Why Cambodia? Why anywhere?

Yeah, why would anyone come here?

“Cambodia? Why would you want to go there?” asked a surprising number of people. The question baffled me at first, after all, one need not know very much about the country to understand its appeal. I assumed that was the answer, that the people asking the question had somehow never heard of Angkor Wat, or the Khmer Rouge, each a blazing demand to be witnessed, albeit on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum.

But even without its chapter heading draws, Cambodia would still be undeniably worth visiting. Because it’s a place. They’re all worth visiting. (Okay fine, except Fresno.) So that’s the question they’re really asking. “Travel? Why would you do that?”

Reading list on a Phnom Penh street

This is a perennial question to the vagabond castes, and one I’ve mentioned before. But that’s fine because there are endless reasons, endless answers. Travel means different things to people at different times, and often simultaneously, to ever have a standardized rationale.

Last month was hard. Old burdens of childhood pain showed up for the holidays as they always do, their customary anxiety now equipped with the depression of too much time alone in my silent apartment, often in a queasy sauce of purposelessness, as the dream occupation of last year continues to offer me nothing but rejection, and the newer dream occupation 2.0 wavers in the face of extremist violence. I’m left with a desire to punch everything in the face, balanced by a fatigue that just wants to sleep, but is scared to try.

So a trip to Anywhere sounded pretty fucking fantastic to me.

Change of pace

Travel can be an escape. A refugee flight. I’m well aware of that. That’s what it was for me, for a long time, though I resisted admitting it. I have to laugh at the odds that I’m repeating that denial in the next sentence….but I really don’t think so…

Because I don’t think this was that. I wasn’t running away in Cambodia. But I did happily take a break. A change of scenery, temperature, and temperament. I gratefully lay back in the easy purpose of choosing where to go and making it happen.

But I came back. Fleeing one’s life takes longer than 11 days, and this ticket was round-trip from the get-go.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I don’t have a tidy conclusion. Those are in short supply these days, when my inner landscape is rather roiled, and the world at large seems dominated by deterioration, where the intelligent voices are defining the problems, but the responses seem dominated by the asinine braying of lunatics and extremists.

Ready to go anywhere, I started listing countries, and when both y’all illustrious readers and Lydia jumped on Cambodia, I bought the ticket without pause. Was I driven by intuition, wisdom, or cowardice? I had to go to find out.

Why I travel.

Take me back.

Take me back to rotting garbage on dirty streets, where water is a luxury and stink a certainty. I want to feel unwashed and threadbare sheets on hard beds, and pay more than I think I should for it. I want suspicious food, where I savor every bite, knowing it might be the one that ruins the next day. I want to take nothing for granted, be vulnerable and love everyone who shows me kindness.

I want to be concerned about bed bugs, so I remember their absence. I want to be aware of the malarial menace of mosquitoes, so that I notice when my ankles are unblemished.

I want to be foreign to the irritation I felt on the BART train yesterday, “delayed” a couple irrelevant seconds by the guy who was too busy talking on his phone to put his ticket in correctly. I want to feel only incomprehension for the ambient discontent of the spoiled and comfortable, knowing that they are me. I want to stay shocked that people complain and grimace while they wait a few minutes for delicious, safe, nutritious food, prepared by people they won't even bother to thank, unmindful of the insane miracle that brings it to us, every single god-blessamned day.

That work, those wages...
a foreign experience

I want to look at those wrinkles everyone here has between their eyes, the scowl of the perpetually concerned, the mouths of unspecified tension, and feel a wash of gratitude that cleans my face and lifts my lips. I want to be aware of the masses that have so little, every country on Earth. I want to remember how scarce and precious food was for all of human history except the past tiny sliver, invisible on the timeline, and how horrifically we will return to that state...probably sooner than we realize, so that I can stand in awe in a grocery store again, unrushed, uncritical, reverent.

I want to move slowly.

I want to disconnect.

I want to be away from screens. I want to read a book.

I want to talk to strangers.

Here I have friends, but move among the distrusted, suspicious without reason, fearful until proven innocent. There is little danger here. Screw the newspapers, the evening news is a betrayal.

There I will know no one, but might move among possibility, alert and careful, but accessible and listening. The danger is much higher there. The intimacy with human brutality and human kindness, experiential and firsthand, the latter outnumbering the former, despite brutality's instant potency.

Here I can go in comfort. I can pass my day easily, accomplishing tasks in virtual reality, e-living in binary code that I can never touch, my life erased by a magnet.

There every hour will be uncertain, the world so foreign, so unknowable, that it might touch me at any minute. It will be under my fingernails and between my toes. Present on my skin and stained into my clothes. It's possible I will bleed. It's possible I will help, just a little. It's possible I will reach new magnitudes of suffering, or experience joy so visceral you'd have to pay a fortune to chase it.

Take me back. I want to travel.

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.

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.

Where do I go now?

Why do I feel so antsy lately? There are approximately 196 reasons, depending on how you count, but one stands out, and it's time it came out of the closet. Nope, no discussion of sexuality here, I'm still depressingly heterosexual, I mean the closet in a much more literal sense.

Lunchtime in Leon

It felt like dropping a beloved friend off at prison when I put my backpack on the shelf in my closet. I mitigated the pain by whispering “Don't worry baby, it may not be long...”

To my surprise I am committed to living in a fixed place for a while, and the pack is getting juuust a bit dusty.

So why so antsy? Because I am human, ergo I want both sides of every coin. Of course I want to have this cake and eat it too, can there be a more appropriately ridiculous expression? I want to have this home and leave it too.

I seem to have misplaced my pics from
Mexico and Guatemala at the moment,
so these are all Leon, Nicaragua

“But no!” I scolded myself without deliberation or articulation, “you need to settle down and stay put.” As with most arguments, this was needlessly fixed in its opposing positions, and it wasn't until this cup of chai that I realized I CAN have both, just with a little adaptation. I can't follow my beloved tact of buying a one-way ticket to a continent of Tantalus dreams, packed to go until I stop, but I can still travel. I'm thinking...two weeks?

The thought of pulling that bag off the shelf is erecting my bloodstream and stiffening my anticipation. My pupils are dilated in preparation of visions and vistas. So where do I go? There are approximately 196 options, depending on how you count.

It's gotta speak another language, and I don't want to forget my Spanish, so I'm thinking Latin America, which is una coincidencia muy buena for physical proximity.

I'd LOVE to go to Honduras or El Salvador, but trips there without an organization-endorsed purpose are purportedly a matter of hiding in one's hotel room the bulk of the time.

If I go all the way to South America I won't want to leave after only two weeks, and I fairly recently traversed Central Nicaragua down through Costa Rica and Panama. I've spent some time in Mexico's Yucatan, but have not yet been to Oaxaca, a land of colors, textures, and culture that has long called to me. (And has enough rumors of danger to keep me pleasantly on edge.)

I did a solid loop through Guatemala a few years back, but much has changed since then, within the country (for the worse) and within myself (for the better).

And finally Nicaragua, where I missed the northern section, which includes the “recently discovered” Somoto Canyon, where Jerry hurt his knee and you deal with locals more than tour companies as you swim through slot canyons and rappel into ravines.

Where do I go?

Mexico – Oaxaca

Mexico – elsewhere

Honduras/El Salvador

Guatemala

Nicaragua – north of Leon (with the option to cross the border into Honduras/El Salvador if the vibe and local reports condone.

Again, vote on the wordpress version of this blog.

Is it weird being back in America?

Is it weird being back in America?

I wasn't sure how to answer that question. “Not...really.” Adjusting to Stateside norms was pretty easy; I did grow up here, after all. I can handle silverware and I never picked up on the whole spitting thing anyway. But as the last month has passed I've noticed a couple ways in which I am still adjusting after all.

Trishaw drivers know better than anyone how to survive
in the traffic in Yangon, Myanmar

Number One: crossing the street. In 90% of the world, as far as I can tell, moving around on the street is based on the principle of not making any sudden moves or changes of direction. If you can estimate everyone else's trajectory, you can move around them.

To cross the street overseas: start walking into traffic, not fast, not slow, no sharp directional adjustments. If possible, walk straight at the back of a passing car. It will continue moving, so when you reach it you will slide right into the space it just vacated. Continue this until you've Froggered your way across the street.

It's similar to the way you don't try to avoid the cockroaches, just trust that they'll avoid you.

But in America, if you do this, all the cars on the street do something extremely unexpected in the global mind: they stop. Or at least, they slow down and wave you across. Now, instead of sliding unobtrusively through traffic, you are blocking it. Dangit, Americans, stop being so polite!

So I have had to go back to obeying formal traffic rules. It's weird.

One need not make plans in the San Blas Archipelago

Number Two: I rarely planned anything more than a day or two in advance for the past few years. I would reach a town and stay there until I was done, during which time I'd hear about some other place within a six/seven hour bus ride. Go. I am not an itinerary sort of guy. But here, this means I don't get out much, since everyone else has social calendars booked weeks in advance.

Me: “Hey, you wanna do something?”

Friend: “Sure! Let's get sushi! When works for you?”

Me: “How about tonight?”

Friend: “I'm booked until January.”

I gotta get the hang of that. Anyone want to go get sushi...in January?

Does this dude in Kuala Lumpur seem worried about his image?

And finally, there's Image. I've made a career out of trying to resist this, probably as a means of coping with my lack of fashion passion (as my closet of blank-ass clothes will attest), but my skills were were honed overseas. In Nicaragua they described my sandals as “Jesus shoes” and I kept wearing them. In Sri Lanka I sewed up the entire left side of my shorts with the wrong color thread and thought no more about it. In Myanmar I could not have cared less when it was a woman's style bicycle I rode.

You can't be too picky about your image if you get your hair
cut in a saloon. Can I get a sarsaparilla with this perm?

I brought that all home with me. The friend moving out of my new room offered to loan me her woman's style bike and I accepted, no worries, who cares if people think I look silly? It's a bike. That ended up not working out, so I have my manly man ride after all, but whatever, it's shruggalicious.

And I had to smile in the grocery store as I bought a big bag of toilet paper, thinking about how poop-phobic Americans are, and remembering confessions of people who were humiliated to buy the stuff. “I buy it at Cosco in gigantic packs so that I don't have to do it very often.” Whatever! I'm not embarrassed by anything!

Can you guess what these Pa-O kids in a mountain village
in Myanmar think of our image concerns and poop-phobia?

But on the walk home, toilet paper casually under my arm on the busy street, I saw a bag of clothes hangers on the sidewalk. I inherited four hangers with the closet, but I now had seven shirts, with premonitions of more to come. I needed hangers. And here was a bag full of them, free on the sidewalk. We're also an intensely germaphobic nation, but the odds these hangers were actually infected and infested, scabies, hepatitis, bed bugs? Very slight.

But I walked right on past. What would people think if I was rummaging through the garbage on the street?

Oh.

Damn. That's disappointing.

It's weird being back in America.

Will the pattern be repeated?

I am a newly civilized creature of the hostel jungle. I know where I'll sleep tonight. I walk around the more-than-one roomS of my house in confusion. What do I do with all this space? Anybody need a place to stay?

The shower is amazing. I was raised with an ethos of care for energy and water use, so just standing in the steam feels prohibited, but surely I can break the law just a liiiittle, right? God that feels good. (And I don't even have to wear flip flops.) You can try it if you like.

Man, what a kitchen. Plenty of counter space, all the burners work, and I have no problem putting my stuff in the fridge or finding it later. The dishes are clean, the sink empty. We have two ovens. Why the hell do we have two ovens? Was this a bakery in a former life? Anybody need a place to bake?

I'm in love thrice over, twelve legs to complement my two. They're far too lovable to summarize in a paragraph, so they'll get a little less than that at the moment, but suffice to say those furry bastards leave me shaking my head and laughing on a regular basis. Anybody need some animal love?

I have too many blessings not to want to share.

San Francisco breathes just a tunnel away

The location is ideal, with one of America's better mass transit systems (not the most competitive title in the world) a mere block away, plus a drug-addled spider's web of bus lines that I have not learned well yet, since the streets are relatively conducive to bicycicular passage as well.

San Francisco is close at hand, where friends abide in warm houses with chairs at the table ready for my visit. The same in towns all up and down the Bay Area, and it's not inconceivable that I would hear my name called on the street some day. There are people here who recognize me. If I keeled over dead in the gutter...people would notice.

There is a level of food security here that is unimaginable for billions of people around the world, not to mention the awed and wasted faces of millennia past.

You need this many shoes,
don't you, dearie?

I have clean clothes. Every day. I wash them before they stink. It's nearly free. I've even bought more of them, though I think I could still carry all my physical possessions at one time if I had to...but it's getting more precarious. I'd better make two trips, or I'll look like the junk woman from Labyrinth.

I'm getting work done at a better pace than ever before, and I feel almost good enough about it to share with a few more people.

Yup, life is pretty damn good right now.

Sooo...why do I wake up with varying degrees of a racing heart most nights? This doesn't happen when I'm on the road. Is the project too daunting? The To-Do List too relentlessly undone? Someonething missing? Or is it just the adjustment of a vagabond to stationary life?

Earlier this month was the five year anniversary of leaving for my first big solo backpacker wander. It snuck by, a vagabond in the night, without my noticing until it had already left town. I wasn't this Me yet when I left, but who am I now?

This is my third extended stay in the US since leaving my previous life. The first time, I lived with friends in lovely Portland, Oregon, but barely made it four months before I had to fly across an ocean to get my rhythm back. March 2010.

The second time I was house-sitting for friends, a beautiful house in a beautiful place with a kickass feline, and I didn't sleep through the night a single time in the three month span. Cross the ocean. March 2012.

Now here I am, about to finish my first month stateside. Third time's the charm? Or will the pattern continue? Will I cross the ocean in March 2014?

Captain One-Eye's prostitution problem

“We don’t sign contracts or any of that nonsense. Here, you give your word and shake hands. If you keep your side of the deal, no problem. If you don't? Problem.” Saying this, the salty Colombian sailor made a shooting pistol gesture with his hand, squinting the eye that wasn't covered by an eye patch as he took casual aim.

Our passports weren't ready, nothing to do but come back later, but the Cartagena heat was enough to melt the most ardent of itineraries, and what would be a better use of time than lolling around a crumbling yacht harbor, listening to an eye-patched sailor anyway?


He was explaining that Colombia is a culture of honesty. “If we make a deal, and I cheat you? Que me jodes. If you cheat me...” a shrug of the shoulders. Clearly there would be no other option than reliable-calliber justice, if you cheat Captain One-Eye.



He went on to explain that this was the problem with Obama and the prostitutes.


“Obama and the whatnow?” I asked, having been completely out of touch for 5-to-50 days.


The scandal of Secret Service members contracting with prostitutes in Cartagena had broken a week before my arrival in the city. In the US everyone was (pretending to be) shocked that Secret Service agents, single young testosteroney men pursuing a cinematastic career that is remarkably boring despite the constant possibility of death and/or glory, who suddenly found themselves in a place like Cartagena, had gone dancing and come back with hookers. How astonishing!


In Colombia, on the other hand, no one cared a whit that they had gotten hookers. That was uninteresting. The scandal in Cartagena was that they hadn’t paid up as agreed.

The story was that the agents has misunderstood the price, so when the time came to pay up, some of the agents reneged on their agreement. This was unacceptable to el Capitan. “You get a woman, you pay the woman. If you don't understand what you agreed to? That is your problem, you agreed.”


He sat back in his seat, disappointed at the failure in etiquette. I felt embarrassed for my countrymen, and apologetic. “I'm sorry Captain, I'm sure next time they'll be paradigms of moral virtue, and pay for their prostitutes like good, respectable men.”




Did I mention you encounter other perspectives when you travel?

It's all ending; it's all beginning.

On the night I left for Nicaragua, a year and a week ago exactly, I took a moment on the drive to the airport to take my hands off the wheel (the road was clear and it was just a moment) as an acknowledgment to the gods of Travel and Chance (who are cousins) that I was not in control of the world, then I took the wheel to start piloting my way as best I could.

This time I have no illusions; I am not remotely in control. The foundation of my life as I know it, the incarnation that began four years ago when I became more the person I am today, has crumbled out from beneath me.

I've made mistakes I never thought I would make, and I don't yet understand how. Four years ago I changed who I was, and I thought that meant I knew myself. Turns out I was wrong, I'm not yet there. I've had blessing beyond belief in this life; love and friendship to make the angels cry, but there is something missing, something in me that I've lost sight of.

I don't know exactly how to find it, but my path starts now. I am sitting in a corner cafe in the airport in Istanbul, where they charged me more for the orange juice (whose price is not obviously listed) than they did for the sandwich (which is), and looked uncomfortable when I remarked on it.

I guess that's the lesson: it's easy to be good when everyone is watching, but it's what you do when you can get away with it that counts.

K gets here on the next flight, T minus three hours and counting, and leaves on Sunday, D minus 3.5 days and counting.

So the next few days will be an Eden of company, then a Hell of farewell.

And after that?

I have no idea.

Life is one big game of Super Mario Bro's

My brother-in-law pointed it out.

We were talking about how to drive a hybrid car in the most efficient way possible, and noting that even though our efforts didn't make much of a difference, we couldn't help but try our best.

I thought it was just an ecological ethos, but I think he had the right of it.

“We were raised on video games; we want the top score.”

They were more right than I realized until now

My video game credentials are pretty poor. The last system I played on a regular basis was Sega Genesis, which dates me to about 1992. “Look! Three buttons!”

I've played a little playstation 2, and found being a Spartan warrior with swords flying off one's forearms to be eminently enjoyable, but most modern video games make me yearn for a game of freecell and/or a good book.

In '92 I liked Mortal Kombat, with 8 characters and half a dozen moves. I tried Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance around 2005 and lasted about five minutes. 22 characters, each with three different fighting styles, 3D movement...I was already nauseous.

I just want to hit C rapidly. Sega hockey was in my wheelhouse.

But that fundamental video game frame of reference persists, and combines well with my OCD tendencies until I have a particular method for most everyday tasks. I don't have to follow them, I'm not that neurotic, but I prefer to rinse dishes over the other soapy ones so the falling water does half my job for me, and if left to my own devices I will pre-sort the groceries before putting them away so that everything that goes in the refrigerator is laid out within arm's reach.

The less time the refrigerator door is open, the better score I get.

But one of the cardinal joys of video gaming is harder to find in real life: the level up.

I am in the intermediate stages of teaching myself to juggle, I count that as a level up, but yesterday I received a more tangible example.

The customs stamp for Iceland joined one for Morocco on the penultimate page of my passport. The rest are an artwork of ink fading faster than their corresponding memories. With Asia on the horizon, I was out of room.

Three hours of torture in the waiting room of the US Embassy in Brussels, where CNN blared its relentless assault of profane idiocy at us (arguing about Michael Jackson's doctor? Really? Really?), an $82 fee(!), and I now have a Level 3 passport.

(It was the same price to add 24 pages as 48, so I skipped right over Level 2.)

All those pristine pages...I can't wait to start putting stamps in there. Think of the XP I will earn!

A lesson learned in the worst supermarket on Earth.

Some friends did me a favor the other day. They asked my opinion.

Everyone loves to feel like an expert, and travelers may be the worst of all. But I am leery of trying it, because I am vaguely aware of how much I don’t know, and because most people sound like pretentious jackasses while they expound on their expertise. (“I had a two hour layover in Dubai three years ago…let me tell you what the Middle East is like…they’re so organized! They like everything to be nice and orderly, A1, A2, A3, that sort of thing…”)

But I was surrounded by friends, and tales were flowing like the hard alcohol none of us drink anymore, so I indulged.

They were asking about Europe, 27 of whose countries I’ve visited (29 if you count Vatican City and Monaco) and I found myself recommending, as my secret #1 pick: Slovenia.

The capital, Ljubljana, is a friendly place of details, history, and local character which I would describe as “quaint” if I didn’t hate that word so much. Plus have you ever seen a word more fun to say? I’ll wait while you practice a few more times. Make sure to really get that “lyuh” sound. Lyooblyana.

Coastal Slovenian city of Piran, after a truly epic storm

It’s not as expensive as its western and northern neighbors, but is more developed and luxurious than much of Eastern Europe. There are trees, caves, and the coast is absolutely gorgeous.

At the time I thought nothing of it, but just now I was putting away laundry and I noticed the little glass tea-light candle holder I bought in Ljubljana and never gave away. And suddenly I remembered…

I was miserable in Ljubljana.

My time in Ljooobljaaana (calm down) stands out as one of the two lowest points of that first long trip, which are probably my worst moments on the road to date. (Knock on wood.)

It was cold, I didn’t have the proper gear, and I’d spent two days trying to win over a Czech cutie who turned out to be hung up on some dude in Prague whom she admitted was a total jerk. Those three things were actually fairly par for the course, but what really made me miserable was the timing.

I was standing in the deli section of a basement supermarket, deciding whether to have spaghetti again or splurge on some runny goulash, when it hit me.

It was Thanksgiving.

Somehow the fact of being there, surrounded by people who had no idea it was my favorite holiday of the year, so far from my family, and deciding what to eat on another lonely night in a grungy hostel…

 

Have you ever cried in the supermarket? In a foreign country? I hid in the pasta section while I tried to stop. It took awhile.

But there I was last weekend, recommending Slovenia and its capital as among my very favorite places, not even remembering that damn supermarket. Because sadness passes. Because we remember both happy and sad things, but can choose to spend more energy on the former.

And because I just spent Christmas with my family.

K was not there, and nor was her family, who I feel are part of my own, but I can see the sadness of that, accept it, feel it, and focus on the happiness of seeing all my siblings gathered in one place for the first time in 4 years. Watching my parents hand out presents, and all of us immediately knowing they’re socks.

So yes, Ljubljana is one of my favorite places. So is Monterey, California. So is Antwerp Province, Belgium. There’s happiness in all of them. I can focus on that.