and often lined with cedar wood). It was composed of three separate chambers of different temperatures, none of which were unbearably hot.

I preferred the steam room which was located just off of the main bathing hall and was separated into three tile-clad chambers of increasing heat and steam density. The most intense chamber sears the skin, especially where it is thin such as the hands, feet, ankles, ears and…it was all male and 99% of the visitors were naked or in linen loin cloth.

A common practice is switching between the steam room or very hot pool and a nearly freezing plunge pool; it confuses the body, tweaks the blood pressure and heart rate. The result is lucidity of thought and movement which provides entry into an airy and transcendental dimension. The Rudas bath is a trance inducing place.

Healthy? Not really. Hungarians die at an average age of 68, the second lowest average in Europe next to Turkey (which is hardly the standard model for a European nation) and 10 years lower than the average for other European nations (an average of 78). They have the highest rate of cancer in Europe and death rates of persons younger than 65 are growing rapidly.

Many Hungarians are very fat, smoke a lot and eat heavy meat based foods. The constant juggling of the body between near boiling and near freezing waters is also quite taxing on the heart. After doing this for only one day I had a strange experience lying in bed that evening of heat pulses and alternate fits of shivering; it felt as if my body was suddenly boiling and then cooling off on its own.

The other bath house I attended was more upscale and luxurious, the Gellert Bath. It was much larger and included an outdoor pool area, large indoor swimming pool, steam room, Finnish sauna, and several hot pool chambers. Although it is much nicer, cleaner, and larger I prefer the Rudas traditional bath hands down.

A short tour of town was sufficient; I was a bit tired of walking after the mountain excursion a few days prior. Budapest does boast some impressive monuments and political buildings, many of which are too big for their purposes nowadays but once served in administration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Other loose ends:

1.The “Blue” Danube is not blue, but a musky green.

Hungarian wine is pretty good but nothing special for my palate.

The Hungarian language is completely abstract – a bouncy Slavic tongue-twister.

I posted some pics on Picasa. Looking forward to seeing everyone in October.

Thomas

Two Mountain Men, One Pink Cat

2008-08-09T06:07:00.008-05:00

An overnight sleeper train from Prague left us in a thick fog of the Slovak foothills at 6:21am. I had thrown this hiking trip together after hearing about the High Tatras Mountain range in Northern Slovakia about a week before. Luckily, Sam was available and willing to come along; he turned out to be unwavering company and support. He is also the worst singer I have ever heard. Although he frequently reminded me of his vocal inabilities he earned redemption through being an amazing harmonica player. Anyways, It was early and cold and we were headed 15km into the mountains to our first nights stay at the Chata Zelenom Pleso (Cabin by the Green Lake):

Going into the mountains is a perfect way to balance the ego with actual physical and mental capability. Rocks are where men can test their mettle. I was ambitious on this trip (and Sam was obliging), seeking four peaks in three days. Our first day shook my nerves a bit. After a five hour steady trek uphill to the cabin we attacked the first peak. We hit the summit two hours later and by this time we were thoroughly aware that these were real mountains. It may sound silly, not knowing a mountain when you see it, but mountains are much more than piles of rock; they are obstacles. It is hard to appreciate an obstacle or challenge before attempting it. Watching Eric Clapton play guitar, it looks easy. Watching Federer (or Nadal) play tennis, it is a cinch. In this spirit, it is really hard to know how mountainy a mountain is until you try to climb it. There was no mistaking these gnarly crags of sharp black rock; this was war.

Bordering Poland and Slovakia are the High Tatras Mountains, tectonic demons of Eastern Europe. The range of environment nestled here was breathtaking. We went from fields of wildflowers with babbling brooks to alpine lakes to thick forest to huckleberry briars to snowy crevasse to dry dead barrows and cruel razor summits. It was dry, it was wet; hot and cold; pleasant and punishing. Although the pictures may look similar to you, they are not. You would never dream of making such a comment if you had to walk four hours between each one; they are all unique in that they are all observed at a different stage of exhaustion.

We averaged nine hours a day employing such techniques as chain-link-repelling, straight-up-climbing, switch-backing, off-trailing, scrambling, falling, and crawling. Some of the most amazing and challenging parts were the rock walls that offered a chain bolted to the summit as aide in scaling straight up. The longest peak scaled was about 75 meters (that’s about 225 feet) at an 80 degree angle. We would be hiking along, going up a slope and wondering “where the hell is this path leading?” Whether it was denial or wishful thinking, it never really sunk in that we were going over the mountain when all was said and done.

We met up with various trekking groups of Slovaks along the way, all of whom seemed much more prepared for what lie ahead than we did. Sleeping arrangements were awesome. The Slovaks know how to do mountains. At several points through the high country there were mountain huts that served food and provided shelter for the night, provided you had a sleeping bag. It was really nice not having to worry about setting up a tent, especially since there is a decent bear and wolf presence in the region. We didn’t run into any carnivores but we saw a fair share of mountain antelope (seriously). I think we were too high for bears and wolves most of the time.

In the end, we made three of the four summits, did an extra detour twin peak into Poland (just to go to Poland) and walked a grand total of about 30 miles in three days. We also learned that mountain antelope do attack people. We ate sheep’s cheese potato bacon slop, the Slovakian national dish. One final note of clarification, if you happen to see a pink cat in any of the pictures in the Picasa album it is there because Sam was delegated the task of taking the proxy traveling-kitty along. The story is this: we have a friend whose sister cannot travel Europe so she sent a stuffed cat and requested that it be photographed in awesome/random European places. Sam is not a flaming homo. It was hilarious taking its picture on a summit and having four beaten and bruised mountain men watch us prop up this little pink cat for its photo opp.

Hope all is well; I am going to soak in a Hungarian bathhouse for a week to soothe my sore muscles.

Thomas

Southern Italy

2008-08-08T09:13:00.012-05:00

Naples is a pile of shit with flowers growing out of it. The pungent odor of life in this intoxicating city was dizzying. Known most recently for overflowing with trash due to mafia corruption, our first impression of this notoriously dirty, dangerous, and hectic city lived up to the expectations 100%. Dodging Italians on motor scooters, running across lanes of unregulated traffic, getting lost in dark unmarked alleyways…Ah, Italia, there is nothing quite like you.

This was the beginning of our tour of Southern Italy. We were based in Naples, the southern metropolis and the birthplace of pizza, but spent only a little time in the city. One thing has to be said for the capital of the boot heel, the food was very rich and pure and the people were genuine and vibrant. A person with a love for order and efficiency would blow a gasket staying in Italy; it takes a special kind of patience, alertness and laissez faire attitude to feel comfortable in the buzzing but ultimately slow-moving lifestyle.

Or first trip out of the city was to the famous island of Capri. An hour off shore, Capri was first used as a favorite holiday retreat for Roman emperors in AD 27 and it is crystal clear why. Flavorful pastel homes built up the cliff sides, long winding stairways, and treasure troves of sea coves (ha), all of it was right out of a postcard. The island is very small and is separated down the middle by a few mountains with the city of Capri on the East side and the city of Anacapri on the West. I had to wonder, with names like these, do these two towns have an enormous football rivalry or what?

After spending some time in the blue lagoon on the North side of Capri, my numero-uno swimming spot in the world as of now, we took the rickety little bus along the mountain ridge to Anacapri. The towns are identical. We picked up a bottle of the local liqueur, limoncello, which is a syrupy lemon based liquor (80 proof); it goes really well with sparkling water and immense amounts of sunlight. Most of the day was spent wandering white stone staircases, eating local vegetables and cheeses and bathing in Capri sun (not to be confused with the fruit punch, Capri Sun, because that would be messy).

Our next day was a trip to the archaeological dig of Pompeii. Pompeii was a Roman city destroyed by the volcano Mt Vesuvius in AD 79 which preserved most of the city (and a few inhabitants) under a river of ash for centuries. And so it went, one disaster for a Roman granary town turned into a jackpot of relics and insight into Roman life for archaeologists. The city was surprisingly large, much larger than the adjacent New Pompeii. We walked for hours up and down the wide cobblestone paths (which we later discovered were used as open sewers). Perhaps the most interesting sight, if I am permitted to say, were the bodies that were frozen in their last contorted expressions as the tons of poisonous gas pouring down from the volcano suffocated them and even more tons of ash covered their freshly dead bodies. The organic material was left to decompose under the ash and when it was completely deteriorated it left a cavity in the ash that was then filled with a liquid chalk to give us:

The city also had a remarkable intact coliseum, amphitheatre, and many bakeries, manors, private estates, and street front shops. We followed a tour group around for a while and really learned some interesting facts. Pompeii, aside from its unique volcanic history, is also famous for providing the world with the first recorded instances of graffiti. Ancient Romans wrote all over the walls advertising politics, religion, sales of goods, and even insults. The variety of messages ranged from “the finances officer of the emperor Nero says this food is poison” to “Celadus the Thracian gladiator is the delight of all the girls” to “Chie, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than they ever have before!”. So, as the tour guide Enzo liked to say, the lives of humans change very little (except we engineer our rivers of poop to flow underground).

Our final trip was down a stretch of Southern Italy known as the Amalfi Coast. We took a ferry ride along the bay passing the cities of Sorrento, Positano, and finally docking in the city of Amalfi. To me the Amalfi Coast seems to be an experiment in beautiful living. Everything had a custom feel to it, thorough, rich and flavorful. Old ladies picking enormous lemons, children chasing each other down the streets with sticks, an old woman grocer who piled a bunch of vegetables in a bag for me as if she could sense exactly how much of what I needed, delicious wine, fresh mozzarella cheese, the stereotypical fat Italian baker wearing a tank-top and an apron: we were tasting the heart and soul of the Italian South.

A wonderful trip, it really felt like a good slice of Italian life. There are dozens of pictures on Picasa that really communicate the variety of the trip. I am very happy that we decided to get out of the city and do a more local tour; it turned out to be unforgettable.

Buon Giorno!

Thomas

Henry The Navigator

2008-07-21T13:00:00.006-05:00

My brother, Henry Thomas Leitke, came to visit me in the Czech Republic. Here is what we did:

1. First, we did all the touristy stuff, but we did it quickly and with full awareness that it was the necessary evil standing in our way of having some fun. We visited the castle, visited a few enormous and awe inspiring cathedrals that were apparently decorated by the same person, and went to the flea markets to rustle through the piles of magnetic bottle openers, offensively labeled t-shirts and iron-on patches that say “Prague Drinking Team‼” (these are for the British cromagnon-fratboys who come over in hordes to drink beer for a bit cheaper than in London.)

2. Next, we went to one of the oldest and best preserved medieval towns in Eastern Europe, Cesky Krumlov. We walked ye olde streets and drank ye olde local ale (500 years olde!) and enjoyed some really beautiful and well kept gardens. There are two bears kept in a pit under the castle bridge. The town has a particular charm to it; it is like all the good parts of Prague with none of the bad ones.

3.We went rafting down the Vltava River for a day and cruised in to various pubs and restaurants on the banks. This is the trip we met Andrew from Nairobi, Kenya, Vanessa from Melbourne, Australia and some British girl. This is also the trip where I contracted a viral infection in my lungs because the river is still polluted from communist (and to a lesser extent, post communist) chemical and sewage dumping (information that came just a little too late).

4. My infection was aggravated by our next day, a completely random and unplanned for 11 hour hike/wander through Southern Bohemia with our new friends from the raft. The first 9 hours were beautiful; it was the last two, the ones during the thunderstorm, that I think put me over the edge. We meandered from small rural town to smaller rural town, up and down the rolling hills; it was really a nice experience of the Czech countryside. The torrential downpour that soaked my body to the bone was only endurable due to the circular cheerfulness Henry and I cultivated. It would be dishonest to take all of the credit for our heartiness in weathering the storm, our upbeat pace through the grey tumult was also due, in no small part, to Paul Simon’s album Graceland, which we sung from beginning to end and back again. Our spirits were definitely not bolstered by the stone faced owner of a roadhouse pub that turned us out into the rain and cold without allowing us to call for a taxi of ever get a shot of whisky to warm our downtrodden souls.

5. We went rock climbing at the local crag.

6. We played Age Of Empires III: The War Chiefs and Age Of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties. I was the war chief Runs-With-Horses of the Sioux Indians who inhabited the American Great Plains and Henry was the mighty Tokugawa shogunate of 1500’s Imperial Japan.

7. We ate 500g steaks (that’s 1.1 pounds of meat) that were served on sizzling pieces of granite and washed them down with fresh and malty Pilsners.

And so, it was a good trip. I hope he can take something back with him, a wider perspective, a new outlook on possibilities for the future, a new appreciation for beer…but all in all it was just good to see my brother.

Stay tuned for new updates soon,

The Pearl of the Adriatic

2008-07-16T09:22:00.012-05:00

My first morning was panoramic; white sun rising above the Adriatic was a warm welcome as I descended the mountain into Dubrovnik and began my tour of the Dalmatian Coast. Dubrovnik is the southernmost city in a thin stretch of land extending from the Croatian mainland down to Montenegro, a coastline roughly the same length as California’s.

The city itself is a story of rebirth. It was bombed to smithereens by Bosnians and Serbians during the conflict in the 1990s but was rebuilt nearly completely in the old style. The result is a clean and well built city that glimmers like a polished alabaster shell. Somehow Croatia managed to hold on to nearly the entire Adriatic coastline, isolating Bosnia from port access, but their prize did not come without payment. There was a lot of painful emotion in this city. From the nameless crosses to the “Dubrovnik Defenders” memorial, I felt the still emotion of a country too recently scarred with the horror of bombardment and open warfare.

A climb up the hill overlooking the city was an early highlight of the trip. I ran into some free range steer and some goats mulching in fields littered with remnants of concrete fortifications. It was unnerving to see pieces of rusty shrapnel, bombed out concrete bunkers, and destroyed machinery dotting the landscape just beyond the tranquil seaboard. Despite the cheerful attitude in the cities, the broken skeleton of the mountain whispered the residues of war. The pictures on Picasa are mainly of beauty, architectural and natural, but there are some places that reeked strongly of conflict. With that in mind... Croatia is beautiful!

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After enjoying the crystal
waters below the craggy cliffs of Dubrovnik, I moved up to Croatia’s second largest city, Split. It was a bit less of a tourist show and more of a normal Croatian town, I suspected, showing how average Croats live today. The living was modern with a well lit boardwalk and more boutiques and shops than Dubrovnik but there was a large quarter, still inhabited, that was first built by the Roman Emperor Diocletian as a palace getaway. For many years after its construction the palace at Split was reserved for royalty. However, after the fall of the Empire, the locals moved in and began outfitting it for communal living. Perhaps more interesting than the old palace ruins is the fact that families from Roman bloodlines traceable to antiquity have inhabited

the old quarter of this modern amalgamation for centuries. There was also a really eerie shrine to Jupiter, still intact; with a mildly satanic feel (Diocletian thought he

was the son of god. Apparently he wanted a place he could visit his dad to discuss the woes of divinity). I spent a good amount of time wandering the open veggie and fish markets. Experiences abounded: I bought tomatoes weighed out with fishing lures on an old balance scale, was targeted by a group of 40-something hustler/hooligans who played find-the-ball-under-the-moving-cups, and ate a sickening amount of gelato (basically, ice cream as far as I can tell).

Moving on:

I jumped a catamaran to the nearby island of Hvar to check out what all the rage was about. It was a beautiful town full of extraordinarily beautiful women, some of which chose the topless option. However, toplessness is often a catch-22…especially when flabby British yachters are involved. As bad as it was, I think it was a fair trade. I only wish I had had the pervishness to have taken a few pictures so I could convince everyone that Croat women are where it’s at. Unfortunately, Hvar was also the capital of fat bastards wearing speedos with their bellies hanging to their toes.

The hostel in Hvar was wild, mostly due to 2-liter bottles of beer and a crew of girls who were delightfully twisted; they played drinking games that would put Justin Wood in his place. I rented a boat with a few guys and we motor-boated the archipelago flat, stopping in coves, diving for shells, discovering a lost colony of bighorn sheep, and just losing ourselves in the deep blue abyss of the Adriatic. It was a great town but it wasn't exactly my scene. It had a bit too much of the resort atmosphere with far too many yachts that I didn’t own.

On to Korcula: The perfect little seaside villa.

This place was by far my favorite part of the trip due in no small part to the living legend, a South African man named “Z”, who ran the only hostel on this otherwise sleepy isle. Steel buckets of booze, shots of moonshine for flashing your ass to the moon, endless nicknames, bullhorn announcements, Point Break, and enormous sausage sandwiches all made the OneLove hostel a very special place. I connected with some really cool Australians here and was very happy to simply enjoy the lower prices and the traditional food while soaking up some clear coastal sunlight.

Croatia was magnificent. It was the perfect blend of luxury, budget travel, authenticity and natural beauty. The pearly cities and the fresh sea atmosphere was everything you could want from a summer getaway.

Check out the pics on Picasa, there are a lot more! (they save me from writing too many adjectives).

Livin' the dream,

Czech it Out

2008-06-08T14:08:00.005-05:00

Three things:

1. Good lord people here drink a lot of beer. CZR is the highest per-capita beer consuming nation in the world.

I never thought I would develop a sophisticated taste for beers. Maybe it is because most beers in the US taste the same (like piss) so there isn't a large spectrum to familiarize with. The brew here is amazing.

We went to a beer festival in Prague and tried a lot of different small and corporate beers from across the country. The food was a choice between giant sausages and mustard, hunks of cheese, or slices of bull roasted on a split. 'Topped it all off with a gallon of frothy, rich Czech lager and, in short, the contents of my stomach were manlier than Micky Rourke in Sin City.

The crazy thing is that I actually feel quite healthy. It must be all that vitamin B.

2. Czechs are violent. We saw two fistfights today and heard one distressed scream that was unconfirmed as an actual violent confrontation. The first was on a tram and one guy ran off really quick and then another guy chased him and kept swiping at his face; unfortunately the tram pulled away and we couldn't watch the whole thing. The second one was a bit disturbing because one of the participants was holding a baby in one arm as she slugged at some guys face whilst two men twisted and pulled some large girl to the ground several times. I guess it is not wonder when one takes a look at the statuary.

3. We visited a local vineyard and wine cellar and toured the chateau. it was cultural and tasty.

In other news, we might have to move our residence because our dickhole of an apartment is being blown apart by our sadistic landlord and his army of labor-invaders. There are gaping holes in the toilet room that go clear down into the flat below, a giant grotto in the bathroom that leaks through the ceiling into our neighbors kitchen, and PVC pipes strewn everywhere. I came home last week and the carpet was rolled up in front of the door, the toilet didn't flush and there was no running water in the whole apartment. Petra, the roommate on the lease, is tired of all the responsibility and so we are all going to be out of here soon.

Everything else is fine. There is a new album on Picasa with some beautiful shots by the lovely miss Bethany so check them out.

Southern Indiana is flooding so I hope everyone makes safe decisions on the roads and good luck to those with no other option but to weather the storm.

T

How Do I Reech Deez Kidz!

2008-05-13T09:41:00.007-05:00

A picture of me drawn by one of the Hell's Satans

You can never really know what you are made of unless you test yourself, put yourself in a position of suffering, and see just how much guff you can take before you crack. For me it is about 89 minutes. My self-inflicted challenge comes in the form of hour and a half classes teaching a dozen non-anglicized wild things. If you have ever tried to discipline a classroom of 10yr olds, you know half of my pain. If you have ever tried to negotiate a treaty with hostile cannibals through gestures and smiling, you know the other half.

I have never seen behavior like this before in my life. Not in class, not at lunch, not at recess, not even in summer camp where abhorrent behavior was recommended by the stoned counselors (we had a counselor try to talk us into playing “William Tell”). I wish I had a videotape of yesterday’s class to submit to “America’s Most Horrified and Completely Outgunned Teachers”. My company was forced to merge two classes as an emergency measure to avoid calling parents and telling them that demon-sitting would have to be canceled for the evening. 20 minutes before show time I was informed, via text message, of my imminent destruction.

After arriving for my lesson, hopelessly under prepared, I am informed by my snarling and jaded-to-the core colleague that “these kids have some slight behavior problems and I wanted to give you the heads up…”

I was biding my time, watching the clock tick down to the hour, and playing through possible scenarios in my head. My odds were not looking so good, here is why:

I do not speak Czech

The students, for all intensive purposes, only speak Czech

I do not have enough materials for 20 kids

The two classes use different books

The two classes are different levels

I am afraid and children can smell fear and it makes them drunk and wild with power.

I contemplate: I am wearing a tie which could easily be used to hang myself from the window before it is too late. Class begins.

Here is an example of an assignment completed by a student on the prepositions on, near, in, by, out of, far from:

I wish I could fully communicate the caricature of chaos that took place. It is as if there is some playbook that all these little buggers study before coming into class (it reminds me of the Colts no-huddle, a diabolical choice, no doubt chosen so they can run a constant offensive attack on me to keep me from devising a way to defend myself). The scene was complete with flying paper, gel-pen tattooing, games of bloody-knuckles, pornographic doodling, ripping and crumpling of assignments, and topped off with the new Czech addition of repeatedly shouting one word over and over like a chorus of twisted howler monkeys rousing for a gang rape on an unsuspecting sloth.

There were all the stereotypical maligned prototypes, fat-kid-with-anger, girl-with-no-father, over-medicated-child, sugar-holic-kid, brother-hits-me-so-I-gonna-hit-you-boy, lets-see-if-I-can-eat-it-child, and frustrated-Asian-who-is-way-more-motivated-and-less-likely-to- go-to-prison-for-a-“blue collar"-crime-kid, making for a rich scientific experiment in the prime factors contributing to an under-disciplined lot of hooligans.

It was a sad sight. There was no hope to begin with, but dammit I tried.

Czech Wilderness

2008-05-11T10:17:00.004-05:00

Our trip to Vienna just over a month ago issued in the spring season for our central European experience. We have been doing a lot of hiking and climbing all over the Czech Republic. There are many natural reserves within a two hour train radius of Prague, which should give us plenty to do until Bethany gets her visa so we can leave the CZR.

We just went to a huge castle of King Charles the IV and hiked in the surrounding furrows and woods up to the town of Beroun. The trip really highlighted the major differences between Czech and US hiking:

1) Czech hiking trails are interwoven with small hamlets and “hiking pubs” that offer well spaced refreshment and relaxation,

2) common trail-side sights are crumbling ruins and medieval castles,

3) through-hiking from town to town is well mapped and quite popular.

Trains really open up a country. It is so easy to jump from town to town, park to park, and it is cheap too. Having a car is an undeniable luxury but being able to take trains at constant intervals anywhere in the country is pretty remarkable. I would never dream of taking a Greyhound from South Bend to Cincinnati for a day trip.

Now that we are getting a bit more active, I really appreciate the genius who was responsible for the two four-day weekends in May. Check out the hiking pics (remarkable diversity of rock type within this small country).

Peace

The Passion of Easter

2008-04-01T16:53:00.006-05:00

Easter is a man’s holiday. Countless generations of American men have missed out on the greatest holiday tradition on post-crucifixion Earth. I celebrated this past season for every man back at home still hiding plastic eggs in tailpipes and storm drains.

We left for the city of Most in an economy-sized Czech-mobile. The landscape outside of the city is defined by a series of volcanic bulbs, pimples on the dusty Bohemian terrain. These peculiar mounds are the beginning of the story of Most, the Czech Republics most tragic city. This is how it goes: under the protective shadow of these unique hills lie some quaint little towns. Under some of these quaint little towns lies some coal. When the communists in the former Czechoslovakia found the coal under Most they leveled the old town and moved the population into concrete towers on the outskirts of one of Europe’s largest environmental hazards: the Most coal pit. Here is an old chateau overlooking the new designer terrain.

In this toxic hole, we drank plum alcohol at 6am, ate a pile of raw flesh, made and used whips out of willow reeds on neighborhood women, and ate Easter bunnies and eggs until we couldn’t stand under our own strength. When I say we I mean me, a 50 year old AK-47 wielding coal miner and a Czech soldier. The women were painting eggs all day and cooking. May I introduce my host, Petr:

The tradition is to go door to door as a team of masculine marauders, singing a poem that is literally a demand for alcohol and eggs. When you see a woman you whip her butt with your willow switch until she feeds you and gives you booze. Most people in Most brew their own slivovice, which is basically turpentine made from plums or pears, and they are all very proud of it. It would be a great insult to turn down a shot of this delicacy.

I was dizzy on my feet by 9am, my stomach was convulsing by 11am, and I was incapacitated on the couch by noon. This is actually a perfect schedule because if a girl catches you out whipping after noon she has the right to pour ice water on you.

Drinking like a Russian cadet, slurring words in a foreign language and chasing women I have never met with a toy sword: this was one of the most hilarious experiences of my life. God help my neighborhood in the States when I move back, I am not going to let this tradition slip away.

On a more personal note, spend more time appreciating the lining of your stomach and esophagus; they are only one Easter away from being lost forever.

Naz Dravi!

PS

We also visited some castles and chateaus in the region. Check out the new pictures on Picasa.

Ahoj!(pronounced a-hoy as in "ahoy mate-es, arrgh!")

(the little girl is Ivankova. I didn't understand a word she said but children and drunk 20-somethings have a peculiar bond that transcends spoken language.)

City of the Dead

2008-03-18T07:29:00.005-05:00

A monk in the 18^th century gathered and cleaned bones from 40,000 Plague victims and decorated the interior of a small stone ossuary. We had the opportunity to visit this “bone church”. The strangest thing was not all of the bones and skulls but all of the happy, smiling, and excited Japanese tourists throwing peace signs and taking silly pictures of themselves in front of massive piles of skulls and femurs.

Pictures rather than words will do well to describe this scene. Two new albums are on Picasa.

The town itself was very quaint. It reminded me of an old town from a black and white horror film where the monster descends from the castle into the city centre and breaks wooden gates in a full-moon frenzy… SMASH! And the villagers chase it with torches and scream at it in
east-European gibberish. It was a cool trip.

We also went to the Prague zoo, we drank in a wine cellar labyrinth, Bethany went to Dresden to get her Visa and I finished a great book by Nikos Katzanzakis (Zorba the Greek).

Best wishes to all those out there and happy travels to all those coming here.

Thomas

Paranoia and the American Spirit

2008-03-17T07:53:00.000-05:00

They are trying to get me. Every day they call and message. Every day I wake up afraid.

Unfortunately, this time ‘they’ are real and I can’t just take a prescription pill for 6-8 weeks to make them vanish. I am writing about the course managers at my language school. Their un-coveted job is to dispatch teachers to new or prospective clients all across the city. The first problem is that there are some 300 teachers and 14 course managers. Even if the CMs could manage to correctly remember who they were talking to and which language to speak to each person, things would only be marginally less tense between the two factions.

The core problem is dissent within the ranks of the generally rebellious renegade language-rogue; most of us are a bunch of bums. Making an hour commute to teach 40 year old bank managers how to give directions at 7:30am on a Monday morning doesn’t appeal to most of us underpaid (and hence completely unmotivated) beer-barons. This is true in triplicate when the next obligation of the day isn’t until 4 pm. You might even say we resent it.

So therefore, there is a clear power struggle between the teachers at Caledonian and the course managers; the managers are trying to fill shitty schedules and teachers are trying to avoid them.

Some teachers feel pressured to respond to the course managers when they call or message. Who or what is pressuring them is beyond me. Morals, social obligation, guilt, courtesy, work-ethic, God: all are utterly powerless to get me up and going at 5:15am. Even if they all combined forces and punched through my bedroom wall like some ethereal transformer robot, I would rather die than be a slave to such a beast. So, I have opted to avoid them entirely by means of stealth and distraction.

I do not know how much longer I can hold out; they have me in their sights. They see the plump and juicy virgin flesh of my Monday morning freedom and are circling like buzzards. Every last one of them is trying to slam me with some bogus 8am Monday class in the middle of BFE (that is bum f**cked Egypt for those who speak a more sophisticated dialect of English and may not be familiar with the ‘common tongue’ of the working class expatriate internet journalist). Regardless, they are fighting a losing battle because I don’t ride buses in the AM.

I also do not tolerate English pricks stuttering imperialistic propaganda at me on the streets. You might think “well, it certainly doesn’t matter whether that is something you tolerate or not, Thomas, because I am sure that doesn’t happen in Prague”. Well, that is when I would say “you are mistaken”.

Just last night I was walking home from a bar and these two wankers from Sussex overheard me talking to my friend Erin and asked us where the nearest bathroom was. ‘Innocent enough’ I thought foolishly. ‘Maybe these Brits are not complete condescending tallywhackers.” So we chatted a bit about Prague, travel, the beer… and then - faster than the French lost a country - they switched topics and began insulting the American public.

They were not talking about the leadership problems, corruption, governmental and civil disparity, or other evils common to all men, but about how

“Americans are just big and dumb and, frankly, if you don’t mind my mentioning, quite slow to the punch (old chap)”.

I retorted with clear arguments about the trembling and frail English mindset that has led to the police state of London, the pathetic condition of their withering monarch, the unmistakably evil history of raping Africa and the Indian subcontinent, and the ugliness of English women. Faster than they could say something British in response (which may have led to my first felonious criminal indictment) I introduced my American fist to one of those mangled little rot holes they call a mouth showed them how slow an American punch is.

I was upset, needless to say, and I went home, read about the America Revolution, about the firebombing of London, and watched Braveheart AND the Patriot in order to calm my nerves. After this therapy session, I decided that Mel Gibson is my personal hero.

Let’s take a moment (out of respect for his holiness) and think of all the people Mel has killed in effigy: he has killed Medieval Brits (Bravehart), Colonial Brits (the Patriot), drug dealers (Lethal Weapon), Jet Li (Lethal Weapon IV), various mafioso (Payback), oil-bandits (Mad Max and The Road Warrior), Jesus Christ (The Passion of the Christ) and I am pretty sure he killed Helen Hunt (What Women Want). I could be wrong about the last one because when my roommate was watching the film I was in sleeping in another room down the hall with the door closed… but, if I know anything about Mel, he did the right thing and finished her off quick.

Even more notable than his triumph over the Hunt-Amazon, he killed Jet Li. I have heard said this is completely impossible, even in a movie, because Jet Li doesn’t follow the script when it calls for his dying. The Daoist Chuang-Tzu (800 BMKC [Before Mel Killed Christ] wrote, in his great epic about kung fu, that “Jet Li, like the pink moon-cloud on Mount Tai, travels freely through time and space, going where he wishes, kicking people in the throat…and does not surrender his breath to age or bullets.” So, in that spirit, I have created a quote of my own to commemorate Mr. Gibson’s on and off screen accomplishments: the only thing more dangerous than Chuck Norris is Mel Gibson acting the part of Chuck Norris.

By the way, when the Boogey-Man goes to sleep, he checks under his bed for Chuck Norris.

The Elements of Style

2008-02-15T06:57:00.008-06:00

So, I am starting a collection of English "rules" that are helpful in the classroom. These are little tidbits that...welll...I make up as I go along. For instance: did you know that 'were' always comes before a verb in the -ing form? Or that the definite article "the" always accompanies a noun if you can see the noun in question? Nevermind silly sentences like "I like running" or "Look at that whale whose name is Mr Splashy Pants": these are nonsensical because they do not follow the fundamental laws of Winglish.

Here is a sample of the Winglish contract I present to my students after they recognize how special my treatment of the English language is:

Rule number 1:

NEVER, under any circumstances, question the rule-making expertise of your English teacher.

Rule number 2:
Refrain from mentioning rules that are taught to you in class to any outside parties who command an equal or more advanced understanding of the English language as/than yourself.

Rule number Three:

When writing numbers with "less than one syllable" (so spoketh the prophet) always spell the number with conventional Roman letters. [this rule is especially applicable to mute and/or hearing impaired students].

Rule number 4A:

When a word ends in -ed, it is in the past. (Little known fact: you can never really see 'red' only the impact it leaves on the world, kind of like dark matter.)

Rule number 4B:
Words ending in -ed always have a soft 't' sound at the end. (I have yet to meet a student who has commanded this rule and has remained unappreciated by native speakers.)

Rule number 5:

Saying you 'used to' do something is akin to making a squiggly line above a straight line and drawing random Xs in red pen.

Rule number 6:

never underestimate the importance of a new vocabulary word such as: sterilization, witch-doctor, masturbation, decapitation, freak-out, stewardess, and animal sacrifice.

Rule number 7:

The most important uses of English are often the most bizzarre, such as describing the pain of coffee burns in the genital region to medical personnel and arguing for the prohibition of Amazonian hallucinogens.

Rule number 8:

Perhaps the most important rule to remember: in Englsih, words are not spelled like they sound. (period)

Rule number 9:
If a word ends in the letter 'e' then the correct pronunciation of the word is made by saying the English name of every vowel in the word. For instance, plan and pl-A-ne, bit and b-I-te, courage and....C ooo...uuuu....r...A-ge [Good job! just say it faster...so no one can tell what you are saying.]

Rule number 10:

There is no word in the English language than cannot be adequately explained through some variety of flailing hands and arms and the shaking of the head.

So there are only ten rules so far...more are certainly to come as lessons continue.

In other news:

There is a severe gypsy problem in the Czech Republic. Although I have never seen one, the locals swear that they are born and bred thieves, pimps, murderers and scallywags. According to my colleague in the field, the beautiful Bethany Scharnowske, 'times is hard' for gypsy folk and they supplement their income through the illegal smuggling of pheasant carcasses.

A genie lives in the subway station near my apartment. He wears all neon orange clothing (sweatpants, tunic, turban [honestly, a real turban] and slip on sneakers) and digs through the morning garbage for the daily newspaper. He has eluded my camera's eye so far but I am hot on his trail. I am orchestrating a sting operation wherein I will throw away a newspaper and wait nearby with a bronze oil lamp with which to capture the unsuspecting Arabic refugee.

More pictures are coming soon. There really is a lot to see; the dark dirtiness of this European pearl is intriguing.

Now I Have a Job...

2008-02-03T11:11:00.000-06:00

These last two weeks have been hectic. Bethany and I both just started full-time jobs working for two different corporations here in Prague. I am working for the Caledonian School www.caledonianschool.cz. They are a huge language firm that sends over 300 employees out to teach in-company lessons at some of Prague’s largest corporate headquarters. I work at the Citibank building, Vodaphone headquarters, Hewlett-Packard, the Honeywell Aerospace center, and various smaller insurance and financial firms. It is exciting to be able to go into the board rooms of these major companies.

Vodaphone has the coolest building by far with shark tanks, concept furniture, pool tables and mazes of glass walls. I have stumbled into a dead-end glass box on more than one occasion because I find myself following the string of little red arrows that are painted all over the walls, floor and ceiling; As far as I can tell they serve absolutely no purpose and serve only to lead the unsuspecting into corners. Somewhere some surveillance officer is chuckling away as the hordes of visitors mindlessly follow the promising arrow trails only to end up lost and alone in a glass prison. I wish I could take a picture of this oddity but Borlov the security guard would not be pleased.

Teaching business English is pretty cool but we have so many classes and we have to travel so much that there is really no time to be creative with the lessons. However, I am meeting some very flavorful characters. I teach one class (for two hours!) sitting in the passenger seat of Mercedes, not the ideal resource center for a dynamic lesson. I can already see that this line of work has some ups and downs. I have talked to a few teachers who are thoroughly jaded and tired of the endless travel, cocky executives and time crunches, which has been a downer. Either way, this is certainly shaping up to be a unique experience.

Getting a work permit is also proving to be quite ‘unique’. Just so you have a taste…for some reason a German consulate needs a signed document from our Czech landlord (whom we have never met) so that our Czech Republic criminal record, which we had to obtain by waiting in a line with a bunch of dodgey Russians and Vietnamese, can be verified and combined with a medical examination to be processed at the foreign embassy in Dresden. I feel some of Kafka’s frustrated pain expressed in the Trial now that I have to deal with European bureaucratic nonsense.

I really have to question the usefulness of all this foreign records criminal checking and whatnot. If I had accumulated a hefty criminal record within two weeks of being in the Czech Republic, one large enough to bar me from employment, it would be safe to say that I came with the intent of committing crimes. If I was the aforementioned criminal, would I really be the kind of person willing to go through all this crap to apply for a job as an English teacher? I am sure I could make more cash committing petty crimes but, reflecting on Czech punishment history, I would prefer to keep my skin un-flayed for the moment.

This has to be mentioned and there is really no way of inserting it within a thread of thought. There is a guy at the gym we attend who has a huge tattoo on his calf of himself carrying a flaming rugby ball.

Finally, due to my re-structuring of daily tasks in order to conserve time, Bethany has requested a special addendum be attached to this entry:

“I am a dirty bum and I don’t shower anymore”.

Check out the "Prague 3" picture album on Picasa. The giant iron babies crawling on the sides of the Zizkov tower are my personal favorite (…what!?) but the local graffiti is also pretty good.

Best wishes from Prague,

The beer is cheap! The smell is free!

Travel to Prague

2008-01-18T04:59:00.000-06:00

Last Day on the islandWe left Chania at 5:30 in one of the dreaded Greek cabs and it was everything I feared. I have never seen anyone drive like a Greek. They thoughtlessly zip around pedestrians and other cars, honking their horns (even at 5:30) at anyone in their way. The car is driven in the exact middle of the road, blocking both lanes, so swerving is an essential maneuver. Pile all of these quirks on top of a healthy lead foot and what you get shakes your nerves more than a cup of Greek coffee. If these guys are driving the cabs their brothers must be flying the planes…

My final impression of Greek infrastructure was at the security check in Chania airport. Right below the pen-drawn “no smoking” sign sat a ungodly hairy Greek man, belly and chest hair bursting out of his little blue uniform, smoking a cigarette as he watched an x-ray screen. I will miss it.

We arrived at Berlin’s Tegel airport around 9:00 and hopped on a bus to the central train station. The station, all enclosed in glass and multi-leveled, is quite an engineering marvel. While we were waiting for our train I decided to use the restroom and even that was an experience. First of all, you have to pay a decent amount at a turnstile to even use a public washroom. After I paid my fee, I noticed that there were arrows on the floor and signs on the walls pointing to the urinals, leading me along like some trail of skittles used to lure small animals, and then there were little boxes drawn on the floor where you are supposed to stand while releasing into the basin. It wasn’t really a maze…there was one turn and there were no options, but maybe there has been a history of people getting lost in German bathrooms and just peeing all over the walls and floor in distress. Washing my hands, I had to do a double take of the attendant to make sure she was a woman, which she was. It was especially interesting to think that everyone else finds lines traced on the floor and cross-gender attendants quite normal.

Finally our train to Prague arrived at the station. The train was very roomy; we had our own booth which was basically six seats facing one another and two large panorama windows. The ride was five hours long and every station we made a stop at the German conductor would announce something over the PA system. I felt like I was intercepting transmissions for the Allies. Every once in a while he would toss in a little English phrase in a perfectly stereotypical German accent (hewwo wadies and yentelmen, ---‼GERMAN‼---, good biiiiiiiie!). We got a little sleep and got to see a lot of southern Germany’s countryside.

When we finally arrived in Prague it was just after dark, a fitting context setting for the sinister feel of this gothic medieval city. Our new roommate, Petra, met us at the train depot and showed us to the apartment. We have two roommates, Petra (27) and Thomas (24) who both speak fluent English and Czech. Our apartment is in an awesome location just around the block from one of the largest urban shopping centers, grocery marts, and metro stations. It is called the Flora station; maybe in spring flowers grow out of the dark cobblestone that covers everything…

Our next day was our tour of the city with Petra, who seemed to thoroughly enjoy her role as host. She is awesome and we had a great time visiting all of the popular sites. I put the first Prague album up on Picasa. The feel of this city is very epic but also very dark and forbidding. The statues depict gruesome murders: burning people alive at the stake, stabbings, clubbing, capturing and torturing. The history behind the art is an invisible evil that seems to creep up out of the sewers like those shadow-demons from the movie Ghost. Much of the common knowledge of Prague’s long history (gained from Petra) sends tingles up my spine.

One story tells about a man who was cast into a pit in the castle to starve because of some treason. The man asked for a violin and succeeded in teaching himself to play a piece of music and keeping himself a live until he could recite it beautifully. At this point in the story I was expecting to hear that the king heard this music and released him for his extraordinary dedication but no, he starved. True or not, it serves as an allegory for the complex feeling of hope and despair that this city sings to me.

Being recently independent from soviet overlords, the Czechs have a bit of a chip on their shoulder. While American presence here is quite large and the reputation of US expatriates is decent, I sense a silent distaste for outsiders... sometimes, not so silent. I was walking to the grocer and a man in a phone booth, probably around 30, was eying me intently as I approached. Right as I passed he spat a huge blast of saliva on the inside of the glass box, which would have struck me quite directly. I spent a few minutes trying to think of other reasons for this unprovoked and aggressive gesture with no good alternatives to the obvious: he could tell I was a foreigner and he didn’t like that. Well, I could tell he was an asshole and I didn’t like that; he is lucky he had a pope-box to protect him from some American-made boots.

Anyways, I am settling in. the roommates and I drank some fabled absinthe and it is quite interesting. It is very, very strong (although not as strong as Greek “after dinner mints” which were shots of ice-cold grain alcohol) and leaves you with a very airy feeling aside from the drunkenness. I only took a single shot, just to try it, but it may have more to offer in larger doses. The woman working the absinthe parlor made it sound like the right amount would result in a unique evening of dreamlike waking and lifelike dreaming. Time (and my budget) will tell.

My job does not pay an extraordinary amount when it is converted to dollars (although the dollar is falling still…) but it is decent wage for life in Prague. The food here is cheap and the metro is cheap; I ate a roasted duck and a pile of dumplings with cabbage and cranberry as well as a tall pilsner for about $10 (which converts to about 200 Czech Korunas [crowns]). I will keep you updated on life as a business-English teacher. Take care.

STRANDED!

2008-01-08T08:14:00.000-06:00

Paradise lost! down periscope! get us outta here!

Here we are hanging out in yet another island café sipping kiwi juice and breathing deep the mixed aroma of Mediterranean sea-mist and cigarette smoke. We need jobs.

It is hard for me to believe how focused our initial job search was and how picky we were. At this point, we are seeking the more lucrative markets of the Far East as opposed to the cow-feed positions in Eastern Europe. Either way, we still have a lot of work to do. As a good friend so accurately put it, “looking for a job is a full-time job”.

We did make some time to have a little fun on New Year’s Eve; it was unavoidable. The Cretans go nuts for the New Year. Children walk around all day clanging metal triangles and receiving donations from door to door. Do not be fooled as I was – they are no salvation army; all of their elicited funds go straight to the fireworks stand and are used in strategic strikes against fruit stands, glass bottles, and flower planters. It isn’t just children either; we were the victims of a drive by fire-cracking by two fully grown men in a station wagon. The constant explosions were not for the faint of heart but it helped to shake off some of the tension that the international job market puts on new recruits. The sky was filled with a traditional fireworks display at the stroke of midnight to top-off a day of vigilante gunpowder slinging. I do not think the locals got much closure though…they are still lighting off fireworks daily and nightly and it is the 8^th of January.

Someone must have mixed fireworks and alcohol because there was an unfortunate disaster later that evening. After Bethany cashed in her chips I took a walk around to absorb a little more of the excitement. As I was making my rounds I noticed a strange smell and shortly found the flame-gutted remains of a once ritzy coffee bar. The smoldering floor was smoking lightly and all the windows were blasted out. It seemed that the Greeks did have a fire department (not funny because I was having serious doubts). A capitalist at heart, I took my penlight out and slowly investigated the possibility of anything valuable surviving the flames (i.e. a cash register). Alcohol induced treasure hunting is surprisingly exciting. Needless to say, I didn’t find any money but I did not return empty handed. I grabbed a glass bowl, a tin full of toothpicks and an ashtray for reasons only God knows.

On my way back through town with my loot, "American Alley" (a bar strip named for the magnetic force it exerts on US military personnel) was in an uproar. Apparently, the Greek police has been called (they had police too!?) because there was a fight with some Americans and a Greek and then some Syrians decided to make threats with a gun and surround the building or something. Ah, alcohol - "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" Homer J. Simpson. Way too heavy for me so I just went on my way, clicking my beads in the early hours of the morning. I really enjoy the cool quiet of the early morning when the birds are just waking and the hangover hasn't even begun to stir.

Anyways, we met some very friendly guys from the Navy base and have been hanging out with them a bit more, which is a nice relief. One of them even gave me a guitar! I am looking forward to reporting something a bit more exciting such as changing time zones.

Check out a few new pictures on Picasa. We found some old ruins, a hilarious car, a church, and a creepy doll-house thing...

Nightwalker

2007-12-27T08:54:00.000-06:00

Eerie silence lies still as stone in the cold corridors of Chania’s night. I have been finding myself walking later and later, getting lost in the maze of houses and making my turns when a faint sound catches my ear. The sound will lead you to some quite interesting places in the quiet hours of the night.

There does not seem to be a commercial/residential divide in the muddled patchwork of construction that makes up the heart of town. As I walked this evening I passed Minoan ruins crumbling into the hillside and, right next to it, a discotheque with pulsing dance music and seizure inducing lights pumping out into the streets. Houses are stacked upon the remains of a Venetian wall and bars are built into everything from old dock houses to what feels like janitorial closets.

Bouzoukia is a traditional Cretan ‘bar’ but it is really more like a small café. They are in the most peculiar places but always draw a crowd of Greeks seeking some traditional music. I ventured in to listen. The band was three men: one playing a traditional Spanish rhythm guitar and two playing bouzoukies which are like twangy banjoes. The bouzoukies have eight strings but the strings come in couples, one heavy and one light string per note, so the sound is more full but relatively simple. The most enlivening part of the bouzoukia is that the entire bar is part of the entertainment with people dancing, clapping and singing.

The discotheque is something else. The other night I was out wandering about and slinging my komboloi* when I heard a soft pulse coming from a nearby basement. As I went closer it became clear that this was an all-night dance bar. It was so smoky inside that my eyes burned but the music was motivating and the crowd was very entertaining. It was packed from wall to wall with people at 3:00am; I finally found where all the young people are. It isn’t really my scene but after finding this first one, I started to notice them all over the place.

I forgot to mention the komboloi: every man on the island has a string of beads and they sell them everywhere. Some are cheap plastic ones, like mine, and others are silver, gold, ivory, jade, amber, or whatever you can imagine. They are on a loop of string and half of the string is bare so that the beads can slide back and forth. Like I said, men swing them around all the time. It is a manner of style to click and seamlessly swing them from finger to finger, a subconscious art of sorts that really gets addictive. I hear it is good for those trying to quit smoking but I feel like I need to pick up smoking just to quit manipulating the komboloi.

I am a bit restless in the limbo of the island winter. There is no holiday from an overextended vacation. Mountains are on the horizon; the white caps are calling me. My feet are itching to conqueror some rock.

Party on

Happy Holidays

2007-12-23T13:16:00.000-06:00

I’m alive! and I’m getting fat from all the goat butter and feta!

It looks like we are going to be spending the holidays in Crete, which is ok by me. The town is all lit up and everyone is out buying gifts. Our landlord and lady, Efetehis and Natalie, are very nice people and we have been talking with them a lot more now that all of our fellow classmates have shipped off. Meghan is interviewing in Florence and Sarah in Seville. We are trying to decide between Prague and Spain…as soon as we know, you will.

It is a bittersweet realization that staying in Greece isn’t a realistic option. In a way, the short time I have spent here has captured me. It is well knit, friendly, and wholesome but it is also small. Living here is like living in Ellettsville, IN,…but in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and with several languages being spoken, thousand year old ruins, fresh food pouring off of the street corners, grain alcohol after every meal, and a huge tourist boom economy and an equally significant off-season slump…so nothing like it really. Regardless, it can certainly feel small. The way I see it, it doesn’t hurt to keep moving along; there is always more green grass out there somewhere.

Bethany and I took a walk out of town today and followed the coast until it became craggy and rough. It was very beautiful and the cliff-side tide-pools were a unique sight. Check out the new pics, it was one of my favorite places I have been to around here. The waves were crashing in right up to my feet and the air was so briny that I had some salt crystals in my eyebrows when we got home.

For a while, I watched some fiddler crabs spin around in their own little world, carved into the safety of the stone. I couldn’t help but get philosophical as I looked out into the vast blue of the sea; I knew that the crab would never see my perspective on the true magnitude of the sea and he would certainly never understand it if I told him. But I understand him, he is rational; he has all of his necessities in his shallow pool. I sometimes wonder if I had all I needed in mine. Then again, it may be because I had all I needed that I felt the compulsion to leave.

After our climb, we caught a water polo game. Greeks are serious about few things but smoking cigarettes and water polo are definitely two of them. It may seem like a pool game but it is intense. These guys drown each other for 45 minutes and all the while the crowd is lighting off explosives, banging on giant drums and sitting on air-horns. It was fun to watch. I would go to another one.

Not much going on, life is quiet here. It will be strange not being home for Christmas. I wish you all the best.

Happy Holidays!

Καλα Κριστμας!

Diary of a Mad Woman

2007-12-23T13:05:00.000-06:00

Things have been quiet here on the island. Winter comes with cold sprays of rain and rough seas. Everywhere in the old town you see and hear the green waves crashing over the breakers and craggy rocks. Most everything is quiet, except for the mind of one woman.

Where she comes form is vague; somewhere in Virginia. Somewhere where Catholicism, ADD education, and six children of her own made her life worth living, made her sanity worth holding on to. She doesn’t have any of that anymore.

We first met MA on the tarmac bus in Athens. We were waiting ten minutes on the bus, everyone was waiting. Our first impression of MA was the haphazard old woman, 60 years and looking it, who was making the entire plane from Athens to Chania late. She stumbled and waddled around the bus until she sat directly across from us. Bethany, bless her heart, is a nice person most of the time but in this particular situation she leaned over to me and whispered “I HATE this woman, I don’t know what it is about her but I HATE her.” She was serious, and she had reason to be. We often hate things we are afraid of, that disturb our vision of life, that interrupt our pleasant fates. Crazy interrupts. Bethany must have been sensing the whirlwind of confused emotion that this woman was going to put us through, all of us.

I told her, in my striving to be fair to someone we have never met, that she needed to calm down and just look away if she was being bothered. I told her that she was just a normal woman with a peculiar face and unfortunately repulsive facial gestures. Her twitching and soft whispering, her befuddled look of worry and confusion; it was a shattered soul leaking out through the cracks of a tired old body.

As we boarded the plane, Bethany and I were talking, looking through the same safety manuals in so many different languages, when MA pops her head right into our faces,

“Are you two going to meet Sara?! Are you Americans?”

Yes we were and yes we are. At this point I told Bethany that I was severely pissed at her for bringing down this hail of instant karma. MA was our new classmate for a 4 week, 60 hr a week teaching internship.

At the luggage pick up we got the full heave,

“I’m MA and I’m from Virginia and in Virginia I raised six kids, two are good and are you religious? Are you Christian because it is nice to do the Lord’s work and I worked with ADD kids, well actually, God worked with ADD kids and I was just there, or not, I started three schools, then I don’t know, I got, well let’s not get into that, I think I just put my own sock in my mouth so what did you study at school? My husband and I, well he is into some weird stuff, he hates me and, well, isn’t divorce just a bad thing? I got my Masters in secondary education and I just love working with ADD kids…I wonder if there are ADD kids in Jerusalem because I am going to Jerusalem…oh my heart stops just thinking about it! When I teach I just like to give the kids something to see, something brain based that they can touch like a bunny. In my classes at my schools I used to just plop a bunny rabbit right down in their laps and say, see isn’t that better? Did you bring bleach because I was told by a lady who gave me shots that you should dip your lettuce in bleach when you go to Greece so you don’t get e. coli and I was checking to see what kind of bleach you were going to use and…” SO ON AND SO ON AND SO ON.

Her favorite phrase is “one last thing…” which is NEVER the last thing because it never ends, ever. Ever.

And nothing could stop it. It was like a flood of nonsense, of pain, of longing to be heard, to be liked, to be noticed, to be in control, to be anywhere but in contemplation of what was really going on in her life.

Our class was relatively small, five students, which was nice because we all got a good amount of personal attention and coaching on areas we needed to improve. We also got to teach more classes a piece so it was a good set up. MA would stumble in late, spill coffee all over the floor, get up and leave randomly, give long semi-question speeches, clog up the toilets, leave half full milk cartons everywhere and steal all of the pens in the whole school. She couldn’t make it to school because she would get lost or sidetracked or caught up proselytizing Greeks in unrelenting streams of English. She tripped mid stride, broke or lost everything of value she ever held on to, and even dropped her passport in the gutter when crossing the street. Luckily, Bethany was behind her and picked it up, only to receive a sneer and a snatch. There was one point where she disappeared completely and the school staff and the landlords went to the police and hospital looking for her. It was only that evening that a student found her screaming at someone on a payphone. Needless to say, she didn’t pass the course

After a week of this, no one could really believe it, not even the instructor and especially not the landlord. It was too bizarre, too far from anything real that we had ever experienced and much too similar to a scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where any sense of normal is drowned in an eerie lack of self control, loss of boundaries and disregard for consequence. It was frustrating, but as it grew more and more serious, it was troubling.

She began prefacing her intrusive ramblings with things like,

“Thomas, I would hate to bother you, more than I would hate to slit my own wrists, up-ways not sideways, but could you help me find the phonetics sheet and make a copy of it for my class I am going to teach because I ripped mine up in a fit of rage...”

You knew she was crying for help but who were you to help her? What can you do for someone who is already running across the world to escape something? The other trainees and I had long talks about this and we agreed that, as bad as we all felt, the only one who could help MA was MA. Doctors couldn’t help, her family couldn’t help, we couldn’t help; she was truly alone.

She was so over medicated that she would not sleep all night. Her light was always on and at any hour of the night there would be loud bangs from her sliding around furniture, falling, breaking things. Day long screaming bouts to no observable being, sobs, threats, and a general air of misery sank out of her second story Cretan flat into the cold dark alley where only the feral cats were undisturbed.

What could we do? We had serious talks with the landlords about how we were concerned that she was going to kill herself, how she is a wreck. They knew more than we did. Upon cleaning her room the landlady found a large suitcase full of post-it notes and pages upon pages of incomprehensible scribble and rambling. Some of the notes said things like “I need you” and some “I hate you” and some “will you take me shopping?” Her quilt had pen ink splattered all over it. There were black of unknown substance all over the walls. Rotting food was stuffed under the bed. She would shout commands down at them, demand services never promised at all hours, freak out when it rained, and ask the same questions over and over. She was suffering; everyone was suffering.

It is hard to really give to you in words the full experience of living parallel to a nutcase, but it was something that weighed on all of us. We felt bad for disliking her, even though she was everything someone would dislike; she was rude, loud, messy, destructive, invasive, and self-righteous… but she was lost and we all knew it. We also knew that we were not the shepards to guide her home.

There are pits in this world, dark black pits of despair. We feel immune, we live above them, but they are there and they are destroying lives. We found out MA was in the hospital for having tried to kill herself one day before she left for Jerusalem. She is there now, presuming she made her flight. Who knows, maybe Jerusalem is it for her; maybe the holy city is the shove that will set her over or the slap that may bring her back. All she left behind her was seven bags full of plastic water bottles, a pile of used toilet tissue and a bar of soap in her coffee mug.

I know she has given me a new perspective on pain and on control.

Megan told us a story of a woman who was so destroyed at the thought of her husband’s recent affair that she started falling apart, little things like, tripping, messing up at work, sabotaging herself. She would curse her clumsiness, her stupidity, her inability to control anything until she finally faced the true problem that was eating her from inside. It takes a lot to face your life when it isn’t what you wanted it to be and it may hurt, it may kill you, but I can imagine a fate worse than death; when you live solely to wrap lies and fantasy around the true state of your life so that you can hide from what is really happening, who are you? MA has a demon inside of her, who knows what put it there, but only MA can chase it out.

Mountain Village

2007-11-27T06:05:00.001-06:00

24 November, 2007

In rocky outcropped mountains of the Cretan wilderness, there lies the town of Μιληα (Mi-li-ah). Our chosen destination is an organic farm that is also an authentic Cretan village restored to resemble rural life 150 years ago. Surrounded by trees plump with olives ready to drop, the mountain cradle for this little establishment is one of the many beautiful sites Crete has to offer.

Our voyage up the mountains in Sara’s KIA was unexpectedly frightening. Of all the little things I have taken for granted in Τhe States, the highway system is the largest. There were times when the dirt road on the mountain side was eroded so badly, and the subsequent cement repairs eroded as well, that I held my breath as we crossed over the patchwork. Sara held her nerve with the help of a pack of GR cigarettes.

Along the way there were the twisted and rugged olive trees. I love the olive tree; it is hard and knotted, beautifully twisted, hearty in the face of harsh climate, and plentiful to those who are patient enough to tend it during its decade long maturation. It is a shame so many hundreds of acres of olive trees, a very slow to replace economic resource, burned down in this last summer’s wildfires/arsons in the Peloponnese. It has created a unique social class of ecological refugees. People whose families have lived off of olive crops for generations are now displaced by fires. They are forced into the cities to earn by conniving and /or seeking employment far outside of their familiar skills. Although burnt in places, Crete was generally spared the burning wrath of the mainland fires. However, there is one upside. In the ashes of the enriched soil grow...........mushrooms!

Anyways, check out some pictures of the mountains on Picasa. We got there, ate a lot of lamb, Cretan salad, and other delicacies, and drank some raki. The trip was nice, but I was with a bunch of girls and didn’t get to climb any real mountains. I did run off for a while and trek over some rocky hills and saw some burnt up shrubbery and trees. My first taste of Cretan wilderness was a tease, all it did it solidify my conviction to climb some serious rock in the Lefka Ori.

From the summit,

Thomas (and the Via Lingua crew)

From left to right: Megan (home-skillet), Cynthia (Instructor), Sara Signore (Instructor), Sarah from Tennessee, Bethany, & Thomas.