Our plans are under way, though sadly our shanghai contact will not be in town when we are. We are currently in the process of arranging to buy our tickets to Japan!

Good night and thank you for reading.

Pre-Flickrparty Update

A re-budget makes the trip bare minimum seem entirely feasable. Here are a slew of big and small plan changes, followed by a first odd problem:

• We will be staying more time in Japan - over 2mos, but only about 3wks with Naoko and family, a few her friends and relatives are interested.
• The flight to Tokyo seems very cheep (about $400 w/ Intl student ID) - and we may stay via Servas/Couchsurf is possible there for a few days before taking local Chuo/Tokaido trains (slow and pretty route) to Osaka. We will also be staying with people so. of Osaka, and in Fukui and Tokushima, although I know little of the settings - those are prefectures, not towns.
• Re-looking at the cost and our likely host/setting - Sam is having doubts about the Poland leg of the trip. We may get a Eurail flexi-date pass (net savings) and go from Moscow to Amsterdam via Kiev, Bucharest, Budapest, Vienna, (Prauge?) and Berlin with very short stays unless we can find hosts. Advice?
• Possible new/additional hosts in Shanghai and So. France.

Read on:

Thanks!

The party raised about $200 towards the trip! This will make a huge difference in our being able to afford food, shelter, and transit (all very nice things). Once again thank you all for the lovely card and a special thanks to DebLatt for throwing the thing together. I hope you all like the prints; we made them in the darkroom on the day of the party and Iím afraid a few of them had little watermarks.

THANKS! (Seconded by Sam B.)

One Month

Currently trying to figure out if I should buy the Japan-India ticket here or in Japan.

Tickets and Visas

Sam and I had planned to get our Eurail passes, Japan-India tickets and India visas this morning, but due to stupidity by both of us, we only managed the first two.

Sam had forgotten his passport on the way here, and I had remembered it, but forgotten to ask Sam to shoot the two required photos or take out the $60 cash (no cards...?) required. I got everything together though, and Sam will soon, so hopefully by early next week we will have visas. Processing should be same-day.

 As for the tickets, we got a better deal than we'd thought, about $1000 for both the Osaka-Chennai flight and 10 days of rail/ferry travel in two months in Europe.

Thank you everyone for checking out the site. We will be posting as often as possible on the road with blog entries, photographs, bad jokes, and observations. If you wish to be able to comment and to receive the occasional friendly e-mail reminding you that we exist, please sign up for an account . Simply give us your social security number, a photo-copy of your passport, all of your credit card information, and the contents of your bank account and these handy services will be made available to you in due time.

Sam and I started bouncing around the idea of a gap year of travel over a year ago now. Both of us are planning on going to college afterwards (Sam Bowman already got into U. of Chicago and deferred) but we both also suffer from the problem of having too many hobbies and interests to want to choose a major just yet. We believe that travel is one of the best forms of education, and that seeing the world will radically change our way of thinking (Sam B just thinks he will learn a new turnip recipe).

The trip will most likely last between seven and nine months. When we are staying in a place where we have no contacts we will either stay in hostels or else negotiate lodging through a website such as CouchSurfing or Hospitality Club. When we can’t find anyone through these sites we will stay in hostels. We have both packed our backpacks and are running over the details ceaselessly.

I won't write long - just reiterating what I heard from Sam Sobolewski over the phone. 

The going away and birthday party went very well, the house (surprisingly) did not burn down, and Sam is well on track for the trip financially thanks to your support. If you'd like to find out about our plans, or hear about our misadventures, read below (remember to click read more for longer articles) and create an account. More information in the below post.

The bags have been packed, the bording passes printed and the moist towlettes removed from the carry-on. A brief breakfast with family and a handful of others and I am off. Flight 27 to Tokyo.

Thanks for everyone's pre-trip support. I will post from Tokyo and send out an email then.

Tokyo is wonderfully gritty and solid and urban. I have only taken a few shots so far, it has been raining lightly. We might meet up with the Flickrr Fatman today or tomorrow afternoon to shoot, and will probably wander through Asakusa and Shibuya soon. There is so much that I know is normal, and am trying not to overphotograph only because if their novelty. Parking spaces that lift up to let cars park under them, cash registers that count coins themselves and let you pay with a digital camera. People riding bikes holding umbrellas down nonexistantly small streets in the rain. These manga-kisas. The free drinks include sweet frothy green tea (matcha), coffee, corn soup and melon slushies.

I bought a carrot for desert, and asked for no bag, and the clerck put the security recipt-tag on the carrot. I photographed it.

Ginza and Asakusa

The last three days have been amazing and stressful at the same time.The stress is mostly caused by the hostel we are staying in at NishiKawaguchi. It is smaller than my kitchen back home and sleeps twentyfive. The sink smells like someone crowded in it and died, and if oneof us is trying to get something out of our bag the other people can'tget to their rooms. Part of it for me is also just getting used tocarrying about ten pounds of camera gear at every moment of the day.

I got a haircut yesterday that forever changed my definition of a goodhaircut. It was a little weird because I speak little Japanese and hadtrouble explaining through Sam how I wanted it, but he ended up doinga fine job. Then it got weird. He gave me a massage, shaved me with astrait razor, and spent about ten minutes putting hot towels on myface.

Akasaka and the Chuo Line

We are currently in a relatively comfortable JR train, our sixth of the day, 90 minutes in. Getting out of Tokyo was hectic, and my hat may be gone, but the countryside is too amazing to keep worrying. I may be able to get it back from the hostel owner and I have everything that matters.

On that note, Sam just knocked a paper cup out of the open car window.

Yesterday was better. We found Zoka and got a couple of coffees at a fifty percent we-got-jobs-with-a-madwoman-at-a-cafe-in-sf-that-uses-your-beans discount after chatting a bit. After that, we walked through some of the Akasaka financial district and along the mostly empty and jeeringly quiet park outside of the closed-for-the-day imperial palace. There was a 500m wide gravel cross on the ground. Odd. I crashed at about ten and drifted with some confusion back to the hostel.

Quick Update

We have been eating quite a bit more than Anko and Noodles, even in Tokyo. Naoko is feeding us quite well. Food has not been an issue.

Yesterday and the day before we just explored the neighborhood and cooked, but for a brief episode of being invited into a stranger's house to have their no parking sign (which I had pointed my camera at) explained in detail, and their entire family, including prize winning Kendo-master son introduced to us. Sufficiently surreal.

Things are going well, I am quite wowed by the Kate stories (see comments on the previous item) and we are in touch. More details later.

Kyuanji and Sax

Yesterday we mostly stayed at home and cooked for Naoko and seven other people. We made potato leek soup, roasted bell peppers, and chocolate chip (ahem) cookies. You see, apparently baking soda is not available in Japan. This meant that they tasted fine, but that they were tortilla shaped. After dinner we had a little music party. It ranged from very pretty guitar playing by one guest to anime theme singing to a solo saxophone performance by Naokoís husband, Osamu.

Things are well here. I agree that food is a good thing. I think the jet lag and the stress of Tokyo made us a little bit wrong in the head. We are better now for the most part, and a few more nights of sleep on the really comfortable futons should have me more up to snuff.

One Morning

I woke up to Naoko on the phone trying to explain her plan of action to Kate. If all goes well, we will call her and meet up in the early afternoon after a morning in Kyoto. Wish us luck.

Food Byte

Breakfast, today, for the record, was two cherry tomatoes, a pile of diced cabbage, an inch thick slice of white toast, iced coffee, water, ketchup, jam, marmalade, margarine, butter, cream and cottage cheeses and cheese slices. I was impressed.

Kyoto

Today we went to Kyoto. Naoko and the two of us went to a 800 year old Zen temple, and the first site of tea (both ceremony and beverage) in Japan. In spite of the low eves and miniscule slippers (for use between temple buildings, you leave your shoes at the door), it was an experience, if in the form of a relatively quick tour.

We met Kate with little hassle near Kawaramachi and the Kamo river (Kamogawa), she was with her two work-underlings. Aki grew up in Japan and had a sister in Kyoto, so she knew her way around. Barb (transliterated Bahbu) was quite a bit less at home, but was and I hope had fun. What we did was subject to plenty of debate along the lines of "should we...", "up to you..." and "we might...", so we meandered a bit walking half-cluelessly into a rather large and crowded (but amazing view-totin) temple in the hills near the university without being entire clear what was happening.

Packing for Shikoku

Tomorrow morning we are leaving Osaka temporarily to spend the weekend in Tokushima, on Shikoku, the smallest of the main four islands of Japan. The trip will take about three hours by bus, and beyond that, I am clueless.

Osamu, the husband of our current host (I suppose co-host), has coordinated our joining his doctor cousin on a small part of a nationally famous temple pilgrimage route popular amoung stamp collecting retirees, among others. We will be somewhere in Shikoku, see some number of temples no greater than 88 and stay in some form of lodging paid by them. I think that it is resonable to expect that we will eat.

I think it will be the appropriate blend of strange, comfortable, new and entirely unpredictable. I look forward to it.

Expect details on Sunday.

Shikoku: 76-81

We met the husband Tadanori's parents (Osamu's uncle and aunt) who were tending the rice. Tadanori explained that small rice farms yield nearly no profit, but nearly none lay unplanted due to a high concentration of retirees with farming skills. The rice that night was great... al dente.

We felt odd being invited to use the absurdly small house slippers (not to mention the 20 year old toilet with the slow remote-controlled lid), and contemplated buying new ones that day. The next morning was an early start with a large breakfast and a very un-osaka single-track two-car diesel train ride to the northern face of Shikoku, Kanagawa.

Off to Nara

Hello all.

We arrived back at Naoko's house yesterday afternoon. Shikoku was a good experience to have, and it was a good test of our walking-with-heavy-backpacks skills. We did okay, but I think we should work on it more before India. Ideally we should be comfortable walking fifteen to twenty miles with the bags fully packed.

We leave in about an hour to go meet Bruce who will bring us to his house in Nara. Bruce is a friend of my friends Ann and Anatole. He has bikes for us to use and I would guess based on his friends in San Francisco that he has great music and/or movies. Should be fun.

Today was fairly lazy but nice. I got to sleep in a bit (till eight thirty) and than helped Naoko take out the trash and strip the futons so that we can wash the sheets. We then went for a little tea party at Naoko's old apartment to meet her friend and tenant Josee from Canada. She seemed like a cool person and was able to give some advice because she has lived in about a dozen countries.

Nara

We met Bruce early at Namba and took the train to his relatively rural home in Nara prefecture. He has been teaching English here since 1989, and buys and sells traditional Indian and Japanese textiles on line on the side. He has studied Buddhism, though not Japanese, and he knows the history - Buddhist and otherwise - of this area like the back of his hand. We spend Monday evening and much of Tuesday biking around to various smaller old temples and bizarre stones and had a good time. It was nice to be back on a bike that fit and someone who spoke in English about something other than the best topless bars (one English teacher at the local elementary school).

I am alone at the moment. Bruce left for work this morning (Tuesdays and Sundays off) and Sam decided to try to make it home with only a set of directions and a phone number. I am gnawing on Nigiri at his house after a long and strange walk through the fields.

A night walk in the land of talking escalators

It doesn't seem like all that many people are reading this blog. Oh well.

Today Sam and I split up in Nara. He walked around in loops through rice fields and vending machines and I walked to the train station with a page of directions from Sam and a convenience store Onigiri in three plastic bags.

Off to Fukui

Hello again,

It is about nine thirty on Saturday night. Tomarow we are getting up at some ungodly hour to catch a few trains to Fukui. We will be staying with Osamuís friend Akira and in a temple a few nights as well. We have no idea if we will have internet there or not but we will try to find a manga-kissa (internet cafÈ with free drinks and reading material) if we donít have internet where we are staying. Cross fingers!

Today we went to a large park in Osaka and I played a guitar that Osamu has had for about forty years. Sam put out his hat for donations but we didnít get any. Oh well.

We than cooked kimchee fried rice and a sort of stir-fry for Naoko, Osamu, Akira, Nozomu, and a friend of the family whose name I didnít here. (he didnít speak much English) It worked out alright.

Jelly and Shrimp

We woke up early and badly this morning. I had a pinched nerve in my back that is just starting to right itself with some painkillers, and Sam, of course, barely slept. A pleasant seeing off and an uneventful train trip brought us to Awara, where we met the Sakanos.

They (Akira and Akiko) seem to have a sense of humor, and I at least feel at home. Sam is a bit on edge though, since neither of them is conversationally fluent in English. They both know some words though and make a good effort, and I think we can make it work. This gap has also produced a few gems, such as his saying that since he lives close to his office, "everyday I eat my house for lunch," and a reference to a Shinto shrimp (shrine).

Fukui Transition

We are off, after a shockingly huge breakfast, to eat a large lunch and then settle in where we will be staying for the next few days.

We will be staying, with some kind of accommodation, at a Buddhist temple about a kilometer across town. Akira will be staying with us, Akiko, his wife (and boss/Secretary at the dental office, we found out) will be holding up the fort here.

Yesterday we went to the "Kanaz(u) Forest of Creation" per the Sakanos' suggestion. We admired a craftsman's incredibly elaborate carved and sculpted bamboo dolls and tea accessories, and than took a semi-class in which he gave us mostly-precut pieces and had us finish and assemble bamboo model Rhinoceros-Beatles, Mantises and balencing-Dragonflies. The day before was photo-strolling. Fun.

Rain and mud

Hello everyone,

First I should mention that the comments button is working again. I don't know why that happened but Sam was able to sort it all out.

So, yeah. Chennai is pretty insane. So far it isn't quite as difficult as I was told to expect, but that could just be the area we are in. I am feeling better having slept a little more and Sam appears to have the majority of his limbs.

We are staying with Scott Carney, a writer for Wired Magazine. We found him through Couch Surfers. I feel bad that we had to wake him up at such an absurd hour when we flew in but he has been nice to us nevertheless. He brought us to his favorite restaurant in Chennai, which was incredible. Most items on the menu are less than seventy-five cents and the food is up there with the best Indian food I have ever had. In short, India is a great place to go for Indian food.

Fukui: Wednesday

Our room is big enough that it would just as easily serve as a dining room for a family of fifteen (see picture) and manages to feel both way too fancy for us and a bit like a crappy hostel. On the one hand the floor is spanking new tatami and the walls are byoubu and shoji. On the other hand the woman who runs the temple enters the room without knocking every ten minutes or so to check on things.

We just had a seven course meal served in our room. I have decided that I really don't like Oden. For those of you haven't heard of Oden it is essentialy a bowl of bland and soggy brown things in bland brown water. I can't really tell what most of the ingrediants are (ed. note: daikon, smooth seaweed, unsweetened mochi, and tofu skin mostly).

Fukui: Thursday

We took a walk through silent, shopless residential streets, rain, clouds, school grounds, a giant Italian-flag colored pachinko parlor named USA and a vast expanse of rice surrounded by strip malls, those beautiful little white soba (buckwheat) flowers and nameless industry.

We ate out at a place that milled its own soba, though Akira misunderstood my advice to ask about fish and we had to send back a bowl of brine shrimp. Tense but oishii (good tasting).

Fukui: Friday

This morning we went to Awara Onsen (hot spring). It was conveniently located a good distance from Awara Onsen station, and across the street from a station on a different line. We unwittingly got a direct hotel shuttle there, arrived an hour before opening, found a cafe, ordered a coffee for Sam, drank and paid for (thanks Sam) two, and arrived at the Onsen.

It was not too annerving, at least not as much as the hotel bath in Shikoku. The crowds in the sauna/baths did a good job of maintaining the famous Japanese illusion of the private, opaque bubble around people in crowds. We reddened quickly, but took a very roundabout bus back and arrived at the ramen shop to meet Akira just in time.

Thoughtful strangers, persimmons in season

We are with Bruce again in Nara. Everything is fine and we are eating quite well. Both of us are taking our vitamins and Bruce is going to help us research further methods of bug repellent for India to help with the new mosquito born illnesses that are popping up there.

The day before yesterday we experienced an almost frightening level of consideration from a complete stranger in Fukui. It was raining heavily and since I like rain I didn't use an umbrella and was soaking wet. We stopped to get train snacks at a convenience store and got a weird look from one of the women who was shopping there. About ten minutes later her car pulled up at the station and she handed towels to us through window and drove away.

She wasn't the only considerate stranger that day. About half an hour later someone at the train station gave me a bag of pocky (long cylindrical cookies covered in chocolate or other things).

Back to Osaka

If I find a quick way of making it into an Mp3 I will post it.

It reminds me of another piece of art we saw in Nara. An indigo futon cover from the 1880s that had been used, torn and stained for at least 50 years, and patched so many times that there were no identifiable pieces of the original left. All of the patches were a shade of indigo, but the combination of ages and textiles was fantastic, and there was likely no artistic intent beyond necessity.

Slice! Dice!

We met a very happy long-haired Dachsund and it's owner in Hommachi, central Osaka, in their apartment for a cooking class. Naoko helped work out the Japanese for a few recipes and we started in with a team of Naoko's housewifish friends. It would be hard to reproduce in the states without a scale, Japanese sweet potato, burdock root, and a means of pre-baking something at 98.6F, but the results were good and I think I picked up a few odd bits here and there. We made a quite decent vegetable cake (sweet, think carrot cake), some sweet-red-bean rolls, cheese rolls, and sweet potato rolls, consumed with pleasant chatting, tea, and a burdock-beef-cream soup.

After that, Sam, Naoko and I went our separate ways. Sam bought pants and picked up a few prints (to be scanned soon), and we both walked. We unintentionally followed similar routes, though I went farther out of the way to pay a visit to the electronics-and-junk area of town, with the flimsy excuse of looking for a microphone to record a few things.

Mawatte

I left the house sans-Sam at around eleven and rode Naoko's bike in a loop around the domestic airport nearby. It took me through a very long tunnel and into some half-abandoned collections of houses under the flight path. The few people seemed friendly, but the cats were not. The light and exercise were nice, and I was tempted but failed to strike up a pointless conversation with someone who stopped his bike to watch planes take off.

I looped my way around to the university and picked up a local smartish English magazine on politics, culture and the like, and sat around campus half-reading and one-quarter each listening to the dozen out-of-sync trumpeters that were practicing in all directions, and watching attempts at a absurd stunts by the juggling club. The vibes were nice, so I stayed for a few hours, slurped some cheep udon and then headed back to Naoko's, chatted over coffee and chocolate, and sat down to read the U of Chicago student newspaper. Why not?

A day at the lake

I spent most of the day there. I read for a while, walked around, and read some more. I had matcha (green tea) ice cream and spent a good amount of time watching the fish. One particularly unintelligent koi nibbled on my finger for several seconds before realizing that I wasn't food, and then got spooked and did a sort of half back-flip and splashed water on me. Cute.

A couple of Australian tourists talked to me for a while. They were very loud and had little to say, but they left quickly and I went back to my book. If I lived here I think I would have to spend at least a day a week at Kyuanji... I feel insanely relaxed and it cleared my head a bit.

More Wanderings

We went to Karaoke in the evening, we rented a private pod (standard) and gradually Naoko's friend (karaoke-mute), her old English teacher from NZ and Osamu drifted in. My voice and ears were tired by the end, but it was fun. I tried and failed to sing a bit of Japanese.

We realized that Sam had left his wallet somewhere as we were walking back, and a couple of frantic phone calls from Naoko's revealed that he dropped it from his bike near a police box (mini-station), and he went to pick it up. He is using a chain now, and nothing is missing.

Kyoto: Sam B

Fushimi Inari Taisha (head-shrine) is on a quiet, wooded mountainside in Kyoto, and counted as a single structure, it would probably be by far the largest wood structure in the world. The main building is nothing too special; big eves, tile roof, typical. It is the smaller shrines and torii (~10ft red freestanding arches) that make it so unusual.

There are thousands of them.

The torii are arranged such that extremely closely spaced, similar ones form tunnels, broken only by foot-or-so gaps and openings for the hundred-or-so smaller shrines along the way.

Kyoto (Sam S.)

Hello all,

Before I talk about my day in Kyoto I should mention that the sleep disagreements between us Sams are calming down because Naoko, being extremely considerate, prepared a separate room for me. Now Sam Bowman can go to sleep whenever he wants and I can not go to sleep whenever I can't.

Today I went to Kyoto an hour after Sam because I got up a little later. The map I had was in Japanese, and I didn't really know what there was in Kyoto. In retrospect I should have just gotten less sleep (I got five hours) and gone to Kyoto with Sam. Not only does he read and speak enough Japanese to get by, but he also just has a better sense of direction and sleeps more so can pay more attention to where we are going. Most of the day I was slightly lost and in a major shopping neighborhood. I had a hell of a time getting out of the neighborhood as didn't know the names of anything else and kept getting confused as to what direction I was coming from. It still wasn't a waste of time though; I got a bunch of reading done and did find one pretty temple.

Yesterday Naoko took us to a really nice cafe. I have been telling her about how my mom and I plan to start a cafe and about the cafes I have worked for (Blue Bottle and Bittersweet) and so she did some research. What do you know, you can get really good coffee here too if you know where to go. The place was called RELAXCUBE and it had a La Marzocco. For those of you who aren't coffee freaks (gasp!) these are really good espresso machines handmade in Florence, Italy. More importantly, they knew how to use it. Yay! Good coffee! Thank you Naoko!

In Summary

It is very late, so I will be brief.

Yesterday I made a long bike ride to Sam's favorite hilly haunt and Naoko's sanctuary of late, Kyuanji temple. It was quite fast, but for a short stretch with no shoulders. Bikes and cars do not coexist well here, the sidewalk is standard. I did not stay long after discovering that they charged admissions to the inner gardens, and had previously waved us through because of Naoko. I have not seen much that is quiet and green that does not charge here. It was not much, but still seemed odd.

In the evening we met up with my former Japanese teacher from Lowell, Fukuda-Sensei. By the way, is a title for teachers/doctors, but pretty much became her name in English and Japanese at Lowell. She was with her partner Doug, and it seemed blasphemous to hear her actual name. Heh. It was quite fun, we had some fantastic Okonomiyaki (fried cabbage batter pancakes with sauces) with kimchee, mochi and cheese among other things. More later.

Giant spiders in Nose

Two days ago I went for a hike though some mountains in Nose (pronounced no-say). I felt like getting away from the hustle and bustle of the city for a while and Sam had a vague memory of Nose being pretty.

I followed the main road out of the train station. There were only five or six buildings on it, two of which sold nothing but raw chestnuts. The road missed the mountains, but I was able to find a steep and narrow dirt road heading up the face of one of them. After about fifteen minutes of hiking in silence I came upon a smaller dirt path. It was about a foot wide and quite steep. I climbed that path for maybe twenty minutes until it ended at a narrow stream. The forest here was densely packed so that almost no light could get in.

I decided that I wouldn't get too lost if I waded through the stream and followed it for a while. As I walked the trees got closer and closer together until I could barley fit between them. Without warning I walked into something sticky that held onto me for a second before giving way. I had walked through a spider web that was about four feet wide and five feet tall. I am not usually scared of spiders, but the size and strength of the web weirded me out. I got out my small flash light and turned it on pointing towards where I was walking and saw, maybe ten feet in front of me the largest spider I have ever seen.

It was the size of my fist and had green markings on it's sides. The belly had a red dot on it. Any spider experts out there?

Weird dreams, weird drugs

The other night I had a strange dream. It could be the result of having taken Mephloquine (an anti malarial pill that sometimes gives you happy dreams) the previous night.

I was in my room, back in Berkeley. Everything seemed more or less normal except for the fact that one wall was made of shoji. My window was cracked open, and somehow a wild boar had managed to crawl in.

The boar was about the size of my old cat Nimbus (I miss him) and was, don't ask me why, covered in a black sticky substance resembling tar. It pounced at me and slammed me into a wall. We fought for a short while before I managed to get him off of me. I turned around and jumped straight through the shoji, tearing a large hole in it. I landed back in my room here in Osaka. I woke up right than, not sure how I had made it in to bed.

Mephloquine is a strange drug. In rare cases it causes paranoia. It also can give you hallucinations. Sam and I have to take one a week for the next nine or so weeks.

Off to Dubai and India

Hey folks,

It's transition time again. We are leaving the great comfort and company of Naoko's home and heading off for what promises to be an insane couple of days.

First we are flying, in about five and a half hours, to Dubai in the United Arab Emerates. The flight is around ten hours long. We have secured visas and will be wandering around the richest city in the world for sixteen hours or so.

Next we will be flying to Chennai, a four hour flight. We will land there at about three AM India time and wait for the sun to come out before leaving the airport. The first night or two in India we will be staying with someone named Scott who we found on Couch Surfing. He is a journalist and has taken some pretty cool pictures. Other than that I don't know much about him.

So wish us luck at remaining conscious when nessesary and unconscious when possible.

Dubai

Hello everyone,

We are in Dubai in an internet cafe. Niether of us slept on the plane and I am really tired, but other than that things here are interesting. We are going to wander towards the airport now and get lunch somewhere. Tonight we fly to Chennai!

Arriving in Chennai

We made it. I have not had time to absorb where we are, or what we are doing, but we are in Chennai.

A hard goodbye to Naoko and a moderate bus ride brought us to Kansai Int'l, from which we boarded our first sleepless flight to Dubai. It was plush, and Sam plans to write. We arrived dazed and tired at 4:30 in the morning, and after a coffee (for which I withdrew way too much cash) at a Starbucks-type cafÈ at the airport, managed to stumble onto a bus and into the city proper.

We spent most of our first hour wondering along a major street that borders the inlet, unable to cross the busy street and reluctant to get lost in the maze of ex-market side streets full of closed stores. The sun had just risen and it was already oppressively hot. Sam was close to collapsing.

Hello Chennai

It has been quite a fun few days. We have been chilling with a crowd of expats, so I am not sure if we have totally arrived in India yet, but I think it is a good idea. We are still getting used to the rickshaws, bacteria and day-to-day navigation.

Friday night was a Halloween party here at Scott's - we met a very friendly small crowd of NGO people, film people and other journalists. We were both costumeless, despite having waded through the monsoon for a few hours ostensibly in search of one. Sam was the Noir-guy, and I snagged Padma's leather coat per Scott's suggestion a little ways in to become Indiana Jones. It went over well.

It went over late and we wound up having a late, even by Indian standards, dinner at a fancy hotel. Mine was about $2.

A possible split

Hey kids,

Chennai is not necessarily where I would chose to raise a family, but it is a nice place to visit nonetheless. Most of the problems I am having are not the sort of thing I will even remember in a few years and a lot of them are being amplified tenfold by culture shock. The poverty is the hardest thing for me to take in, and it doesn't help that there is nothing that I can really do to help. The consensus seems to be that if you give money to a starving child on the street it will almost definitely get intercepted before it can be used for food or clothes. Some parents apparently injure their children to make them look more pathetic and therefor more profitable.After that any other issues that we are having seem ludicrously trivial. Sam's clothes, for example, have started to mildew because they're never dry. A large amount of my energy each day seems to go into bargaining down rickshaw prices as they are often tripled for tourists. Every time I step outside I am reminded quite painfully that my problems are tiny.

When I went to retrieve my laundry from the five star hotel the man behind the desk seemed a little confused. "You want to pick up clothes? And you are not a guest?" He spend a few minutes on the phone before he spoke to me again. "I am very sorry to inconvenience you sir, but I am afraid that today's laundry will be complementary. We do not generally take laundry from non guests. I will not be able to charge you, sir." As you can probably guess this was fine with me.

More Chennai

In response to the comments:

I can write more later - I am only online for a little while and looking up the meaning of the catchphrases plastered on the backs of the autos (three-wheeled yellow-and-black autorickshaws) is much more important than communicating more fundamental problems. We are doing well together now, and for the foreseeable future, and will buy sandals ASAP - they don't hold water, and it is unavoidable when it rains. If we go north, I think it will be because we both want to and it is feasible for both of us, since Sam seems to want to hit all the same spots in the south and for as much time.

I do need 'auntie's email, a change of system left me sans-addresses - and any contacts in Bombay/Mumbai would be cool, we may wind up going there to fly out.

Staying South

Hello again,

Huh... I had no idea that would cause such a panic. When I wrote that post I was sort of day dreaming the whole thing; I had not yet gotten the chance to do any research. At this point I think I will probably stay south after all.

Most of the problems that Sam and I have had can pretty much be traced down to the amount of time we spend together. When you put together the stress of monsoons, mosquitoes, not knowing where we will sleep the next night, dealing with incredibly aggressive rickshaw drivers (we had one today who was almost crying when we said we didn't want to go to the souvenir shops) and the general chaos of India you get two irritable, easily annoyed people.

I, for one, have been a jerk for a large part of the last week. I am short tempered and cranky around the clock and I end up getting angry over really stupid things. I think it would be good for me if we got out of the hustle and bustle of the big city. Right now it looks like we are going to head south to the little city of Mamallapuram. Our Lonely Planet says it is calm but still interesting. After a couple of days there we will head down further South to Pondicherry and then over to Auroville, the commune thing. We don't know very much about Auroville but we have contacts there and they have a store in Chennai that we visited the other day. I ended up buying shampoo and Sam got mosquito incense.

In the Dark

I was standing in a grand old colonial cavern, lit only through narrow windows near the ceiling, staring through glass at what eventually revealed itself as a beige lump. I guessed that it was a model of bamboo roots by the context, but the plaque that should have explained this lump was scratched and sun-bleached into oblivion. Walking away, I passed a few men trying to see their hands of cards over inexplicably large moustaches, cooled by a BC-era fan whose cord had been stripped and jammed directly into an outlet.

The Tamil Nadu Government Museum was gargantuan, spanning six buildings of galleries with everything from "modern art" (model planes) to "national art" (building cordoned off due to structural damage) to ancient carvings to stamps. Most of it was either unlit or closed or nonsensical or without any explanation, but the sheer strangeness of the place, and the wonderful architecture made it solidly worth my Rs.75 plus transit.

My sore throat is a good bit better, and other than a morning at the museum we have been laying quite fantastically low lately. Yesterday and today have essentially been tiny splashes of shooting, lots of good food, and a few hours cafe-ing with and without the expat crowd. We are planning to book a ticket out of Chennai this weekend for the first week of December, and spend today shooting with Jerome again at the beach.

French people, sandals, and sleep deprivation

Greetings,

All is well here in Mamallapuram. Today I woke up late because I wanted to get some sleep, but unfortunately I didnít fall asleep last night until about six thirty AM. If anyone knows a good quick fix for sleep phase disorder please let me know. All of the cures that I have read about are absurdly complicated. Tonight I may resort to an Ambien.

This morning (technically afternoon) we went about a block down the road and rented bikes. I had a not great thali meal (rice and side dishes served on a banana leaf) and than we set out in an arbitrary direction on the bikes. We had heard about the insane rock carving in Mamallapuram and were curious to check it out. We met to guys at one of the stone temples and talked for a while. One of them spoke Tamil, Hindi, some Japanese, some French, and some Italian. A group of tourists from Hyderabad came along and asked if they could take our picture. They liked my hat and ended up passing it around for a photo shoot.

One of the two people we had been talking to gave us a little tour of the rock carvings and brought us back to his studio. There was some pressure to buy things so I got a little stone guy. I liked the little studio setup and the profits went directly to the artist so I would much rather get something there than in a tourist shop.

French people, sandals, and sleep deprivation

Greetings,

All is well here in Mamallapuram. Today I woke up late because I wanted to get some sleep, but unfortunately I didnít fall asleep last night until about six thirty AM. If anyone knows a good quick fix for sleep phase disorder please let me know. All of the cures that I have read about are absurdly complicated. Tonight I may resort to an Ambien.

This morning (technically afternoon) we went about a block down the road and rented bikes. I had a not great thali meal (rice and side dishes served on a banana leaf) and than we set out in an arbitrary direction on the bikes. We had heard about the insane rock carving in Mamallapuram and were curious to check it out. We met to guys at one of the stone temples and talked for a while. One of them spoke Tamil, Hindi, some Japanese, some French, and some Italian. A group of tourists from Hyderabad came along and asked if they could take our picture. They liked my hat and ended up passing it around for a photo shoot.

One of the two people we had been talking to gave us a little tour of the rock carvings and brought us back to his studio. There was some pressure to buy things so I got a little stone guy. I liked the little studio setup and the profits went directly to the artist so I would much rather get something there than in a tourist shop.

French people, sandals, and sleep deprivation

Greetings,

All is well here in Mamallapuram. Today I woke up late because I wanted to get some sleep, but unfortunately I didn't fall asleep last night until about six thirty AM. If anyone knows a good quick fix for sleep phase disorder please let me know. All of the cures that I have read about are absurdly complicated. Tonight I may resort to an Ambien.

This morning (technically afternoon) we went about a block down the road and rented bikes. I had a not great thali meal (rice and side dishes served on a banana leaf) and than we set out in an arbitrary direction on the bikes. We had heard about the insane rock carving in Mamallapuram and were curious to check it out. We met to guys at one of the stone temples and talked for a while. One of them spoke Tamil, Hindi, some Japanese, some French, and some Italian. A group of tourists from Hyderabad came along and asked if they could take our picture. They liked my hat and ended up passing it around for a photo shoot.

Dropping in

"Welcome, welcome, Namaste, Amen" blurted about twenty beaming children, mostly middle school age. It was only in the fourth repeat of the chorus that we were able to decipher the droning, but the smiles were powerful enough to give us headaches. They stopped after a few minutes, and as we started to clap they initiated an instant-encore, charging wholeheartedly into "If You Are Happy and You Know It."

We were in a Christian orphanage in Mamallapuram - CCC. Lonely Planet and some extraordinarily cute kids near the entrance beckoned us in off of the tourist main drag, and after hellos and handshakes from all twenty of them, and with no further explanation, they showed us seats and started singing.

The kicker came when the verse in "If You Are Happy and You Know It" about nodding your head - on cue the crowd executed a well-synchronized head bobble. It was hard not to crack up.

Opposite sleep patterns and the importance of independent thought

So here is how things are now,

When I last talked to a doctor I was diagnosed with sleep phase disorder, the fancy science word for night-owlism. It is almost impossible for me to fall asleep before three in the morning, regardless of how little sleep I got the night before. There are two possible cures, both of which are extremely finicky and time consuming.

The first is essentially a big expensive lamp. I would have to shine this lamp directly in to my eyes in half hour sessions, four times a day. Supposedly this would correct my circadian rhythms which are what tells my brain when to get sleepy. The lamp retails for $280 U.S. and is far from portable.

The second potential cure is even more inconvenient. Each night I would have to go to sleep a bit later, each morning wake up later, until I had gone clear around the clock back to what most people might call a normal sleep schedule.

Good Morning Pondy

Today has not been bad. We woke up on the late side - I rolled over on the single bed to an odd angle preventing Sam from getting as much sleep - he couldn't move me and slept on the floor. I could get up before him (as I had hoped) because the place he unrolled himself on the floor prevented me from getting my pants.

Pondicherry feels like quite a vacation from India. It was still a French colony until the fixed price shops, low density of buildings, people, and sounds, and a surprising dearth of beggars, touts, belligerent auto drivers (the town is small enough to walk), shit, cows and stray dogs.

I miss them already.

In a strange twist of fate, the photographer friend-of-Sam's-friends who lives here was out of town when we called this morning, but was able to help us out in other ways. He is affiliated with a maybe-ashram-connected gallery that is attached to a high-end bed and breakfast. He was able to get us a room and asked us to name our budget, we said what we had been paying and said that it would be enough - the online rates were four times that.

Walking and Shooting

Things are quiet. We are eating new and strange things on a near-hourly basis, trying to cook, almost getting hit by cars and motorcycles and trying to reach too many people. Though we have been relatively busy (Sam's camera jammed - adding to it) I have felt oddly vegetative - as though I should be shooting with some goal, or doing something more concrete.

When we go to Auroville (about 10km, hopefully soon) we are thinking of walking, partially for that reason - to have done something. The food is fantastic though, and though we are still stuck in the same smallish room, it is nice, and we are coping sleep wise. We were planning to do a late night shoot, but Sam needs a screwdriver to unjam his camera first.

I am also contemplating minor Christmas shopping (beyond what will inevitably mostly be photos), since with the strangeness of the Indian postal system, mail might take quite a few weeks.

Off to Auroville, one lens short

Hello friends,

Pondicherry is a really cool city. For one thing it is small and reasonably well organized so I can actually navigate on my own on a bike. I also like the weird mix of French and Indian culture that is dominant here. On the same day I have had Muesli, toast, masala dosa, and palak paneer. Good food!

Unfortunatly the problem with my camera is not an easy enough repair for me to do myself. I am shipping it home and will reunite with it and my parents at the same time in early January when we meet in Paris. In the mean time they are going to send me a 35-mm that was in my closet back home. Thanks for that.

Auro

Auroville - the Internationalist town founded by South India's favorite ashram - is both more and less pleasant than I had expected. I am glad to be here, but I am waiting eagerly for the FedEx guy that will bring Sam's camera and with it freedom of movement.

We walked here from Pondicherry, it mostly lacked the epic long-walk-with-backpacks feeling that I had hoped for, but enjoyable nonetheless. I spent yesterday morning negotiating with a laundry stand and trying to get our clothes back only an hour after the promised deadline (we wound up two garments short). Dispite my offers of paying full price for late and unpressed laundry, they outright refused to give it to me at all without ironing it.

We ate for the fourth time at Hotel Surguru (unlike most "hotel" restaurants, it also has rooms), a fantastic pan-Indian place. Having had a good bit of Southern food I splurged on the Northern Punjabi thali (set lunch) - it was fantastic. Punjab is the source of most western export Indian food, so it was mostly familiar dishes; paneer (dry, light cheese) curries, deadly-strong pickles, naan, basmati rice, chutneys, yogurt, ice cream and about a dozen more small courses that I forgot to mention. We are eating well. Or... we were.

Leaving Auroville

Just a brief update - crack of dawn farming yesterday was enjoyable. Sitting in the central amphitheater/park listening to an inaudible recording of the mother's reading to music was similarly so. The Hungarian WWII film yesterday evening was not so nice - the movie was gripping, but inevitably depressing, and Sam started feeling a cold, followed this morning by a low fever. I am out getting him some Paracetamol. Sam is in good hands at the American Pavilion, and can find his way to Pondicherry to stay at the Cafe-associated guest house if needed, since he needs to be Auroville-accessible 'til Monday or Tuesday for his package - so we are attempting the threatened split-up, but for a much shorter term. I am leaving tomorrow evening on a sleeper train for Madurai, the hectic temple-centered town that is home to Scott's awesome archaeologist-friend Gwen. Sam and I will keep thoroughly in touch, and if all goes well, he will follow on Tuesday and meet me.In other news, I am off to try to poke my head in to the strange giant golden golfball of a meditation center called Matrimandir - getting in is of course a very complicated process.Wish us luck.

Leaving Auroville

Sam is in good hands at the American Pavilion, and can find his way to Pondicherry to stay at the Cafe-associated guest house if needed, since he needs to be Auroville-accessible 'til Monday or Tuesday for his package - so we are attempting the threatened split-up, but for a much shorter term. I am leaving tomorrow evening on a sleeper train for Madurai, the hectic temple-centered town that is home to Scott's awesome archaeologist-friend Gwen. Sam and I will keep thoroughly in touch, and if all goes well, he will follow on Tuesday and meet me.

In other news, I am off to try to poke my head in to the strange giant golden golfball of a meditation center called Matrimandir - getting in is of course a very complicated process.

Wish us luck.

Headachey thinking

Hello,

Sam is off to Madurai all by his lonesome. I am here in Auroville and getting better health-wise. All that is left of this strange illness is a nearly endless head-ache.

Tomorrow I am going to walk back down to Pondy, about 15 kilometers. I'll stay there for at least a couple of days before going back to Auroville to pick up my camera, and then eventually somehow finding a train to somewhere in Southern Kerala. Those of you who have been keeping in touch with e-mail should have faster response times while I am in Pondy because I plan on checking e-mail every night in case Sam should need to contact me.

Auroville is an odd place. The idea of it seems great, an international and self sustaining community surrounded by trees and pretty flowers, but it also is pretty successful at keeping out nearly all things Indian. You pretty much can't get good Indian food here. In India!

Thanksgiving from a pile of roaches

Three days ago I went in to a cafe and met two Brits named Roger and Effie. He was from just outside London and she from Oxford. We hit it off nicely (at least I thought so) and spent a couple of days together haunting the streets (and cafes) of Pondicherry together. My camera arrived in one piece and now I just need to get film somewhere.

Last night I left at around eight o'clock from the cafe I like and walked to the Pondicherry bus stand. I got lucky and the first bus I saw was mine, bound for Villupuram. The bus ride was only an hour long but it was an hour I will never forget. Blaring Tamil music, glowing orange and green lighting, electric blue seats, neon orange poles, and a rather astonishingly large cross dressing crowd at the back of the bus who talked to me a bit. They were very cheerful and when I got off the bus one of them leaned over and yelled (the music was loud) "If you are ever having a problem definitely contact me!" I never got his number.

Thoughts from the Madurai Sleeper

Though I don't want to say so, my time in India is more than half up for this trip.

I am not sure who said it to me first, but I am confidant I have heard it more than once. You don't love India the first time you visit - you love it when you step on to the plane home.

I am wondering if that will be the case with me too. I am enjoying travelling here - none of the well-known problems are enough to overcome the occasional bursts of awe and the energy of the streets. I am not sure if I love it yet though, and that is more my fault. I wonder if ambiguity will stay ambiguity over the Mediteranian on British Air.

A mostly insubstantial post from Madurai

I suppose we have not said it outright on the blog yet, and I feel it is due. Thank you Naoko (see comments on last post), you have been a great ambassador (as it were), host and extra-mom. We are forever in your debt.

Anyway - things are going well-if-uneventfully in Madurai. The sleeper on the way over was more-or-less a misnomer. It was not terribly uncomfortable, but getting arranged in the bunk took some time, and I was still on a bit of an adrenaline high from having to leap from a train on the opposite platform that someone had mistakenly told me was mine. So, yesterday was spent only mostly awake.

I arrived at about 6:30, made an attempt at skyping home and made my way to Gwen's apartment. We had some Idly down the street for breakfast and I went downtown, wandered around, gave in to a tout and had a Kurta (North Indian long shirt) tailored in the cloth bazaar, and saw the outer area and museum of the temple. There are dozens, if not hundreds of temples in Madurai, as in any other Tamil city, but from the facade(s, there are four), it is clear that this is the temple. It is about four hundred years old, and four of the five gates are topped by 15-story towers with about 1100 brightly colored life-sized sculptures (largely of gods) covering them.

Thiruvananthapuram

The night train was quite comfy, but as expected, four hours of sleep did little to either of us. I am glad to have slept last night. We showed up in Kanniyakumari dazed and hunting for a Skype-outlet to make some thanksgiving dinner phone calls just after dawn on Friday. The one Internet cafe that was open looked entirely forgotten and had no hope of Skyping, so we used one of the ubiquitous ISD booths to make (gasp!) $3 phone calls. We climbed down to the rocky beach at the south tip of the subcontinent and waded around a bit while poking at Sam's new/old camera, we think it is working.

The sun was intense, and the strange ("pan-Indian architecture") Gandhi memorial did not take up too much time - we took a cab to the bus Terminal and asked around. We did not wait long, although we heard that a regional transit strike (a guarantee in Kerala) would force us to take a TN based bus and transfer at a town just on the Kerala side of the border. The bus ride was typical, a few hours and accented by having our bags numb our knees for most of the ride. We survived, and are planning a more ambitions such ride tomorrow.

Nilgiri Bus

Regarding the previous comments, we are seriously considering extending our time in South India until close to Christmas, so that we could spend more time in Cochin and Northern Kerala, and so that I might have a chance to visit Bangalore. I have contacted British Airlines to find out how much it would cost, if anything. This is also assuming that our European plans can be rearranged accordingly - possibly Paris - Italy - Germany - Netherlands - Paris - So. France - UK - Ireland. Eastern Europe is pending railpass status and money, but would likely coincide with Germany, and only if we push the flight back. We should know if it is possible within a day or two.

The last two days have been a whirlwind of travel. We booked reservations from Cochin to Chennai for later (before the idea of changing our flight), and same-day tickets to Aleppuzha, the northern gateway of the famous backwaters.

The train was quite comfortable, drifting through the countryside and showing us glimpses of the southern backwaters, which we had passed up in favor of the more convenient and less tourist-frequented northern branches. After a few hours we got off and had lunch, then transferred to a small but sturdy covered ferry and paid our Rs. 10 to be the two of perhaps three people on the ~50 person ferry to take it all the way to its destination - Kottayam. We soon found out why.

Goodbye India

We are, as originally planned, leaving Chennai for Berlin on December 4th. I would have been glad to stay longer, but extending our time here and keeping all of our other plans in tact with a liberal allotment of time pushes our return date into June, a bit late for Sam's cafe opening plans, and both of us are getting a bit weary of the necessary slight paranoia and lack of connection. Sam also has a flu or something like one for the second time.

Regarding Judy (Goo)'s suggestion, I do have a plan that might work. We will be in Chennai for 24hrs before we take off, and though not Bangalore, the city does have a bit of a tech scene - if I can find any outlets online I might try to poke my head in during that time.

Things have been moving slowly. Yesterday I met up with a pastel of Germans at our guesthouse, two backpacking students and a group of conference-goers on a break. They dragged me into a private tour, and we poked our heads in to tea plantations, a couple of waterfalls, small sandalwood, black pepper and coffee fields, and took a 4 hour hike, no, sprint, through a wildlife reserve with the goal of seeing a few wild elephants. We did see quite a few from a distance, although the guide was confident that we were mere meters from one at nearly all times, thus the sprinting.

Fort Cochi and Twitching

Tonight at 7 we will be boarding a train for a 12 hour trip to Chennai, and the next night we will be spending at the airport gate - our flight boards at 3:30. From there it is a 10 hour flight to London and another to Berlin that afternoon to meet LunarYuna. Thanks!

The last couple of days have gone pretty well for me, although Sam is still on the mend. Hopefully he will post soon with more.

Two days ago I followed a slightly Doctor Seuss styled hand-drawn map from our hotel proprioter for a hike. It was longer than I had bargained for at about 13km and nearly all up- and downhill. It was beautiful though, the route took me up both sides of an enormous tea growing valley with hundred-mile views and through a couple of slightly strange Tata (Indian corporate megalith that produces cars, tea and nearly everything else) company towns.

Fort Cochi and Twitching

Tonight at 7 we will be boarding a train for a 12 hour trip to Chennai, and the next night we will be spending at the airport gate - our flight boards at 3:30. From there it is a 10 hour flight to London and another to Berlin that afternoon to meet LunarYuna. Thanks!

The last couple of days have gone pretty well for me, although Sam is still on the mend. Hopefully he will post soon with more.

Two days ago I followed a slightly Doctor Seuss styled hand-drawn map from our hotel proprioter for a hike. It was longer than I had bargained for at about 13km and nearly all up- and downhill. It was beautiful though, the route took me up both sides of an enormous tea growing valley with hundred-mile views and through a couple of slightly strange Tata (Indian corporate megalith that produces cars, tea and nearly everything else) company towns.

Fort Cochi and Twitching

Tonight at 7 we will be boarding a train for a 12 hour trip to Chennai, and the next night we will be spending at the airport gate - our flight boards at 3:30. From there it is a 10 hour flight to London and another to Berlin that afternoon to meet LunarYuna. Thanks!

The last couple of days have gone pretty well for me, although Sam is still on the mend. Hopefully he will post soon with more.

Two days ago I followed a slightly Doctor Seuss styled hand-drawn map from our hotel proprioter for a hike. It was longer than I had bargained for at about 13km and nearly all up- and downhill. It was beautiful though, the route took me up both sides of an enormous tea growing valley with hundred-mile views and through a couple of slightly strange Tata (Indian corporate megalith that produces cars, tea and nearly everything else) company towns.

Berlinward bound

Hello all yee fine chaps and chapettes,

I haven’t written to you for a while, but I have my reasons. When we reached Munnar I got really quite sick. At first it was a low fever, and then a headache followed by dizziness and eventually deep pain in my bones and enough fatigue to lay me out for three days. Even now I tire very easily.

We spent one day in Kochi after which we snagged a night train to Chennai where we arrived this morning. Tonight we fly out to Berlin by was of London Heathrow.

I want to give you a quote but I should first give some context: Many people here speak English very well but use words from the colonial days that have no meaning to someone like me. One rainy night I was leaving an Internet cafÈ and went to put on my sandals when the owner of the cafÈ said to me:

The Dosa

Five minutes later he returns to confirm that we'd ordered two teas.

Over the next twenty minutes we hear half-intelligible shouting at waiters from other tables, it seemed like a very busy night for too few people. One group almost left after ordering because of the wait.

Berlin Thought

Today I walked through a market hearing a drone of "Kaki, Kaki!", followed by prices in Turkish and German. The Kaki were in season when we left Nara.

Sam bought a guitar and portable amplifier, I am nervous about the endless possibilities of loss or damage, since the guitar has a cloth case only, and the amp nothing. He is happy though, and it sounds like it is worth it for him. My laptop is held up in a puddle of molasses at the FedEx customs department, but hopefully should leave Frankfurt soon.

IF YOU WANT TO KEEP READING IN CHRONILOGICAL ORDER - GO TO THE BOTTOM NOW AND READ UP

PART 2 - RECOVERED FROM FACEBOOK (Newest First):

Home

11:11pm Sunday, Apr 8
I am back home. I flew back with surprisingly little jet-leg to SFO and spent the evening unpacking and chatting with Lee. Little things have changed, but not quite as much as I had expected. Opening the package from India on my chair was an odd feeling. I couldn’t picture having been there more recently than home.
Today was a shuffle of lunch with friends, Sam included, briefly meeting Jerome of Paris and Chennai again (who is staying with Sam until he finds a flat) and going home to Alameda and figuring things out there. More of the same is in the plans. Photos should keep coming on Flickr, and at least another post or two later on.

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London

7:16am Wednesday, Apr 4
Alas, one more batch of uploads made it up before trip’s end. Need I repeat for the hundredth time that things go well?
I am in London, and wandering around with my father between terrific free galleries, and absurdly priced shops and restaurants. The trip is over, but I am not home yet. I am trying to just enjoy the time as what it is. We are staying in a posh-location ‘apartment’ that was cheeper than nearly all of the hotels for the week, but it turns out to be a tiny hotel room with a tiny kitchenette in a cabinet.
Getting here was uneventful. The international ferry, my first in open sea, was quite calm. The boat is massive, and the layout of expensive food courts, arcades and shops interspersed with waiting-room type seating made it feel like an airport.
I had contemplated looking for a replacement to my warping hat here, but hats are very out of fashion in all but the highest of societies, so they are both few and expensive.
I have a slowly growing mental list of things to do upon my return, including turning up for the dreaded tech job after a week or so back.

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Waterford

5:03am Friday, Mar 30
Today’s may be the last photo post, depending on the amount of internet access I have in London. Either way though, expect at least another month of trip uploads to my flickr stream, as well as a bit more categorization. I’ll try not to be quite as hasty at dumping the blog when I get home, but I do not plan to continue this blog for my more normal life, so do not expect too much more.
Anyway, today. I am now sitting in the flat of Eric, a French student interning here in Waterford, a midsized port town near Rosslare, where I will depart for England from tomorrow morning. Today will likely be a quiet last in Ireland, as I will have to be out of the flat by about six-thirty in the morning, though I am helping to cook for eight or so people for the evening.
Bantry wound itself up nicely. A few more bikes and hikes across cliffs, rocky beaches and innumerable sheep and a terrific evening with my host’s pick-up band at a countryside pub singing.

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Down the Hobbitt-Hole

5:19am Monday, Mar 26
First, the bookings have been made. This Friday I will take a bus to Waterford in the South-East of Ireland and spend a night before an early ferry from nearby Rosslaire will take me to England to meet a train to London to meet up with my father. After a week or so there, I will take VA019 on Saturday, April 7 to San Francisco, the end of the trip.
At the moment I am in Bantry, a fishing town and regional hub of about three thousand on the south coast. I showed up to meet a CouchSurfing host as well as five other guests who had all been on unpredictable schedules and showed up at the same time (most of whom were only around for a night). We took took a hike out of town through a pasture of sheep (Ireland probably has more sheep than humans) and along a beach that nearly trapped us at high tide. The scenery is idyllic.
The host, Feargal is an eccentric one. He is a shy vegan largely-apolitical communist who works in a bike shop fixing bikes, building bikes and building furniture from bikes. His house is the first old house I have been in in Ireland, a country that appears to be littered with an equal number of ruins and post-90s developments. It is oddly reminiscent of a Hobbit-Hole, it is partly dug into the steep hillside, and ceilings are low and the rooms are all quite small. Combined with the spoked shelves and the couchmobile under construction, the atmosphere is slightly surreal. Yesterday I spent part of the evening sawing chunks off of a bike shipping palette for the fire.

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Writing the Conclusion

2:29pm Thursday, Mar 22
I just arrived in Galway to a CouchSurfing glitch. Host was working late (closing a restaurant), gave me housemates number assuming housemate would handle keys and directions. Housemate’s phone was off. I wound up checking into a hostel.
The trip down the coast was scenic, but unless I am hit with any inspiration for things to do in-or-near the admittedly spiffy town of Galway, I will continue said trip all the way across the country to Bantry. It is equally scenic and a bit less grey-of-weather on the south coast, and more importantly, has some interesting sounding CS people.
The trip is nearly over, I will be meeting my father in London on the 31st and flying home on the 7th, although I might have to leave my final stop in Ireland for Dublin on the 30th, in nearly a week, in order to make the sea crossing to London in one day. I am not sure exactly how I want to kill this week-or-so, but especially since the landscape seems uniformly stunning people seems like a good criteria for travel. If the weather is in order, it might be good long hiking territory. I also hear that Sam has some family there, but they are unlikely to be worth visiting according to him, and details are not forthcoming by email. I’ll give him a Skype.

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Sheep

9:02am Friday, Mar 16
There is not too much to report, I just don’t want to let the blog down. I am still on the border. The last few days have been on and off wandring-in-town, and trips with various folks through the landscape of abandoned churches, bases and countless sheep. Things go well, and I am plotting my next steps in Ireland.

Why no Flickr? Nothing but dialup here, and none of the Derry cafes have wifi.

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North

1:17pm Saturday, Mar 10
(note: click on photo to view - will fix soon)
I can’t remember when I last posted, so I’ll start with the flight. RyanAir was impressive. The fare was €19, and after taxes and a €6 baggage check fee, it turned into €55, under $75 from Endhoven, a relatively remote Dutch airport, to Dublin. The turnaround was very fast - as soon as the plane was empty we were herded through both doors onto the plane and took off. Music with ads for airport shuttles and hotel finders was quietly playing in the background, and we were given menus for a variety of overpriced snacks. Legroom was typically mediocre for a short flight. I found out after the flight that their customer service was typically almost criminally bad (the number to request wheelchair accommodation is billed as a 1-900 number at 35 cents/minute with hour-average wait times), but it was certainly cheeper than taking ferries and trains. Getting back to the UK I might save a bit of stress though, and take the ferry, which is ticketed with busses to London and reasonably priced.
I only spent a couple of days in Dublin, since I found out on arrival that an old family friend Caren (Lee’s long-time babysitter) was living with her family in the north near Derry. Dublin was a bit of an odd city, rather spread out and with wildly different architecture on each block. I went to a couple of museums and a couple of brief pub-visits with hostelgoers, and put War and Peace on sabbatical in exchange for the slightly more cohesive King Lear. I walked by the massive Guinness complex at one point, and the smell of hops brought back at first inexplicable memories of my last year of middle school… just after the school had moved across the street from a brewery.
On Friday I took a bus halfway across Ireland (4 hours on small roads, it is not a huge island) to Derry, where I met Caren. We had dinner with one of her numerous nieces in town. As we were driving out of town towards their house Caren mentioned offhand (after I hand carefully sorted all of my Euro coins into a bag to an uncertain fate in exchange for the northern sterling) that we had just crossed an international border back into the Republic (the south). They recently moved across the border, but still work in town just a few minutes away. Fortunately, the border is open and peaceful, but from recent election results, it sounds like there is still plenty of tension around.

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Life back home

8:08am Thursday, Mar 8
Hello everybody,

I am terribly sorry about the delay in posts. I wanted so badly to get into my life again right away that I saw everything else as a distraction of sorts.

I am home now, and adjusting a bit. It does feel a little weird and the cars look nine feet tall but it seems to be working out. I got the old job back at Bittersweet Café and I am looking for other work as well. I have completed the online application process for CCSF twice now but the web site is a bureaucratic nightmare that it has now failed twice. I will go in person soon.

In a way it feels like time stopped while I was gone. Things change so much slower at home than they do on the road. When you have predictable routine time goes fling by. I have met some people who didn’t notice that I had left, some people who thought I had left in January, and a few people who thought I had been gone for a full year already.

To those of you expecting phone calls, it would help if you left your phone numbers in your messages, especially if they are new. Thanks.

Sam, good luck out there (or in there if you are indoors a lot) and say hi to Ireland for me. I miss it.

Thanks you all for reading. I might be writing some things about the trip in greater detail now that I have time, but they will most likely be on paper. I really don’t like staring at screens any more if it can be avoided.

Bye for now,

Tall black-hat Sam-kun

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Utrecht

10:46pm Monday, Mar 5
Today will be my last day in The Netherlands, and coincidentally, my first in Ireland, where I have booked a hostel for a few days while I look for either a means of contacting the old friend, or interesting directions to surf. For better or for worse, every hotel and couch within thirty miles of Dublin is booked for Saint Patrick's day, so I shouldn't plan to be in town then.

I am now in the old college town of Utrecht (which I until recently thought was a sketchbook manufacturer (http://www.utrechtart.com/)). I have only been here for a couple of days and it is pretty. The canals in town all have interesting basement-access doors for the canalside buildings, and become quietly scenic a twenty-minute borrowed-bike-ride out of town. I am staying with a fantastic palentologist/Elvis-impersonator/plant-lover, and things have gone well. Good couch, bike my height, good food, interesting conversation. But RyanAir beckons, and I am off to Eindhoven airport this afternoon. I have plenty of photos on the way from India, Berlin and here, but they will have to wait a day, since I am using his computer at the moment.

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Final Map

8:59am Friday, Mar 2
I just bought a cheep flight to Ireland this coming Tuesday. I am not sure where exactly I will be going there, but quite a few things sound interesting, and it more-or-less finishes my planning for the trip, thus the map.

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Miscellany

12:03pm Thursday, Mar 1
I have continued to spend the majority of my time inside, cooking, working on photos, sleeping and the like. I am slightly guilty for not taking in as much of Amsterdam as I could, but I am having a fine time, and think a few days alone are probably good for my sanity. I have been out a bit though. I saw several gallery shows of photography, a few of which were very impressive, as well as a bit of typically strange modern art, well, the in-use talk radio studio placed in a gallery was even a bit odd for modern art, but...

Last night I was invited by someone from a previous CouchSurfing event to some kind of event at a strange little squat-club. Side note: squatting seems more-or-less ubiquitous. Did I mention that the place I am at now is rented from a landlord-friendly squatting agency? I got a message saying that the others would a bit late, I headed out the door. When I arrived, there were two doors, one for the monthly bilingual feminist salon, and the other for a pan-Amsterdam student union party/meeting. The time for the meeting sounded more like what I had heard, so I walked in, took a Grolsch, a pamphlet and a sticker and sat down.

From the pamphlet, I figured out that a young Dutch MP with strange hair was debating one of the student union representatives, and the crowd was too engaged to give more than a glance or two at the silent black-and-white film being shown next to them, which, by the way, was a looped ten-minute close-up of someone bending forks into a variety of interesting shapes. I stayed for a while, and on for a monologue by an old man about the price of wurst. After an hour and a half or so, I gave up and returned home.

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Amsterdam and London

5:14am Tuesday, Feb 27
First news item - I have a definite return date. I'll be back on April 7. My dad booked a week in London, and I plan to meet him there at the beginning of April.

I might head to Ireland soon, I got in touch with an old family friend somewhere there. When and how, I am not yet sure.

I am in an odd but welcome form of accommodation for the moment. I had been CouchSurfing at the home of a journalist along with a Dutch-German marketer. A couple of days in I got a call (he lends out a prepaid cell phone) to the effect that he had to leave town for a few days for work. My mentioning that I knew a convenient hostel warranted a quick interruption, I was welcome to stay anyway. The other CouchSurfer left that night, and I am now housesitting. The place is not bad, and I have been cooking quite a bit. Yesterday, spice-heavy cauliflower. Today fresh pasta with mozzarella and basil for lunch, and chickpea curry and parotta for dinner.

I also got a haircut today at a hairdressing school. It was not bad, better than my previous one, cheep, and came with bad coffee. After having thought my razor was gone in St-Caprais, I am making an unsure stab at a beard.

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Amsterdam

7:22am Sunday, Feb 25
Another Amsterdam couch... I rented a bike, but the rain has made riding it more of a chore than anything. Museuming has been good, but I am less and less sure of what I am doing. It would be nice to be able to stay somewhere a little longer, and perhaps a little less chaotic.

I've barely been shooting - it is probably a combination of the rain and the confusion. Flickr photos are on their way, but I am using someone else's computer to get online, so not quite yet.

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Written in The Hague

7:34am Tuesday, Feb 20
I left Sam at the RER platform for his airport train early this morning, and after getting my own things together, got on a sterile, but incredibly fast Thalys train for Brussels.

I spent that train ride working on a Java widget. In a woeful fit of internet withdrawal in the Yurt, I noticed that my OS installation disc included developer tools and a full reference for Java, and have been messing with it since, thinking of things that I don't know how to do and finding ways to do them. It's been a good way to kill time.

Anyway, I got sidetracked. When I arrived in Brussels I remembered a Belgian traveler's strong advice to "spend a day in Brussels" - I was not due to meet my CouchSurfing host in Amsterdam for a couple of hours after my scheduled arrival, so I checked the schedule put off my train north, and gave myself a couple of hours to wander, figuring that I could come back on my way out of Amsterdam.

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More

1:49pm Monday, Feb 19
One more brief note, I will write something more substantial soon enough. No drama to report, though.
I left Saint-Caprais for Paris with Sam this morning with the aim of changing trains in order to meet a CouchSurfer in Amsterdam. A full train left me with a late-night ticket, which I wound up changing in order to see Sam off tomorrow morning. We are in a hotel, and Sam is repacking and getting ready for another early morning trip.
Saint-Caprais was great, but quiet. We got a bit more work done on the room, did some more wandering and watched a few movies. We spent a day in Toulouse - I picked up a tea thermos and the few Chinese teas available in town. Yum.

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Wind

10:08am Thursday, Feb 15
We had to evacuate the yurt for most of the day today - belongings and all because of a hurricane warning. Nothing noticeable happened inside but a bit of raised tension and a Vietnamese movie. The yurt survived with only one loose ceiling spoke and a partially detached rain hat.
The last few days have mostly been slow but fun mud-smearing (actually, enduit-smearing, the material clay mud with lime and fiber) in the old house. The kids have been alternately fun and annoying. The inordinately cute four-year-old Nicolas (alias: Nico) at first was shy and speaking only French (they are both bilingual), but after he switched to English he started to make a point of completely ignoring any attempts to speak to him that were not in response to a question of his. Hmm. If you are sitting on the sofa though, you are vulnerable to a shout of something that sounds like “cayenne!”, followed by a long hug.
We have been doing laundry at the home of the ex-mayor and his wife across town (read: half-a-kilometer). They have been quite friendly, although I have mostly gone alone, and they speak no English, so most of our (long) conversations have been friendly nonsense an wild gesturing.
What next? Amsterdam still sounds interesting, and we are still close to Spain. I am contemplating fleeing the peaceful yurtville a few days early to spend a bit more time in Barcelona before using the last gasp of my pass to get to The Netherlands - though the remaining time is getting too short to make much use of. Incedentaly, both parents have expressed tentative interest in coming at some point… was it something I said? Actually, my mother was inspired by a friend’s trip to Istanbul, and might join them.

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Castle

12:32pm Sunday, Feb 11
The castle is not really a castle, just a large two-story adobe-brick farmhouse from the 1700's. It is half ruined, and Caroline and Wellington are replacing the decayed walls, floors and ceilings with reused/natural materials of each room one by one. It has been fun, and the Mongolian yurt parked out front makes a fine place to stay.

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Toulouse

12:15pm Sunday, Feb 11
As Sam said - he has rejoined me for his last week-or-two on the road. It was quite a surprise, I received an email on what I thought would be my last evening in Paris saying that he was in town and planned to go south to meet Caroline and Wellington (family friends) within a few days. We walked and saw the catacombs and got him a plane ticket home and are as of now on our way south. We have not confirmed any address for Caroline and Wellington, but we know the tiny town and might take advantages to drop by anyway, but regardless have possible CouchSurfing hosts in Toulouse.
I am not sure what I will do once Sam returns home. My railpass expires on the twentieth, the same day that Sam flies, and without it long cross-country train journeys border on prohibitively expensive, so I would like decide before then roughly which direction I want to go in.
Amsterdam, as a stop on the way to the UK and Ireland have been in the plans since the beginning, largely relying on Sam’s distant relatives who will likely be less available than he first thought, and even somewhat less to me alone. With CouchSurfing, the bulk of English speakers has slightly less of an appeal than it otherwise would, and traveling independently in the UK sounds quite expensive.
Sam pointed out mere minutes ago that we will be near the Spanish border. CouchSurfing there, before much research, sounds entirely reasonable, warm and affordable. Barcelona still ranks as a favorite city, though I would be happy to spend time in a part of Spain where it was not an act political rabble-rousing to mention that you are in Spain… though I suppose Basque country is convenient too if I changed my mind.

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February 20th

11:18am Wednesday, Feb 7
Hi again,

This may seem a little sudden but I have decided to come home soon. I bought a ticket out of Paris for the twentieth of this month.

I am not tired of traveling, I am not too home sick, and it isn't because I feel some obligation to get a move on with my life. I can just tell that it is time for me to come home.

I was trying to write something with pretty words in it that summarized the trip and all that I’ve learned but I can’t seem to do it. Perhaps the memories have got to ferment in my brain for a while before I can articulate them. I think that anyone who can possibly afford to travel should do so and I know that I will have to take other such trips.

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Verbing

9:23am Sunday, Feb 4
The documents arrived more-or-less on time and CouchSurfing has been going well. I am at my second spot, this time with a serial-host who has plans to eventually move to Chennai. Plenty more museuming has taken place; the Louvre was just as big and undiscovered as the first time, Orsay was chaotic but had some gems, and the Orangerie was worth it for the modernist-and-more basement, but Monet is not my cup of caffé lungo.
I followed Judith’s recommendations (see comments below) for more than just the Orangerie. The hot chocolate on Rivoli proved hard to find (there are three cafés that serve it, I am assuming you don’t mean the McDonald’s), but I had a good dose anyway. Anyway, cathedraling:
I took an absurdly comfy train out to Chartres, had lunch, lingered in and photographed the famous cathedral for a couple of hours. The building was impressive, and there was a charming British guide floating around, but no one stood out as Yves in the slow moving crowd of tourists in the Plaçe in front of the building. What made the trip most worthwhile was the way back.

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Documents

8:30am Wednesday, Jan 31
Status: CouchSurfing, museum hopping.
Location: Levallois, on the Paris border.
People: Graphic designer/techie/student/stuffie-designer couple, and a very small cat named Fubuki.
I am relaxing, working on photos, taking some here and there and doing some more of the same. The company is great, the cat is too small to exude enough essence-of-cat to overwhelm my allergy drugs and the decor is pleasantly surreal.

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Münching

5:31am Saturday, Jan 27
I am booked tomorrow morning on the EuroCity 66 for Paris. I have a CouchSurfing contact there who is available for a few days, and moving towards France rather than Amsterdam makes sense for now, since Sam mentioned that we will be meeting with family friends of his somewhere in Provençe in the next week or two. He has not told me where or when though, though I have time on my railpass and CouchSurfing around France does not sound like a fate-worse-than-death.
I have been on a small art kick in the last few days, and spent some time at the modern gallery, the 19th century gallery and the Greek/Roman gallery. I am regretting not studying art history, but it has been fun. It is been cold, but snowfall has slowed to a trickle.
Smarts (the small cars) have downward curved vents on their front bumpers, so it has been extremely tempting whenever I see one with a hood covered in snow to poke eye-holes to go with the ‘mouth.’

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Nazi bunkers, Indie rock bands

11:14am Wednesday, Jan 24
Guten nacht,

Things in Berlin are going quite well. My first night here I attended the Berliner Couch Surfing meetup and met about thirty locals who were offering free beds. I had already booked five nights at a hostel but starting tomorrow I´m pretty much set.

On my second day here I had a tour of Nazi and cold war era bunkers. I will never look at a U-bhan station the same way again: the bunkers were in the walls of the train stations.

Of all of the creepy places we went that day the most disturbing bunker was also the most modern. It was the largest current nuclear fall-out shelter in Berlin. Room after room of triple bunk beds made of white hard plastic, a cement decontamination chamber and a fully stocked kitchen. The tables were already set. The place made it feel that a nuclear attack was inevitable, that it could happen any minute. This particular fall-out shelter is outfitted to accommodate around three thousand people for up to three weeks.

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Monaco

9:59am Wednesday, Jan 24
I just ordered a hot chocolate (“ein chocolata” from the menu) at an Italian-theme cafe next-door to a well designed sushi shop, in Germany. When asked what I think was “for here?”, I nodded and then said, in decreasing order of volume and confidence “hai… si… no… oui… ja… um… yes.” Fortunately, the first half-second of nod did the trick, and I am sitting with a nice warm mug as I write this.
The warm mug is definitely nice. I arrived in Munich, where I am now, at about the same time as the snow. When I stepped off of the platform there was nothing visible on the streets, and a mere errant flake or two in the air. By noon the next day even bike handles were white enough to make a mighty snowball.
CouchSurfing in Bologna did not go quite as I had hoped, the student that had offered to host me wrote a PS email as I was on my way saying that I was free to stay, but that he had more work than he thought to prepare for his upcoming Calculus final, leaving him dutifully studying dawn-past-dusk, and me aimlessly wandering the streets of Bologna and making mediocre Karee-Raisu. I wound up gesticulating my way into a film festival to see the work of a relatively obscure Japanese animator in the original language, with largely useless Italian subtitles. Well, so it was advertised. There were also English subtitles, which was unfortunate, because it was one of the least compelling movies I have ever seen - having to struggle to understand it would have given it an at least a bit of an edge. He made good coffee, which was nice, and I learned that unlike in the US of french-presses and filters and drip machines and Sanka, coffee there comes in exactly two forms, no matter how hard you search, Moka (stovetop espresso), and full sized espresso machine.

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Berlinward bound II.

1:43am Saturday, Jan 20
Hullo,

I made it. I´m here in Berlin after a full 23 hours of train ride. I used some of the waiting time to write a gory account of what it took to get here.

"At the moment I am in a stalled train somewhere in Austria. I left Florence at about ten o´clock this morning for Munich but severe weather in Germany has resulted in the cancellation of many lines. This is already the third train I have been on today, and I don´t think I´m even half way yet. There is a healthy amount of snow outside, and the alps are covered in very dark trees. The sun looks like it wants to set but it is only about three thirty. So far I have enlisted the aid of several toothless Italian men and an Austrian with skis to find all of the connections."

"I a still somewhere in Austria, albeit a different somewhere. For the past twenty minutes I have passed a series of cute little villages on minuscule green hills. The place has a dreary-in-a-good-way sort of feel to it. I guess that´s real winter for you."

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Thoughts from a New Place

10:42am Friday, Jan 19
In less important, more literal news, the split happened more-or-less as planned, if a bit hurriedly. Sam had been talking about leaving tomorrow, but last night when we tried to extend our hostel stay one more day, we found out that they were full through the weekend, and I helped him plan a last minute 20 hour journey to Berlin. He left before I did but I walked through the station just as he was boarding and he mentioned something about the first train to Munich having to dodge a storm and being potentially fantastically delayed at the German border, so I guess stay tuned here.
As for the next month or two of the trip, a couple of people have suggested returning home. I agree with them that there is no shame in that, and I am half tempted to, but I think that it deserves a few days thought, and am leaning against it. I still see plenty of opportunities and interesting people, and think that this is just a pretty natural part of the journey.
To start I want to give CouchSurfing a try as more of something unto itself than a means. I am heading tomorrow to meet a student in Bologna (ancient college town near here, I am told). I have made contact with an ex-pat American 60-year old ex-revolutionary vegetarian cook living in rural Tuscany, a photographer/DJ in Tampere, Finland, and an Amsterdammer who sounds thoroughly obsessed with his city.

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More Thoughts

3:37am Thursday, Jan 18
Thanks for the small flood of emails about what happens next. It has helped, though I have been wandering in a bit of a daze (very long walk in the mountains just outside of town this morning) trying to figure it out. Unless I have any other ideas soon, I think to start I will just try to find an interesting connection on CouchSurfing or Flickr somewhere that is not terribly cold (Italy/Spain/South of France/maybe Croatia) in the next few days.

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Standing on the Horizon

6:39am Tuesday, Jan 16
Sam’s parents are gone, but we plan to stay in Florence until we figure out what we are doing. Sam wound up in a pretty harsh argument with his parents over sleep in Venice and missed missed meeting them on their second to last day in Florence due to direction and sleep related confusion, and has since been thinking more seriously about splitting up for a few weeks until we firm up plans somewhere else, and burning through the rest of his railpass, possibly trying to hook up with a few musicians on the road, as he did in Berlin. I am not against the idea, although I want to give the reasons a bit of time. I have no idea what I want to do next - couch-surf my way around Spain? Eastern Europe? How fast? What motives? It is strange to have so little planned.
Arriving in Florence was unremarkable, the hostel has been comfortable (we plan to make use of the kitchen) and Sam’s parents connected with us for some falafels in the evening. Aside from some good celebratory gelato (Florence specialty), my birthday was not particularly festive, but not disappointing either.
I have not gone shooting yet here, though I have seen a good bit of spectacular art, and climbing up the inside of the dome at the cathedral (Duomo) was fun, if exhausting. I mentioned in a few earlier emails that it was about fifteen feet high, I was off. It was about thirty.

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Don't panic!

5:44am Tuesday, Jan 16
Hello everyone,

So, here goes.

Sam and I are once again thinking of splitting up for a while. Unlike last time we are not in a third world country and have a much better sense of what we each want to get out of the trip. No panic please.

I have heard the same story from nearly everyone who went on a trip with a friend; no matter how close you are you will still drive eachother crazy. It is entirely possible that after a few weeks apart we will be much less prone to argument and a good deal more relaxed.

As for what I will do at this point I am not sure. I am looking at some options in Barcelona and Grenada as well as in Slovakia and in Southern France. I have started posting on a few web sites for musicians and photographers to see if I can track down a crowd somewhere. I also started looking into a couple of two week long culinary programs in France and Italy.

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Italy & India

6:58am Saturday, Jan 13
I guess we have hit a turning point in the trip. We have emails out to quite a few people, and some more confirmed plans in the UK for a month or two from now, but for the next while, our itinerary ends in about three days when Sam’s parents leave Florence for the US. As I write this, I am sitting on an Italian high speed train on the way there from Venice with a trio of Texans on vacation. Sam’s parents moved ahead to Bologna yesterday, and we plan to meet at the station on Florence.
Yesterday I took a long, ponderous walk across a strangely deserted couple of quarters, and ran in to something that I think in retrospect would have been locked if it weren’t under a bit of construction. Every two years Venice holds an architectural fair - largely exhibits in showrooms in permanent pavilions set up by the participating countries. I showed up most of a year after the last exhibition, and all of the countries’ structures were up, but covered with half-assembled exhibits draped in wet leaves and piles of cup and boxes. It was tempting to pick up a Russian-language design information CD. It was surreal compared to the crowds of tourists near Piazza San Marco, which I had walked through to get there.
I shot quite a bit more in Venice, a bit at night with Sam a fellow hostel-goer.

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Venice so far

3:19am Friday, Jan 12
Hey people,

I haven’t been able to get online much in the past few days. Sam has managed by spending a goodly amount of time running around Venice with his laptop out in the hopes of finding wireless networks.

Venice has been really great. I think I could get used to the no-car thing pretty fast. I only wish that it was a little bit less touristy, but I am a part of that so I guess I can’t complain.

I am writing this from our cute little neighborhood café / bar. They make decent coffee and sandwiches. At the bar a shot of espresso is only 80 cents - needless to say I may be over doing it.

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Winter on the Campo

11:09am Monday, Jan 8
I woke up this morning on a train, in a bit of a panic. The key to my locked messenger bag (and laptop case) had fallen out of my pocket, and the only other copy was in my wallet, which was locked inside the bag. I realized that they loop holding the shoulder strap onto the bag which I had locked the zipper to was not a solid piece of metal, only a keychain like loop. I decided to try to pry it open enough to remove the lock and find the other key, then fix it when I next could track down pliers. The train was scheduled to arrive in Venice in less than an hour.

I pulled my pocket knife out of the unlocked outer pocket of the bag and armed myself with the mysterious wedge shaped tool. I tried to fit it into the gap in the metal loop. My hand slipped, and the wedge went flying into the lock.

It opened.

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The Door

8:12am Friday, Jan 5
My quality time with my laptop resulted in a quick pace of flickr updates, but I apologize, the blog has been half-forgotten. We’ll try to revive it. I’ll start as far back as I can remember.
New years eve. We met up with Jerome and Noë (his son) for a simple dinner at our borrowed apartment, and spent a while messing with cameras, drawing 07 on ourselves with LED lights in a dark room, and taking group shots. We intended to go out around midnight to walk around a bit, but made it out a bit late and wound up doing our shouting out the window. By Japanese standards, what happened next was not good. The year is supposed to start well.
We left no more than ten minutes after the clock struck twelve, us for a walk, possibly some music, and Jerome and Noë for his apartment. When I shut the door behind me and turned to bolt it from the outside, the key would not enter the lock. Since there was only one lock mechanism for the dead-bolt and the door latch, this meant we could not get back in. Sam looked for his key, and we realized the problem. He had left it in the keyhole on the other side of the door activating a security feature that stopped the door from being unlocked from the outside. It thought that he was still there.

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The pictures you wanted

1:41pm Monday, Jan 1
Hello peeps,

I have now received more e-mails requesting pictures of us then I feel like counting. I have been doing some self-portrait things with Sam’s camera the last few days and he shot some of me recently as well. I threw in a funny winter-clothing picture of him out of spite.

Paris has been a mixed bag. It has been difficult to find a middle ground between the crack smoking neighborhoods and the seven-dollar coffee ones. We are working on it though.

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More Paris

5:29am Saturday, Dec 30, 2006
Just a brief update. We are both a bit rushed to get out and do nothing in particular, and plan to write more later. I would put this off until then, but that is more or less what has stopped us from posting anything lately.
Christmas was unremarkable, as planned. We cooked (photos soon) a few things, and I worked on photos. Sam played guitar. We put on James Brown. The next day I bought Sam a french press, and he bought me better gloves, both at the same store. We split the bill.
We dropped by Pere Lachaise cemetery, home of countless well known authors, composers and other interesting types. The vague map at the gate to the massive piece of land got us only as far as Chopin, but walking through the centuries old stones was worthwhile. I got a few decent shots, and Sam borrowed my camera for a few more.

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Paris as Paris

4:04am Sunday, Dec 24, 2006
Paris has surprised me so far in how much it has felt like Paris. It has probably felt more like Paris, and more like my preconceptions than anywhere else on the trip so far.
People are well dressed, many of the buildings have layers of decayed hand-painted signs over alleys cut through walls, which lead of course to designer clothing shops and bakeries.
The food is good. We ate out the first night and I wound up with 13 Euro salad with salad with mayo. Sam got chicken and chips. Eating in has been the thing, fresh baguettes and fresh produce are far to easy to come by. We made pesto and ratatouille and cookies the other day and will probably whip up some pasta and goat cheese salad tonight. As Sam pointed out, the apartment that my family friends the Kremers are generously lending us is quite comfortable, and having a kitchen feels great.

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Falafel, Absinthe, and Scottish People

4:43pm Friday, Dec 22, 2006
Hello my friends,

We are now staying in a snazzy apartment in the tenth arrondissement of Paris. We spent yesterday on trains to get here and are now deep in debt to the Kramer family, friends of the other Sam, who have lent us their place.

The train from Berlin left at six thirty in the morning. I don’t usually get to bed until three or four a.m. so I decided I just wouldn’t sleep that night and would meet Sam back at the hostel in time to pack. That evening I had finally received word from Flo, the guitar store employee I mentioned earlier, saying that he w