briSite

Though it's in its rough stages (I set it up during breaks from writing final papers), I've finally managed to kick the blogger habit and set up my own site, brisite. It has all the former MWT entries, all my kind of miscellaneous stuff, and the stuff I'm writing about now. Notably not travel related, though I'm working on fixing that. There's always another adventure...

To Hell With Tom Wolfe

You can go home again. And it can be beautiful. Merry Christmas, everybody. It feels great to be home.

Done

Oh, and it feels so good. Off to party my last real night here.

A Walking Duality

Such a weird place to be in right now. I am a walking duality. One part of me is just done, has had enough of India and its madness and its aggravation. This part of me is oh-so-ready for Paris and home, beyond that. Yet, at the same time, there is another part of me that is breaking up inside at the thought of leaving these people I've become so close to in the past 6+ months. Luckily I've had quite a bit of work to focus on these last few days, so the shock of it really hasn't totally set in, but I can feel it coming on as these papers get whittled down to fine points. These people, Rob, Mike, Noel, Cat, Anusha, Mira, Marla and Jenn, are absolutely members of my family. Though I'm a few hypothetically blissful days away from my real family, it's testimony to how tight we've become here that the last time I felt something like this was when I was in the car on the way to Logan on June 14th. It's different, but it's the closest approximation. I feel the impending loss as much as I did then. Maybe this is just the way things happen. Maybe loss is balanced by expectation. Maybe the end really is the beginning is the end. I'll be sure to tell you about it. In Other News Since now three seperate people have emailed me about this, and only one in jest, I didn't actually meet a hot art history student on the internet who I'm going to visit in Paris, though so much of our communication is done online of late that it almost qualifies as an apt description. I know her quite well actually. I've even met her once or twice, so have no fear. ;) Has to Be Said The Taj Mahal is the single most beautiful building in the world. It's more than the hype. It's more than my words, but I'm really gonna try. I'm going to write the update on the plane and who knows when I'll find time to type and upload it. It'll get here eventually, though. How else could I finish this up?

Taj Tomorrow and Beyond

I'm off to Agra all day tomorrow to see the most beautiful building in the world. Check back soon to hear about it. In other news, I love you all and miss you desperately. Some more than others. ;) I'm counting down the days. For those not in the know, I'm going to Paris for a week on the 17th to see this hot art history student I met on the internet. She sure looked pretty in her photo, so we'll see what happens. :) On December 23rd, I'm back on an Air France flight to Boston, then a car ride home with the family. I cannot tell possibly explain to you in words how much I miss them and how much I'm looking forward to spending Christmas with them. And you all, my extended family and friends, I miss you guys, too. I've learned here is that life really is too short and there isn't enough love in the world, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to say that you all make my life worth it and I don't know what I'd do without you, even the people that drive me crazy. I love you all and am doing my best to be deserving of your love and support. I know it's still a bit early, but have a Merry Christmas season. You deserve it. Trust me.

Tik ta?

I think I just passed my Hindi exam. I'll know by Monday, but I felt pretty good. The last page was just incomprehensible. It was a dialogue between two girls speaking lots and lots of slang and I probably got 2 out of the 4 questions right. It was only maybe 5 percent of the grade, so I'm not that worried about it. I got the big stuff ok. I'm reticent to even post this, because any mention of grades and my mom freaks out, good or bad, so no news is usually the best policy. But I'm done with a semester of an extremely alien language and I can say that I do, actually, understand quite a bit of it. My vocabulary isn't as good as I'd want, but I can communicate pretty effectively most of the time. My listening skills aren't remotely close to what they are in French, but I have crossed the b.s. threshold, where even if I don't totally know what's going on, I can convincingly come across like I do. This, I don't need to tell you, is an important threshold to have crossed, especially for me. I'm undecided as to whether or not I'm going to continue to study Hindi. Part of me thinks I could be better served either by taking more advanced French or starting a new language, either Spanish or Arabic. We shall see. On verra. Hum dekhengue. UPDATE: Officially passed. Got a B overall.

Pushkar - Thoughts from the Mela

"I don't remember anything. I only remember ideas and emotions," said Buck Mulligan. That's a bit like what my experience in Pushkar was like, though not exclusively. I can't help but wonder, though, when I look back at all this travel if that won't become my summary statement on it all. On verra. Nocturnal I hadn't been sleeping. For two weeks it was the cough. I'd sleep for 40 minutes or so at a time, then rouse myself with a nasty coughing fit. Rob was losing his mind as much as I was: he's a rather light sleeper. Things like the power light from our speakers can keep him awake, so a high-decibel, constant, raw-sounding hack was enough to drive him into the living room. After the cough had mostly passed, there was a succession of birthdays that kept us up till early morning, never in bed till 5 or so. Great times, all around: people had fantastic birthdays, but I was damned annoyed to be functionally nocturnal again. It paid off on the day we left for Pushkar, though, because I just stayed up till 4, called the taxi-wallah to wake him up, then made tea and got everyone else up to get going. Heartland It was still dark as night as we pulled out of the station. I spent most of the journey with my iPod and sunglasses on, occasionally waking up to read Catch 22.

Side note: Catch-22 is brilliant. It's beautiful and dark and raw and poignant and funny. If I ever write something half as powerful, I will consider my life a success.

I dozed off and on, never for more than 10 minutes at a time, the whole way to Pushkar. That Saturday was Grandpa's birthday and he was very much on my mind (see entry). What a guy, my Grandpa. Everybody in my family is thankful that we've somehow got a bit of his genetic code. The dude is 90, now, and still is out there everyday, farming. FARMING! He's got two fake hips, but the last time I asked him about them he reported that "They feel about as well as they ever did. Darned fantastic things they can do these days." I hope I can get out there next summer to help with harvest. Ajmer The train stops rattled off, more exotic names and more arid land the farther from Delhi we got. It was early afternoon by the time we pulled in to Ajmer, where we got off for the ride to Pushkar. The first thing we noticed was the heat. We figured the desert would be cooling off to something akin to the gorgeously mild weather Delhi's experiencing right now: 70's and 80's during the day, dropping to a brisk sweater-weather at night. We were wrong. It was 85� in Pushkar when we got there at 11AM, and only increased as the day wore on.

Side note: Dilliwallas are wimps. The weather in Delhi right now is just gorgeous. Perfect, basically, except for the dust. Yet you talk to a Dilliwalla at night, just after you reluctantly put on a light sweater, and you don't hear anything because their parka is muffling their voices. They open up for just long enough to say "Aren't you freezing?" When you respond that you love this weather, especially in December, they say something about "crazy Americans" as they button back up their complicated coverings.

It's... clean. We took two big jeeps from Ajmer to Pushkar. To get there, we had to go up and over a sizable little desert mountain. The views, even in rattling jeep, were beautiful. Rolling plains extended to the horizon, slices of rocky mountains dividing the expanse into valleys. Coming down the other side, we caught a glimpse of the holy lake at Pushkar and a dust cloud off to the Northwest. I really do like the desert. I said this the whole weekend at Pushkar, and eventually someone said "You know, just because you like Lawrence of Arabia doesn't mean you need to act the part." Well, touch�, but the point holds: Rajasthan is just unrelentingly beautiful. T.E. Lawrence was right, in the movie, anyway, when Bentley asks him "What attracts you personally to the desert?" and Lawrence replies "It's... clean." Amen. The lines are rugged but close inspection shows them smooth and mobile. It's gorgeous. I can't wait to get out, someday, into the proper Thar Desert and then the Arabian. I heard a story, I think from Rob, about a German woman who comes to Egypt every summer and just takes 4 camels and supplies and heads out into the Sahara alone. I can totally see doing that, though I'd prefer horses. More on the horses v. camels debate later, but the solitude, the beauty, the stars at night, the silence, like you brushed up against eternity and it stared back at you... it'd be well worth it. Labor Replacement Everything in Rajasthan is camels. That's the most noticeable difference between Delhi and Rajasthan is the camels. In Delhi, bulls, donkeys and small horses are the mainstay small-freight delivery methods. In Rajasthan, camels of varying sizes and numbers take the place of all three. Just on the road into Pushkar, we saw much variety in camel usage. Pulling carts of varying sizes, serving as personal transportation, serving as shade generators. Interesting, really. The Zoo/Hotel Our hotel was called the Sunset Hotel and Caf�. The first thing I noticed was all the white people. It's still such a shock for me to see white people in India. I'm so used to billions of brown faces and brown eyes, that it's sort of weird to see white (or red, actually, as was the case with many of them) faces, blue and green eyes, and wildly varying accents. It was like being in a zoo. A Caucasian zoo. We were all pointing and staring, as if there were glass between the strange creatures and us. Throughout the next four days, the shock never totally went away, but we did find that the Caucasian Zoo only had two real species in it: young, faux-spiritual, unwashed, tan, hash-smoking hippies, and aging, tour-group-led, matching-hat-wearing, huge-camera-toting, sunburned, rich, hash-smoking retirees. The Holy Lake at Pushkar It's almost perfectly round. It's eerie, really, but certainly calming. It's the calm shared by all holy places, even crowded touristy ones: it's brain-quieting, like when Mom closed the door after kissing me goodnight when I was a kid, leaving just a crack of light to filter into the room. It's that kind of Pavlovian response, triggering some systems in me and shutting others down. Our hotel looked out on the lake from one of the Ghats (platforms for visiting the lake and performing a Pooja or holy dip) straight to the west. The result was a perfect look at, of course, the sunset, thus the hotel's name. Just sitting there on the terrace of the restaurant, looking out at the lake and the mountain and the sunset was just good for the soul, even if some of the actual "religious" activity surrounding the holy lake was less than savory. I was a stupid tourist when it came to actually visiting the lake, somehow forgetting in that beautiful, heavy, holy atmosphere, all the good instincts I've picked up traveling. Fleeced The temples at Pushkar have an ingenious method of acquiring pilgrims. At the start of one stretch of tourist heaven/hell half a block away from the lake, a peaceful-looking holy man in all white, wrinkles befitting sand dunes, hands tourists marigolds without saying a word. The charmed tourists take the marigolds and walk on. Another holy crony, this one in plain clothes, posing as a helpful passerby, says "You must hold it in your right hand!" The charmed tourists dutifully switch hands, the marigolds dampening from the residue of perspiring Pepsi bottles. A little further on, the tourists pass an opening between overpriced Rajasthani camel wear. Another man in white is standing there and picks out the smitten tourists from a mile away, looking for their clenched right fists. As they approach, he walks out into the foot traffic and says "I see you have an offering. Come this way to throw it in the lake and receive your blessing." Most charmed tourists march, lemming-like and giggling, down the alley, into the ghat. When the tourists are isolated, the pitch/ceremony begins. Impressive, and probably sincere, Sanskrit recitations start, which tourist-lemmings are supposed to repeat in small chunks, phonetically. This is followed by an English translation: "For mother," splash of water toward the lake, "for father," splash, "for sister", splash, "for brother"--"I don't have a brother," the lemming perks up. "Not in this life, of course, but in your previous life. Pray for his soul." "Oh, right, of course." "For myself," splash, "for success," splash, "for love." Rinse (literally) and repeat. In front of the tourist is the plate with water, the afore-mentioned marigold, and red dyes. The pitch starts in earnest:

"Some people come here, they give $50, $100, $200--wait, you're American?" "Yes." "$10,000, $15,000." "They just throw it in the lake?" "They give it to the temple." "Oh. What for?" "We are a holy charity." "Oh, well, I give--" "It will give you very good karma." "You can buy???" "You do not buy anything. Lord Brahma gives it to you." "In exchange for money." "In exchange for charity," the holy man says, and the pitch moves on. "How much do you have on you?" "Not much." "I think you can give... $200." "How bout 100 rupees?" "Oh, sir, you have many blessings in your life," he says, nailing a kernel of truth, "and your kindness shall be repaid to you in the future."

Searching through a drawn-out wallet, the lemming sees 70 rupees. Looking around at the other tourists, with large wads of cash being broken out, the lemming feels unnaturally guilty and borderline disrespectful, against all instincts. He grabs 270, all his better parts rebelling in a losing battle to unspoken, quasi-religious peer pressure. As soon as it is out, a miracle happens: the money has passed through some alternate quantum dimension, out of his hand and into the quickly buttoned pocket of the holy man in front of him. "Now, finally, I would like you to pray for me and my family." The tourist's eyes are itching to roll and forget the whole thing, yet enough of his mind is still taken with the peace within chaos that the lake itself provides. 100 rupees later, the tourist is standing alone, finally, at the edge of the lake with the silver dish in his hands, the prayerful debris of previous pilgrims and suckers floating idly towards the southern end of the lake. Thoughts flash through his head of the 1st Commandment, whether he is committing a serious act of blasphemy, about whether he was actually being disrespectful to Hinduism by doing this. He thinks about the words of the prayer he had just spoken, ostensibly to another God. For family, for friends, for me... In the end, he decides, in a simple and not entirely un-childish manner, that there must really be just one God, but he goes by different names and does different things depending on what culture he's seen in. This thought does what true religious experiences have always done: made him feel more connected to everyone around him, more entitled to be at this holy place, more at peace, more centered. It's the same feeling he got, intensely, at Mt. St. Michel, the same feeling he got standing, alone, outside the Jamma Masjid at evening prayers. He stands, barefoot, at the lowest step of the ghat, silver plate still in hand. In a smooth, under-handed motion, he swings the plate down, then up in a long arc. The flowers and powder leap from the plate and swing high towards the sun before bowing to earthly gravity. They make a long red and gold trail in the air that stays for a second before dissipating in a surprising gust of warm air that makes him shuffle his feet for balance. The universe had answered. Leaving the ghat, his guide on this fleecing yet still spiritual expedition stops him and puts a red theeka in the middle of his forehead, just above the separation of his eyebrows, then ties a red and gold string around his right wrist. This last step is what the locals call the "tourist passport," indicating that the tourist has already paid and paid his respects to Brahma. Out on the street again, the reunited groups of lemmings discuss the ritual:

"He was like, 'People come here, they give $200, $500, $10,000.' I was like, 'You can have 10 rupees and that's it.' Who the hell gives anything more than that to this place?" There is a chorus of "Not me"'s, then a lone voice that says, "Uh, I gave a bit more than that." Laughing, laughing, they ask, "How much?" "A lot." Laughing, laughing, they ask, "How much is a lot?" "270." Laughing, laughing, gasping for air. "Plus 100 for the guy," the voice says, trying to slip it into the cacophony. One recovers her breath long enough to say, "I thought you were Mr. Experienced Traveler over here, that you didn't fall for this crap?!" "Yea, usually," the voice grumbles.

Reports Vary... There are three circulating stories about why the Pushkar lake is holy:

1. My version that I read in two different places is that the lake is the tears of Brahma himself. They represent his compassion for the world, that's why when you do the Pooja (ceremony involving a dip in the water), your sins are cleansed.
2. That the lake is a remnant of a lotus petal dropped from heaven by Brahma as he was flying across the sky. Details vary wildly in this version, occasionally getting mixed up with story #3.
3. That Brahma was smiting a demon from the sky. He threw three fireballs, one somewhere I don't know, one at Ajmer, and the one that killed the demon which fell at Pushkar.

Who's to say? Even Hindus aren't totally straight on this score, so I don't think I'm just an ignorant tourist for not having figured it out. I was an ignorant tourist for having given up Rs 370, but this isn't that bad... The Mela We walked through the main market in Pushkar, took a right, and found 150,000 camels. The noise that 150,000 camels make is beyond description. No really, I'm just going to leave it at that. We walked through the dusty mela (Hindi for "gathering") just taking it all in. The camel traders stared us at, universally,, even while they were doing deals. (Perhaps they thought themselves at the Zoo, as well.) Over here a deal went awry and two old men started beating each other with big sticks. This was the first time I ever saw someone knock someone else's turban off, which I understand is a really serious thing to do. Moving on, a prospective buyer was conducting a dental exam on a sizable camel with the help of ten men with ropes and sticks. The camel was not such a big fan of this (I don't blame him) and was making that ragged sound that camels make when they're annoyed, which is always, though this was continuous and only interrupted when a particularly sharp swing of the stick struck. Walking further out, the compression of camels loosened a bit, enough to fit in a horse or 2000. With numbers so comparatively small, the horses were hardly noticeable or worth mentioning. The variation in size is enormous in the camel world. You think of camels as some sort of boring, monolithic species, though with their two famous branches: the Bactrian and the Dromedary. All the camels in Rajasthan are Dromedary, yet some camels are as tall as Clydesdales, and some were full-grown and only had humps up to the top of my head. Our first trip into the mela ended with us at the top of one of the hills in some VIP-looking joint, sipping cold Cokes (at a really good price!) to beat off the heat. We stayed there a long time, the view was so nice and surreal. Manu and Kaluram After walking through the camel mela two days in a row and generally soaking it in, Rob and I decided that we really wanted to go horseback riding. Brinda, who knows everyone in India, knew the owner of our hotel, of course, and knew that he also owned horses that he occasionally rented out to tourists. For Rs250 a piece ("Almost as much as your karma cost!"-Rob), we got 2 hours on the back of real horses doing, functionally, whatever we wanted. The stable was east of the lake, and we got there via two scooters that came for us. Almost unbelievably, it was the first time I'd been on a scooter in India, and it was rather a strange experience. It felt so unstable, and so perilous, as we drove through crowded Pushkar tourist heaven/hell. Our horses were beautiful. My girl's name was Manu, and neither Rob nor I remember his horse's name, though she was Manu's mother. She was light brown and white and her flanks shimmered like they'd been spun from gold in the afternoon light. Our guide was Kaluram, an old, old horseman who was dissatisfied with his job and boss, yet very much in love with the horses he took care of. With basically every camel and elephant-walla I'd yet met, the relationship between man and animal was of a vicious master-slave dynamic. Kaluram and his horses seemed to be genuinely affectionate for each other, and it showed to be a more effective relationship. Where elephant and camel-wallas beat and stab their charges to do what they want, Kaluram whistled and called and his horses obeyed. It was quite impressive. It took us a while to get out of Pushkar proper, and into more open territory. I was dying to see what Manu could do, and as soon as we were out of sight of the highway and I felt like I was properly riding out, Kaluram told me how to break into a fast trot. That initial burst of power is just an electric thing. Manu had strong legs and strong shoulders, unlike so many common horses that you see pulling carts everywhere but Rajasthan. Those horses have been kept a gallop from death their whole lives; Manu had been obviously well fed and well exercised and I felt that the second she went from a walk to a trot. She made this smooth forward motion with her legs and the world got blurry. It was exhilarating to fly through rough desert on horseback. We didn't have any particular destination in mind, so we three wandered into this valley and took some pictures, including one selfie that I love but everyone tells me looks "scary" or "intense." Bah. After a while, we decided to stop and take a break, just chill out and watch the stars fade in. We sat on a sandy hill with Kaluram and just talked for a while. Big K was a cool guy and his English was effective if a bit hard to decipher. While we were hanging out, Manu and the other horse happily grazed near us. I asked Kaluram why they didn't run away or even stray very far. He just pointed at himself and proudly said, "Never without me." It got dark really fast out there, as it is wont to do at this time of year. The desert is jaw-droppingly beautiful at night, but the highway we had to follow to get back was not. All the tourist buses and jeeps and guys on motorcycles passed us at high speed. Every time, Manu would shudder and move more off the road. I could never move her back. From Manu to Babu Oh, Babu. Babu was a bastard. I knew this immediately upon meeting him and was reticent to give him any of my business, but circumstances forced me to employ his services for an afternoon. It took nearly that whole time to get him under proper control, but it ended up all right. Babu was a camel. A bastard camel with even more attitude than your normal, prickly, Rajasthani camels. Babu was the biggest of the 9 camels we took on our afternoon trek, and acted like he had been the biggest bully in his camel schoolyard. He responded to every command with an angry, grunting roar. When descending and ascending, the most precarious of all positions with which to be on a camel in peacetime, he added a totally fragrant and uncalled-for lateral shaking movement. Bastard. Whenever we passed any kind of shrubbery, he would lean his long, square-bottomed neck down to try and grab a bite. A yank of his chain back up would result in that trademark, belched roar. The one time I had to walk in front of him while he was sitting on the ground, the bastard tried to bite me. The one time I went behind him while he was standing up, he nearly pissed on me. Bastard. Headware The first thing they said to us about the whole camel ride expedition was that we would absolutely need head coverings, "or you will die in the heat." Alrighty then. So all the guys fixed up turbans out of long-sleeved shirts, the girls put their shawls to good use, and we were off. We set off west in the early afternoon. It was difficult, at first, to get used to the lumbering, side-to-side motion of the camel. Not nearly as smooth as horse riding had been. We took it slow for an hour or so, passing around fields and small villages as the land became more open and more arid.

Side note: I'm convinced that this region is on top of some kind of auspicious aquifer. That's the only way you could get the lake and enough moisture to farm with.)

About an hour out, we took the opportunity to stop and stretch our legs in the middle of one nice, wide, open expanse. (This is when Babu tried to bite me. Bastard.) We soon continued on after some turban readjustment and some choice photographs. We stopped for chai in the village of one of the camel-wallas. His brother was the chai-wallah. As soon as we came into town, we were swarmed with small children there just to look at us. We made some rudimentary conversation, but mostly it was them looking at us and whispering in each other's ears and us doing the same. They were particularly fascinated by 1) Mira, and 2) digital cameras. I understand both fascinations. Mira's a very pretty Indian girl ("from Canada!" she would be quick to note) and is sort of the dream girl for most men on the sub-continent. The kids were totally taken. And when Jenn took their pictures and they could see themselves, they had precisely the same "gee-wiz" look that I got the first time I played with a digital camera. (Still such a cool thing. Thank God for digital cameras!) It was more so, of course, because it's more than likely that these kids had never had their picture taken before. They were ecstatic and jumpy to see themselves on the small screen. The Run From the village, we turned back towards Pushkar. The camel-wallahs were apparently worried about getting us back on time, or just wanted to screw with us, so we ran the whole way back. Interesting experience. The first thing you notice is how surprisingly smooth it is, compared to walking. The frequency is so much higher that you can barely feel the difference from crest to crest of each wave. Brian of Rajasthan About 2 miles out from Pushkar, at the edge of the Mela grounds, my camel-wallah helper guy left and said "You will be fine. Just follow them." My camel-wallah, of course, had been so distracted for the last 5 minutes that "them" were my friends as tiny specks way off in the distance. Now I was alone and had to catch up with them. Babu, the bastard, sensed that this was his moment to try and battle for supremacy and finally get his own way. He took off to the right, leaving the path. I kept going, but continued on to the right until we were facing back the way we should have been. He let out his angry, ugly roar in discontent. He tried again, but I dragged him back the right way, holding the reins tight in my hand. We passed by a tree with some low-hanging branches. I reached up to try and drag one off to make a stick for Babu-motivation, and got one just as Babu took off for the side of the road again, this time to start munching on plants. I gave him the 30 seconds I needed to strip the flexible branch of leaves and twigs, then laid into him like I'd seen the camel-wallahs do and yelled "TUT TUT TUT!!" Babu, perhaps out of shock, took off at an actual gallop. We were flying. We were going even faster than I'd gone the previous day with Manu. There I was, a white boy in a turban, alone, riding on a speeding camel across the desert. It must have looked cool (it certainly felt cool), because as I got closer to Pushkar and back in the orbit of normal tourists, they all started pointing and taking my picture. One Germanic-looking lot blinded me so bad with all their flashes that I nearly ran Babu into a hay cart. I eventually slowed him down to a nice trot ("TUT!") when I could see my friends again in the distance. I felt a bit like a conquering hero riding back into Pushkar. People were still taking my picture, Babu was listening to my every command, and I knew where I was going.

"What are you looking for? "Some way to annnounce myself." "Be patient with him God."

I had heard the two-part command to give to get the camels to kneel, then sit down so you can dismount. So, while the other camel-wallahs were taking care of my friends' camels, I said to Babu, "Jay!" He instantly took to his front knees, forcing me to lean back. I yelled the second part, "Jay!" And he sat down all the way with another nasty groan. I hopped off as the other camel-wallahs came over and patted me on the back, smiling. Babu craned his long neck around as we just looked at each other. "You're a bastard, Babu." He roared and turned away, putting his head on the ground. The Tears of Brahma India is good for humility. It's easy to be overwhelmed. It excels at challenging preconceptions. It's capable of making you so depressed, but in those darkest of moments, when your faith in humanity is shaken to the core, something will pop up that's subtly beautiful and inspirational. The holy lake in Pushkar, "the tears of Brahma," as it's called by my version, at night is black and shimmering with ambient light. On our last night there, these pilgrims lit candles in bowls of flowers and leaves and floated them out into the tears. I just thought it was so pretty at the time, but it now seems perfectly emblematic of the Indian experience. Bright lights, floating intrepidly in a lake of darkness, hoping against hope. Inspiration in black shine. I think that's a lesson I've learned here: when I think all hope is lost, it never really is. There's always another candle to light against the darkness. Note: There are tons of pictures up on Flickr. I'm eventually going to do the thumbnail thing with this entry, but not now. Feel free to check all of them out on flickr, comment on them there, etc. Second note: The original posting of this somehow forgot to include my conclusion. Sorry. There it is. Enjoy.

Happy Birthday, Grandpa

I felt surprisingly close to my Grandpa yesterday, his 90th birthday, despite being well more than 7000 miles away. We left Delhi at 6am for Pushkar, in Rajasthan, to go to the Camel Fair. There were the preliminary signs, like the Indian man with the striking light blue eyes holding a baby. (My first memory of Grandpa is sitting in his lap on his chair next to the radio, just staring up into his famously blue eyes.) There was the couple on the train with the noticeable Midwest Drawl (tm). It was only when we pulled out of New Delhi, out of the suburbs, that I really started to feel close to Grandpa. The huge wheat fields that support the sizable population of the northern swath of Hindustan start at the tip of the suburbs and continue on till well past the tip of the desert. Defiant farms shake their fist in the face of the dusty winds that roll in from the west. It's unshakable, though. My first and only thought when I see golden fields in low-angle morning radiance is Grandpa on his tractor in Clay County, Kansas. The tractors of Hindustan are few and far between. The farming implements are mostly unchanged since the Middle Ages, with a few modern amenities thrown in. Grandpa is probably real thankful for the CASE (perhaps the defining image of all my Kansas memories), but, at the same time, I think if he had to deal with the rough conditions of Hindustani agriculture, he'd be just fine. Because, really, after 90 years, the highest compliment I can pay to my grandfather is the highest compliment I can pay any man: that he looks after his farm, he looks after his ever-burgeoning family, and he does those things with the best of them. The farmers here would understand him, I think, and wish him a very happy birthday. As do I.

Goodbye Kiddies

Well, then. Just when I thought adults were reading this blog, a little microcosm of our political system erupted in the comments section of that last post. That's just great. So, as much as it pains me, I'm going to refrain from posting any of my political views atleast until I'm back home, because apparently you kids just can't keep it civil. I'm also disabling the comments for a few days so the kiddies in question find new sandboxes in which to play. To my actual friends and family: I stand by what I said, but hope it didn't offend anyone. It's interesting that even my extended family can be a microcosm of the contemporary political divide, and it's worthy of remembrance that we are all, in fact, in this together. I'll just close this off, for the time being, with a quote from Barack Obama, who I think really gets it:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Amen to that.

A Patriotic Admission

Until today, I had never once been embarrassed to be an American. Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Scene From Delhi - 7

I sometimes take a cycle-rickshaw from St. Stephen's to Kumla Nagar to get on extremely high-speed internet at a cafe there, or go to McDonalds, or to buy books. It's 7 rupees door to door, maybe $.14. The cycle-rickshaws, like anyone, will haggle with you over 1 rupee and some occasionally refuse to go for less than 8. I refuse to go for more than 7. Today I took a cycle-rickshaw to KN from college. Again, I haggled with the old cyclewallah. He asked for 10 and I said "Har din ye rasta 7 rupiya hai." "Every day this route is 7 rupees." He came down to 8. I said "7. Bas." "7. That's it." He assented and we went off. At the first turn, we got bumped into by an SUV behind us, which is no laughing matter when you're in something as unsturdy as a cycle-rickshaw. The jerkoffs in the car were laughing and faux-apologetic. Cycle-wallah and I were annoyed. We turned back around. There soon came an opportunity for the cycle-rickshaw to move, while we were waiting at the light, and the cycle-rickshaw didn't take it. The SUV behind us turned down whatever Americana pop drivel they were playing and the driver leaned on his horn to get us to move out of the way. Cycle-wallah looked like he didn't like being pressured so much, and wasn't doing well with it, so he shook his fist at the SUV and didn't budge. The SUV kids revved their engine and yelled out the window. No dice. The light turned green and cycle-wallah moved forward. The SUV screamed out of line and went around us, someone in the backseat throwing a still-lit half-cigarette out the window as they passed. My guy shook his fist again. About halfway to KN, the cycle started shaking every time cycle-wallah pedalled. I had flashbacks to riding my red banana-seat bicycle back at Arbor Drive, the same lurching feeling when the chain came off. He kept trying, but he knew it was fruitless. He pulled over, amid yet more screams of horns all around. He got off the cycle and looked down at the chain. I got out and looked as well. The chain had stripped a few spokes of the gear down to nubs, just in the few wrenching revolutions the cycle-wallah had applied. He looked at it and just started crying. I hadn't yet seen a man really cry in India. He started playing with the chain and rapidly speaking to himself in Hindi between deep, hard breaths. It was plain to see that he was going to have to get his gear replaced, he didn't know how he was going to pay for it. I gave him the 9 rupees I had in my pocket and walked the rest of the way.

Scene From Delhi - 6

At a small, 4-way intersection at the tip of Old Delhi, two cows block a small intersection. During a lull in traffic, they strategically wander into a staggered position that effectively cuts off traffic from all but one direction. Soon traffic piles up on all sides. The cows, one stark white and one jet black, both with long horns, don't budge. They don't seem to have any purpose doing what they're doing, as always. These cows, though, are particularly stubborn in their purposelessness. They just don't move. Traffic continues to pile up on all sides. Horns are blaring, in all the myriad symphonic tones of Delhi transportation. Walkers and bikes skirt around the margins and continue on, but scooters, autos, cars, and one truck are stuck. Usually, cows in this position will lazily move on as the beeping tempo increases, feigning annoyance at the effort. In my experience, Hindus rarely will force a cow out of the way. They accomodate and suggest that it move. To wit, a Sadhu, a Hindu holy man, wearing the battered orange frock of his station and a rag around his head, a long ruffled beard hanging down to his breastbone, walks up to one of the cows and seems to plead with it to move. He gestures, shaking his hands repeatedly but slowly, totally non-threatening. The cows look at each other and continue to stand there, occasionally lifting and dropping their hooves, but not changing their orientation or position. The black cow looks better fed and in better health. He has strong shoulders and a respectable layer of fat around him. The white cow is in less enviable shape. Though nothing could hide the inherent bulk of something bovine, this one's wide arcing ribs are visible just beneath its skin. Though its color is pure and unadulterated, its legs are covered in filth, impugning its purity. The Sadhu's voice rises to a hoarse plea, but still, amazingly, no movement. Two Muslim men presumably (given the dying pinkish light) on their way to evening prayers walk past and smile at the jam. One smartly smacks the white cow on its rear and the cow makes a muffled moo and moves on down a street. The other man yells at the black cow and grabs a small rock and throws it at its backside. The black cow moves on in the opposite direction of the white one. Passing autowallahs thank the men for taking care of the problem. As traffic starts to flow again, horns still blaring in echoing annoyance, the Sadhu shakes his head, lights a beedie, grabs his shabby bag of few possessions, and walks down the street perpendicular to the listless animals. He wishes he had had more time.

Today is the Best Day of My Life

My kids and grandkids will be out of the family unless they memorize the entire roster of the 2004 Red Sox. Victory. History. Sweet.

Scene From Delhi - 5

At five, the bats still feast freely in the black blue night. They hunt in impossibly complex aerial maneuvers, swooping in at high speed just above the dreaded light of orange yellow streetlights to eradicate flies and mosquitoes who slam repeatedly into the faux suns like junkies needing their electromagnetic hit. At five fifteen, there is a precise and orderly changing of the aerial guard, as navy replaces black as the dominant hue on God's arcing palette and the bats disappear. Huge air wings of eagles taxi and take off from the park down the street and fly northeast over our house still in formation, their huge wingspans stark against the lightening sky. Once out over the highway, they break formation and go off to pursue solo bombing runs on rodents, small birds and, horrifyingly, puppies around the city. At six, the sun is risen over the east and the nuisance brigade fully alights. Pigeons disorganizedly flop around the skies, an embarassment to the grace of their hunter cousins. In huge numbers they testify to their insanity: trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different response. They squabble over non-existent food (predictably just outside on my bedroom balcony). They sit, purposeless, for minutes at a time, until some whim of wind or humming low-level instinct move them to move. By six thirty, the city is full alive and aloud. The last to join the sky revel in the ignorance of their own inferiority for the remainder of the day.

Donaldson and the Red Sox

I can't believe it. Even the biggest goddam defeatist in all New England is now jumping on the bandwagon. I thought he would write lots of contrite, don't-count-your-chickens pieces as he eased his way back into our collective good graces. But no. All he gives is one line two columns after his pithy little screed:

I don't hesitate to say that I thought they were all done after that 19-8 embarrassment at Fenway last Saturday night that put them down, 3-0, to the 26-time World Series champions. But the Sox came back, and so they were back at Fenway last night for Game 1 of the 2004 World Series, against St. Louis, another old rival.

What, that's it? They still let this guy into the clubhouse? Sure, he says in his article that he's publicly rooting for the Red Sox to win now, but that's a little like Italy rooting for the Allies after Mussolini fell. It rings a bit hollow, wouldn't you say? For me, I'm not excited yet. I'm not elated. The Cardinals are too good for us to say that this is in the bag. They are not a team that will go down easily. They are a punishing team with which we cannot make mistakes. We count them down and out at our own peril. The Red Sox have been brilliant at caging the bird of prey, so to speak, thus far, but I'm keeping a gun trained on the cage until the very end. I'm going to be calm and supportive when something doesn't go as planned, and happy as hell when things go our way, but I'm not "tasting" anything yet, to use Donaldson's vernacular. I do, though, have full confidence that we can win tomorrow. This is the best Red Sox team of my lifetime, arguably anybody's lifetime. They really do have it all. Their best asset, though, is that they're thinking the same way: they're just going to go out and win the ballgame. They're not seeing any ghosts. They're not daunted by history or numbers or any kind of voodoo. They're calm. I really think tomorrow's game will be one for the history books, and not just because it holds the potential to be one of the greatest sporting moments in the history of the world. It's going to be a fight worthy of the greats. The Thrilla in Missoura, perhaps, or is that a bit much? The day we signed Keith Foulke I told Toby, I think it was, that we were going to win the World Series. I've never wavered. I got jarringly nervous when we traded Nomar, but Theo Epstein has more than allayed all my fears about that. (I hold to what I said: I do miss Nomar. I still love that guy.) And Schilling has become arguably my favorite member of the Red Sox. I'm honestly going to be telling my grandkids about what he's done in his last two starts. I've tried to explain how momentous and amazing he's been to people at St. Stephen's, and I've been marginally successful, though I have to put it in a cricket parallel for them to really understand it: "Ok, imagine India is playing Pakistan for the ICC Cup (big prize) and India's best bowler basically rips a hole in his ankle. He doesn't want to quit, so he has a doctor stitch him up. He runs out there and bowls a bunch of maiden overs, hobbling back to start every time. India wins, Pakistan is permanently demoralized." They get it when you put it this way, for some reason. Donaldson, to his defeatist credit, is right about one thing, though: we are one game away, a mere 54 outs, from the moment most of the people reading this blog have been waiting all their natural lives to see. It's a great time to be alive. Necessary post-script: I know quite well and rather like Jim Donaldson, the long-time columnist for the Providence Journal. I know him well enough to know that if he ever read this he wouldn't take it personally. People in bars around Rhode Island are giving him the same crap I am right now, including my dad, probably, but I can't do that so this is my substitute. Donaldson is a damn nice guy, and an addiction-forming New England sports commentator, if a chronically terrible putter. But really, he should stick to his excellent Patriots commentary until after the Series is over and the dust has settled.

Scene From Delhi - 4

An old Tibetan man, in part of a monk's costume and blue jeans, wears, of all things, a Boston Red Sox hat as he walks down the street. I just have to ask him: "Are you a Red Sox fan?" "Sorry, sir, I am a Buddhist," he says in a heavy accent, not understanding my question. "Oh," I laugh. "So you know the suffering of the world." "Oh yes." "Yea, you're a Red Sox fan."

Scene From Delhi - 3

A small child, maybe three years old, chases after me as I come out of a restaurant at Connaught Place. He tugs at my jeans as I reach for my cell phone. I stop and look down at him. He puts his open hand out, touches his mouth, touches his stomach: the holy trinity of Indian beggardom. His feet are bare and filthy, and one toenail looks mightily infected. His shorts are shoddily cut off at the thigh, revealing legs not nearly as thick as my lower arm. He has a button down shirt that used to belong to someone maybe ten times his size: only two buttons exist on this abbreviated piece of cloth. The bottom of the shirt is more cleanly cut than the shorts, but still obviously an ad-hoc construction. The pattern is alternating light blue and white. He stares at me intently, making his holy pattern. His eyes are huge and dark with a kind of sad depth. I am uncharacteristically swayed towards giving him some money or something, when I see that his "father" is intently watching our paused interaction from the parking lot. His father looks like he's nearly salivating at the thought of the ten rupees I might give this kid. I'm disgusted by this economic whoring of children, and I move on, the boy still clutching the seams of my jeans. I round a corner and look back, the "father" still staring, optimistic that I'll cave and hand his kid some pittance to get rid of him. A block later, despite my repeated Hindi admonitions for him to go and ask someone else, the boy is still hanging on, as if for dear life. I stop again and he looks up at me, still pleading, wordlessly, in his holy beggar sign language. I tell him, firmly, "Nahi." No. I'm not going to give him 5 rupees just so he can give it to his "father," who, more likely than not, will just go off and booze with it. "Nahi." He tugs my jeans in something like the motion of a wide punch, turns and runs back. As he runs away, he turns back over his shoulder, stops for a second, looks at me, looks back in the direction he came, then runs back to find some other sucker for his father. I just wonder what he was thinking about in that one second pause as he looked at me. "How heartless?" "Can I run away?" "What a waste of time," perhaps? Or, maybe, "You'll just never understand."

Scene From Delhi - 2

An old man with one leg hobbles up to an auto at rest on his one crutch while I stand on a streetcorner. He begs in a low rasp for money and is denied. As traffic starts to move, he hobbles back to the sidewalk. His black t-shirt says, in a loopy white script, "Definitely sexy." The next traffic set stops, and he hobbles back out. Some cruel high school girls make fun of him, and he moves on to another vehicle, the same low begging rasp just barely audible above the internal combustion din. These passengers put on radiation-grade urban shields and act like they don't see him. As he hobbles back, dodging all manner of traffic, he sits down on the curb, his skinny leg and quarter splayed out in front of him. A tear forms in his eye and stutteringly makes its way down his weathered cheek. It could just be the dust, we all tell ourselves.

Scene From Delhi - 1

As I pull up to a light in the back of an auto, I hear the familiar St. Loo-loop of Nelly's "Hot in Here." I look out the opening in the auto and turn around to see where it's coming from. The auto just behind us is bumping. The women passengers are clad in black, pre-2001, Kabul-chic burkkas, totally unmoving while the auto-wallah bounces his head to the beat. "So take off all your clothes..."

President Bush has a Point

Decisive can be a good thing. Real update soon, I promise.

Into the Desert

My friends dragged me, kicking and screaming, out of Delhi this weekend. Mike: "Brian, you need to <>-ing leave this city. You're coming with us." So I went to Jaipur. We took the bus at 2:30 on Saturday from Rajasthan House in New Delhi, right near India gate. We could have taken the 1:45, but Nisha admitted to me that she just wanted the nice AC Volvo bus. By the time Mike and Chrissy arrived, around 2:00, she had thought of a better excuse: "We didn't know if you guys would have made the 1:45." Clever girl. It's hard to describe the difference between Delhi and its surrounding regions. Perhaps it's like what I imagine leaving the dirtiest possible version of Phoenix, Arizona, to head out into the wilds of the Southwestern Desert would be like. The lush greenery for which Dilliwallas are so rightfully proud gives way to desert, where rough, low shrubbery dominates the ever more hilly, rocky terrain. The exception to this comparison, of course, is that no one has the audacity to try and really farm anything in the middle of the Southwestern desert. Here, on all sides of the highway, and for as far as the eye can see, intrepid Indians have small plots of land, most growing wheat of some kind. Their fierce attacks on the shrubbery landscape are admirable.

Sidenote: Up in the mountains, we visited this place called SIDH: The Society for the Integrated Development of the Himalayas. It's an NGO that does much for education and social progress in the most hard-pressed areas of the lower Himalayas. There were many interesting things discussed up there, but one that stayed with me was about food. The woman who is co-director of SIDH with her husband talked about a woman in one of the villages in which SIDH works who laid bare her problem with the modern world. She said, "You call yourself educated. You call yourself advanced, elite. I know every aspect of every ingredient that goes into the food I feed my family. I have taken care of and grown every single thing. There is a direct relationship between me and that which sustains me. What price, this education, this advancement, if I lose that?" Now, I my capitalist, progressive instincts immediately jump to concepts like increased urbanization and the human benefits thereof, the specialization of the workforce and the higher yield of the contemporary agrarian economy, etc. in defense against this onslaught. These are all good and defensible concepts. But none strike home like that simple woman's argument because I hide a simple shame: I have no idea how to take a wheat crop and make bread out of it. It's a total mystery to me. I consider myself relatively educated, relatively advanced, and I have a ludicrously indirect and tenuous connection to that which sustains me. So when we were passing mile after mile of rugged, defiant wheat fields, I could help but think that, for all their visible hardships and disadvantages, I was looking out on people who, on perhaps a central existential question, were more advanced than I.

The farms gave way after a while, wholly giving up the battle against the harsh looking shrubbery and sandy soil. It was near this point that the sun started to set in the west. (How odd that the sun sets at about 6:30 or 7 now, where it was plenty light till 9:30 when we first got to India!) You all know how much I love it when God paints in pastels. Lazy light blues and hazy oranges, a rainbow sherbet sunset. When we arrived into the Jaipur bus station, a group of 30 or so men ran alongside our bus, vying to be the first to exploit the newly arrived tourists. We waited on the bus for our ride to the hotel. Maybe 20 or so guys asked us, in unison and some querying in German, French and Spanish, whether we needed a ride. When we got to the hotel, we had a stupid argument over a price difference of Rs60 between hotels. Keerthi, Chrissy and I had a nice dinner together at a place called the Copper Chimney, while Mike, Nancy, Nisha and Cat food from a roadside dhaba. Back at the hotel, we met and chilled with some other backpackers slowly making their way through India: Jesse, from Toronto, and two charming Aussie girls from Melbourne, Prudence and Sienna. Then we went to bed. We got up at 6ish the next morning, showered, had breakfast, and just messed around for a while, waiting for our tour guide to arrive at 9. Our guide, Jawan, was just this side of shady. Nice guy, but with just too much of a penchant to try and fleece money out of foreigners to be a truly standup guy. Jaipur is called the Pink City. Despite all the San Francisco jokes you might be formulating in your head (Dad, I'm looking at you), there's quite a good reason for this: the whole of the Old City is painted pink. The Maharaja first painted it sometime in the 18th Century to honor the visit of the Prince of Wales to Rajasthan. Pink is historically considered the most welcoming color to people in this region (do what you like with your feminist theories). We started off at the base of one of the Maharaja's many hillside palaces. The palace wasn't all that notable, and wasn't even open to the public, but the massive Lakshmi temple at the base of the hill certainly was. About the size of a mid-range cathedral, and in a shimmering pure white marble in the early sun, it was particularly striking. What I noted here was that, unlike at cathedrals, all the figures of notables and holy men and the generally honored around the periphery of the temple and coming off its walls were bowing inwards towards the temple. Even the holy men face in to God, here. If I knew more about Hinduism, and more about symbology in Christian architecture, perhaps I could make some brilliant synthetic argument here about how representative this was, or unrepresentative, of the two religions, but sadly those are some missing arrows in the quiver. We left the temple after doing the whole tourist thing and made our way to Amber Fort through the labor-intensive cleanup process that followed some festival they had at the temple the night before. Amber Fort, our memorization-heavy guide told us, was built by the founder of Jaipur, the Maharaja Jai Singh I. It is located at the top of one of the mountains that surround Jaipur, this one to the Northwest. We stopped at the base where there's a rather impressive man-made lake. There were elephants bathing and playing around, and down the beach a bit there were people dunking statues in the water in a religious rite with which I'm totally unfamiliar. (This is Hinduism, after all, the best result yet of the Acme Make Your Own Religion Kit.) There was also an honest to god snake charmer. I couldn't believe it, and in fact I thought the snakes were fake, until one tried to kill his "charmer" a few times.

Perhaps this is a good time to talk about military brilliance and Jaipur. You have to imagine it in its medieval (or mediaeval, as the British say) state, where the city was entirely contained within its walls, not anything like its contemporary, expansive, 2.3 million strong sprawl. There were no cruise missiles, no bunker-busters, no daisy-cutters, no satellite battle feeds, just what you normally imagine to be the classic weapons of medieval armies. The walls start on the plains in the old city, to the south of the fort and the northern mountains. They spread out on the plains and arch back until they hit the mountains. These they rise up, and spread north along their respective ridges, meeting again in the one small gap between the northern mountains, forming a nice loop. They're interrupted only by the two northwestern ridge forts, Taigur (like the animal) and Jaigur, and on the eastern side by the damn/fort across the main lake to the north of the old city. So, as a prospective commander of even the most formidable medieval army, your options are: A) go up the side of a mountain and try and get over one of the huge, easily re-inforcable, Great Wall of China-like walls, B) Attack the big, northern front gates in the narrow pass from the plains, where there's no place to assemble and less to maneuver, C) Go to the east... it's only 50 kilometers or so, and see if you can attack the dam cum fort which can release a river at you at will, D) Go west and try the wall/mountain thing again, if you can even get up the steep mountainsides, E) Go ALL the way west, around the mountains, and attack from the south. Historically, most people chose option E. All right, so you attack from the south. Say you take one of the 7 impressive gates to the Old City. Say you even take the Old City. You still need to take the retreating army, now feeling to the northern hills along with, in all likelihood, the highly charismatic maharaja. Now you need to take the hills. No problem, you think, you're the man. You just overran Jaipur, this'll be no sweat. You just have to take both the Amber Fort and Jaigar Fort above it. Good luck, mate. The Amber Fort, the Maharaja's mountainside enclave, is nigh impregnable, to my eye. There's nowhere to assemble, as there's that popular-with-the-elephants artificial lake down at the base of the mountain. There's only one road up, and it's rather steep, very narrow, very exposed, and has a series of well-defended checkpoints with excellent sniping positions. All right, Alexander Grant, you're brilliant. You're tough. You don't miss. Somehow, under withering fire from above, you're inspired your (now definitely much depleted) army and somehow manage get up the hill and break the thick main gate to the fort. You're in! Or so you think. That Maharaja's army is toast and so is he, you say to yourself... but where are they? Wouldn't you know it, they've all gone out, up the hill, through underground, now fully sealed tunnels, to Jaigur Fort. As you idle about, admiring the gorgeous inlaid carving on nearly every surface of every public and private space of the fort, perhaps strolling through the Maharaja's wives' apartments, then the separate ones for his concubines, you take a deep breath and look up. Jaigur fort runs a good way across the higher ridge to the northwest of your most recent conquest. It is long and low and thickly built, arrow slits and other insidious devices to exterminate your men adorn every side of the fortress. The side facing you is nearly vertical sandstone for parts, and others very loose gravel and boulders. The one small path that lazily circles up the mountain on the way up is easily protectable with a small number of men. That's gonna hurt more than taking Amber, you realize, as you look around at your weary, arrow-punctured men. The walls are too high to hit with anything but epithets. Even if you managed another miracle and made a start on the pass, you'd lose the rest of your men in the process. You, the logical commander, decide to turn the forces of attrition to your advantage. You'll just starve them out. Brilliant! Well, in a word, no, commander. You won't. Jaigur fort was built on top of water tanks calculated to be able to sustain a healthy army for 4 years. It has stores of what enough to feed a city for nearly as long. Furthermore, only the maharaja himself truly knows all the different ways out of it, so skillful were his architects, so who knows who might slip out of the fort and send you off in the middle of the night. Normally a calm, reasonable man, you presently throw a tantrum, then recover your composure and site back in awe. Four years, you say to yourself. Do I really want to waste that much of my brilliant young career to take one fort, however potentially potent it could become? No, you decide, it's just not worth it. You go back down the mountain, and you ride off into the beautiful Rajasthani sunset, a more docile, less clever conquest on your mind.

So it's an impressive place. Even more impressive when you think about how naturally beautiful and elegant the whole defense plan is. Essentially, it's a small-scale Switzerland model: "Enough mountains already! You can have your damned funky, cheese-mongering neutral republic!" Anyway... This Maharaja character apparently wasn't just a great ruler and an insatiable super-pimp. He was also a man of art and science. After a touristy, expensive lunch (for which Nisha tore our tour guide a new one), we went back to the Old City to see this part of the Maharaja's accomplishments. At lunch, we were sitting in our little air-conditioned tourist haven, and I was the only one facing the window. It struck me that the hillsides off in the distance over the lake weren't all that different from many other places in the world, but nearly everything beneath them was. As if pre-ordained to illustrate the point, here's what traffic passed by my narrow viewpoint outside in the seconds that followed: :: The tops of two cars. Quite normal. :: A big truck. Entirely normal, except that it was carrying 15+ people in the back of it. :: Then a train of camels, 6 or so strong, ungainly lumbering under the strain of the carts they were hauling. Not normal. :: Another truck. Normal. :: Going the opposite direction, I could see just up to the shoulders of two huge elephants slowly passing into and out of view, the feet of their masters just visible near the top of my view. Welcome to India. The elephant-wallas are really rather unkind to their elephants. The conditions are really sad. The elephants are just so nice-seeming, though, despite it all. They're obviously quite smart, despite their lethargic gate and motion. They also seem to have a sense of humor. One huge bull elephant in the courtyard at Amber Fort kept messing with his driver's turban. The driver would turn around and yell, and the elephant would stop, his trunk drooping like a scolded child's hands, as his huge body swayed with idle boredom. A few minutes would pass and then he'd go smacking the red turban again. His driver was much nicer to him than most of the drivers at Amber Fort. While he was waiting around, the driver would pat his elephant's trunk affectionately and lean against his huge legs, appreciating the considerable shade the elephant offered. Most of the drivers were just cruel, using these little metal hooks to cajole the big animals to do their bidding. Perhaps this one driver had come to internalize and respect the fact that this massive animal could destroy him if he wanted to, but never had. Who knows. The way the elephant drivers mount their elephants is quite cool. At a command, the elephant lowers its head and ears. The driver grabs the big, leathery ears and put his foot at the base of the elephant's trunk. Then the elephant raises his head again and literally throws the driver onto his back. It's a cool little maneuver. The city palace and its museum were rather unimpressive. We saw some beautiful fabrics, and some impressive weaponry, but it was overall a bit boring. (Not to mention HOT. I got dehydrated like crazy.) There were two notable exceptions: :: The Maharaja's clothes were beyond gigantic. He was apparently well over 7 feet tall, and this is clearly not legend because I saw his clothes. Later in life he also became enormously fat, weighing in at a truly impressive 255kg (which my computer tells me works out to 562.1788650000001 pounds). They had a progression of his stature from early to late, and his later pant size had to have been maybe 300 or something. They were so big that I couldn't figure out what I was looking at for a while. :: The weapons of war museum (weapons & war? I don't remember the title, exactly) was sort of blah, but there was one set of items in particular that caught my interest. There were whole racks of these particular kinds of blades that I'd never seen before. The actual blades themselves were maybe 10-inch long isosceles triangles, with a base that was just a little bigger than fist width. From the base, down the sides of the wearers arm, ran two support beams. Between the beams were two horizontal bars, meant to fit into the palm of the wearer of this blade. The blade itself, I realized after a while, was bifurcated. It took me a bit longer to realize the function of all these parts. The blade was meant to be punched with, once it had penetrated the victim, the two horizontal bars squeezed together to active a spring-loaded mechanism that split the blade apart inside the victim. This thing was made first to skewer someone, then slice his or her internal organs to shreds. Truly nothing motivates the creative juices of humanity like a little warfare, eh? Some of these weapons (I have no idea what they were called, by the way, due to a notable lack of labeling in any part of this museum) were of truly gorgeous designs, though. Inlaid gold wire patterns, handles of etched steel frame and lapis lazuli core. Artfully designed, brilliantly imagined... bringers of extraordinarily painful death... So it goes. After the mostly underwhelming city palace, where I did not get to meet the current Maharaja, though I saw his current house, we went to the Jantar Mantar Observatory to see some of the first Maharaja Jai Singh's accomplishments. I should note that Indian tourist places in general give everyone an inordinate amount of crap about bringing your camera into them. At the observatory, you had to pay an extra Rs75 for each camera. We were at the "minimize expenses/annoyances" stage of the day, so we didn't bother with it. We just locked our stuff up in these lockers that weren't exactly faith inspiring. Mike, the brilliant artist overall, was our dedicated photographer both at the observatory and at Amber fort. Mike also had his gorgeous Canon Digital Camera with a new 512MB CF card. He could take a crapload of very well constructed, high-resolution pictures, and did. Remember that. The observatory was one of my favorite parts of the day. As I said, the Maharajas weren't just libidinous warmongers, they were also gentlemen of education and culture. The Maharaja Jai Singh was totally enamored of astronomy, and, after reading all east and west had to say about it, dispensed with small-scale brass and glass instruments in favor of precisely built, massive stone structures, designed and calibrated for to capture different measurements. One was for computing local time (accuracy of down to about 5 seconds), a whole set for knowing peculiarities of the different sun signs, and the world's biggest sundial. The sundial was maybe 60 feet high (there wasn't any literature at this place and our guide didn't know), with stairs going up to the top of the "dial." Sweeping out from either side in nice gentle curves were the measures that calculated the time down to within 2 seconds. When the sun stopped flirting with us from behind the clouds, it made a clear line that fell right on the exact time marked on the stone. I prefer my Tag Heuer, but if you're a Maharaja I guess you have to be a bit more large-scale in everything. After the observatory, we went back up the high western mountains at Taigur fort (again, pronounced like the big cat). The guards at the fort gave us more crap about our cameras, but we all individually decided just to pay the ludicrous entrance fee for cameras and move on. Taigur fort is the highest point above Jaipur. One tower inside the fort was so high that, back in the days before air pollution, apparently if you lit a fire at the top the small flame could be seen from the Red Fort in Delhi. That is cool. Who else is thinking Return of the King right now? Good. The views from the ramparts of Taigur Fort were amazing. Even with the pollution, you can see forever. There would be quite a warning if an intrepid army was shaking itself out of the desert and coming over the plains. It's truly a shame that we had to leave at 5 when the fort closed. I could have sat up on those high ramparts for hours, just watching the sun go down, listening to the city below. The sky was a strong blue, tapped by a pointillist with high white clouds, fading to the pre-pink of a desert sunset. The city roared below, as I floated my legs over the cliff. The drum band and explosions of a big wedding fought with the stunted chorus of honking cars and dogs barking, all laid over the raspy throated roar of Old and New Jaipur. It was India, aurally defined. On the way out, I followed Mike to a semi-restricted part of the roof to take pictures. On the way back to the public part, a bunch of broadly smiling Indian kids were waiting for us. When they saw us they broke out in a yell. I have no idea why they thought we were so cool. They started yelling "Picture! Photo! Photo!" Mike looked at me and motioned for me to go over with them. I ran over to get in the photo with them. So there's this brilliant picture of me being swarmed by smiling Indian kids, all holding on to my arms and hands and squeezing my shoulders. "Blue eyes! Yeah! Yeah!" I was dying laughing. I thought the whole thing was so cool. When Mike showed them each their faces on his digital display, they made tons of noise again. They wanted a copy of the photo "for memory!" so I gave one kid my notebook and he scrawled his name and address. Remember how good this picture must be, the sun starting to set behind us, me a white (though tanned) face in a sea of brown skin and extremely white smiling teeth. Remember that. After the fort we were nearly at the end of our day. We decided to go back to the Old City so the girls could do some shopping. I got more some chai nearby and called home. It was amazingly good for the soul just to talk to Mom and Amy. I wrote in my journal for a while, occasionally looking up to watch part of the India v. Pakistan cricket match. India ended up losing, later, 201-200. We had dinner before our bus and waded out through a sea of handicraft wallahs, who really were waiting just for us, as they dispersed after we left. I said to Cat, in our code language, French, that we should really go. One of the handicraft-wallahs exploded in arms and crappy puppets and French. He was badassly fluent. we talked to him for a bit in French. Apparently he has friends in Marseille, Bordeaux, and Paris. Cat made the astute observation that he was probably friends with those guys that try to sell you the crap plastic key chains in front of the Eiffel Tour: "Mr., I think I've met your friends." She talked to him more than she should have after I went off to find an auto and I think ended up buying a puppet from him. She's a sucker like that. We took a supremely ghetto, rickety, non-AC bus back to Delhi simply because it was the first one. Non-AC buses mean seating like steerage, and open windows spitting dust and god knows what else at you all night as you drive through the desert. It leaves you feeling dirty in literally every part of your body. I tried to write as much as possible in my journal, but they turned off the lights about 15 minutes into the ride, and my overhead light didn't work, of course. Alas. I finished my last thoughts on one subject via the flashlight on the end of my cell phone. I talked to the guy next to me for a long while. I forgot the guy's name just as soon as he said it, but he worked for the McKenzie consulting group and was an IIT Grad. IIT grads are like Princeton grads: they can't go five goddam minutes without telling you where they went to school. People from Harvard are much cooler. They're almost embarrassed about having gone to Harvard: "Hey, where'd you go to school?" "Boston." "Boston College? Boston University?" "No." "Well, where then?" "Harvard." With Princeton/IIT people, the progression is: "Hey, did I tell you that I went to Princeton/IIT?" "No." "Oh, well I did." [silence as the expected adoration and kissing doesn't happen.] "Right." The bus stopped all the time. First it was police, for some unknown reason. Then we had our scheduled 15-minute break in the middle of the trip that got extended to around a half-hour. Then we switched drivers (shady bastard driver slept on the dirty floor in the aisle, right near Keerthi and Chrissy's feet). At about 2:45 (we left at 9 for a supposed 5 hour drive, mind you) there was a loud crack and the front windshield shattered. It didn't come apart and fall off and fly all over us, thank God, but it was cracked like hell. I have no idea what the hell hit us, but there was a big, roughly rectangular shaped hole in the middle of the window with all the cracks spreading out like vessels in a bloodshot eye. We stopped for another half hour to examine and try to explain this. Then we stopped for another 15 minutes just down the road, apparently to tell a cop what had happened. I'm sure that was extremely effective, what with Indian police being the most diligent in the world and all... We finally got in around 4am at the InterState Bus Terminal (ISBT), which is right near our house. Being so late, we just wanted to get home. We thought it'd be cheap, given the distance. During the day, there's no chance I'd pay more than Rs20 for a ride there. When we got off the bus and tried to get an auto in front of the station the auto-wallah mafia told us, assuming we were new tourists to Delhi, that Civil Lines was very far away and we'd need to pay at least Rs120 to get there! Keep in mind the fact that we're literally looking at the south side of Civil Lines while he's saying this. So we laughed at this jerkoff and asked some other people: "80!" "90!" They were all in this cartel together and wouldn't budge to anything approaching a reasonable rate. We flagged a guy down who was passing by. We said "20" and he said "Ok." We were trying to work out one more auto for the rest of our group, when the lead auto-wallah mafia guy came out with this big bamboo stick and started whacking the crap out of our reasonable auto-wallah's auto. He was seriously denting the side panels and the metal roofing. Our autowallah freaked out and sped off. After literally having driven away the competition, the autowallah mafioso had this big smirk on his face: "70. Best offer." We were so pissed that we just started walking. Two autos followed and agreed to Rs40, and we were all too tired to bother with it anymore. I fell into bed at 4:25, totally exhausted. I woke up the next morning to what I thought was an odd sight. All my clothes and things from my bag were on the floor. Rob came in and saw me waking up and told me I should talk to Mike. Mike came in as if on cue a second later and apologized for strewing my stuff on the ground. He said someone had stolen his camera and he was really upset and had wanted to make sure it didn't get packed in someone else's bag. So Mike's US$600 camera, with his new US$80 512 MB CF card, as well as all those fantastic pictures I was telling you to remember, are all gone. Poor bastard. I felt and still do feel terrible. we still have no idea where it got snagged. Mike thinks it might have been while he was dozing on the bus. So that was the trip, all in all. Sort of an exhaustive concordance of my weekend, really. It was a damn good time. And I finally got the hell out of Delhi.

Victory

I should preface all this by saying that I have a massive update/story to tell you all about my trip last weekend to Jaipur, a place about 5 hours southwest of Delhi. It's in Rajasthan, the desert state of India. It was quite cool, and I wrote a lot, which I'm transcribing from my journal right after I post this. So what's this? Well, I debated today in my first big debate tournament with my partner, the soon-to-be Rhodes Scholar Rakesh Ankit. The debate was at, of all places, the American Center in Delhi. It was sponsored by a college within Delhi University and the U.S. Embassy. So it was a point of Indo-American pride that Rakesh and I were on the same time for such a debate. The motion for the debate was the following: "Parliamentary democracy is more relevant than the Presidential system in the emerging global order." Being a proud believer in the Presidential system, I spoke against the motion. Rakesh, a proud believer in parliamentary democracy, spoke for. I think the fact that Rakesh plans on being Prime Minister and I plan on being President aided both of our cases. Rakesh is probably the most brilliant speaker I've heard, anywhere in the world. I have no doubt that he will get one of India's 6 Rhodes Scholarships when they're handed out later in the year. While most of the debators prior to our team made the simplistic jump to frame the debate as an explicit India v. America debate and the relative merits of the two systems, Rakesh brilliantly pointed out that what the motion really about was the notion of "emerging global order." He just totally shifted the debate, and made every argument heard before him look childish and beside the point. He talked passionately about how people around the world yearn for representation, and how the challenge for this emerging global order was to successfully integrate diverse interest groups, and how the parliamentary system was tailor made to suit these challenges. The kid is unbelievable. He spoke with no notes, no real preparation, he just got up and delivered this address (that's really what it was). Public speaking is something that I feel like I usually have a pretty good handle on. I feel like I can speak on most topics in the world with little preparation and give something coherent and, if I'm lucky, pretty memorable. It's not often that I'm truly humbled. Rakesh humbles me, and I said as much when I got up. After thanking the "ladies of the chair," our two nice old lady chairwomen, and the judges, I also thanked Rakesh "for being a nearly impossible act to follow. But I'll try my best." I started off with something like a joke, when I said, "Winston Churchill said something once that might be the only thing everyone in this room can agree on. He said 'Democracy is positively the worst form of government, except for all the rest.' If nothing else, we should come away with that truism firmly etched in our minds." Then I said this whole thing about how if people were serious about democracy in the emerging world order, they deserved the best possible system to represent them. That system was clearly the Presidential system because people in the changing world order want three things: "Stability. Long-term planning for the betterment of all. And professional execution of the people's will." I said these were clearly the strengths of the presidential system, or "to use a baseball term, these are all in the wheelhouse of the presidential system." (The Americans knew what I was talking about.) On the first point, I said the very existence of a no-confidence vote was a destabilizing factor in a parliamentary democracy, "a Damocles sword over the heads of visionary politicians." A President must commit "high crimes and misdemeanors, in the words of the U.S. Constitution," but a Prime Minister need only annoy one more Member of Parliament than he or she can afford. This lead me to my second point which is that the Presidential system was better set-up for long-term planning. Because the President can make plans with the long view in mind, the incentive is for him to do so. The nature of coalition politics in a parliamentary form being what it is, the incentive in the system is for the Prime Minister to make decisions for the short-term political gain and hold on to power. This also bespeaks another problem with the parliamentary system, in that the people don't vote for a person whose character they find suitable enough to have make tough decisions for them in their stead. They vote for a party, "and parties are notably characterless." Oddly this line got quite a bit of a laugh and some applause. Thus my third point is that Parliamentary democracy leads to an over-politicization of what should be the professional execution of the people's will. Cabinet members in the presidential system are not necessarily politicians, they're professionals who do their job and their job alone. Having them first have to represent a home district plus handle a cabinet portfolio, as they do in the parliamentary system, does damage in two ways: 1) It forces cabinet members to split their time between tending to their home district and other affairs of parliament and their duty as a cabinet minister. "I don't know about you, but when it comes down to it I want my cabinet members to be focused solely on their area, not pulling double duty as a regular member of parliament as well." 2) It restricts the applicant pool to only those who have been elected to parliament, rather than those who might be best suited for the job. "I don't know about you, but when it comes down to it, I want the BEST people running the day to day functions of my government, not merely the most politically convenient. I want cabinets posts distributed with some element of meritocracy, not handed down as candy to the coalition." I like the assonance of that, by the way, "candy to the coalition." Does that qualify as assonance? I think so... Anyway, further on this point I said that, in the emerging global order, complex economic reforms and their resultant social reforms were going to be necessary. As a result, I said, governments around the world, in adapting to this change, need to have professionals running things, people who really know what's going on and how to move forward. Anyone without this setup was destined to be left behind. I closed by saying that democracy required activism, education and intelligence on the part of the electorate. If those things were present, "if the people, in good faith, want to throw in their lot with their fellow man, then they deserve the best system to do their will and improve their lives. The system of choice, in this changing world, is clearly the Presidential system." Thank you. Applause. After the two speeches, the format of the debate was to take one question per debator from teh audience. Rakesh got some convoluted softball that he knocked out of the park. I got a question about how minority views can still be heard in a presidential system. I answered that I was glad someone had asked that question, and my answer was simply that around the world, parliamentary democracies exacerbated ethnic, religious, etc. tensions, because these things were commonly allowed to be exploited for short-term political gain. I noted that the number one predictor of electoral success in India was the caste make-up of an electoral region as compared to that of the candidates running. The candidate with the closest match to that of his/her electorate nearly always won, which was terrible and against the ideas of a pluralist democracy, an essential part of the emerging global order. Parliamentary democracy inculcated a culture of minority exploitation. In a presidential system, an honorable president will protect the rights of a minority, perhaps even going against his own party, in order to faithfully execute the duties of his office. Basically it was a terrible, rambling response and was the worst part of my whole presentation. Ugh. Anyway, so we sat back down. Jenn and Marla came from LSR, but too late to see me speak. They listened to the last few speakers, one of whom, from IIT, was nearly at a Rakesh level of brilliance and wisdom, but in my opinion still quite inferior. He ended up getting best speaker, though, which I can understand, but disagree with. We broke for about ten minutes to wolf down some brownies (I didn't have any), potato chips (of course I had some), and Coke (you know it). Rakesh and I felt ok about our chances. Rakesh narrowed it down to three teams that were contending. The IIT kids, the two girls from Lady Shri Ram College (where Jenn, Marla and Mira attend), and us. I thought there was one other team from Jesus and Mary College that spoke quite well. So maybe four. When we came back in, a representative from the Embassy spoke for a bit and noted that Manmohan Singh and President Bush had had breakfast this morning in New York, and would be quite proud to see the caliber of debating that went on at this tournament. He was quite good-natured about the level of Bush-bashing that went on, some particularly nasty. Dude was Irish, though, a Mr. McDaniel, and maybe he was just a good Irish democrat like some other people I know. ;) After a few more speeches thanking every one, this nice professor of history at Janka Devi (sp?) College spoke for a minute, then got to the awards. One girl from Jesus and Mary College won for "Best Interjection." They thought some question she asked was right on, and gave her an award for it. The award for Best Speaker went to the tall kid from IIT. Rakesh was surprisingly neutral about that. I think he has ludicrously high standards for himself, and didn't probably think he deserved it. The award for "2nd Best Team" went to the team from Lady Shri Ram. At this point, I thought we'd lost it all. I felt ashamed and a little disappointed. I just looked down at the rug and tightened my face so I didn't make any spastic facial expressions when the team from IIT was called for the big "Best Team" award. "And the award for Best Team goes to the St. Stephen's Team of Rakesh Ankit and Brian J. McGuirk." Big applause. More than mild shock from me and Rakesh. Huge smiles from Jenn and Marla. We walked up and received our prize, and posed for photos with the American Embassy Irish Guy &c. I was told that the photographer/journalist was from the big-time Hindustan Times, but I don't really think that was correct. Ba, lots of applause again. I got this big heavy mother of a prize that I was totally mystified by. Rakesh nearly dropped his. Applause, applause. Big smiles. After one more speech, the thing was over and we had to stay behind to do more photos for the Embassy and stuff. The American Embassy Irish Guy &c told all the winners that we were invited to a function next friday, I think at the embassy itself, to watch the first Kerry/Bush Presidential debate with the embassy staff. That should be a damn nice time. After more thanks and talking all around with other debators, Jenn, Marla and I went to my favorite restaurant, Q'BA, to celebrate. We just chilled and got appetizers, and I opened my big prize. Rather than giving money like most competitions, we got these big heavy boxes. I was totally mystified by what could have been inside. I opened it to reveal a big white book, and a bunch of awesome books underneath it. The big white book is the enormous, gorgeous, expensive (US$70 list) LIFE: Our Century in Pictures. It's one of those books you always want to buy but can never convince yourself that it'd be worth the money. So it's nice that someone just gave it to me. The books underneath were also rather awesome: Faith and the Good Thing, a novel by Charles Johnson. On Democracy, the opus of Robert A. Dahl. Educational Leadership, a compilation edited by Bruce Anthony Jones. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, the earth-shatteringly gorgeous book by the recently departed demi-god John Rawls. I actually needed Rawls' book for some of the tentative political science research I'm thinking of doing here, so that's a nifty little book to pick up. I personally would have prefered a check for US$200 AND the books, but, hey, I'll take what I can get. :) All in all, this was a damn good day. I really know what Bob Marley was talking about when he sang "Sun is Shining / Weather is sweet, yea..." It was gorgeous here in Delhi today, and it's nigh on perfect right now at night. Perhaps Louis Armstrong encompassed it better: "I see skies of blue, and clouds of white The bright blessed days, the dark sacred night. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world." The sky is dark, thankfully, and there's a half moon floating down to the west amid pinpricks of stars. The wind is slow and easy and cools all, gently rattling the trees and vines. Things are good in India. What a wonderful world, indeed. This took me a while to type, so maybe I'll hold off on typing my enormous entry on Jaipur till tomorrow. This should hold you over, right? Good. Miss you all like hell. Take care of yourselves. Don't do anything I wouldn't do.

Delhi at Noon and Midnight

At noon, Delhi is scorching. The BBC, a growing addiction of mine, reports that it's hit 42 degrees Celcius (107.6F) the last few days. Even seasoned Dilliwallas complain about it. The heat is always something you can commiserate over with the most hijacking of Autowallas: B: "Aj garum hai, nahi?" Hot today, no? A: "Haji, bahut garum." Yes sir, very hot. B: "Engine tik, garum-mai hai?" Is the engine ok in the heat? A: "Haji, toh kuch problems hain." Yes sir, but there are some problems. This is usually followed by what I assume is a detailed description of what specific problems the engine has when it's hot, or maybe a funny story about where the autowallah has broken down before. I honestly don't know. I've had this little interchange maybe 5 times in the last week or so, and each time it's pretty much followed this pattern, and always it's followed by a light-speed Hindi retelling of some gripe or another. I smile when the autowallah smiles, I laugh when he laughs. When he finishes, I say, "but it's ok now?" And the answer is always "Haji." I need to learn the word for "oppressive," so I can add that to my heat conversation repertoire. God knows there has to be a word for oppressive in India. Yet, like many things in this country, it balances out in the end. Delhi at midnight is such a different creature. One of my favorite things here is to go out on our southern balcony at around midnight or so, and just sit. By midnight it's somehow, but unquestionably, hotter in our living room than it is outside on the balcony. A cool breeze runs through the gap between the apartment buildings, and the black blue outline of the trees in our neighbor's yard erupts in thousands of miniature explosions of dark color. Everything is different at midnight, not just the temperature. Ring Road traffic has died down, for the most part. During the day it's a roar of chaotic, constantly honking traffic. At night you just hear the deep but distant sounding rumble of big delivery trucks trudging on towards their destination. You still get the occasional screechs, thuds, honks, etc. but mostly it's just an easily ignorable rumble, no different from any other big city. At noon, birds rule the skies. Green parakeets with sharp, forked tails dash from tree to tree, camouflage to camouflage. Stupid pigeons disorganizedly congregate and fly with no real sense of purpose, except to leave little presents for us on the balcony bannister. Huge eagles and hawks and small numbers of other beautiful birds of prey, all with 5 foot plus wingspans, soar with what can only be described as majesty for hours, then swoop and help some pest shuffle on to its next life. At night, bats assume the throne. They fly silently from and to every possible direction. Insects must realize this, because they all but disappear as well. Delhi at noon has uniformly clear skies, now that the rains have all passed. There's so little moisture in the air that to see a cloud in the sky is almost a little surprising. Delhi at midnight is clear as well, but much more rewarding. From the limits to the horizon to maybe a third of the way to the apex, the sky takes on that all-too-familiar, sickening orange glow, common to every industrialized area in the world. (Why do they have to install streetlights of that color? Why?!) As this fades though, a deep dark blue takes over and, believe it or not, a fair number of stars can be seen. We've been here long enough that all of us off-handedly track the progress of the moon through its stages. It's currently about halfway back from a full moon. I'd like to thank you all for the concerned emails, but I'm really doing fine here in India. Last week was particularly stressful, but it passed. I feel better. Delhi hasn't changed, and it certainly won't while I'm here. So since leaving just is an option that neither my pride nor bank account can stomach, the only thing to do is to turn around and figure it out. Not accept the often maddening realities, but understand them and work with them. Reminding myself of my balcony at midnight is a good way to start. Talk to you soon.

Reasons India is Driving Me Crazy

NOTE: There are tons of exceptions to all these generalizations, but all of these hold in the general. Sorry this is such a generally negative entry, but I've just been fed up with this stuff lately. You want to know how I'm feeling in India? This is a pretty accurate assessment. St. Stephen's I go to St. Stephen's College, arguably the most elite liberal arts institution in this India. You would therefore expect a high degree of social and intellectual sophistication. It feels like middle school. At parties, on either side of the dance floor are same-sex cliques that look at each other and "eye-flirt" across the floor. In class, it's recitation, recitation, memorization. The lack of independent thinking and analysis and synthesis is maddening, coming from a place like Brown, where the theme is hybridization, and people actually like being intellectuals. People here are here to get a degree and then get an MBA and then get a job that lets them live like their parents. I also expected there'd be a strong progressive viewpoint, people would have creative ideas for dealing with India's staggering problems. Alas, none. I've heard and been in many more discussions about drinking, smoking, sex and music than anything substantive. It's not like there's not that segment of conversation everyplace in the world, but the proportion here is so unbalanced. There's also the disturbing, rather unbelievable lack of taste, politeness, and/or political correctness. Since my friend Shimrit, who goes to Middlebury and is on the Rutgers program, mentioned it the other day, weirdly enough I've heard more than a few people drop the n-word (the n-bomb, as Nate calls it) to describe black people or anyone in Africa. In America, if you told someone that some people would find it offensive to be called that, odds are good that many people would react with a "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend anyone," sort of thing. Here it's like "Why not? I don't know any, and if I did I don't know if I'd talk to them." Lastly, the St. Stephen's kids in general are righteously spoiled. A huge number have cars and DRIVERS that wait for them to finish classes to take them home. These guys, and there are tons of them, wait in the parking lot at St. Stephen's and read the newspaper and try to stay out of the heat while they wait for their charges. They go to 5-star clubs most nights and throw decadent parties. It's very comparable to a lot of my least favorite people at Brown (and the Agawam, for that matter), in that there's this arrogant feeling of entitlement, like somehow they deserve what they have. As we all know, I have a thousand thoughts flying around in my head at any given time, but arguably the one that inflects more of my actions and beliefs and thoughts and plans is this: To whom much is given, much is expected. I have been given unbelievable opportunities in life, just read some of the archives of this rag for examples. But I don't forget that I've been given them, and I plan to do something with them. I want nothing less than to alter the course of human history, and for the better. I want to move us toward a new plane of existence. Done. That's it. All these experiences, all these things I'm learning and reading and synthesizing, they're all in some way, either directly or indirectly, in order to move closer to that goal. Much can be expected from me. I'm prepared for it. These kids, and I do mean kids, there's just no recognition there... Misogyny and Lack of Liberty It infuriates me to no end that my female friends here literally cannot go out on their own after dark here. Delhi is the rape capital of the subcontinent (243 since the New Year, and those are just the reported ones), and no one seems to care. Even Anusha, one of the most badass and independent people I've ever met, does not walk to her gym after dark, and that's less than a 10 minute walk through our very suburban-feeling neighborhood. My friend Rudy doesn't let his girl friends go home alone, no matter how far they have to go or how inconvenient it would be for someone to escort them home. This is not an unfounded fear. Pick a street in Delhi and odds are excellent that, after dark, stationed at various points along it are groups of shady, leering guys from age maybe 16 on up. These guys check out literally every vehicle that passes their station. If there happens to only be males in the car, they don't give a second glance. If there are females in the vehicle, all eyes are locked on her, giving her not just a once-over but occasionally making gestures that would make Madonna blush. If there are only girls in the car, I have seen it happen that said shady guys will hop in a car and follow whatever vehicle they were looking at. Who knows what their real intent is, or how long they keep that crap up, but the point is that it's intentionally threatening. Related story Keerthi and Chrissy, two Rutgers girls, and two of the sweetest people I've ever met, took an auto to go out to a club a few weeks ago. They were dressed to kill, which admittedly was not good strategy. (Not that there should have to be strategy!) They got their auto from out on the Ring Road, and wanted to go to this place called Shalom, some swank club where a bunch of our friends had gone out. About halfway to their destination, their auto broke down. On a dark street. On this street was the required gaggle of shady guys, growing by the minute, and three drunk cops. The cops immediately started giving them a hard time. Who are you? Where are you going? What are you doing out? After the belligerent one ripped their St. Stephen's ID's out of their hands, Keerthi called her program director and him to speak to the cop. The cop took the phone and started screaming, literally screaming into it. While this was happening, the gaggle of guys around them was still growing. One cop told them to come over to where he was, in the shadows near some bushes or something. The gaggle chanted that they should go over to him, "get it over and done with," to "do their duty," they said, laughing. It was clear to Chrissy and Keerthi that "their duty" was to get raped by the side of the road. Confronted with this terrible and rapidly destabilizing situation, they did what any reasonable person would do: they jetted. They caught an auto, didn't ask the price, didn't tell him the destination, just told him to go and go quickly. The auto guy didn't know what was going on, but he saw a siren in his rear-view mirror. Instead of pulling over, he turned onto sidestreets and tried to blend in with the rest of the rickshaw traffic. Apparently the guy knew he was doing the right thing, but was obviously freaked out. After they told him that they needed to get to Civil Lines, he stopped and pulled over. (This is not an irregular occurence when taking autorickshaws: one guy picked up a woman I assume to be his wife on a detour home from colleg one day.) Already panicking, Chrissy and Keerthi went into overdrive and tried to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. When the autowallah came back, he was smoking one from a pack of cigarettes he had just bought. Chrissy and Keerthi relate that he took backroads, roads they'd never seen before, to get home, and was constantly checking his rearview mirror and muttering to himself in Hindi. They got home alright, but were shaken up for a week after. They didn't go out with us, even with escort, for quite a while. I wish I could say that this was an uncommon occurence, especially the part about the drunken, abusive cops, but apparently it's a part of daily life here. That, my friends, is maddening. Economy Ok, this is a poor country. I understand this. But when every single economic interaction has to become a confrontation, even when prices are LISTED on the item I want to buy, it totally saps my energy. It's such a bloody hassle to get anywhere, to get back from there, to make sure no extra items are added to whatever total bill you accrue there. This faux, "Oh, hey, sorry, those are the prices" B.S. is taxing on mental and physical reserves. Don't tell me just to "deal with it" and move on. It's an onslaught. It takes an enormous amount of strength of will and willingness to just walk away from a transaction in order to get something akin to a market price. More coming, I think, but I have work to do.

Conjured images

It feels like: :: The sounding of "drums in the deep" from the Mines of Moria, in Lord of the Rings. :: The high-pitched whistle of a bomb dropped from a cargo bay. :: The screech of brakes and friction-melted rubber on pavement, just before the crunch. :: The metallic cocking of a gun, in the hands of someone viciously motivated. :: The tightness you feel when you've held your breath too long underwater, notable because you know the tightness is the first in a long series of painful sensations. :: The first slip of a finger when you're hanging on over a precipice. :: A lit match over an ocean of gasoline. My back is giving out again. Tonight will be interesting. UPDATE: Last night was interesting. My back did throb, but it subsided after a while. Stretching helps. Not having a choice but to be moving also helps, in a painfully ironic way. Sleeping on strewn couch pillows because some idiot you don't know drank too much and passed out in your bed, hereby becoming an immovable object, does not help. Right now, imagine that bomb landed and exploded and my ears are still ringing, but I'm still alive.

On a better note

Couple things: :: You can now email posts you like. Tell your friends. :) :: If you want a better, more artistic look at India than my crap pictures that I'll be posting here from time to time, check out this site. This guy is really a brilliant photographer and his India series is just constantly evocative of my experiences here. If nothing else, his photos are beautifully shot, for those of you that like pretty things with no content.

Old Delhi

Old Delhi used to be the capital of the Mughal Empire. It was one of the most decadent and beautiful cities in the world. On equal par with anything Paris, London, Rome, or Constantinople could throw at it. A clear canal used to run through the middle of Chandni Chowk and reflect the moonlight. The whole of the old city was made up of beautiful mansions and fountains punctuated every intersection. Old Delhi was the original reason India was considered the jewel in Victoria's crown. Times have changed. The rickshaw driver dropped us off at the gate of the Red Fort, where the Emperor reigned and Nehru made his famous midnight "tryst with destiny" speech on Independence Day. The main gate is even more impressive than the other (back) side, which borders Ring Road, which I take nearly every day. The main gate is massive, just imposingly huge. It's assembled with thousands of several-ton blocks of red sandstone and topped with curvy, off-white balustrades. The whole thing gorgeously says, "I'm superior. Don't mess with me." Indeed, any invading army would have been awed and cowered before it. That's probably why the British were so happy that Mughal India, capable of building such wonders, was brought down from inside. They walked through the gates of the Red Fort. We didn't go inside and look at the inner gate (known as Lahore Gate), because Chandni Chowk was our stated destination. We turned right at the fort and walked east down the Chowk. The glittering canal, oft-spoken of in Urdu Mughal court writings, has been filled in with concrete, metal bars dividing the now pulsing, disorganized traffic. The brand of aggressive capitalism and beggarism practice on Chandni Chowk is jarring, even for someone like me, who is rapidly developing a strong pair of urban blinders. "Shirt, sir? Finest silk, very low prices." "You want gold? Silver? Right this way." "Paisa, khana, sahib," a .5 legged beggar whispers out, "Money, food, sir." Everyone, from the 3-year olds with scales promising an accurate reading for 5 rupees (10 if you're white and they see you coming) to the ancient, living-dead-looking men selling slices of fruit on aluminum trays, wants your money. The tenacity level varies. One guy selling "The Finest Silk in India" followed Rob and I for three blocks, even after we had already passed his store without looking: "Wait! You missed it, sir. The finest silk in India is this way." Rob and I made our way up the street like this, dodging vendors, beggars and delivery en with unnaturally huge parcels balanced on their heads, when a funny thing happened: I began to like Delhi. Amid all the craziness, two vendors speaking rapidly to me in Hinglish, I stood back and just smiled. I stopped worrying so actively about someone ganking my wallet, stopped worrying about getting randomly assaulted or blown up. Those things were still there, but it's like someone just poked those balloons with a needle. They faded and shriveled and I smiled. I started to embrace and really admire the chaos. I spent the rest of the day acting less like a badass and more like something I know how to be: a politician working a room. I smiled at people and they smiled back. Instead of saying "Nahi, jaiyai" ("No, get lost.) to aggressive vendors, I said "Nahi, shukriya," ("No, thanks.") I talked to people in passing, made more active conversation with Rob, and started investigating how much a proper suit's going to cost me here in Delhi (answer: not much). It was fun. I guess Old Delhi, despite being the rotted corpse of its former glorious self, is still capable of making foreign visitors smile and admire. A long way down Chandni Chowk, Rob and I took a left (south) with the intention of eventually arriving at the Jamma Masjid, the largest mosque in India. The alleys off Chandni Chowk are dark and tiny and quiet. The former aristocratic mansions, now gutted and converted to stores and warehouses, arch towards each other above the alleys, leaving the vague impression of being in a cathedral. A structurally unstable cathedral, to be sure, but no one seemed bothered by the tenuous-looking balancing act the buildings were doing, so neither were we, really. You had to wonder whether that creak you just heard, or one of the many inexplicable loud noises you occasionally hear in Delhi was the sign of a collapse, but it hasn't happened yet, apparently. The alleys are totally nonsensical to navigate, and we lost our sense of direction very quickly. We checked out all kinds of little stores, selling everything from scrap metal to silk to bound notebooks to masala chai. These old Sikh men run these nice fabric stores, and every one we passed had the same arrangement: 3-5 old Sikh men with large beards, sitting in a circle on the floor or against the walls (which were only maybe 6 feet high), talking, playing cards. Store after store fit this pattern. And people say there's no civil society in India. There were some really talented-looking tailors in some of those alleys, it seemed. There were all the requisite Indian-style tailors, but many had tall, western-looking dummies outside of their stores wearing gorgeous, professional looking suits. Some were damned impressive. Next time I go I'm going to bring my notebook and I'm getting price quotes from all of them. After nearly an hour of twisting and turning, Rob and I found ourselves at some kind of rather large intersection. We weren't sure at all which way we had gone, but from the sun we sort of figured out which way was south and moved on. At the next intersection, Rob looked up and just said "Oh, that's where we are." I followed his gaze and far down to our left, towering over everything and perfectly bisected by our street, was the pinkish dome of the Jamma Masjid. We made our way down the street the way everyone goes down the street in India: the wrong way and righteously so. The traffic was at pretty much a standstill, so we weaved in and out of stationary cycles, taxis, auto rickshaws, bicycles, and cows. We only nearly got killed when traffic moved, which was relatively rare. The Jamma is so big that it felt like we were moving towards it but it was never getting closer. We broke right at the end of the street, south, to check out the Jamma and its southern gate, passing a myriad of small auto-parts dealers on the way. Rob suggested we go in to the Jamma. I was a little nervous. It was nearing sunset, which meant prayers were going to start soon. The area around the mosque was starting to fill. I remembered reading the Embassy/State Dept. alert about Anti-American clerics in Old Delhi, advisories about going there and particularly to mosques. But looking up at that gorgeous, holy construction, I just decided "the hell with it." We went in. Holy Ground We walked up the stairs to the open main court of the Jamma. Rob, who's a Middle East/South Asian studies major at Columbia and had already been here twice, told me we had to take off our shoes. An extremely nice and eloquent man named Anil informed us of the same thing as I was untying my hiking boots, and made small talk with us for a bit. Unusually for men like him, we told us up front that he was a guide and said his price was Rs100 per person. We were thankful, but declined. He persisted a little, but I told him I was coming back and would take his tour then. I truly plan to. Knowing the little that I know of Islamic law, the house of Allah was the last place I was ever going to get my wallet or my shoes stolen, but we decided not to pay to have our stuff stored while we explored. The interior of the Jamma Masjid is gorgeously laid out. The main square is, well, square with a square fountain precisely in the middle, and a giant minaret (100+ feet, maybe more) in each corner. To the east is huge face and dome of the Jamma, aligned perfectly to Mecca, of course. I can't wait to get to the top of one of the minarets. There wasn't enough time before prayers to go up and down, but Rob assures me that the view from the top is easily the best in Delhi, and I believe him. Underneath the dome is a wide-open space, prayer mats laid out in neat lines on the floor. The faces of all the walls are beautifully carved and painted with passages from the Qu'ran. The effect is more beautiful than anything formal Roman characters can really attempt. Truly a magnificent layout, yet very simple in premise and execution, like the mosque as a whole. We walked around for a while underneath the dome behind the faithful making their prayers early. We sat on the rim of the pool for a while, in line with Mecca, and just soaked in the gorgeous architecture and holy calm of the place. What I really liked about the Jamma Masjid and the small alleys of Old Delhi was the quiet. Under the dome, the sounds of the city faded and only the mutterings of holy men could be heard. My thoughts inevitably turned to God and His majesty. Few religious buildings do this to me. Mt. St. Michel is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Not St. Paul's. Not Notre Dame. Not the Sacre Coeur. I haven't been to Rome, but something tells me nothing there will fit my standards for inspiration. St. Pius, I guess, qualifies, but that has nothing to do with design. We can certainly rule out the Providence Cathedral, can't we, Brother Michael? After a while, Rob and I decided to go home and catch dinner. Old Delhi is engrossing and the most interesting place I've been yet in a city that was already endlessly fascinating. I look forward to going back there and wandering, alone or with my friends. Cat and I, who now speak to each other almost exclusively in French or Hindi, are making plans to go back to the Jamma Masjid this week right when in opens at 7AM and climb the minaret. I can't even imagine what a sunrise from there must look like. It's a good thing Allah can. Endnote: Ok, the reason there were so many typos in this post when I published it was that I had transcribed it from a notebook, rather than writing it ex tempore. Transcription, because speed is of the essence, is a lower quality endeavor. My apologies. You can stop emailing me about it now. Also, thanks to Rob for these pictures. He took them. I intended to be a tourist, but I forgot my camera. I'm smart like that.

While we're on the excellent article kick...

Ted Turner, media mogul, CNN founder, Brown Class of '60, has a beef with Big Media. It's an absolutely brilliant article that just takes apart the ridiculous standing of modern American media anti-trust policy. Like the article I linked to below, it would be a good article on its own, but significant weight is added to its conclusions based on the author. Just read it and call your congressman. Take advantage of the fact that there exists at least a statistical possibility that someone will take your call, and that might person might even, however indirectly, relay your opinion to people in power and that that may factor into the decisions they make. The more I read about Indian democracy, the more I crave to be at home interacting with ours.

The Best Article I've Ever Read

Just read it: "The son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look at the son of the forty-first and does not like what he sees."

Politicians will stretch the truth. They'll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken "normal" mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.

Tea

Fair warning: This is a long, detailed entry about something very small and unimportant. As entries go, feel free to skip this one, but I liked it and had to post it. Today I had 7 cups of tea. I never liked tea a lot, really, until I came to India. This past semester I'd go to Tealuxe and do work, etc. It wasn't about the tea, though, it was about the environment, the people-watching, the interesting separation a pair of good headphones could provide. The tea was just a reason to be there. Tealuxe will stay in business for a long while because there are enough people like me who would do that, just go for the vibe, the experience, and not the product. The fact that they apparently have a world-class selection of teas will probably increase their longevity as well. In India, though, as much atmosphere and people watching as there always is, no matter which way you turn, there's a very different aspect to this whole tea thing. I've been thinking about it and I think it's the ritual. Today I got up at 5:10 (yea, I'm totally losing it), and, honestly, what got me out of bed was mentally walking myself through the immensely and inexplicably satisfying procedure of preparing my tea and buttered toast breakfast. While I hit the snooze button on instinct, a minute later I actually shut off the alarm entirely and went and did what I had just walked myself through. Someone, I think Mike or Noel, always remembers to turn off the fans and the lights in the living room and kitchen. Early in the morning there is very little light, but my newly adjusting eyes make out everything fine, anyway. I walk into the kitchen and grab the water-boiler. I fill it up to it's maximum, 1.5L capacity, as it saves me a trip a half-hour later. Plus it's easier, in that early morning daze, just to fill to the little line rather than think about your average primary tea displacement. I put the water boiler on its stand and press the button, the orange light on the side lighting up the whole left side of the kitchen in an orange that changes color as my eyes adjust to it, a ripe Florida Orange orange fading to something I think closer to a near-maroon. As soon as the button clicks, a high-pitched, fuzzy electrical whirring emits from the base of the boiler, dominating the early morning sonic landscape with equal aplomb of the shifting light below. The water on, I open the cupboard and feel around for one of the bigger mugs. I slide it across the counter and turn around to get the sugar. The sugar here isn't fine a fine crystalline, like it is in the States. It's thousands and thousands of small but long rectangular crystals that don't stick to each other. We refilled our sugar recently, so it pours freely, nearly too freely into the mug. These days I consciously blink my eyes and make sure it's actually sugar that I'm pouring into my sugar. Three days in a row last week I put in salt by accident and had to do this whole ritual over again. Now the salt, which is in the exact same looking container and is not labeled, is nowhere near the tea ingredients. The sugar poured, I put it back and grab a tea bag. We buy these 100 packs of tea bags, and they're all perfectly folded and arranged inside a small square box. It's really a brilliant arrangement. Four rows, twenty-five to a row. Tea bag, string. Tea bag, string. The pitch of the fuzzy water has been steadily rising as I walk around the kitchen. It's approaching it's apex as I open the fridge and grab the milk. Cat and Anusha, ever, if unnecessarily, hip-conscious females, have been buying skim milk lately and it's just not the same, but in the early morning daze I'm just proud of myself that I've found a liquid to pour into my tea and not rice or something. The sound of fuzzy water rings its final declaration across the early-morning silence, and dies away. The button clicks back with a plastic thud and it echoes around our small but high-ceilinged kitchen. The echo is short-lived, as the water finally hits a boil and starts shaking. I pour the steaming water into the mug, keeping in mind how bloody hot steam can be. Nearly lost a thumb a couple weeks ago when I was messing with the water-boiler. If I've aimed correctly, the water went directly to the bottom and filled up the mug slowly, melting the sugar into it instantly and not disturbing the tea bag. If done correctly, it looks like there' s just water in there. I pour in the milk and watch the solid streams of milk start to break apart in the heated environment. They twirl these amazing patterns in the water. Here I can chance a swirl with the spoon to mix the milk, water and sugar quite well. The result is a uniform, pure white liquid. Now the best part. Two tugs or so on the teabag, held to the side of the mug, and brown shoots straight across the white like the most imaginative scimitar you've ever seen. It hits the other side and splits apart, circling around the circumference. If you're really lucky, for just a little while, the tea infusing into the milky, sugary water makes a pattern that looks like a swirly London Underground logo. It's absolutely brilliant. If I were a filmmaker, I would shoot this scene from twenty angles, or maybe just one, and watch it all happen. I'd let the lens linger there as the bisected circle breaks down and stops rotating, and the tea takes on that taffy-brown color it should when it's well-constructed. I know it might sound stupid and fanciful, and it probably sounds like something a starving artist would say, but honestly watching the tea steep into the water is the best part of my morning. If I do it correctly, it's honestly a beautiful display. There's only one electrical outlet in that part of the kitchen, and the water-boiler splits time with the toaster. I throw two pieces of white toast in the murderous toaster and pray. I don't bother actually turning the dials on our toaster. Ha. What a concept, a toaster that responds to even vague requests of cooking length and intensity. Ha. No, this toaster has a mind of its own, and that mind is a sick one. No matter what the setting, 1-10, odds are good that your toast will either come out looking like a deformed hockey puck or like it hadn't been in a toaster yet. And attempting to retrieve your toast, via any method including unplugging the devil box from the wall, will fail. I guarantee you. The slider you push to push your toast down to its death, not unlike that memorable scene from Temple of Doom, come to think of it, stays down and immovable until it damn well feels like releasing your toast. Bastard. Let's assume it's one day in ten, and instead of scorching my toast beyond recognition or palatability for any 1+ celled organisms, the bastard manages to punch out perfect, lightly browned, hot toast. It's only happened maybe three or four times total, while I've been here. Oddly, other people here report no big problems. Maybe it's just me? Anyway, I butter the toast, one side only, and no matter how hard the butter was when it came out it'll melt on this toast. It fades in to the toast, gives up, really, and I enjoy a piece straight up, usually still at the kitchen counter. I butter a second one and do one of two things. The first is more usual. I go back to my room and sit down at my desk, check my email, do some dems coding, read the news, maybe talk online, before I go take a shower. I usually am not done with the first cup of tea by the time I take a shower so I just take it with me. It's a nice feeling to get out of your own shower and still have a hot cup of tea waiting for you. The other option is much more rare. I've only done it twice, but it's been amazing. As I've explained before, our rooftop is a flat terrace that stretches the length of the building. Our stairs go right to the terrace, so we do lots of stuff up there. On the eastern side of the building, the "Rutgers Girls" wing, there is a separate terrace that's hardly ever open. Once in a while someone will leave the door open overnight, though I've only seen that happen twice. People on our side of the building are less anal about doors being locked and whatnot. This terrace faces directly east. In the foreground is Ring Road, a huge highway that circles Delhi. Beyond that is a huge temple, the Tibetan colony, the Yamuna River, a big stadium/cricket grounds, and the eastern horizon. It's a rarity, but days where the terrace on that side is open and it's a really clear morning, there are some truly awe-inspiring sunrises. Typical India that you have to look over 8 lanes of honking, high-emissions vehicles to see it, but it's well worth it regardless. To sit there, a brilliant cup of tea in hand, the sun rising, a light breeze blowing... You guys ask me all the time, "So what do you do over there?" Well, when you picture me here in India, picture me sitting high on a terrace, sipping tea, looking off at the eastern horizon ablaze, with my thoughts inescapably wandering exactly the opposite direction.

Hey There, Neighbor

This weekend was Independence Day Weekend. It's not the biggest state holiday in India, but it's probably second after Republic Day in January. Of course the state holidays are nothing compared to religious festivals like Diwali, which is in November this year and promises to be a blast. But Independence Day is a different kind of occasion. Much celebrating, like our 4th of July, but with a bit more solemn of an air. Independence Day holds a maddening irony to it for the residents of Kashmir, the disputed region in India's north. India, Pakistan and China all claim parts of Kashmir for themselves. The big contention is the Indo-Pak section of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have fought four wars over it. It's a touchy subject. India calls the part that Pakistan controls "Pakistani-occupied Kashmir," while the Pakistanis call their part "Azad Kashmir," or "Free Kashmir," and the Indian-controlled part "Occupied Kashmir." In terms of international law and respected boundaries, it's still an unsettled question. Independence from anything is rather an abstract concept to those living in Kashmir. Although things have been moving in the right direction since the massive military buildup in 2001-2002, they've been heating up again. Islamist Kashmiri seperatists, who want India to give up control of its territorial claims, have run murderous raids all throughout the great Kashmir valley and into parts of India proper. Rob, my roommate, had been planning to go there until we saw on the news one night that ten people had been slaughtered in their sleep in a small village in Jammu. "There goes that idea," he said. "Dammit." I give this history lesson because a few weeks ago, a few known Kashmiri seperatists dropped off the map and reportedly crossed into India. The plan, it was reported in Indian newspapers, was to bomb the Indian Independence Day ceremony in New Delhi. The Indian military was on high alert. The police, usually the most useless, lazy, power-abusing people on the planet, from all accounts actually got off their uniformly fat asses and paid attention to things. (I have a seperate rant against the Delhi police that I'll post here later.) The kicker was that Indian intelligence was concentrating their search for these terrorists in Northern and Western Delhi. As the days went on the papers (The Times of India, notably, and the Asian Age) starting mentioning neighborhoods. Azadpur. Model Town. Kamla Nagar. North Campus. Timarpur. Civil Lines. My neighborhood. This new tidbit of information, that real-live terrorists might be living in a flat around the block from my house, brought a new level of edginess to my already awkward mini-relationships with passersby on the street. The vast majority of Indians on the street will smile and/or do this tilted head-shake that can either mean "Yes," or "No," or "Oh god, you're stupid," or "Pleased to meet you," or "I recognize your existence," or "Absolutely," depending on the axis of the tilt and accompanying facial expression. If I can get a movie of it being properly done, I'll definitely upload it somewhere and post a link. Anyway, this weekend, maybe I was just imagining it, maybe my back was just hurting again and blinding me to reality a bit, but people seemed more on edge, more skeptical. As possible terrorists go, at least outside of Belfast, I pass the racial profiling test pretty easily. So I still got the head tilt from those I passed on a walk around the neighborhood saturday night, but it was different. People were in a hurry. No one hurries in Delhi unless they are driving somewhere, in which case God is waiting impatiently at their arrival location (he always leaves before they arrive). It's just odd how this black cloud of fear just descends on an area when the threat of random violence is announced. That's the ultimate leverage of terrorists, I guess: the ability to get people to change their actions out of fear of attack. All you need to do is provide some credibility and hint at what you might do further down the road. Fear of the unknown is so powerful. You can feel it when all the lights go out and you start hearing noises in the room. It's an old fear, maye the oldest. It's the fear that propelled our ancestors into the trees. It's the fear that keeps imaginative kids awake for hours looking at shadows. It's the fear that changes the entire character of a city for a weekend at a time. Everything seems to have worked out, in the end. No one was caught, but no one was blown up, either. I heard a tidbit on the news about a bombing about 50 miles northwest of here, with 10 people killed, but this is India and 10 people blown to bits by a bomb is apparently not enough to make the news, so I haven't heard anything since. This morning everything was the same as usual. No reserve. Certainly no rushing. Endless bargaining with rickshaw drivers, a process I can now do pretty convincingly in Hindi. Normal. Honestly, if I were a terrorist I would have waited till today. It seems everyone made the calculation that because nothing happened at the Red Fort celebrations yesterday, then nothing was going to happen. Life goes on. That's not a terrible way to think about it.

Excuse me, three

I just got the most indignant instant message from my sister. She's indignant that I thought there only 2, and not 3, McGuirks "truly in cyberspace." So, in the spirit of truth and the hope that with a wider audience Amy will improve her writing to not use so much "IM-speak," hereis Amy's blog. She's getting to have nearly as much travel experience as I do, and hopefully that will be more fully reflected on her blog sometime soon. I know she's in the process of uploading pictures to it at this moment. But remember: any time she uses an abbreviation that's not in the OED, comment on her site and knock her for it. I hope Brother Paul reads this and tears her site to shreds like he'll probably do with her papers in the fall. :) Then again, if Brother Paul reads this, he'll probably tear my site to shreds well before hers. Alas. UPDATE: Christ, Amy's had her blog for what, a day? And already it's cooler than mine. Those pictures are fantastic. Yes I'm working on getting mine uploaded. In due time... UPDATE #2: My sister is beautiful, isn't she? Jesus.

Vis

Expect some changes around here. I'm tired of the color scheme and I can't have Uncle John's site start to look better than mine. :)

Assorted Thoughts

:: My English spelling has become just terrible. It was always pretty good, something I could be proud of, but thinking simultaneously in English, French, and now Hindi is just terrible for that sort of thing. I've made tons of simple mistakes lately (probably on this blog), and I keep wondering if I'm going to start writing an entry on how I bought a new book by saying "J'ai ach�t� this kitab..." :: Uh oh. Uncle John's online now. That's 2, count-em, two McGuirk's truly in cyberspace. It's also competition. I can't wait. :: This article about the only female Delhi rickshaw driver is pretty funny. Why does only the BBC seem to do quality, wide-ranging reporting? Old-timers: was it always this way or did Americans, at one point, actually know how to cover the world? Seriously, the New York Times is great and all, but they have a measly international section. It pales in comparison to the Beeb. Sometimes it feels like they even have a better handle on American politics than institutions like the Times! :: It's so odd, becoming a morning person all of a sudden. I mean, the majority of morning that I've been in India I've been up before 7 in the morning. Of my own violition. Those that know me well are understandably skeptical and disbelieving. I am too! I'm also starting to understand why Mom has always gotten up so early, and why people do it around the world. The day is just so much longer, so much more accessible. I get a ton done between 6:10, when I get up, and 9 when I have to leave for school most days. Yet it's still a shock to look at the clock and realize that it's 7:37 and I've been up for an hour and a half. :: Karma: The law of moral cause and effect; also a person's moral merit/demerit according to one's actions and (moreso) the inner intentions or motives which accompany them in terms of their conformity/non-conformity with dharma. In other words, you get what you deserve. Nice concept, that one. :: Comment spammers (like those currently plaguing browndemocrats.org) should be taken out back and shot like the vermin they are. The whole concept of spamming is just offensive. It's even more offensive that they try tot hide behind the mantle of the 1st Amendment. It's happened throughout history, though: impure souls hiding behind something pure and good. :: Unbelievably, I was running my powerbook without the firewall enabled all this time. Hello and goodbye to any and all hackers that tried to break in. Sheesh. :: want want want want want want want... :: I hope all is well with everyone. Stay safe. A lot of people are travelling right now, so I wish you all safe journeys. Come back to us in one piece.

Official

It took until today, as far as I know, but Nomar is finally off the Red Sox.com banner: It's official. God help us.

Debate

The St. Stephens Debating Society, the word goes, is probably the most elite debating society in India. They throw a debating tournament in November that attracts debators from all over Delhi, all over India, and all over Asia at large (good teams from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Bangkok). Former winners of this tournament include former Prime Ministers, Chief Ministers, and heads of major businesses. The society engages in competitions where the cash prizes average (average!) well over $1000 for a semester. All the members of the executive board have already paid off the rest of their tuition and rent to St. Stephen's with earnings from debate, with plenty to spare. And I just walked onto the team. There were two rounds held this week. The first was an individual round with 24 hours preparation, requiring a 4-minute speech and 2 minutes of question answering. The topic was "This house believes there is no such thing as national sovereignty anymore." I was on the government side, so I had to affirm the topic. I argued that the cumulative Philosophical, Technological, and Economic developments of the 20th century had nullified the concept of national sovereignty as it stood for the last 1000 years or so. It was a pretty good argument, and I spoke pretty well, I think. I was quite nervous, but I think it came across well. Cat said I moved too much while I was speaking, so I worked on that in the second round. The second round was a real test. The resolutions given were really abstract and you had to make a concrete case out of them in under 3 minutes. Cat's resolution was "This house is comfortably numb." She crafted a case that said social apathy was the biggest obstacle to constructive social change in the world today. My resolution was more straightforward: "This house believes in free-for-all," and I had to speak for the opposition. I crafted an argument that said "This house should show a proper respect for law and order." I said that a proper respect for law and order permitted economic growth, enhanced democracy, and saved lives. It worked out pretty well. I thought I spoke very clearly. I didn't even get any questions, which I thought might be a bad thing. After I spoke, they told us that the list of those who had made it would posted on the main board tomorrow (today - Saturday) morning. I have classes early Saturday morning, so I knew I'd be able to check. I honestly didn't expect to make the team. There were some very good speakers. It was interesting, actually, that the speakers were mostly either very, very good or very, very bad. The contrast from speaker to speaker was striking. There were enough good speakers that I put my chances at making the team at 50/50. Thus it was nice to come in this morning and fine both my name and Cat's name on the list. The list said that we qualified for the "interview round." I thought this was the final selection process, but apparently, in talking to some of the exec. board members, it's just a "get-to-know-you-and-give-you-crap-because-you're-new" session. It should be interesting. I'm excited for the debate tournaments to start. Apparently we're going to be practicing rather hard every other day for the next few weeks in order to prepare for the first big tournaments. Apparently a big topic at these tournaments is to rail against U.S. foreign policy/hypocrisy, etc. This, of course, begs the Teddy Roosevelt question: Does partisanship really stop at the water's edge? For most Presidents/Congresses, I would probably say yes. This one is so ludicrous and vindictive that it'll be fun to take it to task with greater precise knowledge than most Indians could. Let the games begin. UPDATE: The interview round yesterday was really more like an explanation of what was expected in terms of membership. It's a lot of debate, a lot of competition, but also quite a bit of work. If we were prepared to give a lot of time and effort to the society, we would gain a lot in return. But the relationship, said the President, Anvesh, should be you giving something to the society, not the society being solely for your benefit. He said if they saw that, that a student was taking advantage of society membership and not helping out with anything that it does, that that person was out. Cat and I are both very serious about doing debate, so this didn't phase us at all. After the interview/explanation, the President and Secretary took us aside and talkted to us for a bit. "I just want you to know that the people selected for the interview round were selected based on debating merit alone. I was under a lot of pressure not to select you two, as you will be leaving in December and won't form a good basis to build the society on in the future. But since we decided to select people based on debating merit, we didn't take those things into account. We just wanted to be clear with you regarding that: the only reason you made it here is because you deserve it." "Thank you, thank you very much," we responded, rather uneloquently. "That said, I don't think it would be untoward of us to ask quite a bit from you in return. By virtue of being from a different place, you think differently than we do. We could see this in your debating style. It's just a product of geography and culture. So we want you to interact heavily with the society, to share your ideas and different views on things, your experiences regarding organizing and putting on events." I responded with something stupid like "Absolutely, as long as you do the same. I want to learn from you as well," then went on to talk about how I had organized some big events before and that I had an idea of how to work with unwieldy administrational/societal internia problems. Cat was actually on the executive board of the debate team back at Brown, so she responded that she had been smiling the w whole time Anvesh had been talking because the problems he described were precisely the problems that the Brown debate team grappled with every year. So she knew what she was doing. The President and the Secretary seemed pleased with our responses and our enthusiasm. I'm even more excited to get going with this than I was before.

Monkey Wars

I almost don't believe this, and if I weren't in India I wouldn't think that it was true, but the Asian Age reported yesterday that companies are now buying trained langurs (big, black-faced, white-furred monkeys that I threw rocks at in the mountains) to defend their buildings against typical rhesus monkeys that are all over Delhi. These trained langhurs will patrol the grounds of a given building and will violently attack any other monkeys that come near it. If the monkeys here are like terrorists, these Langhurs are like the Special Forces. I've yet to see a Langhur/Rhesus battle, but I bet it'd be interesting. The langhurs are big (probably a good 40+ lbs) and strongly built. When we were in the mountains, it was legitimately scary when they charged. The rhesus monkeys are just funny and pretty small, if terrorist-like. Plus they travel in huge groups, titling the scales in their favor. All in all, it's nice to know that in the war on terrorist monkeys, someone (something) is out there fighting for us.

Good Management

Today I was walking through Kumla Nagar, a long street of markets near college. It was near lunch time and it had been a while, so I decided to get McDonalds. I just beat the lunchtime rush, which came in after me. The staff were getting more overwhelmed as my order was being processed and people kept coming in and getting in line. They got my fries and coke very quickly, then promised to bring my burger (chicken burger, by the way - big sign out front that says "No beef products are sold in this establishment.") out to me. Time went on. My coke disappeared. Then my fries. Most of the people who had been behind me in the lunchtime rush had already finished their food. So I walked up to the counter to see if I could just get my burger. I was prepared for the worst, because the typical Dilliwalla businessman answer to this kind of question is "You didn't order one," or "We gave you your burger. Did you lose it?" But the manager was standing right there and said, "You didn't get your burger?" I said yes, that I had been waiting for it for quite some time. He said "Oh, goodness, I'm terribly sorry. Let me get you fresh fries and a coke." While he did so, my burger arrived, fresh and hot. I relayed my sincere thanks and went back to eat my food. This story is worthy of note because it's about the best, and most unexpected, single example of management that I've seen yet in India. I am absolutely going back there again, and not just for the food. Stuff like that sticks in people's minds. If the manager or someone working there had given the typical Dilliwalla business response, like some hellish rickshaw drivers I've had, there's a good chance that not even the allure of a nice chicken burger and fries would get me to go back there.

On the Benefits of Taking Notes on a Laptop

So I've been taking notes on my shiny new gift from God/my parents: an Apple Powerbook G4, 15" w/ Superdrive. It's easily the coolest thing I've ever owned. It is successfully the beautiful center of my digital life. The book comes with the newest version of Microsoft Office X, which incidentally is the best product Microsoft makes. I cannot understand how such a good product with such genuinely original ideas doesn't cross back over and make the Windows version of office that much better. Anyway, the new version of Word X has a built in template for taking notes. It's really logically laid out, really intuitive, and even looks like a piece of notebook paper. You can add color-coded dots for emphasis, you can highlight, you can even select a particular note and turn it into an Outlook task that pops up near the time that it's due. There is also the added nicety that, because not everything you write is set in stone as you type it, you can go back and add things to different sections of your outline. All in all, the notes take a fuller, more logical character and I feel like I understand the material better. Also, though I haven't done it yet, there is an option to record the audio from all my lectures right into the Word file. That way, even though I'm taking notes and typing, I can go back over whatever I think I missed. The problem is that there is far too much ambient noise. There's no air-conditioning anywhere in St. Stephen's.

Sidenote: The exceptions to this rule are only for the Principal's office and my Political Science professor/Dean of the College's office. The latter is nice because we've been meeting to discuss areas of extracurricular research that I could investigate while I'm here. Talking for hours about contemporary Indian politics and its development since before independence would be fine anyway, but there's extra incentive when the air conditioner is blasting on a 109 degree day.

So if I tried to record voices, all I would probably get would be a low-pitched, all-pervading hum. Perhaps later in the year when the weather is more mild I can try this out. Once or twice, when the lecture is dragging, I'll break out iPhoto and rank old photos and arrange them correctly and whatnot. The other day I got to a particularly hilarious photo of Toby passed out on a couch in a compromising manner and the girls behind me started giggling uncontrollably. My economics professor, whom I've discussed before, was unamused. She stopped lecture and glared at them, then continued on. The only problem is the looks I get. My friends here posit, probably correctly, that not only am I the only person at St. Stephen's College who takes notes in this method, but perhaps the whole of Delhi University, which has maybe 40 000 students. So I stand out, a bit. I'm convinced that it's a superior method, and I don't plan on stopping. I get stared at so often in this country that getting stared at a bit more because I take notes on my powerbook is not an issue. Sleep well, America. Goodnight.

The Lost Boys

I know this is entirely random, but for any adults out there who want to understand my generation, you should definitely check out this article. It's a really interesting look into the minds and habits of men ages 18-34. I know for a fact that over 10 regular readers of this site have children in that age group, so you'd do well to check it out. it's all seen through the lens of advertising, but the insights into generational values are there.

Maddening

Can I just read you the headline from RedSox.com's homepage regarding last night's game against the Twins:

Pedro Martinez fanned eleven and Orlando Cabrera homered in his first at-bat, but his error in the eighth let in the eventual winning run on Sunday.

Check the 14th word in that little paragraph. Error. It means someone on the defense screwed up. In this case, it was the guy that we just acquired specifically for defensive excellence! I'm telling you, the Gods are mocking us for making this trade. I'm a diehard Red Sox fan, totally partisan and totally bent on beating the Yankees and whatever eventual National League challenger, but I'm losing faith quickly in the Red Sox this season. Plus, who knows how long it could take to rebuild a team that could get us to the World Series. I don't care if Cabrera hits 20 home runs in August, the more I think about it the more I think that this whole trade was a really bad idea. Dan O'Shaugnassey of the Boston Globe disagrees:

Thank the baseball god, he's gone. We no longer have to watch Nomar Garciaparra pretend that he cares about the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox. This is a strange story. No one ever played harder, or gave more, to the Boston Red Sox and the citizens of Red Sox Nation than Nomar Garciaparra. He was probably the most popular Sox player since Ted Williams, and rightfully so; no player was more worthy of your applause. But at the same time, no player polluted the clubhouse more than Nomar, and in the end, he was the ultimate non-team guy. He had to go. He was more miserable than any athlete I have ever seen. In the Sox clubhouse, he was as happy as Michael Moore at a Bush family reunion. [...] Had he liked it here, he could have been our DiMaggio. He was that good. But he hated being famous and he hated being a prime-time ballplayer in a region that cares with relentless passion. So now he is gone. It was a great run, but life goes on without Nomar. It hurts. But it was the right thing to do. The Red Sox traded a great player. But they have a chance to be a better team without him.

Granted the O'Shaugnassey has access to a lot more information than I do, has actually been in the holy of holies, the Red Sox clubhouse, and heard the discussions and the behind-the-scenes mutterings. Totally granted. But perfectly rational choice or not, I don't think I'll ever really emotionally accept that it was a great idea to trade him. A good front office, a non-lethal media, and perhaps a more inspirational coach could have changed the atmosphere and made him consider re-signing. A little rest and not as much pressure to get going while still on an injury could have gone a long way... I know this is a pointless endeavor. I know he's gone. I know purely rational minds are rejoicing. I know we got some good defensive strength in return. I know the club atmosphere will change. I know Chicago will benefit from his hitting, and lord knows I'd like to see them beat the Cardinals. I know other leaders will step forward and be proactive. I know our offense can still light a fire under any pitcher in the majors. But I don't know how to deal with losing a player that has been with my team for as long as I've been intelligently following them. For all my intents and purposes, Nomar has always been on the Red Sox. I don't know how to deal with losing a player that has always been a paragon of hard work, dedication, team-play, and creative display of talent. I don't know how the Red Sox will really be the Red Sox without my generation's Ted Williams. I just don't know. Nomar, you will be missed.

Rain

Well, it finally happened. Late last night, after I got back from seeing Spider-Man 2 again (!), the rains started. It started off very light and almost illusory, growing into a full, unabated torrential downpour at one point. At various points throughout the night and early this morning, it varied regularly between these two extremes. Now, as I'm getting ready to go to school, it has faded again and I think the sun may be about to break through the clouds. But this is a start. The weathermen (and it's all men in this country, which I find odd), seem to think that the monsoons are really going to start now. So Delhi will definitely start to take on a different feel to it. I only really know it as this dusty, hot-as-hell, crazy metropolis. It'll be a refreshing change to know it as the rainy, muggy-as-hell metropolis. We shall see... Off to class. Keep safe, all of you. Especially those of you that work at or walk past major financial institutions. You know who you are.

Tell me this is just a bad dream

I don't believe it. Nomar is gone. Tell me this is not true. I'm always going to miss Nomar. He was my favorite member of the Red Sox for a long, long time. I thought he got totally shafted this winter when we thought about trading him in a side-trade to the White Sox. He's one of the best players in the game and you want to trade him in a side-trade involving another shortstop? That's just offensive. And now in this trade, the only person we could have righteously traded him for was Jesus, and He was notably not on waivers. The front office also totally mismanaged the presentation of this whole thing. While focusing on the need for defensive strength so much-which, I admit, we will be getting in exchange-they made it sound like Nomar was not a gold glove winner and five time all star and rather some bobbling idiot making errors all the time, "How'd he get there in the first place?" That's just offensive. Theo Epstein: You'd better know what you're doing. You're only a whiz kid if you're right.

DSL woes...

Ok, so it's in. It works. Technically. I can access many websites, I can download some of my non-brown email accounts. I can even use AOL Instant Messenger. But I can't access a whole plethora of necessary sites: brown.edu, columbia.edu, mlb.com, washingtonpost.com, wired.com. It's a crapshoot to find out what sites are going to work and which ones are not. Notably, none of the popular image hosting sites work at all (ofoto, funtigo, yahoo!photos, msn photos, etc.) which is just totally maddening. Nobody out there in digital land has seen any pictures of me climbing mountains, negotiating with richshawwallas, or playing Trivial Pursuit. I've got to get this sorted out.

Sidenote: The title "-walla" literally means "one associated with [blank]." It's used off to mean, basically, "one who sells [blank]." But you can use it all over the place. I created the term DSLwalla because it sounded funny and I think the guy liked it. You could argue, and people have, that last October Lenehan and I were "whiskeywallas," or, perhaps more truly accurate, "Soxwallas." Anyway, I gather the use of this term has generated quite a bit of confusion and I thought I'd set it straight. Hope that was helpful.

Kerry

Wow. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of John Kerry's speech today. Granted, I didn't see Clinton or Obama, so I don't really know what the high bar was for this convention, but as an acceptance speech for a candidate for high office in a very serious time, I think he did quite well. Where he usually stiff and inaccessible and long-winded, he was brief, rolling, and hammered his key points. Where the republican acceptance speech will be dominated by testosterone, false piety and fear, Kerry was strong, unrelenting, and hopeful. Perhaps his best line was, "There's nothing more pessimistic than saying American can't do better." I liked the bit about faith. The two things that annoy me about the contemporary Republican party are the two things they've attempted to steal outright from all Americans: God and the flag. The whole convention was liberally peppered with people who don't see things so clearly, military men who resent anyone claiming the flag for themselves, people of faith who are also Democrats. The DNC did a good job of really representing the party for what it is: a big, optimistic tent. All around a good speech, and I'm interested to hear all of your diverse opinions on the matter. Oh, and Beautiful Day at the end his speech? Perfect. God I wish I was in Boston...

Wildlife

I'm in class right now, and the discussion has devolved into a very idiosyncratic, microcosmic analysis of a part of a problem that used to be interesting. So I was looking through my bag to check my schedule for my next class, when a spider jumped out of my bag at me. It was only maybe an inch plus across, but it jumped! It missed me and fell on the floor, where it proceeded to walk a few steps, jump five inches forward, walk a few more steps, jump five more inches. What an amazing little thing. I guess I'm glad I didn't stomp on it immediately. The wildlife in general in this country is continually, and by turns, amazing and vexing. I had so many misconceptions when I first came here. For example, I thought monkeys would be cool little animals that I could give bananas to and semi-play with. They'd be like squirrels but smarter. No. Monkeys are the terrorists of the Indian geopoliticobiosphere. They're crazy. If you look at them wrong, or, god help you, you happen to smile and thus bare your teeth, they totally flip out. They'll jump up and down and scream and get real aggressive. They're constantly on the move and getting into places they shouldn't be, like bathrooms and classrooms and hallways here at St. Stephen's. They steal things like fruit and small bags like purses and then literally laugh at people that run after them trying to get them back. They launch precision strikes on fruit stands, some making an obvious diversion in front of the fruitwalla while others will climb over a wall, unseen, to grab a ton of fruit and then take off. Bastards. In the mountains, they'd constantly be making a ruckus on the way to school. We had to carry rocks to throw at them just in case. I got quite good at monkey pummeling. They hated me even more, I think. They were particularly bad when I was on the phone at the telephone booth. The booth had a thin tin roof and when there were a bunch of people inside they would jump on top of the roof and just jump up and down and pound, making as much noise as possible. Phonewalla would run out and throw stuff at them and they'd leave, but everyday I was left with one thought: war on terror... and monkeys. Just as terrorists manage to find every weakness in the massive endeavor that is the US security structure, monkeys found precision ways to drive humans crazy. I think they're still jealous that we evolved and they didn't. Bastards. In the mountains, I also had lots of interesting interactions with scorpions. The scorpions up in the mountains were small but apparently packed quite a painful punch. There was one in our downstairs bathroom one day, which really freaked out the girls. We've got some very cool pictures, which will be uploaded eventually (damned DSLwalla!). The other two that I had to remove I ran into in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom. Both times they were on near the wall in the hallway, rather scurrying about looking for something. They're really stupid animals, actually. They'll just sit there as you place a matchbox over them and box them up. When you throw them outside, when they land they just sit there again, as if to contemplate the metaphysical aspects of them getting kicked out of the house. Then they scurry off to strike fear into the hearts of monkeys, rabbits, and girls from Georgetown everywhere. Also notable for home invasion are the lizards. Cat had an unwanted roommate for a few days last week: a 6 inch, hyper-active lizard. We have no idea how it got in, but it lived just above her curtains, and would creep out to explore every once in a while. Cat did not deal all that well with her roommate, though she stopped yelling after the first two times or so. The lizard was actually really cool looking (Rob was jealous that it came into Cat's room and not ours. I pointed out that it would freeze to death in our gorgeously arctic room). All in all, the wildlife here is a very interesting and very constant part of life. No tigers yet, but they use these huge elephants to do large-scale maintenance in some of the big parks in Delhi: things like clearing out fallen tree branches, moving huge rocks, etc. I'm not sure how well-taken care of they are. Alas. Alright, I'm off. Gotta get back to class. Hope all is well.

Classes

At St. Stephen's, I'm probably going to be taking the following classes: :: Indian Government :: The Problem of Economic Development and Policy :: Greek Philosophy I've had the Government class and the development class already. Both are really interesting. Teachers here really are a force to be reckoned with. Case in point: during my development class, the teacher had been talking for a while about this concept of disguised unemployment. Disguised unemployment is when there are workers in a traditional economy that are not essential for output, i.e. they could leave and the same amount of work would ultimately get done. While explaining this, my teacher, Ms. Mohan stopped and asked one guy what he thought the critical point of her lecture up to then might be. He fumbled a little, being so put on the spot, and talked a little about why disguised unemployment is important for development in the theoretical scheme she was developing. It was slightly b.s. -ey, but mostly on point. She said, "No. You weren't listening." "No, really, Professor, I was." "No you weren't. Leave. Immediately." "Prof-" "Now." I saw that guy walk past my window on the way out and I think he was about to cry. It'll be interesting to see if she lets him come back. Sort of an impressive, if scary, display. My government class is fantastic. The professor, Mr. Ayde, is first-rate. He's also the Dean of the College and rather likes us (he thought my questions after our introduction on democratization were good, so I think he likes me as well), so he could come in handy. The students in his class have amazing respect for him, and I can see why. When he walks in the classroom, everyone stands very tall and silently. It had been quite noisy before he arrived, but when he walked in the room all you could hear were the fans and his shoes on the dusty floor. When he sits at his desk to take attendance (they take attendance at every class here), the class sits down. Though he this impressive aura about him, he's really very upbeat and funny. He punctuates his lecture with anecdotes and stories and seemingly ridiculous but apt comparisons. He knows an amazing amount about Indian politics.

Sidestory: Professor Ayde told us today about the minister for food and health in the Uttar Pradesh state government whose name I absolutely could not understand during lecture. The man has over 100 separate criminal cases currently filed against him. That's 100 cases, by the way, all with separate charges beneath them. He is said to personally have killed at least 20 of his political opponents and many others have mysteriously disappeared and were never heard from again. One of the suits against him is actually a suit filed by the Uttar Pradesh wildlife control agency, their reason being that he keeps an unsafe number of tigers and lions on his massive estate and has a large pond in which he keeps some huge number of crocodiles. Apparently he hasn't denied that some of his political opponents have ended up as a late lunch for his crocodiles. Then again, he hasn't affirmed it, so I guess we just give him the benefit of the doubt, right? At least the most damaging extra-curricular thing our politicians do back home is make inedible pasta sauce.

Technical difficulties - Updated

DSL still isn't working. Sorry. Will try to update as soon as possible with something of interest. UPDATE: Okay, after much unsuccessful harassment, we've pretty much decided to switch DSL companies. I'm in the process of pricing out other offers. Regardless of who we choose, it's unlikely that we'll get anything installed before the weekend. Alas. So I'll continue to use the connection here at school, which is painfully slow and shared by up to 20 students at the same time. God I miss Brown's T3. In the meantime, read the entry above for a small clue into how my life is here.

This Afternoon...

We shall be DSL-powered. Then I can update from the apartment, use instant messenger, and all kinds of fun things like that. Can't wait to talk to you all more.

Thoughts On the Return

Party We had a going away party last Friday night. It was a nice event, all around, with some hilarious moments, of which I'll share an edited few: :: Me being the only sober person for 8 hours straight. :: Twenty University of California students showing up at the same time. None of them wanted to drink, and almost all of them looked at us like we were totally crazy. :: This exchange between me and an unidentified Columbia student: "Dude, where's the girl?" "What girl?" "The girl outside." ", we are outside." Pause. "Touche." :: The son of the Principal of the Landour Language School getting tipsy and proclaiming to us all that "I can destroy you all with my mind alone!" He's 17. :: Four hours of some unbelievably funny dancing. :: A 15-minute debate between and unidentified Brown student and an unidentified UC student about whether or not the fruits in question were in fact pickled lemons or pickled limes, culminating in this brilliant observation: "No, no. Trust me. I'm a music person. Lemon's have a kind of a decrescendo that limes do not. This is a decrescendo. This is a lemon. This is not a lime." :: Twenty UC students all leaving at once, without a word exchanged between them or us about it. Rather a psychic moment. :: "This whole not-drinking thing makes you creepy." - Maive, a UC student, regarding me. I have no idea what she was talking about. After the mass of UC students left I just became the general photographer/caretaker of my crazily dancing friends. The music continued till about 3 in the morning when I had the presence of mind to realize that we were probably keeping the whole valley awake. It took some convincing, but the music came down. It went back up again the first time I left the room, but came down permanently after that. There was much conversation and laughing till closing in on a lightening sky. Leaving We all got up early to a laughing Gambhir. Apparently, he came down several times to check on us through the windows and found us hilarious. So did his whole family. Apparently. Our last breakfast in Mussoorie was fantastic. It was mostly the same as we'd been having every day before school, but everything was just really well done. There was new jam, the eggs were seasoned a little bit but not too much. It was just nice. Lunch was the same way: still dal and rice, but with a new kind of fragrance and a more smooth taste. After lunch we all rushed to pack everything and get in the taxis by 3:00. I hadn't remembered bringing that much stuff, but jesus my pack was heavy. After my experience at the Delhi station the first time, I was highly distrustful of porters so I carried my own, heavy bag up the stairs to the taxis (160.5 stairs at 9000 feet - not an easy task), to the train, and loaded it in the luggage rack all by myself. Although everyone else blindly trusted their valuables and all their clothes for the next 5 months to people they didn't know, couldn't communicate with, and who were paid at a rate well below India's laughable poverty line, I thought it'd be prudent not to. Plus I didn't have to pay anything, which was good. But it seemed I was being overly cautious. No one lost their bags. Every single one made it to the train and up on the rack. The taxi ride down to Dehradun was one of the most beautiful I've ever taken. I've been reading My Life, by Bill Clinton, which is rather great, but I couldn't even touch it during the ride down. It had just rained that afternoon while we were packing, and it the rain was still a fading presence as we snaked around mountain hillsides and descended to the plains. This light, misty composition to the air made it explode in yellows and pinks and blues. As the clouds exhausted themselves, the whole of the valley was visible to us, literally hundreds of miles across to the horizon, where another, smaller, mountain range stuck up like tacks through the backside of a paper. Off to the northwest the sun reflected off the rivers that fell from the mountains and rolled toward their ocean destiny. The whole thing was golden and glittering and dramatic. I don't think the people of Dehradun will ever know how gorgeous their dirty, polluted, crowded, impolite little city looked that day. I don't think anyone could ever really relate it to them. In a sense it was India defined: massive, inexplicable, tear-inducing natural beauty laid over an intricate human problem. How blessed this country is, and how cursed. The train ride to Delhi was largely uneventful. I wrote letters to people and read Clinton's book. Brinda met us at the Delhi station (she actually knew, somehow, what car we were on and came on the car with porters to help us take our stuff away). Outside the train station, we realized that this, really, was it. Over the past month our Brown-in-India group has become very tight, very family-like. They've been invaluable in helping me tear me thoughts away from the western horizon and a particular star in the sky and placing me back in the here and now. I feel amazingly comfortable with every single member of the group and love them dearly. At Delhi Railway Station, though, we realized that our family was going to be broken and placed across a metropolis from itself. Myra, Marla, and Jenn are going to Lady Shri Ram College on Delhi's south side (Greater Kailaish - Part 1 if you're keeping score at home). I'm going to miss their everyday presence. The first-month family turned asunder. Alas. Delhi God this place is big. I haven't felt in the presence of such a mass of humanity since I flew into Los Angeles on the way back from Sydney. It just keeps going and going and going... It's so muddled and so buzzing, as well. On every road there are people walking, sitting, sleeping, driving. There are cows walking totally unmolested through the streets, looking for random grass to cut down. Skinny dogs nimbly pick dropped food off sidewalks, dodging the brooms and rocks hurtled at them from shopkeepers (dukhandars, in Hindi). There's tons of green and brown. Organic life just busts out of every crack and crevice, every median is a developed jungle, every sidewalk an impromptu garden. How blessed this country is... Dust swirls from air pushed by tires to the side of the road and back, occasionally lifting off the ground to pepper eyes, ears and noses (thank the lord for q-tips, or ear buds as they call them here). ...and how cursed. From all accounts, this is the weirdest monsoon season on record. The monsoon is over two weeks late. It usually arrives with mechanical precision on June 29, I believe (can't be positive on that quite yet) and, despite our impressions and the declarations of weathermen at the time, the downpour we got when we left for Mussoorie was not the start of the Monsoon. The government says that they're giving it a week more before they declare a crisis situation. India depends on the monsoon rains because it's the only rain they get the whole year, basically. It rains like hell between June and late September and then not again till late March if they're lucky. So it needs to happen soon or it might not happen at all, goes the logic. And if it doesn't happen at all, people will die on an epic scale and it's quite possible I'll have to leave India prematurely. So pray for some damn rain, please. Home Sweet Home The Raj Narain Road Apartment is just gorgeous. It's a little more sparse than I remember, but just as big and just as comfortable. Rob and I have the corner room with an extremely powerful air conditioner. Now that I've got all my stuff moved in and I'm quite settled, it's really starting to feel homey. It'll feel even more homey when we get our super-p1mped out cable modem in here at the end of the week and I can upload some pictures to you all. I'm rather psyched for that, I have to say. You'll not believe the stuff I've seen here and have to show for you all.

Delinquent

Sorry, but for some reason this post got deleted in mid-publish. I can't really explain it. Hopefully it works out this time. So, all right, you can all stop emailing me: I'm still alive and well. I've really been rather busy lately. Unbelievably, actually. But on the 6 hour journey home, I promise to attempt to fully describe the events of the last few weeks. These include: :: July 4th, and related thoughts on America. :: The Trek - Kissing the sky at 14,000 feet. :: Hindi exam - Bahut painful ta. :: Cricket - Brilliant sport, actually. :: List of things I miss about home. Hopefully we'll have DSL in our apartment by late next week, so updates will be more frequent and I'll be able to upload tons of pictures. And, boy, are there good ones. Hope all is well back there. I love you all. Be good. Yes, you.

Oh and by the way...

::I hate the Yankees. At least we just routed Oakland and they lost to... Detroit: the doormat of, well, everywhere. I can't wait for October. ::Kerry-Edwards! Brilliant! It's in the bag, baby. Those of you who made bets with me, just remember this: 9+. God, what great news. ::My friend here has put me to shame. She's got wicked Delhi-belly. Twenty times worse than I ever even thought of having it. Poor girl. ::Death of Vishnu is amazing. Full review to follow sometime soon. ::I've lost so much weight. Weird looking in the mirror. Cheeks are thinner, my body overall has acquired definition and, maybe, some tone. Running up the 160.5 stairs to the road several times a day and only eating at mealtimes will do that, I guess. ::Also, I haven't shaved or cut my hair since I got here. Such a hilarious thing. I figure it's best to try stupid stuff like this way out in the mountains where everyone looks weird. The not shaving thing is quite interesting. Lots of hair on my chin, the sideburns are fine, the mustache/handlebar area is a little sparse, and there's NOTHING ELSE. My cheeks refuse to grow anything. Really an interesting thing. I've never tried to do this, really, so I'm going to keep going till I get bored or annoyed.

Hindi

When I was first learning French, there was a point where I was really falling behind. My whole academic philosophy was "I don't really care" at that point, so it didn't really phase me. I figured I'd figure it out eventually. After a long bout of lackluster quizzes and tests, Mr. Lisi sent a note home to my parents. This was maybe a semester and a half or so into my freshman year of high school. I sat down with Dad for a little while in the kitchen nook and we started going over things. As the "review" progressed, Dad got more and more annoyed with me. Eventually he said "Read this sentence." I forget what it was, but it started with "J'ai." I read the sentence and Dad said "What does that mean?" I said, "I don't know." "What about that, right there." "J?ai" "Yea, start there." "What does 'j'ai' mean?" Dad was, shall we say, unhappy. "What does 'j'ai' mean? The most common expression in the entirety of the French language? That phrase? Is that the one you mean? You don't know what 'j'ai' means? There are infants in France that would laugh at you. Jesus Christ, how can you take a semester of French and not know what that means? What the hell have you been doing?" Now, I was young, very young, maybe 14 or so, and rather an ass. You may say the situation hasn't changed a whole lot, but then you'd be working on an absolute scale and not one of degrees, wouldn't you. So I probably yelled at Dad and swore and ran away upstairs. But he was right. You hear that, Dad? You were right. Note the date and time. What an idiot I was. Such an unbelievable half-assed job. Really, sincerely sorry about that. In many ways it was a more extreme version of what I did throughout high school and, arguably, the first year and a half of college: didn't work hard, didn't prepare, did just enough to be able to successfully b.s. the rest. Idiot. I've done stupid things in my life to date, but few as painfully regrettable. The French thing got worse before it got better, but it eventually worked itself out. Near the end of that semester, still smarting from Dad caning my pride, I started to work harder and try to understand how the language fit together. I still dropped down to a lower level French class after that year because Mr. Lisi was unimpressed, which was a major blow to my pride, but also a major inspiration. This whole thing just drove me nuts. I honestly cannot remember an instance in high school where I was more annoyed and angry on a daily basis. The surface part was indignation at being in anything but the top classes at LaSalle. The ship-sinking part of the iceberg, though, was anger at myself for letting it happen. Anger can be an effective inspiration, sometimes. I really went after the French language. It was a vendetta of sorts. Irish Alzheimer's in full effect. I did extremely well in that lower French class. I studied way more than I ever had the prior year, even though the class was undeniably easier. After one semester, all the powers that be agreed that I should move back up. It worked out. I ended up doing pretty well in French overall, certainly well enough to not be clueless when I ended up in Nice the March after my senior year. Well enough to test into Brown's highest non-literature French class. I relate this story because I had a moment today, during a Hindi quiz, that felt a lot like that night in the kitchen nook with Dad. No one yelled at me, and I didn?t get all immature like I did when I was 14. There's no one to yell at these days. It's all on me. But I did get really angry. I hate that clueless feeling, where you can grasp at strands of somehow connected meanings and symbols. It's like there's fog in the Sistine Chapel and all you can see is a couple of feet up the walls. You know they connect to this beautiful ceiling that is, in many ways, a pinnacle of human achievement. But this damn fog is there. Well, fog no more. I'm angry now. I have a Hindi vendetta. C'est dangereux. Time to nip this one in the bud. It shouldn't be tremendously difficult. The teachers at Landour are at their best if you ask them lots of pointed questions, so that's just what I'll have to do. They're all also very nice and very willing to go over things again and again, so that'll have to be on the list as well. Hindi is more difficult than French or some other Romance language because even if you understand the structure, how the words are supposed to be arranged, you still have to transpose those words into this alien and unbelievably, phonetically precise script. It's maddening sometimes to have to say "da" "dha" "deha" "dnha", all of which are scripted letters in Hindi and, when native speakers are speaking, exactly the same sound to my ears. But I have a CD with precise speakers on it, we've been watching some Hindi movies, so there's hope in that area. This might, like French, get worse before it gets better, but it will get better.

Nuttin happenin...

Sorry I'm not writing more, but really it's all same'ol, same'ol. Except for this weekend. Saturday We went to SIDH: The Society for the Integrated Development of the Himalayas. They run schools in villages that are too small to have a state-run school. Interesting philosophy on education: very holistic. This visist deserves an update of its own, but I've yet to really coalesce my thoughts on the subject. Sunday: Happy 4th of July! We threw ourselves a little 4th of July party here at Valley View. Just the 8 of us, a cheesy American playlist off of Rob's computer ("Proud to be an American," "Born in the USA," "American Woman," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Summer of '69," Jimi Hendrix's "National Anthem," "Fortunate Son"), quite a bit of Indian beer (no is the answer to that question), and Gambhir made us all personal pizzas. Definitely the best meal of the trip thus far. The real event was after dinner: good ol' massive fireworks show. We spent, collectively, Rs1700 on fireworks (about $35) and set them all off. There were small little spinny things that were designed to burn down wood-thatch buildings. There were what can only be described as fire geysers. There were excellent bottle rockets that went a long, long ways down into the valley. Then there were these two mystery cylinders, about a foot and a half long, with gruesome looking graphics of what could happen if you messed these things up. Mike, the crazy pyro, lit the first one off and ran like hell. About 5 seconds later there was a huge, HUGE boom and we couldn't figure out why these things were so expensive. There was nothing. Another 5 seconds, maybe 300 feet up, a huge firework exploded in air. It was blue and white and looked like a massive flower of some kind. A huge round of applause. Mike lit the second one. BOOM. No dice. "Misfire?" BOOM. Another massive, professional looking firework several hundred feet above Valley View. God Bless America. Other observations... to follow. I've been thinking a lot about America, in general, and I need to finalize them before I post them here. Be safe, all of you. Much love.

Praise the Lord and Hallelujah, pretty much...

Unbelievably, almost inconceivably, my back has been made better not through Jack Daniel's, Advil and TLC, but hot water, funky Indian stretching exercises, and a non-rock-hard bed. Unbelievable. I have to admit, the other method is actually a bit more fun, but what are you gonna do? In a nice new bit of hilarity, just as the sneezy, blurry, pain-induced haze of the back pain was fading and I felt like I wanted to just dance, dance, dance for the rest of my life (just kidding), I was attacked by that wonderful Indian insitution: DELHI BELLY!! W00!! Wow, what an experience this "Indian Experience" is. "Come to magical India, where Pain and Vistas await you." "Come to India, where you may see a beautiful vista if you can leave the can for long enough." And so on. I'm sure you can imagine my other, not-quite-fit-for-public-consumption thoughts on the subject. Anyway, I feel quite a bit better now. I can walk around and bend in all directions without cringing or feeling nauseated. Seems the belly thang only lasts like three or four days, which is, indeed, a blessing. Praise the Lord, Hallelujah.

Pain - hilarity

Ok, this is just getting a little ridiculous. My back is still killing me, though the stretching/hot water bottle combo is quite nice. To add to that, I woke up this morning to some kind of allergy attack. I've been sneezing and blowing my noze all day. I can't wait to get back to the house and take a Zertec. The hilarious part is that every time I sneeze my whole body shakes and I bend, partly, at the waist. This quick movement is not appreciated by my back, which sends shocks of pain reverberating up my spine. So if you were blind, these are the sounds you would currently hear me making: "Achew-AHHH!" "Achew-". It's really sort of funny if you think about it. I've been really non-productive these last couple days. Pain is not a great inspiration for writing, really, though I should try using it as such. Hopefully this thing will subside and I'll return to those productive habits I was so enjoying. Love you all.

Pain, continued...

Yea, the only update I can really give on my life is that my back still hurts like hell. I've been doing these exercises that my school principal taught me. They help a bit, but they more reduce the conflagration to a smoulder, if that makes some kind of sense. I'm gonna go the hot-water bottle route tonight, and I've already changed rooms to a more accomodating mattress. Hope you all are doing better than I am. Much love.

Pain

My back has been killing me for two straight days. This happens occasionally, and no doctor yet has given me a good reason. People here, locals and hippies alike, have suggested acupuncture. Apparently there are some good people in Mussoorie. I don't know what I think about that, but I do know that I'm in rather excrutiating pain a lot of the time. It's driving me nuts. I've just taken a bunch of Advil and I'm going to bed. Hopefully that'll straighten me out. Hope all is well. Congrats to Amy for successfully crossing an ocean by herself. The first of many such cool feats. It's nice to know she's just one long, long walk away. :)

The View from Valley View

If you, the uninformed observer, woke up at 4:03 this afternoon on my porch, you would have no idea where you were. The fog was so thick, so enveloping in dulled and silvering mid-afternoon light, that visibility was maybe 10 feet at best. Beyond you could be anything. The temperature was cool, the breeze was just shy of swift. For all you knew you could be looking at the sea. A sniff of cool air to the sensitive, balanced observer would connote a palpable thinness, thus ruling out the sea. The view would continue to be a mystery, hypotheticals would swirl and die and rise and fall, until about 4:08. The unfolding of the view from Valley View must be framed with beautiful, epic comparisons. Venus rising out of the sea. A silk dress falling pointedly to the floor. A rocket, moon-bound at dawn. The rise and crash of a thousand waves. The coiled strength of an Olympian. It is simply jaw-dropping. As the clouds rolled away and up the mountain, you would simply stare. Your gaze would probably first take in the first huge landscape, then move up and down the gorgeous imperfect geometry of mountain, valley and plain. The side of the mountain sloped steeply down in front of you, broken with infrequency by hotels, flat terraces, and homes, ended in a crack that reminded you of arms stretched out in a breast-stroke. This crack would be just the northern side of a cracked, irregular bowl that is probably 5 miles across. Across the bowl would be another hillside, sprinkled on top with hotels and houses, roads like some ladled sauce across and around it. Way off to the left, well beyond the western edge of the bowl, the Himalayas would rise with ominous power. On particularly clear days, like today at around 4:10, the distant glint of snow-capped mountains shines through high haze. Way off to the right, the organic sprouting of houses and small shops, and the call from the top of two small-looking distant minarets signals Mussoorie proper. Behind Mussoorie off to the east would be, to your rapidly spoiling eye, comparitively unimpressive high, forested hillside. Taking in the bowl and its surroundings, your eyes would inevitably gravitate to the distant center of your view. In the plains below the mountain range you would currently inhabit, flat brown plains would stretch on forever, meekly interrupted by tiny tan squares you would assume to be houses and dark, wriggling lines you would assume to be roads with diry diesel vehicles on them, collectively making up what you might assume to be Dehradun. But the plains... the plains stretch on and on. If this was your first time blessed with such a view, raw beauty and visual power, as well as the yielding intricacies of any passing gaze would force you to stay and just look. Eventually your analysis would stop but the brilliantly arranged light flowing into your eye would not. Time would pass, more clouds would roll in and reshroud your recently revealed treasure. You would lament the loss of such a thing, but be greedy for some break in the clouds. Perhaps after a few hours and a few quick but punishing rainshowers, you would break off the vigil for a while. You would go in and eat, play poker for valueless wooden cubes, and cheer for unknown football players trying to do their country proud. The view would be in the back of your mind, calling you like some kind of siren. Randomly you would run out to the porch, riding on a hope, and you would be well rewarded. The sun would have gone down, leaving its western tropical wake. Reflected light would still gently color the top-most layer of trees, but the landscape would be totally different. Tiny lights would dot the hills, Dehradun beyond would be shimmering. On the nearside of the bowl, two cones of light would be snaking up the hillside, giving pinpoint and momentary access to daylight color. Again you would be called to stay, your analysis fading in importance, your connection with the world more palpable and flowing. I have to say, I wish you would have been here today. It's really quite the view.

Empty Nest

Amy leaves for Europe today. Now at least both the McGuirk kids will be on the same landmass... I wonder what my parents will do with a totally quiet house? I'm interested to find out.

Elite

How cool am I? Just got a fresh new gmail account. it's bmcguirk then at gmail dot c0m. That's gonna be my primary address at least till I get back in delhi. Much love. Be safe all of you.

The Routine

So, here's been my daily schedule this week, with little variation: 7:00AM - Get up. Check out the view from my window. Roll out of bed. 7:10AM - Run around the loop. I'm a real bitch so I probably stop once or twice. 7:40AM - Get back. Shower. 7:50AM - Breakfast downstairs: Tea, toast, eggs, occasionally fruit. 8:00AM - Leave for school. Walk up the massive stairs in the thin air... 8:06AM - Reach top of stairs. 8:10AM - Arrive at school. Wait for my first teacher, Habib Ahmad: grammar.

Habib-ji, or, as we know him, zipper-ji, is a cool guy. He's known as zipper-ji because 4 of 5 days this week when he came to class his fly was down. After you notice for the first time, it's hard to concentrate. Inevitably halfway through class he'll invent a reason to turn around and fix it. Thank God. Habib-ji (ji is an honorific title in Hindi btw) is of average height, average build, thick Indian hair, dark skin, dark eyes, and a thickly settled yet thin mustache. He's funny, and has the classic Indian accent. He's an excellent teacher, though. He tries to get you to experiment with the language, concentrating on the oral aspects and perfect pronunciation rather than rote practice. I learn a lot in Habib-ji's class.

8:20 - Class is supposed to start. ~8:35 - Habib-ji arrives. 8:55 - Habib-ji fixes his fly. 9:10 - Class 1 ends. 9:20 - Class 2 with Jaswinder: writing.

Jaswinder has the most attitude of any Indian woman I've met yet. I'm not entirely sure she likes her job, or likes Americans, or likes writing things over and over again. She's constantly chewing gum, looking out the window while we're working, or telling stories about other students. The jury is out on her. We fill the period everyday, but I can't for the life of me remember what we do in there...

10:00 - Class 2 ends. We walk to Chardukhan ("the 4 stores" in Hindi) down the hill for tea. 10:30 - Class 3 starts with Kumud: grammar.

Kumud is my least favorite teacher. She goes too fast. She writes illegibly on the board and with script characters that none of us know. She attempts to reteach lessons that Habib-ji taught in the morning and only succeeds in obfuscating whatever clarity we were able to attain. Add to that the fact that she smells and won't turn off or not answer her cell phone during class, and there you have it...

11:10 - Class 3 ends. I run out. 11:20 - Class 4 starts with Urmila-ji: writing.

Urmila-ji is my favorite teacher. It's a good thing, too, given who she comes after. Urmila is a large woman who always wears these amazingly ornate saris. I've never seen her not smiling, and she is patient in a way that comes naturally to old, giving women. She corrects with kindness but will harp on you for correct pronunciation of the billions of identical letters in Hindi. Her handwriting is beautiful and reinforces my faith that Hindi is actually a truly beautiful written language. When she speaks her speech is inflected with her constant true smile, giving a sweetness to the language that Kumud notably lacks.

12:10 - Class 4 ends. We walk home. 1:20 - Lunch at the house, prepared by Gambhir.

Gambhir is so cool. He speaks very little english, but he's forgotten more about this region, Indian food, and home repair than anybody I've ever known. He's worked here at Valley View for 12 years or so. Gambhir is also an avid gardener, as the pictures of the house here will attest to. He has a particular affinity for this type of purple flower grown here in India (sorry - can't remember the name). Funnily enough, the local monkey troops picked up on the attentive care Gambhir gave to these particular flowers and decided to raise a ruckus. The story goes that they would drop down from the trees next to these flowers just after he had finished working on them and tear off the flower petals, then just look at Gambhir and run away. Damn monkeys. Gambhir took this personally and decided to get even. So he bought a shotgun. Brinda thought this was a bit much, so she got him Mindy. Mindy is this rather small dog that looks like she's part wolf. Gambhir trained her to go after monkeys at a particular signal ("shhh shhh shhh"). The monkey problem went away, though Gambhir apparently kept the shotgun, just in case.

2:00-6:00 - Chill. Do homework. Play some random card games and maybe Trivial Pursuit. ~6:00 - Tea. 7:30 - Dinner. I'll have to do a seperate update on the food here sometime. 8:10 till whenever - Hardcore, Texas-holdem poker. If you go out, you join the Trivial Pursuit game, probably. We've also been watching the EuroCup on tv these last couple nights. Extremely dramatic. England-Portugal last night was one of the best games I've ever seen. Before Midnight - to sleep. "Rinse and repeat." It's a pretty chill schedule. Lots of leisure time. Lots of hard work. It's nice. More tomorrow. :)

Short Observations of the Hindi Language

Brilliant. Very tonal. Very logical script. Maddeningly precise pronunciation requirements. Heavy. Wide variety of sounds.

Landour

Yea, I'm here. I have a sizable update to post later, but we have a meeting with the principal of the language school in like an hour and I have to get back. No net in the house, we have to walk for like 10 minutes. Not bad at all, I think. Random note: I've been going to bed before midnight and waking up before 7 every day that I've been in India. Am I turning into my mom? :) Worse things could happen... It's nice though, being so productive in the early hours of the day. Love you all. Another update soon. UPDATE: See below for the new post.

Delhi to Dehradun

Absolutely insane day yesterday, demolished entirely by today. Today: We awoke at 5:15 in order to catch our train at 6:45. The taxis should have been here at 6:00, to be loaded and departed by 6:05. Only three of us were truly ready by 6:05, so there was that. Aided multiple people in bringing bags down. The taxis didn't arrive at the hotel till 6:25. Madness ensued. After loading our bags--did I mention that the monsoons started today--our taxis broke all traffic laws to get to the station. Speed, signs, avoiding collision: more suggestions than anything else. Arriving at the station, Indra, the god of rain, bestowed his blessings upon us. The skies opened up with our doors as we descended into a calf-level puddle. As we got out of the taxis and the rain started to pour, random porters came and just took our bags away. Rather shocking if you're not prepared for it, and even then... I held on to my bags. Our situation was worsened by our total lack of info. Brinda was in another car and, though she told us our train, it was some long thing in Hindi. I couldn't bloody remember it. So when 50 yelling porters asked us what train we were on, we had no idea. Brinda apparently broke less traffic laws than we did. Being the poor sheep that we are, we blindly followed the porterse who were carrying our bags on their heads. Totally no clue where we were going, even though once in a while they would just start running, as if our non-existent train were leaving. Brinda soon showed up, smiling. Apparently having your bags semi-stolen and being herded are normal occurrences in India. "Oh, this is the coach." Up (way up, weirdly--a little difficult with a big suitcase on your back), and in. It's packed. Nowhere to sit, nowhere to stow our bags. I pictured myself standing for five hours on the way to Dehradun. Some Hindi rang out in a lovely womans voice from the back of the train and the porters started grabbing our bags again ("No, thank you, I'm taking my own bag." "I take bag?" "No." "Bag?" "No." "Theekai?"), heading off the train. It filters up our 8 person-strong line that we're on the wrong coach, C1 instead of C3 or some such thing. Off the train, again, herded like unholy cows by men we couldn't understand. Yelling, yelling, rain and uneven shafts of light littering down onto the platform, hand gestures, more yelling. I think there's a Hind word that's something like "Ahna" or something meaning "Move your ass, stupid American," because that's what they were thinking and thus that's what they chanted, a tattered, red-clad Hindu chorus. We finally made it on the train, having lost non of our bags (Amazing! What a country!). Now we're sipping decent tea in the air conditioning and all this seems funny.

Sidenote: I'd always thought that, when presented with it, I'd like sitar music. I'd find it interesting somehow. Perhaps, with time, that may be true. But right now the irregular clanging of maddeningly disharmonic notes on the shitty speakers is giving me a sensation something akin to classic road rage. Thank God for the iPod.

Yesterday - June 18th, 2004 So the goal yesterday (the 18th) was two-fold: buy things we needed and see our respective colleges (Lady Shri Ram and St. Stephen?s are on opposite sides of Delhi: 40 minute drive assuming little traffic... which means about an hour and ten minutes...). Before that we were to have lunch with Rudy and Sumar at this trendy new place called "Mocha." Mocha is the slightly stale, corporate edition of what Akbar?s Harem must have looked like. The tables were all low, as were the lights, and we sat on plush silk-covered pillows. We were in a VIP-looking remote corner, silk sheets hung from the rafters to act as semi-opaque, exotic doorways. Unnervingly out-of-place American Pop and Eurotrash House thumped on the stereo. Trendy, indeed. We starts with bottled water and a main course. I had an excellent Country Roasted Chicken Panini. But the desserts were the main attraction. Desserts: ::Cr�me Brul�e ::Lava lava - Melted butter, hot dark chocolate and oil in a coffee mug ::Between the Sheets - Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream mixed w/ toffee, between chocolate covered cookies ::Jamaican Blue Mountain Cappuccino Cake ::Plus 2 hookaks: apricot and strawberry. I didn't partake. I've given up drinking while I'm here (exempting, of course, October--those in the know will know why and, yes, I'm working on a Thirsty McShady). I want to see/remember what an alcohol-less life is like. Interesting, if nothing else. Healthy, most probably. I mean I'm in a country that values renunciation (just look at the deification of Sonia Gandhi), so why not do my part and go a bit native? So, despite the fact that half of my ancestors are probably spinning with impressive revolution in their graves, I didn't have Irish coffee at Mocha yesterday, or beers later when we were watching the football. Yes, football. A bit addictive, actually and, in certain circumstances, beautiful to watch. Talented players are like artists making a fine carving of the field and their opponents. And, come on, Zenadine Zedane is just a badass name. Shopping was crazy, Delhi-crazy. We went all over Delhi looking for, of all things, surge protectors. I ended up going in on some speakers with my flatmates. We split them 5 ways, so it was 260 Rs per person. Around 6 bucks. That's a dollar a month for what will be a well-used luxury. But power! My laptop and iPod are finally fully charged. We almost kissed the guy that finally had them for us. Hotness. Speaking of hot, it was oppressive yesterday. The monsoon today cooled things down, thankfully. But it was not just hot but so muggy that all items of clothing stuck to all proximate parts of our bodies. Chafing going on in unfun places. Welcome to Delhi.

There was a woman who came begging to our car on the way through New Delhi. She wore a dirt and red colored sari, and her shawl was fluttering around her stretched, thin face. She had sad, sad eyes, brown, a deep brown like rich soil. Her teeth were few and far between, and her jaw was perceptibly askew. She held out one open hand, a flower clutched between thumb and forefinger. The other arm ended in a bruised, pus and blood-leaking wound. Her legs were twigs wrapped in cotton against the wind. She stared at me in my $180 sunglasses, $1100 watch, $150 hiking boots, silver ring, and asked for small change through the glass. I have always prided myself on having a bit of eye-power, being able to meet anyones gaze. I withered under her weak, pleading assault. I could not meet her eyes. The car was completely silent. I don?t think I?ve ever felt as ashamed of the blessings I've been given. I won?t ever forget it.

Delhi is massive. It just keeps going, straining under its 11 million inhabitants. We drove in our car for an hour north, through relatively smoothly moving traffic, to get to St. Stephen's. We passed the India gate and the huge governmental buildings. I say huge because I've already used massive in this paragraph. Note to self: find better synonyms for use on truly massive things. These buildings, though, they were so imposing. You felt so small--which was of course the object of their design. Other would probably say they felt powerless, but my ego won't quite let me. :) St. Stephen's is perfectly Indian. The furniture is sparsely furnished with wooden chairs and big slate chalk-boards. The grounds are fully of greenery (though I admit in the Delhi heat they look a bit brown--apparently after the monsoons they bounce back), including a massive cricket/football field and random itinerant wildlife.

Sidenote: everyone here says football when referring to soccer. It?s so overwhelming (there's a billion of'em!) that I'm just going to go with it. Deal. When American football season starts, I'll work out some way of delineating the two. Stephen's is going to be a highly competitive program, and I think that's exactly what I need. I'm psyched for it. If my productivity since coming to India can be sustained (I don't see why not: I haven't been making an effort or anything, it's just sort of happened), then that shouldn't be a problem.

The poverty in this country is overwhelming. It just stretches on and on to all points of the horizon. I just don't know what would be required to raise the standard of living. Forced secondary education, at least, probably, for starters. Clean energy. Better infrastructure overall, come to think of it. Less corruption in government. Better civil society. Less vertical reliance. That'd be a start. But that's just it. I keep thinking of the caterpillar who, when asked what foot to move first, never moved again. I guess education and corruption are the two most gateway issues. They affect so much. So I guess you concentrate there. Once you have a clean, well-ordered government, you can start really fixing the infrastructure. With better communication, better access to education, civil society will start to right itself and expand and reverse the vertical alignment of Indian society. That's probably how I'd start to go about it. This Indian music is terrible. Valhalla So we went to St. Stephen's, looked around, then went to the apartment. Good Lord. My buddy Rob said it best: "This is the nicest apartment we're going to live in until we're 35." First, the complex is guarded by a 24-hour a day security team with shotguns. They looked comfortably imposing. Once past the big, motorized, wrought iron security gate, the newly paved road slopes down to the 30-ft high, pike-topped eastern wall. On your left are the gardens with grassy paths, bisected by a concrete walkway leading to the building itself. The gardens are awash in exotic-looking flowers of which I am currently totally ignorant. I'm sure in the months to come I'll be able to update you on that. They're gorgeous, trust me. There's no proper door to the building because, really, after the shotguns, why would you bother? There's just a staircase that leads up to the apartments. We're on the third floor, out of four. The fourth floor is the roof, but that deserves its own description. Upon opening the door to our apartment, you?re immediately struck by the enormity of our living/dining room. It's easily half-again as big as my living/dining room at home. Off the living room to the left is the first of four separate balconies. From this balcony, the view to the east is of a temple built around 1000 years ago (we're researching the details here, more to follow). Beyond the temple is the greenness of Delhi. Delhi is actually one of the greenest capital cities in the world. From what I've seen, I believe it. The only problem is that it's also one of the worlds most dirt-colored capitol cities... but who's counting that stat? Regardless, all you can see to the eastern horizon is trees and the occasional bigger than average building. Back inside, straight ahead from the entrance door is the dining table and the first of three bedrooms. This one was under construction at the time we visited (why? No one tells us). In the northeast corner, to the right of the room under construction, is a sizable bookshelf and the second bedroom. It's almost the length of my bedroom at home, with most of the width (but no slanted ceilings). There are two beds, two desks, two surge protectors (!), and one private bathroom. The bathroom is nicely sized. As long as it was bigger than chez Madam Mercier in Nice, I was going to be happy. The shower has a semi-sunken basin, which is sort of cool. So you step in and you're feet are below the level of the floor by about a foot. It's an odd-looking thing, but... exotic? Am I overusing that particular adjective? Anyway... The balcony off this room has views of the park close to the complex to the Northwest and Delhi's green down the hill to the east. The bedroom next to this is largely the same, but with an even more sunken tub/basin. Next to this bedroom is the kitchen, complete with stove oven, microwave, fridge, tons of cupboards, and a gleaming new white paint job. Gorgeous. It really is an unbelievable apartment. If we can get some DSL going on there, my life will be complete. The apartment is about 10 minutes to St. Stephen's by Auto-rickshaw. Apparently we need to learn to haggle with them over prices. That'll be fun. Speaking of haggling, I want to join the debate society at St. Stephen's. Cat will join with me, she says. It'll be cool. I need to flex and grow those muscles better and more often. The Roof Oh my God. One floor up from us is the roof. It's a huge flat terrace with two sides. The view is nearly panoramic (the building directly to the east blocks much of that direction, but that's up the hill anyway, so we wouldn't be able to see much anyway). You can see the tops of the great white government buildings in New Delhi, as well as part of the top of the Red Fort... no words... And that's just at night! Beautiful. Just beautiful. It totally changed my perspective on how I was going to be living in Delhi. Movies/pictures soon to follow as soon as I'm back in civilization. What a damn good day. Note: This post was post-dated to June 19th, because that's when it was written. I'm finally online here in the mountains, so more should be forthcoming.

Hot

Friggin hot here. Internet time is also rather at a premium. That's the bad news. The good news is that we go to the mountains on Saturday morning and it's supposed to be fantastic there right now. Also, the house (yes house) that we're staying in in Landour has cable and an internet connection. Hotness. So there'll be blog updates/emails from out there. Not a tremendous amount to update you all on. We've been taking it rather easy here. Yesterday went food, nap, food, soccer match on tv, sleep. I got up at 5:10 this morning, weirdly enough, and was really productive. Wrote a select few of you letters and generally got my life organized. Also spent some time watching a hawk/falcon/some kind of bird of prey have breakfast on top of our air conditioning... interesting display... Ok, I gotta go have lunch and get the hell out of the heat. Hopefully more interesting and analytical updates here soon. Funny English of the day: "...which was well shy of the estimates the government had tom-tommed for the last year."

Delhi - First Impressions

Big. Dirty. Crazy. Rather backward. They speak a funny english ("Don't bamboozle me. We might have to tussle.") Half-stepping embrace of law and order. We're actually at a hotel for the first couple nights, apparently. Close to our program coordinator Brinda who lives down the street here in South Delhi. Brinda seems great. Very warm and mother-like, which, I admit, I really could use right now. Hope I stay on her good side. :) Of the 9 people in my program, Rob, Jennifer, Marla, Mike and I are here. Noel and Mira get here tomorrow at some point. I couldn't sleep very well last night, even though the room has air conditioning. I slept from maybe 1-6. From 6-8:30 I wrote and read "The Death of Vishnu," which Elaine Sawtelle gave me before I left. After that I watched the Pistons kick the crap out of the Lakers. I was in disbelief that a team that good could be so thoroughly dominated and demoralized. The second half of the third quarter and the whole of the fourth were just ugly... Our assistant coordinator, Rudy, and the rest of us went out and around a bit in Delhi today. Such a crazy place. I feel like I stick out in a major way. Luckily the sun is so intense that I'll probably have brown skin in a month. :) On that note, it's unbelievably hot. It's supposed to hit 42 degrees celcius this afternoon: 108 degrees fahrenheit. Holy crap. And it's humid, too, because it rained last week apparently. I can't wait to get to the mountains. I don't know what my internet/computer situation will be for the next few days. I'll update and email as soon as I can. Love you all. Yes, I'm still alive.

Somewhere Over Kabul

It's odd, flying over one of the most miserable places in the world. Below me reigned the Taliban. Below me, somewhere, lives Osama bin Laden. Yet I'm 1:08 from a massive, if imperfect, democratic institution. Such an odd world, this one. I'm completely exhausted, which is good because I might be able to slide back into something resembling a normal sleep schedule. No regrets at all about barely sleeping last night (13th) and a good call, I think, sleeping rather sparingly on my flights today. I think I may be homesick already. I probably wouldn't be if I had done this whole leaving process a little more (a lot more) professionally. I think there as just a lot less certainty about leaving this time. Not about whether or not I was going to leave, but abotu what I would come back to. There are great, and potentially life-changing, things afoot for some of the people closest to me. I know which way I want these things to turn out, but there's no guarantee of that. So all you can do in that situatino is resign yourself to uncertainty and move on, keep them in your prayers. Or you can run it over and over and over in your mind until you're literally sick with worry and morbid fantasy. Moi, j'ai choisi le deuxieme. So there's that. Then there's this little thing I 've mentioned once or twice: I'm goign to f***ing India! I see the sun rising on the subcontinent, light raising on this great mass of humanity. I can picture it, but only in great detail: sculpted, elaborate doorways, high, rolling tea estates, colorful animals, the stately and imposing imperial buildings of New Delhi... yet when I mentally zoom out, everything gets blurry. Nothing seems right and clean and known. A behemoth of a standalone entity, almost completely unknown. Humans fear the unknown. We do that. I heard one of the "Band of Brothers" say that courage is knowing your fears, knowing the obstacles you face, but doing the right thing anyway. Food for thought... They show our route in the air on the tv screens around the cabin. We took this huge detour around Kashmir. It's one thing to read about this stuff, another thing entirely to feel the effects of it. The stewardesses on KLM Royal Dutch Air are, to a woman, beautiful. Very nice and helpful as well. Talk about friendly skies. 30 minutes to Delhi. We're in Indian airspace. Phew. Of course now turbulence is starting and it's hard to write. Welcome to India: nothing is too ironic. Extremely nice woman next to me from the UK. Her family is from Jammu and Kashmir. She's unphased by the conflict. More courageous than I. But I guess you do what you have to for family, right? Starting our descent. Local time is, I think, 9:40, but I honestly don't know what I'm talking about. It's 1 in the afternoon to my body. I typed this entry from things I had jotten down in my notebook. Thus the present tense from the plane. :)

Amsterdam - WiFi is everywhere

God bless whoever invented 802.11 wireless networking. I'm in Amsterdam, currently, and there's this excellent little WiFi service here with which I'm going to occupy my time until my flight to Delhi. The flight here was fine. Cramped. Dad's appellation of coach as "steerage" was dead on. Northwest is almost as bad as budget lines like EasyJet and RyanAir and Southwest. Just keep packing them in... For contrast, and for taunting, they make you walk through business class. Huge seats, plenty of stretch room, personal video setups, a wine list. Nice. It's the way to go if you can get it. I sat next to a guy named Harry from Ohio (yes, an OSU fan) who was on his way to Lithuania to build the main buildings for a Christian Summer Camp. Another guy named Valoo was also on his way to Delhi. Grad student at BU in Physics, yet his thesis is in something akin to statistical analysis. "Not practicable at all yet. Physicists are just bored these days because there's nothing else to solve. Everything's either solved or too hard for normal humans." Makes me think of the guy that ran the patent office back in the day. You know what I'm talking about. This airport is brilliant. Truly a beautiful place. Typical Dutch: it's extremely clean and all the people speak perfect English and are really nice. The Dutch are different. I mean, this airport is beautiful and clean and glimmering, but it's not like Germany where they sort of make a show of how hard they try to keep things clean and running well. It's like the Dutch do it without all that much thought or effort. Such a funny language as well. Lots of "oo"s and "yer"s and "bok"s. Sort of charming, I guess, in a way. For the record I have no idea what the hell Hindi is all about. I can't even say "Hello" in Hindi. Clean slate and all that. It's still technically part of the Indo-European language group, though, so apparently the structure is overall sort of similar to other languages I know. It'll be fun to start to learn it. Hopefully by the end I'll at least be able to have a conversation. I'm starting to feel the distance. Leaving was hard. Reading going-away letters was harder. I'll admit it, I got a little emotional on the plane reading some of these letters. I really am going far, far away for a long, long time. Who knows what will happen while I'm gone. You all better stay healthy, goddamit. I don't have the cash to fly back for any old thing, so just don't let it happen. Be good and be good to yourselves. God I miss you all. Some quite acutely. Well there's no point getting emotional at an internet kiosk in the amsterdam airport. I'm just going to write some emails, read the news, and go doze for a bit in the waiting area. Now, truly, the next update will be from Asia. Unless something strikes me in the next hour and a half, of course. :)

Logan

How hot is this? WiFi at Logan Airport. I hemmed and hawwed, but I realized that this is the last consistent internet access I might have for maybe a month or so. It's not all that expensive anyway (really, Dad). Last night and today have been crazy. The people came over and we had a chill last evening together. My family was in fine form. The party didn't really end till this morning. When I roused myself off the couch, I realized I had only a few hours in which to pack EVERYTHING I'M GOING TO NEED FOR 6 MONTHS. The ladies--Mom, Liz and Amy--packed all my clothes upstairs while I got my digital and document affairs in order. I have no idea what they packed. They have no idea what I really wanted. A conundrum. But whatever, the suitcase is surely heavy and I think I saw some t-shirts in there somewhere. The drive up with the aforementioned ladies was hard. I've been really queasy all day, part of which is admittedly my fault and part of which is surely just nerves. It's better now. I'm in badass traveller mode now. Shit they're calling my flight. I gotta run. Now, truly, the next update will be from Asia.

With a hop, a skip and a jump...

Here I go. Holy crap. Here's the deal: Northwest Airlines, Boston to Amsterdam (um...), Amsterdam to Delhi, arriving in Delhi at 10:50PM local time. The schedule: June 17th: Go to the Landour Language School in Mussoorie June 21-July 12th: Landour Language School, Himilayan foothills July 16th: Semester starts at St. Stephen's College I'll update with more pertinent dates later, but this really doesn't matter because I'm compensating with productive, useful information to take the place of the sheer chaotic state my head is in right now. I'm really not quite ready to leave. It's going to happen regardless, so I'd better start thinking more clearly about what I'm doing and how I'm going to do it. As you can probably tell from my writing in this paragraph, that hasn't happened yet. Pray for me. Updates from Asia when I get there. I love you all, some more than others. :) Be good. Don't do anything I wouldn't do.

Countdown continues...

Jesus. In 30 hours I'll be off to the other side of the world. How the hell did that happen? I'm honestly at a loss. I'm not packed, I'm not really mentally prepared. About the only things really in order are the documents, and I had to be forced at gunpoint to do them. That's not to say that I'm reticent to go or that I don't want to go, it's just that I can't quite bring myself to believe that this is about to happen. It still hasn't really hit me. It hit me a little bit on Friday night, when we had people over for this little get together (much beer bought, much beer consumed, Nate turned out to be a worse grill-master than I, I saw Walter's girlfriend Caitlin for the first time in like 2 years, lots of fun stuff) and I said the second round of goodbyes. The first were at Brown, some more emotional than others. This last round might be the one that does it, where I really realize that the road ahead is long and unknown. It's just this big conflict between the intellectual part of me and my soul. I know in my head what's going on, what's going to happen. I just don't feel it yet.

Golf

Oh, I'm gonna miss this. Woke up early today and played a round of golf with my oldest friend, Walter. We started on the back nine, and I did really rather shitty. 55, gross. When we came in from the back nine, we decided to play 9 holes of match play. I shot lights out. 42. Best 9 holes of my life, basically. Walt, who plays club golf for UVA, shot 41 and, for the match, beat my by 1 hole. Bastard. It was a beautiful day, regardless. Very warm, but with a nice cooling breeze. We got out relatively early, and played an unorthodox route through the course, so there was relatively little traffic or waiting. Golf was followed by the 19th hole, a beer, a jd, a grilled cheese and fries, and a rerun of last night's Red Sox game. Hard to beat. God I will miss this place.

According to Camus...

"Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question."

3.0

Still on Blogger, but check out the new digs. This is the 3.0. The thrizzy, as some would say. The first version was my (now mostly broken but still legible) geocities site. Version 2.0 was this site, mcguirk.blogspot.com, in its original form. 3.0 is new and improved, utilizing some of the features of the Great Blogger Relaunch (tm) like commenting and better behind-the-scenes stuff that you don't know about. So here's the deal: I'm off to New Delhi, India this Monday, June 14th, the year of our lord 2004. I'll be studying at St. Stephen's College, Delhi from July 17th till December 23rd (the first month in India is an intensive Hindi course up in the mountains). This site is a digital notebook to try and record and analyze the probable numerous experiences I'm going to have there. I think I probably summed it up best back when I was leaving for Australia in December of 2001:

Joyce left Dublin to write Ulysses. Hemingway left Spain to write The Sun Also Rises. They had to. Distance generates perspective and understanding. Thus the McGuirk World Tour: I've been given a year in which to work, study, travel, see the world, write, take pictures, and, most importantly, gain perspective and understanding.

Life, the tour, and the exploration of all things continue...

Photoblog test - Look at that ugly mug

Best picture of me ever taken. 

The Totals 1 new years eve 6 months 5 currencies 2 websites ~200 pictures 12 countries 50 million annoying frenchmen 3 wallets 300+ goodbyes 300+ new friends 2 full notebooks 1000+ emails 4 freaky experiences 5 days off 10 good friends that thought I was kidding 3 things lost 82 hours on a plane 102 hours on a train �� thoughts of home �� new experiences �� memories 1 changed life 0 regrets

McGuirk on Budapest Budapest was cool. It's hard to explain what I saw exactly. The thing that stuck with me was how hard hit it was by communism. I'm really starting to get an honest sense of how many people were pawns in communist expansion, and how much better capitalism is for the average person than communism. Communism is just like nazism, actually, in its ease to adoption. It provides an easy way out. Hitler made scapegoats of the Jews and anybody not fitting his masterrace criteria. For downtrodden people, this was easy to latch onto. It's not their fault anymore, they recover some dignity at the expense of someone they didn't like all that much anyway. Communism appeals to the same sort of feeling. If you're downtrodden, communism is the easy way out. 'Psst. Listen. If you come with us everybody'll get paid the same. That aristocrat down the street with his huge house, he'll make just the same as you.' The problem with Nazism was that not only was it inaccurate, but it turned out to be evil. The problem with communism is,not only is it designed to be easily warped (� la Animal Farm) but it functionally brings an economy to a standstill. If people are going to make the same amount of money, regardless of the effort they put in, they're going to put in the bare minimum. After communism fell in Hungary (that's where Budapest is, you ignorant Americans :P) there was a whole generation of people accustomed to, well, not working. Capitalism, supported specifically by a new attempt at democracy, doesn't deal with that well, so they got fired. Thus high unemployment. Thus a new generation of 'downtrodden' people. Guess what happened? The communists just won the last elections. Here we go again. This is extremely fascinating for me, more than any tourist site or memorial or hip bar or something, because I just can't insert myself into the mindset of someone who would look at public services that don't work (transport is laughable, and though we got around alright, my guess is that it took a long time for it to get to a semi-consistent basis), restaurant service that takes a minimum of a half-hour for just about anything, even just a coke or a coffee (except at McDonalds, it should be noted. God bless American Capitalism), and says 'Yes, I want more from the people who gave me this great system.' My only guess is that if you're poor and hungry, your first concern is immediate food, thus immediate money, and anyone who can promise you that, you vote for, regardless of the side-effects of that decision. Budapest was one of the most interesting places I've been to yet. This was originally in email form to Bethany, but she was nice enough to say that I could post it, as it sort of summed up my whole feeling on my Budapest trip. Thanks, Beth, and much love!

Galleria degli Uffizi They say that 80% of the world's great artworks are in Italy, and 60% of those are in Florence. I hit the two most notable galleries today, Uffizi and Accademia and have come to a sorry conclusion: I am museumed out. If I did just see 60% of the world's great art, I missed it. I just was unable to appreciate just about everything. The two most impressive things I saw the whole day, art-wise, were the sketches of the masters, like Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael, etc. and... The David which was the single most impressive piece of art I've ever seen with my own eyes. The scuplture is, well, perfect. It's amazing. Painted well and perhaps reduced in size, you would believe it really was a human being, just with an amazing capacity to stand still. It's lifelike. It's so perfect that I swear it looks like it's breathing. At any moment he could just jump down and start whipping people with that towel. I'm going to give up describing it and raving about it, just come here and check it out. No picture or virtual tour or website or anything can do it justice. Demain, L'Avenir, Certainties of Weirdness Back to Nice. I'm staying there for the night of the 8th and 9th, then it's back to Rhode Island, baby. The trip shall be at an end. It'll be weird not be moving every few days or weeks. It'll certainly be weird to be around millions of english speaking Americans with little or no accent (well, Rhode Island accent, but even that's less severe than, say, a Scottish one). It'll certainly be weird. But off of that, I'm still sort of trying to get my head around this whole trip and how I've changed and stuff. I'm sure I'll have some big update once I'm back, sort of a summation, a thank you and all that. But till then, business style stuff calls. Errands. Go to Nice (Nizza as the Italians say in their lovely language), pick up my stuff from Madame Mercier, go out with Lauren and Fez (trust me, I'll get a good picture and you'll understand why we call him that) one last time as no one can tell when I'll next see them, get my travel affairs in order, figure out how to fit everything into my three bags, then get on a plane. Holy god. It really is almost over. It'll certainly be weird.

Firenze Dear god the food is good here. Cheap, too. I just spent 10euro on a lunch that was a big bowl of spaghetti bolognase, bread, wine, and sorbet and coffee for dessert. Perfecto. Now it's off to the Uffizi and the Duomo (never got there yesterday due to a hostile hostel problem). Much love.

Lord of the Rings and Southerners You know, I'm not usually into fantasy of this kind at all, but I picked up the Hobbit at the Munich train station and read it straight through on the way to Budapest. Now I'm reading the Lord of the Rings and it's honestly extremely difficult to put down. So skillfully done from a variety of aspects: linguistics, drama, pace, depth, accessibility, scope, creativity, world definition. I am honestly completely in awe. Tolkien knew what he was doing. I had always sort of written off LOTR as sort of a hippy/geek cult classic that wasn't exactly my style, but I am now a true believer in this quote from the London Sunday Times: 'The English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and those who are going to read them.' I know for a fact that I'm going to read all of this book (Fellowship of the Ring) and the following two, despite the exhaustive length. I feel like a bit of a jerk, actually, for having written these books off as geek stuff, putting myself on some sort of a 'cool' pedestal. It makes me think of other things that I must consciously or subconsciously do that for, and that makes me feel bad. Like southerners. I know for a fact that before I left I was absolutely prejudiced against people from the south of the US. In travelling, though, many of these prejudices have fallen through. I've met a lot of extremely cool and interesting southerners, and now I'm forced to step back and honestly reevaluate. A challenged reality is a more enlightened one.

Les sents du voyage Yet another night basically without sleep. This train ride was actually worse than the one with the drunken Russians, from Budapest to Munich, as it was a bit more unnvering. I had a couchette and below me was a gypsy woman and her maybe four year old son, next to her bunk was a rather large spanish woman, above me was a vietnamese cigarette addict, and next to him was a nice french woman. The bunk next to me I think was supposed to be occupied but was not. From this description, though, you wouldn't think it all that bad. I wouldn't either. But I'm in Europe, and some fundamentals that Americans take for granted are 'debatable' here. Take hygiene for example. I honestly fear for the life of that gypsy woman's son. At such a young age, yea, kids should get dirty, roll around, have fun, but should probably be washed off after that. Apparently his mother didn't think so. I would estimate that he has not had a bath in 3 months. His mother, true to her philosophy, had not bathed in maybe a third that much time. It's as if we're back in Elizabethan times, and people think the more dirt caked to your face the better, as the 'bad spirits,' now known as microbes, can't get in. And they honestly did have dirt caked to their faces. When the boy scratched his face with his surprisingly long fingernails, a thin line of off-white skin shown beneath. He did it again later to the otherside of his face and it looked like warpaint. Now the great thing about the modern world is that we read about thins like hygiene in the Elizabethan age, dirt-caked faces, muddy, manure-laden streets, etc. and we can shudder at the thought of it. But what reading about it, or even seeing movies set in that time do not do (thank god that this technology hasn't yet been developed) is let you understand exactly what that smells like. It is like a physical barrier to be walked through when you enter a room. It has the effect of immediately unsettling stomachs. My first instinct was to not put down my bags but to run to the window and open it. This was smell number one (well, one and two if you count the fact this the mother smelt of something slightly sharper than the son). The large spanish woman was a case all her own. She had on some kind of business suit, in a low green, like turquoise or the color of the statue of liberty. It was heavy looking for early summer, and she was obviously feeling the effects of it. She was sweating when I got to the couchette, and, here's what I honestly cannot fathom, later when she settled down to go to bed she not only kept on her whole business suit, heavy jacket mit sweatstains included, she didn't even open the package with the light cotton sheets in it, she just threw the heavy wool blanket over her. Am I missing something? Did someone spike the that coke I bought at Gare de Bercy? Perhaps needless to say, after a few minutes of this, I could see the sweat rolling down her face, and the sweat stains that before had been darkness at folds and fabric borders became long lines. My guess is that she had something spicy for dinner before she got on the train, as the smell that soon competed with the dirt twins was, in addition to natural body odor, sharp and gave a strike high in the back of the nose like when you smell hot peppers. This was smell number two. The Vietnamese guy, though nice, was a chain smoker. Thankfully he spent a large portion of the evening at the train door, blowing smoke out into the french countryside. He was clean and well dressed, too, and left his heavy blanket on the eave over the door. He slept with just one sheet and the only smell that came from him, thank god, was that of heavy smokers around the world. Seeing as I've spent now three months in Europe, where people like to smoke even in the shower if they can manage it, I'm actually well used to this one and it didn't bother me. Other than the fact that he was figgety, and would occasionally pull some precise gymnastics to turn from one shoulder to another in one fell swoop and without actually moving his body from an apparently well grooved spot, he was great. The person I was happiest with was the french woman. She looked Mediterranean in origin, and wore all black with a black bag. We had fluid and funny conversations in French, and, despite the popular and generally accurate preconception of the French, she did not smell. Given that half the people in the cabin were battling for pungent dominance, you have no idea what a relief that was. When she got off in the morning at some small stop in Italy, she walked past and smiled, and for the first time the whole train ride, I smelled something honestly beautiful and refreshing: French perfume. And with that I laid back and got a whole hour of sleep. Firenze ...Is beautiful. I've only been here for a few hours and have not explored much, but it is quite beautiful already. I lucked out, as well, that it rained all last night and now the sun is shining and there's nary a cloud in the sky. More updates on that later. I'm gonna go have lunch and check out the Duomo.

Good Thing I Learned in the Past Six Months #7 For all its faults, America is the greatest country on earth. This just in... Bush is still an idiot. Good Thing I Learned in the Past Six Months #8 Even though Bush is an idiot, not all Republicans are evil and want to do harm to portions of the population they don't like or agree with. Good Thing I Learned in the Past Six Months #9 Competition in any given marketplace is the best way to improve quality, lower prices. Color me a free-market believer. Good Thing I Learned in the Past Six Months #10 Just like #9, but different: the best way to blow your mind, Amsterdam aside (haha), is debate and discussion with people from vastly different backgrounds from yourself. A good reality challenge is more refreshing than a hot shower or a Lynchberg Lemonade.

Paris - Touchdown Crazy week. Amazing, even. It was just the perfect balance of people, time, places, views, rests, walks, rain, weather, warmth and cool. Everyone was all smiles the whole week. We saw what we wanted, had great food, soaked in the Parisien atmosphere. Probably the best week of this whole trip, and that's truly saying something. I just came back from Charles de Gaulle Airport where I dropped off Liz, Mom, and Aunt Nancy. Hope they get home okay and basically in one piece. :) Paris - Metro The designers of the Paris Metro were art lovers. They laid their lines like Pollock. L'Avenir Off to Florence tonight on an overnight train. Couchettes again. Yay. Hope I sleep. Anything will be better than the drunken Russians from Budapest to Munich.

Good Thing I Learned in the Past Six Months #6 Lennon was right. All you need is love.

Paris - Liftoff So psyched to see Mom, Liz and Aunt Nancy. Life is good, but unfortunately really busy. I'm sure I'll be hitting up the late night internet cafes while I'm here and the rest of the group sleeps. I always end up doing that... Hope all is well. Much love.

Visuals Just uploaded 54 pictures from across europe (placed in the aply titled 'Across Europe' Gallery). Dig them. I'll add descriptions later, maybe tomorrow night before my people arrive in Paris. Much love! I'm outta here...

Budapest Is lovely. But, unfortunately, I have to go to Paris. I'll update for real when I get there. Wish me luck on my 19 hour train trip. This is almost as bad as Australia.

Good Thing Learned in the Past Six Months #3 America is the most powerful thing in the world, and maybe 5% of America knows it. Good Thing Learned in the Past Six Months #4 The X-Files were right. Trust no one. Read everything. Read The Economist, the New York Times, The Times of London, National Review. This relates to number five. Good Thing Learned in the Past Six Months #5 Balance is the future. Balance should be the goal. Taoism is right in this regard.

Casualties The first real casualty on this trip was my ankh necklace that I left in Sydney. My understanding is that Chris was nice enough to send that back to me. Net result: I�m still in possession of my necklace. Second casualty: my towel that I left in Dublin on the edge of my bed. Air dry or recycled t-shirt ever since. Not really an issue and I might just �confuse� a white t-shirt of mine with a hotel towel... Third casualty: Today, post-tour (more on that maybe tomorrow), I left a present that I bought Amy, the new Economist, and Tom Wolfe�s �Hooking Up� (with my Eurail Pass Protection voucher inside--just the voucher: the pass hasn�t been further from me than three feet in three weeks) at the McDonalds register and when I finally realized what I had done, the angry-looking staff played dumb and shook their heads. I think they ganked it becuase I�m a stupid bloody American Tourist (tm). Plans Going out with some people tonight then off to Budapest tomorrow morning.

Episode II You have no idea how long I�ve waited for this movie. You roll your eyes, and you say �Um, since the last one?� Technically, you should be right, but this was the movie that Episode I should have been, and I waited for that for a long, long time. I remember my friend Brendan talking with me when I was little about the �Prequels� and how Lucas was going to wait to make them till he thought the technology was good enough. I wanted this movie. When Episode I came out, after the thrill of the pod-race and anytime Natalie Portman was onscreen had died down, I was actually a little dissapointed. Yes, I know, it had to lay out the broad spectrum, define the limits within an epic story could be told, but it still could have been better done. It seemed, well, safe, not risky and quick like the originals. Episode II is much, much different. Episode II fills the void created by Episode I. Episode II is epic and beautiful. The links to the other movies, the hints, the artistry in the crafting of (albeit badly delivered)lines that act like viruses in your mind, slowly taking over and expanding. One really feels the story, believes in the existence of a galactic republic, believes in the force and the actions indicative of destiny. My only gripe, really, was that Lucas has no idea how to use actors. He has, at his disposal, some of the most talented and powerful actors available (Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee... Yoda...) and yet their performances feel stiff, unbalanced. Even some of the interim lines feel like Lucas was trying to remember, himself, what made the other movies, A New Hope in particular, so good, and he ended up trying too hard. It�s forgivable, though, as the story itself is so skillfully assembled. Definite recommendation. Go see it now. And not in German. I made that mistake the first time.

Arbeit Macht Frei I didn�t want to go. I really didn�t. I tried to con myself into believing that reading books about the Holocaust and seeing Schindler�s List was enough. I don�t need to see this, I thought. My trip, to now, and with limited exceptions, has been an entirely pleasurable experience. �Why change that?� I asked myself. It was a rhetorical question. I knew I had to go to Dachau. It was loaded with irony, even just approaching Dachau. It was a beautiful day today. The sun was bright and brilliant. There were no clouds in the sky bar light and loose ones at the horizons. There was a light west to east wind that swept across the flat Rhineland plains of which Munich is the capital. The town of Dachau is, actually, beautiful. The town centre has packed early 19th century-looking buildings and cobblestone streets. The countryside has flowing fields punctuated by small streams that come together in the town center, necessitating a small romanesque bridge. It�s beautiful. It�s 2 miles from a death camp. So it goes. I won�t tell you start to finish about my tour of Dachau, because if you�re seriously interested you could undoubtedly find a better website with a more talented writer that can take you visually and historically through the whole camp. I�ll just tell you my impressions. I�ve been thinking a lot about my experiences today. I think they could be explained by one image that I just can�t get out of my head. I was sitting on the far end of the camp, near the memorials. The main barracks of the camp, where the prisoners were kept, were knocked down in the 1960�s because they were decrepit. Only the foundations remain. On days like today, the sun beats down particularly hard on these foundations and the gravel paths around them. Being stone, they take this energy and radiate it around them. The effect is like we see on highways or savannas in summer. It�s as if shouts of horror from all those years ago were rising from the ground and shaking the air. It�s the first manifestation of the heavy atmosphere of the camp. One always hears writers use phrases like �The feeling of death was palpable�, or �It was a heavy atmosphere,� or �If these walls could talk...� and things like that. I�d never actually felt it till today. If the walls in Dachau could talk, they would scream. The vicious nature of this place is brought out by the camp motto, molded in iron on the entrance gate �Arbeit macht frei.� Work will set you free. This is a vicious truth. The only freedom one got in Dachau was death. And death was brought, in most cases, through overwork, like a bitter and compassion-free euthanasia. Dachau is a heavy place. One feels the history, the violence, the barbarism. The feeling is brought to life by little simple explanations in different rooms like �And this blank room in front of you is where countless prisoners were tortured to their death.� This takes a bit to sink in, but when it does, and is compounded by others, like �A man was executed for coughing on that spot you�re standing there,� the atmosphere is heavy and oppressive and sad. A look to the perfect sky above, the rolling fields beyond the fences, garners the question �How on earth could something like that have happened?� The only response to this question isn�t really a direct answer and is posted on the memorial, visible only when leaving, in five languages: Never again... Mike�s Bike Tours On a much, much lighter note, I passed this afternoon/evening on Mike�s Bike Tours. Yea, basically they give you a very silly looking bike with Harley Davidson hog handlebars that come up to your shoulders, and a little bell, usually in an embarassing neon color that used to be reserved for early 90�s spandex and MC Hammer video backgrounds. My tour guide (no, his name was not Mike) was a hilarious englishman named Jason. He�s been doing the tour for something like three years now, and when you weren�t being made to say �Wow...� at the historical or practical significance you were probably nearly falling off your bike you were laughing so hard. Definitely recommended to anybody in Munich. They do tours in Paris and Amsterdam, as well, apparently, so next time I�m in either of those places, I�m going to try and hit them up. Lina, etc. Yea, she didn�t try to kill me and we had a great night last night. We went out with her cousin and her cousins friends to the English garten. Definitely a fun time. Hope to see her friday as well. Much love, everybody. I hope all is well. originally posted on 22 may 2002, edited because of embarassing mistakes 23 may 2002 and reposted.

Munich That seriously seemed like the longest voyage of my life. Even Australia, which took over a day of travel to complete, felt less long than this. Berlin->Munich is killer. Even the ICE, the InterCityExpress, Germany�s shiny new technogism of a train, which goes at amazing speeds for most of the voyage, took forever on this trip. It wasn�t even really the time that killed me so much. Nice->Z�rich was longer, actually, but what got me this time was the fact that the damn train kept stopping every 20 minutes. If we had just gone a consistent speed, stopped at the major stops as was needed, the time could have been half, but today it just kept stopping and going, stopping and going. If one had no tactile or gravitational sense what so ever, one could tell when the train had stopped again as the babies that had rocked themselves to sleep on the gently vibrating floor of the train would wake up and want their mandala back. I�m with the babies, frankly; the whole experience was infuriating. Memoirs of a Geisha Great book. The character of Sayuri is an amazingly intricate construction. That was probably the best thing about the book: the way one immersed oneself in the life and surroundings of Sayuri almost effortlessly. The greatest books bring you into their world and you don�t notice the difference until you put them down. Memoirs was such a book. Definitely recommended.

Good Thing Learned in the Past Six Months #2 Friends and family are the most important commodity in the world.

Good Thing Learned in the Past Six Months #1 I�m not always right.

Berlin part drei - T minus 10 I can�t really place why, but I was so tired this morning. I slept through everything. The train. The Moulin Rouge soundtrack I heard playing at one point outside my door. The rain. The thunder. The morning. I just slept. I don�t know why I was so tired. Cool conversations last night with Marie-Anne, from Quebec City, Quebec, and this guy from Hong Kong. Yes, he told me his name, but after the third time asking him to repeat it, I just nodded and said `Oh...� Chinese is going to be insanely difficult next year. I think his name had a Koi in it somewhere... One of the guys that runs the hostel, Martin, is a funky Australian guy with dreads. His day job is as an experimental DJ. He makes what he calls �Limited� or �Fractional� techno music. It is the easily the weirdest assortment of sounds I�ve ever heard. He makes the point that it can be really powerful on a big system with a lot of people around. While I�m sure that�s true, it still doesn�t quite jive with me. Chaq�un a son gout, I guess. He�s apparently pretty popular, though. One of the Irish guys standing at the counter while we were talking music said, after Martin had walked away, �That guy is a genius, man...� Then he walked away, too. The jury is still out. Off to Munich tomorrow. Psyched. Probably staying at least one night in a hostel, after that we�ll see. After Munich it�s beautiful budapest for a few days, which I know nothing about, by the way, then Paris! And, for the record, if I don�t write you an email, but I write an update here, don�t take it personally, that�s sort of the idea of this site is that it�s easier to update this one page than it is to write emails to the 50 odd people that are actively interested in my trip. A postcard... now that�s personal... :D Much love everybody.

Berlin part zwei Berlin is really a very cool city. Beautiful weather here, thus far. It�s been like 70 with spotless skies the whole time I�ve been here. It even has that nice early-summer feel at night; reminds me of the Cape, actually: cool enough to warrant a sweater, but just warm enough to permit sandals. And stars. One can actually see some stars here, which is extremely odd for a city of its size. The people are beautiful, too. It�s humbling that the only people noticeably not fit (and I do mean fit, not just skinny: these people look like real athletes) are the American tourists and the Italian cooks. Such a shame. Steeles my resolve to be extremely active this summer, though. They�re all blond haired and blue eyed, too, though, here, so at least I can sort of fit in in that regard. Today I did the touristy things: tried to see the Reichstag, but the line was too long, walked through this big park whose name I forget, then took a balloon trip (no joke) about 500 feet above Berlin. Very cool. Can�t wait to get the pictures up, as well as the ones from Ireland. Thoughts that pass through my head every every landing Designed by the smartest people in the world. Safer to fly then drive. Boeing. Billion dollar profits. At what cost? Marvel of American industrial power. This is an Airbus. Shut up. Smartest people in the world. Trust in technology an economic necessity. Sheep to the slaughter. Shut up. Da Vinci and the helicopter. Boeing. Smartest people in the world. Man�s triumph over gravity. Flying in the face of God. No we�re not. This is a new tool in our inborn need to explore, seek out new horizons. Our proficiency at this denotes that we should go to Mars and beyond. Titanic. Shut up. Smartest people in the world. Really? Uncle John studies space rocks, and Dad, the smartest man in the world, studies law and literature and mythology. But, but... A-ha! We can�t crash. I�m meant to live. I refuse to be a statistic. I�m going to do great things. Copenhagen Interpretation. Maybe some other life. God loves me. We talk. He�d have warned me, not let me take the plane somehow. God does not love you. You are not special. You are no different than anyone else on this plane. You are not a little white snowflake. Your plane is about to crash. You�re gone. Face it. Touchdown. Reverse thrusters. Slow to a halt. Collective sigh. Ha! I knew it. God bless technology. Yea, right. See you next time. Ze future I changed from a hotel to a hostel this morning. It�s called, and my mom and family in Kansas will love this, the Sunflower Hostel. I managed to get a single room for 2 nights, and on Monday afternoon I�m going to take the train to Munich. There I�ll probably meet Lina, my long lost german friend, and her family, and maybe some people I met in Nice.

Berlin ...is less insane than Amsterdam. Though that wouldn�t be all that hard. Amsterdam is what George Orwell described as a double-think. This place accepts that 2 and 2 are 5 and you believe it even though that rational side of you knows it�s wrong. What the Dutch consider normal, everyday things, the rest of the world stops and looks around waiting for someone to stop them from happening. The entire place and experience was, to say the least, mind-blowing and not the least bit unnerving. I really don�t know if I�ll ever want to go back or not. Regardless, from what I�ve seen of it, Berlin is a really cool place. Disadvantage is that I couldn�t find a hostel where you didn�t have to be a member, so I�m shelling out a bit more than usual for a hotel. It�s nice, though, and I love the fact that I don�t have to wait for a 300lb. Swiss chocolate freak to finish his shower to take mine (like I did in Dublin--that guy beat me to the shower every day). Tomorrow I�m off to tour Berlin (not that it can be done in a day, but I�ll at least get my trendy-tourist ticket punched). The day after either more Berlin or Dresden. The day after that I think I�m off to Munich for who knows how long. Much love. Keep safe, and whatever you do, don�t go to Amsterdam without adult supervision.

Amsterdam I definitely need to get out of here. Updates later from a non-insane place. Holy God...

Not fa nothin� Booked my ticket to Brussels, tomorrow. Short train ride (1.5 hours or so, I believe) from there to Amsterdam. If I have time, I�m going to have lunch with a friend of mine from Nice who lives in Waterford, Ireland. It�s been raining since last night, here, and it�s starting to really annoy me. Especially since it�s so inconsistent: It�ll be pouring down rain, then the next minute the clouds will open up and everything will be bathed in perfect sunshine. Then another ten minutes passes and it starts to drizzle, proceeding quickly to yet another downpour. It�s maddening. Cork ...actually reminds me of Providence, minus the tall buildings. Ok, minus the tall buildings and anything done to it in the last 15 years. Yea, maybe Providence with no high rises in the dark ages of the 1980's. There's a nice looking river, about the breadth of the Providence River, running through the middle of town. To the east, a hill a bit smaller than College Hill, but with the same sort of sloping and plenty of antique looking houses. To the north, rather than a valley like we have in Providence, the hill curves around. Imagine elevating Pawtucket a few hunded feet and you'd achieve roughly the same effect. When I wrote this down, the road I was on also sort of reminded me of Jeremy's 'funcut' off 146 near his house. The bus driver's driving like Jer, too, so, therefore, I feared for my life. The municipal buses in Cork are the exact same as the ones in Sydney. Different upholstery, of course, and ad placements, but basically the same. Blarney Yea, I kissed the stone. Wasn't quite what I envisioned. A lot smaller, for one, and the position you have to get yourself in is insane. I had these anglo-american tourist girls take my picture. I'll try and upload it from Amsterdam or Berlin. There's not really a whole lot to say other than I'm thankful I didn't wreck my digital camera in the rain. That and more places should take American Express. Wow, was this my least inspired update yet, or what? :) Much love, guys.

Galway I took the train this morning to Galway. I honestly just wanted to see something other than another big city, so Galway was it. It's extremely small and (searching for the bon mot) rustic, perhaps. I did the touristy thing, which is rare right now since tourist season doesn't start for another two months, which was to take the tour bus. Was pretty cool, actually. The whole area of the west is one of the last remaining bastions of native Irish-speakers, so we passed numerous schools were everything was taught solely in Irish (something I didn't know still existed) as well as numerous local shop-windows or pubs that advertised solely in Irish. Most notably in this regard, there is an election coming up I believe next monday. The political parties here are canvassing everything everywhere in an attempt to swing it (the same in every other country). The difference is that in Galway, as opposed to Dublin, all the signs are completely Irish. Revelation I wear my claddagh ring always. I always knew the story behind it, but one element baffled me: the crown on top. Why the hell would the Irish, of all people, honor the crown in something that has become sort of a national symbol? Must be loyalist trickery, I always supposed, that the Irish put up with because it was too old to change, sort of like the orange on the flag. Today, though, there was a revelation. It is meant to symbolize loyalty, but I had the kings wrong. Apparently, the little village of Claddagh was extremely against the Norman invasion. So much so that the Normans built the walls of old Galway city so as to keep well out of their way. The people of Claddagh recognized their own king, king of the village of Claddagh. Thus when Joyce, the talented silver worker, set out to perfect his design on the ring, he put the crown on there as a symbol of his loyalty to his village king. Apparently there is still a king of Claddagh, though it's only ceremonial. They elect a new one every three years. One downside I finally discovered one thing I can't stand about some Irishmen: they don't shut the hell up. This guy in Galway today was so keen on getting his sentence out, no matter what it had to do with, that he'd cut you off in midsentence if the thought occured to him. Sometimes it'd be such a non-sequitor that the rest of the people round the table would stop and stare. He didn't mind, he'd just keep talking. Extremely nice guy, this one, so I didn't mind all that much, and he seemed decently intelligent, but about the fourth time he cut me off I just started laughing with the Australian guy across the table from me. Oi... Guestbook Sign the guestbook. Tell me you're here, reading, etc. Makes me feel good. Link at right. :)

Ugh, what a wasted day. I felt horrible last night when I went to bed, my stomach bothered my all night, and when I finally slept, I slept, in typical Brian fashion, through everything. I woke up at 1:00PM, really pissed at myself. Completely wasted day. Even if I could have gotten a train then to Galway or Cork, I would have had to turn right around and come back as soon as I got there. Grr... so now I'm faced with a tough decision: Decide between Cork or Galway for tomorrow (a tough decision in its own right) or stay an extra day. If I'm reading the Irish Ferries web site correctly, then I might have to stay another day, anyway. I'll find out when I go to Hueston Station tonight. Also, I've been reading about the trip I'm going to have to take to get to Amsterdam. Ouch. Looking at something like a 26hr+ trip. At least 2 hours to Connaght, then, and this is where my stomach starts turning, an 18 hour boat ride to Cherbourg. Then it's Cherbourg to Paris, Paris to Amsterdam. Ouch. Ouch. a flash lights on the liffey, swaying people on o'connell st., a left, a right, a left, no ey's not down, ey's restin', lost but happy, silent streets with echoes of 'summer dreams' from Grease, somehow leads to thinking of 'It's the End of the World as we know it,' alone with everybody, turn back 'round, cross ha'penny bridge, deep eyes on the homeless girl 'spare a Euro or two, sir?' would you sink, would you sink? guy in front bumps into an old woman, seems like he did it just so he could say 'excuse me.' is that the definition of loneliness? What if every day and every night were like this? 'I'll give you a Euro if you talk to me,' he whispered. It's a long night for some, every night an eternity for others...

I feel like crap. I'm going back to the hostel to chill. I'm going to Cork to kiss the Blarney Stone tomorrow morning. Need some sleep.

Some Startling Realizations 1) The Kitchen closed down indefinitely one week ago today. I had been hoping to go there since this trip started. Ouch. 2) I now understand, have internalized, what Richard Ashcroft meant when he titled his album Alone with Everybody. Here I am in a big city, and I know no one. It's odd. For basically the entirety of my natural life, I could count on walking in somewhere and knowing at least one person. It's something I've come to socially rely on. In Dublin, the only people I really know are the members of U2. And they do not know me. I'm just another of their billions of fans, to them. This relates definitively to Fight Club, and Jack's Single Serving Friends. The friends I meet on this trip, with the exceptions of the friends I met through extended contact (Nice people), are single serving friends. I meet them, use them or their time up like the little sugar packets on airline flights, then they're gone. In a trash bin, or their next destination, or enviably home to loved ones.

Dublin, Ireland - Bubblin' in Dublin After an excellent night on the town in London last night that got us home at close to 4AM, I woke up at a reasonable hour and got my stuff together. Mild issues because of how much I've taken out of my bag. I planned to send it home via Royal Mail (british post office) but the timing just did not work out. So I carried two plastic bags worth of spare clothing across London to get to Stanstead Airport. I missed my first plane and had to pay 40� to transfer the ticket. God bless Capitalism. It worked out, and I sat across the row from an extremely cute and curious little kid. His father slept the whole way so I kept him occupied. Funny as hell. I wish I were a kid again. Wouldn't it be great if you could occupy an hour just playing with and admiring one claddagh ring? Think of all the movies you wouldn't have to see. I could at least forget I ever saw Daylight with Stallone. I also met some girls from Chicago on the plane. We're gonna go to the Kitchen which is a club owned by U2. It's in the basement of their hotel, the Clarence. Should be a good time. The International Youth Hostel, where I'm staying, is sort of in the ghetto. I hesitate to put this here because I know my mom's going to start subtly flipping out, but I thought I would anyway. (Yes, I know that makes you ask all sorts of questions about what I write here and what I don't, my thoughts on audience, etc. but just deal with it, ok? It's sort of an essential irony of this site) It's to the north of the Liffey River, but not all that far off O'Connell Street, which is sort of the main north-south thoroughfare here in Dublin. It's like Guinness: the further away from Dublin you go, the worse it is. Same for O'Connell St.: the further away you go, the worse it is. My hostel is the pail. The last bastion of buildings that look like they should be standing before slums take over. A little unnerving, especially since I'm going to have to walk home probably pretty late tonight. Tempted to taxi it, but that depends on rates. I hope everyone's doing well. Much love. Preceding entry should have been posted last night, but due to technical difficulties was not. Sorry for any confusion.

Cross-in-Hand, UK - Rural Suburban Perfection I've been at chez Karavias for a few days now. It is perfect. You know how, with most houses, there's always that little something that you don't like, the one bush that's sort of shaggy and doesn't look right, the off-kilter towel on the rack in the bathroom, maybe you don't quite approve of the color scheme in the living room. It might be very subtle, you may not know that you're doing it, but everyone does. I never noticed until I got here because that part of my head that decided what it didn't like, what didn't look right, feel right in some way, was completely silent. Everything was absolutely comfortable, beautiful, most things in an intricate sort of way, but done in a livable manner. It doesn't feel like a musuem house, where everything is beautiful and arranged and nice, just don't touch anything. Form follows function, here, and the living experience it creates is an intensely pleasurable one. When you add that to the fact that Nadia's mom is an excellent cook (just now nice smells I can't even recognize are wafting through the house), the whole family is funny, witty, and full of warm conversation, as well as the presence of a 50-inch Pioneer plasma tv, I really don't want to leave. I think Nadia's starting to get annoyed with me, as I've been saying 'Thank you, again, by the way,' about every five minutes. I don't care, really. After Nice, and before the controlled, amazing chaos that is sure to be the rest of this trip, not only is this place perfect objectively, it's perfect for me.

Must be special One of the biggest, greatest cities in the world, and I can't really decide what to do. I went and saw Blade II, which was pretty cool, and it was really refreshing to be around huge sound and a decent sized screen after the blah-ness of Nice. Now I'm again at Trafalgar Square, which is a beautiful place if you discount the pigeons. Internet access, at least here, at EasyInternetCafe (a sister company of EasyJet--we so need these people in America) is extremely cheap, in comparison to what I've been used to these last few months: 1� an hour. Easy. That's like a buck fifty, and, when compared to my cable modem at home, is still extortion, but the economics at home are much, much different. I've resigned myself to that, now. Ah well. Going to stay with Nadia tomorrow for a few days, so I think I can update from there, maybe. Much love.

Je pars If Providence broke out all the stops to keep me there, Nice was happy to see me go. Don't let the door smack you on your way out. It was spitting down rain, making things generally pretty miserable. The hot water was once again protesting, as any self-respecting French appliance should, work before 10 in the morning. The only thinga I will truly miss in Nice are the people I met there, and most of those will be gone by the end of this month, anyway. What could have happened --I need a place to stay, mate. --Meter's running, he said, pointing. --I can see that, thanks. --Meter's running, I mean, he said, as if he had somehow been in error the first time. --Ok, I need a place to stay, sir, do you have any suggestions? --You can't stay with me, the meter's running. --Ok, thanks, have a nice day, I said, opening the door. I don't care whose luck it is... We all know I'm, well, a dumbass. Many times I just do things without really thinking about what is actually being done. Absent minded, as we, the absent minded, refer to ourselves. This absent-mindedness sometimes results in striking, horrifying realizations. Like today, for example, when I took of my sunglasses at the Thomas Cooke Bureau de Change where I do what you do at those places. I left them there on the bloody counter, which, by the way, is behind two security deboarding checks as well as customs. It took a small hole that opened up in the trademark gray London sky. It was a bit harsh and I moved to get my sunglasses. Startling, horrifying realization. Luckily, the lady at the info desk was extremely helpful (one can only imagine and shudder at what the situation would have been if this woman were French) and called around for me. A cleaning lady with a right tackle looking guy of a security escort came out to bring them to me. When I was effusive in thanking them all, the cleaning lady turned around and said 'Well, you know, thank you for letting me do my nice deed for the day,' then walked away. I love the English. It's so good to be here. London Town My hotel is crap, and, given that I'm in the second most expensive metropolis in the world, I'm paying 40� a night for 2 nights for it. I don't have a bathroom, the entire floor I'm on smells strongly of urine, the bed sinks to the point it looks like that couch in the Reebok commercial, except that it's also tiny (I know the British in general are not, well, a large people, but this is a little ridiculous. My feet actually do stick off the end. I immediately thought of Road to Wigan Pier's first chapter, where he describes the conditions of the house he's investigating. Nowhere near as bad as it was in 1930, obviously, the place would be out of business otherwise, but the bed leans more that way than anything made after 1950.). The location of this hotel, though, is the entirety of its goodness, so to speak. The window looks out onto a small, intricate garden and a terrasse where people have afternoon tea (yea, they actually do that). Birds sing, and air lightly scented with flowers (a more talented and worldy writer would tell you what flowers, but sorry I've no such horticultural distinction) washes away, at least temporarily, the ever-present scent of urine. Down the street--literally, it's less than a block away--is the British Museum. It's rather cool to know that you're a block from one of the greatest collections of knowledge on Earth. I had never been there, before, so that was the first thing I did today. The Rosetta Stone What a cool experience. I figured it to be bigger, somehow. I also always thought of it, though, as having been written with the express purpose of relating the language of formal hieroglyphics. It was really rather ordinary, though, but much has been inferred from it. It was a decree that established, of all things, a formal cult in Egypt. It's odd to look at something so small, a gateway through which so much knowledge has been gained. It's something visible through which one feels the connections that connect everything and everybody on the planet.

Finished 1984. Amazing book. Anything that challenges your reality like that, the likes of Fight Club, Blade Runner, Trainspotting, etc. I love immediately. Sort of on the lines of whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Whatever doesn't tear down your comfortable little world completely will eventually make it stronger and more broad.

Nice Semi-Summation One of my friends got me thinking: they asked me if this had been a goodexperience, this whole Nice trip. Images that flashed in my head immediately were of Ross getting robbed at gunpoint, the guy on the moto snagging that lady's bag on the Promenade des Anglais, paying 9� for a mediocre spaghetti bolagnaise, seeing things raised in price steadily every day for 2 weeks as tourist season approached. These were not good experiences, things that did not reflect well on my time here. Seeing my hesitation, my friend offered 'Valuable experience, perhaps?' Perhaps. My french has improved drastically; I have met absolute quality people; my understanding of French civilization has changed a bit (and no, despite my complaining, it's not all negative); I've had time to read inordinate amounts of books that I had always meant to read; I've seen Venice and San Remo and crossed northern Italy by train; I've been in 3 countries in under a week, when at home if I'm in 3 states in a week, that's a record; I was here for an election that very well might change the nature of the French Republic. These have been valuable, positive experiences, in fact magnified and put in perspective by the previously mentioned negative ones. I am a better, more interesting person for having been through them, and that was the whole goal of this trip. But I'd still prefer it if all my clothes didn't smell like smoke. Two Minds I've been of two minds lately. The one mind is unbelievably psyched for the next phase of this trip, and with good reason. I don't know if I'll be able to see everything I want to see (Italy itself might have to wait for the dedicated trip it deserves), but the trip itself will, undoubtedly, be well worth the trouble. The other mind, which has been gaining ground in my internal civil war, is the one that intensely misses home. I'm hesitant to even write about it because it depresses me, but I'll be with friends in a few minutes, my mood inevitably lightened. This second mind, called to the fore at the most random moments, like when it's just rained (as it just did) and there's this pure bit of mingling white light in the clouds that takes me instantly to Kaitlin's eyes last summer (oh how things have changed), makes me want to just say 'screw it to the whole rest of the trip and go home and be around people I love again. That's really what it is, what it always is, the ongoing war between emotion and rational thought. Heart and mind. My mind knows, objectively, that this is one of the greatest opportunities i'm ever going to have, and not only that but few otehr people, comparitively, are as blessed as I am in this and many regards. Logically, that should be the end of it. Emotionally, all I'm able to imagine is little league games down at Fargnoli, my sister singing constantly through the house, Mom gardening with Clancy always at her side. My mind counters with images of O'Connell St., the spires of Prague, buzzing diesel engines around the Colisseum in Rome. I have an intellectual attachment to these things, but I have an emotional attachment to home and its people. This trans-Atlantic, intra-corps battle is with me every waking moment. No rest for the bless-ed.

Venice Photos Up! Check it out at the photo site (link at right).

Bliss I found a 'net cafe that lets you use your laptop, so this one is direct. I forgot what a live, hella fast connection with a live, hella fast computer really feels like. All other cafes are so stunted in security and logins and too many users for a puny DSL line. This is so cool... Anyway, I'm going to try, today, to upload pictures of Venice. It should work. More sizable update before I leave for London (on Saturday). Much love.

Ah, Venice... Was amazing. Charming is perhaps a better word. Hours could be spent, and were, by me and Nadia, lazily wandering the labrynth of alleys and canals that is Venice. We only really hit one touristy spot: San Marco and its square. There was a Jackson Pollock exhibition there which was extremely interesting. Trippy, even. The part of my mind that secretly loves bad puns (I must get it from dad) also wants to say 'drippy.' Other than San Marco, really we just walked around. It was entirely pleasurable. sidenote: Opulent churches like that make me angry. San Marco was less so, because I was so buoyed by the experience of just being in Venice, but still. I consider them vast wastes of money. There are so many things out there that deserve the money that was spent on that church. There are millions of causes and always will be. I dislike the whole idea of building something opulent in order to somehow please/honor God. There's something very false-idol about it. I mean, in the end, don't you want your attention to be entirely on God when you're in Church? I think Luther may have been right: simplicity. No mediator. God is bigger than any statue you can make of or for him or any song you sing. He is the dust that rises from the first strike of the sculptor and the air that vibrates with the chorus. No amount of opulence can possibly impress God. Jesus was a carpenter. The man spent his days making wooden shelves and drinking cups. Simple. God is God becuase he is everything and everywhere, yet is simplicity itself. He just is. I'd rather be humble before God, not to mention honset as hell, not try to impress him with how much cash I'm willing to jettison on some phallus. But that's just me. Back to Venice. So we walked. A lot. All over the alce. Along all the coasts of the islands, through countless tiny alleys and small squares with their covered public wells and trattoria (sidewalk caf�, but we didn't know that). Countless Americans, too, by the way. More than in Australia. I found that surprising. Our first night we went to Trattoria del something. I want to say del Sempiore, but I don't know. To summarize, it was the best meal of my life. I had a fillet with whisky sauce (o mon dieu... Nadia made fun of me for my groans and stunned looks of pleasure) and vegetables, and a perfect lemon sorbet. It was all rounded with a bottle of Chianto Classico and after-dinner Grappa that we dared each other into. We went out after, mingled with some funny Italian people, and fell lazily asleep. Nad woke up earlier than I did. She did things. I have no clue. I heard her get up but I just went right back to sleep. We checked out and had breakfast, then left our bags with the Concierge. More walking. It was still entirely agreeable. We occasionally marvelled just at the fact that we were there, that the cold stones of the walls really existed. The place is bloody magical, it really is. Life was good in Venice. I should add, though, that the train rides there and back were less than pleasurable. We lucked out I guess, given that we didn't get robbed or in a fight. The worst thing that happened was that we got stuck with some French people who grumble in low Gallic tones the whole way, even in sleep. Other than that, it was a beautiful, amazing, memorable trip. I'm coming back. Pictures forthcoming...

New pictures up on the picture site. Dig it. I'm about to leave for Venice, which itself should garner quite an update when I get back. Much love.

This ought to do I dig this layout. Please feel free to tell me what you think.

New do... Is that how it's spelled, when someone looks at your haircut and says they like the new 'do'? I never really thought about that till right now. Regardless, I'm tampering with the look of this site. The other version was a little too boring for me. You can be sure to see multiple new versions this week. Just thought I'd keep you aware.

Yak... I've been coughing for five days straight. This is the root of all my current evils. The constant cough, its sound and ability to contract my body have prevented me from sleeping and given me a splitting headache. Then, in an injury worthy of the Three Stooges, I think I pulled a muscle in my neck tonight during one particularly nasty fit. The cough also has generated this lovely burn in the back of my throat that doesn't seem to go away for anything. Not fun. Your guess is as good as mine as to what's causing it. Popular hypotheses have ranged from dust to the fact that there was lots of sun last week (yea, got me on that one, too; the popular French epithet 'Ey, c'est la vie,' used in all cases ranging from a questionably bitter cup of coffee that you complain about to thermonuclear war, has been replaced in my mind by a slightly different phrase: 'Eh, it's the French�' I say this because I've sort of stopped questioning the maddeningly odd responses the French give sometimes and instead substituted a shrug and a 'Eh, it's the French' for any analysis.) Anyway, the cough has to go. It's killing me. Monaco I've been thinking a lot about Monaco, lately. Especially, today, since Lauren and I ventured West along the coast to Cannes. Going West from Nice is a little like Dante's slow route down into hell. The scenery fades from the lower side of modest to structurally questionable, the graffiti from sparse but noticeable to quadruple-layered. It is the exact opposite of going East to Monaco. A Journey to Monaco One leaves Nice-Ville station surrounded on both sides by decent-looking apartment buildings. These fade into decent-looking houses. One looks down at a magazine for a minute and before one knows it one is surrounded by beautiful houses and a gently arching coastline, cozy harbors with medium-size sailboats and, weather-permitting, the odd collection of old-men sunbathing on rocky beaches. The hills of these towns, Villefrance, Breagne-sur-Mer, Eze, etc. seem vertical, their houses somehow carved into sheer cliff wall. One gets closer as the train snakes around the harbors and they seem less steep but higher than one had previously estimated, the calculated views all the more breathtaking. Magazine forgotten, one wonders, regardless of current economic condition, how much a summer place up there would be. A few minutes later, a tunnel one could not be bothered to see appears and covers the Mediterranean bliss. Lights flash by like the beginning of Half-Life, getting ever farther apart as the train slows. As one follows the 'Sortie' signs to the exit, one is drawn, naturally, to the natural light coming in from the right and one realizes that one is in a train station that is entirely self-contained inside a mountain. A few escalators later, one rounds a corner and sees, down a pass beautifully layered with orange-topped houses, a small harbor ringed by a small curving peninsula. Above, one sees a sign 'Bienvenue � Monaco.' The policeman to ones immediate right, the first of many, tips his hat and says 'Bonjour,' with what might be a wink. Welcome to Monaco. Signs The first thing Lauren and I noticed upon arriving in Monaco, were the cleanliness and the police presence. Upon passing an Aston Martin dealership a few minutes later, we soon added 'beautiful cars' to the list of things immediately visible (While I was gawking through the window at the hand-crafted Vantage, a Ferrari of some sort, too fast to tell, passed right behind me). Like many things, these three immediately visible things are all the result of economics. High Rollers and History One of the reasons the principality of Monaco is so popular a residence of the mega-rich is that there are no taxes. When Menton, a neighboring region, was ceded to France in 1860, Monaco was deprived of the revenue from its extremely profitable lemon and olive crops. The government (i.e. the Royalty, Prince Charles III and his family), needed another convenient way to fill its coffers and they decided on a Casino. The returns on this investment eventually became so large that the Prince saw that he really didn't need to tax his subjects at all. Nice guy. Here's where the economics come into play though: while Casino owners and operators love and cherish the quarters that you give them in the slot machines, you are really probably only just paying for their overhead. The big money that they make is with the high rollers: rich dudes with plenty of money to burn. High rollers are the most important people in a Casino, to a Casino owner anyway, so they must be kept happy: � High rollers do not want filthy sidewalks, graffiti, or begging homeless people. Monaco is small enough (smaller, all told, than Central Park) that this is easily accomplishable. Everything, every public sidewalk, every park, every handrail, has a look to it that could be described as 'spit-polished.' My understanding is that the public works people in general are very well compensated. � High rollers also do not want to have to worry about their Ferraris being keyed, their wives mugged in the street, etc. so not only is there the pervasive and extremely visible police presence, but the Big Brother-like creepy mystery of the hidden cameras. Apparently there are 150+ of these buggers hidden across the principality, recording and ready to catch any possible grievances. It's quite a system they've got there, if a little crimping on what I as an American view as my god-given civil liberties. The idea of hidden cameras in public places controlled by a government entity makes me jittery. But hey, I don't live there. Unrelenting The observation that may not strike immediately about Monaco, but will undoubtedly rise at some point during anyone's stay there, is its unrelenting, never-disappointing, jaw-dropping physical beauty. A huge mountain slopes down to the sea, a wave of orange topped houses splashing to meet it. A palace sits atop a jutting peninsula with vertical cliff walls on three sides. A horseshoe-shaped harbor on the Casino-side houses boats ranging from normal 26-foot outboarders to boats so big they could double as cruiseliners in neat lines, their polished ivory color daring the blue-green water they rest in. The other side of the palace sees another harbor with still more sparkling boats, an elevated garden � la Hunterw�sser, and a boldly angled stadium. The other side of the Casino, to the east, sees miles of houses built into hills, high plateaus with small white dots of observatories perched atop, the coast drunkenly swerving in and out to the beauty that is Northern Italy. It's a gorgeous place. Voodoo Economics One practical but interesting note is that Monaco, home of the worlds rich and elite, is cheaper than Nice! Nice, the red-headed stepchild of a beautiful civilization, dares charge more than Monaco! How is this possible? Literally, it is cheaper for me to get on a train to Monaco, eat lunch there, drinks and all, get back on a train to Nice for my afternoon classes than it would be to eat in Nice itself. I went to Monaco with extra money, as I expected to have to pay 8 Euro for a bottle of water, but it ended up being the least expensive day I've had in the Riviera! A Lead-in During our all-day, self-navigated tour of Monaco, Lauren and I also make like race-car drivers and walked most of the Formula 1 Grand Prix route. It's quite a route. One of the smallest in Formula 1, but one of the most intense: great scenery, stunning turns, plenty of overtaking opportunities. Lauren is an F1 nut, so I had countless F1 trivia thrown at me throughout the day. The Grand Prix, this year, is a day I'm really looking forward to. --Where are my seats? you ask. --Oh, haha, I laugh. I don't have tickets. --Oh� you trail off. Friend's got a hotel room to view from then, eh? --Uh, nope, I respond, cracking a smile at your eyebrow-lowering confusion. --Well, you say, in a last ditch creative effort, do you have someplace cool to watch the Grand Prix from? --Nope, I laugh. --Well, dammit, where are you going to be on May 28th that's so great? --Paris, I say, smiling from ear to ear. Picking up my Mom, my Aunt Nancy, and my Liz from the airport. You didn't think it was possible, but my smile just got broader. --I'm really, really, really looking forward to the day of the Grand Prix, but I could not possible care less about who wins. :)

Post Dated These entries were written in a notebook that I bought at Uluru and had with me at various points since then. These are direct from the page, no edit at all. 23 Feb 2002 -- Uluru Woke up. Still no stars. Had breakfast. Went to the rock. Walked around it. Went to the cultural center, very cool. Bought crappy souvenirs. Need to take a photography class when I get back. --People on this Way Outback Tour: Patrick, from Zurich. Simon, from Taiwan. Willy, Irish living in London. Tim, our tour guide, lives in Alice Springs. Me and Chris. A good group. 24 Feb 2002 -- Kings Creek Station --Stayed up late last night, talking and feeling nice. --Rained while we were bivouacking. I had to drag Chris' heavy ass under cover. --Woke up, had breakfast, drove to Kings Canyon. Great place. Great pictures, I think. Then we came back, had lunch at Kings Creek Station, where everything was a ripoff, then left for Alice Springs. Managed to check my e-mail at a reststop. Nothing too greatly interesting, but it was an odd experience to be looking at pictures of Bethany and I at her winter formal while at a reststop in the middle of the Australian Outback. --Almost at Alice. Got a ton of sun today. Gonna be red, I know. --This is a vast and beautiful land. 9 Mar 2002 -- Bonanza en route to Logan It's a beautiful day. The clouds are thin and listless, the air is just under warm and sweet. The first flowers are peeking out from behind rocks. It's a beautiful day, but I wish it wasn't. A day like this makes it hard to want to leave. Light so pure makes me think of Liz and her glowing skin in summer, my sisters shimmering jet-black hair, cool spring days playing golf with dad in sweaters, the course still a light, undecided gray under blue skies before its green spring transformation. I wish it were bone-chillingly cold, dark, sleeting. Then I could curse this place where I live and say 'I can't wait for the Mediterranean.' But, alas, my thoughts are firmly in the here and now, entrenched and churning over things like love and its truth, truth in general, family, friends, balance, the future, truth, truth, truth. A day like this makes one call Tom Wolfe into question: 'Why can't I go home again? Look at it! Who wouldn't want to come home again?' I think about this awhile, then decide that it's not the home that's the problem. The home will always be there. The home that one pines away for is almost static. Things do change, of course, but it's still home. The problem is oneself after being gone. People told me that all the time, before I left: 'You're going to change so much.' And I nodded, and I said 'Yea.' Occasionally I'd try and be clever and say 'That's the idea,' and throw back a big smile, then usually walk away. I know I'm different now, I can feel it, and I'll be even more different when I get back. I will go home again, some day in June, and it'll be roughly the same home, but there's no chance that I'm going to look at it in the same way. In effect, I'm not going to go home, I'm going to go to a place that I've never seen before. 11 Mar 2002 -- First impressions of Nice (already published) and Mme. Mercier She's a funny old woman. Shes' not particularly frail, not particularly large or small and not particularly outgoing or shy. She reflects the great compromise of the city around her. We talked yesterday, my first day, about her daughter, who died of a disease whose name I did not catch. Her pictures are everywhere. Either she was loved much and is now missed on a daily basis (a la 'Music I Heard,' by Conrad Aiken) or she was never loved enough and it took disease/death to realize that. I wonder. Addition: I wrote that my first day, but, having come to know Mme. Mercier very well, and having seen her love for just about everything in the world except politicians and bad milk, I must conclude that is was the former hypothesis. She's an extremely kind woman, and must have been an excellent mother in her day. I cannot imagine her children receiving anything but the most love possible in the world.

Je viens d'aller... Just for updates sake, I thought I'd mention that I went to Monaco last weekend and had an excellent time. Pictures and a little bit of observation are forthcoming. Thanks, really, but... That poem last week was by W.B.Yeats. The one I wrote in elegy a few weeks ago was definitely by me, but Yeats is Yeats is Yeats. Accept no substitutes. I'm not a betting man nor a praying one... Back at LaSalle, we used to have these anonymous special intentions in the morning, right before prayer. I was in the office a lot, so I eventually got to know the procedure: someone would come in, near tears, and Mrs. Murphy would take them into her office, jumping the line of people waiting to talk to her, close the door, and a few minutes later she'd come back out and make a note on the sheets that whoever was doing prayer that morning read from. Then at the beginning of prayer, before their prepared remarks, they would say 'The LaSalle community is asked to pray for a special intention.' Either that, or I'd see her across the office, sitting at her desk, when her phone would ring, and she'd talk for a few minutes, furrow her brow, shake her head and hang up. A little note on the sheets. Never any names, really, or description, just a notification that someone was in pain and some thought for them would be appreciated. So now that I'm out of LaSalle, I guess this is my version of morning prayer, my time to myself to sit and reflect and chill while everything happens around me, and now I have an anonymous special intention and a request. Even if you're not the praying type, could you just throw one up there and see if the big man digs it? It really can't hurt you. The jury is out, for me, on whether or not I believe, truly, in the power of prayer, but I figure that at certain times it's better to hedge your bets and give in to something you're unsure of, but could have a big payoff, just in case. So even if it's not really your thing, if you think it's some hoax, the illusion given by the mass-opium of religion, please throw down your philosophies and just know that someone is in pain, and for a lt of people there's a long and dark road ahead, with no way of knowing what lies at the end of it. This is my anonymous special intention. Thank you for your attention, please wait for the bell and have a nice day.

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face. And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead, And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

'Sun is shining, weather is sweet, yea...' Finally some nice weather. Excuse me, good weather. Not nice. I don't even like that word much, anymore. Good weather is more apt. It's warming up beautifully. All the girls in my program here basically sprinted to the beach after class. I'm one of the few who attends what are called our 'options' in the afternoon, so I had to wait till 3:30 when it had cooled off a little bit.

I'm back in that one sentence mode. Everything I've been writing lately, mosty in email form, has been good and eloquent and really seems to have some force behind it. I just need that one starting sentence, idea, what have you. The spark. That's what I need. The spark. I'm sitting in wooden rowboat in a lake of gasoline, and no spark can be made. I want to go up in flames of inspiration, but right now I feel like the only way that's going to happen is with a lightning strike. And that's never something to be wished for or counted on. Waiting for lightning to strike...

And so it starts... hopefully...

Bliss is a french cafe, excellent conversation and flashing memories of home.

It is much, much easier to waken ones self at the ungodly hour of 6:30 or something comparable if one goes to bed at the ungodly hour of 10:30 or something comparable. This is a revelation for someone who sleeps, in many peoples estimations, for ungodly lengths of time (when he does, in fact, sleep at all). Last night was beautifully uneventful. I sat and read 'From Paris to the Moon,' by Adam Gopnik until I was forced at gunpoint to have bratw�rst. Heartily recommended to everyone. The book, that is. More later, when I can find an American keyboard.

St. Patrick's Day has come and gone. We went to an Irish Pub (as one must on St. Patricks Day) called McMahon's. Irony: A large group of people from my language program, EF, went to an Irish pub, me being the only one with Irish background among us. More people were from Belgium than any other country at that point. The afore-mentioned pub was owned by a Frenchman, operated by a girl from Cleveland, staffed by English girls, and frequented most often by Mexicans and Germans. This, my friends, is cosmopolitan living. I talked almost all night to a girl named Sarah from Dublin. She and her friends (which encompassed just about everyone in the pub, oddly enough) are students at Trinity College, Dublin, and they're taking an 'Erasmus' year here in Nice. They've been here since September and they'll be here till late May. She was impressed that I actually knew the meaning behind my claddagh ring and I was impressed that she actually knew 1) where Rhode Island was, and 2) that it was not, actually, an island. These both are serious problems with foreigners. The other big problem with coming from Rhode Island is that people very easily confuse it with Long Island, or, if they're greek, they ask 'You're from Rhodes?' Cosmopolitan living... This city is so expensive. From transportation to public phones to McDonalds to net access to horribly-technically-uninclined movie theatres to rollerblade rental... It's depressing because if I do all the things I want to do, I will waste away what money I have left saved and be unable to do anything else cool all over Europe. A quandary. I thought about getting a job here, which would be perfect, given that I could use the money I made to pay for expenses here as well as save up for the future, and it would give me something else to do in the evenings instead of watch 'Big Dil' with Mme. Mercier, my host mother. I could also claim 'international work experience' on my r�sum� and it would undoubtedly help me improve my french. The only thing is that I don't think my visa will allow it. If I were from in the EU, it would be no problem, but I really don't know about restrictions on US workers. Australia was vehemently opposed to issuing work permits, and I'm not optimistic about France. I'm off, probably to a book and a bed and a nap then dinner and a newspaper and French comedy shows that mix Jerry Lewis with Double Dare more effectively than any previous human effort. Should be an interesting evening.

We had a bohemian, hilarious, beautiful evening last night. Lots of people. It's been interesting. I was late today, but was perfectly on time for my test on which i did quite well. some dumb mistakes, but nothing more than the average french person probably does when they speak. I'm improving quite a bit, especially in regards to listening. Walked around a lot today. Had McDonalds for lunch. Felt at home. :) Browsed through the Virgin Megastore where I got to play Halo. That is a beautiful thing. then we had ice cream and came here, to the internet cafe. Tonight I think we're going to dinner then a club for a nice birthday celebration. Can't wait. More tomorrow.

Nice is nice. There. I said it. The too-oft-repeated faux joke that has plagued travel writers and annoying, world-travelling relatives for generations. I said it. I got it out of the way. I hope to never have to do it again. But it is. Nice. Nice. The weather isn't bad for this time of year, the Promenade des Anglais is beautiful and fun. The Vielle Ville is intricate and homey. It's nice. It's a place of bold contrast, however. For every Benz-driving, turtle-neck and sport-coat wearing heir to someone's throne, there are two guys with wheels of the more base kind: the kind that are basically four wheels bolted to a piece of plywood by which they propel themselves from one temporary shelter from the elements to the next. The mega-rich and the awe-inspiring poor yell at each other as they pass on the Promenade des Anglais. The views are striking from the hills, but there's a thick layer of tangible smog from impartial diesel engines and the fumes of thousands of simultaneously lit cigarettes that prohibits any extended vistas from hitting home. The public transit system covers a wide area and is relatively cheap, but is only in operation from 7AM to 1AM, and even then is spotty and inconsistent. The region is full, rempli, of immigrants of some kind: Italian, Spanish, Portugal, Senegalese, and yet a typical gripe, or, more exactly, a typical vector quantity of a gripe here is "les immigrants," even if the griper in question happens to be one. Comment vite qu'on oublie... Stark contrasts. Interesting contrasts. This place has character, but it still hasn't made up its mind. Sydney made up its mind a while ago, and decided to strut its stuff on the world stage. Watching things happen in Sydney is like watching a fine athlete in play. Conscious thought and instinct and muscle and resilience meld to form something beautiful and meant to be. Watching things happen in Nice is like watching someone on ice-skates for the first time, complaining the whole way about how it wouldn't be so difficult if the ice weren't so slippery. It's an interesting place. Nice.

Yea, this is the new getup. Because internet access here in Nice is so spotty (the french only got telephones in the 70's), it's basically impossible to update the current page the way I want to. My apologies. I'm still going to keep it up, I think, for reference but, for the most part, what people came to the other site for was this journal (that was my impression, anyway) and this (blogger) is the best method for doing something like that. Very low-maintenance, high-yield. Hope you dig it.

Derelict Well, not really. It's not quite dereliction, as I've been pretty good about fulfilling my real obligations down here. I've been working pretty hard and researching a ton for two papers that are due this Friday. They're both extremely challenging and important to my grade, so I really, really don't want to mess them up. Thus my social life and this webpage have taken a bit of a backseat. Right now I'm really tired of reading about SNCC, the SCLC, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, "Make it new!" the rise of post-modernism, and I'll do just about anything for a new study album. I've been listening to OK Computer, by Radiohead, as well as assorted Radiohead MP3's, as it's really surreal music and Thom Yorke's voice is largely unintelligible. It makes it harder to sing along if what you think you should be singing sounds the same to you as it would a Neanderthal. Effective study music, but I really need some variation.

"This one's optimistic..." -Radiohead's only intelligible line ever.

Mail: Irony Defined I left a lot of things behind that I really wish I'd taken with me. Some don't exactly fit in AirMail packages, like Liz, for example, or the Focus, so it's unreasonable to expect someone to ship them to me (though the image of either of those things wrapped up and sitting on Darlington Road is enough to make me laugh). There was one thing, however, that I annoyed myself with by leaving behind, and that was a CD that my good friend Jenn (the box jellyfish expert) made for me. Jenn and I have this competition every week called LOTW: Lyric of the Week. We each select some obscure or not-so-obscure lyric and the other person has to guess what it is without looking it up. If you don't look it up, you know the lyric, you get a point. If you are stumped and give in to the lyrical resources of the internet, you get no points. Very simple game, but a lot of fun, and, before I left, Jenn made me a CD of all the songs that had been featured in the game up to then. The CD was great, and was even, I believe, in chronological order. I liked it so much that I left it in permanent rotation in the Focus? permanent in that Amy and Mom listened to it on the way to the airport (we took separate cars) and I forgot to get it out. I've really been jonesin' for this CD since I got here, and Dad was kind enough to volunteer to send it back to me. I told him where it was (in the Focus), and a little over three weeks later, I got this nice package in the mail, Edwards & Angell mailing label and all, which engendered in me energy I didn't know I had and an unstoppable smile. I sprinted the stairs by threes, threw open any blocking door, got to my room, opened the package with one hand while I opened the CD tray on my laptop and turned up the speakers with the other. Inside, sure enough, was the case that said "LOTW Volume 1" and Jenn's funny if lazy note: "hahaha, bet you thought there would be a track list back here?sorry, noy [sic] you gotta listen to it!" I smiled again at remembering when she gave it to me and I read the note for the first time. I opened the case and was, well, surprised. It was empty. Instantly a few scenarios ran through my head, all very possible:

1. I had done something wrong and my dad had wasted $3.70 to teach me some sort of cruel lesson. || Shot down because, even though he's a lawyer, my dad's not a cruel guy.
2. Some enterprising postal worker, either in Oz or the US (or even, I imagined, in the Edwards & Engell mail room), in passing the package from one place to another had noticed that it had the feel of a CD case and had an easy-to-open and re-close metal stopper and felt like committing a federal offense. || Not easily discountable. It would, in all honesty, be really easy to do such a thing, were one so inclined.
3. My instructions were not specific enough regarding the location of the CD, and Dad had just made the easy and justified assumption that the CD was in the case, not still in the CD player. || The most likely scenario. I never did actually tell him that it was in the CD player, I just said it was in the Focus. I probably would have done the same thing.

Scenario 3 was soon confirmed and Dad, I think, Express Mailed the CD itself sometime on Friday. This may seem like a long bit of writing for something like this, but you have to take time into account and realize how sparse my physical contact is with home. I waited for a little over three weeks for this CD, a great and vivid reminder of home and the beautiful warmth of people I had been privileged to be around this holiday season, only to have my hopes dashed. I mean, the only other concrete piece of mail I've received was the postcard that Kaitlin sent me from St. Louis. The only links I have are digital: either the pictures you can see in the gallery, or email. Australia is just about as far away as one can physically get from Providence, RI, and it's easy to feel completely detached.

If you don't like the weather? According to my friend Paul, the people of Melbourne elegantly borrowed from a common London phrase. The phrase, well known and well verified by millions, is "If you don't like the weather in London, wait fifteen minutes." The phrase in Melbourne, and this is just pure Australia here, is "If you don't like the weather in Melbourne, piss off!" See the Melbournites (pronounced mel-ba-nites, also sometimes referred to as mel-bi-nahs) are fully aware of how horrible their weather is, and are tired of tourists coming in and complaining about it. I say this, not to confuse you and make you think I'm in Melbourne, but because this week could be known as "Melbourne's Revenge." It seems the days of the Bush Fire and the 39 degree Celcius heat and zero humidity are but a distant memory. It has rained Seattle-style here for almost a week. Not only that, but it's been taunting. After a few nights of hard rain this week, the skies cleared up completely, coloring the dome a perfect deep blue: the type of weather where one feels guilty for being inside at any time, feels guilty for benefiting from the invention of air conditioning, years to be outside on grass with wafting trees around or sand with crashing waves. The weather made me jealous of every free person in the world as I went to class on Friday morning. I hated the fact that I had to sit in a frigid, climate-controlled classroom and discuss relevant, interesting things when there was such a glorious day outside. So you can imagine my surprise when I walked outside into a powerful downpour and dark skies at 1:00 in the afternoon. I actually still had Leo's umbrella in my backpack, so it got put to good use. I also walked home from class barefoot, which was an interesting experience, because my Birkenstock's were getting waterlogged and really uncomfortable. As I write this, the skies have opened up again, to the point where the rain against the window is audible with headphones on and the volume high. Rain's a great thing, very calming, as long as you're inside and dry.

FMI into the Bigtime ? In the words of Bill Clinton: "Awww yeaaa??" My DJ Company, FMI, has secured it's own domain: www.fmidj.com. This is truly a great day. I have wanted a domain since I first got on the WWW way back in 6th Grade. I didn't even know this until after it had changed, but, originally, one could register a domain name for free. There was even the famous case where a journalist secured the rights to McDonalds.com, just to prove that he could. I believe he was eventually sued and forced to give up the domain. Anyway, FMI can now claim to be as cool as any other industry leading company, like Microsoft, Intel, GE, Yahoo! Be sure to check it out now and bookmark it so that when the new and awe-inspiring website is posted, you'll be fully prepared.

The Super Bowl It's so amazing, so unfathomable, to un-bloody-likely, that I really almost don't believe that the New England Patriots are going to be in the Super Bowl. Due to the god-forsaken time difference between here and the US, I'm going to be watching the Super Bowl on Monday morning, not Sunday night. That makes it a little difficult to partake in the time-honored American Super Bowl traditions (you know, like pizza?), but I'm sure we'll manage somehow. I've actually managed to browbeat and argue a decent group to go down to One World Sports in Darling Harbour for the game: Leo, Paul, Jenny, Chris (the newly arrived American that I've been hanging with quite a bit) and myself. Some friends of friends might meet us there. The only downside is that I have to wake everybody up for 8:00 or so, so we can be out of here at 9:00, at the pub by 9:30 (yes, it'll be open, we checked). I'm really psyched. I can't believe the Pats made it. As Mrs. Sawtelle points out, it's almost perfect dramatic irony that Bledsoe should come off the bench after sitting out for something like 126 days to pull out a great win that gets his team into the Super Bowl. I'm amazed. I can't wait.

I'm now off to bed so that I'll be capable of getting up at the ridiculous hour of 8:00AM. I'll write again soon, when my papers are nearing completion and I'm going to really need a break from formal writing. By the way, if you frequent this site at all, regardless of whether you love it, hate it or really couldn't care less, please do sign the Guestbook. I'd love to know who comes here, who digs it, etc.

Much love, people. Go Pats!

Brian

Australia Day

One sentence for a spark... I just need one sentence. I've felt that writing energy these past few days, that inexpressible feeling of being alive directly at the fingertips. I feel it. It's coursing through me like anything else necessary for existence. I feel it. Something great could be written sometime soon: All I need is one sentence. If I had a truly perfect first sentence, something great would get written. I feel it. Anyone who's written anything will tell you the same thing. It's a mood, it's an energy, it's a mindset. It's uncontrollable, unpredictable, inconsistent. You can just feel it and know it. I just need one sentence. Any thoughts? No, it can't come from someone else. It has to be complete, whole, and the original product has to be entirely of me. I just wish it would happen, because I don't know how much longer this will last or when it will come back. I wonder: did Isaac Asimov feel like this everyday? Amazing guy, Asimov, with an amazing mind, but what did he feel like when he wrote? I know he did it basically every day of his life for maybe seventy-some-odd years. What kind of energy must he have had?

I went with Leo and Cassie the other night to take Mel to the airport. Mel's going to visit her family in Malaysia, then her friends in Singapore. She used to live in both places, and her parents still have an apartment in Concord, one of the innumerable suburbs of Sydney. She'll be gone for two weeks. It's odd, but I miss her already. I missed her the morning after. Mel's cool. She's one of my best friends down here.

"Aussie ! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!" --John Howard.

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds...

Mel One of the first things you notice about Mel is her smile. It's this broad, genuine expression that is given to the world on a very consistent basis. There's a chain reaction: Mel's face lights up when she smiles or when she laughs, and she, in turn, lights up the room as a result. It doesn't matter why, or whether or not you were listening to her, because she's a conduit of positive energy and everybody feeds off it. Looking at her, it does occur odd that such energy would be present in such a small person. She's short, she's slim, and she's almost perfectly proportioned. She walks funny, as if each step were just a tiny thrilling surprise. Her dark hair, now died slightly red, is almost always pulled straight back. Her skin is of a light, even olive color, and her eyes match her natural hair color. Her eyes are almost as expressive as her smile. She calls them Asian eyes, but I don't really know what to call them. They say eyes are a window to the soul, and Mel's eyes are like two bay windows. They're open and accepting in the same way that her personality is. They can do so much, say so much, that they add an extra layer to this bland language, English, that she speaks in a confused Australian/American accent. She's an Australian citizen, and has lived here for now almost four years, but spent significant amounts of time in Louisiana, so her accent is a mishmash of Southern-Belle American pronunciation of Aussie vernacular. In an odd juxtaposition of localities, she calls Australia home, her family lives in Malaysia, she speaks largely like an American who hasn't lived here long enough, her Mom is a native of Singapore, and her dad is a stodgy-Englishman looking Aussie. The resulting mix is what people long ago called an "exotic" beauty, but to me at the dawn of the 3rd Millennium, she just looks stunning in a way I'm not used to. It's a blessing that she's got a warm personality to match. This is a long way of indicating why she's been gone not even two days and I miss her already. She's greatly benefited my time here in Sydney, and two weeks is going to be quite a while without her.

Australia Day Today is Australia Day. It's like the 4th of July, but less emotional. You get the feeling that people really like it here, but not enough to get excited about it. It's just Australia, no big deal. Today I saw more Australian flags than I ever had before, and these much ridiculed cartoon characters supposed to remind Australians of their unique environment. The effect was less than stellar. The Australians looked a little embarrassed, as if they didn't want the culminating cultural symbol of life down under to be the Wombat.

Cassie and I took the bus downtown, got off near Town Hall. We went first to the Australian Museum which is right across from Hyde Park. The Australian Museum, Cassie thinks, is modeled after the Museum of Natural History in NYC. It had tons of interesting exhibits, from a tour of Aboriginal (or Indigenous, as they said in the exhibit, so as to not offend one group or another, I believe) Culture, which was extremely interesting, to an exhibition on Biodiversity. I love museums in general, and this was polished and fun. They also had this amazing collection of nature photographs. God that sounds fruity to say, but, trust me, it was quite amazing. Things were done with cameras that we, as 21st Century humans would think only possibly with large amounts of computer editing.

After the museum, Cassie and I went through Hyde Park where there were Australia Day festivities happening. There were antique cars, including someone's Cadillac Pride and Joy, in front of which I had my picture taken. There was multi-cultural food and drink. There was a stage for kids with annoying performers who didn't even have the decency to sing "Do your ears hang low?" There was a main stage with a nameless, hopeless rock band. There was a jazz stage just off Hyde Park where even the performers looked bored. This all sounds rather cynical, but it was a nice experience. Hyde Park is beautiful, with its overarching gum trees that filter and disperse the light, its many accessible and dramatic water fountains, and, today, its special provision for public alcohol consumption. All these factors conspired to make it an interesting and beautiful afternoon.

After Hyde Park, Cassie and I walked around the City Centre (yes, they spell it weird like the French. I've already been yelled at for spelling it Darling Harbor, instead of Harbour, for saying the light had a nice color, when in fact down here it has nice colour. It's all faux-sophistication, if you ask me. It's also rather odd that the Aussies, who drop whole syllables and sounds off of words would get in a funk over me taking away one pointless letter) and then down to Circular Quay. We got something to drink at this nice place called Quay Grand and just generally soaked