Reverential expression of the divine, or just obsessed with boobs?

“Ugh. Great. Tits again. Cuz that’s all women are. I am so sick of that.”

“No way! Look at the care, the precision, the ornamentation and dignity of the carvings. And the serene smiles, delicate hand mudras, and lengthened earlobes of enlightenment. These are demonstrations of reverence for feminine deities, or femininity itself as divine.”

“But why do they all have to be bare breasted? The dudes get to cover their junk.”

“Maybe they didn’t see boobs as nudity, maybe that’s just how women dressed. Lots of cultures are like that, hence National Geographic’s popularity among boys.”

“So why are they so big? This isn’t Sweden. Men are depicted pretty normally, so why are all the ta-tas supersized?”

Lydia and I had different responses to the ubiquitous boobage of Angkor Wat. In the mass of carved curves, one of us saw a monotonous obsession with female bodies, and the other saw the meticulous expression of their sanctity.

What do you think?

Do the multitudinous bare breasts of Angkor Wat reveal an obsession with one aspect of female anatomy, with an emphasis on exaggerated, even unnatural dimensions?

Or do they reflect a culture that revered femininity as a goddess, an apsara or devata?

Is it artistic license and style, or another oppressive patriarchal hypersexuality?

Or is it both, a fascination that was both sexual and respectful, boobcentric reverence?

Or are we missing the point entirely?

What if Angkor Wat sucks?

Be honest, though you’ve heard it all before. The Mona Lisa...looks like it’s supposed to, and is surprisingly small. The Coliseum? Sure, you feel like watching Gladiator, but mostly you’re just waiting for your next gelato. The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur? Yup, really tall, pretty. Now what’s for dinner? The Panama Canal...is impressive as hell on paper, but outside the window it’s the world’s most boring river.

Now that I’ve offended a few million people, I should clarify that all of these places are still worth seeing. Lordy knows I’ve sought out my share of postcard sites, and smile at my inner version every time I see their iconic images. But in the end? They can be a little underwhelming.

There are exceptions to this. Machu Picchu is stunning, even with the crowds. I hear the Grand Canyon is the same, though I shamefacedly admit I’ve never been. Which category would Angkor Wat fall into?

When we pulled up along the reservoir outside the iconic triple-tower-temple, there was a bit of a “Yup, there it is” first impression. But Angkor Wat is much more than a first impression.

It is cool hallways filled with the soft tranquility left by centuries of people relaxing in relief from the sun. A visceral tradition you’re now part of. Then you’re humbled by the massive stone structures, an achievement in any century. Where did they get the stone? How many people worked on this? For how many generations? My mind felt fragile with admiration already, when I noticed the carvings. Unimaginable, incredible that humans did this. The sheer volume of artistry made me want to shake the nearest Cambodian hand.

Entire armies marched down walls, identical and detailed in an age before mechanized reproduction. Elephants reared and kings balanced, chariots raced while horses pranced and archers took aim. But apparently the ancient Khmer and I have something in common. Because as well and good as war is, sure, whatever, there are more beautiful things in life.

Namely? Boobs. Lots and lots of boobs.

Women danced on walls, watched from doorways, and made mudras in alcoves throughout the temples, hallways, and galleries of the ancient complex. Subtle smiles of feminine wiles that predated and predicted Mona Lisa’s secret by centuries, inspiring craftsmanship and care that has stood the test of time. And they all had knockers to die for.

(See the additional 6 image gallery on the vagabondurges.com post)

Dear fellow Oakland protesters, and others.

The type of legitimate protesters I went to join

Dear fellow protesters in Oakland, thank you for coming. I know you’re angry, so to not waste your time I’ll get to it:

What is the point? Your point. Your purpose. Your goal. Why are you here?

Are you here to express your frustration with race and class relations in this country, advocate for justice and change, and oppose the militarization and impunity of a segment of the police?

Or do you just want to burn shit?

Because the two are mutually exclusive. Standing for the former entails NOT doing any of the latter, and doing the latter destroys the voice of the former.

Are you here to protest, or riot? They are fundamentally different. Is your enemy hate crime, or Starbucks? Do you want to build something better, or just smash what’s here? Do you want to oppose those responsible, or just harm your neighbors?

My opinion? This War on Trash Cans accomplishes nothing but toxic fumes. This aggression towards all police officers does nothing but further inhibit dialogue and progress. I see demonstrators and police pushing each other into simplified extremism, and it makes me sad. I’ve known good cops. Men and women who I was glad were there to back me up.

When will you learn that violence does not have the effect you wanted it to when you were an angry 16 year old? It’s time to grow the fuck up.

Just an excuse for their ugly little tags

As you may have guessed, angry violent “protester”, I am sick of your shit. You are not a protester. You are a hooligan. And I will not stand by you. So tonight, as the helicopters again drift overhead, despite my desire to finish what I’ve started and demonstrate my conscience, I am staying home. It’s not because I’m scared, not afraid of being arrested again, but because last night looked to me like a movement degraded, a legitimate grievance lost in petty vandalism, and I will not participate in that, even tacitly.

To those actual protesters, both previous night, and probably tonight too, I thank you for caring. Apathy is the great enabler of discord and abuse.

And to those who have come to Oakland to hide behind your coward’s mask and make trouble in someone else’s community… Violence breeds violence, so please don’t tempt me.

Now that's just far too pretty. This is Jökulsarlon.

“Did you make it to Jökulsarlon?” asked a friend, when she heard I was in Iceland. The name didn't ring any bells. “Don't get on the plane without seeing it – really!” This from a woman who has traveled across 97% of the Earth's surface, as far as I can tell.

I followed her link to a website and saw a spray of beautiful images, boats apparently tooling around among gorgeous iceberg hunks of calved glacier. How could we have missed something that beautiful?

I clicked the “translate to English” button, which pondered a moment and informed me that the page had been translated, though there was no visible change in the text. I love the Icelandic language. Anything that confounds google, for that matter, but this language of umlauts, accents and whatever the hell this thing is: Þ

But upon closer inspection...oh, Jökulsarlon is that place! Hell yes we went there. I was just thinking of it as The Glacial Lagoon.

A few centuries back, in the Little Ice Age, the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier dug its way down to the coast, where it met the Jökulsá river. (It's okay that you enjoy the words more than the info.) Normally a glacier digs out a big ravine, sure, but when it's equipped with a river to wash away the sediment it's grinding? It overachieves.

Thus, the Jökulsarlon glacial lagoon, 300 meters deep, and growing in size as the glacier retreats. Fifteen square kilometers in 1998, it looked much bigger to my eye last week. Of course, to my eye it was an entire planet of seductively clear water, murky with cobalt mystery under striated chunks of ice that looked like the furniture of a liquid nitrogen god.

1. Arrive at Jökulsarlon, put on all available clothing layers and get out of the car.

   

   Oh, the thing is full of seals, too.

2. Realize you've just spent an indeterminate amount of time gaping at the blue expanse, frozen yet liquid, immovable but constantly in motion, eternal and ephemeral.
3. Walk down the rock and gravel embankment, aware that sliding into the water would be lethal.
4. Try to take pictures that don't profane the place.
5. Once fingers feel like recent transplants from a corpse, limit yourself to 20 more photos. Okay 50.
6. Get back in car, thaw fingers, and soak in gratitude to this beautiful planet.

We returned to Jökulsarlon a couple times, because there was a whole other side to the place...

(Again, all images copyright, let me know if you'd like to use them. That'd be swell.)

Hornafjordur. It won't notice when it kills you.

Someone lived here.

That's the thing that boggled my mind, as I leaned into the wind, peering at the fuzzy shapes of dunes through the mesh of my cheap hooded shirt pulled across my face, hoping the sweatshop fibers would keep the black volcanic sand from scraping out my retinas.

And I'm not talking about living here nowadays, though that too is impressive, but back in the Xth century. Some Danish king told Bjorkylvörlakvirðerheim Þorlakhöslmangleson (or some such appropriately Vikingish name, I didn't write it down):

“Hey, why don't you move out to the eastern edge of that frozen and geologically genocidal island we found in the icy and ill-tempered seas? You'll love it there. They have sand. And ice. Take your crusty wife and your crusty children too, they'll thank you for it.”

I'm guessing the king didn't like Bjorkylvörlakvirðerheim very much.

You can see the replica settlement in the distance

But he came here. In a frickin boat. Built a homestead, and didn't die. Incredible. Named Hornafjörður, this area eventually grew into one of the larger settlements of Iceland, though it remained remote, isolated, and caustically severe for centuries. The isolation didn't start to thaw until the late 1970's, when the technology necessary to build bridges that could withstand the epic jökulhlaups, or glacial floods, was developed and implemented, completing the ring road around the island.

I shook my head, hearing the percussive scratch of sand whipped against the cloth covering my face, and walked deeper into the black sand dunes, veined with dry grasses as tenacious as any living thing on Earth. I stepped over a jaw bone, bleached white and completely stripped of flesh, the calcium already wearing away at the edges.

This is the sort of place that doesn't even notice when it kills you.

To my right, white-capped waves off the Norwegian Sea hacked the backs of the waves before them into froth in their haste to assault the shore, outraged at sand's impertinence in impeding their icily majestic sweep across the sea. Behind me an American-built weather station, nearly abandoned after the nation politely told us to remove out military presence in 2006, hunkered down in olive green desolation, waiting to die.

But in front of me...

Maybe the aggression of the waves had provoked volcanic obstinacy, a geologic temper tantrum, but whatever natural forces pushed up those mountains did so with a ferocious hand. Edges to break axes, ice-lined heights to turn blood to stone and shatter it with a feral grin, and loose rocky screes that could avalanche over a home in seconds to annihilate all trace of the temerity of mortals.

It was pretty.

I wanted to stare at it forever. Or at least until the brutal beauty either opened my mind or eroded it. But after a few minutes, fingers growing stiff as the ligaments steadily froze, I got back in the car, which rocked in the blasts of wind.

In the shower later that night, my downwind ear was empty but the side that had faced into the fury was lined with a layer of black volcanic grit that had pierced right through the cloth of my shirt. Cotton? That would last an hour out there. But that place, it will outlast us all.

(This place was so brutally beautiful that I'd like to remind you these images are copyright. If you fancy them, let me know, and I'll share them.)

I don't believe you, but I love you anyway

They tell me this is one planet. All the same one. But I'm not sure I believe them.

Because I remember walking down a backstreet in San Salvador, where children stopped their futbol game (played with a clump of garbage) to watch me pass, grandmothers winked at me, everyone said hello, and laundry hung to dry on rusting barbed wire.

There was exhaust, and constant noise, and a large plate of food cost about $3. It was warm to hot, and I needed no vocabulary beyond T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. Violence was a very real possibility and twenty-dollar bills were too large to use most places, tens were pushing it.

But today I rode around in a car, since you can't really walk around Iceland at present, and the sky opened up with an array of things that were all irrefutably snow. People are all friendly, but there is a distance between strangers that even I can feel, I who seemed aloof to the Salvadoran sensibility of space. The cold has perhaps hardened cheeks into a habitual emotional reserve? Or something about long months of darkness, of light, or of the relentless need to work together?

The barbed wire here is clean, and serves only to remind the shaggy ponies that they shouldn't wander into the street. A small plate of food, elegantly arranged, three slices of lamb and some decorations around the perimeter was about $40.

$40? According to this site's data on minimum wages in El Salvador, that would be about a third of a month's salary for an agricultural worker. For a small meal. Ten long days' work, one tasty but unsatisfying plate.

They tell me this is one planet, but I'm not sure I believe them.

But I can tell Them, one planet of more, I love it all. I love the noise of San Salvador, and the silence of an Icelandic field at night. I love wandering a hill town past indigena women in colorful skirts, and bundling up with the armored layers against the cold. I love cheese and ham on toast, and pupusas.

I love the hearty belly laughs of latinos, and the hard-won smiles of pleased Nords. And I love, beyond love, the chance to come and see as much of it as I can.

And the craziest part? I'm saving the best Iceland photos
for later posts. This country is just...preposterous.

I love travel. I love this planet. Hell, I love you too.

One last off-kilter day in Lima

I couldn't find a child. I've never had that problem before. Of course, I'd never had this particular mission either, but it was an irregular day.

After MPicchu, I had just enough time in Cuzco to marvel at the mess of the girl in the dorm (who leaves a shoe insole, a chopped up water bottle, and a blizzard of shredded paper in a shared space?) before flying back to Lima.

Outside the terminal I stepped in a swirl of taxi drivers, police, questions unanswered and documents unproduced, followed by ejections among exclamations as the officer declared my ride illegal. The next driver had an unmarked car and instructed “If the police ask, just tell them I came to collect you from your hotel.”

Wait, what? Maybe I shouldn't... Too late.

He didn't murder me, which is always appreciated, and the whole ride I kept my window down, eyes searching in vain for street kids.

The hostel wouldn't let me wash my own clothes, and the laundry's minimum charge was for three kilograms, so I dropped off every article of clothing besides the ones I had on, 2.4 kilos, and prayed she'd return it. She did, and with a clean sweatshirt in hand I went looking for a child.

But I couldn't find one.

I'd met and adored a bunch of them on the coast, but those had already gotten some help (details down the road). I was looking for one still in the thick of it. My flip flops flapped for block after block, but apparently street children are not allowed in Miraflores, the tourist/wealthy section of Lima.

A friend in California gave me the sweatshirt to use in Cusco then pass on to one of the street kids who had drawn me to Peru. Maybe in the park. But in Parque Kennedy, since all the world worships the idea of a US president with morals instead of just business acumen, I found the park full of well-off park-goers.

And cats.

Felines in the flowers, paws on the paths, kitties crapping in the hedgerows. Lima had decided that street children are offensive to moneyed individuals and thrown them out. Instead the park was home to fifty cats. Well-fed, healthy, protected cats.

In the end, I left the sweatshirt in the hostel, since perhaps a backpacker is the next best thing to a child in need? Pale consolation.

I would have liked to stay another day, search out the street kids, perhaps save them with my wealthy western concern, paternalistic messiah, but the people I’ll tell you about soon know how to do it better than my bumbling flicks at charity.

Besides, I had an appointment in the next nation, an unclear event of unknown interest, experience, and danger. And a sweatshirt wouldn't protect me.

Making friends and witnesses in Cuzco

Normally being forced to walk an unnecessary U might annoy me, but not in the Cuzco airport, where the circuitous walkway is lined with plate glass windows that display the verdant Andean mountainsides, divided up by red dirt roads into blocks of homes, towns, and fields with a tidy precision normally only seen in Farmville.

It's Cuzco. Why would there NOT be a llama on the street?

Atahualpa has lost a llama, can you help him find it?

Everyone loves Cuzco, and with a view like that, I could see why. Literally. So I loved Cuzco, now it was time to make Cuzco love me.

Problem: who are the first people you meet when you leave an airport? Taxi drivers. Not easy people to pal with, especially when you refuse to pay their tourist fare x2.

But the taxista who accepted my fare chatted with me on the way in, warming, and was won over when I told him about the Brazilian fart monster that fumigated my room last night. In my experience most males love a good fart joke, and Latin American men even more than average thus far. Ha! I'd won over a taxista via a Brazilian's digestive disorder. Victory! Almost worth the stench.

The hostel staff were lovely (how did we end up talking about Nijmegen?), and the people around town responded politely and kindly in every interaction, from the restaurant kid to the lady in a bowler hat who sold me two cactus fruits. Dang, Cuzco and I are on our honeymoon!

“Masaje señor?” I habitually ignore offers made in tourist-saturated plazas, but while I waited for the incessant stream of cars to hiccup, she added “30 soles for one hour.” 30 soles is about ten bucks US. For an hour massage? Vamonos!

The table was handmade, the face-hole an uneven gap that you reached through Xs cut in sheets, but I was a happy camper. The honeymoon continued. Except for one thing.

My feet stank. I apologized in advance, explained that my shoes were old and I'd been walking all day... She assured me that they are used to such things. Professional. The honeymoon was back on. Except...

When she pulled the sheet back to get to my lower back she saw my undies. Tired old backpacker skivvies, handwashed and wrung out a thousand times over the miles, fraying elastic and formless droop. Not great. Then she noted: “Te los pusiste al reves.” I was wearing them inside out.

Face pushed into the hand-cut hole in the sheet, I explained to the ground that I caught an early flight this morning, so got ready at 5:00 in a dark bathroom. This excuse makes little sense, but she let it slide. Gracias, amiga.

The writing says "I love so much". Why yes.

They had Enya on loop, so I watched The Fellowship of the Ring on inner Dvd, followed by a flashback to middle school for the courageous and terrifically awkward performance of Caribbean Blue by a girl in my 7^th grade class at the talent show. So good, so awful. “If every man, says all he can, if every man were true” sang the 12 year old.

I've only gotten a few professional massages, but if they were all $10, I'd be in there daily. It was lovely, and I came out so relaxed I'd kinda forgotten how to talk, so when they asked if it was okay, my answer was a sort of boneless jig, forearms flapping. I realized this may have been an odd response and turned to see how it was received.

“Your fly is open” said the matron.

I don't know how to say “blush” in Spanish, but I know how to do it in Cuzco.

Sometimes there's dance in the current

Tonight is penultimate night's eve, 48 hours from now I'll be surrounded by people trying to sleep on a red-eye flight to Mexico City, too bored with the miracle of flight to look out the window. Traveling again...excitement and nerves have been simmering in my stomach for days, warring factions that rise and fall independent of reason, oddly balanced...

So what better way to spend tonight than a travel writing reading. Because that's not an awkward phrase. The Weekday Wanderlust series has been going for x years in San Francisco, and is a familial den of pleasantries, community, and catiness, a common interest shared among moderately disparate people. My favorites are the groupies.

This was my second, more comfortable than my first, and I felt at ease as I stood long-term in line for the single overworked bartender, watching the faux-innocence of the lady who cut in line, and the brazen dickishness of the guy who followed her lead. Chatting with a couple fellow aspirants was a bonus, and I took my place without qualms as a wallflower at the back of the room when the chairs were gone by the time the glacial bartender passed me the glass of overpriced wine*.

(*Maybe he thought I was with the JP Morgan conference, instead of the writers gaggle?)

I enjoyed the readings, particularly the cleanup hitter, and debated trying to mingle when it was done. I felt comfortable, yes; after all, these people have no power to hurt me, there is nothing they can take away when you have nothing to start with. But not so at ease that I wanted to try and mingle.

My new headphones have better quality sound than the last ones, and the Aloe Blacc song that came on as I walked away was just right to make my legs swing steady, irresistible, so when I reach a red light I turn to find the green. This mood happens sometimes, street surfing, following the currents of the city, accepting whatever road it tells me to follow.

I passed a block west of the station, but that didn't matter because I had energy to burn off, the euphoria that comes after leaving a tense situation. Maybe I wasn't as comfortable as I thought? Or maybe it was just the January air, warm as the sigh after a good meal, embracing like the casual presence of an old friend.

Pass two girls, one more obviously attractive than the other, so give my best flirting smile at the “lesser” of the two, a currency she seemed to value.

Good song followed good song, and I couldn't help but respond. The first dance steps were pure gratitude to B.B. King.

The cute little filly standing outside another hotel with two others is going to notice me. Lift the chin to show her I'm the Emperor of the World, an impersonation both convenient and true, and watch her look back a second later. Give her a smile and a look, see it reflect. But the legs never slow.

There's something about suits that makes me want to celebrate not having to take myself that seriously. That accounted for the next dance steps. Well, that and The Black Keys.

Then dance was just in the currents of the evening, as I jigged my way across intersections, spotlighted in the headlights of taxis, and bopping past the windows of crowded restaurants.

A security guard slept in a chair, unaware of the performance I put on for him, though the two waiters smoking behind me enjoyed it. My last move brought me around to face the gorgeous woman who had stopped to watch. She gave me a smile like lust, and a laugh like licking, but I'm sorry ma'am, I'm too in love with the night to fall for you.

Five months ago I found a $20 bill on the sidewalk on the way home from what was already a good night. That combination meant the money was clearly not for me, and I've carried it since, waiting for the person I'm supposed to give it to. But oops, I took it out last week, it was sitting on my desk. So when I passed the saxophone player, filling an urban canyon with Coltrane's familiar My Favorite Things, I could only give him my last $10. I consider the task half-completed.

My wallet felt better empty.

It's amazing how sweaty one can get while dancing around San Francisco. When the time was ready, I took my place on the BART platform, determined not to scare anyone. We are modern people, bitter at the indifference of strangers, desperately alone in our bubbles, utterly opposed to anyone who threatens this.

But...damnit..those French guys in C2C are just too catchy, and my cup overfloweth with groove. The sustained gaze of spectators threatened to put a damper on me, but it was an empty threat, and the tomfoolery continued until the train frottaged its way up to the platform. Sexy train.

Once on the train I turned off the music to behave myself. That's a personality-free environment. Breathe.

At first, I admit, the heads bent over cell phones looked to me as mourners too stupid to realize they were at their own funeral. A dozen victims, overdosed on Candy Crush. Cerebrums corroded by Farmville cyanide. But those thoughts are so wonderfully dark that I couldn't help but laugh them away.

In front of me a gorgeous man conversed with a gorgeous woman in the curt and clear tones of Spain's Spanish, beloved to my ear. She was explaining BART to him, their stop would be 19^th Street, and when she informed him that we were currently under the water of the Bay, he was impressed behind his flawless complexion under perfect hair, she had green eyes above lips too perfect to kiss.

At 12^th Street they looked around in confusion, consternation, peering for a sign, half steps towards the door. She gnawed on one of those perfect lips, and I had to intervene on its behalf.

“19^th Street is the next stop.” Did you know green can flash like fantasy as it says “Thank you”? It was the perfect opening for conversation, and the palabras swarmed through my brain, but no, I was too shy, too self-conscious to speak to them.

The yang that danced through the streets of San Francisco was satisfied, its yin now in effect, and everything was as it should be.

Good night San Francisco.

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.

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.