A Tahoe reminder

No signal. I love when it says that. In fact, seeking that elusive status was one of my reasons for going up to Tahoe in the first place. To spend two days in the white opulence of this year’s record snowfall on the branches of ponderosa pines that will carry three centuries of memory while they grow on slopes that slough off the passing of millennia. Puts these plastic pocket addictions into perspective.

It's not Tahoe without Emerald Bay

The absence of cell signal is getting harder to find. The previous day a millennial had told me his wild travel story “When I was in Morocco, I just, like, didn’t buy a sim-card for my phone? I just didn’t get one! I was there for three weeks, without a phone!” I waited to hear how this setup contributed to an adventure before realizing that being disconnected is itself an experience worth relating now.

Now up in the Sierras, the temptation of the phone tickled me. “I suppose I could post an instagram of this…” I thought, guilty maintenance of my sadly inactive account. But there it was: no signal. I smiled in the clear air and put the phone away.

A buddy and I snowshoed around Spooner Lake that first afternoon, trying out the clompy plastic flippers we’d rented. Walked a while before we realized the big snowy meadow WAS the lake, no indication of its watery underlayer except a small pool where winter-frozen fish floated belly-up in their silvery thousand, distracting from the darker wiggles of their still-living kin below.

“Maybe they’re just...hibernating.” One of us offered. “You know, that winter stasis thing.”

We watched the sluggish stirs of the living among the immobile remainders of their kin, inert and inverted. “No, probably not.” Snap a picture out of curiosity, then go check out those aspens…

The next day Fallen Leaf Lake was waiting for us, politely holding onto a layer of ice until we stood gaping at its side, then letting it dissolve in the crackled collisions of cold succumbing to an unseasonably warm sun.

Somebody benevolent left a canoe on the shore, so now we were paddling, jiggling in the wavelets kicked up by a wind that came to greet us when we left the stony shore behind.

Hot tubs were invented for cold nights beside snow embankments while stars monitor your relaxation below. Granted the electric lights killed them away years ago, but I could put them solidly in my mind’s moonroof anyway.

Hard to see the ski tracks down the western slope, and
trust me that that thing is even steeper than it looks.

Four lakes in two days has a certain symmetry, so we trudged out to Eagle Lake before joining the Sunday return. Snowballs rolling down the slopes to the snowmelt creek that earned its fame in the waterfall of name, and paid homage to the local lunatics who laid the sinuous tracks down sheer slopes when no one was there to see. What that must feel like, I can only envy.

Travel has driven home that America’s greatest treasure is its wild spaces. (Sorry Hollywood.) So it was nice to get out there and light a memory votive on the altar of one of California’s great ones. You can always count on a mountain to show things in perspective, and the signal was coming in loud and clear.

Photopost, 3 from Europe

It's a week I look forward to all year: tour guide summit week in Washington State. So many wonderful people, sharing this lucky career, and an employer I believe in.

I had a delicious meal in this sidewalk cafe in Brussels.
The rain only added to it all.

So I'll be learning and sharing and laughing a lot these next 9 days. But not much sleep. And nearly no free time. So the next few posts will be photos that have been lingering on my computer, unused, but in which I find some version of beauty, and a post link for each place.

A friend my lady and I made in Greece.
A time that feels both near and unbearably far away

How wonderful to live in a world with so many facets of beauty!

So much beauty in Istanbul, it was difficult
to pick just a few for a post about the city.

Happy January!

Things got a bit Biblical in Hoi An, Viet Nam

Nobody bombed Hoi An. North Vietnam, South Vietnam, even the Americans in their flying fortresses decided the ancient port city of the Champa Empire with its softly Southeast Asian old town and 16th century Japanese Bridge was not a place for the ugliness of war. (Or maybe they were just focused on Hue. But that can Hue-t.)

After escaping the festive plane I headed for Hoi An, which is kin to Bruges, Rothenburg, and to some extent Venice. Powerful merchant centers, all lost their influence when the tides of trade shifted elsewhere, leaving behind period pieces to be preserved by their neglect. Whoddathunk that forgetting something could make it so easy to remember?

Spared from the abrasive concrete edges and phlegmy pollution of its modernized neighbors, Hoi An is a beautiful place to walk, down streets made elegant by centuries of spice trade flowing from Indonesia up to China, ceramics shipped off to Egypt, and an amalgam of international styles that persist in the city’s impressive tailoring sector.

For long slow hours I walked the quiet ways of Hoi An, past the unintelligible slogans of bicycle vendors selling food to the locals, and the proffered meats and fried treats of those hawking snacks to foreigners. Dark alleyways with Vietnam’s delicious street food where I continued to eat all my meals on low plastic stools, a bowl of soup while kids peered at me and their parents coaxed them to break out a shy “hello.” I enjoyed Hoi An, but my experience was deeply underwritten by one other factor.

It rained. Nonstop. For days. The Old Town was underwater, streets for blocks around rising liquid to the tops of taxi tires. Flooding blocked off the section of the city the hotel map told me to see, but it didn’t take much effort to enjoy what I could reach. I figured I’d come back another time to see the sights.

Yes, I liked Hoi An. Despite the rain. Then I heard of the city’s fame for ruthlessly overcharging foreigners, its notoriously crummy museums with their inflated ticket prices, and all-around tourist gouging practices run rampant. Huh.

So thank you, typhoon whatever-it-was. With your deluge of assistance I saw a muzzled version of modern Hoi An, most of my fellow foreign friends holed up in their hotels, and the ambition of voracious vendors muted by your constant cool downpour.

Tourism is a hell of a thing to do to a country. And Vietnam’s got it bad. But it’s a veneer, a sideshow distraction of mutual exploitation, and it’s not so hard to get past. Sometimes you just have to walk two minutes away from the tourist hub (Hanoi), and sometimes a mere relentless rainfall can restore an ancient city to its fundamental character.

What is Skopje?

Skopje, Macedonia, from the ancient Kale Fortress

Skopje has nothing to do with the Italian verb scopare, which technically means “to sweep,” but just as “to screw” has a bit more oomph than inserting a light bulb, scopare is that favorite vulgar verb of the angry, horny, or adolescent.

And they don’t speak Dutch in Macedonia, so Skopje has nothing to do with the diminutive -je in that language, which makes things smaller, cuter, cuddlier. If you have a dog in Holland, you have a hond. If you have a puppy-wuppy, you have a hondje.

So while Skopje might sound like a quick little lusty interlude to me, and now to you (you’re welcome), no one will have any idea what you’re talking about when you try to explain why you’re giggling in front of the heroic statues. (But feel free to try anyway.)

So that’s what Skopje is not. But what Skopje is?

It's a neolithic settlement already 4000 years old when the Romans got there a bit before 0. Then centuries of chaos calming to empires that crumbled back to chaos, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Ottoman all getting to fancy themselves eternal on the banks of the Vardar River. After six millennia, Skopje is a powerhouse arena of history, culture, and pride...that currently hosts a Las Vegas style showroom of propaganda mayhem like I had never seen. It’s bizarre. Surreal. Kinda hideous. And I loved it!

It was mostly men, but these ladies were lurking near the opera

Statues of scholars in robes, kings in crowns, and the odd barbarian looking perplexed and aggressive over a big lumpy club line every bridge, lurk in arcades, and loom like suicidal squadrons on the edges of prominent buildings. Don’t jump, toga-clad men! We’ll get you some modern fashion!

I gave some background here (click to open), but why all the classical imagery?

Macedonia declared independence in 1991, and 27 seconds later was feuding with Greece over ownership of the name and Alexander the Great’s legacy. The quandary continues, as Macedonia struggles between Classical or Slavic origin, bashing out an identity for its ethnically diverse population in a region where such questions have been soaked in blood for centuries.

Just slightly a mother and father national
foundation story going on here.

So some say the classical theme is anti-Greek, part of that dispute. Others say anti-Bulgarian for much the same ethnic reasons. But a former adviser to the Prime Minister reassures us on both those counts.

“No! It’s not anti-Greek or anti-Bulgarian!” Says Shmuel Ben David Vaknin. And we pause for a quick sigh of relief before he adds “Antiquisation has a double goal, which is to marginalize the Albanians and create an identity that will not allow Albanians to become Macedonians."

Something of the Romans must have lingered in Skopje, because it doesn’t take an Australian playing a Spaniard in an American movie about Ancient Rome to tell me that if you win the crowd, they won’t ask questions. Bread and circus, man, bread and circus. (Except without the bread.)

So is it working? Are the people placated? Blood-red handprints on shiny new marble say no, but we’ll talk about that next time.

Because even though the towering statue of a warrior on a horse is the centerpiece of an international dispute, it is also a great fountain, spraying water from a variety of jets, at unpredictable moments from unexpected places, shifting colors as grandiloquent music piped into the square on pigeon-pooped speakers.

And the kids loved it.

And I loved that.

Small-minded men have been picking fights since we climbed out of the trees, but as July heat emanated from the stones after dark on a calm Macedonian evening, the laughter of happiness was enough.

And that's what Skopje is.

Skopje: beauty, brutalism, and unpopular propoganda

I can't get to my SD card so will have to make
do with crappy cellphone pics for now.

You can’t come to Skopje and not talk about the monuments. Everyone in the city has an opinion. And I mean that literally, an opinion. The same one. Not a single Macedonian I talked to disagreed about the massive urban development, er, beautification? Statue-ization? Neo-classical building barrage? Not sure what to call the $80-500 million project that’s been renovating downtown Skopje since 2010, but they all hate it. Or rather, in keeping with the Macedonian character, it’s more of a bemused ridicule mixed with an acidic disgust in their government.

For starters, how about that price tag? Quite a tally, especially for a country with high levels of poverty and about 30% unemployment. And how about that range? Hard to pin down numbers, especially when no one quite knows what they are and the opposition says it’s ten times what it needed to be.

So...why? Why is Skopje doing this?

Friday morning at 5:17 AM, exactly 53 years ago today, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake in Skopje killed over a thousand people, injured upwards of three thousand, left 200,000 people homeless, and destroyed about 80% of the city.

80% of your city destroyed in 20 seconds. Can’t begin to imagine. One local I talked to said “We were just glad it happened during summer when many people were on vacation. If it had been in October or something, it would have been worse.” Now that’s dedication to the silver lining. Nazdravje! (Yes, they say that here too.)

The Triumphal Arch.
Let me get back to you on the paint job...

Kennedy and Kruschev both sent help, and in the demolished streets of Skopje, Soviet and American troops could shake hands for the first time since 1945. Maybe they should have stayed.

Downtown Skopje was gradually rebuilt under a plan that was half Japanese architect Kenzo Tange and half Yugoslavia. The aesthetic bummer (if you ask me) was that Tange offered neo-brutalism, and Yugoslavia added the sort of concrete blast-wall atmosphere that we associate with Communism during the Soviet age. A tad bit bleak. Who do you know who raves about Macedonia? (Unless you’re Dutch or Australian, in which case y’all’re so well traveled you’re exempted from rhetorical questions like that. Sorry.)

So why not pep it up? Except there are those pesky issues of funding. And then there’s the style. Oh mama, the style. Ancient Rome meets the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A heroic guy who is officially not Alexander the Great because of the ongoing dispute with Greece (but totally is) looms over the main square, anchoring a lattice of marble-columned buildings for such exalted institutions as the Agency of Electronic Communications, whose temple reminded me of Ephesus.

It’s quite a spectacle. Rather...monumental, you might say. And to be honest? I loved it. It’s ridiculous, yes. Perhaps obscenely expensive and criminally irresponsible. But in a day and age when so many places seem to not give the slightest thought to how they look (Athens isn’t standing behind me, is it?) it’s nice to see a city giving it a go. A bizarre festival of propaganda and thinly veiled ethnic discrimination, but still, a go.

In fact? I’m going to rave about Macedonia. Back me up, Aussies and Nederlanders.

Happy birthday, America, from elsewheres

Roman stroller

That’s Athens out there in the haze. Spread outside my room like too much hot peanut butter, chunky with concrete and creamy with Mediterraneanity. In my camera it’s Italy on the rare moments when I had the leisure to photograph, and in my pockets it’s Paris, a metro ticket, receipt for coffee, l’addition si vous plait.

But somewhere, on this 4th of July, it’s America out there. Maybe everywhere. We’re all living in Amerika, sang a German band to my tour members while we waited in a Swiss traffic jam behind a Ford truck. Kool and the Gang came next and everything made sense anyway.

So happy birthday, America!

And what better place to be, for me you see, on the 4th of July than the birthplace of democracy? That least-worst approach that we’ve so publicly endorsed. Because from here, in the fugue and fog of travel and border crossing, where I wake at night not knowing where I am (but downright positive that I didn’t tell the group when dinner starts), from here I can see what being American is to me today.

I wonder why they call it "Painter's Corner"?
Bacharach, Germany

Being American means I can do this job, helping my brothers and sisters of privilege come to see the places where our culture came from, and learn that the divides that separate us are either fictitious or delicious, and in neither case important.

With my American passport I can move around nearly freely, taking advantage of the modern age of peace and gadgetry, perhaps before the Fall or maybe on the cusp of Transcendence, either way it’s a damn fine stage at the moment.

My citizenship can be a looming shadow behind me. Protection in many places, a liability in a few, and a cause for concern in most, where they like us so much they try valiantly to conceal how much damage this election cycle has already done to a country that was working so hard to regain the world’s respect. (And in that flux, from intelligent leader for the past 8 years to the possibility of lunatic demagogue, I fear we run fault lines through the future either way.)

Paris, where even the shopping malls look good

It means I can talk like this, say plainly that Donald Trump is a profound threat to the future of my nation, and add that I think Brexit was a huge mistake, whose price the English will pay worst, but which all of us will share a little. (And I have to wonder if Athens was a more somber city after the results came in.)

And it gives me a perspective, from where I can look at Brexit as England rejected the taxation and foreign governance through the ballot, on the day that commemorates the time when my country did the same, with musket balls and dead humans. Progress!

Looking out over Rome

And finally, my homeland gave me its culture, so much of which I choose to keep, even if it doesn’t always fit in. Because if Parisians think I’m touched in the head for smiling as I walk down the street, that’s fine with me. I’m going to do it anyway.

Because they smile back.

So I’m smiling at you today, America, over there visible through the haze. Maybe I’ll see you again sometime.

Photo Friday - Three years ago

I'm breaking up. It's the end of an era. But I just couldn't handle the constant interruptions to my service... A couple more words of explanation, then the flashback, on today's vagabondurges.com post, here.

Photo Friday - Stairs

I’ll make you a deal. One post per week with words in it, less than a page-worth, circa 500. And one post of photos. Workable?

Wednesday had words in it, and next week just might have a massive conspiracy to reveal, so today is for letterless images, eyes but few i’s.

Today itself is a day between places, step by stepping, heading somewhere I’m sure, where I expect perhaps. But along the way, beauty lives in every detail in this marvelous world of ours.

 This is half of them, the other half are on the vagabondurges.com version, here.

See you Tuesday (unless the government finds out and assassinates me first.)

Time for a Seattle trip

Seattle: 2.7 coffeeshops per capita
(estimated) And all of them damn nice

Is it just me or is this year’s cold a serious pain in the neck? Still just a cold, no need antibiotics, but enough to have me emailing my upstairs neighbors to ask “Y’all can’t hear it when I’m coughing my lungs out all night, can you?”

And evolving into the kind of swollen tonsils that give the wrong impression to the new neighbors across the way. “Have you seen the guy next door? He’s always in his kitchen, just staring at the ceiling. Then he bows to his sink. What a weirdo!”

Maybe I should prep my saltwater gargle solution in plain view next time….

Seattle: where even the
dirtiest alleys are clean

All in all, it was the best of weeks, it was the worst of weeks, to escape up to Seattle for a few days. Lovely city, that Seattle. A place where you can have locally sourced corned beef hash with your lady one day, then tendon soup in a place called “What the pho?” with an old school-buddy the next.

A great place to justify an easy blog of photos, before I tell you what happened after the apian terror in Turkey with my brother. Have a swell (but not swollen) weekend!

Seattle: a very helpful sort of place

Seattle: where even the garbage is pretty

Seattle: where even the sidewalks are interesting

Seattle: where Jennyfers want to share open tacos with you

Myanmar and America politics, only one to like

Goatherd on the tracks in Myanmar?
That's a job I wouldn't mind talking about.

“I think we should talk about politics,” I suggested to the table of tour members, bored senseless with the American conversation of what you do for work.

“Oh, but wouldn’t you rather be friends?” A woman responded, half joking. Maybe a quarter. Heads around the table nodded their agreement, and we discovered that Bill was an accountant.

I get it. It bums me out, but I get it. And given how much more important politics is than what we normally talk about (unless Game of Thrones really affects your life) this kinda boggles my mind, so I’ve grabbed a few theories to explain it.

Not your enemy. Not anyone's enemy.

3. Things seem so screwed, talking about them depresses me. (I get that. But what if ignoring problems is an implicit endorsement of them?)

2: I don’t understand politics and I’m scared that if we talk about it, you’ll find that out. (Chicken or the egg?)

And my number 1 reason why I think Americans are scared to talk about politics: We’ve forgotten that disagreeing with each other doesn’t friggin mean we’re enemies. You can still be friends with people you disagree with. And personally, I think you should be friends with people you disagree with. That might help our impasse, and lessen the ease with which we demonize and ridicule those with other opinions, instead of understanding and connecting with them.

So I’m delighted that Rick Steves encourages his guides to talk politics with tour members. And I’m going to. With frequent disclaimers that they’re just my opinions, and that I respect differing viewpoints, yada yada yada, and I’m sure I’ll get cases (like the one in Rome) where people look at me and their eyes indict “Oh. You’re one of them.” Who want to take our guns. Who want to demean the sanctity of marriage. Who want to give our jobs to the ___s.

Daily life, somewhere between Yangon and Mandalay

But what about when teaching refugees? Should I talk politics with people whose politics might have gotten them killed, and gotten their families killed? Probably not.

But when I have so many students from Myanmar, and that country is having its first apparently/relatively fair election in 25 years, I just have to ask something. And that one particular student is such a positive, friendly, open guy, and he speaks English so well, I just had to ask him a question that’s been lingering since I visited Myanmar in 2013.

I stopped by Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday. It was fantastic.
But why were the shirts in English?
(About 100 languages are spoken in Myanmar. Oh.)

 “How do you feel about Aung San Suu Kyi?” He looked at me, slightly bewildered. “I heard, in Myanmar, people say that she is kind of more for foreigners than Burmese people.” (Kind of like how the Dalai Lama is the outside world’s representative of Tibet, but inside the country the Panchen Lama is often more significant.)

My student summed up politics in so many countries. “We like her. Because she’s the only one to like.”

So as the Republicans continue to search for the most insane viewpoints, the most profound misarticulation of reality, and the worst possible responses to it, and Hillary tries to squirm out from under the perception that she’s an intelligent, dedicated diplomat who is basically just another politician, I am left loving Bernie Sanders. Of course, the more I hear from and about him, the more I love him, but still, he’s the only one to like. Wouldn’t it be great to have more than one good option?

I wonder if I can get a table full of Americans to talk about that one.

Community of strangers, on one last night in Rome

I'm developing...not traditions. Not rituals. Habits. I'm developing habits, perhaps tendencies, at different points of these current trips and travels.

Before coming home, I tend to eat my last dinner at a sub-par restaurant, invariably in a city known for its delicious cuisine. Pizza by the slice in Paris. A pasta place in Rome that waits until I sit down to begin breaking my rules. (The non-Italian hustler talking people into coming in must have been in the WC when I arrived.) After weeks of great food, I have to stumble at the finish line.

I get up on time, with eagerness in limbs not fully rested, and take a thorough shower. I've saved one entirely clean shirt, like gold by that point, an aspiration for the most pristine pre-travel hygienic state possible. I will NOT subject my neighbor to Traveler Armpit, nor arrive stinking and disheveled! Then I walk to public transit, and arrive soaked in sweat, ready to ferment for 12 transatlantic hours, wearing my soggy garb and a rueful smile at the familiarity of it all.

I also book an extra night's accommodation so that I'll have time to go over end-of-tour paperwork and processes with the other guide, only to watch them depart immediately for their next gig. So I spend a day with myself, listening to the music of my headphones and the recriminations of my head at further delaying my return to the arms that are waiting for me. And I walk. I walk past the sights I will someday show, and the sights I have not yet seen. I find a museum I should know about, and a restaurant I can comfortably forget.

With fealty to no schedule, I stop and watch the chestnut vendors, islands of desperate stillness among the casual frenzy of the crowd. I stroll the intermittent museum of city walls and subway tiles, their art that says things more modern than most masters. Feeling minimal membership with the tourist mob, I find myself harboring feelings of kinship with the vendors, milking a living from the gargantuan teat of tourism. They flick their flimsy lights and hawk their imitation purses, ready to run if they see the gray uniforms of the Guardia di Finanza, having already run from the camouflaged terror and violence of their homelands.

They have a community these men, since men they nearly always are. (What happened to their women? Where were they left?) They have formed a new edition of an ancient tradition, society's subtext of foreigners who do not pertain, but belong anyway. I find these men fascinating, annoying in their machinations and beautiful in the tragedy of their existence, maybe hopeful in the pursuit of their own salvation. I can not imagine their lives. And I assume they cannot imagine mine.

When my eyes have seen enough, and feet have walked too much, I return to that last night of foreign home, on sheets I won't have to wash, and sleep my waiting sleep, filled with gratitude for the Home to which I can return.