Top Ten posts from a year I love anyway

Did you ever have a particularly brutal teacher? Who grilled you harder, left you doubting your fundamental competency, and didn't seem to notice when you turned in tear-stained homework? I didn't. Until 2013. When itstarted I thought the rug had been pulled out from under me, but the worst part was over.

Cute.

I'd like to say I understand the year and learned all its lessons, but the mere notion of summarizing 2013 just led to my wasting the better part of the afternoon watching the Daily Show, Colbert, and crocheting the start of a new blanket. Clearly I haven't processed it all.

But what I can do is fulfill the tacit contractual obligation to post my Top Ten Blogs of the Year. Wordpress has informed me which ones got the most clicks, but forget statistical accuracy, I'm going to list the ten that stand out to me.

10. AnUnexpected Chance to get Killed in Mandalay  Just a fun day in Mandalay, where circumstances reminded me of how much I love to travel, even if it occasionally increases the chances of severe injury.

9. IfI'd had a clue I wouldn't have met the Wigi  The places are incredible, but sometimes it's the people you meet that maintain the strongest hold on you.

8. WhatHappens to Men like Rudi? Same theme as #9, another trip, another country, another human person. I wish I had the answer.

7. BlueDragon It's so easy to get pessimistic, but hearing about people doing incredible work, helping each other and making a difference gives me so much joy. I hope I can spread some of it to you.

6. ItSeemed like Spring for a Moment Why is it so hard to be grateful and not greedy?

5. Mardin. This city is one of my all time favorites. Poignantly beautiful in its own right, I always feel a rush of vagabond adrenalin when I remember looking out over the Syrian Plain below, tantalized and tortured by the proximity to so much heritage, so much sheer human intensity, and so much suffering. In my mind I still sometimes watch the children of Mardin flying kites on their rooftops, held aloft by the exhalation of ages.

4. Twotravelgasms and a tragedy, Hasankeyf Part 2. I was already in love with Turkey, both halves of it, but that day cemented the region in my heart. Standing in ancient dwellings carved into the very stone, then walking alone through stunning mountain meadows of crimson poppies before descending to find myself in the company of a half dozen new friends? Now that's a good day. Did you sign the petition yet?

3. Is that a good start or a bad one? Jungle Birthday Part 2. It wasn't much fun at the time, aware that I was alone and stupidly helpless in the jungle, where sound does not travel and help is hard to find, but I can't think of a more appropriate way to start the birthyear: lost, angry, in pain from a dozen stupid little cuts, but on my way to what will hopefully be a good story. 

2. TheSystem's Broken, and the Fire Hasn't Even Started Yet. This post was just a set up for the Glow fire festival in Santa Cruz, but to my surprise, was chosen to be Freshly Pressed, and I am grateful for the increased readership that generated. So grateful in fact, that I can almost entirely overcome the pique that the tag which brought me there was not #Travel. #Transportation? Close enough.

1. Falling apart inAnuradhapura. This took no thought at all. The post itself is nearly irrelevant, but that was the pivotal moment of the year. At times I've felt a stunned confusion too guilty to smile about, that I had somehow minced through the minefield of romantic love without detonation, pain yes of course, but never the soul crushing agony. In Anuradhapura...

How to say this without reeking of self pity? The floor was dirty, long black hairs from tenants past, while ants and cockroaches commuted up and down the walls, but still I lay there most of the night and past the dawn, unable to uncurl from around a core of pain like nothing I'd ever felt before. It doesn't surprise me that the non-emotional account of the town was more popular. 

Well shit, I didn't mean to end on a downer. And I'm not.

Because seconds keep clicking, and months slip past while you're waiting on a minute, so here I am, unexpectedly stationary on the other side of the world from where I expected to be. And I like it.

Many things are not as I would have written them, but we don't write our lives. I guess they write us. And right now, I like where the story is headed.

Congratulations to all of you, for surviving the insanity of 2013. All my best wishes for understanding it, and all my earnest hope for a brilliant 2014.

Merry Christmas, especially to those apart.

Tonight's not Christmas Eve, tonight's just...Tuesday.

I threw a rueful grin at Miles earlier tonight when that thought occurred to me, adding “That's not a thought I could put in a blog!” After all, people don't want to hear any voices of dissent against Christmas Perfection. (Miles didn't seem to find it funny either, although it's hard to tell, cats have a awfully dry sense of humor.)

But I can laugh at that, because I have my Christmas this year, last weekend with most of the family, and I'll spend some time tomorrow with a couple of the ones who weren't there. But tonight? For me, tonight was a bowl of pasta I made (good enough for me but I wouldn't put it on this last weekend's table), and a movie on Netflix for me and Miles.

(We watched the last Mission: Impossible movie, Ghost Protocol or whatever, and agreed with a friend's review “It's good and funny in that over-the-top way, though only Tom Cruise seems to not realize it's a joke.”)

So I can laugh, not bitter or sad (much) about being alone tonight, but there are two notes I want to add. First: if you are with family, appreciate it. Yes, they drive you nuts as only family can, but you'd probably miss them if they weren't there, and they would miss you. (Do I need to add a disclaimer against an implicit assumption of the universality of an ostensibly Christian holiday? It's a symbol, people, stop fighting.)

But second, a bit more vital to me, I want to wish a very Merry Christmas to all of those people who are apart tonight. I'm sure there are more than we realize, some for work, some for reasons I can't imagine, but the ones close to my heart are the travelers. Hopefully most of them are finding happy evenings in crowded hostels, perhaps even a fraction as good as the one I had in Rome in 2008...

But there are some of you, undoubtedly, alone tonight. I don't want to be a bummer here, and hopefully you remember that everything is temporary, and these circumstances will change. So appreciate them now, learn the lessons there, and have this memory to revisit later. Maybe it will make a good story.

If it turns out you prefer holidays alone, that's fine, that's your right, far be it from me to reproach anyone. But if you find, perhaps surprisingly, that you miss your family, then hold on to that, and let it mean more when you come Home, more aware of what that word means than you were when you left.

And to those of you who are missing someone... That pain comes from love, and that's always something to be thankful for. And/even if all circumstances change.

Anyway. To everyone, idyllic families around the fire, people fighting and squabbling about stupid shit, playing Scrabble or whatever you do: Merry Christmas. And to those who are away, who are separate, who find themselves apart tonight: Merry Christmas.

Christmas is what, and where, we choose

I wish I'd taken pics of the food, but I was busy eating it.
I only have half a dozen from a walk I took.

It's a malleable business, this human experience. Preferences, priorities, and personalities shift and adjust. Even the calendar can be fluid, because tomorrow may be Christmas Eve, but the bulk of my Christmas 2013 was last weekend.

A huge part of the reason I came back from The Magical Land of Abroad was to reconnect with family and friends, so that's what I'm going to do, damnit, even if I have to drag recalcitrant ass to the table now and then.

And what a table I found. I am far from a foodie (ironic that the Oxford English Dictionary says the word “foodie” entered the world the same year I did), but the fact that I'm well pleased with a plastic to-go tray of chicken and rice didn't interfere with the culinary contortions of that fiesta of flavor.

Savory spasms of bacon-wrapped dates beside bogs of brie fondue preceded slow-cooked pork shoulder that dripped all the customary adulations one could hope for. Or was that before the chicken stew that turned plain bread into a platform for piquant pleasure? I remember the pear crumble that coincided somehow with Spanish coffees, whose blue flames of burning alcohol illuminated the grinning faces of family members carefully caramelizing the sugared rims of their glasses. And there is no disputing the tongue-teasing triumph that obliterated my long-standing stigma against carrots and cauliflower.

And if the arrivals lounge at Portland International Airport blindsided me with recollections of another visitor in years past? Or if a shattered flower pot put me in mind of another balcony across a sea?

Well.

The season can accommodate a breadth of sensation, from the simply salubrious to more complicated questions of sentiment and memory. But one thing's for sure, I have a helluva lot to be thankful for, from previous years, the one now ending, and in the era to come. And I, for one, am optimistic.

Limited Time Offer, perfect for the holiday season.

“So, honey, have you met anyone new?” Does your mother ask you that? Are you tired of evading and prevaricating when asked this question?

“Are there any young men around who you find interesting these days?” I'm pretty sure that's grammatically incorrect, but arguing about when to use “whom” is only going to avoid the question a limited number of times.

Well I have the solution for you.

Special limited time offer: Rentable Boy Friend

RBF is your quick and painless protection against prying relatives. (Warning, RBF may not be effective at fooling your friends.) RBF will pose as your new “friend” for the length of a meal, and comes pre-loaded with a number of scenarios to choose from.

Option 1: RBF spent the last five years traveling, and is now settling down, with promising paths in a professional field as well as graduate school. He is likeable, but a bit bland, very non-threatening, but fairly easy to forget. Perfect for the short-term “Well, he seems nice” that can easily evolve into “This new one is much more interesting than that last guy, and more reliable too.”

Option 2: RBF is Scottish or English, studying abroad, and would love to learn more about your country. Pontificate and brag at will. This option is great for its short-term entertainment value, but is easily discarded by “Oh, he had to go back to Scotland. Yes, I'm very sad, please don't bother me with these questions for at least 13 months.”

Maybe borderline between smarmy and
employed, but your mom might approve

Option 3: Wallflower mode. RBF will sit there, smile at jokes, and reply with the minimum necessary verbiage to be polite. Wallflower mode is perfect when you don't want the RBF to make much of an impression, whereupon family members are free to project whatever personality upon him they choose.

Note: Wallflower Mode requires additional payment, due to its stupefyingly boring nature. Namely: dessert.

Terms and Conditions for RBF

-Both parties hereby state that this is a fictitious relationship, and will not extend beyond said contract period, namely the length of one meal.

-Both parties agree that there will be no physical intimacy required.

-Payment for RBF's services will be the right to write about anything interesting that comes about during, or as a result of the encounter. Names of those involved will be changed to protect the innocent. Foibles will be exaggerated for the amusement of the audience.

Special costumes available upon request

-RBF is not responsible for reimbursal of any food or beverages consumed by RBF during the course of the event.

-The goal of the RBF professional is an interesting story to blog about, thus, advantageous consideration will be awarded to candidates whose families include any of the following:

     -Racist uncles/aunts

     -Rebellious nephews/nieces

     -Conspiratorial grandmothers/grandfathers

-RBF will not get drunk and embarrass you. That's your family's job.

Sights, sensations, and allegations from Vilnius

I'd like to say my dominant memory from Vilnius was Uzupis, the bohemian neighborhood of the capital of Lithuania, the third and last of the countries I've visited from The World's Ten Best Ethical Destinations list for 2014.

Walls are not blank in Uzupis

Uzupis followed one of the quintessential paths of the European twentieth century, from origin through inhumane human suffering, to the blossom of hope. It was primarily Jewish until the Nazis brought genocide (an estimated 70,000 people from Vilnius and the surrounding area murdered), then the Soviets killed the dead, destroying the old Jewish cemetery that once stood nearby. For a few decades of neglect, the area was home to the homeless, drugs, prostitution, and decay, then their sometime offspring: art, inspiration, and a spirit of self-reliance.

Click to enlarge, or here

By Lithuanian independence in 1990, the area was already home to a bohemian set, and in 1997 Uzupis declared itself independent. How independent? The mayor of Vilnius lived there, independence day is April (Fools) 1, and the constitution? Click to enlarge. The area is just over half a square kilometer, and according to wikipedia, 1000 of the 7000 inhabitants are artists. I wonder if 6000 people would take issue with that statistic.

I walked along the river, admired the art, and chatted with crusty men smoking pipes and joints with pigment-stained fingers. The area is no ghetto anymore, and reminded me of Christiania in Copenhagen. I loved Uzupis. But it is not my strongest memory of Vilnius.

From there I walked up to “Bleak Hill” to see the three whitewashed crosses built in 1989 to replace the ones blown up by the Soviets in 1950, themselves replicas in a tradition dating back to 1636, when a couple missionary friars pissed off the local pagans and got themselves tortured to death. The remnants of the previous crosses lie just below, and you can see them for a moment before your eyes are inexorably drawn to the panorama of Vilnius below. It's a good looking city.

Beautiful, historical, cultural and religious. And still not my main memory. The strongest impression was left by a girl, but it's not what you're thinking.

After the crosses I walked the streets of Old Town, and around to St. Peter and Paul Church, a Baroque masterpiece that stands out, even on that continent of churches. On my way to food I had to stop off at the Frank Zappa statue, pausing to read the graffiti notes until my stomach got too demanding. Then it was time for the girl. I have no idea what her name was.

I actually first met her in Riga, where she was packing her bag on the beer-spotted carpet of a floppy hostel common room, Jimi Hendrix posters on the wall and Bob Marley on the stereo. She wrote my name in Korean on a torn guidebook page, and offered everyone valium and xanax from a shockingly large supply of both that she carried around in a sandwich bag.

That should have been my first warning.

But she seemed nice enough, and when she showed up in Vilnius, I greeted her with a smile and introduced her to the usual suspects from England, Australia, Canada etc. The lot of us went out to the bars, as you do, but her habit of carrying multiple sides of a conversation all by herself may have had something to do with the way everyone else drifted off.

I don't think anyone else heard it the first time she said to me “Well, I've forgot my condoms, but if you like we can find a bathroom for a bit of a shag.” I pretended not to hear either. So she repeated it. I politely declined. Add several beers, and she no longer saw me as a friend. I discovered this fact on the dance floor, when my dorky dancing was interrupted by her hands closing around my throat from behind. Let's just say, she was not a waif of a girl.

The rest of the night was a series of assaults, then allegations made against me to random guys on the street who turned out to be plain-clothes police. Their investigation quickly reached the factual basis of the situation, and their looks were pure laughing commiseration. I spent the night on an empty bunk upstairs, not trusting her sanity to sleep in the same dorm room.

In the morning I came downstairs and was greeted with the question: “Hey, guy, did you pee on that girl last night?”

Luckily the hostel owner was as astute as the police, and he quickly deduced “Yeah, I didn't think so, she was just that drunk, but she said you peed on her bed to make her look bad, and that next time she sees you, you're going to be sorry. She means it, man.”

I would have liked to stay longer in beautiful Vilnius, but I caught a bus out that afternoon.

Latvia, a second Ethical Destination memory

The two men could be twins, though they would have to be of the “long-lost” variety. One of them works in Washington, D.C. with all the other ambassadors, and flies out to San Francisco to accept the award when Latvia earns a spot on The Ten Best Ethical Destinations of 2014 list. He wears a tailored suit, speaks good English with a clipped Baltic accent, and presumably has a fair amount of ink on his tax return.

His brother with the identical jaw line wore battered jeans, worked below the table in a backbreaking tree removal job, and rode a rusty bicycle home through the snow with me from our Dutch class in rural Belgium. He spoke only a little English, and didn't know the name of his country in my language. “I am from Letland” he told me, and I smiled and nodded, embarrassed at my bad American geography. I could label a blank map of Europe without trouble, including major cities and places I'd slept, but had no idea where Letland was until he started talking about Riga.

My first night in Riga I was walking through this park at
11:00 PM, thinking I shouldn't be there, then saw women
walking alone, felt much safer, and a bit in love with the city

Riga... Ah yes. I remember Riga.

My dominant memory of Riga is rather salacious, best told in another medium, but that's okay, because I like the back-up too. I heard this second story from a brash Scotsman who drank his beer like water in a smoky bar in Wroclaw, Poland.

“You were in Latvia too? Riga?” He asked me, finishing the first third of his pint as I answered. “Did you stay out of the strip joints?”

At that point in my life I was desperately dull and ruthlessly well-behaved, so strip clubs were off the table and out the door, impossible. “Good call, in Riga” said the Scot, “You know they're all Russian mob, right?” I had heard this actually, it's not a secret in Riga.

It was just above freezing and still the miniskirts still came
out, even at the Freedom Monument. Okay with the guards.

“I was in one of them up there with a mate a couple months ago. We're having a pint, and this girl comes up, gorgeous girl, great tits, legs for days, and she starts flirting with him. Asks him to buy her a drink.” I give the wince to acknowledge that I'm aware that would be a bad idea.

“I know, right? But he figures 'What the hell, just one.' So he buys this bird a drink, and she's rubbing his thigh and whatnot, putting ideas in his head, but he's not that stupid, so when she asks for another he says no and we ask for the tab.”

It's not tab time in Poland yet, and he signals the barman for another pint.

“So the bill comes, and the girl's drink cost a hundred euro! He knew it would be more than the menu price, but a hundred? So he says 'No way I'm bloody paying that!' and as soon as the words come out of his mouth these two gigantic guys have him pinned up against the wall, and this third bastard, in an expensive suit, real dirtbag, Russian mafia for sure, comes over. He's smoking a cigarette, right, and he takes a drag and asks my mate 'You will pay ze bill?'”

A semi-drunk Scotsman does a pretty passable Russian accent.

"How much for Georgia?" A darker era for the US. Several
around Riga, sometimes with added Hitler mustaches.

“My friend says 'Hell no' and without a word the guy puts his cigarette out in my friend's arm. Ssssss. Now, my friend's a tough bastard, so he doesn't say much, but that hurts. This mafioso lights his cigarette again. 'You want to pay ze bill now?'

“But my mate's pissed off now, 'Fuck you' he says, and the mafia bloke takes another big pull on his cig, and sssss, puts it out on his arm again, right below the first one. I'm wondering how long this can go on, but after he lights his cigarette for the third time he says, real cold like:

'I am going to ask you for ze third time. But you should know, ze next one, it goes in your eye. Now. You want to pay ze bill?'”

I was briefly tempted to ask the Latvian ambassador about mafia strip clubs in Riga, but out of respect for his twin brother, biking home next to me with a smile and frozen fingertips, I kept it to myself.

Memories from Andros

I came of age in a two week ceremony of illicit rum, charismatic tarantulas, and a desperate wispy crush on a lithe girl named Molly. She broke my heart with innocence, but still we drifted over coral reefs, hand in hand, shy smiles letting water into our snorkeling masks.

I have no pictures of my own from then,
but was somewhere above Coakley Town

One of The World'sTen Best Ethical Destinations for 2014 is the Bahamas, and I missed most of what they said about it (60% of the country's GDP comes from tourism), lost in a Caribbean drift of recollection.

I owe eternal thanks to my high school English teacher and a science teacher I never had, but who somehow knew of me anyway, for nominating me for the Student Challenge Award, in cooperation with Earthwatch, an organization that connects volunteers with scientific researchers around the world.

In my application essay I mentioned my obsession with sharks, and made some comment about being willing to go to Hawaii. The example expeditions were in Oregon, Nevada, and Vallejo, swell places to be sure, but I thought I was being a tad roguish by mentioning somewhere as tropically idyllic as Hawaii. Turns out I wasn't aspiring high enough.

They sent me on an all-expenses-paid two week research trip to an untouristed town in the Bahamas, where we tested samples of sea sponges for antiviral and antibacterial properties (did you know sea sponges basically don't get sick?), sampled and measured the chemical properties of water taken from various depths of the country's picturesque blue holes, and accompanied a botany class from George Mason University on their field walks through the jungle. I remember their professor was infatuated with orchids, and reminded me of a charismatic Hemingway.

We tagged butterflies for population estimates, gathered garbage off a remote beach to help study ocean currents, and heard some living history from a village witch doctor with projectile teeth no one noticed, since we were busy not looking at the two gigantic goiters throbbing and wobbling on her neck.

The woman, speaking Caribbean English that had to be translated by our program director, had prescribed herself a local herb as an antidote to a curse placed on her by a jealous rival. It worked against the curse, but also blocked her iodine absorption, so now she carried two ripe flesh mangoes below her jaw.

The curses of obeah, a Caribbean variant of voodoo, are not to be trifled with. She also told us about a local millionaire, who, flush with the invincibility of the hyper-wealthy in a developing nation, raped a local girl then went on vacation. Little did he know that this girl's mother was an obeah priestess, and as he was disembarking from his private plane on the runway in Miami, a powerful wind of obeah justice blew him off the steps and into the propeller.

We stopped staring at her goiters and listened respectfully after that. (And drove home past his former mansion, reclaimed by the jungle, but which had stood unlooted for years, the expensive possessions within tainted by the curse, until a hurricane was deemed to have cleansed it.)

That trip was my first non-family-vacation overseas experience, and exposed me to many of the truths that have delighted and sustained me since then. The incomparable succulence of local food eaten in situ after a long hot day of whatevering. The powerful appeal of foreign cultures, languages, and customs. And the brazen hospitality of people who have so little, by western standards of wealth, but who smile wider, brighter, and more frequently than any of us in the “First” World.

Poor arrogant First Worlders. First to what, exactly? First in line to work long hours to buy stuff we don't need? Come to de islan, dey goin show you what is impotant.

My experience on the incomparable isle of Andros, in a town so small they hadn't decided whether it was spelled Stanyard Creek or Staniard, was an intense one, which makes it all the more bizarre that the seed of wanderlust it sowed was dormant for nearly ten years. Instead I worked long hours...to buy stuff I didn't need. Hell, I didn't even do that, I worked long hours to foster a bank account I didn't use.

How tragically responsible of me.

But now, with a few more stamps in my passport, I can sit back and remember that trip, blow a kiss to Molly, taste the coconut rice and freshly caught fish, and laugh at the typically ridiculous kid I was when I bought one of those colorful woven Jamaican/rasta/Bob Marley beanies and wore it home like it was the new me. (I still have it, in the suitcase where I store my extra stuff when I'm abroad. I've never worn it since but can't throw it away. Anybody want it?)

I remember heat lightning in the distance at night, land rover rides through the jungle when the trees sprang up again behind us when we finished running them over, and the endless rubber chewiness of conch fritters, served in the house of a town leader, because we needed a third place to eat in our rotation, and the town only had two restaurants.

Wendy, one of the locals who helped us out, made me the cake for my eighteenth birthday. I don't remember what I wished for as I blew those candles out, but in that place, with those people, there really wasn't a need to ask for more.

How do you choose where to go? Ethical Traveler might help.

It's all a big search for updates, I guess.

My computer wanted Windows 8.1, so that's what I gave it. Now it can barely find the internet. What use is a computer without the internet? Even freecell needs it nowadays.

I tried to connect to my old hub. I had some suggestions, thought I'd troubleshot some shit, but I'm still dealing with the old version I guess, software out of date, the new stuff unknowable and incompatible. I'm behind the times.

But I have an event tonight, and the borrowed snazzy jacket to prove it. (Apparently people don't say “sportscoat” anymore?) I'm hoping the agenda includes my future; think that's too much to ask? But there is comfort in the tangible and external. This island will last me until tomorrow. Maybe I should stop renting rooms in Atlantis.

So there's an update. It'll do for today.

Do you daydream about your next trip? Wonder where you should go? Postcard images from all over the world pass through your mind like a screensaver. You can see Victoria Falls, or Windhoek, or lie on the beach in _____! You can almost hear the samba, gnawa, or gamelan. You drool over the enjera, ceviche, and monkey brain options. Well, maybe not the monkey brain.

Or Ais kacang, the Malaysian shaved ice dessert with
beans, corn, and gummy candies.

How do you choose?

I have a suggestion. Someone's troubleshot this one for you.

Every year EthicalTraveler.org publishes a list of The World's Ten Best Ethical Destinations. These are the ten developing countries who are making the best gains in criteria you agree with, like human rights, environmental preservation, and not being total ass*****.

Last summer I went to Myanmar. I never would have gone a couple years ago, in the days of “Don't let your tourist dollars pay for SPDC's bullets” fliers. Aun San Suu Kyi made that one easy, but how can you tell if Mauritius, Zimbabwe, Palau, and Namibia are making similar gains or not? (Yes, no, yes, no.) All that depressing research?

Maybe I'll just go back to Cancun...

Is that a welcoming smile, or fear?

This is the answer you're looking for. Instead of randomly picking a place or going with the easy option, you can go somewhere and feel good about supporting it. You can contribute to an international awareness, on the part of both governments and individuals, that there is a cost and reward basis for behavior. Accountability on an international scale, and you still get to lie on the beach.

The link above takes you to the 2013 rankings. The new ones come out at an event tonight. An event like that merits a snazzy jacket.