10

Meatballs from the Lord

Yesterday was my last day in Rome before the trip to Florence (we'll be back for a day at the end of my vacation), and MFAH and I spent it the best way possible: seeing Rome. At least the Trastevere part of it. One friend had recommended a shoe store in that neighborhood, and two other friends had recommended the same nearby restaurant.

No luck with the shoes; although there were some really cool ones, the ones that fit weren't comfortable and the ones that looked comfortable didn't fit. Then we had approximately four hours to wait until dinner. In Italy dinner doesn't seem to begin until 8:00 or so, but some restaurants that want to cater to early-rising tourists like us will open around 7:30. We wandered around the neighborhood, looking in shops but not buying anything, stopping once in a while for a coffee or a gelato, ducking into various churches and an art museum.

One of the churches, the basilica of Santa Maria, is probably in that top ten list I'll never actually write down. The floor plan dates from the 340s AD, making it one of the oldest churches in Rome, and its collection is distinguished by a bunch of Russian Orthodox art, which in my limited experience you don't usually see in Catholic churches. I'm not wild about religious art from the Renaissance and later, but I really love the two-dimensional icons and other art from earlier periods, especially Russian icons. This one had a seventh-century painting of the Virgin Mary on wood, called the "Madonna della Clemenza." There were also apparently four saints (count 'em!) buried underneath the altar, but I only discovered that after we left.

Eventually it was time for dinner, and although the proprietor of Spirito di Vino seemed miffed at first that we wanted him to open at 7:30, he quickly started to treat us like family. He was happy that Rebecca spoke some Italian and didn't seem to talk down to her; he was kind enough to address me in English and provided an English menu. He made recommendations but didn't insist; he sent his handsome son over to help us pick some wine; the son asked us what we like to drink, gave us a long look, asked "Do you believe in me?" and then came back with a delicious local blend. The highlight of dinner was an appetizer of veal meatballs that have given this post its title, by far the best thing ate while in Rome. Well... until dessert. The pasta course was good, and although I made the mistake of trying something odd for my main course (basically Indian-spiced chicken with rice), dessert made it all up to us. Here the proprietor insisted: he had a creme brulee, but "It's not like any creme brulee you've ever had." And it wasn't—it was the best damned dessert I've ever had, and it didn't even include cheesecake. That is saying a lot.

Oh, did I mention that the restaurant was in the oldest building in Rome currently used as a commercial establishment? And that the wine cellar dated from somewhere between 100 and 200 years before the Colosseum was built? If you find yourself in Rome, make a trip to Trastevere. You might find some good shoes, but you will have the meal of your life.

Now we're in Florence after an uneventful train ride. We tried to get into the Uffizi, but there's a national strike on. We did go into the supremely-ugly-on-the-outside Duomo, which has an interior and crypt that more than make up for the wedding cake 19th-century exterior, and then we wandered through the city museum, which is among the coolest museums I've ever been in. (I'm going to have to come up with a better description than "coolest [blank] I've ever [blank], because it keeps happening on these trips.) It's a great blend of modern museum design and the actual stuff you're there to see—pieces of ancient columns are set into plaster walls at the approximate height that piece would have rested had the column not crumbled, etc. Lots of wonderful statues (Shane, you'd be in photographic heaven!), carvings, and one of Michelangelo's unfinished pietas.

We're staying with Anne, an art historian who has a palatial apartment that I'd never be able to find again after one hell of a winding cab ride. We're going to relax, and although this place will be full of academics tomorrow evening, I think it will still be a wonderful visit for the next four days, until we return to Rome for one last evening before heading back to ungodly cold and snow.

Assisi

Yesterday we toured the hell out of Assisi, home of both St. Francis and St. Clare, who apparently were romantically entangled before they became saints. Probably not afterwards. We took the train to Assisi, which required us to get up at 6:30 in the damn morning. But it was worth it!

Assisi was really wonderful, made more wonderful by the very helpful cab driver who turned out to be the very helpful and expensive cab driver. He drove us waaay up the mountain to the monastery/abbey where St. Clare died; it's still a working monastery (or maybe a friary) where smiling friars in their Franciscan robes talked to Japanese tourists and either sang beautiful hymns behind closed doors or listened to CDs of other people singing. The driver then took us even farther up the mountain to the retreat where, almost 800 years ago, St. Francis communed with the animals and mortified his flesh in a cave. We saw the tree where he communed and the cave where he mortified; the whole place seemed very organic, dug into the side of a mountain and constructed of rough-hewn rocks made from that mountain. It was cold, foggy, and windy outside, dark and winding and mysterious inside, which made it seem like a nice place to set a medieval murder mystery.

After a truly terrifying drive at high speeds down narrow roads lined with wandering tourists, Mr. Friendly Cab Driver revealed himself as Mr. Expensive Cab Driver—the meter, which had been running all this time concealed behind an ashtray, revealed that we didn't have enough cash to pay for the trip. He was gracious about taking less than he thought he deserved, but even more gracious when we arranged for him to come back at the end of the day and pick us up. We wanted to see St. Catherine's church, but it was finishing up a mass and then was closing for two hours, so instead we had some really good sandwiches and pasta (good even though it was all mushroomy), then walked up the narrow, winding (really need different adjectives, but those are so well-suited) streets to Chiesa San Francesco, the church that was begun just six or eight years after St. Francis died and was quickly beatified. It's an amazing tri-level construction that bears little evidence of the extensive damage it suffered in an earthquake 15 years ago. On the top level is an enormous, gorgeous sanctuary lined with frescoes designed by Giotto that illustrate scenes from St. Francis's life. They show a grasping, beginning understanding of modern perspective. No pictures; there was a sad security guard whose job it was to hiss "no photo" and "silenzio" into a wireless microphone every few minutes.

Downstairs was another phenomenal sanctuary, its groin vaulting supporting the edifice upstairs. It was lined with 700-year-old stained glass windows, which is pretty amazing to think about, especially considering however many earthquakes it's probably endured. And below that is a small room containing St. Francis's tomb, along with the tombs of four of his closest followers. It's apparently pretty rare that class and rank were disregarded so that a saint could share his final resting place with ordinary mortals. I'm pretty immune to religion, but at this point I found myself wishing that I could share the rapt adoration I saw on the faces of the kneeling Catholics in this room. My admiration was for a monument of architectural ingenuity constructed in honor of a monument of human goodness.

Then it was back on the train, then an immorally delicious meal at a Sicilian restaurant, then almost twelve hours of sleep. Today is poking around in vintage shops, bookstores, and maybe a museum or two. (Maybe, ha! You can't take two steps here without wandering into a museum or two.)

Yo! Bum Rush the Raphael Room!

So very tired. We did the Vatican today, which, in retrospect, was a bad idea. It was closed yesterday, and there's some kind of religious holiday tomorrow, so today was the day when everyone and their kids flocked to the big V on their extra-long weekend. Add to that the fact that the guys in charge (you know, the pope and his cardinals) plotted a perverse, winding/upstairs/downstairs/tunnelsandbridges route we HAD to follow, stuffed in with hundreds of other people, and you get sore legs and a touch of agoraphobia even in the most stable of people. I was a wee bit weirded out by the experience. Worst was the entrance to the Raphael rooms, which prompted this post's title, which really says it all. I don't mean to disparage it; it's really wonderful. But it's too much to do in one chunk, and the way the tour is set up, you can't break it down into manageable pieces.

Later on we journeyed to some remote corner of Rome for a small-press book fair, which would have been nice except I was utterly exhausted and all the books were in Italian. I tried to relax in a cafe, but I couldn't figure out how to order, and then when I did figure it out, I realized that they didn't take credit cards and I had no euros. Alas. Now I'm going to bed by 10 because we leave for Assisi at 7:00 tomorrow morning. I hope to meet St. Francis; I'll keep you posted.

When in Rome, Eat at Cafes Like the Romans Do

So I'm in Rome, staying in Prati near piazza Mazzini. MFAH's been here teaching wealthy American university students about the Renaissance; back in Chicago, she shows slides of St. Peter's and lectures about it, but here, she takes the students to St. Peter's. But that's done now, and I'm the last in the parade of relations. Her mom Debbie, MFMIL, is here for a couple days, and we're staying in the cute little musician-owned apartment with its own huge veranda with a great view of one of the seven hills of Rome. Not sure which hill. There's a veranda cat named Luna, a doddering ancient thing that likes to have her face scratched and is covered with matted fur.

Calling the trip "eventful" is an understatement, because of the screaming old woman. She was suffering from some form of dementia and wouldn't take her medication despite the pleas of her son. She alternated between (1) screaming fits in Italian punctuated by vicious slaps to his face; (2) raging up and down the aisles insisting (I'm told) that she won't sit anywhere near him; and (3) napping to gather her strength for the next outburst. No sleep for me on that flight.

But I arrived in one piece. MFAH picked me up at the airport and we came back to the apartment, ran off for a quick visit to the Chiesa Sant Ivo Sapienza (pictured above), with a facade by some dude and the rest by crackpot genius Boromini. The interior is dazzling, surprisingly small, stark white (most Baroque stuff is more, well, baroque), and incredibly tall. We ate wonderful pizza at La Monteccarlo, Debbie dashed off to see an exhibit, and I quickly crashed. I vaguely remember the trip back to the apartment; I think at one point I walked for a block with my eyes closed. Took a much-needed nap, then we went and sat at the sidewalk cafe on the corner, drinking cappuccino, eating pastries, and listening to old Italian men argue. MFAH cooked a wonderful pasta with basil picked fresh from the veranda, and now she and Deb are trying to figure out how to get pictures off the camera, onto the thumb drive, and onto Facebook. I had more cappuccino so I can stay awake until a reasonable hour, then it's dreamland for me. The Sistine Chapel awaits us tomorrow.

Rome Part I

I feel like I've been sprinting through a museum, both because my feet hurt like hell and because I've been seeing Rome, the cradle of Western civilization, at a very high rate of speed. We got here late Sunday afternoon and found our way to the home of our friends Jennifer and David, and their children Lee and Isaac. They've spent the past year here and are returning to New York soon.

We spent Monday morning in ancient Rome and the afternoon in the Renaissance. MFAH, Jennifer, Lee, and I went to the Forum and wandered around. I was struck by how close together everything was; much like Chicago's own Milennium Park, where the sculptures are crowded together, forcing people to interact with each other, these monuments were crowded around a public space where everyday people from all over the Empire jostled together. (Yes, I just compared ancient Rome with the finest city in the Midwest.) Again, it was great to have such wonderful tour guides: both MFAH and Jennifer knew quite a bit about what we were seeing, and they were able to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of ancient Rome that Rome, I, Claudius, and Ben-Hur didn't fill. The highlight of the forum area was the house of Augustus, where you can still see original frescoes, or at least the fragments of them that haven't disintigrated yet. Both Jennifer and MFAH had horror stories about the disintigration of ancient artifacts: at Pompeii, there's a sort of crisis underway, as lots of the details that have been left exposed to the elements and to tourists' hands are gone, including some that MFAH's colleague wrote about only two years ago. The park employees were too pushy here: they gave you a set amount of time in each room and then started to usher you to the next. I understand they want to let as many people see it as possible, but a few minutes isn't long enough for more than a cursory look.

Lee and Jennifer left us after this, and MFAH and I went to see the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum. The Colosseum is a lot more impressive from the outside than from the inside; you can't go down into the basement, which is exposed, and although there is a wooden deck built at what would have been the floor level, you can't go out on it. Add to that the fact that the one bunch of seats that are "restored" are in fact completely wrong (there's apparently a lot of bad restoration around, most of it perpetrated under Mussolini and serving Fascist ends), and it's just not all that great. But the Arch of Constantine is amazing. When we were finished with the ancient stuff, we learned a valuable lesson about Rome: never eat lunch at a place that's within view of any ruins. We ate at a place outside the Colosseum, and we paid 15 euros (approximately $21) for what was basically a frozen TV dinner. Easily the worst meal we've ever had while traveling, and for MFAH, who has done significantly more traveling, that's really saying something.

After lunch was St. Peter's basilica, which a good friend called the greatest work of art ever created by man. I can't agree. It's impressive, certainly, but it's just too much. It's overdecorated, overstatued, overbronzed, overpillared, overpilastered, and overcooked. There are individual works of art that are phenomenal, but they're set against a Baroque riot of color and shape; the end result is incomprehensible and tiring. My favorite parts were the ceiling—which was, in fact, designed by Michelangelo instead of the overmannered Bernini—and the Bernini statues set into alcoves in the pilasters lining the nave. These Berninis were great because they were set against a plain background; since you could take them in as individual works, they didn't disappear into the exploding circus of the rest of the building. And of course, Michelangelo's Pieta, set off from visitors' grasping hands by plexiglass, was beautiful, but even more beautiful to me was an unlabeled and unidentified medieval bronze crucifix set along the wal of the Pieta's plastic prison.

Then we headed back to J&D's before heading out en masse to dinner, which was the best dinner so far on this trip: real Neapolitan pizza at an outdoor cafe. I need to rest a moment—I feel lightheaded just thinking about it. We went on a walking tour of the city center, where David, an architect; MFAH, a Renaissance art historian; and Jennifer, who studied art history, provided me with an incredibly detailed and passionate explaination of all the wonderful architecture we were walking by.

Of course not everything can be so wonderful: we may have fried our camera beyond repair; if it's beyond repair, all of the photographs we took of the Forum and St. Peter's are lost forever. It's supposed to function on either 110 or 220 volts, and it's charged without damage before on this trip, but when we plugged it in to recharge this time, there was a spark, and now it won't turn on. We bought a new camera today, and maybe we can get the old one repaired.

Tuesday morning we went to the Borgese museum, which specializes in ancient art but has a pretty nice collection of Renaissance and later periods. There was a special exhibition of Corregio, a minor Italian Renaissance painter. I don't like him: I don't like his fuzzy, insubstantial backgrounds, and I don't like the fact that none of his faces look "right," for lack of a better word. Most of them were rather unconvincing religious paintings, but there were two mythological subjects that both I and MFAH liked. We tend to mostly agree on art, except where we don't. But the highlight here was surprisingly Bernini, whom I didn't like at St. Peter's. Here they had a bunch of incredibly kinetic sculptures of Biblical and mythological scenes, and they really looked like the figures were about to burst out of their marble prisons and run across the room. And because they weren't surrounded by a surfeit of decoration, I could appreciate them as individual works of art. They might have been my favorite things in Rome, but the museum had one more surprise in store: a room full of Corregio's drawings, which were so phenomenal I'm going to buy a coffee table book of them when I get home. If he couldn't paint a face to save his life, he drew some so achingly beautiful that I could have spent the afternoon looking at them.

This afternoon we're shifting gears and going to Dario Argento's World of Horror, a combination shop and museum dedicated to the work of the king of Italian horror films. His films are celebrations of style over substance, of scenes of individual brilliance surrounded by halfhearted plots and burdened by substandard acting, so I think Bernini would approve of our visit, even if Michelangelo might not.

More later—we just got back from walking several hundred miles, and I'm tired.

Bergamo Means "Heaven" in Italian

In the sixteenth century, after generations of citizens of the northern Italian city of Bergamo suffered a series of invasions by the French and the Spanish, the Venetians (who were occupying Bergamo when it wasn't being occupied by the French or Spanish) built seventy-foot-thick walls to keep out future invaders. However, they left large gates open throughout the walled city, effectively rendering the barriers useless except to attract tourists. And they came, the tourists, in droves. (This was some time later.) My favorite art historian and I managed to sneak in too. Of course we are not tourists; she wanted to come here to do research on something in a museum, and the fact that the museum is closed and we're here looking at the same things as the tourists does not make us tourists.

We arrived here after an overnight train dropped us in Milan and we transferred to a commuter. Overnight train travel in reality bears absolutely no similarity to what Alfred Hitchcock and others have shown me in countless movies. For one thing, there's no plush dining car, or at least I didn't see one. More importantly, there's no room: we were stuffed into a compartment along with four other people, and the beds, which fold down from the walls, are narrow, hard, uncomfortable shelves so tightly packed together that I couldn't lie on my back because my feet would have touched the luggage rack. We were berth-mates to a gaggle of French high school girls on a camping expedition, so we had to endure their constant chattering, their enormous backpacks that didn't fit into any of the storage spaces, and the inevitable gaggle of chattering teenage boys along on the same school-sponsored camping trip. We waited until they had all moved on to talk loudly in the hall and in neighboring compartments, and we quickly pounced, pulling down the beds and installing ourselves in the top bunks. When the girls returned, they were forced to sleep or at least lie down and chatter. I think they decided on the latter, but I had taken some nighttime sinus medicine, so I was able to sleep fitfully until our arrival in Milan at 5:30 in the morning. We took a quick, surreal trip to the local cathedral (surreal because I think I was still asleep for most of it), which is notable for its triangular facade, and made it back in time for the commuter train to Bergamo, a small city in the north of Italy. After a nap at our hotel, the Golden Fleece (or Lamb), we started exploring.

It was incredibly beautiful there, with winding cobblestone streets too narrow for the cars that drove down them at high speeds, huge stone arches, little shops tucked into the sides of 500-year-old buildings, and hills. Lots of hills. The old city of Bergamo, the one surrounded by the porous walls, sits atop a mountain, and just about every direction is either downhill or uphill. While walking up one of them, we discovered the Church of Saint Erasmus, which, like just about everything else here, is undergoing restoration. The doors were half open, so we edged in, into one of the nicest vacation surprises either of us has ever had. A little old lady interrupted her duties—laying out programs for an upcoming service—and gave us an extended, private tour of the church, including areas that are normally locked away from the eyes of tourists. We wandered around behind the altar as she described the restoration process, the history of the church and the surrounding areas, and other things in Italian, which I do not understand at all. MFAH translated the important stuff, but it was sort of like subtitles on a foreign film: I got the information, but I missed the poetry. She led us down dusty halls, over and under scaffolding, and into the bowels of the building, talking rapidly all the while, until she shepherded us to what I'll call "the treasure room": a small room decorated with exquisitely painted, peeling, unrestored murals, topped by a vaulted ceiling lined with more paintings, and stuffed to the rafters with booty. (Can I call it booty? It would be booty if I were there to steal it. It would have made one hell of a haul for a pirate.) There were fabulous statues and candelabra and various carved and painted and gilded objets d'art, some being restored, some just moved there to get them out of the way of the scaffolding in the rest of the church. We got some wonderful photographs to go with our unforgettable experience.

But we had only a day there, and now we're on a train to Rome. The shouting children got off at the last stop, so it's relatively peaceful now. I'm watching the mountains of Italy roll past the windows, marveling at the ancient, tiny towns perched along rocky cliffs, all roofed with that pretty reddish tile that seems to be the national roofing of Italy, at least the few parts of Italy I've seen. Sometimes we go through miles-long tunnels, and I marvel at the effort involved in linking together cities in a region this mountainous. I'm wondering what we'll do when we get to Rome, where we're staying with a college friend of MFAH's, her husband the architect, and their children. I'm wondering how the show went last night at my theater, where my new minions were on their own for the first time with a 35mm film. I'm wondering whether I'll be ready to go back when I have to depart on Thursday: if four days wasn't enough time in Paris, how can parts of four days be enough in Rome? I guess I'll just have to come back.

(We're in Rome now! More on that later.)

Les Photos

I finally got some photographs uploaded to my Flickr page.

Comment dit-on "exchange rate"?

So let me start by saying that I came thisclose to meeting Mike Leigh, whose new film is opening in Paris soon. I was having lunch with a French critic who had a press conference with Leigh after lunch, followed by a personal interview. She called Leigh's publicist, claiming that she wanted to bring her assistant (moi)—although I'd have been able to assist in exactly nothing—but he said non. Mais non!

Last night was movie night. We walked through the Jardin de Yitzhak Rabin in the Parc de Bercy, which, like most Parisian parks, is exquisitely landscaped and treelined. We watched French people throwing French balls to their French dogs for a while, basically enjoying being in Paris with each other. We had some pretty darned good coffee out of a machine at the Cinémathè Francaise—it's nothing like what you get out of machines in the States—and then watched Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight, which was really good, except when it showed the seams of its multi-year production and its pieced-together-from-five-plays structure. It's among the most beautifully shot things Welles ever did, which is saying something. But I admit I almost fell asleep during the middle portion, and I never fall asleep during movies. After that was Hanns Kobe's Brandherd, aka Torgus, an interesting Expressionist film that they unfortunately played completely silent, i.e., with no musical accompaniment. That's flat-out the most unnatural way to watch a "silent" film, which were always, always, always accompanied by music. It was an excellent restoration, which makes me wonder why they didn't provide some kind of music. You'd think the French, who invented cinephilia, would know better. But it was well worth watching anyway, for its unique take on the grotesque set designs of the Expressionist movement. More on that this Sunday.

If all there was to Paris was great movie theaters, I'd still be glad I came, but just walking around is like being in paradise. (Except when my feet hurt.) I have the world's best tour guide in MFAH, who has lived here in the past and can tell me interesting stories about various little shops and cobblestoned streets she used to frequent; today she introduced me to the world's greatest falafel sandwich at L'As de Fallafel ("The Ace of Falafel"), which is endorsed by MFAH, Lenny Kravitz, and me. And if I ask about a sculpture or a carved cornice or whatever, the odds are pretty good that she can explain its significance. I'm scheming to turn this into a money-making venture so we can somehow stay over here, but don't tell her I said that. Today she had to go to a conference, so I played tourist by myself, but during her break we went shopping for DVDs (I finally have Bigger Than Life!) and ate the aforementioned falafel. Yeah, I went to a movie today too: Peter Collinson's entrancingly unusual WW2 film The Long Day's Dying (1968). Tonight we're going out for Vietnamese food, which is supposed to be excellent in Paris, and then we're going for ice cream. Tomorrow is the Louvre, then we leave. I don't want to go, and if Bergamo and Rome in Italy weren't the next stops on our trip, I might be pretty disappointed.

Je Prends le Croque Monsieur

This morning I bought cheese at a cheese store in French, and then I asked directions to the grocery store in French, after which I purchased salami and lettuce in French. Dear readers, I've gone native. Soon I will be wearing shirts with particularly wide stripes and employing exaggerated hand gestures when I talk. Hell, I already watched a classic American film late at night in a hole-in-the-wall revival house. I might as well order my beret and tear up my return ticket now.

Yesterday we discovered that the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, so we walked, and walked, and walked, down the Champs Elysées (prompting me to sing the chorus of that song "Aux Champs Elysées" that we learned the first week of French I, and MFAH's resulting look of confusion—doesn't everyone sing that over here?) toward the Arc de Triomphe until we got close enough to see it clearly as we dashed across the street, dodging scooters and large trucks. Then we backtracked to the Musée d'Orsay, which contains 19th-century French art as well as thousands of tourists, all of whom want to take a picture of ma and pa and the little one in front of Van Goughs and Monets and not so much Delacroixes and Cézannes, which was nice because I prefer the latter and was happy to leave ma and pa to all those haystacks and windmills. Buy the god damned postcard, people! It will look better anyway. And put your video camera away! When you get home and never watch the footage again, you may not realize that you didn't really experience the musuem at all. I started off my tour through the museum approving of the policy, so different than in American art museums, that allows photography, and ended by deliberately walking through people's shots because I was so sick of standing to the side while dozens of flashes went off.

Then we had a rather expensive lunch, where I learned the delights of the Croque Monsieur, which is ham and cheese on toast, although those simple words don't do this tasty snack justice. We rested our aching feet (well, I rested my aching feet and MFAH pitied me my old-before-their-time insteps) and deliberated whether we'd attempt Notre Dame or just go home for a nap. We decided to do both. Notre Dame is pretty amazing, he said banally. It's so huge, and the ceiling is so high up there, and the builders in the 12th and 13th centuries didn't have calculators or cranes, but they managed to create this stupendous monument to their faith. It's almost enough to make an atheist genuflect. Again, there were also thousands of tourists using flash photography, despite the fact that a flash is but an annoyance to those around you when your target is the chancel several hundred yards away.

Then it was nap time. One of my favorite things about this city is that no matter where you are, you can pretty much get where you're going in less than an hour. The trains are everywhere, they run constantly, and as long as you have a decent map, you can transfer with ease from one line to another, arriving back at your apartment with plenty of time for a doze. Après nap, we had dinner with Agnès et Ralph, two art historians (I think) MFAH knows, at Japanese restaurant that thankfully was not a sushi restaurant. I had a noodle soup, which I failed to eat elegantly because I still can't figure out why anyone would want to eat noodles with chopsticks. Then we took part in that most holy of Parisian experiences, the café crème in a sidewalk café somewhere along the same cobblestone streets where perhaps Hemingway and Sartre once sat drinking café crème. (But not together.) And then it was off to the cinema for what is now my favorite Michelangelo Antonioni film, because I liked it quite a bit, whereas I actively hated The Passenger and thought Blow-Up incredibly overrated. But Zabriskie Point was a compelling snapshot of the late 1960s, a strikingly beautiful film, and fodder for one of those fun "did she or didn't she" conversations on the train on the way back to the apartment. More on that later.

Today it's lunch with a Parisian movie critic, followed by a trip to the holy of holies—the Cinémathèque Francaise—for a screening of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight and later a screening of Brandherd, a German silent film so unknown to the United States that it as yet lacks five votes on the IMDB. Perhaps I will be #5.

Je Suis Dans Paris

Nobody here will speak French to me. I got off the plane prepared, even if misconjugated, to buy my train ticket to our room at the University of Chicago Paris Center, which is only a few blocks from the new Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris. "Je voudrais acheter un billet à Chatelet," I said to the woman at the ticket counter, "et prochaine à la quatorze à la Bibliothèque Francois Mitterand." Yeah, it's probably not perfect, but it's pretty darned good, considering the fact that I haven't spoken French since my four years in high school, which was a really long time ago. (Fourteen years!) But she said "That will be eight forty," and after I had my ticket and said "merci," she said an exaggerated "bye!" As soon as people see that I'm an American, they switch to English. Which is nice, but I'd really like to practice my French.

I found our apartment, which overlooks the Seine, relatively easily, although when I asked a couple of people for directions coming out of the train station, they pointed me in the wrong direction. But because water tends to flow downhill, I decided that rivers should also be downhill, and I was able to locate the Paris Center. Did I mention that it overlooks the Seine? I'm looking at it right now! I was wide awake and full of energy when I arrived, so we planned an afternoon of cultural events: to the Bibliothèque so MFAH could get a €35 library card et prochaine to the Cinemathèque du Quartier Latin so we could take part in that French national pastime of watching old American movies on the big screen. We were going to see Richard Brooks's antiwestern The Last Hunt, mais il y a des chaises très confortable dans the lobby of the Bibliothèque, where we had to wait for a half hour while the IT department repaired the cash registers, and I was pretty much out. We stumbled—well, I stumbled, she supported—back to the room for a two-hour nap.

But after that I was wide awake and full of energy. I still am, and it's 4:42 in the morning here. I really should be asleep. Maybe the problem is that I've had a gallon of caffeine since I got here, from the Coke Zéro MFAH surprised me with in the apartment to the Coke Zéro they sold at the sandwich shop to the café we had after dinner with Chad the American Studies Guy and his mother. But those who know me personally know that I always drink a gallon of caffeine, and it doesn't usually trouble my sleep, so maybe it's just jet lag. Tomorrow it's tourist time: we're going to the Louvre and Notre Dame, so perhaps I should try this sleeping thing again.

Goatdog Triumphs against the Elements

Hello from New Haven, home of some damn fine pizza, some of the best I've ever had (Chicago residents, imagine pizza from Piece but with a slightly better crust). We're back from gorging ourselves on some of that damn fine pizza. I'm here until Thursday, while my favorite art historian will be here for the rest of the month on a fellowship.

My stay in Maine was a lot of fun. We got a lot of progress done on the documentary about MFAH's great-grandparents; we interviewed her charming grandmother and great-aunt for nearly an hour apiece. I also got some minor work done on the artistamp documentary, as one of the major artistamp artists happened to live and work in a small town nearby, so we were able to drive up and get some shots of the studio.

Our two days on Monhegan Island were perfect. I'm not much of an outdoor type, so when I found myself panting, sweaty, and exhausted halfway up a rocky trail, I thought of Donal Logue in The Tao of Steve and started humming the Lemonheads' "I Lied About Being the Outdoor Type." We hiked and hiked and hiked, stopping every once in a while to rest, look for wildlife, or read; then we hiked some more until it was time to eat, after which we hiked and read. Our stay was pretty much like that, and it was an immense amount of fun, although my poor feet and legs are still in semi-revolt against me.

There's something incredibly gratifying about sitting on a rock ledge overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and reading, say, Richard Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, about his 1830s trip on a merchant vessel from Massachusetts to California and back, or reading one of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander novels, and being able to look down and see a bit of the oceans you're reading about. I hope I remember those moments forever, and I hope that years down the road, I will be able to pick up those books and be transported back to last weekend.

In one particular woodsy-type area, visitors built little structures called "fairy houses," made of bits of twigs and moss and bark. There's a controversy on the island about them, because some people uproot live saplings and moss and strip the bark off trees to make increasingly swanky fairy penthouses and fairy gated communities. I was going to take a photo of one of them to post here, but I'll be darned if the things didn't disappear when you tried to snap your picture. Weird.

Adventures of a City Boy

I'm in Maine on a combination vacation/filmmaking/high seas adventure trip. We started interviewing people for a short documentary about my favorite art historian's ancestors, who were pretty famous painters. Sure, forgetting the charger for the video camera was a problem, but our combination of east coast pluck and midwestern determination got us through (a trip to Portland to the Sony dealer helped too).

Today we went out in cousin Charlie's boat, and we were shipwrecked on a barren rock on the high seas! Er, well, the boat kept stalling, and then we were becalmed a few dozen feet off the island where we stopped for lunch; the ordeal lasted approximately fifteen minutes, but we had already worked out a plan to draw straws and eat the person unlucky enough to get the short straw, if the situation grew dire enough. (So I've been reading all of these books about shipwrecks and mutinies, and my imagination was working overdrive. And no, I didn't tell the other members of our stalwart crew about the emergency plan.) I even got a bit of a sunburn on the backs of my hands. All in all, a disaster narrowly averted.

Later tonight, it's off to the movies with MFAH's mother, then tomorrow we interview another relative and meet some people. Later in the week, we're going to the island of Monhegan for two nights, then back here for two nights, then it's off to New Haven for a few days before I return to Chicago. I might get a chance to blog again before I come back, but if you don't hear from me, know that I'm having a great time. (Or, suspect that we're all victims of a nautical disaster.)

Back from Maine

I was in Maine for most of a week, in case you were wondering. I left Sunday afternoon and landed in Boston at around 5. My favorite art historian was there to pick me up, and we drove into the wilderness of the upper northeast. I find that I'm not in a "discuss every detail" mood right now, so here are the highlights:

It rained most of the first three days, which was fine, because I had a freelance editing project to finish. MFAH and I made daily trips from the family cottage, in beautiful Robinhood, ME, to Bath or Brunswick, where the coffee shops have free Wi-Fi. We had dinner with two groups of friends/family, and I found another someone who won't mind my sending him discs full of music I think he should hear. We went to the beach where I first confessed my love to the art historian, three years ago; it was misty and windy, the way I always pictured Maine anyway. We had lunch at MFAH's grandmother's house, where her great-grandparents' art lines the walls and sits on pedestals in the lawn. Her cousin took us on an extended boat tour of the coves and fjords that surround the island (Georgetown island?) where Robinhood is. We even saw seals.

We drove into Portland, saw The Constant Gardener, spent too much money on CDs (including the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, which, after a few listenings, I believe is one of the best albums ever released). We went to the great new Mexican place in Brunswick, where MFAH grew up and where her mother still lives; I believe I had food poisoning, which made Thursday night quite disagreeable.

Between the chorizo and the late night, we drove to the strangest town I've ever seen. Freeport used to be a regular little town, with shops and houses and credit unions and suchlike. Now it's an outlet mall—but it still looks like a town. There's the old Carnegie library building, but it's really Abercrombie and Fitch. The tasteful brick courthouse is really a Banana Republic. All along the quiet streets are outlet stores disguised as houses and historical buildings. The Starbucks is an 18th-century Cape Cod house. The McDonald's used to be a three-bedroom dwelling. And all of the houses that are not inhabited by major retailers are now bed and breakfasts. There are probably people living in Freeport, but I don't know where they live.

Friday evening I caught a bus to Boston, where I stayed with my old friend Moosie and his new wife Erin in their suburban apartment. Rent is sure expensive around Boston. $1200 for a one-bedroom apartment a half-hour's drive from the actual city? No thank you.

Um, I guess that's it. It was a nice vacation, except for the food poisoning, and even that passed pretty quickly.

Michigan Is Exotic Too

I spent this past week in glorious northern Michigan. Michigan is just as fascinating as Thailand or England (he told himself), so I thought it was a good fit for a "travel" entry.

My favorite art historian's car was broken, so we rented a car, a brand-new Chevy Malibu that was smarter than some people I have known. It turned the lights on automatically as soon as it started getting dark; it raised the volume on the radio when I sped up, so it continued to sound just as loud. When I asked what kind of car it was, it said, "I'm scanning your interrogatives quite satisfactorily. I am the voice of Knight Industry 2000's Micro processor, K.I.T.T. for easy reference, KITT if you prefer."

The ride north was uneventful. The car could go really, really fast, and it didn't feel like it, so I had to set the cruise control to keep from accidentally speeding. It's much better to speed on purpose. I got to Mesick, Michigan, where my parents spend all summer camping, at around 9:00. My parents were both there, and we sat around the fire chatting. The fire is always my responsibility. I'm very protective of it. I will yell at you if you pile too many logs on, or waste kindling, or—shudder—use lighter fluid to start it. I like to sit for hours, staring into it, poking it with one of the designated fire sticks. It's the most peaceful I've felt in quite a while.

I must clarify what I mean by "camping." I wasn't roughing it; we didn't sleep on the ground or anything. My parents have a trailer with a queen-size bed for them, a pull-out couch, a recliner, and a television and VCR. They have a stove inside, a double burner outside, and a gas grill for the serious cooking. There's running water, a small toilet in the camper, and electricity available on all sides. There are several places to take nice, hot showers. Many of the campers lining the paved roads have satellite dishes sprouting from their roofs.

Monday morning I went with my stepdad, Bob, into Mesick for breakfast, where I met one of the species that can be found in the area: the redneck racist. Upon hearing that I lived in Chicago, this old cracker regaled us with stories of the year he lived in Chicago as a young teenager—stories of "coloreds" and other quaint epithets, stories of the horrors of getting on the wrong bus and going into "their neighborhoods." I don't even want to type some of the things he said. I sat there mutely. What do you do in a situation like that? I could have argued with him, or called him a racist, but it would have pissed him off, embarrassed by stepdad, who thinks of this guy as a friend, and basically I was afraid to make a scene.

Mom and Bob left me alone on Monday, and it was a great day. I took a nap. I sat out on the dock looking at the lake, which was created in 1926 when the Hodenpyle Dam was built, blocking off the Manistee River and flooding farmland and forest. You can still see stumps sticking up out of the water in some places, and there are houses and barns underneath the deepest parts of the lake, sort of like Northfork, only without James Woods. After a while I went into Cadillac, the closest population center. Cadillac is one of those northern Michigan towns balanced uncertainly between failed industry and tourism. I wandered around downtown, went to a used book store and bought a pile of mystery novels, and went to see Wedding Crashers (2.5 goats) at the local theater. Later, I went back to the campsite and built a fire, then sat next to it, with tiki torches on either side of me, and read The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald, who is one of the best of the hard-boiled school of writers.

Tuesday I got up late, ate breakfast, took a nap, then left for Kalamazoo, where I was to pick up Rebecca at the train station. The ride down was really, really long. We went back to Muskegon to stay at my parents' house, and we left reasonably early the next day for Ludington and Manistee. We stopped for lunch and a visit at my aunt Marsha and uncle Chris's restaurant in Ludington. Aunt Marsha has always been my favorite relative, and she's the only person on my dad's side of the family that I ever see, not that I see her that often. Apparently the high gas prices are really hurting the tourist industry up there, and something like 56% of respondents on a survey said they were cutting down on eating out to compensate for the higher prices, which is two strikes against the owners of a restaurant in a tourist town.

Then it was on to Manistee, where I grew up. We did a quick driving tour, I got to play the "that wasn't there when I lived here" game, and we went into my old house on Hughes Street. It's the house where four generations of my family lived, until my birth father "forgot" to pay several years of property taxes, and my mom had to sell it. Now it's a rental awaiting tenants, and while it's all fixed up inside (remember the library at the front of the house? It's now a staircase to the upstairs), it was sad to see it sitting empty.

We made it back to the campground by early evening, and my older sister and her new boyfriend were there. Her new boyfriend was basically a younger, louder version of the guy described in the fourth paragraph. They stayed long into my fireside time, and the new boyfriend really pissed everyone off with a story of how he defrauded some Mexican migrant workers. But finally they left, and Rebecca and mom and Bob and I sat around the fire and chatted.

The next morning, Bob took us on a tour of the lake on our pontoon boat. We were so tired out by the exertion of sitting in the fresh air that we took a nap when we got back. We dawdled around the campsite, then went into Cadillac to eat lunch and look around. That evening my mother took us on a tour of Crystal Mountain, the resort where she works three days a week. Then it was back for more fireside time. We got up late the next morning, had breakfast, and drove home. It was a good week, with few problems, and it was nice to get away.

Photos

I've started posting my travel photos from Southeast Asia online. You can see them here. Some have captions, some don't. I plan on uploading all of them eventually, at least all of the ones that are at least somewhat interesting.

Day 6: Back in London

After surviving the train trip with the chavs, I arrived in London at around 5. I found my hotel easily enough, then set out for an adventure. It started out pretty well, with a walk through Hyde Park (the real one, not the fake one where I currently live). It was a long walk. I learned early in my trip that I had worn the wrong shoes. I had a choice between sensible brown shoes and my tennis shoes. I picked the sensible brown ones, thinking that there was an outside chance that I might need to wear something nice; besides, they seemed comfortable enough. Well, it turns out that they are intensely uncomfortable on long walks. The bottoms of my feet ached, for most of my trip, like I had just run a marathon barefoot. Plus, they gave absolutely no support to my ankles, and when I get tired my feet start to flop around like I'm wearing clown shoes. I was constantly twisting my ankles on the cobblestones.

But Hyde Park was beautiful. It had started to cloud over and then to rain—back to normal for London. I was in desperate need of a cash station, so I walked along Kensington Road, past Queen's Gate, the Albert Memorial, and various other gates. I got on the tube at Knightsbridge, which made me think, as did just about every tube station in the whole of London, of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which takes place in a mystical London Underground where the tube station names are taken literally.

I got off at Picadilly Circus. Later on, I scribbled this in my little travel notebook/journal:

I'm sitting in a coffee shop a block north of Picadilly Circus—north, or east, or west, I don't know. Even with a map of this city, I'm lost. I stood in PC for 10 mins. staring quizzically around at the multitude of streets veering off in every direction. I started down four of them before I found my street, and I only hope I can find my way back.

I decided to go to a movie because of several reasons. First, my feet and legs are killing me. Second, I like to see things I won't be able to see in the states. Third, I'm feeling incredibly lonely. I discovered that I hate traveling alone. It's just not as much fun when you don't have someone to nudge and say "look at that!" I might just go back to the hotel.

Which I did. Poor little Mike, you're thinking (and so am I). But I really don't like traveling alone in a place where I'm a stranger. If it had been somewhere familiar, it wouldn't have been bad. But I was tired and sore and lonely. It may come as a surprise to some of you, but I can be a little moody sometimes. (No, really. Honestly.) I was moody that night, so I went back to the hotel for an early bedtime.

The next day I was a total idiot. I glanced at my itinerary and thought it said my flight departed at 14:35, which is 2:35, right? So I headed out to the tube station for a train to Heathrow. I got there at around noon, hoping against hope to be able to get an exit-row seat. When I arrived at the check-in counter, the nice British woman informed me that my flight was actually at 4:35, not 14:35. So I spent four hours in Heathrow Airport, reading the autobiography of an intrepid British war correspondent, Max Hastings's Going to the Wars. He wrote, among other things, about how important it is to take a good pair of shoes with you, wherever you go. Good advice.

Update: Here's a picture of the gang in Edinburgh. L-R: Duncan, Lemont, Andrew, Matt, Duncan's wife Kendra, and me.

Day 5: Edinburgh

Edinburgh has a lot of hills. A lot of hills. Steep ones. In the course of our five hours of pub crawling, we walked up and down and back up again. I doubt there's a flat spot in the entire city. Lemont and I arrived by train from York at 3:30, and Duncan (grad-school friend) and his friend Simon (new to me) picked us up. We met Matt and Andrew (grad-school friends) at a pub.

We hit six pubs, I think. (Things got a little foggy toward the end.) I wish I had kept track of the names, but by the third one, I likely wouldn't have been able to remember anyway. Being a lightweight, I didn't drink as much as everyone else (save Andrew, who wasn't drinking), but I still had more than my share. I just let Duncan pick the beers for me, since he knows more about such things. I had ales of all sorts, including one really cool one made with heather instead of hops. It was great until it started to get warm, whereupon it started to taste like perfume. All I can say is that it's a good thing for me that pubs close at 11 in the UK, because they would have had to carry me home.

Matt lives in Milwaukee, but I had to fly to England to see him. He's busy with a dissertation and a two-year-old. Andrew and I weren't really close—I always thought he looked at me like I was a bug—but it was nice to see him. Duncan was still all rakish smiles and bad puns, in a fashionably retro leather jacket and new Converse All-Stars. Lemont was not much different for three years in England, except that he pronounces his "got" and "not" like a Brit.

Some things had changed in the three or four years since I'd seen some of them. I was the only one to remain unmarried; I was the only one not working on a PhD. (We made a rule early on that anyone complaining about his dissertation had to buy the next round.) But a lot of things were exactly the same; if not for the hills and the good beer and the accents around us, we could have been at The Bird in Mt. Pleasant. We had some of the same conversations. Matt and Andrew and Lemont talked about God; Duncan and Simon talked about beer. I did a lot of listening to other people's conversations. The evening was the perfect length; any longer, and I would have had to make the choice between drinking too much, and thus getting sick, and being bored.

The next day, before our train left, Lemont and I dropped in on Liz, another friend. She had been the assistant department secretary the entire time I was at Central. She had dated Duncan, but they broke up and married other people. She lives and works in Edinburgh, and we stopped by her office. It was really great to see her.

Then it was time for the five-hour train ride back to London. Lemont and I brainstormed on a movie we want to write until he got off the train at York, and I was left to attempt to sleep on the train. Good thing: I was in the so-called quiet car, where cell phones are supposed to remain off and conversations quiet. Bad thing: there were a bunch of "chavs," which is British slang for asinine thugs in knockoff track suits and gold chains. They were loud and obnoxious, and they even yelled at an old woman who asked them to be quiet. There are assholes in every country, I guess.

Merrie Olde Englande

I don't have a lot of time to write, but here's an update. It was cold and drizzly when I arrived, which is exactly as it should be. I saw sheep and lambs cavorting in a hilly pasture from my train to Cambridge. I even saw hedgerows, which permanently stuck "Stairway to Heaven" in my head ("If there's a bustle in your hedgerow..."). Hedgerows! You can't get more English than that!

Yesterday we met up with my old grad school friend Lemont, walked through Soho, and sat down for a pint at a pub called St. Andrew's or something suitably British. We had Indian food, which is sort of like eating the local cuisine, since Indian food here is supposed to be the best in the world (outside of India, I presume). I saved my favorite art historian from being run down by a London taxi—we both looked the wrong way before crossing, but she was a few feet ahead, and I heroically grabbed her sleeve and pulled her back. I haven't heard yet whether the Queen will award me a knighthood for my bravery.

Today we walked to Trafalgar Square, went to the National Gallery to look at a Caravaggio exhibition, then walked down to the houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. We saw the narrow street leading to Tony Blair's house, but we couldn't go in to chat with him because of the huge metal gate and craggy policemen (I can't call them bobbies because they're not wearing those cute hats).

My feet are killing me, but I wouldn't trade this for the world. Tomorrow I go to York to hang out with Lemont, then it's on to Edinburgh for pub crawling. This will probably be my last update until I get back. Until then, cheerio, and various other British sayings.

Travels with Goatdog

I'm going on a week-long trip—my first—to the UK on Thursday. I arrive in London on Friday morning, and then I take a train to Cambridge, where Rebecca has a conference. We're staying there until Saturday, when we get on a train to London. We hope to meet up with my friends Lemont and Jackie in London on Saturday or Sunday. Monday, Rebecca comes back to the US, and I get on a train to York, where Lemont lives. Tuesday, Lemont and I get on a train to Edinburgh for an evening of pub-crawling with three other grad school friends, who happen to be there doing research. Wednesday, after I crawl out of bed with my hangover, I get on a train back to London, and then Thursday evening I fly back to Chicago.

Wow. That's a lot of trains. I'm bringing half of my library to keep me occupied, and I assume that there will be nice scenery to look at as well. I wish I could stay longer in any given spot, but seeing old friends is more important right now than sightseeing.

I just received my $300 Britrail pass, which, sadly, is the cheapest way to pay for all of my trains. It's a combination of the high price of travel in Britain and the sad state of the US dollar. I'm used to traveling to other countries and receiving a bounty of oddly shaped and colored money in exchange for a pittance in US funds. Going to England, though, makes me feel like I live in a third-world country (for a lot of reasons, actually).

Jet Lag Sucks

I'm awake at 6:17 am. Those of you who know me know that there must be something wrong. It's jet lag! (hurrah!) My sleep schedule is completely messed up. Yesterday I went to bed at 11, got up at 4:30 to watch Chinatown and check my email (nobody emails you at 6:30 in the morning), and went back to bed at 9:30, to sleep until 1:30. Not good if you're trying to get back on a normal schedule. Plus I have this stomach ache, which I think I had last year when I came back to the states as well. Yuck.

The trip home was nearly unbearable. We had to get up at 5:30 in the morning, catch a cab to the airport for a 6:30 check-in, and get on the plane at 8:30. While sitting in the airport waiting to board, we were treated to a really obnoxious family which was sitting behind us. The kids were loudly upset that they weren't allowed to sit in first class (god save me from kids who feel entitled to first class). The mother was giving a long, loud lecture about an assistant of hers who is obviously suffering from depression; the self-important woman doing all the talking was unable to conceive that it might not have anything to do with her. We prayed that they wouldn't be on the flight between Tokyo and Chicago.

The Japan Airlines plane was among the most uncomfortable rides I've ever had. It was physically impossible for me to sit normally; I had to either have my knees pulled up to my chest, or have my legs stretched out under the seat in front of me. I think I slept a little, but I can't remember.

At the Tokyo airport, Tim and Peggy had to go catch a different flight, and there was an emotional parting scene. Peggy's the best grandma ever, and I hope I have the opportunity of traveling with her again. We staggered into the concourse at Tokyo in search of food, but all we could find was bad rice dishes (but isn't all airport food bad?) and nothing vegetarian for Rebecca. In the biggest airport in a country where just about everybody eats fish all the time, there wasn't even any fish. Just meat, meat, meat. Huh.

The flight from Tokyo to Chicago wasn't as bad, except it was longer, and there was the shrieking baby, and the obnoxious Americans (different ones this time) who sat behind us, kept their overhead lights on, talked in really loud voices, and watched the "Everybody Loves Raymond" channel, laughing like buffoons the entire trip home. The flight attendants close all the blinds and turn off the lights to provide a better environment for sleeping; this is supposed to help you cope with jet lag, I guess. Or it's just in recognition that most of the people on the plane have already been awake for something like fifteen hours. But there was no stopping the Ugly Americans.

We didn't hear about the earthquake or the tsunamis until we got home, which I think was a good thing. And I guess that's about it: our trip is over. I can't wait until the next one.

Home

No, I wasn't in Thailand when the earthquake and tsunamis hit. I'm safe at home, more or less in one piece, and headed for bed. More details later.

One Last Entry before We Go

Let's say you travel around the world. Which of the following activities would be on your list of priorities? (a) Spending hours in the hotel computer lab, playing video games. (b) Eating at the McDonald's in the hotel lobby. (c) Spending the day drinking Corona at the bar next door to the hotel. (d) Getting a tattoo in the tattoo parlor off the hotel lobby. (e) None of the above.

My choice is (e), but there are a whole lot of Western tourists in this area who choose a combination of (a-d). Maybe I just have too strict a definition of acceptable vacation choices, but the main rule on my list is this: don't do/eat things that you can do/eat at home. (I realize that I can blog at home, but that's different, because I'm practicing my travel writing skills, skills which will support me when I move to Thailand. And I'm entertaining my loyal readers.)

Breaking that rule, we ate dinner at a pizza place tonight. (But it was Thai pizza, he rationalized.) There isn't anywhere around here to get good Thai food, and we didn't want our last meal here to be bad Thai food. It was nothing like dinner last night, at a restaurant owned by a friend of a friend of Rebecca's: Eat Me Restaurant and Art Gallery. I didn't expect to be eating at a luxury restaurant any time on this trip, especially not one with $50 bottles of wine. We ate with Jim, from Axis of Evil, and Rebecca's friend Brian and his boyfriend, whose name sounded like "A." Decorating the walls was a series of photographs re-enacting ancient Greek sculpture using nude male figures. And beach balls. It was a perfect combination of goofy and artsy. Jim and Brian teach at the same university here, so we were glad that they seemed to hit it off. Tim volunteered to pay before he realized that a single dish at Eat Me cost about as much as a meal for four up in Chiang Mai. Ouch.

So we have to be in the lobby of the hotel at 5:45 in the morning. I should try to sleep, but of course I'm not tired, nor will I be for a few hours. I suppose this will help me sleep on the plane. I was going to write up a list of the things I forgot to mention in my various blog posts, but I forgot most of them. Maybe they'll end up on my travelogue CD after I ask Rebecca to remind me of them. I'll close with the name of the lounge singer in the Hotel Amari Rincome in Chiang Mai: Dang Fantastic. A good description of this entire trip.

See you guys in a couple of days.

Bangkok Dangerous

Today we had one of the indispensible Bangkok experiences: we got hosed. Cheated. Scammed. Taken for a ride. Literally.

Bangkok is criss-crossed by hundreds of canals, some as wide as superhighways, some as narrow as hallways. I think the bulk of the population lives along these canals, although I'm not positive. They're generally lined with dilapidated houses that stand out of the water on stilts; the houses are patched together from a combination of wood and sheet metal and tree trunks. Some of them are really beautiful, but most of them are just incredibly interesting to look at.

We booked a canal tour, where you go down some of the main canals on long boats powered by car engines fitted with propellers. A "normal" canal tour, like the ones that Rebecca and I had taken in previous visits here, involves a long canal trip on a boat, with perhaps a stop for a bathroom break. These stops are usually short, unless you work out with your tour guide that you want to do something extended.

This trip was arranged by the travel agent in the lobby of our hotel, but what we thought we were paying for and what we got were two entirely different things. It started out reasonably well: we took a mini-bus to a pier, where we got onto a boat. The bus driver said that he would pick us up after the trip. Everything seemed normal. It was a little difficult for Peggy to get into the boat, but she managed.

Then the surprises started. We were taken, after a short ride, to a souvenir shop and forced to get out of the boat. We had entered from the front, where there were stairs leading down from the prow of the boat into the seating area. We were told to climb out the side, over a row of seats and onto a swaying dock that varied between a few inches and a foot and a half from the boat. This seemed like too much for Peggy, and we figured we wouldn't be there very long, so we asked if we could just sit it out. Nope. We had to leave. Peggy managed to get out, with the desired help from us and some undesired tugging from the dock workers. I realize that they were trying to be helpful, but yanking her arms out of her sockets or attempting to bodily lift her is not helpful. I won't be surprised if she ends up with bruises.

We had to leave because if we didn't leave, we wouldn't have the opportunity to wander around the shelves full of overpriced and under-quality merchandise for a half hour. There was nowhere to sit, so Peggy had to stand until Rebecca stole a vendor's stool for her. Everybody was done looking after ten minutes, but we were forced to wait, even though the boat driver, who had pulled downriver a few hundred feet, could see that we were all ready to go.

The second indignity was being taken to a literal tourist trap: a crocodile farm intended for tourists. It was a trap: we were again ejected from the boat and forced to wait. The crocodile attraction cost an extra 100 baht apiece, which the travel agent neglected to tell us. Instead of going in, we sat at some benches near the dock for the 40 minutes they were inside. We tried to find out how to hire a water taxi to take us back, but nobody was willing to help.

Finally we made it back to the dock, where the last surprise awaited us: the mini-bus driver had lied; he was not waiting for us, nor was there any plan for him to return. We had to take a cab, which, after a bit of strident arguing from Rebecca, the guy in charge of the dock paid for. We were gone for three hours, and we spent almost half of that time in tourist traps that we didn't want to see.

When we got back, Rebecca stopped to complain to the travel agent, this time a different person than yesterday. I am not positive, but I don't think she understood half of what we were saying. She nodded and smiled, or frowned when it seemed appropriate, and said a sincere apology at the end.

The time spent on the water was really nice; I took around 20 minutes of footage on Rebecca's video camera. But we couldn't understand a word of the broken English that the boat guide spoke, and we were forced to climb in and out of the boat twice and wait at places we were never told about.

I don't really like Bangkok; this confirms it. It's too big, too fast, too dirty, too polluted. While in Chiang Mai, the "taxi" drivers knew their city and usually understood where you wanted to go, here they look at you blankly even if you manage to pronounce the name of the road correctly. They don't read maps, so it doesn't help if you produce your Lonely Planet guidebook map. And since it's a big city, there are a lot of scams around. I don't think that this canal boat debacle was intended as a scam; it was more a series of miscommunications: between the travel agent and us, between the travel agent and the bus driver, between the bus driver and us, etc. It makes me miss Chiang Mai even more.

We're going to the Jim Thompson house later today; Thompson was a former CIA agent who became a major silk exporter until he disappeared while traveling in Malaysia. After that I hope to go to the MBK, a multilevel maze of shops where I hope to find some Thai movies with English subtitles. Rebecca was successful there last time, so I hope I have the same luck. We have to get up before dawn tomorrow to catch our 8:30 plane home. Gah. I'll write about that experience when I recover from the trip. Merry Christmas!

Update (like anyone has read this yet): We found Thai movies with English subtitles! It was amazingly easy. We walked into MBK, and there in front of us was a DVD store with an employee who understood what we were asking for. We got around six movies, including a couple that were at international festivals recently, and I got a Joey Boy CD. Joey Boy is a Thai rapper. He sounds about like what you'd expect, given that description.

Crazy in Bangkok

Bangkok is crazy enough; Khaosan Road is extra crazy. We're staying here because it's close to the Royal Palace and several other important cultural sites. That's likely the same reason that the legions of sweaty, twentysomething backpackers are staying here too. It's loud, and smokey, and filled with Westerners without shirts, Westerners with severe sunburns, Westerners demanding cheap taxi service to the airport. If I weren't rather dazed from it all, it might make for great people-watching.

Tonight we're having dinner with Jim Barnhart, who was intereviewed for Axis of Evil, and one of Rebecca's friends. They both teach at Chulalongkorn University here in Bangkok; they both expressed amazement that we were staying here in backpacker central. But they're both making their way over here for dinner.

This might be the last chance I get to blog before I head back. You're all off work, celebrating Christmas or something, so you won't miss anything. Did I mention that they really get into Christmas over here, despite the fact that they're Buddhist? I suppose it doesn't really have much to do with Christianity anymore in the US, so why should Buddhism keep a country from hanging colored lights and worshipping a fat house burglar? The woman who sold us our tickets for a canal boat tour tomorrow respectfully asked us if she could wish us a merry Christmas. I respectfully ask my loyal readers the same. Merry Christmas (eve)!

Short Goodbye to Chiang Mai

I have a master plan. It's simple, really: (1) Sell Rebecca's condo. (2) Move to Chiang Mai and get an apartment. (3) Find a way to earn a living. It's foolproof.

So it's the night before we leave for Bangkok, and just three nights before we leave Thailand. Just as last year, I don't want to go home. I could really see living over here. I would miss my friends and movies. And fall. Maybe some other things that I'm not thinking of right now because I don't want to leave.

Today we went to The Land Project, a sort of collaborative art/agriculture project near Chiang Mai. Kamin, a local artist who is close to being big-time, and one of his friends started it. They get artists to design simple houses on the property, and young art students live there, make art, and grow crops. It's just wonderful, and I'm too tired to come up with better adjectives. I shot almost ten minutes of footage around the property, but that probably isn't enough to convey how great the project is. After we left The Land, we went to Kamin's studio to drink tea and see his latest projects.

Kamin was immediately taken with Peggy, as is just about everyone over here. Khaew, the young artist who took charge of her at dinner on Tuesday, gave her one of his paintings as a going away present, and everyone calls her grandma. When Kamin dropped us off at the hotel this afternoon, he stood next to her, rubbing her back and complimenting her on how "strong" she is. And he's right.

Rebecca had another lecture tonight, and then we ate at our new favorite restaurant, Khun Churn, with Ong, another local artist, and his girlfriend Kat, an artist and dancer from Australia. I met them last year, and it was nice to see them both again.

They're closing the internet place, so I have to go. Goodbye Fine Thanks, the nightclub that we didn't attend. Goodbye Girly Cutie and all the other crappy pop bands with odd English names that they play on the radio. Goodbye Amari Ricome Hotel, with your opulence and the desk clerk who seems to work 24 hours a day. Goodbye, Chiang Mai. I hope to see you again soon.

Bumming Around and Climbing Mountains

So of course, after I told everybody that I would be able to blog every day, I missed a day. Will you ever forgive me?

Yesterday was my bumming around day. I slept in past our usual breakfast time of 8:00, instead making it down there at 9:30. Rebecca had to prepare for her lecture, so I wandered around a little. I made it to a big mall-type thing, where I looked for Thai movies with English subtitles and Thai music. I struck out on the first one, but I found a couple of CDs that the Lonely Planet guidebook recommended: Carabao and Modern Dog. If Santana had been Thai, he would have sounded just like Carabao. The CD I bought was actually a double-disc live compilation, and aside from the cheering and the bantering, it's really good. If Modern Dog had been American, they would sound like just about every other mid-1990s alterna-pop band. Sean Lennon plays guitar on two of their songs. Wahoo.

I got too much sun on Monday and was feeling a little feverish, so I went back to the hotel and took a nap. By the time I was ready to face the rest of the day, it was almost time for Rebecca's lecture. Because I'm a good boyfriend, I went with her to hear her talk about visual culture and why it was a big thing for academics to study. The thing about translated lectures is that they take twice as long. It was a fine lecture, but I was bored silly by the time the Q&A session finally ended, a half hour after the posted time of 7:00.

I learned something interesting about the peculiar kind of politeness that Thai students demonstrate. They will talk through the lecture, answer their phones in class, and come in fully an hour late. But they didn't leave early; they didn't even leave when the lecture went a half-hour over, even though they weren't paying attention. They waited until their adjarns (professors) gave the signal that the shindig was over, and then they left. American students would have likely been quieter during the lecture, but they would have flocked to the exit at exactly 7:00.

After the lecture, I had what is probably the most fun I've had in Thailand. We went out to dinner with a bunch of people from the Media Studies department. In addition to me, Rebecca, Peggy, and Tim, there was Uthit, a senior professor who drove like a raving lunatic; Arun, a quiet and friendly man who isn't really a student but isn't really a professor; Khaew, a student who took charge of Peggy during and after the meal, talking animatedly to her and helping her up the stairs; and Thasnai, one of Rebecca's former students in Chicago who recently joined the faculty at Chiang Mai. We ate like kings at a restaurant right on the river that flows through Chiang Mai and down to Bangkok, as a lively conversation, half in English and half in Thai, flowed over the table. I was a bit tipsy by the time we got back to the hotel, and it was past our bedtime (10:20!), so I didn't blog. Don't blame me, blame the Beer Chang.

This morning we were up at the crack of dawn, or thereabouts, because we had a trip planned to Doi Inthanon, the tallest mountain in Thailand. On the way we stopped at a temple that was populated by several monks and dozens of cats; here we learned that our wonderful tour guide, Ying, unlike most Thai people, preferred cats to dogs. There was also a relic of the Buddha at this temple, but they kept it locked under a small chedi in the main wiharn. It made me wonder how many relics of the Buddha there are in the world, and whether the old joke about having enough slivers from the cross Jesus was crucified upon to build a city. But these relics may just be things that the Buddha touched, and hey, it is a good excuse for building a huge, beautiful temple, so I'm not complaining.

When we got to the top of Doi Inthanon, after a long, long drive, it was actually cold. Our guide told us that it sometimes gets down to zero degrees in the highlands, and she found some frost to prove it. Of course, we made do with sweatshirts and extra layers, while many of the Thai people visiting the mountain were wearing parkas. One funny thing about the highest point in Thailand: there's a big sign, where tourists can stand and have their picture taken, that reads "The Highest Point in Thailand." Then there are the stairs that lead up to the actual highest point, which isn't nearly as photogenic. We went for a short walk on a great wooden walkway through the forest, which I filmed and which will end up on the CD I'm supposed to make when I get back.

After we scaled the mighty mountain, we ate lunch at the Royal Projects (or something like that; I don't have the guidebook with me). This is an enormous valley filled with greenhouses where they grow the houseplants we Americans know and love, in addition to beautiful, gigantic flowers and rare plants from around the world. Our guide told us that the king and queen had the project built to give the hill tribes somewhere to work instead of growing opium. I don't know how well it's working. On the way down the mountain we stopped at a Karen village. Our guide informed us that the Karen were the "best" hill tribe because their traditional economy doesn't involve clear-cutting the forest. I don't know exactly what it involves, but part of it was weaving beautiful cotton scarves on hand looms. I just had to buy a couple.

We stopped at a waterfall after that, and then headed back to Chiang Mai. I went on a mission to find Thai movies with English subtitles. Rebecca's Thai friends told me to go to the Airport Plaza, which is a huge mall, so I went. What a frustrating trip. I wandered around until I had located all of the stores that sold DVDs or VCDs, but nobody seemed to have what I wanted. Or perhaps they did: ye olde language barrier got in the way of my even finding out with any certainty whether they had what I wanted. The most likely store was staffed by a woman who kept repeating "In Thai! In Thai!" because I couldn't make her understand "subtitles." Rebecca had this problem the last time she was here; she ended up with some movies, but only after she went to the store with a fluent Thai speaker. Put that on your checklist for your next trip to Thailand: a fluent Thai speaker. You'll have to count him or her as a carry-on item at the airport.

Tonight it's dinner at the vegetarian restaurant again, followed by rampant capitalism at the night market. I can't wait to spend my money. Which prompts an interesting story. The first night we were in Chiang Mai, Rebecca and I went in search of an ATM. I was really tired, and I was having trouble calculating the exchange rate, and they had thoose "instant cash" buttons, so I just jabbed the highest one: 10,000 baht. It was only on the way back that Rebecca informed me that it was nearly $250, a hell of a lot more than I would ever need here. It was all in 1,000 baht bills, which almost nobody can break. I felt like the main character in The Jungle, when he gets the $100 bill but finds that it is basically useless because nobody will take it and the police think he must have stolen it. Thankfully, nobody arrested me, and I was able to break some of them at the hotel desk.

Elephants, More Temples, and a Long Drive

I discovered that there is a limit to how many wonderful temples I can look at. Today we went on a long drive from Chiang Mai to Lampang and Lampun provinces to see more ancient temples. By the end of the day, after an hour in the bouncy van and several hours out in the sun, we had had enough. We were all sort of grumpy on the way back, except for Peggy, who reacts to everything with a mild, self-deprecating humor.

But first, the elephants! We went to an elephant rescue camp, where they take in elephants that are no longer needed in the lumber industry. We saw elephants dance, paint (sort of like early Picasso, only with more elephants), play music, bow, push logs around, put logs in piles, and voraciously eat bananas and sugarcane that we held out to them. There was a French father with three or four little kids who insisted on ignoring the warning over the loudspeaker to keep behind both fences: he was letting his kids clamber around between the fences, and we all watched with a sick fascination, wondering if an elephant was going to accidentally take one of his kids' arms off in its haste to get at the sugarcane. Thankfully, no arms were lost.

After that, we drove to Wat Phra That Lampang, which was built in the fifteenth century on the site of an eighth century fortification. It's different from many other temples because its sides are open instead of being enclosed, and it hasn't been constantly remodeled to fit current ideas about temples, as so many other Thai temples have been. Its wiharn (pronounced wee-han, the central prayer hall) is the oldest wooden building in Thailand. The massive teak pillars that support the multi-level roof have been standing for over five hundred years. I can't get my brain around that. You can see traces of sixteenth-century paintings on the interior walls of another building on site. Finally, two outbuildings have really cool camera obscura features that show the inverted image of the main chedi and wiharn. Sadly, Rebecca and Peggy couldn't see the most stunning camera obscura, because the building was marked by a large sign that says "no lady intry" or something like that. Many Buddhist temple buildings are off-limits to women.

On the way into the temple, a woman selling lottery tickets was also offering the string blessing I described earlier. She didn't look much like a monk, but hey, as Rebecca said at the time, the Buddha works in mysterious ways. We had strings tied around our wrists, and she said a benediction that included words of luck in five or six languages. I suppose it couldn't hurt.

We had lunch at a restaurant that made me feel like we had wandered into an Indiana Jones movie. It was in a resort that was set well away from the road, and to reach the restaurant, you had to wend your way down a series of foliage-cloaked paths (cloaked, as usual, in houseplants), and then across a swaying, rickety wooden suspension bridge. The effect was somewhat ruined when we ate lunch overlooking a river that was in the process of being dredged by large construction equipment.

We were pretty tired by the time we got to Wat Cham Devi in Lamphun. It is interesting because of its chedi, built in 1218, that is the oldest surviving square chedi of the Dvaravati period (guidebooks are helpful). The stepped tower is festooned with dozens of different Buddha figures, each in his own little alcove. Pretty neat. That was about all we could take for the day.

We rode back in the bumpy van, took a long nap, and went out to dinner at a Filipino restaurant that Rebecca and I had visited last year. The restaurant is in the owner's house, and she doesn't get much business. We pretty much had the place to ourselves. The owner is somewhat batty, and it takes forever for the food to get to you, but hey, if you starve to death waiting for dinner, it was just your time to go. The food was really great. I had what was basically spaghetti and meatballs, but really tasty and spicy Filipino meatballs. Rebecca's dad Tim had a Pepper Incident: he bit a big chunk off a vegetable that looked sort of like a big bean, and it turned out to be a really hot pepper. He didn't suffer as much as I did last night, though.

Tomorrow I get my bumming-around day, as Peggy and Tim are going on a guided tour in the morning while Rebecca prepares for a lecture she's giving at the art museum tomorrow night. I'm going in search of classic Thai movies and music. I'll get to ride in a tuk-tuk, which is an experience not to be missed, or repeated too often.

Mountain. Market. Attempted Murder.

This morning, after our usual 8:00 am breakfast, we started walking toward Doi Suthep (pronounced soo-tape), the mountain on top of which the sacred white elephant dropped dead. We walked about a kilometer and a half (like, quite a ways) and then rode in a sawngthaew (pronounced song-tow, basically a pickup truck with two long benches in the back). We had earlier walked past the driver as he shouted "Go back! You go back!" and lowered his asking price from 600 baht to 300 baht ($15 to $7). When we encountered a road that would have been nearly impossible to cross—there aren't a lot of crosswalks around; if you get run down by a car, hey, it was just your time to go—we realized that the sawngthaew driver had been tailing us, and we gratefully climbed into his "mini-bus," as they so quaintly call them around here.

Driving up the twisting, dusty road that led up the side of the mountain, I could easily understand why that sacred white elephant dropped dead at the top. It apparently used to take five hours to walk up the old trails to the top, and it takes a good two hours to walk up the new road. We made it to the top in something like twenty minutes. At the top of the road, we encountered the first really pushy salespeople: hill tribe people wanting to sell you paintings, plastic kites, and lottery tickets. Last year, when we went to Angkor in Cambodia, just about everyone was incredibly pushy about selling you things, but you don't see that a lot in Thailand. Except, apparently, on Doi Suthep.

To get up to the temple, Wat Prathat Doi Suthep, you have to take an elevator that climbs diagonally up the last stretch of mountain. There were hundreds of people there: it's one of the places in Chiang Mai that you "just have to see," in addition to being a major holy place for all of Thailand. It was a little crowded for my taste. Still, it was pretty amazing to see the glowing golden chedi, which some workers were patching up with gold paint.

There were two places where you could interact with actual monks. In one temple, a monk was tying strings around the wrists of kneeling visitors. This string, which has been blessed by the monk, is supposed to stay on one's wrist until it wears off; it brings luck, or something. As usual, I didn't take part. I'm so afraid of coming off as the Ugly American that I am often too respectful: there were hundreds of bells around the temple grounds, and Japanese visitors were ringing them merrily (I learned that it, too, is supposed to bring luck), but I didn't ring a one. The other monk interaction zone was another temple where an elderly monk was splashing blessed water on a crowd of kneeling visitors. I went in and kneeled, but far from the monk. Still, a drop of blessed water hit my right knee, which can't be bad.

We came back from Doi Suthep and had an hour or so off for a nap and some reading. (Since I started my trip, I've read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere [a good book with a terrible title], and half of Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Seville Communion.) We then set off for part of the old city that is sometimes blocked off to traffic and turned into a market. I purchaced gifts for a few people and two shirts for myself, and fretted over what else I needed to get. It was a little overwhelming, especially since we didn't really expect there to be a market; we simply expected to be free from the danger of getting flattened by a motorcycle bearing an entire family. We made it back to the hotel for another hour of rest before dinner, which was a traumatizing experience for me. My pork stuff tried to kill me.

We ate at Le Gong Kum, a Vietnamese restaurant at the end of a dark alley and hidden in a maze of foliage—foliage that serves as exotic plants in American households. The loud sound of croaking frogs filled the air, as there was apparently a large frog population living in the foliage. Oddly (or not so oddly), frog's legs were featured prominently on the menu. I assure you that none of us ate Kermit. The meal was sort of disappointing, even without the attempted murder. My pork tasted vaguely of fish, the corn cakes were too deed-fried and greasy, and the barbequed pork tasted vaguely of lemon furniture polish. Then I bit into the pepper.

I didn't even see it. I noticed the larger red and green peppers, which I knew to be really hot, and which I avoided. I didn't see the tiny, undercover pepper, no bigger than my pinky fingernail, that was hiding under a piece of pork. I bit into it and swallowed, and the Hellmouth opened up in my mouth. My nose started running, my eyes gushed tears, and my ears burned to a crisp and fell off into the rice noodles. The entire back of my mouth and throat was a flaming hell. It was hard to breathe, and it felt like real damage was being done to my esophagus. I drank the rest of my... some kind of fruit juice, then Rebecca's lemonade, then Peggy's lemonade. Then Rebecca ran to find the waiter to bring some water, which I promptly drank. I ate up most of the rice, the cucumbers, the tomato slices, and some rice noodles. Dairy products are supposed to help with such things, but there aren't a lot of dairy products in a Vietnamese restaurant. I gradually recovered, but the burning didn't completely go away until I drank an iced coffee, which is made with cream. I still feel a little shaken.

Tomorrow we're going to Lampang province to see an elephant rescue camp and another big, historical temple.

Flashback. Temples. Food.

After we landed in Chiang Mai and got settled into our posh hotel, we walked down to the Chiang Mai University art museum to see what they had going on. When Rebecca was here teaching last year, I stopped by, but the only attractions were the dogs wandering around the grounds. The museum staff want the museum to become what the wats (temples) used to be: a cultural center for the town. For wats, this entailed, among other things, taking in stray animals. The museum was fulfilling this job admirably: this time, there was a well-fed dog with a pronounced limp hopping around outside the main building.

The museum's main installation was something that you just wouldn't see (at least, I hope we won't see) in the United States. In commemoration of the Queen's birthday and visit to Chiang Mai, students of all ages were asked (ordered?) to paint pictures of her. There were literally hundreds of paintings of her, lining the long walls, like some kind of Andy Warhol installation gone mad. The Queen in acrylics; the Queen in oils; the Queen in crayon. Can you imagine an art exhibit devoted to hundreds of images of Laura Bush? Well, now that you mention it...

Chiang Mai was founded in 1293 (or 1295, depending on which plaques you read). It means "small town," and although it has close to a million inhabitants, it still feels like a small town. I suppose it's a matter of ease of getting around: because I can't imagine driving around a big foreign city (like Bangkok) on a rented motorcycle wearing a battered batter's helmet on my head, as we did last year, it must be that Chiang Mai is small enough to allow such craziness. Within the borders of the old city, there are 97 temples; there are over a thousand of them in Chiang Mai province. Today we went on a guided tour of some of the most important local temples. I was initially a grudging participant in this tour. I wanted to rest my legs, and the prospect of all the walking that temple-crawling entails didn't appeal to me. Also, I had already seen these temples. I had the idea that going back to them would be like entertaining visitors to Chicago with a trip to Navy Pier (yawn). I only went because the trip didn't start until the afternoon.

Now that the trip is over, I reflect on how stupid I was being. These temples are not Navy Pier. For one thing, the guided tour, complete with a tour guide who spoke pretty good English, taught me a lot about the temples that I didn't know before. We visited Wat Pra Sing, Wat Chiang Man, Wat Chedi Luang, and Wat Suan Dok. Wat Chedi Luang has an enormous chedi (which is generally a bell-shaped tower that houses a relic of the Buddha or the ashes of someone important) that was mostly destroyed within a few generations of its construction some 600 years ago; what remains is 50 meters tall (like, a lot of feet tall). Wat Chiang Man houses a marble statue of the Buddha that is said to date from the Buddha's lifetime, or some 2500 years ago. Wat Suan Dok houses a holy relic of the Buddha, which miraculously replicated itself upon being interred in the chedi in the late 14th century; the new piece was placed on the back of a sacred white elephant, which was allowed to wander wherever it wanted to go. It stopped, trumpeted a few times, and dropped dead on top of Doi Suthep, the mountain overlooking Chiang Mai, and they built a temple on that spot to house the relic.

History lesson over. The greatest part of these temple visits is the unbelievable calm they prompt in me. You walk up the steps leading into the main wat, kick your shoes off and remove your hat and backpack, and walk into a cool, unevenly lit, sometimes vast, sometimes close space. You're surrounded by murals, stencils, huge teak pillars that support the roof. Ahead of you is the main altar; there might be one large Buddha statue, or there might be dozens. You walk quietly toward the altar and kneel. You can bow, but I can't remember how to do it properly, so I don't. You sit there, and this weird feeling of everything being right with the world washes over you (or at least it does me). After a few peaceful moments, you get up; you can light a candle or a stick of incense up at the altar, or you can drop some coins or paper money into the offering boxes (proceeds go to feed the monks and pay for repairs), or you can just quietly back a few respectful steps away before turning to leave.

Temples prompt an almost religious reverie in me; so does good food. We had some damn fine chow for dinner tonight. It's a vegetarian restaurant called Khun Churn (pronounced koon chun, meaning either Mr. or Mrs. Churn's [depending on Churn's gender]), on soi 7 (alley #7) of Nimmanhaeminda Road. They serve manna from heaven. If you leave now, you can be there in time for dinner on the 20th. Mind you, I have never had a bad meal in Thailand. Everything has been at least pretty good. This was ambrosial. I don't know enough adjectives to describe how good it was. We had... well. I don't know what most of it was called. There was the curry stuff with the noodles, the corn cakes, the pad thai, the "cripey protein" (English spelling is always a source of amusement over here) in sauce, the pepperish pastey stuff that was so deliciously hot. When we ordered, I thought we were getting way too much food for the four of us. But we pretty much cleaned it up; I was the last to finish, as I was desperately trying to shovel the last of the curry into my mouth before my satiety cues kicked in and told my body that I had already eaten too much. We sat there, dazed, staring at the wasteland of piled plates that our table had become. We vowed a blood oath to return there for another dinner before we leave. Care to join us?

Tomorrow it's off to Doi Suthep, where the elephant carrying the miraculous Buddha relic dropped dead. It's an important pilgrimage site for all Thai buddhists, and a hazing ritual for incoming students at Chiang Mai University: they have to walk up it, five hours of hot, dusty exertion. We'll be driving.

Where the Heck Am I?

I'm sitting at a computer in an internet cafe down the street from our posh hotel. The Miami Sound Machine is on the overhead speakers. Now it's Michael Jackson (I wonder how you say "You know I'm bad, I'm bad, shamon" in Thai?). It looks like I should be able to post just about every day while I'm in Chiang Mai. We're here until the 24th, then we head to Bangkok in time for Christmas.

There are little islands of the West here; but in other places you'd think would be just like home, there's nothing familiar. I stopped at a 7-11 looking for shaving cream and snacks. They didn't have shaving cream, nor did they have it in the drug store next door. I suppose there isn't a whole lot of shaving going on around here. The guy at the drug store pointed at his hairless chin and giggled as he regretfully informed me that he couldn't help me.

I miss the freedom we had the last time I was here. We had rented a motorcycle, and we could just putt-putt off in whatever direction we wanted to go. This time around, since we're here more as tourists (read Rebecca's blog post here about the difference), we're doing more planned tours of the usual tourist spots. Not that 12th-century temples that have survived dozens of invasions are a disappointment, mind you. I guess I'll just have to come back. I guess I already said that.

We're off to tour some of the temples in the old city this afternoon. I already have pictures of most of them from last year. I was going to put together a CD-ROM of my travel photos and writing, but I never got around to finishing it. Maybe this will prompt me to do it. Then I can give it to my family and friends, who will complain that looking at someone else's travel photos is boring.

Now Johnny Hates Jazz is on the radio. Let's do the timewarp! And it's not the original artists. The guy singing Wham's "Careless Whispers" has a French accent.

I had this crazy dream a few nights ago, my first night in Luang Prabang. Loew's had bought my little theater at the LaSalle Bank. It was undergoing some major renovations: a huge, dazzling concessions counter, a grand staircase, uniformed ushers, lots of blinking lights. The problem was that they didn't have room for me and my little 16mm projector, which they didn't bother to replace. They finally decided that I could project through a window in one of the doors to the main theater. People walking through the door would block the light, interrupting the show. I don't know what this was supposed to mean, or why I would dream about it in southeast Asia.

Anyway. Time to find a laundromat that doesn't charge 50 baht ($1.20) to wash a pair of socks. I'll write more later.

Greetings from Chiang Mai

So where do I start? With the flight that they bumped me from on my first, aborted travel day? That got me an $800 travel voucher, but you already knew that. With Steve, the secret agent who was my single-serving friend from Chicago to Tokyo? He was an "intelligence liaison" for the US government, who had flown secret anti-drug flights over Peru and surveillance flights over Afghanistan. He didn't wear a black hat or a trenchcoat, and he said there was no glamor or danger in his job, but he had nightmares that scared him awake. Or maybe that was just the airplane food.

I still can't sleep on the plane, at least when I want to, even after two Tylenol PMs and 13 hours to think about it. So I watched Beverly Hills Cop and Independence Day and Billy Elliot (which is really good), and spent the rest of the time staring at the inside of my eyelids. At least they put me in business class as an apology for bumping me from the earlier flight. Business class. Mmmm. It's like heaven, if heaven includes almost-fully-reclining seats and enough legroom to stretch all the way out.

When I got to Tokyo, I had a three-hour layover, so I thought I could curl up under a bench somewhere and sleep. Wrong. I stood in one line for an hour to check in, then another line for an hour and a half to go through security, and then they were boarding. There was a monk in his saffron robes waiting to board the same plane. Nothing says "you're a long way from Chicago" like a monk waiting to board a plane.

I couldn't stay awake on the second leg of the flight, even with Metallica blasting through my headphones. I had wanted to stay awake then, because I didn't want to be wide awake when I got to the hotel. I'm glad I slept, actually, because I needed to be alert for the desperate search for my bag, which had departed Chicago without me, and which they couldn't find for two and a half hours in the Bangkok airport. They finally found it, and I staggered to the hotel, to find that they wouldn't let me check in without Rebecca's credit card. I was too broke to pay for the room by myself, and I limped back toward the airport, thinking that I would just sleep in the terminal until my flight to Laos the next day, but a kindly agent of a local hotel offered me a good deal at the Jumbotel, which had a bed and a wake-up call, the only two things I needed right then. I probably could have done without the bed by then. I made it to the hotel at 3:00 am, and I had to leave for the airport at 8.

I depend on the whims of my clients (I guess that's what they are) for my "walking-around money," and since the LaSalle Bank's main branch recently caught on fire, paying the projectionist at their money-losing theater was probably not high on their list of priorities. Thus, I was completely broke by the time I paid for my hotel. I had enough for the 500 baht (around $12) "airport tax" at the Bangkok airport, and I scraped up the $20 visa fee that Laos would charge... except it was $30. I had to beg $10 from some kindly Torontonians, one of whom was an art history professor. You just can't go anywhere without running into those people. My favorite art historian paid them back when we made it through the Kafka-esque series of immigration and passport control lines at the Luang Prabang airport.

So I made it to Laos, and it was pretty darned great. Too many Western tourists for my taste, and a constant haze of woodsmoke, but nice nonetheless. One of the best things about these trips is the food: I had the best damned sausage I've ever tasted, an array of colorful and flavorful fruit, and French baguette sandwiches on the side of a mountain overlooking the Mekong river, having just emerged from a dank cave where Buddhist monks go to purify themselves. Former French colonies are strange places. The most interesting part for me, for some reason, was learning that the water level of the Mekong river raised up to 50 feet during the rainy season, and the scattered islands and banks that were planted with crops and tended by people in ramshackle huts were on land that didn't exist for almost half of the year. China has been building dams on the Mekong, and when they are finished, the river won't change its level very much, which will put these farmers out of work because their land won't be there.

Throughout all of this, Rebecca's grandmother Peggy has been simply amazing. I'm almost 30, and I get tired and sore and cranky from all the walking we've been doing. Peggy, at 88, keeps up without a complaint. Sure, she didn't climb the 328 steps to the top of the hill in Luang Prabang to see the view, but it's amazing how much walking and climbing she's been able to do. I only hope that I have that much energy when I'm 88 (or 38).

So now we're in Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, where Rebecca was Fulbrighted last year. This is my favorite place of everywhere I've been in Southeast Asia. It feels sort of like I could stay here, while the other places have felt like vacation stops. I'm going to spend tomorrow relaxing and resting my aching legs and back (I'm mostly healed, but all the walking has reminded me that I spent most of last week in bed). I sent a bunch of postcards from Laos before we left, but I doubt you'll get them before I get back. I took ten rolls of film last year, so I'm not taking as many pictures, but Rebecca has her camera in case we run into anything that we didn't cover last year. This week, we're going to see elephants working, climb the highest mountain in Thailand (well, drive up it), and go to the night market, where I'll buy beautiful things for my favorite people, and lumps of coal for the rest of you. :P

I wish I had a better memory for details. There are so many things I've seen that I wanted to remember, but by the time I got back to the hotel to write them in my journal (good idea, Shawn), they're gone. I guess I'll just have to keep coming back.