Your calculations are correct, that's like a million damned words!!
I've now got pictures up covering the entire trip up to the three and a half month mark (Zagreb to the Parhentien Islands in Malaysia) at the following link: http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy
Still to come: A few more from Malaysia and Vietnam!
Catch my flight home tomorrow at 9:40 a.m. Malaysia time. Would be more keen on it if my nose hadn't just now, in the last 16 hours or so, turned into a veritable faucet. My body's such a pussy, can't even deal with transitioning from a/c to sweltering heat several dozen times a day. Hopefully the torrent will abate prior to bording. If not I may have to greet my grandparents with kleenex plugs sticking out of the ol' shnozz. Savour that image.
Love
Ben
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Two posts in two days??? Wh-wh-WHAT!!!???
I've decided that yesterday's post was shitty and didn't do justice to Vietnam. And today was awesome so I wanted to write about it. And internet is absurdly cheap (typical) and convenient (less so).
So today I rented a motor scooter to take part in the law-and-orderlessness that is taking to the road in Vietnam. It was nice to not have to stop at red lights, and intense having to be aware 100% of the time of what's happening in 365 degrees. Taking some of the pressure off is that the other scooterists are acclimatized to just such a driving environment and thus are thus highly adept at reacting in an instant to any of an infinite number of driving contingencies. Plus, no one really goes faster than 40 kph. I ended up renting the most expensive bike because it was the only automatic. It set me back a whopping 12 dollars (including gas) for the day. The cheapest one was only about 6 but I haven't had any experience with standard transmission motorcycles and thought that as I was travelling alone, safety was worth the six dollar premium.
The countryside around Hue is stunning; a mix of rice patties, jungle, meandering and lotus covered rivers, elegant buddhist graveyards (a lot of people died in Vietnam in the last 50 years), and accentuated by elaborate and colourful monuments, temples and old imperial tombs. There's a mildewed grandiosity to the way the Vietnamese build things. It reminds me of what I know about french-Louisiana, although the French influence is heavily complimented by the Chinese and other Asian influences.
Side note: I've just been sneezed on. Pet peeve: the Vietnamese don't ever cover their mouths. It was particularly offensive while packed into a sealed bus with 70 other people breathing recycled air for 14 hours.
Back to description of the countryside: The colours are fantastic as well, all saffrons, turqoises, stained yellows and reds that fit in almost organically among the natural greens, browns and greys.
The people are just as photogenic as the landscape, self-posessedly wearing a fusion of traditional wear with the sortof clothes I've seen in every developing country I've been to, and doing quotidian things in interesting ways - using these complicated looking bamboo and net contraptions to fish, carrying goods balanced in baskets strung from either side of long polls, moving livestock by binding its hooves together and tying it to the back of a motorscooter (I saw live cows being moved this way). I kept seeing the napalm girl from the famous picture that came out during the war. Where usually the difficulty in telling East Asian strangers apart I find vaguely shameful and mildly amusing, when they all become the napalm girl it's downright upsetting.
I'm excited for the next 6 days.
So today I rented a motor scooter to take part in the law-and-orderlessness that is taking to the road in Vietnam. It was nice to not have to stop at red lights, and intense having to be aware 100% of the time of what's happening in 365 degrees. Taking some of the pressure off is that the other scooterists are acclimatized to just such a driving environment and thus are thus highly adept at reacting in an instant to any of an infinite number of driving contingencies. Plus, no one really goes faster than 40 kph. I ended up renting the most expensive bike because it was the only automatic. It set me back a whopping 12 dollars (including gas) for the day. The cheapest one was only about 6 but I haven't had any experience with standard transmission motorcycles and thought that as I was travelling alone, safety was worth the six dollar premium.
The countryside around Hue is stunning; a mix of rice patties, jungle, meandering and lotus covered rivers, elegant buddhist graveyards (a lot of people died in Vietnam in the last 50 years), and accentuated by elaborate and colourful monuments, temples and old imperial tombs. There's a mildewed grandiosity to the way the Vietnamese build things. It reminds me of what I know about french-Louisiana, although the French influence is heavily complimented by the Chinese and other Asian influences.
Side note: I've just been sneezed on. Pet peeve: the Vietnamese don't ever cover their mouths. It was particularly offensive while packed into a sealed bus with 70 other people breathing recycled air for 14 hours.
Back to description of the countryside: The colours are fantastic as well, all saffrons, turqoises, stained yellows and reds that fit in almost organically among the natural greens, browns and greys.
The people are just as photogenic as the landscape, self-posessedly wearing a fusion of traditional wear with the sortof clothes I've seen in every developing country I've been to, and doing quotidian things in interesting ways - using these complicated looking bamboo and net contraptions to fish, carrying goods balanced in baskets strung from either side of long polls, moving livestock by binding its hooves together and tying it to the back of a motorscooter (I saw live cows being moved this way). I kept seeing the napalm girl from the famous picture that came out during the war. Where usually the difficulty in telling East Asian strangers apart I find vaguely shameful and mildly amusing, when they all become the napalm girl it's downright upsetting.
I'm excited for the next 6 days.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Thought I heard a rumblin' / callin' to my name
Vietnam!
Been here for a few days and it's like night from day from Malaysia. For one thing beer isn't jacked up to first world prices by a sin tax. In fact not much is jacked up once you get haggling. Considering that and the dwindling days left in my trip I think some major major shopping is in order. Beyond that I've been duly impressed by the country (although somewhat exasperated as well). It's truly frenetic although in a way that is distinct from the freneticness of Beijing. Millions of motor scooters anarchically swerve through every major street and every single one of them seems to want to give you a ride. I don't really have time for a major post right now but just to give a short advert as to my whereabouts I've spent the last three days cruising through the impressive Halong Bay archipelego. A series of islands that protrude vertically from the soupy green water of the gulf of Tonkin. It was like floating into one of those oh so exotic landscape wall scrolls that everyone seems to bring home from Asia. I bought some pearls and made friends with some Brits one of whom basically was the brother-in-law from Match Point. I learned from him that apparently 'Eton these days is mostly for new money.' I liked him a lot, for all that he was very good natured. I wasn't really at my social best though, I was feeling introspective and couldn't decide whether I really wanted to play the social game of who sits at what table etc. that's inevitable when you stick a bunch of twenty-something strangers together on a boat for three days. The result was that I pretty much did all of the group activities, but dragged my feet a bit. In hindsight it was a pretty shitty attitude to take. It's far better to either commit to the party, or commit to being a recluse. I did get pretty smashed playing Asshole the first night though. I ended in the # 2 seat. Drinking games are vicious.
Got back to Hanoi yesterday and immediately caught an overnight bus to Hué. Got here at 9 just as a major thunderstorm was breaking. Walked around a bit but mostly just went from restaurant to restaurant to take refuge and gorge myself on they ultra-yummy Vietnamese food. Tomorrow I'm going to rent a scooter and go check out some tombs, and the next day I'll head for the DMZ.
Heart.
Been here for a few days and it's like night from day from Malaysia. For one thing beer isn't jacked up to first world prices by a sin tax. In fact not much is jacked up once you get haggling. Considering that and the dwindling days left in my trip I think some major major shopping is in order. Beyond that I've been duly impressed by the country (although somewhat exasperated as well). It's truly frenetic although in a way that is distinct from the freneticness of Beijing. Millions of motor scooters anarchically swerve through every major street and every single one of them seems to want to give you a ride. I don't really have time for a major post right now but just to give a short advert as to my whereabouts I've spent the last three days cruising through the impressive Halong Bay archipelego. A series of islands that protrude vertically from the soupy green water of the gulf of Tonkin. It was like floating into one of those oh so exotic landscape wall scrolls that everyone seems to bring home from Asia. I bought some pearls and made friends with some Brits one of whom basically was the brother-in-law from Match Point. I learned from him that apparently 'Eton these days is mostly for new money.' I liked him a lot, for all that he was very good natured. I wasn't really at my social best though, I was feeling introspective and couldn't decide whether I really wanted to play the social game of who sits at what table etc. that's inevitable when you stick a bunch of twenty-something strangers together on a boat for three days. The result was that I pretty much did all of the group activities, but dragged my feet a bit. In hindsight it was a pretty shitty attitude to take. It's far better to either commit to the party, or commit to being a recluse. I did get pretty smashed playing Asshole the first night though. I ended in the # 2 seat. Drinking games are vicious.
Got back to Hanoi yesterday and immediately caught an overnight bus to Hué. Got here at 9 just as a major thunderstorm was breaking. Walked around a bit but mostly just went from restaurant to restaurant to take refuge and gorge myself on they ultra-yummy Vietnamese food. Tomorrow I'm going to rent a scooter and go check out some tombs, and the next day I'll head for the DMZ.
Heart.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
PICTURES!!!!
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/BestOfCroatiaZagrebAndSurroundingArea
Croatianess (Zagreb, Ptuj, Plitvice, and some other places)
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/CroatiaZadartoSplit
More Croateocity (Zadar->Split)
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/BenSPhotosOfCroatia
Click on the above link for some Croatia excitedment! (covers Split->Dubrovnik)
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/BulgariaBestOfTurkey1
Bulgaria and the first half of Istanbul
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/BestOfTurkey2
Turkey (second half of Istanbul on) and a bit of Russia
More to come.
Disclaimer: These photos are unsorted. I apologize. They'll be sorted upon return to Canada.
Croatianess (Zagreb, Ptuj, Plitvice, and some other places)
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/CroatiaZadartoSplit
More Croateocity (Zadar->Split)
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/BenSPhotosOfCroatia
Click on the above link for some Croatia excitedment! (covers Split->Dubrovnik)
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/BulgariaBestOfTurkey1
Bulgaria and the first half of Istanbul
http://picasaweb.google.com/to.bentropy/BestOfTurkey2
Turkey (second half of Istanbul on) and a bit of Russia
More to come.
Disclaimer: These photos are unsorted. I apologize. They'll be sorted upon return to Canada.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
I met the internet... in person
I'm staying in a house in Kuala Lumpur in which political sentiments are bitter and oft expressed. I couldn't help but be infected by an interest and perhaps, I acknowledge, a bias. I mentioned in my last post that Joanna's friend had been arbitrarily arrested. Well, he was released last week due largely to a very public campaign on the part of his friends, family, and most importantly to this post, his network of fellow bloggers. They even managed to get a BBC news team to come down to film the vigil outside of the police station at which he was being kept.
Backtracking a bit, he was arrested specifically because, it's claimed by the authorities, he was suspected of having classified government material on his computer pertaining to a very high profile case involving the alleged murder of a Mongolian actress by a high ranking government official. A case that has elicited much cynicism from the public at large. Anyway, they weren't able to get anything substantial on him and it's more likely than not that they were trying to scare him to get him to back off of his government criticism in the one medium that is completely free from any direct government supervision.
Anyway, yesterday Joanna, her friend Tracy and I went to a seminar he had organized called "Facing & Surviving the Internet Clampdown: Our Liabilities, Rights and Responsibilities". It was attended by a motley crew of about 20 people (bloggers mostly, but also journalists and concerned citizens). As one would expect it was a bit of a mixed bag, much like the on-line community in general. There were several that were very on point, had highly relevant concerns and asked poigniant questions. Others seemed to like attention and tended to blather noisily when given the opportunity.
We learned about what to do if one is arrested or otherwise approached by the police by this rather rotund but obviously very good natured and highly enthusiastic communist Indian guy. His presentation lacked any structure (he tended to spend a lot of time on obvious points and speed through the more complex details), but he incorporated some play acting and was really into it. He seemed to really get off on the glamour of standing up to police officers and was often distracted by reminiscences - fairly typical of radicals.
The highlight for me was the human rights lawyer that Nat (I'm not sure if I ever gave you the arrested blogger's name) had invited. He spoke about and answered questions regarding defamation law as it applies to blogs and internet postings in general. He was highly articulate and obviously knew very well what he was talking about and knew how to present it to a non-lawyer audience. My one critique, and I suppose it's an easy one to make as a spoiled, non-government besieged Canadian, was that I think up to a point he presented anti-defamation laws as bad. Or at least that he could have been interpreted that way. I think it's really important to make clear what those laws are there for, and that they can just as easily apply to the efforts of those attempting to counter the influence of the bloggers as to the bloggers themselves. Furthermore it gives them credibility because they are accountable to be able to produce substantive claims and are thus forced to hone those weapons needed to defend themselves against claims of going off on flights of fancy. At one point he said, I think proabably accidentally or as a placation of an excited questioner, that "unfortunately" one cannot disclaim one's own posts. There's nothing unfortunate about not being able to shirk responsibility for what one says.
I took a voyeuristic pleasure from seeing grass-roots internet politics in action. It was a great way for a total politics dork like me to waste an afternoon.
The evening was worth recounting as well: We went to see a presentation of Indian ballet. Of the main dancer, as I told Tracy, I'm not entirely convinced that she wasn't a Hindu goddess. Her whole body was involved in the dance (her eyes, her mouth, her fingers, her toes). She was halfway to being Shiva. The live musical accompaniment rocked too.
Ta ta for now.
Notes
-Nathaniel's blog is at the following address: http://jelas.info/
Backtracking a bit, he was arrested specifically because, it's claimed by the authorities, he was suspected of having classified government material on his computer pertaining to a very high profile case involving the alleged murder of a Mongolian actress by a high ranking government official. A case that has elicited much cynicism from the public at large. Anyway, they weren't able to get anything substantial on him and it's more likely than not that they were trying to scare him to get him to back off of his government criticism in the one medium that is completely free from any direct government supervision.
Anyway, yesterday Joanna, her friend Tracy and I went to a seminar he had organized called "Facing & Surviving the Internet Clampdown: Our Liabilities, Rights and Responsibilities". It was attended by a motley crew of about 20 people (bloggers mostly, but also journalists and concerned citizens). As one would expect it was a bit of a mixed bag, much like the on-line community in general. There were several that were very on point, had highly relevant concerns and asked poigniant questions. Others seemed to like attention and tended to blather noisily when given the opportunity.
We learned about what to do if one is arrested or otherwise approached by the police by this rather rotund but obviously very good natured and highly enthusiastic communist Indian guy. His presentation lacked any structure (he tended to spend a lot of time on obvious points and speed through the more complex details), but he incorporated some play acting and was really into it. He seemed to really get off on the glamour of standing up to police officers and was often distracted by reminiscences - fairly typical of radicals.
The highlight for me was the human rights lawyer that Nat (I'm not sure if I ever gave you the arrested blogger's name) had invited. He spoke about and answered questions regarding defamation law as it applies to blogs and internet postings in general. He was highly articulate and obviously knew very well what he was talking about and knew how to present it to a non-lawyer audience. My one critique, and I suppose it's an easy one to make as a spoiled, non-government besieged Canadian, was that I think up to a point he presented anti-defamation laws as bad. Or at least that he could have been interpreted that way. I think it's really important to make clear what those laws are there for, and that they can just as easily apply to the efforts of those attempting to counter the influence of the bloggers as to the bloggers themselves. Furthermore it gives them credibility because they are accountable to be able to produce substantive claims and are thus forced to hone those weapons needed to defend themselves against claims of going off on flights of fancy. At one point he said, I think proabably accidentally or as a placation of an excited questioner, that "unfortunately" one cannot disclaim one's own posts. There's nothing unfortunate about not being able to shirk responsibility for what one says.
I took a voyeuristic pleasure from seeing grass-roots internet politics in action. It was a great way for a total politics dork like me to waste an afternoon.
The evening was worth recounting as well: We went to see a presentation of Indian ballet. Of the main dancer, as I told Tracy, I'm not entirely convinced that she wasn't a Hindu goddess. Her whole body was involved in the dance (her eyes, her mouth, her fingers, her toes). She was halfway to being Shiva. The live musical accompaniment rocked too.
Ta ta for now.
Notes
-Nathaniel's blog is at the following address: http://jelas.info/
Monday, July 23, 2007
I've been a bad bad blogger
It's been far too long to stick to the narrative format I've been following so I'm going to go back to the whole random anecdote thing:
The Chinese male dress code is a combination of a t-shirt (button up or otherwise) rolled up under the armpits to bare the belly, combined with slacks worn as high as possible (think Urkel but worse). The most important accessory is a cigarette smoked at all times while conscious (even while eating). Women don't smoke in public, it's considered un-ladylike.
The parks north of the Forbidden City are cooler than the Forbidden City itself.
I can now play Chinese Chess and challenge anyone who wants to play/learn to play to a game. I bought a set for 1/5th of the original asking price. Haggling is fun and the Chinese love it.
I was bumped up to business class on my Beijing->Seoul flight. I rather enjoyed the experience and perhaps drank a bit too much considering it was a morning flight.
Korea has very very good food. Ahrum's (my friend in Seoul) family are tremendously cool and her mom cooks better than anyone I know.
I bought a Royal Canadian Legion hat at a street stall in Seoul. It's blue and yellow. I like it a lot.
We went to the DMZ and saw North Korea officially completing my tour of the border regions of all three Axis of Evil countries (although I never actually managed to get close enough to look directly into Iraq as I was able to do with the other two).
Malaysia is stickily warm but not particuarly harder to deal with than Beijing was. The worst I felt it was when I think I ended up with heat exhaustion after playing badminton for three hours.
I spent last week on the "showcase islands of Malaysia" (as put by Lonely Planet S E Asia on a Shoestring). I swam with sharks and turtles and clown fish and octopi and all kinds of other kaleidoscopically colourful fish. Met some very nice Welshmen/women. Got sunburnt (for the second time in the last decade+... I generally have a very sun repellant complexion). My back is still a bit flakey (it's a bit like Oprah now, having gone down from its Madonna-like heights of flakeyness on the weekend). I don't enjoy the sensation but the snorkeling was totally worth it.
Joanna's family are terrific too. They're both english teachers and we've been having these highly entertaining conversations accented with uproarious guffaws together every chance one of us manages to relate the political/social/economic/ethnic situation in Malaysia to some post-renaissance European philosophical/literary notion (her dad is Oxford to the extreme).
Malaysia is fucked right now. The Malay majority are milking the highly productive Chinese and Indian minorities for everything they've got. As a result there's a massive outflow of skilled labour and investment is drying up because of all the bs regulations aimed at giving Malays a leg up (hiring quotas, differing standards to achieve the same certification, etc...). It reminds me of Atlas Shrugged. Joanna's friend was arrested randomly. He works for an opposition party.
Harry Potter, finishing reading about you has rent my soul, but don't worry, I won't even think about making a hoarcrux.
The Chinese male dress code is a combination of a t-shirt (button up or otherwise) rolled up under the armpits to bare the belly, combined with slacks worn as high as possible (think Urkel but worse). The most important accessory is a cigarette smoked at all times while conscious (even while eating). Women don't smoke in public, it's considered un-ladylike.
The parks north of the Forbidden City are cooler than the Forbidden City itself.
I can now play Chinese Chess and challenge anyone who wants to play/learn to play to a game. I bought a set for 1/5th of the original asking price. Haggling is fun and the Chinese love it.
I was bumped up to business class on my Beijing->Seoul flight. I rather enjoyed the experience and perhaps drank a bit too much considering it was a morning flight.
Korea has very very good food. Ahrum's (my friend in Seoul) family are tremendously cool and her mom cooks better than anyone I know.
I bought a Royal Canadian Legion hat at a street stall in Seoul. It's blue and yellow. I like it a lot.
We went to the DMZ and saw North Korea officially completing my tour of the border regions of all three Axis of Evil countries (although I never actually managed to get close enough to look directly into Iraq as I was able to do with the other two).
Malaysia is stickily warm but not particuarly harder to deal with than Beijing was. The worst I felt it was when I think I ended up with heat exhaustion after playing badminton for three hours.
I spent last week on the "showcase islands of Malaysia" (as put by Lonely Planet S E Asia on a Shoestring). I swam with sharks and turtles and clown fish and octopi and all kinds of other kaleidoscopically colourful fish. Met some very nice Welshmen/women. Got sunburnt (for the second time in the last decade+... I generally have a very sun repellant complexion). My back is still a bit flakey (it's a bit like Oprah now, having gone down from its Madonna-like heights of flakeyness on the weekend). I don't enjoy the sensation but the snorkeling was totally worth it.
Joanna's family are terrific too. They're both english teachers and we've been having these highly entertaining conversations accented with uproarious guffaws together every chance one of us manages to relate the political/social/economic/ethnic situation in Malaysia to some post-renaissance European philosophical/literary notion (her dad is Oxford to the extreme).
Malaysia is fucked right now. The Malay majority are milking the highly productive Chinese and Indian minorities for everything they've got. As a result there's a massive outflow of skilled labour and investment is drying up because of all the bs regulations aimed at giving Malays a leg up (hiring quotas, differing standards to achieve the same certification, etc...). It reminds me of Atlas Shrugged. Joanna's friend was arrested randomly. He works for an opposition party.
Harry Potter, finishing reading about you has rent my soul, but don't worry, I won't even think about making a hoarcrux.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
7 Days of Solitude (nearly), and Beijing
Three two one go: Hi everyone from sunny (for now) Beijing! Most of you know that I got here via the trans-Siberian railway and so I'll tell you a bit about that.
I departed from Moscow at midnight two fridays ago boarding a long red blue and white train and nervously noting that not only did I not hear any languages that weren't Russian or Mandarin, but also that my Russian had not proven to be exactly conversational. It can better be described as functional at the most basic level. Anyway. In a broad stroke the trip was a solid week and until day 5 I was in fact the only non-Russian or Chinese person in the train. This was kind of cool actually partially because I would be forced to practice my Russian a bit, but also because I had been craving a bit of solitary confinement to do some reading/reflecting. 7 Days is a long time though. By day 5 I was pretty much having outright conversations with myself and jumping up and down on the bunks in my cabin (I got a cabin to myself after the first night and until day 4 at which point a middle aged Chinese man who snored more loudly than anyone I've ever met but who was very generous with his food joined me). I did do a lot of reading though. I polished off Crime and Punishment, Breakfast of Champions, Midnight's Children (which I realized that I had read the first half of before) and the first third of Lolita - take that lexicon of classics! - (which was freaking me out so much that I've put it aside to reread The Half Blood Prince in preparation for Deathly Hallows). Other than that I mostly just stared out the window and slept (although that became progressively more difficult as the consistent time changes of one hour per day began to add up... by day 6 I was completely nocturnal). On day 5 a bunch of British people boarded from the station at Irkutsk near lake Baikal. I made buddies with this middle aged Scottish couple who I'm pretty convinced were both alcoholics and just wanted someone to drink with... but they insisted on buying all of my food and drink so that was cool and Chinese beer is pathetically weak, typically in the 3% range so it didn't get too rowdy). The border was hell, it took at least 4 hours each on both the Russian and Chinese side, but that's just the norm. We didn't have any problems per se. From there it was a day an a half across the Inner Mongolia region of China and then Manchuria both of which were vaguely interesting but lost their novelty very quickly. What was the most shocking was the sheer number of huge multi-million populated mega-cities that we passed through that I had never even heard of before, and all of them looked like they had come off of the cover of a Sim-City box.
Landed in Beijing at 5 a.m. last Friday morning. In hindsight 7 days solid was wayyyy too long. To do it again I would have stopped probably in Tomsk, Irkutsk, and Harbin just to get off of the damned train for a few hours. I was happy that I did the trans-Manchurian route though as the trans-mongolian is a million times more touristy and non-westerners would likely have been in the minority.
Beijing: It seemed like I had stepped off the train and into Lars von Trier's 'The Element of Crime'. The air was pregnant and everything was dripping, and it might just have been the fatigue or more alarmingly the pollution but everything seemed to have a tint of sepia. People were barraging me from the getgo with proferred hotel rooms and taxi cabs and tours etc.. It was stressful at 5 a.m., especially when you're soaked from the humidity. Anyway, I finally found my way to the Beijing Lotus Hostel at about 11 after waiting at the Bank of China to change some money and grabbing a quick bite to eat. The hostel significantly improved my day. It's the coolest complex surrounding a traditional chinese courtyard, and best of all, only 7 dollars or so per night. Plus! I was meeting up with Julie Anne MacDonald (a friend from Parliament who's studying Mandarin in a city a couple of hours away by train) later that afternoon and finally being able to stow away my bags I was able to allow myself to get excited about it. I had a short nap, a 25 cent/half litre beer and read for a bit feelign the anticipation build. J.A.M. landed at about 6. It was beyond awesome to see a familiar face after so long (pretty much a full month since leaving Brent and Karin) and we spent the whole night excitedly tripping over each other trying to tell as many stories about recent experiences as was possible.
Day 2 was a thunderstorm from the moment we woke up to the moment we crashed at about 3:30 am. I actually kindof liked walking around in that because it kept the air cool and gave me an excuse to buy an umbrella for a dollar fifty or so. Plus, wet streets and colourful umbrellas make for good pictures. We wandered over to the People's Congress building and checked that out. The scale of everything was totally overwhelming but the information available was decidedly the opposite. Apparently no one not on the inside really understand how Chinese government works. That's all I'll say about that for now though. That afternoon we spent probably 4 or 5 hours sitting around in various restaurants and tea shops just eating... warm food was still a novelty for me after subsisting for a week on non-parishables (the restaurant on the train was obscenely expensive). We taught ourselves Chinese chess and played a few games. I'm going to try to find a nice set this afternoon. It's similar to western chess but with just enough differences to totally change the way you have to strategize. So we played that and shot the shit about Quebec separatism until we were both ready to collapse in the wee hours.
Day 3 we slept in far too late and only set off to Simatai (the most dramatic of the nearby stretches of the Great Wall) at eleven. We had decided to find our own transportation which proved to be an adventure. At one point we had two taxi's driving beside us and yelling at each other as we walked towards the tourist information center at the halfway point trying to figure out if there was a bus. Our reticense to board gave us a good haggling position and we ended up in the end hiring one of the cars for about a third of what they were all asking initially. Simatai blew my mind out of my head through my ears. I can't really describe it though, so you'll have to wait for pictures. It's one of those great wonders that totally lives up to the billing and we had the whole place to ourselves (we saw I think 5 other tourists the whole time). The climb was a bit extreme though considering the heat, but the air was crystal clear courtesy of the rain the previous day and the views were spectacular. On our way down we took a 300 m zip line over a lake a la treetop obstacle course near Ottawa. A great way to end the day at the wall. The trip home though was not quite so much fun. We were both desperately hungry and I was consistently horrified at how people drive in this country. THere was passing going on on the inside, outside, in the shoulder, stradling the middle line and squeezing between oncoming and other traffic and an overturned truck that served just to remind us of our own vulnerability. We got back into Beijing at about 9 and ran to the nearest restaurant. The most interesting thing about that experience was observing two Chinese men physically fighting (though with smiles on their faces) over who would pay the bill. They woudl each take turns throwing money towards the waitress, then the other would run and snatch it back and leave their own money and then the other guy would make a big fuss and push the waitress back to retrieve the money and put back the original bill, etc. etc.. Apparently this is a pretty common occurance. Julie-Anne and I split our bill.
I had been thinking a lot about Laurent coming to Beijing and I was very happy when Julie Anne suggested that we go to visit the site where he was killed and leave flower and yell at the cars a bit. So we did that on Monday but we forgot the flowers in the rush (Julie-Anne had a train to catch back to school early that afternoon). What we did instead was just talk for a little while about him and then we each wrote him a letter and just left it at the side of the street. It was pretty cathartic, especially since we were doing it together Julie-Anne having been one of the people with whom he was closest from the summer we spent as guides. I don't really remember what it is that I wrote in my letter but I think it was the best thing we could have done.
WE rushed to the train station from there and after a quick bite at California Beef Noodle King U.S.A. we sadly parted. It was a fantastic weekend.
Yesterday I was a bum and have absolutely nothing to report. Today I go to the forbidden city.
Missing everyone and everything, but not in a bad "take me home!" kindof way... in a good "it's going to be nice when it happens" kind of way.
I departed from Moscow at midnight two fridays ago boarding a long red blue and white train and nervously noting that not only did I not hear any languages that weren't Russian or Mandarin, but also that my Russian had not proven to be exactly conversational. It can better be described as functional at the most basic level. Anyway. In a broad stroke the trip was a solid week and until day 5 I was in fact the only non-Russian or Chinese person in the train. This was kind of cool actually partially because I would be forced to practice my Russian a bit, but also because I had been craving a bit of solitary confinement to do some reading/reflecting. 7 Days is a long time though. By day 5 I was pretty much having outright conversations with myself and jumping up and down on the bunks in my cabin (I got a cabin to myself after the first night and until day 4 at which point a middle aged Chinese man who snored more loudly than anyone I've ever met but who was very generous with his food joined me). I did do a lot of reading though. I polished off Crime and Punishment, Breakfast of Champions, Midnight's Children (which I realized that I had read the first half of before) and the first third of Lolita - take that lexicon of classics! - (which was freaking me out so much that I've put it aside to reread The Half Blood Prince in preparation for Deathly Hallows). Other than that I mostly just stared out the window and slept (although that became progressively more difficult as the consistent time changes of one hour per day began to add up... by day 6 I was completely nocturnal). On day 5 a bunch of British people boarded from the station at Irkutsk near lake Baikal. I made buddies with this middle aged Scottish couple who I'm pretty convinced were both alcoholics and just wanted someone to drink with... but they insisted on buying all of my food and drink so that was cool and Chinese beer is pathetically weak, typically in the 3% range so it didn't get too rowdy). The border was hell, it took at least 4 hours each on both the Russian and Chinese side, but that's just the norm. We didn't have any problems per se. From there it was a day an a half across the Inner Mongolia region of China and then Manchuria both of which were vaguely interesting but lost their novelty very quickly. What was the most shocking was the sheer number of huge multi-million populated mega-cities that we passed through that I had never even heard of before, and all of them looked like they had come off of the cover of a Sim-City box.
Landed in Beijing at 5 a.m. last Friday morning. In hindsight 7 days solid was wayyyy too long. To do it again I would have stopped probably in Tomsk, Irkutsk, and Harbin just to get off of the damned train for a few hours. I was happy that I did the trans-Manchurian route though as the trans-mongolian is a million times more touristy and non-westerners would likely have been in the minority.
Beijing: It seemed like I had stepped off the train and into Lars von Trier's 'The Element of Crime'. The air was pregnant and everything was dripping, and it might just have been the fatigue or more alarmingly the pollution but everything seemed to have a tint of sepia. People were barraging me from the getgo with proferred hotel rooms and taxi cabs and tours etc.. It was stressful at 5 a.m., especially when you're soaked from the humidity. Anyway, I finally found my way to the Beijing Lotus Hostel at about 11 after waiting at the Bank of China to change some money and grabbing a quick bite to eat. The hostel significantly improved my day. It's the coolest complex surrounding a traditional chinese courtyard, and best of all, only 7 dollars or so per night. Plus! I was meeting up with Julie Anne MacDonald (a friend from Parliament who's studying Mandarin in a city a couple of hours away by train) later that afternoon and finally being able to stow away my bags I was able to allow myself to get excited about it. I had a short nap, a 25 cent/half litre beer and read for a bit feelign the anticipation build. J.A.M. landed at about 6. It was beyond awesome to see a familiar face after so long (pretty much a full month since leaving Brent and Karin) and we spent the whole night excitedly tripping over each other trying to tell as many stories about recent experiences as was possible.
Day 2 was a thunderstorm from the moment we woke up to the moment we crashed at about 3:30 am. I actually kindof liked walking around in that because it kept the air cool and gave me an excuse to buy an umbrella for a dollar fifty or so. Plus, wet streets and colourful umbrellas make for good pictures. We wandered over to the People's Congress building and checked that out. The scale of everything was totally overwhelming but the information available was decidedly the opposite. Apparently no one not on the inside really understand how Chinese government works. That's all I'll say about that for now though. That afternoon we spent probably 4 or 5 hours sitting around in various restaurants and tea shops just eating... warm food was still a novelty for me after subsisting for a week on non-parishables (the restaurant on the train was obscenely expensive). We taught ourselves Chinese chess and played a few games. I'm going to try to find a nice set this afternoon. It's similar to western chess but with just enough differences to totally change the way you have to strategize. So we played that and shot the shit about Quebec separatism until we were both ready to collapse in the wee hours.
Day 3 we slept in far too late and only set off to Simatai (the most dramatic of the nearby stretches of the Great Wall) at eleven. We had decided to find our own transportation which proved to be an adventure. At one point we had two taxi's driving beside us and yelling at each other as we walked towards the tourist information center at the halfway point trying to figure out if there was a bus. Our reticense to board gave us a good haggling position and we ended up in the end hiring one of the cars for about a third of what they were all asking initially. Simatai blew my mind out of my head through my ears. I can't really describe it though, so you'll have to wait for pictures. It's one of those great wonders that totally lives up to the billing and we had the whole place to ourselves (we saw I think 5 other tourists the whole time). The climb was a bit extreme though considering the heat, but the air was crystal clear courtesy of the rain the previous day and the views were spectacular. On our way down we took a 300 m zip line over a lake a la treetop obstacle course near Ottawa. A great way to end the day at the wall. The trip home though was not quite so much fun. We were both desperately hungry and I was consistently horrified at how people drive in this country. THere was passing going on on the inside, outside, in the shoulder, stradling the middle line and squeezing between oncoming and other traffic and an overturned truck that served just to remind us of our own vulnerability. We got back into Beijing at about 9 and ran to the nearest restaurant. The most interesting thing about that experience was observing two Chinese men physically fighting (though with smiles on their faces) over who would pay the bill. They woudl each take turns throwing money towards the waitress, then the other would run and snatch it back and leave their own money and then the other guy would make a big fuss and push the waitress back to retrieve the money and put back the original bill, etc. etc.. Apparently this is a pretty common occurance. Julie-Anne and I split our bill.
I had been thinking a lot about Laurent coming to Beijing and I was very happy when Julie Anne suggested that we go to visit the site where he was killed and leave flower and yell at the cars a bit. So we did that on Monday but we forgot the flowers in the rush (Julie-Anne had a train to catch back to school early that afternoon). What we did instead was just talk for a little while about him and then we each wrote him a letter and just left it at the side of the street. It was pretty cathartic, especially since we were doing it together Julie-Anne having been one of the people with whom he was closest from the summer we spent as guides. I don't really remember what it is that I wrote in my letter but I think it was the best thing we could have done.
WE rushed to the train station from there and after a quick bite at California Beef Noodle King U.S.A. we sadly parted. It was a fantastic weekend.
Yesterday I was a bum and have absolutely nothing to report. Today I go to the forbidden city.
Missing everyone and everything, but not in a bad "take me home!" kindof way... in a good "it's going to be nice when it happens" kind of way.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Back in the USSR
It's frustrating that I can't properly blog the past week and a half here, but I'm on the free hostel computer that I don't really feel right about monopolizing for more fifteen minutes or so. Thus I'll leave it at the following: St. Petersburg is my new favourite city in the world. It's gorgeous and radiant with creative energy. The people are full of personality and are a refreshingly inconsistent mixture of overly friendly, and Parisian-like brusque. As far as such things go the city is also just gorgeous. Broad avenues flanked by relatively unassuming palaces that are a humane four or five stories (as opposed to the skyscrapers of North American cities), and interspersed with canals spanned with ornate bridges and these perfect tranquil parks full of people sketching or performing puppet shows for awed children. I met these Maritimers on exchange from Mt. A and some Aussies that were travelling with them on their way to teach in Tomsk. They were awesome for drinking in parks and staying out until a still relatively light 4 a.m. with. So most days I wandered around by myself a bit, doing things like reading Fitzgerald in the Old Europe Hotel while drinking a relatively but duly expensive gin and tonic as slowly as possible and listening to a live harpist; sitting on a beach on the Neva drinking beer and watching a sailing regatta as dancers in white body paint pranced around and did Capoeira in celebration of Russia Day; talking Russian lit. and the greatness that was Stalin with a homeless dude who promptly decided I was his best friend and who thuroughly freaked me out by telling me about all the times he had been in jail. It's really nice to be travelling alone for a bit, although it's making me nostalgic for friends and family. And I keep wanting to bring up an inside joke to Karin or Brent and find that no one around will find it even remotely funny at all except myself. Cuba Hostel was cool too.
Moscow: Really big and really smelly and really hot. Overwhelmingly so at first, but I'm starting to digest it. Saw the huge war memorial which was spotted with brides (more brides than anything else oddly... I guess remembering the fallen of the Great Patriotic War is important to Russians entering matrimony), saw the huge exhibition of the successes of the USSR turned crazy capitalist themepark/flea market/who knows and paid too much for the worst pasta I've ever eaten, and saw the statue garden from Juliet Johnson's historical capital lecture. It was also weird and undergoing existential crisis. Can't comment more for now. Again met cool people and learned new card games. Going to the Tchaikovsky International Classical Music Competition tonight. Going to hear some piano playing tonight.
Love to everyone,
Ben
Moscow: Really big and really smelly and really hot. Overwhelmingly so at first, but I'm starting to digest it. Saw the huge war memorial which was spotted with brides (more brides than anything else oddly... I guess remembering the fallen of the Great Patriotic War is important to Russians entering matrimony), saw the huge exhibition of the successes of the USSR turned crazy capitalist themepark/flea market/who knows and paid too much for the worst pasta I've ever eaten, and saw the statue garden from Juliet Johnson's historical capital lecture. It was also weird and undergoing existential crisis. Can't comment more for now. Again met cool people and learned new card games. Going to the Tchaikovsky International Classical Music Competition tonight. Going to hear some piano playing tonight.
Love to everyone,
Ben
Monday, June 11, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Far too much to report in just 52 minutes and 6 lousy seconds
I'm at an internet cafe in Peterburg at the other end of Nevsky Prospekt from the Hermitage and time is stupidly expensive and so despite my desperate desire to write every detail of the million and a half things that have happened in the last week and a half, my pocket book doth protest and so I present to you this inadequate summary (I haven't written it yet, so who knows, maybe I'm being unduly fatalistic... but if this pointless aside is any indication I'll probably crash and burn on the whole brevity and only get down a fraction of what I wanted to):
So I left you in Van in the depths of Kurdistan, we were heading to some sort of concert involving a guitar. Quite an experience that turned out to be, let me tell you! So we follow these two new "friends" of ours down some side streets in the dark of 11pm and finally come to this unlit alleyway leading to a doorway. At this point I'm convinced that we are about to be kidnapped by the PKK. Not wanting to be rude though, I follow them in and we found ourselves in this spacious appartment belonging to this artist friend/brother of theirs (the distinction between friend and brother among males in Turkey is very blurred). This new guy is the coolest yet: expressionist art covers the walls of his bedroom/living room, he's got musical instruments all over the place, and this serenely benevolent look to him. This last was in stark contrast to the look on the face of the elder of the two men that brought us... he was looking lecherous and wouldn't stop clumsily complementing Karin. Anyway... this guy got to be a bit (actually a lot) too much and so we got out of there after only about fourty five minutes and a beer each. He seemed to have this feeling of entitlement where he expected that if he so debased himself by giving her compliment after compliment he didn't need to take no for an answer. We left Van very very early the next morning.
The next stop was Dogubayezit and Mt. Ararat towering above. The town turned out to be a bustling border town (Iran was all of 20 clicks away... we went to the border! :D). That day we ended up on this tour of the region which we got for a steal of 20 lira each. First stop was this amazing palace/fortress about a kilometer up on a bluff overlooking the town. You shall see pictures, as I keep promising, later. Next we were onto muddy roads heading to the highly dubious "Noah's Ark", but that's not really worth talking about. What was far more interesting was getting marooned for 4 hours in a tiny Kurdish village en route. Halfway through the wait the clouds across the valley opened up and Ararat was just there... first the small peak, and shortly after the main 51-hundred metre snow coated temale. Between the three of us I think we probably took several hundred thousand pictures of it happening. The village children and ladies found us vaguely interesting. It was interesting, whereas the cities in Eastern Turkey were 80% occupied by men, the village was pretty much 100% women... It's funny how things come together. A few men turned up shortly before we unstuck ourselves. They were either commuters or had been minding livestock grazing on the mountain plains. ON the topic of those mountain plains: the landscape in this area was the cherry on the cake of landscapes that was Turkey. If you're a landscape lover and you go nowhere else... go to Eastern Turkey. Getting back to the tour though, after unsticking ourselves we pulled briefly into the visitor centre at the supposed site uncovered by some rabidly evangelical american, where the ark eventually landed. No one takes the dude seriously except the Dogubayezit tourism industry who I suspect of an ulterior motive for doing so. So we moved on quickly and headed for a glance at the Iranian border over which we saw the sun set, and then to another slightly larger village at the foot of the Mountain where we got some good pictures of Brent and I gamboling around looking ridiculous (we were trying to reproduce a picture in the Turkey Lonely Planet of 2003 in which Children are running and playing in a field below the mountain.)
I'm going to start a new paragraph now because I feel like it's been a while. We headed back to town and had a very pleasant anniversary dinner (we had been on the road together for exactly 2 months!) which was interrupted by this very drunk, very flamboyant old man with the oddest mannerisms. He would routinely lick his fingertips with a slightly mischievous look on his face, and then groom the wings of his hair with them. For whatever reason he payed for our dinner and refused to hear any of our protests. He kept repeating that he "likes... people." He took us back to his rather lavish office about a block away, furnished with several poofy leather couches and a huge mahogany desk, and proceeded to ramble to us randomly about the nature of wealth, and how he has lots of gay and lesbian friends, how he left his wife, that his son converted to christianity, that money is to be spent, and something incoherent (but not positive) about Jews. We left after about 25 minutes mostly because we were all exhausted and a bit wary of a repeat of the previous night. He was just getting drunker and drunker and less and less coherent as it was, and we thought it better to leave him to pass out in peace.
The next morning we took off for Erzerum where we were catching a late flight back to Istanbul. This was a day earlier than had originally been planned due to a relatively last minute change of my ticket by my travel agent (which we'll return to shortly assuming the time remains... if I don't get to it, ask me about it some time. It's a story). Erzerum hosts the central command against Russian and Persian (they probably mean Iranian, but I'll agree that Darius seemed rather intimidating in the 300... at least I assume he did... I didn't actually end up seeing the movie this spring... I heard it was ethically problematic). The town was a shot of modern bussle after a week in the poorest region of the country. I couldn't really enjoy it though (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to hear me be grossly culturally insensitive)... I had a pretty bad case of traveller's diarrhoea which was exacerbated by the total lack of normal, sit down toilets and bathrooms stocked with toilet paper. That's one respect in which I'm a total Western cultural imperialist: I think access to regular sit-down flush toilets and plentiful toilet paper when one has diarrhoea should be a universal human right. Squat toilets... although probably more hygenic for the lack of ass contact... are stupid and unpleasant.
13 minutes left. *choke*
I'm going to skip over the hell that was my Airplane/visa/accomodation troubles of the following two days and jump straight to walking through the door of Cuba hostel in Peterburg. An awesome, chill, and relatively inexpensive place 30 seconds from the Kazan Cathedral, and 5 minutes from the Hermitage. My first full day here I spent wandering down Nevsky Prospekt to the Nevsky Gardens at he very end of it. Hung out there for a while and, bleeding heart romantic that I am, read the first paragraph of Crime and Punishment while leaning on Dostoyevsky's grave. For all the melodrama in that it was cool. It was really like having a dead guy talk to me.
I spent pretty much all of today (my second day) in the Hermitage, being slapped in the face by the veined but glowingly lit hand of Rembrandt's Old Jewish Man... and the 20 something other paintings by Rembrandt in the collection. And everything else that I saw in the collection. And the architecture and decor of the palace itself. And pretty much everything about the damned place. Long story short... I'm probably going to spend all of tomorrow there too.
Non-sequitor:
Food is stupidly expensive here. As such I've been eating a lot of American fast food and giggling internally at the possible political interpretations of my motives for doing so (kind of kicking a man when he's down isn't it?). Gaah! 2 minutes. I'm going to publish this now and hope for the best. Typos, spelling errors and everything.
May the peace of the lord be with you always.
[your line: and also with you]
So I left you in Van in the depths of Kurdistan, we were heading to some sort of concert involving a guitar. Quite an experience that turned out to be, let me tell you! So we follow these two new "friends" of ours down some side streets in the dark of 11pm and finally come to this unlit alleyway leading to a doorway. At this point I'm convinced that we are about to be kidnapped by the PKK. Not wanting to be rude though, I follow them in and we found ourselves in this spacious appartment belonging to this artist friend/brother of theirs (the distinction between friend and brother among males in Turkey is very blurred). This new guy is the coolest yet: expressionist art covers the walls of his bedroom/living room, he's got musical instruments all over the place, and this serenely benevolent look to him. This last was in stark contrast to the look on the face of the elder of the two men that brought us... he was looking lecherous and wouldn't stop clumsily complementing Karin. Anyway... this guy got to be a bit (actually a lot) too much and so we got out of there after only about fourty five minutes and a beer each. He seemed to have this feeling of entitlement where he expected that if he so debased himself by giving her compliment after compliment he didn't need to take no for an answer. We left Van very very early the next morning.
The next stop was Dogubayezit and Mt. Ararat towering above. The town turned out to be a bustling border town (Iran was all of 20 clicks away... we went to the border! :D). That day we ended up on this tour of the region which we got for a steal of 20 lira each. First stop was this amazing palace/fortress about a kilometer up on a bluff overlooking the town. You shall see pictures, as I keep promising, later. Next we were onto muddy roads heading to the highly dubious "Noah's Ark", but that's not really worth talking about. What was far more interesting was getting marooned for 4 hours in a tiny Kurdish village en route. Halfway through the wait the clouds across the valley opened up and Ararat was just there... first the small peak, and shortly after the main 51-hundred metre snow coated temale. Between the three of us I think we probably took several hundred thousand pictures of it happening. The village children and ladies found us vaguely interesting. It was interesting, whereas the cities in Eastern Turkey were 80% occupied by men, the village was pretty much 100% women... It's funny how things come together. A few men turned up shortly before we unstuck ourselves. They were either commuters or had been minding livestock grazing on the mountain plains. ON the topic of those mountain plains: the landscape in this area was the cherry on the cake of landscapes that was Turkey. If you're a landscape lover and you go nowhere else... go to Eastern Turkey. Getting back to the tour though, after unsticking ourselves we pulled briefly into the visitor centre at the supposed site uncovered by some rabidly evangelical american, where the ark eventually landed. No one takes the dude seriously except the Dogubayezit tourism industry who I suspect of an ulterior motive for doing so. So we moved on quickly and headed for a glance at the Iranian border over which we saw the sun set, and then to another slightly larger village at the foot of the Mountain where we got some good pictures of Brent and I gamboling around looking ridiculous (we were trying to reproduce a picture in the Turkey Lonely Planet of 2003 in which Children are running and playing in a field below the mountain.)
I'm going to start a new paragraph now because I feel like it's been a while. We headed back to town and had a very pleasant anniversary dinner (we had been on the road together for exactly 2 months!) which was interrupted by this very drunk, very flamboyant old man with the oddest mannerisms. He would routinely lick his fingertips with a slightly mischievous look on his face, and then groom the wings of his hair with them. For whatever reason he payed for our dinner and refused to hear any of our protests. He kept repeating that he "likes... people." He took us back to his rather lavish office about a block away, furnished with several poofy leather couches and a huge mahogany desk, and proceeded to ramble to us randomly about the nature of wealth, and how he has lots of gay and lesbian friends, how he left his wife, that his son converted to christianity, that money is to be spent, and something incoherent (but not positive) about Jews. We left after about 25 minutes mostly because we were all exhausted and a bit wary of a repeat of the previous night. He was just getting drunker and drunker and less and less coherent as it was, and we thought it better to leave him to pass out in peace.
The next morning we took off for Erzerum where we were catching a late flight back to Istanbul. This was a day earlier than had originally been planned due to a relatively last minute change of my ticket by my travel agent (which we'll return to shortly assuming the time remains... if I don't get to it, ask me about it some time. It's a story). Erzerum hosts the central command against Russian and Persian (they probably mean Iranian, but I'll agree that Darius seemed rather intimidating in the 300... at least I assume he did... I didn't actually end up seeing the movie this spring... I heard it was ethically problematic). The town was a shot of modern bussle after a week in the poorest region of the country. I couldn't really enjoy it though (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to hear me be grossly culturally insensitive)... I had a pretty bad case of traveller's diarrhoea which was exacerbated by the total lack of normal, sit down toilets and bathrooms stocked with toilet paper. That's one respect in which I'm a total Western cultural imperialist: I think access to regular sit-down flush toilets and plentiful toilet paper when one has diarrhoea should be a universal human right. Squat toilets... although probably more hygenic for the lack of ass contact... are stupid and unpleasant.
13 minutes left. *choke*
I'm going to skip over the hell that was my Airplane/visa/accomodation
I spent pretty much all of today (my second day) in the Hermitage, being slapped in the face by the veined but glowingly lit hand of Rembrandt's Old Jewish Man... and the 20 something other paintings by Rembrandt in the collection. And everything else that I saw in the collection. And the architecture and decor of the palace itself. And pretty much everything about the damned place. Long story short... I'm probably going to spend all of tomorrow there too.
Non-sequitor:
Food is stupidly expensive here. As such I've been eating a lot of American fast food and giggling internally at the possible political interpretations of my motives for doing so (kind of kicking a man when he's down isn't it?). Gaah! 2 minutes. I'm going to publish this now and hope for the best. Typos, spelling errors and everything.
May the peace of the lord be with you always.
[your line: and also with you]
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Eastern Turkey: They'll basically give you their bed to fuck on
It's insane how nice these people are. Today we became honorary members of a local soccer team, were on centre stage at an impromptu dance party on a boat in the rain, were invited to sleep over at some random family's house after eating at their restaurant (unfortunately after we had already paid for a hotel), and are now being dragged off to a concert which apparently involves a guitar... that's all we know so far. As I write this Karin is reading me an e-mail she just received from a random dude we met a couple of towns ago who says that he hopes to meet her again sometime because he really really likes her.
So basically Eastern Turkey has been the best part of the trip so far because to add to the hospitality the history is mind boggling: we visited the cave in which apparently Abraham (that's right, the one the only... well maybe not only, patriarch of western religion) was born, we hiked around this incredible abandoned 4000 year old town perched on top of 100 m high cliffs above the river Tigris, we drank tea in a "bee-hive house" next to the ruins of the oldest mosque in turkey (from the mid-700s), today we boated out to see this old and elaborately relief-bedecked Armenian cathedral from the mid-800s etc... etc... And still more, the landscape is something out of a Peter Jackson movie (if said Peter Jackson movie is one of the LoTR trilogy because beyond that I can't really comment).
Some basic facts: Pretty much everyone around here is either Kurdish or Arab. The Kurds don't really like Turks. The Arabs (that we've met) don't speak a lot of English and so we don't know that much about them.
We're currently in a city named Van famous for its cats which apparently are all white and have one blue and one golden eye. We haven't seen any though because apparently they're so valuable that no one lets them outside.
Tomorrow we go to Ararat... the very one from Genesis on which Noah's ark landed. From there we're headed to Erzerum to catch a flight back to Istanbul just in time to catch my flight to St. P's.
I need to go but I do so while sending all my love to you my loyal readers.
So basically Eastern Turkey has been the best part of the trip so far because to add to the hospitality the history is mind boggling: we visited the cave in which apparently Abraham (that's right, the one the only... well maybe not only, patriarch of western religion) was born, we hiked around this incredible abandoned 4000 year old town perched on top of 100 m high cliffs above the river Tigris, we drank tea in a "bee-hive house" next to the ruins of the oldest mosque in turkey (from the mid-700s), today we boated out to see this old and elaborately relief-bedecked Armenian cathedral from the mid-800s etc... etc... And still more, the landscape is something out of a Peter Jackson movie (if said Peter Jackson movie is one of the LoTR trilogy because beyond that I can't really comment).
Some basic facts: Pretty much everyone around here is either Kurdish or Arab. The Kurds don't really like Turks. The Arabs (that we've met) don't speak a lot of English and so we don't know that much about them.
We're currently in a city named Van famous for its cats which apparently are all white and have one blue and one golden eye. We haven't seen any though because apparently they're so valuable that no one lets them outside.
Tomorrow we go to Ararat... the very one from Genesis on which Noah's ark landed. From there we're headed to Erzerum to catch a flight back to Istanbul just in time to catch my flight to St. P's.
I need to go but I do so while sending all my love to you my loyal readers.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
So very Kayseri
Just a quick one here but I feel compelled to write it: We're currently in Kayseri - with Konya one of the Anatolian economic tigers but also a hub for relative conservativism. It's gorgeously set in the shadow of a 4 kilometre high extinct volcano; the very volcano in fact responsible for the otherworldly terrain in Cappadoccia. Anyway basically we're the only tourists in this city of 500 thousand people. And getting over their shock at seeing us people are more friendly and genuinely interested than we've experienced anywhere else on this trip to date. People give us free bus rides, free tea everywhere we go, free extremely detailed historical tours, and free lunches. It's totally ridiculous how hospitable people are, and my western sensibilities are hinting strongly that I should be feeling guilty. I keep having to remind myself not to. That when they refuse my second attempt to insist on paying the jig is up and I should just enjoy the free ride. Moral of the story: If you ever have the chance, spend a couple of days in Kayseri. It's been a total highlight and I haven't even told you yet about the Turkish bath (Hamam) that I'm still tingling and cleaner-than-I've-ever-been-before from which we took a good 4 hours ago.
The one downer... hanging out with our new friends we ended up watching random internet videos and one of them decided to show us this PETA video of an animal being skinned alive supposedly in Canada (it wasn't any Canadian species that I knew of not that that makes a hell of a lot of difference) and we sat through the whole thing out of politesse. It was pretty horrible as PETA scare videos tend to be. One of the guys then turned to us and asked profoundly who we thought was the animal. Oh PETA... how you can ruin what was otherwise so civilized an afternoon.
Ben's ongoing book club of one update: Finished off the Poisonwood Bible a few days ago somewhat less than impressed (although it was absorbing enough that I plowed through it quickly). The one character with any substance was so weighed down with gimmicks as to be totally distracting. Am now almost through a reread of The Great Gatsby and, craving comfort food, will be plunging into a reread of the Fellowship of the Ring probably on the night bus to Nemrut tonight.
Post Script: Unfortunately I was unable to publish this at time of writing last night due to technical difficulaties. In the mean time I've thought of a few other things I've been meaning to mention: (a) I'm a terrible person and haven't sent a postcard for about a month out of sheer crappy inexcusable laziness. I plan on resuming immediately and I apologize to those of you who have not yet received one but were kind enough to send me your addresses. (b) I wanted to share with you a pick up line that this one carpet dealer taught us. He apparently learned it from American troops posted in Turkey by NATO: "My love for you is like diahorrea, I can't hold it in." Who says Americans don't make a positive impact abroad?
The one downer... hanging out with our new friends we ended up watching random internet videos and one of them decided to show us this PETA video of an animal being skinned alive supposedly in Canada (it wasn't any Canadian species that I knew of not that that makes a hell of a lot of difference) and we sat through the whole thing out of politesse. It was pretty horrible as PETA scare videos tend to be. One of the guys then turned to us and asked profoundly who we thought was the animal. Oh PETA... how you can ruin what was otherwise so civilized an afternoon.
Ben's ongoing book club of one update: Finished off the Poisonwood Bible a few days ago somewhat less than impressed (although it was absorbing enough that I plowed through it quickly). The one character with any substance was so weighed down with gimmicks as to be totally distracting. Am now almost through a reread of The Great Gatsby and, craving comfort food, will be plunging into a reread of the Fellowship of the Ring probably on the night bus to Nemrut tonight.
Post Script: Unfortunately I was unable to publish this at time of writing last night due to technical difficulaties. In the mean time I've thought of a few other things I've been meaning to mention: (a) I'm a terrible person and haven't sent a postcard for about a month out of sheer crappy inexcusable laziness. I plan on resuming immediately and I apologize to those of you who have not yet received one but were kind enough to send me your addresses. (b) I wanted to share with you a pick up line that this one carpet dealer taught us. He apparently learned it from American troops posted in Turkey by NATO: "My love for you is like diahorrea, I can't hold it in." Who says Americans don't make a positive impact abroad?
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Yar.
Once again, apologies for the lateness of this post. . Lots of things have happened so I'm just going to jump right in.
We went on a four day cruise in this turkish sail boat thing. It ruled. It was supposed to be us an 7 Australians but as it happened they cancelled at the last minute and we got the run of the place. Less drunken perhaps than it would have been, it was though probably infinitely more relaxing. Just us and the crew, a lot of swimming in ruins and/or hidden coves, huge and delicious Turkish meals cooked on board, dolphins at one point, backgammon, The Poisonwood Bible...
The first night these rich as all hell polish people who had chartered a luxury sailboat came over for drinks (our boats having been tied together to weather a storm that had crept up on everyone). THe main dude brought over the best Vodka I'd ever tasted and bounced back and forth between proclaiming the justness and injustice of a world driven by the acquisitive nature of the human race... particularly the upper cadres. Not that that's necessarily contradictory, but from him it was, it couldn't not be as he was so pationately emotional whatever his opinion and so aggressive about drunkenly elaborating it. Heh. By the end of the night he was taking down our digits and inviting us all to spend the rest of the summer in Warsaw. I lost his contact information the next day however when I decided to take a swim without emptying the pockets of my bathing suit.
Ask me sometimes and I'll tell you more about it. I need to check out soon though so I'd better move on.
From the boat we went to this place called Olympos where backpackers stay in tree houses and spend the days climbing around the spectacular mountains in the surrounding area, lounging on the rocky beach, or putzing around the local ruins (I'm learning Yiddish by the way. My vocabulary stands currently at the following, forgive poor spelling... it's supposed to be in the hebrew alphabet anyway: Meshigenah, Schlemeel, Schlemozel, Babele, kvetch, schtetel, putz, tukhis, schlepp, shmuck, schmaltz, and I forget the one that's what's thrown away after a bris but I'm intent on retaining it before I let Brent off the hook). At midnight our first night there we were walking back from the fire spouting slope of the mountain which gives Olympos its name and I got a call from my aunt who gave me the news that the condo that's been the bane of my exhistence has finally sold. Not only that but it sold the day it was put up on the market. Not only that but it sold for the price of initial posting which was significantly higher than we had expected. I am very happy and you can all breathe a sigh of relief.
From Olympos we made our way to Konya, birthplace of the Dervish order, and spent a day wandering around mosques and museums. Karin was told she was dressed inappropriately because her skirt only went down to about 4 inches below her knees.
Next was cappadoccia and we've done a crapload most of which can be best expressed pictorially so I'll maybe give details about this later. I'll say this much though: it's otherworldly. Yesterday we were hiking around and got caught in the rain. WE fuond a rock arch that we were able to shimmy up into and waited it out playing backgrammon.
Here's hoping that the days ahead at least keep pace with those behind!
We went on a four day cruise in this turkish sail boat thing. It ruled. It was supposed to be us an 7 Australians but as it happened they cancelled at the last minute and we got the run of the place. Less drunken perhaps than it would have been, it was though probably infinitely more relaxing. Just us and the crew, a lot of swimming in ruins and/or hidden coves, huge and delicious Turkish meals cooked on board, dolphins at one point, backgammon, The Poisonwood Bible...
The first night these rich as all hell polish people who had chartered a luxury sailboat came over for drinks (our boats having been tied together to weather a storm that had crept up on everyone). THe main dude brought over the best Vodka I'd ever tasted and bounced back and forth between proclaiming the justness and injustice of a world driven by the acquisitive nature of the human race... particularly the upper cadres. Not that that's necessarily contradictory, but from him it was, it couldn't not be as he was so pationately emotional whatever his opinion and so aggressive about drunkenly elaborating it. Heh. By the end of the night he was taking down our digits and inviting us all to spend the rest of the summer in Warsaw. I lost his contact information the next day however when I decided to take a swim without emptying the pockets of my bathing suit.
Ask me sometimes and I'll tell you more about it. I need to check out soon though so I'd better move on.
From the boat we went to this place called Olympos where backpackers stay in tree houses and spend the days climbing around the spectacular mountains in the surrounding area, lounging on the rocky beach, or putzing around the local ruins (I'm learning Yiddish by the way. My vocabulary stands currently at the following, forgive poor spelling... it's supposed to be in the hebrew alphabet anyway: Meshigenah, Schlemeel, Schlemozel, Babele, kvetch, schtetel, putz, tukhis, schlepp, shmuck, schmaltz, and I forget the one that's what's thrown away after a bris but I'm intent on retaining it before I let Brent off the hook). At midnight our first night there we were walking back from the fire spouting slope of the mountain which gives Olympos its name and I got a call from my aunt who gave me the news that the condo that's been the bane of my exhistence has finally sold. Not only that but it sold the day it was put up on the market. Not only that but it sold for the price of initial posting which was significantly higher than we had expected. I am very happy and you can all breathe a sigh of relief.
From Olympos we made our way to Konya, birthplace of the Dervish order, and spent a day wandering around mosques and museums. Karin was told she was dressed inappropriately because her skirt only went down to about 4 inches below her knees.
Next was cappadoccia and we've done a crapload most of which can be best expressed pictorially so I'll maybe give details about this later. I'll say this much though: it's otherworldly. Yesterday we were hiking around and got caught in the rain. WE fuond a rock arch that we were able to shimmy up into and waited it out playing backgrammon.
Here's hoping that the days ahead at least keep pace with those behind!
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Did the Romans really need that many theatres?
It's been a while since my last post and I apologize for that. Time slows when one is at the beach and while a lot has happened ıt doesn't really seem it. I finished War and Peace after a three month battle. It wasn't that I didn't absolutely adore it... the actually story and characters rank probably at the top of anythıng I've ever read... it's just that Tolstoy has this compulsion to bluster repetitively about the nature of history for thirty pages at a time which would each time effectively kill my momentum. Probably a bıgger reason though is that I actually lost the book twice - one turned up a few weeks later in my grandmother's pantry, the other I would like to think has been going back and forth from Toronto to Vienna with Austrian airlines... perhaps ın the handbag of a comely stewardess (the italics indicate how to properly stress the word in this context).
Since then I've notched Atwood's Handmaid's Tale which was interesting but miles behind the Blind Assassin and definitely not warranting the comparisons to 1984 (not to say the world she paints is less horrifyıng or provocatıve, it's just not as well written.) Now I'm halfway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which has been a pretty intense experience (mostly the fırst chapter) it's a memoır by thıs 21 year old named Dave Eggers whose parents both died of cancer within a single month. I was really pissed off at him especially through the preface and to a lesser degree for the first chapter - a combination of resentment at him for seemingly taking away my tragedy and irritation at his obsessive reflexivity. In Chapter 2 though it clicked... you could tell he was more comfortable once he got past describing the deaths themselves (maybe I'm projecting). He really is a terrific writer though.
But that's not what you're interested in. 'He can read at home' is what you're probably thinking. So without further ado: Bursa, Turkey's fourth largest city, was a lot of fun after the initial wandering around for an hour with huge backpacks looking for a manger which we figured after a couple of hotels would be the only thıng available for a reasonable price. We ended up finding a place for about 18 dollars that was pretty comfortable. What was really cool though was that there was this neıghbour who was a vice principal at the local high school who just liked to hang out with tourists and spoke passable English. He took us to this tea house where young and old Bursans gather in the back to jam with traditional folk instruments. What was extra cool was that they gave us all percussion instruments of our own to join in. I must say that Karin and Brent rather lack rhythm. I on the other hand had the party bouncing. Later we went to a Sufi service attended only by local Muslims aside from us and involving Dervishes and very intensely human music involving chanting, what seemed like inuu throat singing, basic precussion, and some very emotive flute playing. It rocked.
From there we went to this place famous for making tiles in the 18th century, then a smallish town on the Aegean coast where we got into and won a fight with a cabbie over fare, although we've been growing less and less sure of our rıghteousness since. The place we stayed was probably the nicest of the entire trip. We were in a huge room in an old greek house with saffron curtains that billowed out from open windows through which it was possible to see all of the boats in the harbour. While we were there some soccer team won something and everyone got very excited. They wouldn't stop honking until 2 in the morning. 2 in the damn morning (I had a headache). Blah blah Effasus and Pergamum... lots of amphıtheatres and theatres and fat British people that in hind sight may just have been monstrous tomatoes pretending to be British people (they were red enough). I've realized that I find ruins pretty boring. I'm only really ınterested in the art at the sites, most of which has been looted, or ıf not, taken out of the sıte to some local museum where it's better preserved but out of context. Now we're in Fetiye and are going on a 4 day blue cruise on a sail boat (which we got for a pretty awesome, though dubiously classifyable as within my budget, 200 dollars). It include meals, water sports, shisha, and a bunch of other stuff. Not alcohol though. I bought some vodka which I need to learn to like pronto.
Hope all is well and sorry to all who have facebook messaged me ın the last couple of days... for whatever reason this computer won't let me log in.
Since then I've notched Atwood's Handmaid's Tale which was interesting but miles behind the Blind Assassin and definitely not warranting the comparisons to 1984 (not to say the world she paints is less horrifyıng or provocatıve, it's just not as well written.) Now I'm halfway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which has been a pretty intense experience (mostly the fırst chapter) it's a memoır by thıs 21 year old named Dave Eggers whose parents both died of cancer within a single month. I was really pissed off at him especially through the preface and to a lesser degree for the first chapter - a combination of resentment at him for seemingly taking away my tragedy and irritation at his obsessive reflexivity. In Chapter 2 though it clicked... you could tell he was more comfortable once he got past describing the deaths themselves (maybe I'm projecting). He really is a terrific writer though.
But that's not what you're interested in. 'He can read at home' is what you're probably thinking. So without further ado: Bursa, Turkey's fourth largest city, was a lot of fun after the initial wandering around for an hour with huge backpacks looking for a manger which we figured after a couple of hotels would be the only thıng available for a reasonable price. We ended up finding a place for about 18 dollars that was pretty comfortable. What was really cool though was that there was this neıghbour who was a vice principal at the local high school who just liked to hang out with tourists and spoke passable English. He took us to this tea house where young and old Bursans gather in the back to jam with traditional folk instruments. What was extra cool was that they gave us all percussion instruments of our own to join in. I must say that Karin and Brent rather lack rhythm. I on the other hand had the party bouncing. Later we went to a Sufi service attended only by local Muslims aside from us and involving Dervishes and very intensely human music involving chanting, what seemed like inuu throat singing, basic precussion, and some very emotive flute playing. It rocked.
From there we went to this place famous for making tiles in the 18th century, then a smallish town on the Aegean coast where we got into and won a fight with a cabbie over fare, although we've been growing less and less sure of our rıghteousness since. The place we stayed was probably the nicest of the entire trip. We were in a huge room in an old greek house with saffron curtains that billowed out from open windows through which it was possible to see all of the boats in the harbour. While we were there some soccer team won something and everyone got very excited. They wouldn't stop honking until 2 in the morning. 2 in the damn morning (I had a headache). Blah blah Effasus and Pergamum... lots of amphıtheatres and theatres and fat British people that in hind sight may just have been monstrous tomatoes pretending to be British people (they were red enough). I've realized that I find ruins pretty boring. I'm only really ınterested in the art at the sites, most of which has been looted, or ıf not, taken out of the sıte to some local museum where it's better preserved but out of context. Now we're in Fetiye and are going on a 4 day blue cruise on a sail boat (which we got for a pretty awesome, though dubiously classifyable as within my budget, 200 dollars). It include meals, water sports, shisha, and a bunch of other stuff. Not alcohol though. I bought some vodka which I need to learn to like pronto.
Hope all is well and sorry to all who have facebook messaged me ın the last couple of days... for whatever reason this computer won't let me log in.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Youth in Asia
Despite the title, most if not all of this entry will be set on the European side of Istanbul, although it is being composed in Bursa (Turkey's fourth largest city... and squarely in Asıa Minor).
Starved for some good ol' Amerıcana I decıded to opt out of the 25 lira whirling Dervish show and opt into Spiderman 3 which surprisingly turned out to have probably been more of a cultural experıance than the other... mostly because I was the only non-turk ın the theatre.
Some observatıons:
-Most of the people in attendance were eıther in theır late teens-early twentıes and ın larger sıngle sex groups, or they were 6 years old, male, and theır wıth theır father who wasn't overly enthusastıc about the whole ordeal.
-It was totally fıne when Toby Maguıre kissed hıs beautıful lab partner thus betrayıng Mary Jane... but when Mary Jane kıssed another man ın a moment of weakness the entıre theatre went up ın arms. I'm not posıtıve what slut ıs ın Turkısh, but I know that I heard ıt.
-There was an ıntermıssıon whıch was handy for me as I can't seem to make ıt through a movıe any more wıthout usıng the bathroom at least one, but whıch came abruptly ın the mıddle of one of the most tense scenes of the movıe... actually ın the mıddle of one of the most ıntense sentences of one of the most ıntsne scenes ın the movıe.
-Everyone laughed at Toby Maguıre when he started to cry when Mary Jane broke up wıth hım (oh ya... uh... retroactıve spoiler warnıng). Maybe they were just laughıng at hıs overactıng.
Movıng on though. The next day was really good. Karın and Brent went off to do theır own thıng and I spent the day plowıng through Franny and Zooey for the second tıme ın the garden just outsıde of the small Hagıa Sophıa (also Byzantıne era church buılt by Justınıan a few years before ıts larger counterpart. It was converted ınto a Mosque after the Ottoman conquest and now ınterestıngly ıs used for both chrıstıan and muslım servıces). I was approached by thıs guy who wanted to have tea wıth me... turned out he was a hıstory teacher and a great resource for ınfo about every aspect of the mosque and cıty ın general. I talked wıth hım for about 2 hours before I had to go and meet Karın and Brent.
That nıght we pretty much just hung out and played backgammon and chess wıth the hotel staff who cooked us some donkey meat (apparently) and lamb. I rocked the chess board and went undefeated the whole nıght (I'd lıke to pre-emptıvely tell Phıl to shut up).
Random anecdote from today: Brent after he attempted to get mustard out of a jar, shakıng ıt to no avaıl for several seconds, he announced 'It's lıke I'm tryıng to jack off Bob Dole'. I thought that was very funny.
Peace and long life,
Ben
Starved for some good ol' Amerıcana I decıded to opt out of the 25 lira whirling Dervish show and opt into Spiderman 3 which surprisingly turned out to have probably been more of a cultural experıance than the other... mostly because I was the only non-turk ın the theatre.
Some observatıons:
-Most of the people in attendance were eıther in theır late teens-early twentıes and ın larger sıngle sex groups, or they were 6 years old, male, and theır wıth theır father who wasn't overly enthusastıc about the whole ordeal.
-It was totally fıne when Toby Maguıre kissed hıs beautıful lab partner thus betrayıng Mary Jane... but when Mary Jane kıssed another man ın a moment of weakness the entıre theatre went up ın arms. I'm not posıtıve what slut ıs ın Turkısh, but I know that I heard ıt.
-There was an ıntermıssıon whıch was handy for me as I can't seem to make ıt through a movıe any more wıthout usıng the bathroom at least one, but whıch came abruptly ın the mıddle of one of the most tense scenes of the movıe... actually ın the mıddle of one of the most ıntense sentences of one of the most ıntsne scenes ın the movıe.
-Everyone laughed at Toby Maguıre when he started to cry when Mary Jane broke up wıth hım (oh ya... uh... retroactıve spoiler warnıng). Maybe they were just laughıng at hıs overactıng.
Movıng on though. The next day was really good. Karın and Brent went off to do theır own thıng and I spent the day plowıng through Franny and Zooey for the second tıme ın the garden just outsıde of the small Hagıa Sophıa (also Byzantıne era church buılt by Justınıan a few years before ıts larger counterpart. It was converted ınto a Mosque after the Ottoman conquest and now ınterestıngly ıs used for both chrıstıan and muslım servıces). I was approached by thıs guy who wanted to have tea wıth me... turned out he was a hıstory teacher and a great resource for ınfo about every aspect of the mosque and cıty ın general. I talked wıth hım for about 2 hours before I had to go and meet Karın and Brent.
That nıght we pretty much just hung out and played backgammon and chess wıth the hotel staff who cooked us some donkey meat (apparently) and lamb. I rocked the chess board and went undefeated the whole nıght (I'd lıke to pre-emptıvely tell Phıl to shut up).
Random anecdote from today: Brent after he attempted to get mustard out of a jar, shakıng ıt to no avaıl for several seconds, he announced 'It's lıke I'm tryıng to jack off Bob Dole'. I thought that was very funny.
Peace and long life,
Ben
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Gobble Gobble Gobble
Ben's in Turkey!
We arrived on the night train from Turnovo a few days ago and have found ourselves a lovely little hotel 5 minutes from the Haghia Sofia with a terrace that looks out over the Sea for only 10 Euros each per night (we're sharing a room but we each have our own bed). It's a pretty good deal in what has turned out to be a surprisingly expensive city. But enough blather... anecdotes:
Yesterday we got up early to go to Shul (synagog) which we identified, after a small amount of searching, by the many massive armed guards and blast shielded doors. The security didn't stop there... we had faxed copies of our passports the night before and now the hard copies were combed over in detail. Our bags were searched item by item even before they were scanned by the metal detector. While doing this they asked questions in a very friendly and bantering tone, but those questions amounted to a grilling about why we were interested in going to the Shul, how we had heard about it, where we had been traveling, how and where we were employed, etc... The reason for the intensity became clear immediately after the service: one of the old men pointed to a bomb scar on the wall behind the bima (dais) and told us about the several attacks that have been made in the past decade. I still felt safe inside, thanks to the security, but as soon as we left the premise I was eager to get a reasonable distance from the building.
Back to the service though: it was very interesting (my first synagog experience). Everyone was very loudly participatory - no reserved humming along to hymns (catholic style... at least by my experience) here... people were basically shouting them out competitively. Brent was shocked when a few prayers were sung in Ladino (the language that Sephardic Jews used to speak in Spain before the inquisition... 500 years ago!). Particularly interesting to me was that it was totally cool to have a regular conversation and wander around the sanctuary as the service was going on (again... quite different from the white-bread christian shame and reserve). I had a really good time thanks largely to Brent's ongoing interpretation of what was happening (pretty much everything but the Ladino bits were in Hebrew and there were no English prayer books), but the fun was only starting... as soon as we had tossed off our prayer shawls we found ourselves being herded upstairs for a veritable kosher feast! Loud toasts and conversation abounded and we met this very nice - and very Jewish - gay couple from San Francisco who had just gotten in the night before. Funnily enough, we've been running into them ever since (literally 3 times since leaving the compound, including in the middle of a tourist packed Topkapi palace).
So that was cool... with the rest of the day we walked around in the neighbourhood across the Golden Horn from where our hotel is (I forget what it's called but it's very cosmopolitan and bursting at the seems... apparently the hub of secular Turkish cultural life). I bought a Kaval (a traditional Turkish musical instrument known as "the instrument of the shepherds) for 20 Lira (16ish dollars) and have resolved to buy a new folk music instrument in each broad region I visit as my souvenir. I'm very excited by this notion even in writing it.
ON the topic of music... as soon as we got back to our neighbourhood that evening we found ourselves in the middle of a huge street based folk-festival with multiple stages as well as roving bands of people smacking drums, playing these awesome double read instruments, and a surprising number of brass instruments. We made our way to the main stage and spent an hour jumping around in circles, arms over each others' shoulders with these very fraternal Turkish men to this ethno-pop group that remarkably, we found out later, are sephardic Jewish and tend to blend Turkish with ladino in their music.
I need to go but, long story short, this continued until we shuffled out under fire works and collapsed into bed leaving the windows open so we could hear the music wafting up from the street, which apparently continued for hours more... though I was comatose in mere minutes.
Totally toasting you in tubular Turkey!
We arrived on the night train from Turnovo a few days ago and have found ourselves a lovely little hotel 5 minutes from the Haghia Sofia with a terrace that looks out over the Sea for only 10 Euros each per night (we're sharing a room but we each have our own bed). It's a pretty good deal in what has turned out to be a surprisingly expensive city. But enough blather... anecdotes:
Yesterday we got up early to go to Shul (synagog) which we identified, after a small amount of searching, by the many massive armed guards and blast shielded doors. The security didn't stop there... we had faxed copies of our passports the night before and now the hard copies were combed over in detail. Our bags were searched item by item even before they were scanned by the metal detector. While doing this they asked questions in a very friendly and bantering tone, but those questions amounted to a grilling about why we were interested in going to the Shul, how we had heard about it, where we had been traveling, how and where we were employed, etc... The reason for the intensity became clear immediately after the service: one of the old men pointed to a bomb scar on the wall behind the bima (dais) and told us about the several attacks that have been made in the past decade. I still felt safe inside, thanks to the security, but as soon as we left the premise I was eager to get a reasonable distance from the building.
Back to the service though: it was very interesting (my first synagog experience). Everyone was very loudly participatory - no reserved humming along to hymns (catholic style... at least by my experience) here... people were basically shouting them out competitively. Brent was shocked when a few prayers were sung in Ladino (the language that Sephardic Jews used to speak in Spain before the inquisition... 500 years ago!). Particularly interesting to me was that it was totally cool to have a regular conversation and wander around the sanctuary as the service was going on (again... quite different from the white-bread christian shame and reserve). I had a really good time thanks largely to Brent's ongoing interpretation of what was happening (pretty much everything but the Ladino bits were in Hebrew and there were no English prayer books), but the fun was only starting... as soon as we had tossed off our prayer shawls we found ourselves being herded upstairs for a veritable kosher feast! Loud toasts and conversation abounded and we met this very nice - and very Jewish - gay couple from San Francisco who had just gotten in the night before. Funnily enough, we've been running into them ever since (literally 3 times since leaving the compound, including in the middle of a tourist packed Topkapi palace).
So that was cool... with the rest of the day we walked around in the neighbourhood across the Golden Horn from where our hotel is (I forget what it's called but it's very cosmopolitan and bursting at the seems... apparently the hub of secular Turkish cultural life). I bought a Kaval (a traditional Turkish musical instrument known as "the instrument of the shepherds) for 20 Lira (16ish dollars) and have resolved to buy a new folk music instrument in each broad region I visit as my souvenir. I'm very excited by this notion even in writing it.
ON the topic of music... as soon as we got back to our neighbourhood that evening we found ourselves in the middle of a huge street based folk-festival with multiple stages as well as roving bands of people smacking drums, playing these awesome double read instruments, and a surprising number of brass instruments. We made our way to the main stage and spent an hour jumping around in circles, arms over each others' shoulders with these very fraternal Turkish men to this ethno-pop group that remarkably, we found out later, are sephardic Jewish and tend to blend Turkish with ladino in their music.
I need to go but, long story short, this continued until we shuffled out under fire works and collapsed into bed leaving the windows open so we could hear the music wafting up from the street, which apparently continued for hours more... though I was comatose in mere minutes.
Totally toasting you in tubular Turkey!
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Yet another near disasterous amateur hike
So we avoided by about 2 hours being stuck in a blizzard in the Pirin range in the South of Bulgaria with very little equipment or clothing. We had stayed over night in a nizhni (or something like that) - a state run mountain hut in this case about 2000 m up and a four hour hike from the nearest town. The next morning dawned not so nice so instead of spending the day doing the "most exhilirating and beautiful" hike in the country, head back to civilization. It started to snow before we hit the tree-line. Luckily it stopped long enough for us to make it down to Bonsco but about 10 minutes after we made the city limits we were in the midst of a major thunder storm. As a reassurance: I know how to build a snow shelter.
The trip to Bonsco from Melnik (the smallest town in Bulgaria... beautifully set in this cool semi-arid canyony place) didn't quite go as planned either. Brent, feeling the urge, decided to sit on (or more likely, hover over) the can for the duration of our bus's arrival and departure from the station. Karin and I, thinking he would be back at any second, loaded all of our bags into the under-bus compartment thing. Recognizing that he wasn't coming any time soon and that the bus driver had lost all patience I basically threw Karin onto the bus (which was packed and in which she had to stand for the entire 2 hour journey)... not one of my most gentlemanly acts but I thought that she had payed already and I figured that it would be better for her to get there and be able to relax rather than deal with all the uncertainty of staying behind on the hope that Brent at some point would finish his bowel movement. It was a snap decision. Anyway... Brent did in fact finish his bombing run and emerged completely oblivious, wondering where our bags and Karin had gone. I would have yelled at him if I hadn't been laughing so hard.
We caught a bus an hour or so later and eventually made it to the Bansco bus station where we found a rather peeved and harassed Karin. Bulgarian men are very friendly. Nothing really happened, she was right in the bus station, but she had a bit more of a rapore with them than she probably wanted by the time we arrived. The fact that I was sending her alone was also something that I didn't consider when analyzing the situation under duress.
We're in the city of Plovdiv which I like considerably more than Sofia. We'll probably head North tomorrow night and then to Turkey a couple of days later.
Pax!
The trip to Bonsco from Melnik (the smallest town in Bulgaria... beautifully set in this cool semi-arid canyony place) didn't quite go as planned either. Brent, feeling the urge, decided to sit on (or more likely, hover over) the can for the duration of our bus's arrival and departure from the station. Karin and I, thinking he would be back at any second, loaded all of our bags into the under-bus compartment thing. Recognizing that he wasn't coming any time soon and that the bus driver had lost all patience I basically threw Karin onto the bus (which was packed and in which she had to stand for the entire 2 hour journey)... not one of my most gentlemanly acts but I thought that she had payed already and I figured that it would be better for her to get there and be able to relax rather than deal with all the uncertainty of staying behind on the hope that Brent at some point would finish his bowel movement. It was a snap decision. Anyway... Brent did in fact finish his bombing run and emerged completely oblivious, wondering where our bags and Karin had gone. I would have yelled at him if I hadn't been laughing so hard.
We caught a bus an hour or so later and eventually made it to the Bansco bus station where we found a rather peeved and harassed Karin. Bulgarian men are very friendly. Nothing really happened, she was right in the bus station, but she had a bit more of a rapore with them than she probably wanted by the time we arrived. The fact that I was sending her alone was also something that I didn't consider when analyzing the situation under duress.
We're in the city of Plovdiv which I like considerably more than Sofia. We'll probably head North tomorrow night and then to Turkey a couple of days later.
Pax!
Monday, April 23, 2007
A Modern Odyssey in the Mountains Above Sofia
So So SO Soooo. My knees are a bit creaky this morning, but before I tell you why I want to assure you that this harrowing tale has a happy resolution and I ask that you keep that in mind so that at the bleakest moments you won't be so overcome as to lose the will to keep reading.
So... (I just paused for about 5 minutes trying vainly to think of an opening line in Iambic pentameter... recognizing how long it was taking I have come to the conclusion that this tale shall be told in prose rather than verse... my apologies).
Ok... So: We got our collective shit together to go hiking only by about 1 in the afternoon yesterday. An hour or so later we were on a rickety communist era (potentially from the early years of real existing socialism) bus puttering at about 15 clicks up a winding dirt road to just above the tree line on Mt. Vitosha... directly below the 4th highest peak in the entire country (at just over 2000m). An other couple of hours of labourious trudging through snow later and we were sipping wine on a rocky outcropping just below said 4th highest peak deliberating whether or not to go the extra 150m over rock and snow to the top and risk being caught in the dark, or just lie and say that we had. We opted for the later. (By the way... the view from the summit was gorgeous... we could totally see the CN Tower). ... We ran straight down - which was exhilarating and effectively packed all of our shoes with slowly melting snow (when I finally took off my shoes about 4 or 5 hours later my feet were emitting waves of what smelled like freshly caught fish) - only to find that we had missed the last bus by 5 minutes. WE asked the dude parked right by the bus stop if he could fit us for the ride down and he was nice enough to oblige... two of us (there were four). After much negotiation we decided who got the spots alphabetically by the second letters of our middle names. Or so Karin, Brent and I understood. Dan (an Aussie who joined us) got shafted... he thought we were going by the first letter... his middle name is Warren. Anyway... Dan and I ended up fending for ourselves. We stuck out thumbs out at a couple of cars... the first was full, the second was being driven by sour looking old people who just made a face at us. So we walked back to the chalet parking lot to beg. On route we saw a parked cab in which people appeared to be having sex. We made lots of noise but were unable to get their attention (I think they were ignoring us). That was a no go.
All of the few cars in the lot were full... so that was a no go too. We also found out that the walk down the road would be about 2 and a half hours before even reaching the fringes of civilization (the sun would set in about an hour and a half). Finally we approached this couple who were snacking at a picnic table. They didn't really speak English but between the odd word that they knew, and my horrible Russian we were able to communicate to them that we had missed the last bus down. They told us that if we waited for half an hour we could go down with them. We were elated. I had a beer. Only once they took us plunging down an icy slope did we realize that they hadn't meant that we could come with them in their car... but on foot, bushwhacking. But we weren't really worried until they decided that we needed to cross three metres of icy pipe over rushing glacier water. At that point Karin and Brent had probably just arrived at the hostel. Neither of us fell in though my fine motor skills weren't great after the wine and beer and I had a couple of scary wobbles. I think the only thing that kept us in the game was the enthusiasm of our two guides who seemed really excited by our company (the man told us that he really likes Canada, Australia and New Zealand.... I don't really know why he threw New Zealand in there... he then segued into some elaborate story that involved Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Sydney Opera House and the 1980s. I couldn't really follow it.) An hour and a half later (10 minutes by our guide) we started to see signs of human activity again. We had crossed about 4 different ecological zones. We started to think that maybe they weren't taking us to their candy house to cook us (which had seemed more and more likely as the sun got lower and lower and we were still on game trails in a forest growing on a 45 degree slope). By the way... sorry this is so raw, I don't really have time to make this post right now so I'm trying to write it as fast as possible. They shook our hands triumphantly when we arrived at a bus stop and informed us that we would be in our hostel in like 20 minutes max! (I don't know where this guy learned to tell time). After waiting for 20 minutes a bus finally came... and after riding it for about 20 minutes we were booted out on some dark street in god knows what neighbourhood in Sofia. After getting contradictory directions from 3 people we just picked a direction and walked eventually finding a tram (by this time it's about 9pm and the stars are out) that went to a stop that we recognized. It being Sunday night it took another half an hour before it arrived and we only staggered into the hostel shortly before 10. Karin and Brent were very happy to see us. Apparently our being unaccounted for for like 3 hours was worrisome! They bought us dinner. The end.
PS - The night before we went to see the Magic Flute. Tickets were under 8 dollars. Champagne at intermission cost about one dollar. Eastern Europe rules.
So... (I just paused for about 5 minutes trying vainly to think of an opening line in Iambic pentameter... recognizing how long it was taking I have come to the conclusion that this tale shall be told in prose rather than verse... my apologies).
Ok... So: We got our collective shit together to go hiking only by about 1 in the afternoon yesterday. An hour or so later we were on a rickety communist era (potentially from the early years of real existing socialism) bus puttering at about 15 clicks up a winding dirt road to just above the tree line on Mt. Vitosha... directly below the 4th highest peak in the entire country (at just over 2000m). An other couple of hours of labourious trudging through snow later and we were sipping wine on a rocky outcropping just below said 4th highest peak deliberating whether or not to go the extra 150m over rock and snow to the top and risk being caught in the dark, or just lie and say that we had. We opted for the later. (By the way... the view from the summit was gorgeous... we could totally see the CN Tower). ... We ran straight down - which was exhilarating and effectively packed all of our shoes with slowly melting snow (when I finally took off my shoes about 4 or 5 hours later my feet were emitting waves of what smelled like freshly caught fish) - only to find that we had missed the last bus by 5 minutes. WE asked the dude parked right by the bus stop if he could fit us for the ride down and he was nice enough to oblige... two of us (there were four). After much negotiation we decided who got the spots alphabetically by the second letters of our middle names. Or so Karin, Brent and I understood. Dan (an Aussie who joined us) got shafted... he thought we were going by the first letter... his middle name is Warren. Anyway... Dan and I ended up fending for ourselves. We stuck out thumbs out at a couple of cars... the first was full, the second was being driven by sour looking old people who just made a face at us. So we walked back to the chalet parking lot to beg. On route we saw a parked cab in which people appeared to be having sex. We made lots of noise but were unable to get their attention (I think they were ignoring us). That was a no go.
All of the few cars in the lot were full... so that was a no go too. We also found out that the walk down the road would be about 2 and a half hours before even reaching the fringes of civilization (the sun would set in about an hour and a half). Finally we approached this couple who were snacking at a picnic table. They didn't really speak English but between the odd word that they knew, and my horrible Russian we were able to communicate to them that we had missed the last bus down. They told us that if we waited for half an hour we could go down with them. We were elated. I had a beer. Only once they took us plunging down an icy slope did we realize that they hadn't meant that we could come with them in their car... but on foot, bushwhacking. But we weren't really worried until they decided that we needed to cross three metres of icy pipe over rushing glacier water. At that point Karin and Brent had probably just arrived at the hostel. Neither of us fell in though my fine motor skills weren't great after the wine and beer and I had a couple of scary wobbles. I think the only thing that kept us in the game was the enthusiasm of our two guides who seemed really excited by our company (the man told us that he really likes Canada, Australia and New Zealand.... I don't really know why he threw New Zealand in there... he then segued into some elaborate story that involved Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Sydney Opera House and the 1980s. I couldn't really follow it.) An hour and a half later (10 minutes by our guide) we started to see signs of human activity again. We had crossed about 4 different ecological zones. We started to think that maybe they weren't taking us to their candy house to cook us (which had seemed more and more likely as the sun got lower and lower and we were still on game trails in a forest growing on a 45 degree slope). By the way... sorry this is so raw, I don't really have time to make this post right now so I'm trying to write it as fast as possible. They shook our hands triumphantly when we arrived at a bus stop and informed us that we would be in our hostel in like 20 minutes max! (I don't know where this guy learned to tell time). After waiting for 20 minutes a bus finally came... and after riding it for about 20 minutes we were booted out on some dark street in god knows what neighbourhood in Sofia. After getting contradictory directions from 3 people we just picked a direction and walked eventually finding a tram (by this time it's about 9pm and the stars are out) that went to a stop that we recognized. It being Sunday night it took another half an hour before it arrived and we only staggered into the hostel shortly before 10. Karin and Brent were very happy to see us. Apparently our being unaccounted for for like 3 hours was worrisome! They bought us dinner. The end.
PS - The night before we went to see the Magic Flute. Tickets were under 8 dollars. Champagne at intermission cost about one dollar. Eastern Europe rules.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Dani Beograd to Bond
For the Belgrade component of this travel blog I'm going to describe a few relatively unrelated things.
1 - The Three Cats Hostel is probably my favourite hostel ever (possibly tied with the Orbit in L.A.). The owner met us at the bus station. He looks like a Viking: probably 6'4" 220 Ibs., long wavy red hair, a long time smoker's face, pretty major facial hair, and an obvious grudge against the government (which I could certainly understand). He doesn't say much, but when he does it's cool. Favourite quote: "Are you stupid or just American?!" (to this American guy that hangs out there all the time). He taught us his name as follows: "Laden... as in Osama bin Laden". He didn't laugh when I said that I was Ben as in Osama Ben Laden. But then most of you probably wouldn't have either. There are about 10 beds in the place, the internet is free, and everyone is relaxed, good natured, and cool. The beer's in the fridge if you want it. Everyone watched a pirated copy of Grindhouse the night we arrived... except the three of us who had gone to nap (a plan which went awry when it turned into a full night's sleep) and didn't hear about it until the next day. I was disappointed.
2 - It's a dynamic and bustling, self-possessed metropolis. It's neither a museum nor an antique... in that way it seemed more North American to me than any of the other cities we had visited so far. At the same time you feel the weight of history and pride in the people themselves. This is both a positive and a negative (the negative side of things really stood out to me coming from Sarajevo): There's no war guilt and even a sense of victimization regarding the way things ended up happening through the 90s. A locally published guidebook talked about the "NATO aggression of '95"... though maybe it was a weird translation. Brent had a weird experience too when a money exchange clerk told him that he should really not be wearing his Croatia patch so visibly on his backpack. Does time in fact soothe all sorrow? The positive side of that is that it lends a real vibrancy and vivacity to the atmosphere on the streets, in the cafes and in the bars. The culture seems more alive and unburdened than I've seen elsewhere.
3 - The night life is better than the day life.
4 - Tito's grave (which is not clearly marked on any maps though apparently has an entire museum built around it) closes at 3pm. It's stupid. We wasted a trip (got there at 3:02 and met a completely unsympathetic guard).
5 - I could have stayed much longer... the impressions I've written are really just inklings and I'd have loved to explore them more deeply.
Yesterday night at 9 we caught a sleeper train to Sofia (from where I'm writing). As Brent sees it we were basically in the same car that James Bond was in From Russia with Love. It was pretty awesome and very comfortable. The conductor was probably the nicest old man I've ever met. He took good care of us. I slept well. Karin had some trouble brushing her teeth, but I'll let her tell you about that if you're interested. Ask her about it. And also about then night when she fell backwards into a bush and couldn't stand up again because her backpack was too heavy (we have a very good picture).
Apparently we might be sharing a room with a Romanian hip hop group. They seem like dicks. I hope that doesn't happen.
1 - The Three Cats Hostel is probably my favourite hostel ever (possibly tied with the Orbit in L.A.). The owner met us at the bus station. He looks like a Viking: probably 6'4" 220 Ibs., long wavy red hair, a long time smoker's face, pretty major facial hair, and an obvious grudge against the government (which I could certainly understand). He doesn't say much, but when he does it's cool. Favourite quote: "Are you stupid or just American?!" (to this American guy that hangs out there all the time). He taught us his name as follows: "Laden... as in Osama bin Laden". He didn't laugh when I said that I was Ben as in Osama Ben Laden. But then most of you probably wouldn't have either. There are about 10 beds in the place, the internet is free, and everyone is relaxed, good natured, and cool. The beer's in the fridge if you want it. Everyone watched a pirated copy of Grindhouse the night we arrived... except the three of us who had gone to nap (a plan which went awry when it turned into a full night's sleep) and didn't hear about it until the next day. I was disappointed.
2 - It's a dynamic and bustling, self-possessed metropolis. It's neither a museum nor an antique... in that way it seemed more North American to me than any of the other cities we had visited so far. At the same time you feel the weight of history and pride in the people themselves. This is both a positive and a negative (the negative side of things really stood out to me coming from Sarajevo): There's no war guilt and even a sense of victimization regarding the way things ended up happening through the 90s. A locally published guidebook talked about the "NATO aggression of '95"... though maybe it was a weird translation. Brent had a weird experience too when a money exchange clerk told him that he should really not be wearing his Croatia patch so visibly on his backpack. Does time in fact soothe all sorrow? The positive side of that is that it lends a real vibrancy and vivacity to the atmosphere on the streets, in the cafes and in the bars. The culture seems more alive and unburdened than I've seen elsewhere.
3 - The night life is better than the day life.
4 - Tito's grave (which is not clearly marked on any maps though apparently has an entire museum built around it) closes at 3pm. It's stupid. We wasted a trip (got there at 3:02 and met a completely unsympathetic guard).
5 - I could have stayed much longer... the impressions I've written are really just inklings and I'd have loved to explore them more deeply.
Yesterday night at 9 we caught a sleeper train to Sofia (from where I'm writing). As Brent sees it we were basically in the same car that James Bond was in From Russia with Love. It was pretty awesome and very comfortable. The conductor was probably the nicest old man I've ever met. He took good care of us. I slept well. Karin had some trouble brushing her teeth, but I'll let her tell you about that if you're interested. Ask her about it. And also about then night when she fell backwards into a bush and couldn't stand up again because her backpack was too heavy (we have a very good picture).
Apparently we might be sharing a room with a Romanian hip hop group. They seem like dicks. I hope that doesn't happen.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Scarred Buildings and People
I'm writing from a hostel just off of the central square in Sarajevo. Croatia seems really far away.
We spend most of Sunday in the town of Mostar which was basically levelled in a clash between the Bosnian Croats and Muslims (who, as the NYT put it, were nominal allies through the rest of the war). The bullet scarred walls, bombed out buildings, the parks turned graveyards in which every stone was inscribed with '- 93' -- the number before the dash ranging from the 1910s to the year itself -- and the rather bemused (as another backpacker described it) attitude of the Bosnians to find tourists visiting their country profoundly impressed a variety of messages, feelings and questions that we've all been struggling with. How do you approach being a tourist in a country recovering so visibly from a horrific tragedy that didn't really touch you at all beyond a vague recollections of news reports absorbed periferally as a 9 year old? What's the middle ground between romanticization and avoidance? Should my camera even be out?
Yesterday we followed an emotionally charged tour led by one of the employees of the hostel here in Sarajevo. He took us to the tunnel under the airport (now mostly collapsed) that was the sole source of communication, electricity, fuel and illicit armaments for the 300 000 people that weathered and fought off the siege (the longest in the history of modern warfare at over three and a half years). There I pulled a pectoral muscle carrying a 35 kilo backpack for 25 m through the 1 by 1.5 m space. In operation the tunnel was 800 m long and constantly active, with hundreds moving within it at a time in both directions -- traffic density sometimes extending the trip to several hours. We also took in, wide eyed, a furious venting session in the guise of interpretation from one of the tunnel museum's staff members who, like our guide in the broader tour, had almost no patience for questions. I don't want that description to be interpreted as criticism. For it to have been as sanitized and visitor focused as the tours I used to give at parliament would have seemed incredibly artificial. And the hostility to questions seemed to stem largely from an attitude (probably correct) that we couldn't possibly even know the right questions to ask so why waste the time when there's so much to describe and say?
The tour went on to the old WW2 memorial from which the Serbian army sniped and barraged much of the city. There our guide sat us down (standing, the wind overpowered his voice) and described for 45 minutes the bungling of the UN (sending tons of malaria medication and condoms but less than 100 grams of food per person per day) and how the city mobilized to defend itself without military equipment or training. He told us about how the militia resolrted to buying millions of dollars of guns from a Colombian drug cartel because of the UN embargo on selling weapons to the combatants on either side (good in theory but a death warrant for the Sarajevans who faced an army inherited by Serbia from the former Yugoslavia). He showed us Sarajevo roses -- painted red to symbolize blood -- and told us about the proud history of diversity in the city (the only major European city which, accepting Jews expelled by the Spanish inquisition, did not force them into segregated ghettos, and in which today and for centuries can be heard both the call to prayer and ringing church bells.). He told jokes and in telling them fluctuated between a sardonic expression and one that was dead serious.
The driver was nuts although I think he may have been exaggerating his insanity to make a point expressed by the guide earlier that Sarajevans are frantic drivers because of the habit from having needed to barrel serpentine through the city at 120 kph in order to avoid artillery and sniper fire.
Following the tour I tried to engage Sunny (our guide) in conversation. Considering the fury he expresses towards Serbia I asked him if he had ever had Serbians on his tour. He said that he had and was unhappy to learn of them, but was impressed by their attitude as the tour progressed. I wanted to ask him why he gave this tour; whether it was out of a sense of duty to tell the story of Sarajevo, or whether it was just a job, an unoccupied niche? How did he feel about these voyeuristic English speakers coming to oggle the suffering of Sarajevo? Did he see them that way or was he more charitable? Could he empathize with us? His dismissiveness though kept me from pushing these questions on him. I hope he recognizes the potency of the experience for us.
I was emotionally spent for the rest of the day and still have a lot to think about. Sarajevo makes an interesting preface to Belgrade.
Now I'm off to check out what the deal is here with Franz Ferdinand.
Peace.
We spend most of Sunday in the town of Mostar which was basically levelled in a clash between the Bosnian Croats and Muslims (who, as the NYT put it, were nominal allies through the rest of the war). The bullet scarred walls, bombed out buildings, the parks turned graveyards in which every stone was inscribed with '- 93' -- the number before the dash ranging from the 1910s to the year itself -- and the rather bemused (as another backpacker described it) attitude of the Bosnians to find tourists visiting their country profoundly impressed a variety of messages, feelings and questions that we've all been struggling with. How do you approach being a tourist in a country recovering so visibly from a horrific tragedy that didn't really touch you at all beyond a vague recollections of news reports absorbed periferally as a 9 year old? What's the middle ground between romanticization and avoidance? Should my camera even be out?
Yesterday we followed an emotionally charged tour led by one of the employees of the hostel here in Sarajevo. He took us to the tunnel under the airport (now mostly collapsed) that was the sole source of communication, electricity, fuel and illicit armaments for the 300 000 people that weathered and fought off the siege (the longest in the history of modern warfare at over three and a half years). There I pulled a pectoral muscle carrying a 35 kilo backpack for 25 m through the 1 by 1.5 m space. In operation the tunnel was 800 m long and constantly active, with hundreds moving within it at a time in both directions -- traffic density sometimes extending the trip to several hours. We also took in, wide eyed, a furious venting session in the guise of interpretation from one of the tunnel museum's staff members who, like our guide in the broader tour, had almost no patience for questions. I don't want that description to be interpreted as criticism. For it to have been as sanitized and visitor focused as the tours I used to give at parliament would have seemed incredibly artificial. And the hostility to questions seemed to stem largely from an attitude (probably correct) that we couldn't possibly even know the right questions to ask so why waste the time when there's so much to describe and say?
The tour went on to the old WW2 memorial from which the Serbian army sniped and barraged much of the city. There our guide sat us down (standing, the wind overpowered his voice) and described for 45 minutes the bungling of the UN (sending tons of malaria medication and condoms but less than 100 grams of food per person per day) and how the city mobilized to defend itself without military equipment or training. He told us about how the militia resolrted to buying millions of dollars of guns from a Colombian drug cartel because of the UN embargo on selling weapons to the combatants on either side (good in theory but a death warrant for the Sarajevans who faced an army inherited by Serbia from the former Yugoslavia). He showed us Sarajevo roses -- painted red to symbolize blood -- and told us about the proud history of diversity in the city (the only major European city which, accepting Jews expelled by the Spanish inquisition, did not force them into segregated ghettos, and in which today and for centuries can be heard both the call to prayer and ringing church bells.). He told jokes and in telling them fluctuated between a sardonic expression and one that was dead serious.
The driver was nuts although I think he may have been exaggerating his insanity to make a point expressed by the guide earlier that Sarajevans are frantic drivers because of the habit from having needed to barrel serpentine through the city at 120 kph in order to avoid artillery and sniper fire.
Following the tour I tried to engage Sunny (our guide) in conversation. Considering the fury he expresses towards Serbia I asked him if he had ever had Serbians on his tour. He said that he had and was unhappy to learn of them, but was impressed by their attitude as the tour progressed. I wanted to ask him why he gave this tour; whether it was out of a sense of duty to tell the story of Sarajevo, or whether it was just a job, an unoccupied niche? How did he feel about these voyeuristic English speakers coming to oggle the suffering of Sarajevo? Did he see them that way or was he more charitable? Could he empathize with us? His dismissiveness though kept me from pushing these questions on him. I hope he recognizes the potency of the experience for us.
I was emotionally spent for the rest of the day and still have a lot to think about. Sarajevo makes an interesting preface to Belgrade.
Now I'm off to check out what the deal is here with Franz Ferdinand.
Peace.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
General Call for Addresses
Please send me addresses. I've been buying post-cards and need people to send them to.
I'm currently in Dubrovnik who's fortifications I had heard about but did not expect to be nearly so impressive. The labyrinth of streets cramped inside are also highly novel from a North American perspective, although it's far more tourist saturated than some of the smaller towns we visited on the islands (on which I have every intention of buying property at some point and would be happy to share time in if anyone else wanted to chip in. Hvar in particular jumped out to me as heavenly). Downside to the islands: The gelato is on average about 20 cents more expensive per scoop.
Interestingly, as it is the calm before the tourist storm of May and onwards, there were only about 25 other tourist following our trajectory going South from Split, most of whom are our age and partiers. Fun in moderation. Messes were made in the presidential suite of this hotel we stayed in Cordula (the key was in the door - practically an invitation - and we were the only guests having haggled a price of about 16 dollars per night (85 kuna)). I was in bed before the worst of it but I can't say I wasn't in support of opening the 'complementary' champagne.
One last quick note: Sorry for the lack of pictures... uploading is a bitch here, and the time is expensive. Expect a blitz at some point, but it may not be soon.
Send me your addresses! The only ones I have are my old Apt., and family members'.
Heart
Ben
I'm currently in Dubrovnik who's fortifications I had heard about but did not expect to be nearly so impressive. The labyrinth of streets cramped inside are also highly novel from a North American perspective, although it's far more tourist saturated than some of the smaller towns we visited on the islands (on which I have every intention of buying property at some point and would be happy to share time in if anyone else wanted to chip in. Hvar in particular jumped out to me as heavenly). Downside to the islands: The gelato is on average about 20 cents more expensive per scoop.
Interestingly, as it is the calm before the tourist storm of May and onwards, there were only about 25 other tourist following our trajectory going South from Split, most of whom are our age and partiers. Fun in moderation. Messes were made in the presidential suite of this hotel we stayed in Cordula (the key was in the door - practically an invitation - and we were the only guests having haggled a price of about 16 dollars per night (85 kuna)). I was in bed before the worst of it but I can't say I wasn't in support of opening the 'complementary' champagne.
One last quick note: Sorry for the lack of pictures... uploading is a bitch here, and the time is expensive. Expect a blitz at some point, but it may not be soon.
Send me your addresses! The only ones I have are my old Apt., and family members'.
Heart
Ben
Monday, April 9, 2007
Aaah! I've filled up my camera's 1 gig memory card with about 700 pictures already. I need to find a way to upload them asap, so expect it.
We are currently in Split. We're staying with this Babushka who solicited us at the bus station. It's about $20 canadian/night and she's being forcing snacks and coffee on us since we arrived. It's probably the ideal situation.
We caught the end of an Easter mass yesterday in Zadar (literally the last 2 minutes plus the exit procession). Organ music, people smiling, a kindly preist in a wheel chair shaking everybody's hands and giving blessings in Croatian, and apparently some body part of St. Anastasia all contributed to a rather european experience. The tone was much different from the Good Friday service we attended in Ptuj (pronounced like the act of spitting) in the poorest section of Slovenia. Also in a beautiful and ancient church, there was much solemn and sonorous chanting, the lights were dim, and inside the church it was at least 5 degrees colder than it was outside. It was very moving.
Sorry these are so short... internet has been hard to come by in packed days.
Hope you all had a bountiful Easter.
Less than 3.
Ben
We are currently in Split. We're staying with this Babushka who solicited us at the bus station. It's about $20 canadian/night and she's being forcing snacks and coffee on us since we arrived. It's probably the ideal situation.
We caught the end of an Easter mass yesterday in Zadar (literally the last 2 minutes plus the exit procession). Organ music, people smiling, a kindly preist in a wheel chair shaking everybody's hands and giving blessings in Croatian, and apparently some body part of St. Anastasia all contributed to a rather european experience. The tone was much different from the Good Friday service we attended in Ptuj (pronounced like the act of spitting) in the poorest section of Slovenia. Also in a beautiful and ancient church, there was much solemn and sonorous chanting, the lights were dim, and inside the church it was at least 5 degrees colder than it was outside. It was very moving.
Sorry these are so short... internet has been hard to come by in packed days.
Hope you all had a bountiful Easter.
Less than 3.
Ben
Thursday, April 5, 2007
So apparently Jesus died on this day a few years ago. This is a fairly big deal in 90%+ catholic Croatia. We're going to try to go to the Good Fridaz service in Zagreb's 13th century Cathedral. We'll see if it works out.
Tid bit 3: Produce here is incredible. I didn't used to like tomatoes. Now I do. Just went back to the open air market to reload. Also bought some hand made goat cheese from the cutest babushka who chased me through the market because I left before I got back all of my change.
Since last writing I met up with Karin a Brent. Yesterday was spent walking about with said pair. The weather was beautiful and shined a light on what is definitely a vastly superior quality of life here. Maybe I'm just seeing the nice parts. The communist bauhaus high rises that I passed on mz way from the airport didn't quite give the same impression.
Tid bit 4: Impromptu, I became the subject of a photography class yesterday who captured every angle of me looking at maps and taking pictures of St. Marks chuch in the upper town. The light was really beautiful... it probably brought out the best in me... although they weren't enthused when I offered to do a nude.
Today: We rent a car for the day and go see castles and vineyards in the countryside North-East of the city.
From the Vip in Zagreb with love.
Tid bit 3: Produce here is incredible. I didn't used to like tomatoes. Now I do. Just went back to the open air market to reload. Also bought some hand made goat cheese from the cutest babushka who chased me through the market because I left before I got back all of my change.
Since last writing I met up with Karin a Brent. Yesterday was spent walking about with said pair. The weather was beautiful and shined a light on what is definitely a vastly superior quality of life here. Maybe I'm just seeing the nice parts. The communist bauhaus high rises that I passed on mz way from the airport didn't quite give the same impression.
Tid bit 4: Impromptu, I became the subject of a photography class yesterday who captured every angle of me looking at maps and taking pictures of St. Marks chuch in the upper town. The light was really beautiful... it probably brought out the best in me... although they weren't enthused when I offered to do a nude.
Today: We rent a car for the day and go see castles and vineyards in the countryside North-East of the city.
From the Vip in Zagreb with love.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Einz
This shall be my travel blog. And verily it shall. It shall differ in scope from fearandloathingeverywhere.blogspot.com (from last summer's road trip) as I am actually keeping a hand-written travel journal in which I will attempt to maintain a continuous narrative for posterity (which I think will keep the blog unencumbered and from collapsing under it's own weight as the aforementionned experiment did). This will be a compilation of various anecdotes, whims and other such tid-bits united only by the fact of their all being by me while not in Canada.
Anecdote 1: Keyboards in Croatia are identical to those in English speaking Canada except that the y key and the z key have inexplicably traded spots. I apologiye for any tzpos resulting from said idioszncracz.
Tid-bit 2: Here's a poem I wrote while waiting around for five hours at a gate in the airport in Vienna... I was feeling gradiose. And yes I know that the structure is inconsistent.
Working title: Gate A12
Harsh dim lights and stone walls
Off which echo international flight calls
As rain falls
Lightly on the tarmac
I sit back
But can't get comfortable, anxiously
Clenching ass cheeks on hard green plastic seat
Green bag with mz life in it between my uncomfortably warm feet
(why the wool socks dumbass)
The crowd ebbs and flows like Vienna's status through history
But it flows outwards
They're all leaving
From this room anyway
To them though I imagine Vienna is more tangible
Than a room with green chairs and the fanciful
Rendering of a high school history textbook
Nevertheless
Hard floors, bad lighting and cold facts
Encompass mz Vienna as it was encompassed by walls
Which held off Muslim hoards but not cannon balls
Cannons blow a hole in the walls that contain me
So that Vienna can come in
And be quick about it
I'm only here a couple hours more
Anecdote 1: Keyboards in Croatia are identical to those in English speaking Canada except that the y key and the z key have inexplicably traded spots. I apologiye for any tzpos resulting from said idioszncracz.
Tid-bit 2: Here's a poem I wrote while waiting around for five hours at a gate in the airport in Vienna... I was feeling gradiose. And yes I know that the structure is inconsistent.
Working title: Gate A12
Harsh dim lights and stone walls
Off which echo international flight calls
As rain falls
Lightly on the tarmac
I sit back
But can't get comfortable, anxiously
Clenching ass cheeks on hard green plastic seat
Green bag with mz life in it between my uncomfortably warm feet
(why the wool socks dumbass)
The crowd ebbs and flows like Vienna's status through history
But it flows outwards
They're all leaving
From this room anyway
To them though I imagine Vienna is more tangible
Than a room with green chairs and the fanciful
Rendering of a high school history textbook
Nevertheless
Hard floors, bad lighting and cold facts
Encompass mz Vienna as it was encompassed by walls
Which held off Muslim hoards but not cannon balls
Cannons blow a hole in the walls that contain me
So that Vienna can come in
And be quick about it
I'm only here a couple hours more
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