44 posts tagged “travel”
The biggest excitement of late is that I finally broke down and got a new computer. It was way past time, and doing anything-- anything, including turning it on-- had become a nightmare on the old one. The new one is muuuuuuch faster, and has more storage space, but moving computers it almost as traumatic as moving house... I can't get the contents of my iTunes to move over except for the things that I'd burned from CDs. I can't afford to buy a computer and upgrade to CS3, so I'm still working with Photoshop two versions ago, which is now refusing to open RAW files. I've downloaded the plug in. Twice. No luck. I can't get my website pages to open up in the application I'd been using to make and modify it, and I have things to add to it. And I don't like Vista. All of which is knocking the excitement of a new machine down about fifty notches.
I was on travel for work this week, which isn't so bad, except that I had to go out to the Eastern Shore (also not so bad-- though, am I wrong in thinking that name redundant? Does VA had a Western shore?), which required driving through Norfolk and VA Beach. Which ended up being a six hour traffic back up odyssey. It took almost three hours to go three miles and made me very glad that we don't live in Norfolk.
Eastern Shore was neat. The work part went fine, and I got up early one morning in search of a place to take a jog on the beach, failed miserably at that, and shot some pictures instead. Sadly, the trip ended with a four hour, traffic-laden return. On the upside, while I was gone a few seeds in an herb container I'd planted sprouted. Yeay! Not that this makes up for having lost my entire herb garden in the deluge last weekend, but it's good none the less.
In the meantime, I got an email from a friend at old job, two jobs back, who said my dissertation had arrived. Pardon? I had no idea what he was talking about. He sent them on to me, and while they were en route, I remembered that when I'd initially completed, had signed off, and submitted my diss manuscript to the library at erstwhile uni, there had been a form where you could request (at an outrageous price for what it is) photocopies of your dissertation from UMI, which is the org that does all the copying and microfiching/microfilming of dissertations in the U.S., if you wanted extra copies. I ordered three-- one for my parents, one for my beloved adviser/second committee member, Prof. DKW, and one for my third committee member. They arrived from two jobs ago old job the other day:
And yeah. It has been two and a half years. It has been so long that dear Prof. DKW has passed away since I ordered the frigging things (making me feel sad that he may have thought I'd forgotten him). His widow was deaccessioning his library (which was enormous and amazing), as was he in the last bit of his life, so there is nowhere to send the thing. It's been so long that it's kind of uncomfortable sending it to third committee member-- sort of highlighting that we haven't spoken since the paperwork was finally signed, as well as the oogie-ness of getting all of it done, which was not an easy process, even by doctoral dissertation insanity norms. Obviously, my parents will get their copy. But two and a half years? jeeeeeeez. And I opened it up to find that it is not the print out with nice pictures that the copy I got from my Uni library is-- it's a photocopy. No, really, a photocopy. Two and a half yeas for a photocopy? It's bound in hideous plastic covered cardboard in a shade of blue I can only think if institutional elementary school bathroom tile. Perhaps UMI stands for Unbelievably, Mindbogglingly, Inefficient.
Other than that, I read this article, and was depressed and sad, missing my erstwhile home in PP, and just disgusted to see the way these things fall out....
So, the state of Virginia celebrates a holiday I'd never heard of before-- even when I was living in the District. In fact, I didn't hear about it last year when I was living in the Commonwealth, but working in the District. And P, who lives and works in VA, mentioned it to coworkers, who all live and work in VA, but they'd never heard of it either. *But*, there are certain sectors of the state that observe this holiday, so I had it off this year. What holiday? Lee-Jackson Day. That would be Robert E. and Stonewall. It fell (I assume probably always falls) on the Friday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I'm told that the state used to wrap these up into a single day-- Lee-Jackson-King Day, which feels a bit at cross purposes, really. As my dad said when I mentioned this to him, that isn't exactly a threesome one would expect to be going out for a beer together. At some point the Reverend Dr. was given his own day, free of generals, and for those institutions that observe both days, a four day weekend in January appeared.
What to do with a four day weekend in January? I don't ski (well, downhill, anyway), and with global warming it isn't like there's a lot of skiing going on in any case. I suppose we could have gone to Miami or something, but in the post-wedding dollar crunch, we aren't planning to go anywhere that involves a plane. Or a hotel, if we can help it. Which meant visiting family, and we'd just seen my parents when they came down for Phil's opening. Soooo.... Tennessee hoooooooooooooo!
We had a really good time.... the only bummer being the Very Long Drive. But we got to see P's family, and even got in some photography time, with his father and stepbrother taking us off to different abandoned spots to do some shooting (this being more to my benefit than anyone else's. Thanks!).
The next day I was able to shoot for a good long while in an abandoned trailer, including a fair number of 4x5 sheets , which had basically been impossible the day before (it takes too long to set each image to really work in the cold).
Hey Polaroid execs! I hope this comes back to haunt you!
The picture above was made with now obsolete Polaroid 54, peel apart film for 4x5 cameras.
Update: The WaPo has an article on the death of polaroid. They blame Flickr (though, judging by groups like Polaroid, Polaroid addiction monkey, Polaroid SX70, Polaroid Edge, Polaroid Land Camera, to name a few--- all of which have over a thousand members, Flickr doesn't seem to be the problem) and the appearance of digital (or at least the appearance of cheap digital cameras) for Polaroid's demise.
There's an interesting article in the NY Times about women in Thai kickboxing. It's interesting for a lot of reasons, in particular because the kickboxing ring has traditionally been seen as male ritual space, with women being banned from it because of their potential (particularly during menstruation) for messing with the manly juju.
When I was living in Cambodia (something I've been thinking about a lot lately.... I miss it), I used to go to the kickboxing matches in Phnom Penh almost every weekend. The ones on Sunday at the Women's and Veterans' ministry arena (don't ask) were the best,
though I also enjoyed the occasional Saturday bout at the TV station. (Though not when the had the little guys-- seven year olds going at it "just for joking," though they were doing each other damage).
I got a press pass at one point, so that I could take pictures, and while the TV station really didn't care where I was (I crawled all up on the edges of the ring, my press pass flying), I was sent down off the edge of the ring during the Sunday matches, press pass or no, because I was of the wrong sex. All the male photojournalists were up on the edge of the ring, but I was only allowed on the floor around the ring, as I might have sent the juju all into a tizzy. It should be noted that the TV ring also had round girls in miniskirts who walked around the ring with numerals on cards to let you know what round it was. No such thing happened on the Sunday bouts.
I was also interested in the article because I trained, ever so briefly, at a camp in Chiang Mai. I got my butt kicked. A lot. Pretty much all the time, in fact.
I'd been planning to write something about the wetplate jamboree.... but what could possibly describe it? So I'll just put up some pictures....
We stayed down in Watkins Glen, and I took P for a quick walk up the gorge there, which is really beautiful. We zipped over to Ithaca as we headed out (going East to Massachusetts to visit another wet plate artist and my family, ever so briefly), had lunch at one of the Korean places, and then walked a bit around the campus. It was really weird being back on my old stomping grounds, and really really weird to be back on the campus. I took P around the Arts & Sciences quad (which is where I spent most of my time), and then took him into the library to show him my erstwhile carrel-- the locked one that was the original birdcage (I used to send out emails to friends from my laptop while locked in there with my dissertation, the subject line reading: missives from the birdcage). He said it made him imagine me in an orange jumpsuit locked in there. I spent a year and a half locked in that thing, usually for something like twelve or more hours a day, six, and sometimes seven days a week. Grad school can be so ridiculous, no? Though I do deeply miss the freedom to read many hours a day without judgment. If I read that many hours a day now (books, as opposed to reports or files), I'd be considered a slackass. But in grad school I was diligent. *sigh*
Anyhoo, after squiring my dear P around the library (here are the stacks where I whiled away years, here is the carrel I had the first three years I was here-- the one with the great view), not seeing a soul I knew, I told him the story of the pumpkin appearing on the clock tower (which he spent a lot of time pondering the logistics of), and then took him through the grad housing complex where I worked in exchange for housing (an excellent deal, except when someone called you at three in the morning to say that the dryer had eaten their quarter. Uh, this phone is for emergencies. But this is and emergency-- my clothes aren't going to be dry! That is an actual conversation that I had, at three in the morning). And then we headed off, alighting briefly in New England before heading south.
Of course, the Finger Lakes are lovely for about two and a half months of the year, and we visited in the middle of that period, so it was beautiful, with perfect weather, delightful views, and all that good stuff. When I'm up there in the summer it makes me miss it a bit, and a felt a little pang of jealousy for the couple at the jamboree who are from California and bought a summer cabin on the other side of the lake that they are fixing up themselves. But, you know, it doesn't take long before I remember the Finger Lake winter and the three foot snow storms and that it is five + hours from everything.... But in the summertime you'd be hard pressed to find a lovelier spot.
We had a chock full weekend involving art, performance, travel, and lots and lots of flarn.
Thursday we went to the opening performance of 33 Variations at Arena Stage. It was very enjoyable, alternatively moving and funny, and good performances all around. We both liked it a lot, particularly the set design and lighting design. There's an interesting article about it in the WaPo.
Friday was taken up with much wedding necessities, various flarn tasks, and then driving north. I wanted to take P on a surprise trip, and didn't want him to know where until we got there, but he figured it out when we were about 50 miles away. Of course, when booking out hotel for the evening on Travelocity, they failed to mention that the Days Inn, ahem, "near the zoo," was in fact in a rather dicey place. Pulling off the highway P said "isn't this the part of Philly where all the murders are always happening?" We rolled up to the Days Inn Ghetto at about nine at night, having passed a number of neighborhood characters along the way. What did I know? I mean, when the Fabulous Miss A lived in Philly and my parents were just across the bridge I always visited her in Center City or when into CC with my mom or whatever. I didn't spend a whole lotta time elsewhere (except for, you know, the airport).
So. We pull into the parking lot where a bottle blond woman who is clearly on the clock is leaning into an SUV while her bare booty is flashing everyone. Uh-huh. I go into the lobby to check in and wait in line behind a loud, dirty woman who smells very bad and is calling everyone either "honey," "sugar," or "baby." Behind the bullet-proof glass is a South Asian man in his forties who is angry. He won't look at anyone unless you demand that he talk to you, and even then maybe not. He seems to be thinking, "Damn all of you, I have a degree in engineering and came to America to make my fortune as an engineer and here I am dealing with the dregs of society in a hotel. I should have stayed in Lahore." He pointedly ignored me as I waited, and also pointedly ignored the man banging on his window saying, "where can I get a orange juice, man? I needs an orange juice. Where can I get a orange juice?" Smelly lady finally moved on, though stopped to tell the orange juice man, in a booming voice, "YOU CAN GET ORANGE JUICE AT THE STORE, HONEY. JUST WALK OUT HERE PAST THE IHOP AND YOU CAN GET A JUICE AT THE STORE, BABY."
The other man behind the glass was older, sporting little round glasses, it was a bit like having Ben Kingsley playing Ghandi getting your hotel key. He also seemed a bit like he may have been on a hunger strike because he was moving very very slowly. When I got back out to the parking lot the woman was still hanging her bare booty out of the SUV. We parked and went inside, contemplating whether or not the Jeep would be there in the morning.
The halls smelled of stale smoke (surprise), and the room smelled of deep seated damp. Surprisingly, we had a quiet enough sleep, mostly because the A/C ran at about 10,000 decibels. It was like having an airplane taking off continually in the bedroom. We got up early and headed into the city, thankful to find the Jeep there and in one piece.
Coffee, breakfast, I took Phil to the Mutter Museum, which was the reason why I'd decided to take him to Philly in the first place. I think I've had it on my mind recently, as I've been thinking a lot about Wunderkammers, and the Mutter is probably as close to a Wunderkammer that you can get at this point.But also because I knew that it was something that he'd be interested in (and he was).
While in Philly we saw signs up for the Franklin Institute of Science saying that they had a King Tut exhibit. Whoo! Since both of us had had a major impression on us made at a young age by King Tut mania in the sevenites, but had never had a chance to go see the actual exhibit, we were all over it. It was an interesting exhibit.... but it was also highly disappointing. If you click on the link you will see that all of their advertising has what appears to be the famous mask (it's actually a much much smaller piece that was obviously chosen for the advertising due to its resemblance to the most famous pieces from the tomb). But, while the exhibit was chock full of neat stuff that was in his tomb (canopic jars, chairs, helper statues), neither the sarcophogus nor the mask were anywhere to be found. The stuff got progressively more interesting and ornate as we went through, and we rounded that final corner thinking, well, here, at last will be the mask! And then found ourselves in the gift shop. It was a very pricey show, and falsely advertised. Not a bad show, but I think we both would have enjoyed it more if we'd known that we weren't going to see the most famous pieces-- and since they choise a piece that invokes it to be shown on all the posters and ads the implication is certainly that we should expect to see them.
We also would have enjoyed it a lot more if there were fewer people. Good gravy. Lots of people lost in their audio tours, blocking the view forever while they listen to the droning voice on the tape, stumbling like zombies through the exhibit. And lots of people with kids who were too young to really make it through an exhibit that long, one man getting angry at his seven year old for not being interested in or fascinated by the same things he was interested in and fascinated by. "Well you'd know that if you'd been paying attention, but you weren't!" Dude, he's seven. This is the sixth room of stuff. His attention isn't mature enough for that. Give the kid a break.
Also packed into the weekend were a photo trip to Arlington National Cemetery (lots and lots of people there) and a trip to the National Gallery to see the photography show on modernity in Central Europe. The show was very interesting, with some really lovely photographs, and an interesting view on the development of photography in Hungary, Czech, Slovenia, Russia, etc. It's definitely worth a trip down there to take a look-- and is closing soon, so hop to it.
We went to the gallery with friends of ours and we all went to a new-ish Mexican place on 7th afterwards where we had a whole lotta margarits (which were very good, and made me very sleepy). Standing on the corner by the Archives metro stop afterwards, about to head in opposite directions, we chatted for a while, until a very happy man came up to the group and announced, "Someone said that there's gonna be ducks coming out of the cake!" He smiled and moved on. And with that, we headed home.
Over the weekend I took a wee photography road trip with my friend Craig. I don't have a car, so road trips are always an awesome distraction from my rather rooted-in-D.C. life. (I have been cranky about this lately. I'm not feeling any less cranky about it today, which is why I'm going to follow that up by saying: I lived in New York for years and never felt bummed or annoyed or boxed in by my carlessness and roadtriplessness. Sometimes D.C. seems so irredeemably small.)
Anyhoo.
I do love me a road trip, and road trips that involve photography are my favorite kind of road trips. This was a road trip that involved photography and exploring industrial ruins, another thing that I love. Unfortunately, it also involved winter, which involves being cold, which is something I hate above all things. Okay, not all things per se, but above many many things. Most things. A whole lot of things.
It also involved my needing to get to Baltimore on Saturday to meet Craig, and since the MARC doesn't run on weekends (because that would be smart and convenient), this meant taking the Greyhound. *sigh* Twenty minutes into the ride that was supposed to take forty-five minutes the bus grinds to a halt, along with all the other traffic on 295. Fire rescue vehicles, ambulances, police cars.... lots and lots of lights coming up from behind. The traffic inches along for an hour. No traffic coming from the other direction either-- 295 closed in both directions. Just as we were inching towards the exit everyone was being directed to take I saw the medivac helicopter land on the highway up ahead. Never a good sign.
So I arrived late. He went to pick up the rental car, and I got to take in a little bit of the Bawlmer bus stop flavah. Ten people sitting on the bench outside, waiting for their rides to show up in the late afternoon sun. A woman in her forties comes out by the benches, wanting to smoke a cigarette, and wanting to engage someone in conversation. How to engage a bunch of people you don't know in conversation? Ask a question! A silly one!
"Y'all waiting for the Peter Pan?"
This is not the side where the busses come. All the busses are clearly on the other side of the building. Where she came from. Everyone looked at her, briefly, with that pained look on their faces. Several men told her that the busses were actually around the other side.
"I was just wonderin', cousin I seen the Peter Pan sign up there." Points to wall behind benches. It also says Greyhound. Long pause. "I liked-ed the Peter Pan. They use to go to Philly. Back in the day. I wish they was still driving to Philly. The Peter Pan."
The same men tried to explain that Greyhound had bought out Peter Pan and they were now the same company. Too much for her to process. "I liked the Peter Pan. They was cheaper than Greyhound and they had videos on the bus, you know... the little televisions with DVDs? I liked the Peter Pan to Philly." She rambled on like that for a while... it was kind of regular rambling so I was able to go back to my book and block her out.... until she started screaming about the birds.
At the end of the bench were two dudes-- dorky dudes in their late twenties, dressed in black, one kind of overweight, long stringy hair, probably played a lot of D&D (or the massively-multiplayer equivalent)... One of them had a bag of goldfish crackers and he'd thrown a couple to the flock of seagulls (the regular kind, not the British Invasion New Wave kind), who had swooped down to try to snatch them. At which point the woman who liked to take Peter Pan to Philly freaked the hell out.
AAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! THE BIRDS!!!! THE BIRDS!!!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! I'M AFRAID OF BIRDS!!!!! AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
She started kind of leaping sideways, like a cat, away from the birds, continuing to yell:
I got a thing about birds! I'm scared of birds! Why you feeding them birds?? Why you feeding them? Why? Why?! Stop! STOP! STOP FEEDING THEM BIRDS! I'm scared of birds! They come down and snatch at you, snatch at what you got in your hands! Snatch at you! Birds will do that! I'm scared of birds! Why you gots to feed them bird where people be walking! You feed them birds someplace else!
Whoa, Nellie. She was not happy about the addition of bird into the mix. Everyone kind of looked at her wide eyed for a moment. Then the man sitting next to me got up and clapped and stomped at the gulls until they flew away. The long haired dude stopped feeding them. The woman, still skittish, went back to talking about inane things... television shows, movies she'd watched riding the Peter Pan, the weather. After a while things seemed to calm down until she turned around and saw that the gulls had regathered on the sidewalk.
Aaaaaahhhhhhh!!!! The birds! The birds are back! I'm scared a birds!! I'm scared, I got a thing about them birds!!!! I got to go back inside where there aren't any people feeding the birds right where people are walking. Why would you do that? Why would you do that where people are walking??
She was truly outraged. Then she turned to the man who had stomped them away before and asked that he help her by escorting her past those scary birds to the inside of the bus terminal. Ever the gentleman, he did as she asked. Eventually a geeky guy in a broken down Honda picked up the two geeky long haired dudes. A woman dressed entirely in skin-tight black, white, and grey camouflage and black go go boots smoked a cigarette and was picked up by a guy sporting a gold grill. The bird lady didn't come back. Craig showed up in a sporty rental car, the rental place having run out of economy cars. Everyone looked, commented on how nice it was. As we drove off the gentleman who'd helped the bird lady was still waiting for his ride.
I used to own a motorcycle. I was very attached to it, and miss having it (and continue to curse the crazy woman who totaled it-- while I was on it, mind you--with her car because she was late for her aerobics class). It was a Minsk, a large, metal-framed bike made in Minsk, Belarusse based on the design of a BMW bike, circa 1946. It had a persnickety two-stroke engine, was incredibly loud and spat hot oil from a couple of different places. For the first few months it blew through spark plugs at the rate of two a week, and I became a spark-plug changing master. I learned how to say lots of motorcycle parts in Vietnamese and spent quality time with my mechanic in Danang. I drove up and down Vietnam a few times, drove down the Ho Chi Minh trail, moved on it from Danang to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, took it on what I was hoping would be a Southeast Asian loop, from Phnom Penh into Thailand, looping back through Laos and then into Vietnam where I would sell it in Hanoi, say goodbye to friends, stop briefly in Phnom Penh and head to France for my last two months of research.... the late-for-her-exercise-class woman was in Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand, and that ended that.
I was going through some of my photographic archives (I suspect this will take up most of my "free" time well into my old age, as I've been terribly lazy about it for twenty years) and found a roll of medium format film from my first solo motorbike trip, which I took a couple of weeks after I got the bike. I threw the bike on the train and went up to Hanoi to make yet another (failed) stab at the archives and visit some friends. From there I drove up to Mai Chau, a small town in the mountains northwest of Hanoi. Just outside of town there is a White Tai village-- a cluster of stilt houses surrounded by rice paddies and mountains. It's in a beautiful valley, the weather is usually pleasant and the scenery stunning. So I headed up there for a few days of chilling out.
The first couple of days I mostly hung out, chatted with the family whose house I was staying in, made pictures, read a book.... exactly what I'd been looking to do. The evening of the third day a minibus pulled up at the edge of the village, disgorging twenty backpackers, mostly in their twenties and thirties, mostly German, but with a clutch of young British women, an older Aussie couple, and a middle-aged American woman who kept going on about what lovely, peaceful people the Vietnamese were, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, while most of the other people she'd met on her trip were Vietnamese, these people were actually White Tai. The village wasn't as calming as it had been anymore, which was fine since I was planning to leave the next day anyway, though I lost all of my conversation partners as many of the people in the village had to go to work setting up places for the backpackers to sleep, gathering ingredients to make meals for them, and hanging out clothing to sell (the village was heavily engaged in weaving and there were looms under most of the stilt houses, clacking away). I went back to my book.
An hour later the group's tour guide, a Vietnamese guy about my age, sat down next to me at the table where I was reading and started talking at me in English. He had longish hair and was slickly dressed, and told me his name was Van. The woman who was hosting me (it was a bed and breakfast and dinner and lunch arrangement) brought out dinner for me. He barked at her rudely in Vietnamese, demanding a bottle of bia hoi (a not fully fermented beer that you can get all over Vietnam. It's alcoholic, but less so than regular beer, and is lighter). He ignored that I was reading, ignored that I was answering his questions in a way that was civil but not encouraging him to continue. Ignored that I was markedly unimpressed that he was being so rude to the woman whose front yard he was sitting in. He went on for a long while, and I began to pointedly ignore him. He petered out, and I hoped that was the end of it.
Then my hostess walked by with plates for food for a couple other tourists from the guy's group who had sat down at one of the tables in the yard. She stopped by after giving them their food and said, in Vietnamese, "Sister Giang, the women are going to dance at the house over there in an hour. You should go watch-- they dance beautifully." I thanked her, but now dude knew I could speak Vietnamese, which he got very excited about and burst into a whole new line of questioning. He also knew my name, which was a real bummer. (My American name is particularly ill-suited to Vietnamese, so at the suggestion of several Vietnamse friends and a teacher of mine, I took a Vietnamese name just to make life easier for everyone. The name that was suggested to me was Giang-- pronounced like "Yahng"-- and means river). His questioning turned in a particular direction, and he was relentless.
"Do you have a husband yet?" I must have been asked this question a million times in Vietnam. In fact, at the time I *did* have a husband, but we had been separated for a year and a half, so it was often far more expedient to just say "not yet" rather than explain that I was getting a divorce, which has a certain stigma. I'd already told the people in the village that I'd been chatting with for the past few days that I had "not yet" gotten a husband, so as much as I wanted to tell him yes, I have one, he's coming later, I'm going to meet him, anything to end this conversation, I felt compelled to say "not yet." He moved his chair closer. "Why not?" I answered with the joke that I usually answered with (one of my first successful stabs at humor in Vietnamese) "Ohhh, toi e chong roi." Which bascially means that I'd passed my expiry date for husband-hunting.
He moved his chair closer. I scooted my chair away. Oh noooooo, you aren't "e" at all! Moves his chair closer. Puts his hand on my leg. I move my leg away, scoot chair away. I don't have a wife yet myself. Moves chair closer, touches my leg again. I move my leg away, scoot chair away. Mercifully, someone called him away to deal with some issue with his group. I'll be back soon, he said, while I hoped against hope that he would do no such thing.
At the performance that night he made the people sitting behind me move so that he could sit at my shoulder. He kept leaning forward and whispering things in my ear. I shifted to the side, scooted forward, as I was in the way of the dancers I was trying to get away from him. At the point where the dancers finished performing and invited audience members to come up and learn how to do the dance I slip away from him in the crowd as he asks me to dance with him.
The next morning I pack up my bag, strapping it on my bike, and sit down out in the yard to drink coffee and eat a bowl of noodles before heading out. Van appears (groan) and sits down next to me. "You disappeared last night. I wanted to dance with you." No one can be this clueless, right? "I didn't want to dance with you." He clicked his tongue at me condescendingly. It was clear that he did, in fact, believe that my husband-finding expiration date had come and gone, and that I should just be grateful for getting so much male attention at my age (I was 29 at the time). "You should come with us," he said. "You can ride in the jeep with me." (There was a minibus and a Russian jeep in their group).
I pointed to my Minsk. "I have a motorcycle."
He looked stunned. "You drive that?"
"Yes, I drive that." He stumbled a little.
"You shouldn't travel by yourself, though. It's dangerous."
"I don't think it's dangerous."
"It is, though! Lots of bad things can happen. You should at least follow us, stay with us while we go to Sapa."
"I
can't. I'm going to meet my boyfriend." I had no boyfriend, I made him
up, but he wasn't quite grasping the go-it-alone-feminist thing.
"You have a boyfriend?"
"Yes."
"He is Vietnamese?"
"No.
He is Australian. He is very tall, and very strong. And very, very
jealous. He is on a motorcycly trip and I am meeting him."
"Oh."
Soon afterward he got into his jeep and took off with the backpackers, though he yelled out the back of the jeep at me as he drove away that he loved me. I looked at him blankly and went back to my coffee before heeding out on my bike. And that, I figured, was that.
Six Months Later
I was in Saigon, flipping through CDs in a shop in the Saigon backpacker ghetto of Pham Ngu Lao, and I hear someone yelling, "Giang! Giang! Giang, oi!" I looked up briefly at the man yelling my name. He came towards me, his arms open, like he was going to hug me. I must have looked puzzled-- at first I didn't recognize him, and I recoiled from him, some strange man trying to hug me. "It's me! Van!" Even so, I couldn't figure out who he was, so I was still looking at him, perplexed. "From Mai Chau! I am a tour guide!" It clicked. Shit. Without thinking about it, I decided to continue my initial reaction of confusion and non-recognition.
"Who?"
"Van! You are Giang! You speak Vietnamese!"
"No, I don't. My name is Karen."
"No, you are Giang! We met in Mai Chau!"
"Is that in Vietnam?"
"Yes, of course!"
"I only got here yesterday, from Cambodia. We've never met."
Laughing. "Oh that is a good joke. Come on, Giang!"
"My name is Karen."
"No, you are Giang and you are American! You are from New York!"
"No, I'm Karen. I'm American, but I'm from California."
He paused. Looked at me perplexed. Shook his head.
"No.... you are the same... you have to be.... you..."
"Seriously, dude, I've never met you. I'm just traveling through. I've been in Cambodia for the last three weeks."
More perplexed looking. "I.....I'm sorry... you look so much like her. Are you sure."
"Yeah, dude. Really, I don't know you."
He shook his head. "I'm sorry... I... you know, it's so hard to tell foreigners apart... sometimes you all look alike."
I nearly lost it there. Oh the irony! And I was starting to feel bad for the guy because he was so confused, but I just could not deal with the idea of him propositioning me.
I ended up traveling twice in December-- once out to AZ for Phil's birthday, and then a week after I got back to DC I was back at National waiting for my flights up to New England to see my family. In general I don't mind flying, and usually just sort of see it as a chance to catch up on my reading. Of course, I also often stupidly pack work reading, either from work, or research stuff that used to be "school" work when I was in grad school and that I don't know what to call now that I'm out of school but didn't go into academia. Aparently I'm smart enough to get the Ph.D., but not smart enough to learn from my packing mistakes. Until this last trip to New England, where I packed one research book, one fun book, and a copy of the New Yorker. I was only flying to Connecticut, so this should be more than enough. And it probably would have been if any of my flights had been on time.
Sigh.
For reasons totally unclear to me National seems to have decided to moved all the self check in terminals and restructure the lining up procedures for flights. I ran into this on the was to AZ, and it happened again on the way to Hartford. It's complete pandemonium-- none of the passengers has any idea what line they are in. I walked up and down the line asking if they were there for self check in. Half the people say yes, half say no. At the AZ flight I ask the woman at the desk where the line for self check in is and she sighs and says she's too busy to answer me. I wait in line for forty minutes as people mill and meander, watching people jumping the line because they assume that the whole line can't be for self check in. Going to Hartford I recognize the goat rodeo that has become check in. I ask people in line if they are there for self check in. After four people in a row say "I don't know," I ask the woman at the self check in-- is this line for you? She says no. That's the line for checking in with an agent. I announce this to the line as I step into the space behind the self check in guy. Half the line moves in behind me, all shaking their heads. I tell the woman as she tags my bag that no one knows where they are supposed to be in line because there isn't any signage or direction. She shakes her head, disgusted, and says, "That's not my fault." Uhm. Okaaaay.
I was routed through Texas on my way to AZ (this always happens). On the flight to Houston I got stuck next to a Vietnamese couple in their early sixites. Of course I did, because it's like I have a homing device. If there is a Vietnamese person on a flight I will end up next to them. I worried that I would get dragooned into walking them through the airport. I didn't. Instead, they drove me crazy, as I found it impossibe to tune them out. They bickered at each other in Vietnamese pretty much the entire way. The woman was sitting in my seat when I got to the row and she decided to play stupid. If she had asked me to switch so she could have the window seat I would have taken the aisle seat. But when her husband said in Vietnamese, "Oh, someone is sitting there," and she answered, "Oh, just keep quiet, act like you don't know what she's saying. She'll give up." Well, then I got annoyed and said, in Vietnamese (in response to her pointing to her ticket stub, which she waved, saying in Vietnamese, "I have seat B! I have seat B!") "Yes, you have seat B-- and this (pointing to the middle seat is seat B. I have seat A. You're in it." She sighed, and moved, but refused to get out of the seat, forcing me to climb over her. She was sick and she kept sneezing in my direction all through the flight. She was dripping with jade and gaudy gold jewelry and clicked and clattered every time she moved, the six jade bangles on either arm clanging into each other. I was utterly exhausted-- the flight had left at butt early o'clock and I had only had two hours of sleep- and finally managed to fall asleep-- just as they started passing out breakfast boxes. I was far more interested in sleeping than in eating crappy food. Ms. Jade decided that I should make sure to get my box, and woke me up to get it. I could have strangled her. I waved the box away, glared at her, and failed miserably at getting back to sleep.
Getting off the flight the couple in front of me, on their way to Hawaii, the wife in law school in D.C., gets into a conversation with the woman in front of them (also in law school in D.C.), and in the course of the conversation they tell the other law student how they were robbed at gun point in my neighborhood at 11 at night on the previous weekend. They've lived in D.C. for six years, so not tourists. I put that into the general blechiness I've been feeling about living here lately. Between the breakin and the recently published crime statistics, I'd already been feeling a bit oogie about things.Then, while I was in Arizona, there was a fatal shooting two blocks from my office, in front of the 7-11 where I usually get something to drink at around the time that the shooting happened. Listening to people describing being held up very close to my apartment is not helping with the feeling okay about where I live thing.
On the flight to Tucson I was stuck in the middle seat an overweight woman on my left who spilled over the arm rest and into my personal space. She kept sticking her right foot into the middle section of the leg space-- my limited leg space. The other woman had lost all concept of personal space. She kept her elbow on the arm rest the entire flight, and read a newspaper, which she opened up completely so that her left arm was half way across the middle seat in front of us. I was scrunched up into a little ball being smacked by arms on either side.
On the way back to DC I was, thankfully, allowed to have physical personal space, though my aural space was all kinds of violated. I sat down on the flight back to Houston and a large woman in her forties with long blond hair and bangs sat down in the seat behind me. She made a cell phone call, and whomever she was calling wasn't there, so she left a message: "Bob? I read the report you gave me and it's complete shit. You should call these people back and tell them that if they weren't complete idiots and someone in their group had bothered to go to school they would realize that these results that they are prediciting aren't possible and only a complete moron with no education would come to these conclusions." She went on and on and on about what fools the report writers were, and how uneducated they must all be, and interspersed it with notations on delamination (or something like that). She hung up, dialed another number, got another voice mail, and spouted the same, acidic rant on the idiocy and lack of education. After she'd left the third such message, the woman next to her said, "problem with work?", allowing the blond to launch into a rant about how she's surrounded by idiots at work. She's an engineer, used to do defense contracting, now does work for the construction industry, she changed over because she wanted normal hours, but she's in such incredible demand that her hours are just as crazy as before. "Look at this-- I'm going to visit my family and they are grabbing me on the way out the door, begging me to read this report and give my opinion on it! Well, I've done my due diligence." They talked for the rest of the flight. Loudly.
On the upside, I wasn't stuck next to any people without any personal space understanding, or who feel the need to go on and on about how other peoples' work is shit on my way to or from New England. Instead, I got the more classic delays and inspections.
I don't know what it is about me, but for as long as I can remember, I am always the one who gets pulled out of lines to have my bags searched. I used to just think that I must be hitting some list of criteria-- I was young, traveling alone, coming from Southeast Asia, dressed kind of backpackerish. I always figured that they were looking for opium or something when my Bangkok-LAX flight landed and I ended up in the "check extra carefully" line. But when I got older and started wearing suits on these flights I still got inspected. The drug dogs would walk right by me and I would still get extra inspected. It continues to happen now. I'm in my mid-thirties, I'm traveling to Tucson or Chicago or San Francisco, and I still get pulled out of line to be inspected. I also get those little mash notes in my checked luggage from TSA. I don't mean occasionally. I mean 75% of the time. On the way up to Hartford the security people red flagged my ticket and I was sent through the giant air blasting machine. Then they checked my shoes, jacket, and bags for explosive traces. When I got to Hartford I had a note from TSA in my checked bag. On the way back I was red flagged again and my shoes, jacket, and bags were checked for explosive traces. When I opened my checked bag last night looking for my hair brush, there it was again! Another note from TSA.
Of course, I almost didn't make it up or back. I was supposed to fly with Delta. But the flight was delayed and delayed and delayed out of DCA. It was obvious that I wasn't going to make my connection at JFK. Did anyone announce it? No. In the last month everyone has become allergic to announcing delays. The first announcement was made only when it was 45 minutes after the flight was supposed to have taken off. Those with connections were sent upstairs to rebook, where I was told they could reroute me through Atlanta and I would arrive at almost 2am. And I arrived at the airport early for this. I thought not. I am not flying south so that I can add four extra hours of travel time so that my parents are forced to pick me up in the middle of the night. She eventually booked me on a US Air flight that went direct and got in an hour and a half later than I would have if my flights had all been on time. She did this at my insistence-- but only after she said, "but the US Air flight doesn't leave until 9pm! The Atlanta flight leaves in half an hour." Uhm... but you see, a direct flight, going straight north to Hartford-- you know, my destination is actually worth sitting at National for an extra two hours. As though the issue were not the 2am arrival, but the horror of sitting at National for one moment longer. Sheesh. I had a book.
Which was sadly not enough, since I ended up having eight hours of waiting/flying on the way up and thirteen hours on the way back. Once again, delayed canceled delayed canceled. Did anyone announce this? No. Forty-five minutes after my flight was supposed to leave I got a phone call from a woman at Delta telling me she was changing my booking. They never announced the delay. Once again, Delta couldn't get it together, and once again, I ended up flying direct to DCA on USAir. But not before I'd finished both books and the New Yorker and had to buy another book at the airport, which I got three quarters of the way through by the time the plane landed in D.C. For the first time in the history of all of my traveling I actually underpacked reading material. That never happens.
I ran home, changed, grabbed some high speed film and headed downtown to the Warehouse theater for the Lobsterboy Revue New Year's celebration, which was purdy damned entertaining, as always. I shot only film, so I won't have anything to show for it until the end of the week... though I should have film back from the Christmas Trixie Little/Evil Hate Monkey show tomorrow night. And for all of my talk of taking pictures of New England, I didn't. I shot a lot of my niece, who is ridiculously cute, but who was sick and was in the mood for sharing. So here it is, the first day of 2007, and I woke up this morning to the resurgence of the kitchen river (it rained last night) and with a sore throat and sniffly nose-- a gift from Layla.
In a couple of hours I head to the airport for my flight to Hartford. My parents recently moved back to Western Massachusetts from suburban Philly, and for the first time in a decade I'm going home for the holidays. Which is not to say that I haven't seen my family or spent Christmas with them for that long, I just always went to Boston where the rest of my family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins) live or converge. In the intervening ten years my parents sold the house where I spent most of my youth, moved to a condo in the same town, sold that, moved to a house in southern New Jersey, sold that and moved back to Western Mass., though not the same town where I went to high school (thank God for small mercies). I never saw the condo (except in pictures). And poking through pictures this morning, looking for something that said Pioneer Valley to me, I realized I had no such things... I recently found a roll of film of pictures I shot in high school... but they're pictures of high school, and could have been made anywhere, in any high school, in any town, sometime in the mid-eighties. I think they were shot my freshman year, and they are testimony to how dorky I was (but with an angry, punk rock sort of dorkiness... they kind that said, yeah, I play the violin...what are you staring at, assclown?). They are nearly all pictures of people I was in the orchestra and choir with, and a few scattered pictures of random people about whom I recall certain details, but often not their name. (The Brazilian girl whose family was, I think, Jehovah's Witnesses, who didn't celebrate Christmas, and who wouldn't do surgery when someone in her family was gravely ill... her father? her brother?... she didn't know what to do when I gave her a Christmas present, and I hadn't realized that I wasn't supposed to give her one. I have totally forgotten her name.In an appropriate bookending story, there's also a picture of Laura, whose mother once told us the story of how she scared off Jehovah's who came calling by answering the door in the buff and inviting them in to pray before some Buddha or Vishnu or Shiva statue.)
In any case, the pictures said "high school," but not "Western Mass.," so I ended up going with a picture I made in Maine when I was up there over the summer for a training thing for work. I mean.... New England? Good enough? Probably not really.... which is one of the reasons why I'm bringing a couple of cameras, though I suspect that I will, like I usually do when in my home state, become incapable of seeing anything worth making a picture of. It always makes me think of the people who look at you askance as you make an image of something they think of as ugly or bland or normal or pointless.... what are you taking a picture of that for? I think I glaze over when I'm home and everything seems like something not worth shooting. At the very least I figure I'll take a lot of pictures of my family. I recently found the negs from some family group portraits I did years and years ago... probably twelve... maybe even more like fourteen... years ago. I haven't had a chance to scan them yet, but they were sort of fascinating documents...
I'd also be thinking about how this week has seemed like the end of an era, what with the Godfather of Soul and Gerald Ford dying, and El Jefe seemingly on his last cigar. Though I suppose it's really more confirmation that the era has ended, rather than necessarily closing it. When I was teaching in my last semesters at grad school I had an epiphany one day that I was actually getting old because a) while I would have been very young, I was physically old enough to have given birth to my students-- college students; b) every face looked at me in complete, blank ignorance when mentioned the evacuation of the embassy in Saigon as an example of a pivotal moment in history (apparently 9/11 is the only pivotal moment now in existence); c) not a single one of them knew, even vaguely, who Ollie North was, though one said he'd "heard of" the Iran-Contra Scandal. I figure when college students view a decade as ancient history, it's time has probably come and gone. Of course, they didn't recognize things that happened in their own lifetimes, so perhaps that is an inappropriate bar.
In any case, Pioneer Valley, hooooooo! See y'all in the New Year!
In 1994 I spent a semester studying at the University of Nanjing in Nanjing, China. It's kind of a big town for foreign students-- there are four universities, including NanDa (where I was studying) NanShiDa (the teacher's college) and two science/trade universities. Between the four schools there were not only thousands of Chinese students, but also students from all over Europe, Asia, Africa, North Ameriaca, and Australia. (Other than hyphenated Americans I didn't meet anyone from South America-- they were likely there, but not well represented).
I was there during the fall semester with a group from the City University system (there are many stories about how wacky that whole thing was, but another time), a group of Chinese students invited us to a New Moon party, where we stood on the roof of one of the dorms at NanShiDa, looked at the moon, ate moon cakes, and chatted. There was one guy there who was an English major who'd had a little too much rice wine who spent an hour insisting on my Asian heritage. "Your mother is Chinese?" "No." "She is Korean?" "No." "She is Japanese?" "No." "She is Vietnamese?" "No." "She is Thailand person?" "No." "Uhhhmmm.... She is Burmese?" "No." Pause. "Your father is Chinese?" Repeat the whole list, and make it through both sets of grandparents. I insisted repeatedly that none of my ancestors that I knew of were Asian, but he was pretty adament that I had someone hiding in there somewhere. I think he left that night convinced that I was somehow ashamed of my heritage. It was an odd exchange, but it prepared me for years of people in Vietnam asking which of my parents was Vietnamese (because otherwise how could I know how to speak Vietnamese?).
Anyhoo, as a reciprocal gesture the City folk decided we would put on an American-style Thanksgiving do for the Chinese students who'd invited us to their New Moon party. This was spearheaded mostly by my roommate, K, and (to a lesser extent) myself. She gathered people together to accomplish a variety of tasks ranging from difficult to impossible, including finding a place with a kitchen big enough to make a Thanksgiving dinner for fifty, a place to eat it, a place to cook a turkey (China is-- or at least was-- virtually oven-less. Not a baked cuisine is Chinese cuisine.), and a place to bake pies, and where the hell do you get a turkey in a place where there aren't turkeys?
To this day I don't know the details of how that turkey ended up in our room. I know it involved F. (one of the City peeps) turning his language skills on and the only five star hotel in town, and I assume some sort of bribe, but beyond that, no idea. What I do know is that it was frozen rock solid, in a Butterball wrapper, and was a 32lb freak of nature. It sat in our wash bucket defrosting in our room for two days and was still frighteningly solid Thanksgiving morning. (We only had heat in the room for two hours a day-- one in the morning, and one in the evening. It was cool enough in that room to do some pork curing.) In the meantime, K. had managed to secure use of the university cooking school kitchen and dining room. She'd asked if there was an oven and was told, yes, the students of the cooking school learned baking techniques, so there was an oven. We prevailed upon the American grad student couple living there for two years teaching at the university who had an awesome apartment and a toaster oven to bake the pies (apple only-- you gotta work with what you can get) in the toaster oven.
K. and I, who had spent the evening before enjoying an evening out at the Sprite (don't ask, it's a long story), overslept. We woke up three hours later than planned, hung over, and were freaking out. That 32lb bird was, no way, getting cooked by the time the guests were arriving. Panic! The panic of lateness was quickly supplanted by the panic of realizing we hadn't figured out how to get a huge, heavy animal carcass to the other side of campus (more than two km away). A logistical nightmare-- we ended up hiring one of the cart bike guys to haul it over there in its washbucket.
Now, K. had asked if they had an oven, but she hadn't actually looked at the oven. We walk into the school's kitchen and there was an oven.... a pastry oven. If you've never seen one of these things, it's big, metal, and has several slots where you slide trays of pastries into it. It's like a multi-level pizza oven-- but with narrower slots. Let me reiterate here that we have a thirty-two pound Butterball turkey that we need to stuff into this thing. K. and I look at each other and we're like, oh shit. This is never getting done. That was when the butchering teacher came in. He ran classes teaching cooking students how to cut up and prepare carcasses. He looks at the bird, at the oven, laughs, grabs the bird and goes at it. In five minutes the bird was lying in the tin foil pan that F. had managed to get from the place he'd gotten the bird, spread eagle. K. and I shrug at each other. What else can ya do? It is what it is.I covered it in butter (the story involved with securing this box of buttersticks is epic. China was not a dairy culture) and herbs that I'd scrounged together (not all the herbs you think of at Thanksgiving, but you have to wing it sometimes), made a tin foil tent and slid the sucker into the pastry oven. We moved on to mashed potatoes, candied yams (well, sweet potatoes, we didn't see any yams at the market), green beans, carrots, and rice (because our guests would probably not have eaten if that wasn't provided).
That's when we realized that we didn't have a range top. We looked around the kitchen and, oh boy... lookee here.... a series of holes in the tiled counters where you dropped the charcoal braziers. K. went to get the head instructor, who was amused that we didn't quite know what to do to fire up the, erm... cooking holes. He got some cooking students to prepare the braziers. I can't begin to tell you how difficult it is to make proper gravy on an open fire. There's no "simmer" setting, if you know what I mean.
We kept cooking away, periodically basting the bird. Three and a half hours into the baking I lifted the tent to give it another baste and saw that the popper thingy had popped. I called K. over. It couldn't possibly be right, could it? I mean, it weighs a ton. Shouldn't it take like 47 hours to cook? But it was spread eagle... so the interior should cook faster... I dunno. We debated back and forth. Finally, we pulled it out to check, slicing through, and lo and behold, it was cooked and done. Just then one of the teachers from the school brought a group of students in to learn about Western cooking methods by watching us do our thing. Not that they saw many Western cooking methods-- I'm sure they left with a truly bizarre conception of Western cuisine and cooking methods. They were fascinated by the turkey, which they thought was a bit monstrous (which it was). They'd never seen a bird so big, and thought that it was a mutant chicken. One pointed to the popper thingy and asked what it was. I tried to explain in my not so great Chinese that it was the thing that told you when it was done. Well then they asked it they could have it. I tried to explain that it was a one time only sort of thing, and only worked with this kind of animal and only if you baked it. They did not care. I handed it over, and they all started fighting over it. Eventually the teacher took it to "study and research on his own later."
In the end, everything came out surprisingly well. It all tasted good (if not exactly like home). Someone even managed to get a can of cranberry sauce. The Chinese students all tried a bit, and while most were clearly not going to be clammoring for a repeat of the meal, I think a few had things they were surprised to find they liked.
And then we all sang karaoke, because that's what you do.