The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I just got back from a 12-day trip to Europe, which I may comment on more in depth later. My trip took me to the British Isles. I'd been to London several times before and some of the nearby areas (e.g., Oxford, Cambridge) but that was about it. This time I got to Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Belfast.

I had no idea what to expect about Belfast. In a sense, upon arrival, I was pleasantly surprised. The area around the Central (train) Station is full of modern new buildings, and runs into a vibrant downtown shopping area. It appeared on first glance that Belfast is a fine and functioning town.

The next day I joined some other women from my hostel on the Black Taxi tour of the city including the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. And there the dysfunction was revealed. It's not as if urban planning isn't challenging enough without having Balkanized neighborhoods and walls separating them. Buildings and walls were covered with huge murals with each neighborhood's propoganda and memorials to the perceived martyrs of either side. The wall dividing the Catholics and Protestants was stained with the scorchmarks from petroleum bombs and pocked by shrapnel. A brick shopping center near downtown used to be a bus depot, the driver told us, where one day apparently 15 bombs went off. He said they had to scrape up the body parts with a shovel afterwards.

I was just there a few days ago and I'm still reeling from the ironies and contrasts. On the one hand I had a great time in Belfast connected to the event I was there to see. On the other hand, I feel a twinge of guilt for having griped about my hostel in the face of such more serious - and still mostly unresolved - issues.

With my friend visiting me for the 4th of July weekend we made some effort to get out and see the local sights, possibly my last chance before my aforementioned move.

We ended up in Solano County, in the northeast corner of the Bay Area. We went wine-tasting in the Suisun Valley area, headed over to Vacaville later to catch Johnny Colla perform at CreekWalk, visited the Jelly Belly factory (which, with the Cadbury Factory in Birmingham, England makes the second large confectioner I've toured this year), and of course, couldn't miss the crop circles... cue twighlight zone music

As if relocating across the country wasn't emotionally stressful enough, the moving itself caused all sorts of hassles and elevated blood pressure. It took 2 days and several emergency trips to UPS (too much stuff!) to pack up my car to the gills (where on earth did I get all this stuff????) and then 4 days to then drive from Santa Clara, CA to Boston, MA.

The most interesting day was probably Day 2 when I went from Salt Lake City to Omaha. First I nearly failed Basic Roadtripping 101 when I almost ran out of gas. That morning when I left Salt Lake there seemed to be enough left in the tank to get me to Evanston, WY, where I had planned to stop and get breakfast. It's the border town, only 60-70 miles away, and I figured it would be more efficient to hit the road right away and get the gas when I'd be ready to eat. My car generally gets great mileage so I didn't think the extra miles would pose any problem at all. However, I neglected to calculate the loss of fuel efficiency that comes from lugging a car hauling a gazillion pounds of stuff (approx. 1/2 gazillion kilograms for you metric types) up the northerly spires of the Rocky Mountains. As I was climbing the gas gauge started to drop precipitously low. When I passed the sign indicating 22 miles to go, I figured I was toast. I took out my cell phone and started watching the mileage markers so that I could give AAA precise location information about where to find me when I inevitably stalled out.

And then, over a ridge, like an oasis in a desert, was the first exit in Wyoming. With a gas station at the end of it. I nursed my car down the exit ramp and pulled up to the pump. I've never been so happy to be at a gas station before. Had you been there you would have seen me lovingly pat my dashboard and say, "Good car! Very good car!" Next you would have seen me slap myself upside the head for being such a moron.

Gas purchased, and a new personal policy passed to always top off the tank any time I stopped, I headed off across the vastness of Wyoming. I have a book called Rising from the Plains which is about the geology of Wyoming. Apparently the state has some very interesting geological features, some of which are visible from I-80. Unfortunately, while the state may be interesting from a plate-tectonic standpoint, it's not all that interesting from an automotive touring standpoint. Until about Laramie when the terrain gets more varied with buttes and valleys chasing each other to see which can be the highest.

Heading through the hills surrounding Cheyenne, the friendly fluffy rainbow-bearing clouds from the day before had started ganging up into some nasty looking storm clouds. As I descended out of the hills into Nebraska, I saw in the rearview mirror dark charcoal skies with a lightning bolt slicing through to the ground. Growing up back East I'd seen thunderstorms build up before, but they'd tended to swell up more slowly as they inhaled all the humidity. Whereas in Nebraska follicles of moisture careened into vengeful atmospheric monsters with great speed and viciousness.

When I was a little I had one of those irrational childhood fears of thunderstorms, probably because they were loud. It was only when I grew up and found out that thunderstorms could actually be dangerous that the fear turned more rational. So as raindrops started dripping onto me I began trying to outrace the storm. And good thing too, because as I happened to glance off to the right I saw a swirling patch of dirt. It looked a little bit like the clear air dustdevils I've seen while driving through the Nevada desert. But it was bigger, and it was connected by a ghostly funnel silhouette to a big nasty cloud up above.

I'm no idiot, I saw what happened to Dorothy. Tornados cause all sorts of havoc and I wanted nothing to do with this one. Fortunately, it was heading southeast and I was just heading east so it posed no threat to me, other than the inherent danger that comes from zipping down a highway while looking at a tornado.

For the most part, I managed to avoid other calamitous weather. The only rain of any significance fell just as I was crossing the Hudson River and ended by Connecticut. I was originally going to cross at the George Washington Bridge at the eastern end of Route 80 so that I could say I'd gone from Bridge to Bridge (Bay Bridge to GWB). But then my dad told me that 80 technically stopped in Teaneck, NJ, and there just didn't seem to be anything romantic about saying I'd driven from Bridge to Teaneck. Disillusioned and tired, apathy took over and so in Pennsylvania I veered off to I-84 instead.

Although it's too bad I didn't drive through New York City, because with all of the beautiful flitting butterflies smashed on my windshield I could have used the services of those famous Squeegee Men.

This entry was actually posted on Aug. 4. However, it really applies to 8/3 when it was mentally conceived. Like the previous post I wanted to assign it a different day to keep things spread out.

I've travelled all over Europe by train. Though the rail system is complex, it's very easy to get around nearly the entire continent by train. Trains run on time with predictable pre-printed schedules. Bookings are easy to make for almost any train anywhere in Europe. Ticket agents are friendly and helpful. I only had problems in Italy, when the night train was mysteriously cancelled and no one could hazard a guess as to why, either in English or even Italian. And in Spain, when the train was mysteriously and inexplicably late departing (but that worked out ok, because so was I.)

Then there's Amtrak. I wanted to take a trip from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe, but I didn't know the best way to route it. The website was insufficiently helpful. So I called the reservation line. The agent was even less helpful. She didn't know where the stations were, and when I tried to look them up online while we were talking (broadband is a good thing) so I didn't book the ticket to the wrong place, she threatened to hang up. "This line is for reservations only! I've got calls waiting and can only talk to people who have all their information. You need to do your research and call back."

"But it isn't possible to do any research because I can't get any information!"

Back and forth we went. Eventually it became clear that she wasn't going to be able to provide me a sufficient amount of information to allow me confidence in ending up in the right place so I had to hang up. When I called back the different woman who took my call was very nice, but interestingly, in booking the reservation no money changed hands. So I'm wondering why the first woman couldn't have waited a few more minutes to make sure I'd gotten the information I needed since it's not like I was preventing an actual monetary transaction from taking place.

It turns out that if you board at unstaffed stations, which I did, you pay on the train. It also turned out that the reservation was completely unnecessary since I had no proof of it and the conductors had no way to tap into the reservation system. So I think next time I take Amtrak I will save myself a phonecall (or two.)

But on the good side, the conductor was nice and, glory of glory, THERE IS FREE WIRELESS ACCESS ON THE TRAIN!!! I'm zipping along (ok, not really zipping, the train's moving fairly slow) the Sacramento Delta as I type and post this. Wireless access makes up for a multitude of sins, but still, I fear for the nation's rail infrastructure. Amtrak shouldn't be losing money, and it should be a functional rail network. To make it truly comprehensive and functional will take a lot of work, but I think it will be well worth it for the nation's interests if we undertake it.

In the meantime I think there are a couple of quick fixes that might help. A comprehensive, usable reservation system, for one. And a reduction in the amount of surely reservation agents employed.

Edited for clarity and style 1/18/04.

9/16/04: I turned off comments for this particular post because it seems to be a popular one for comment spammers. I'm going to see if that makes my life easier, not having to delete so many so often. If you really want to comment about Amtrak, drop me a line.

By last Friday I was a mess. I had applications due, summer jobs to be found, run-of-the-mill homework to do, upcoming seder plans to make, and I'm sure 14 million other things I can't remember offhand right now. I was starting to regret having signed up for the student bar association-sponsored softball tournament to be held in Virginia.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, to get to play organized softball. I can hardly remember the last time I had the chance to be on a team. Maybe intramurals as an undergraduate, but even that wasn't so much fun since I had to organize the team. For this I just needed to show up. But at the time I signed up I hadn't anticipated just how complicated my life would be, or how trampled my sense of self-worth would be, by the time the weekend rolled around.

I was sure though that I didn't want to miss my classes, so I decided not to take the chartered bus down with the rest of the team. This was a good call, because I also didn't think spending 14 hours on a bus with increasingly inebriated law students would be much fun either. My goal was to take a flight after classes were over for the day and then rent a car. It turned out that the only cheap plane fare was to Baltimore, and I figured that was close enough to the University of Virginia. It is, if you consider a 2-3 hour drive to be convenient. I probably should have looked at a map before I set the plans into stone but oh well.

Oh well indeed, because I think in the final analysis the trip logistics, poorly planned as they were, served me well. I love traveling. I love getting to new places. I even love the journey of getting there. Although I suppose there is a breaking point, I seem to have a lot of stamina for being in motion and in some ways derive as much pleasure from it as I do from arriving at the destinations. To some extent this might stem from fascination from the miracle of flight, that so much ground can be covered so quickly. But even the driving is pleasant, cocooning myself in the cockpit of the car with my favorite music and (hopefully) open roads.

It may not be possible to express succinctly the amount of angst I was experiencing last week. I was particularly stressed out about my summer employment situation, which had not yet settled and involved absorbing the disappointment of not getting a position I had greatly wanted. The specter of all the work I had to do, combined with the psychic kick in the gut, sapped the energy required to do it and was becoming a vicious cycle. It is questionable whether, if I had stayed home, I would have gotten anything done anyway. There's a good chance I would have frittered away the time, stuck in the mire of stress, and then I'd have begun the week even more behind and feeling worse about it. Maybe being able to get away right then was the best thing for me after all.

Because I was already behind on some things due that day I ended up missing one of my classes anyway. Then I left for the airport, hoping to be able to standby on an earlier flight. I was there on time, but ended up missing the earlier one due to complications from the moronic policy by US Airways to charge for the privilege of MAYBE getting to fly standby. I think that in the age of overbooking and weather delays, when the airlines are constantly requiring flexibility by their customers, they should be GRATEFUL that passengers are willing to fly earlier if they are able. It makes no sense that an airline would rather send a plane off with an empty seat and keep a willing passenger in the airport, especially when there's a reasonable likelihood that by the end of the day the airline will have too many passengers overbooked and will need to bump people, or that delays may keep these willing passengers from making their connections. It makes even less sense considering that the only reason airlines such as US Airways won't fill the seats more efficiently is out of spite that customers didn't pay for the privilege of helping them out. And it infuriates me that, although I arrived with enough time to catch the flight, I did not arrive with enough time to pay for the ability to catch the earlier flight. Because of that I was doomed to waste extra hours in the airport. My time is rare and precious and I resent the airline for making me waste it as a consequence of doing business with it.

Eventually I took my preplanned flight to Philadelphia and from there a 20 minute flight on to Baltimore, which, being in a 737, took over an hour what with loading time and taxiing and takeoff clearances. I got to Baltimore and rented the car and began the trip to Charlottesville.

Unfortunately, my law-addled brain once again let me down in the packing department. While this time I did manage to remember to pack the suitcase, I didn't also manage to remember to pack pants. All I had was the jeans I was wearing and nothing more suited for playing lots of softball. So once again I had to reconstitute my wardrobe on the fly. On the way down I popped into a Walmart and found some cheap sweatpants. They did the trick, but I lament having needed to shop at Walmart. The economic cost Walmarts have inflicted on the downtowns of America is severe, and the resulting effect on the community by driving away diverse establishments is particularly problematic given that Walmart refuses to provide a full suite of female pharmaceuticals. While that might be their private prerogative, if it has made it uneconomically viable for a pharmacist whose prerogative to provide them to stay in business, then I think the prerogative becomes much less private and is subject to public scrutiny. It's a terrible burden for women who happen to live in rural communities to not be able to purchase the same medication that females in a more economically diverse locale can.

(The next morning I also bought some cheap shorts at a Marshalls, but I have no tirade about that establishment.)

All told the trip took about 3 hours of fairly easy driving. As the miles passed and Boston got further and further away, so did my stress.

The next day the tournament began. We had sent two co-ed teams and one men's team. I was on the team that was presumed to be the least talented of the three, and the outcome of the first game would seem to have supported that view. I did, however, get to play second base, which made me very happy. I did so with some degree of competence, which made me feel even more satisfied. It is a tantrum that I will save for another day that all my years of little league were spent banished to the outfield or the bench while all the more popular kids got to play the positions where things actually happened. It was only as an adult when I was able to stake out second base, with no one knowing that I was supposedly an un-athletic unpopular urchin undeserving of playing time, when I was able to get the opportunity to work on developing the necessary skills.

There was a gap between our first game and our second game, which was at a field outside of the central Charlottesville area. In fact it was in a fairly undeveloped spot near the Monticello visitors' center. In the intervening time I went to the center and stood in the early spring sunshine communing with the Jeffersonian spirit. Spring came earlier to Virginia than Boston, and as rainy clouds departed the skies became warm and blue. My cell phone rang with a phone call from my dad.

"Where are you?" he asked. I imagine he'd tried to call me at home, noticed I wasn't there, and was curious about what I was up to. I don't think he expected the answer, "Charlottesville, Virginia."

The reception was lousy (sometime I will have another tantrum about AT&T Wireless) so it was a short call and soon I got back to the field. The games were being held all over the Charlottesville area in this double-elimination tournament, and so far all of our teams were way on their way to being eliminated. We had no reason to suspect a better result when we took the field for our second game, but it turns out that somehow we won nevertheless. The lousiest team of the three we sent, we were the only one who managed to win any games. As a result we got another game to play, hours later at ten o'clock that night, when Rutgers managed to serve us up our apparently unavoidable fate.

Since we lost, soundly, there was no reason to stay around the next day and we all left around eight in the morning. I got in the car and drove back to Baltimore. I was early for my flight, which had been booked for late in the day anticipating needing to play that morning. Since I had so much time to spare I decided to splurge for standby status. It worked, and I got to LaGuardia by 4. Unfortunately, the next flight to Boston was too full to standby on. So since I was "in the neighborhood," I decided to surprise my grandma and drop in on her in Brooklyn. This was a very impetuous plan, though, because traffic could be a nightmare, she might not be home... any number of things could go wrong and it would either not work, or I might miss my flight to Boston... But as the cab pulled up to her house I called her from my cell phone. "Grandma, open your front door." She did, and there I was. When I was a little girl she used to come over to my house a lot. I remember walking home from school and at the top of my street, a long, straight downhill, I used to squint and look to see if maybe I'd see her car parked in front of the house. It always seemed like the best surprise if she was there, so I figured I would return the favor.

It was a very short visit, not even an hour, because I had to make sure that I caught by 8pm flight back to Boston and I had no idea how much traffic there would be on the return. Maybe it was a gratuitous use of cab fare, $65 roundtrip, but I'm glad I made the stop. In the cab returning to the airport my cell phone rang again with a call from my dad. "Where are you?" he asked, probably expecting Virginia or Boston. "I'm in a cab on the BQE," I told him. I take it as a bonus from the weekend that I spent it flummoxing my dad by popping up in all sorts of far-flung places. Given how much I like to travel, I suspect there will be further flummoxing in the future.

It turns out there was little traffic and I got the airport early enough to take the 7pm flight back to Boston. I was home around 10, tired from a long day, but happy and surprisingly de-stressed. Something about the traveling reset something in me, like I'd been wound up tightly and now the tension had been released. It's odd because traveling is itself a source of stress, what with schedules to keep and not being able to relax in a home environment. But I seem to thrive on it and was glad I took the trip. It turns out it was probably the best way to have spent my weekend after all.

I began writing this on the date I've changed the entry to, but didn't finish or post it until 4/18/04.

The two have nothing to do with each other except my weekend involved both.

I flew back up to Boston to see my sister graduate. I took US Air from Baltimore because it was supposed to get me United frequent flier miles and it was relatively cheap. But it's so hit or miss with them. I got to the airport plenty early but with summer thunderstorms on the East Coast the schedule was a shambles already. So they put me on American direct. Worked for me, I got there sooner. And I didn't have to enable their bizarre policy of paying for the privilege of standby to do it.

Senator Lugar spoke at the ceremonies in comments that were picked up by the national news. As a Republican, his criticism of the Bush foreign policy takes on additional gravitas because it can't be labeled as partisan. Still, I feel a bit cynical about him. Although I agree with his meta message about the necessity of putting more resources into diplomacy than exercise of military might, I thought some of his comments were politically manipulative. In making the argument for increased funding for the State Department (whom I am now a fan of...) he seemed to suggest that Congress had cut funding for such programs. It's possible that it has, I'm not sure, but my problem was that based on the facts and figures he cited in his speech, it was only possible to conclude that Congress had simply not INCREASED the funding as much as they could have. I resented him for using provocative rhetoric that implied a different conclusion than his facts supported. Of course, such is what politicians often do, I guess.

My sister all graduated, I rushed from a family celebratory dinner to get to the airport. When I checked in US Air said everything was on-time. I don't know why they said that � the plane was already late from its previous destination. Time got wasted while I went to the gate and shoertly thereafter saw it delayed by 45 minutes, then an hour and 45 minutes. Even the gate agents were confused. I was supposed to change in New York but it was unclear if I would make the connection. I didn't want to get stuck there (it was too late to call up my grandma) so an agent put me on the flight to National in DC. Great! Yippee! Except my car was at Baltimore. So he gave me a taxi voucher for the trip up to get it.

Of course, the expediency of the plan began to crumble when we sat on the DC-bound plane and the pilot detected a mechanical problem. After maintenance poked at it they declared it unflyable. They did find another plane to fly, but by the time they towed it over and we boarded it was over an hour later. We didn't get to DC until after 10:30pm, and then I still had to take my taxi ride to DC. All told I didn't get home until after 1am. Nice way to start the week...

The extended pause in posts was due to a trip to Points Far Away. It's too long to blog, so you can read about it here.

Travelling is a great way to meet people different from you. With my trip to Cambodia and a trip planned to another developing region later this summer I'm getting to meet people much different from the people I know in America.

But maybe I just don't know the right people in America.

Today I stopped into a Subway near my job to pick up dinner. The place was nearly empty, so neither the sandwich preparer nor I was in a rush. As he made my sandwich he asked me if I wanted American cheese or provolone. This led to a conversation when he asked me what the difference was between them. I was sort of surprised he didn't know his own product, but I went along with it. He seemed to have a subtle foreign accent and it dawned on me that he might really not know too much about cheese.

"Provolone has more flavor than American. American is much more bland."

"Cheese is cheese to me," he said.

"Well, HERE," I said, pointing to the Subway cheese spread, "It may all taste the same, but the Europeans take their cheese very seriously. They have lots of different kinds and wouldn't like a bland cheese like American."

He laughed, finished making my sandwich, and then sat down at a table since there were no other customers. I filled my soda cup and went to put my sandwich in my backpack. "That's a heavy backpack," he marvelled.

"Oh this is nothing. I'm a law student and I've carried much bigger and heavier ones."

This led to a discussion on studying law. Apparently he had taken law class in school -- in Africa. His country was a former British colony - so we presume a common law country - where the legal education, like in many other countries other than the US, happens at the undergraduate level. So we talked for a bit comparing legal systems and education. It was like a mini global exchange.

In a Subway restaurant in DC.

I sort of realized, too late, that when I planned my summer I had neglected to schedule for myself a day at the beach, literally or figuratively. A day where I could do nothing but lie around in a relaxing place. And/or go swimming. Even my trip to Southeast Asia ended up beachless, despite there being some very nice ones in Thailand. And I really could have used it - it's been a marathon going form the semester to the writing competition to the move to the job to travel to the job again and I was craving a mental pit stop.

I finally got the proverbial day at the beach when last weekend my friend and I... spent a day at the beach. We headed out to Ocean City, MD. It was a beach whose geographic proximity mocked us as we fjorded the state highways for three hours to get there, but once there we had a nice time. The beach was pleasant and we had a nice swim. The waves were high enough to not be boringly placid but not so big that swimming became a bruising experience. Initially we were near the boardwalk and walked around eating boardwalk food (which naturally included crab cakes) but then we went up the road to this complex that was sort of a Disney-fied bar on the inlet (Ocean City is a barrier island). It was all done up as a Jamaican oasis, with palm trees and sand and lots of distinct bar areas done up with their own tropical atmosphere. It was sort of nauseating, in a way, although having never seen a place like that it was kind of fun to take in for the first time while it still had some novelty. My concern stemmed from the realization that it was the kind of place where "Girls Gone Wild" videos are probably shot (as the various signs warning us that AV recording was happening at all times suggested), where drunken coeds partake in their unique notion of inebriated "fun," and where, for a place with no walls, the dress code was highly regulated (e.g., no backwards baseball caps). I did think the jetski parking lot for those who approached by sea was an interesting touch though.

Neither my friend nor I had ever jetskied, and although it was a little expensive, we decided to give it a try and rented one for a half an hour. It seems that if I think it's important to take in all sorts of new but foreign experiences, it's also worth taking in new domestic ones as well.

For dinner I'd not yet had my fill of greasy beach food and really wanted fried chicken, so we pulled into the first place that seemed like it might offer it. Big mistake. The service was very slow and poorly prioritized. For instance, my meal came with fries. When the waitress came over mid-meal to see how we were doing she thought to ask THEN if I might like ketchup. She eventually returned with it, after having done about 10 thousand other things first.

The bigger problem that really bothered me, in no small part because my fried chicken fix was absurdly expensive (3 or 4 times the equvilent price at KFC, but hey, it was table service and convenient, right????), I couldn't get the chicken pieces I wanted. It came with 4. I was hungry enough for at least three. I asked for drumsticks, which, as I explained to the waitress, was the only kind I really liked. When she brought my order there was but one. "We can't give you any more, we save those for our kids meals."

After my stunned silence abated I managed to shoot back, "Well would you prefer I act like I'm 12? I'm a paying customer and I asked for drumsticks!" I might have understood if it had been like ordering a half-chicken and you'd need to keep the set of parts together. But since they obviously manipulated the inventory I was flabbergasted that they wouldn't manipulate it for me. Given that white meat is usually more popular it wasn't like I was asking for something I wasn't paying for. She took the plate back to the kitchen and returned but one more. "This was all the chef would do." Fearing I'd never get to eat anything at all at this rate, I took it, and regretted it the whole meal. I'd finished the two and was still hungry and I was increasingly livid that I'd be spending an obscene amount of money to not get what I wanted. It was sort of interesting because as the meal went on I heard her tell another table, "Oh we can't do that," with regard to some request (reasonable, I'd imagine). What kind of restaurant says "no" or "we can't do that" to a customer? Has our notion of hospitality really strayed to such cavalier proportions? There are schools all over the country teaching restaurant and hotel management, and I really doubt they teach their students to say that to their customers. Ever.

When you go to a restaurant, the deal is that for your money (more than you'd spend cooking it for yourself or in a take-away shop) you actually get served satisfactorily. This place was straying from that tacit agreement and then playing, well, chicken with me that I wouldn't get uppity and walk out. So not only was I hungry, and not only was I embittered that I wasn't getting what I was paying for, I felt increasinly resentful that I was being taken advantage of. Had I been alone I might have walked out but it wasn't really a viable choice with my friend there. Plus it would have resulted in the wasting of two full meals which couldn't be reserved, and I really hate waste. But I felt I had to assert myself somehow because I hated feeling so taken advantage of.

I thought about asking to speak to a manager but everyone in the restaurant seemed fairly surly and I doubted that I'd get any satisfaction. So I told my friend that I'd contribute the cost of my meal and tax to the bill but no tip. She let her customer flounder and not get what she ordered, and I wasn't going to reward her for it. It was also the only way of acting that wouldn't potentially result in a loud public argument.

The problem is that my friend didn't have the right denominations of money for his share, and decided (for me) that it wasn't such a big deal and I should still contribute a dollar for my portion. But this really made me angry with him, plus it created an awkward situation. "I'll LEND you the dollar you need to pay the tip on yours, but you need to pay it back to me because I WILL NOT GIVE A TIP." This was very awkward because I normally wouldn't be so petty in making my friend repay the debt of a dollar. But it was the principle of the thing, and I was annoyed that he was minimizing it. I'd picked my battle and sunk my teeth into it, and being told to let go for the sake of expediency did not sit well with me at all.

It's not that I'm so petty that I always get worked up over things like two pieces of chicken. It was more a sense of indignation that the restaurant was taking advantage of its customers' compliance, bullying them into just shutting up and taking what it gave them and then making them pay for it, and that's wrong no matter what the context. I didn't like feeling I was enabling such behavior, and I really hated feeling so runover by it personally. As a result of that it was no longer a fight over chicken and felt like something worth fighting on principle. Stupid things that aren't fair always are. Injustice or bullying don't deserve a fair pass for anything.

But I will acknowledge being a little prickly that evening. The sun and salt sort of suck out all your energy while you are having all your fun, and I had a three-hour drive looming in front of me. I was also not looking forward to passing by the spot where earlier in the day we'd passed by a house in the final stages of burning down to the ground. It was a place of anxiety and trauma, where the sweet sooty smell of someone's life being ruined permeated the car (and was still lingering in the air when we passed by again hours later.) As we were passing by in the morning I foolishly turned my head to see it for just a few seconds and that was enough to etch it forever in my mind. The fire raged with a remorseless thoroughness, immune to any pleading to end its destruction. It's frightening enough when such indifferent destruction is exhibited in something inanimate, like fire. It's even worse when that same sort of unrepentant power is demonstrated by people.

I flew up to New York today to see my grandma for her birthday. She mentioned that I seem to be full of complaints lately, which I've noticed too. I've become pretty grumpy lately, and I think it's part of the Great Change. Some of it stems from personal stress � there's a lot of stuff I need to do right now as part of this process � but some of it stems from the experiences I've been having lately, working for an NGO to try to stem the tide of horrific legislation, confronting far greater challenges to the civil liberties I treasure than I ever thought possible in the United States, and worrying about how I'll be able to fix all this (and be a happy healthy person in the process) .

But I can still appreciate and report on nice things, a tale of which I shall report here. Unfortunately, a complaint is going to need to precede it, but then again if something hadn't gone wrong there wouldn't have been the occasion for someone else to have gone above and beyond to fix it.

I flew into LaGuardia and met my mom at the gate, who had arrived from somewhere else. It was pleasant to have her there waiting: one of my favorite feelings is the happy rush you get from being met at an airport by someone who's glad to see you. It happens for me less and less these days because I fly so often on my own to all sorts of farflung places. And when it does happen, because of the new security measures, you never get met at the gate. But because she had arrived on the same airline she was able to be right there. It was a nice change. (And there you go � I just said something nice.)

We then set off to figure out how to navigate local transit to get to Brooklyn. The subway unfortunately doesn't get all the way to the airport, but there are buses that go to subway stops. But even more unfortunately, these buses don't take dollar bills even though a ride costs $2. And still more unfortunately, despite this rather stubborn insistence on taking only (a rather heavy handful of) change, we weren't advised that we needed it when the information desk told us what bus to take. On the plus side, the buses do take Metro Cards, but again, misfortune frowned upon us when we were unable to find a newsstand that could sell us a card good for just one ride (in fact, we had to walk to another whole terminal to find one that could even sell us any cards at all � what a huge waste of time.)

After we gave up the fruitless pursuit for the correct Metro Card, we went to the bus stop, clutching our two singles each, and saw the right bus pull up. Then we discovered we needed change. So we ran into the terminal and luckily found a change machine (that thankfully was not out of change), and when we came out, the bus was still there. At least mostly. It had pulled away from the curb but was stuck in traffic. I knocked on the window but the driver refused to open the doors. MAYBE this is MTA policy, but in most of the places I've been drivers have been willing to pick up passengers as long as it was reasonably safe to do so, especially when service is less frequent than every five minutes or so.

Meanwhile, the Avis shuttle bus driver, seeing this take place, jumped out of his bus. "Get on, and I'll try to catch up with him at the next stop." We did, and so did he. It was tough, what with traffic and an extra stop he had to make that the MTA bus didn't and a Hertz shuttle bus inexplicably stopping in the middle of the road, but there by the Marine Terminal we managed to cut off the MTA bus with a shortcut and he got us to a stop just in time.

It was an interesting mini-adventure, shlepping and racing around LaGuardia (which itself is an interesting airport with its conflux of modern and old airport architecture). It was very nice of the Avis driver to go to the effort for us, but that said, it would also be nice if New York made things a little easier for people coming to visit (or even people who live there, for that matter).

Toward that end, buses should take dollar bills. That technology has been in existence for a long time, and most other bus systems use it. I'm struggling to imagine a compelling enough reason for the MTA not to use them. People are less and less frequently carrying a lot of change, and the amount they need to carry for a ride is becoming absurd. I think the logic is that there's little point since the locals use Metro Cards, but the tourists who've just arrived have no opportunity to acquire them before needing to ride the bus.

So toward fixing that problem, and this would be even easier to do, the Metro Card machines (which I happen to think are very nicely designed � extremely usable particularly in light of the complexity of their offerings and methods of payment) (and see, I said something else nice) should be placed in the terminal where all the mass transit information is. Otherwise there's a good chance tourists could get stuck (what if the single change machine broke?) and most certainly will end up wasting a lot of time. New York City has a very nice and otherwise reasonably usable public transit system. Why make it hard for visitors to use it? Why force them to pay extra for cab fare?

Meanwhile New Yorkers privately are willing to go all out to make things better for their city's guests, but I think it would behoove the city to make certain efforts on its own behalf, especially since it desires to have more visitors (Olympics, RNC). It's hard for them to see what a nice place New York is if they can't easily get into it.

Technically finished and posted 7/18. Mostly written though on the plane back down to Washington on 7/17.

I finally finished my travelogue from my two-week trip halfway around the world [link to the post where I alluded to it]. I went to Israel, the Balkans, and Germany. It was about 14 pages in a word document so I split it up into the three sections.

Edit 8/23/04: I'm working on making some edits so, for instance, ALL the sentences make sense grammatically, and things like that. So check back...

Edit 8/25/04: Most of the sentences should now make sense. I may still clean it up and clarify, but I think it's generally safe to read now...

Like a swallow to Capistrano, every year I return to the Bay Area for the Big Game, the annual football match-up between Cal and Stanford. This year the stakes were even more exciting because Cal does not, as has been the case in recent years, suck. In fact, not only do we not suck, but we're good! We Bear fans don't quite know what to make out of this change in fortunes, so unaccustomed we've become to decent football-playing.

I came out on Friday, on an early flight for which I woke up at 4 in the morning in order to pack, since the Career Panel had kept me out late the night before and I was too wiped out to deal with it when I got home. So maybe because of the exhaustion I was a little raw. And maybe because the semester has gone on so intensely for so long I was also a little worn. And maybe not knowing quite what my future holds, or where it will hold it, had also drained some of my emotional fortitude. And maybe none of these things mattered and the weekend was just weird.

But it began well. After I landed I rented a car (Alamo lets you pick the car you want, so I chose a blue one to show my Cal spirit) and drove up to San Francisco to have lunch with a friend at an organization I much admire. It was such a positive experience: I enjoyed her company, and I was very grateful for having her support in shaping my career. Back at her office I was also conscripted to help out on one of their projects and that has me extremely excited because it's doing the kind of work I hoped to do when I went to law school in the first place.

Then I headed further north to Marin County where I was due to have a Huey Lewis and the News-esque moment. I didn't travel all the way to California just because Johnny Colla was planning to have a concert, but I thought it was awfully nice of him to schedule one so conveniently for me...

It was at Rancho Nicasio, a restaurant (dinner theater?) up in the Marin hills. I drove up after the sun had set, which is too bad because it's a gorgeous drive during daylight. I ended up sitting at a table right next to the stage. At first I thought that would be fun (I hate having an obscured view). Then the show started and I immediately emotionally bonked.

It was the oddest thing. There's nothing more certain in my life than his music - I ALWAYS respond to it. But for some reason, once that show began I was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation that I did not want to be there. That I didn't even belong there. I should have been off working on that cool law project - THAT'S what my life was about. What was I doing going to this concert? I wasn't like anyone else there. I didn't have a boyfriend/spouse/significant other to dance with, like it seemed everyone else did. I wasn't a local and/or neighbor like it seemed everyone else was. I wasn't even (I really hope) one of his uber-fans who danced all night up front and brought the band their beers. I was there, alone, and suddenly I couldn't figure out why.

And the worse I felt, the worse I felt. There I was, right up front, being a vortex of negative energy, and that didn't seem fair to him. Part of me wanted to sneak out the side door to go get my head on straight. Part of me wanted to sneak out and not come back. Eventually, near the very end, I warmed up a bit and went out onto the dance floor and flaccidly danced. I felt like my soul weighed 15 tons, I could hardly move. On top of the embarrassment, I also became worried that maybe the magic of his music has started wearing off and no longer would work for me. Given how important his music is in my life, this change would be awful. But this is probably not the case: my troubles occurred because I do so respond to his music. When he tells his story my mind starts to wander. It kicks up mental dust in my mind, scattering poignant particulates throughout my brain. I was just in no condition to process them, so I got overwhelmed and shut down.

Things improved after the show, though. I chatted a lot with the guys in his band, people I'd met before but hadn't seen since before going to law school. I apologized for being a wet blanket but they weren't too bothered by it. I also talked with another friend I hadn't seen since before I'd started school either, and it was good to catch up with everyone. By the end of the evening things felt much better (mostly). Still, the whole experience felt unexpectedly strange. Little did I know that wasn't the last time that weekend unexpected strangeness would kick in...

The next day I headed over to Berkeley. My friend has, for years, hosted a tailgate party in the same spot in the middle of campus so there's a whole bunch of us who know to converge there on Big Game Day. As we've gotten on with our lives and scattered to the wind I rarely see many of them, so it's nice to have this occasion to bring us back together.

After dining on yummy ribs, I started walking up to the stadium. It seemed like a perfectly innocuous journey... for the first 20 feet at least. Then, there at the top of the stairs, I suddenly nearly bumped into my ex-boyfriend.

I always thought it inevitable that I would run into him somewhere. It's not that big a world, and we'll both be (at least roughly) working in the same industry eventually. But there??? He IS a Cal grad too, but he'd never gone to Cal games except at my instigation. And on this particular day there were 70,000 other people converging on the stadium. The odds that I would have run into him right there, not even six feet away, seemed quite slim.

But there he was. I was initially too stunned to know how to react. The way we were situated though meant that while I saw him, he hadn't seen me. The question then was whether to say hi or not. To my retrospective chagrin, I immediately became befuddled by the relative pros and cons of doing so. It was ridiculous, the same self-doubting garbage that had infected the relationship. But by the time I'd shoved it all to the side and decided to say hi like a normal person, he'd already peeled off to take a different route.

I wasn't inclined to follow him, but then further up the hill I could see our paths would once again converge. As it happened I ended up in front of him, but not in a position where I could just turn around and say hi without it being massively awkward and contrived. But HE could see ME and say hi if he wanted. He didn't. He peeled off once again and was lost in the crowd of 70,000 people.

I couldn't decide what to make out of this. Part of me was disappointed. Part of me was relieved. I'd sometimes wondered about what would happen when I saw him again - since I knew it would happen someday - and how I would feel. I just didn't expect to find out quite so soon. But maybe it was all just as well: that neither of us could cut through the crap to just say hello like normal people makes me think that neither of us was really ready to.

The encounter did seem to fit the strange emotional theme of the weekend though. And I still wasn't in good shape to be able to easily shrug it off. But there was a game to go to and so my attentions were soon preoccupied by more pleasant things. Cal tried to make us nervous by only leading by 10-3 at halftime, but then it squashed Stanford to a pulp in the second half to win 41-6. We still have the Axe, the trophy from the annual match-up, and we all daydream about what sort of Bowl game we might finally get to play this year...

After the game I went down on the field with three friends, and then accidentally lost all of them in the crowd of thousands of celebrating fans. Had I realized my friends all needed to leave so soon, I wouldn't have lost them so readily. I would have said good-bye at least, but I figured we'd meet up again when the band marched out. But they'd apparently all left by that time. It was disappointing, but I did bump into another friend I hadn't seen yet down there on the field. Then I went to Bowles Hall where the band always serenades the crowd and saw another man from my past. I'd had a crush on him for a while but fortunately (on retrospect) he was such a complete jerk so early into the acquaintance that it was pretty easy to get over him. Though it's been years since we'd last spoken, an already poignant weekend didn't seem like a good time to change that.

I walked down afterwards to meet up with my tailgating friend while he was packing up his car. We were in the center of campus, which is up on a hill on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay, with a view straight out the Golden Gate. I suddenly looked up and caught a spectacularly gorgeous scene. The waning hours of the afternoon had given way to a most provocative sunset, one that was begging me to stay when I knew I had to leave.

Posted 11/25, written earlier.

My mom and I went over to Cambridge last night to see a talk by Rick Steves. He's part travel guide, part philosopher, part stand-up comedian. Definitely worth hearing speak. His "Europe through the Back Door" book and TV series (new seasons continue to be aired on PBS) have inspired many travelers with his unique approach to travel. The notion of the "back door" is that the point of going to these foreign places is to really know what it's like to BE there, not to drown in superficial touristy kitsch, but to meet the people and see what life is really like in those places. To make a connection.

The importance of making those connections becomes more acute the more isolationist our country becomes. As long as we think the world is exactly like us (or that if anyone differs it's a shame they are so flawed) our policies might appear to make some sort of sense. They make no sense at all, however, on a planet with millions and millions of people who are not like us, and who may have a thing or two to teach us themselves.

Traveling helps broaden everyone's horizons and build tolerance. Of course to do that we need to travel responsibly. If we travel to places and bark at people because they don't speak English, no connection will be made, and we'll all be much worse off for the encounter. Rick Steves' work - his shows, his books, his tours � attempts to show a better way to travel, a way where more is gained than just some souvenir knickknacks.

For readers unfamiliar with the wonder that is the Garden State Parkway, let me explain. It's a toll road, with a toll plaza in every county it passes through. Actually, Bergen County has two, including one up near the New York border. Unlike the New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Indiana turnpikes, where you get a card as soon as you enter the road and then pay for the distance traversed when you exit, on the Parkway you pay 35 cents at every toll. There are three ways to pay: in cash, with an attendant who makes change, by EZ Pass, the automated system, and with exact change you throw into a basket. I refuse to use EZ Pass, partly because I don't trust there not to be billing errors, and partly because the government can tune into the transponders at places other than the tolls. I'm not keen to enable Big Brother, so I pay my tolls in cash. (Except in France where they are so expensive I pay them by credit card). Of those options, the exact change is the quickest.

When I was learning to drive, as a teen in New Jersey, I had to learn how to pay the tolls. You have to pull up just the right distance from the basket � not too far so you can't reach it and not too close so you hit it... It took a few attempts before I mastered it. At least I thought I had it down, until tonight.

I drove down to my dad's in NJ and had to pass through a toll plaza. I had all my change queued up in my hand, the handy dime and quarter I'd gotten as change from the earlier toll on the MassPike. I pulled up to the basket, at just the right distance, unrolled the window, stuck my arm out...

And somehow managed to hit the door frame. The change went flying. And not into the basket. This was a problem. I didn't have any other spare change to deposit instead, and anyway, I'm a poor student who can't afford to strew money hither and yon on highways. So I put on the emergency brake, turned on the hazard lights, opened the door, and started looking for my change on the ground. I had to act quickly: there were now cars behind me and I feared the wrathful honking that might ensue if I unduly blocked their progress. Lo and behold, there was the quarter, and there was the dime... the dime... the Canadian dime... another dime... another quarter... It was better than Vegas. With one dopey move, I'd managed to double my money. And there was more still lying there. But I decided to quit while I was ahead, before a traffic jam ensued. Quick as a flash I dropped one of the dimes and quarters into the basket, got back into the car (that I had managed not to lock myself out of, as I feared I was accidentally going to, what with me being on the outside of it and the keys still in the ignition), and drove away without further incident, flush with just enough loose change to pay for the trip back.

Edit 12/28: So my cousin thinks it's illegal to pick up change on the ground at the tollbooth, the theory being that the money was intended for the Parkway Authority (this the same authority that requires the National Anthem to be played before any concert at the place formerly known as the Garden State Arts Center - even if the act isn't American or doesn't want to have it played - just so we're clear on the level of fascism that may be affected here). There is something to that theory: [another relative] says that when she misses the basket she drives off anyway, thinking that it should be enough that she got the money TO the toll. But my impression always was that if you didn't get it into the basket it didn't count. Worse, leaving change all over the ground is essentially littering, and I'm sure that's illegal. (And given the age of some of the coins left on the ground it doesn't seem like the Parkway Authority is particularly interested in collecting this money.) Of course, if it does count as paying just by leaving the money on the road at the toll, perhaps that solves how to pay the toll for the George Washington Bridge...

Anyway, it's not that I'm advocating jumping out of the car at every toll to scrape up the lost change as a separate career or anything. Blocking traffic is illegal and dangerous. I was just trying to do my citizenly duty by properly paying my tolls, something that the Parkway Authority often makes difficult. And any guilt I might have had for picking up a teeny bit extra was pretty much wiped out by the booths at which it was impossible to pay *unless* you had exact change or EZ Pass. They do give out envelopes so you could mail in your 35 cents, but by the time you pay for postage you've paid twice. That's hardly fair. If the tolls require you to pay, they should make it possible to do so.

And we're not talking grand theft here either. I picked up an extra 35 cents plus a Canadian dime. In fact, I only had the mens rea for taking an extra 10 cents (plus the Canadian dime because I think foreign coins are neat); I really genuinely and sincerely thought that quarter on the ground there was the one I had dropped.

I just hope my little change-collecting spree doesn't make me fail the moral character application for the bar...

Technically I didn't have time over these holidays to have a proper vacation. (I still have all sorts of papers to write.) But the overall pace of life is less frenzied during the semester break and it's a good time to catch up on all the relationships I've had to neglect for the past many months. Last weekend I went to New Jersey to see lots of family. This past one I went to Seattle, where two of my best friends live.

One of them has a whole bunch of friends who are avid gamers. So for New Year's Eve we sat around playing all sorts of board games and strategy games and party games until 4 in the morning. (I played Bohnanza, Puerto Rico, TransAmerica, and Apples to Apples.) At about 1 min. 42 sec. before midnight the 18 of us went downstairs to watch the final countdown on TV. After several "five, four, three, two, one!" countdowns prior to 20 and 10 seconds remaining, we counted down the final seconds, mocked the city of Seattle's festivities ("Hey, if we want to party like it's 1999, in Seattle that means we won't party at all!"), drank a miniscule portion of the vast collection of champagne that had been accumulated, and then went back to the games.

The next day we woke up to lots of leftover potato chips for breakfast, went out for fondue for dinner, and then went to another person's house for still more games (this time Can't Stop and Celebrity). Then my other friend picked me up on Sunday and I finally got to meet her kids and watch Huey Lewis and the News videos. It's so nice to have friends for whom watching HLN videos is just as much fun as it is for me... and it was really good to see her. I hadn't since exactly a year before, at a HLN concert actually (imagine that!).

After a pleasant, lazy bunch of Sunday hours catching up she returned me to the first friend's apartment. We had earlier decided to meet up with her boyfriend for sushi that evening. In fact, we'd become pretty fixated on the idea that we'd be eating sushi later that evening. It even came up in conversation a few times with the second friend - when she asked me what I'd be doing later I was very clear that it would involve eating sushi.

So when we called the intended restaurant and found it closed, we had no choice but to find another. My friend called the second place. "Are you open for dinner?" The answer was yes. "What time do you close?" Given that we were about to leave to go eat I teased her for asking such a redundant question. It was already 5pm. What kind of restaurant is open for dinner service at 5pm and closes by 5:30?

We left her apartment and pretty soon arrived at the restaurant a bit later, just a moment after her boyfriend. Whereupon we found a "closed" sign and a disillusioned employee outside.

Her boyfriend: "They're closed!"

My friend: "What do you mean they're closed? I just called and someone said they were open!"

Employee: "Yeah, that was me. I thought we were open, but it turns out we're not."

Apparently he had mixed up his days off. Earlier that evening he'd come in and set everything up, but sometime after we'd called he put two and two together when none of his coworkers were showing up.

Everyone was disappointed with the turn of events, but it turns out he was the sushi chef. After we asked if there was anywhere else he knew of nearby where we could get some he volunteered, "Well if you just want sushi I can do that. I just can't do teriyaki and things like that." But who cared about the teriyaki - we were there for the sushi. We HAD to have the sushi. "Yeah, if you wouldn't mind..."

So we ended up with a private sushi dinner. He was very good, and single-handedly served us the entire meal (complete with tea and some very interesting steamed mushrooms). At the end I think we left him a 40% tip, so hopefully that will salve the bruise on his ego from him kicking himself so much for his mistake.

(On the way home afterwards her boyfriend and I stopped off at an Office Depot to pick up some supplies for his printer. While we were paying the lights suddenly dimmed. "Are you closed?" we asked incredulously. "Oh yes, we've been closed for 15 minutes." So it turned out to be a very interesting evening of doing a lot of business with apparently closed establishments.)

All in all the few days in Seattle made for a really nice break. It was good to see my friends and get away from the drudgery for a while. Who cares that there weren't warm sandy beaches and tropical drinks being served poolside... This was all much more rewarding and fun.

I saw a friend at school on Thursday. "Going anywhere on spring break?" she asked. "Yeah. Japan."

With my rather elastic sense of geography, Japan seemed just as easy to get to as New Jersey. But whereas I'd been to New Jersey before, I'd never been to Japan. (Well, I'd been ON Japan last summer when I changed planes for Bangkok, but that doesn't count.)

Meanwhile my friend's job situation happened to leave him free in March. In an email to several friends he said, perhaps only semi-seriously, March is a good time to come visit. So I cashed in some frequent flyer miles, and now here I am...

Getting here was a bit of an ordeal, although at the beginning it went well. For a change I had good T karma, meaning that when I got to the T station the train was just pulling in, rather than just pulling out... I was also processed through airport security expeditiously and got to Chicago O'Hare with more than two hours to spare.

The problem with this trip, however, was that my sinus problem seemed to be more than a trifling cold. All the vegetables, sleep, and fluids didn't seem to shake it, and I didn't have time to see a doctor before I left on my trip. I emailed my friend, "Um, I may need to find a doctor once I'm there..."

I guess it wouldn't have been the end of the world if I'd needed to. My friend would have helped me navigate the system. I've gone to doctors in foreign countries before, including several times in France. (In fact, one of the best doctors I ever had was in France, but that's another story for later.) But at least in France I can speak the language.

It turns out that in Chicago I can also speak the language as well. Which would be apropos of nothing, except that in the airport is a medical clinic. I've seen signs at other airports for medical clinics, but I've never had occasion to use one. But here was my chance to get looked at by a doctor I could talk to and get whatever medicine I might need.

It turns out that I had a 102 degree fever, which, while on the one hand made me feel good as a means of documenting how crappy I felt, on the other hand still meant that I felt crappy. But once I got my prescription I felt much better, if just from relief from not having to worry about how I would take care of it in Japan. I limped back to my plane, boarded at the earliest opportunity, and waited to be whisked away.

And waited and waited and waited... I'm not sure the full comedy of errors that ensued, but first there needed to be refueling, and its corresponding paperwork. Then they needed to check out an electrical smell. Then they needed to figure out why the back of the cabin was so warm. (This problem, in particular, took a while to solve.) Then they had to refuel again because we'd used so much while troubleshooting the problem, and then do even more paperwork. Then we needed to wait an inexplicably long time for an air compression truck to help turn the engines back on (I think this is what the pilot said). Then just when we were good and ready to leave, a passenger decided he was good and ready to leave the plane RIGHT THEN, so we had to let him off and then turn off the engines AGAIN so they could find and remove his bags. By the time we were "on the road" we were about three hours behind. Thus making a 12-13 hour flight even more interminable.

Eventually I and my semi-ambulatory self arrived in Tokyo, where my friend met me. We went back to his apartment, a convenient three hours away from Narita... and there I am this morning - sniffly, but at least medicated.

It's 3/6 in Japan when I wrote this.

On the plane they showed a promotion for the Food Channel's Iron Chef program. With the secret ingredient being "trout," they flashed on the screen the types of dishes each Iron Chef would make with it. Bobby Flay, for instance, would do something southwestern and chilpotle-infused. Mario Batalli would whip up something Italian. Meanwhile Japanese Iron Chef Morimoto would offer up "Trout Ice Cream, with Eyeball."

I think it's sometimes taken on faith that the things Morimoto serves up are even human-edible at all, but it's a testament to the Japanese palate that it can be so creative and expansive with its culinary choices. I'm enjoying eating here more than any other country I've ever traveled in, including France. There's everything � EVERYTHING � you could possibly want here. Especially being sick that's been a huge thing for me. I've had soups in all sorts of styles: udon, then later won-ton soup in Yokohama's Chinatown. When my throat got sore while walking around, right around the corner was a shop serving raspberry sorbet. Today when I craved tempura, there was a special tempura shop we could go to. Tonight when I wanted something light, in the local department store food hall was a salmon-lettuce wrap that totally fit the bill. Meanwhile for the last two days for breakfast I've been eating this great little bean and corn salad that I picked up at the local 7-11...

The food's all been good, and it's all been cheap. I certainly think dining here is cheaper than traveling in Europe would be right now, at least with the exchange rates. And in some instances I think the prices compare favorably with those in the US, as do the tastes and selection as well.

The dearth of posts lately has been due to global travel compounded with my cold (which sapped any available cycles I might have had.) I stayed in Japan until Thursday. My cold got a little better so I was able to see a bit more. Koichi took me to Yohokama station, and the next day we went to Odawara Castle. The day after that we saw more of Tokyo and then on the next we went to Disneyland. The Lonely Planet says, "Despite the crowds and queues, no-one is ever disappointed. Ever." High praise indeed, but it was fun. It was also strange. Everyone there, EVERYONE, was Japanese (or maybe also Chinese or Korean). Despite this being a most American of destination, there were really no Americans there at all. (I actually didn't see many Americans anywhere in Japan during my trip, but what few were there had clearly not been lured here...) There were long queues, however. Really long, even for things like popcorn. Disneyland had this racket going where you could get these souvenir buckets filled with popcorn, and then get them refilled at various stations around the park. Each station offered a particular flavor: carmel (my favorite); salt; honey (yuck); curry(!); etc. Anyway, way too much effort was being expended on popcorn acquisition, but at least for the carmel one I thought it was nominally worth it.

Thursday was my last day, so after a quick jaunt to the Akihabara neighborhood ("Electric Town," where there are tons and tons of electronics stores selling everything from home appliances to individual transistors) and a lunch of ramen, we went to the airport for my afternoon flight. To California. Because what would a school vacation be without a Huey Lewis and the News concert? They were playing out in the desert past Palm Springs, another part of the world I'd never visited. After landing at LAX I rented a car and drove out there (with all the rain SoCal has had the desert was extremely lush and verdant). I am fairly sure that I'm the first person who has visited both Tokyo and Indio in the same day, although if I'm mistaken I'd be interested to know who else might have done this, and why...

Edit 3/15/05: Well this is sad. A tour bus going to the Fantasy Springs Casino in Indio (where I was, and where I had a very nice time) crashed and at least one person died. It's such a random place where I was, and yet here it is, mentioned on CNN.com just a few days later... Very sobering.

Being sick took all the wind out of my sails. Lots of things about my trip were interesting, but I just had no energy to write about them. (The few entries I did manage to post were fairly dull, although a few now have some updates.)

I did mention the food, which was important because I did eat every day, although on retrospect I realize I did not eat enough sushi. Kind of silly to go to Japan and not eat my fill of it, but I was busy trying out ramen and other culinary delights that I ran out of mealtimes.

I didn't mention the tissues either. On street corners and such people often hand out promotional materials. My Berkeley-honed reflexes are now well attuned to avoiding the offerings of such people, but in Japan I had to override these sensibilities. Why? Because what was most commonly handed out was tissues. And with my leaky sinuses, that was the best thing anyone could give me. In fact, even with my massive tissue consumption due to my extremely drippy nose I think I still netted more tissues than I used. It wasn't until several days back in the States � today in fact � when I finally ran out.

Meanwhile it was interesting to wander the streets and subways of Tokyo and be of average height for a change. The problem with the stereotype about Japanese people being short is that, as with any stereotype, there are many, many people for whom it doesn't apply. Still, I did seem to be relatively taller in proportion to the rest of the population. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to discover that it didn't make me taller than Koichi. It seems that if I was to be relatively taller in Japan, I should have been relatively taller than him too...

In reading the following, bear in mind I was walking around with a 102F fever, having just gotten off a 13 hour flight, which was preceded by a 3 hour delay on the tarmac, which was preceded by a multihour layover in Chicago, which itself followed a flight in from Boston for which I had to get up really early to catch.

Because as I was walking through Narita airport from the gate to customs, I happened to have looked through the windows to the departures' area foodcourt, and immediately thought to myself, "Gee, this airport has a lot of Japanese restaurants."

The real reason I went to Washington was for the University of Virginia's law school softball tournament.

Unfortunately, it's been pouring all day so we've been rained out. On the other hand, Charlottesville is not a bad place to be, so we've been making the best of it. A whole crew of people went to Monticello, for example.

We have two French students with us, LLM students, who are disappointed not to get a chance to try out their new baseball gloves. I'm disappointed not to get to watch them play. It might be amusing, except they're on my team so perhaps "amusing" isn't the word...

But another teammate and I decided to introduce them to another aspect of Americana instead, and for breakfast took them to a Waffle House. I suspose it was very mischievous of us, exposing the French palette to a Waffle House just to see what would happen. But they were good sports. Although it might be the first time someone has ever gone to a Waffle House and tried to order an espresso.

Update 4/3: The French guys played great! Or at least no worse than anyone else on the team.

The tournament was supposed to be made up of hour-long double-elimination games. But with all of Saturday's games rained out, it was no longer possible to do that. So instead on Sunday, for the teams that stuck around, there were single-elimination, half-hour speed games. One pitch per batter. Which meant our fate was decided rather quickly.

On the upside, I cleanly fielded all the ground balls hit at me in short center field. About 3 of them. Which held each batter to a single base. So that we could immediately walk them home on the next three pitches. But it at least feels like a moral victory, if not one measured in runs.

Last Thursday I departed from central New Jersey for California. Four days later, I'm now here.

The first day I drove to Effingham, IL. It was about 850 miles, which I've decided is a reasonable amount of driving to do � particularly heading west. The problem with the eastbound journey is that you lose an hour almost each of the first three days. Going west you actually get an extra one. Still, it's a bit of a stretch doing that much in the eastern states. They are slower to traverse, being both more congested and with lower speed limits. I found Pennsylvania particularly tedious. It was pretty, in a bucolic way, in central Pennsylvania with its rolling green farmland hills. But it was a deceptively huge state. Being in the Northeast it at first seemed to be small. But unlike Indiana, which is nice enough to orient itself so you get to zip across the narrow part, Pennsylvania forces transcontinental drivers to traverse its widest dimension, which is actually quite wide. And at only 55 mph, no less.

(At least West Virginia, in the 13 miles I-70 crosses, lets you go 70. Whom are they kidding, they must reason... by the time they caught up with a speeder they'd be in Ohio. So they might as well just let you go fast.)

I was taking I-70, rather than the more direct I-80, because I needed to correct a rather embarrassing geographic omission. See, though I'd been to Kosovo and Cambodia, the alliterated list of places I'd seen did not also include Colorado. I decided that should probably change, and this was my chance.

But not on the second day, which mostly entailed driving through Missouri and Kansas, two other states I'd never before visited. Missouri was ok � not remarkable � but I loved Kansas. Just west of Kansas City the road got open. At the eastern end of the state the surrounding countryside was mildly rolling � but what's really noticeable is just how big the sky got. The day I was there the leading edge of a cold front was right over the highway, brewing into a storm. It was just a lot of rain and wind (no tornadoes) but really dramatic. The land was so open � you could see for so many miles in every direction � that you could see everyone else's weather just as well as your own. The people to the left were getting very wet, but those to the right were still basking in sunlight.

Eventually Kansas got flat, but not until I was about halfway to two-thirds through it. But near the western edge, just as the sun was setting, I could see the tops of the Rockies silhouetted on the horizon. It was dark by the time I got into Colorado, but I just went in a little ways until Limon, where I spent the night.

The next day I finally saw what I came for: the Rockies. It was actually a little stressful driving � my car did not like accelerating at 10,000 feet, which it had to do several times. But after Vail Pass it was essentially all downhill into Utah. As I went west the landscape got drier and drier, although it seems to have been a wet spring because even the desert was verdant (particularly in Nevada). Shortly after Green River in Utah I cut off the interstate, taking US 6 up to meet I-15 in Provo. It seemed like a shortcut, and it was, but it was still about 150 miles of non-interstate road. The first part was two lanes, crossing the desert valleys. Then up over a ridge, suddenly there was a lush canyon. Things stayed fairly green up until I-15, at which point things seemed to get drier. I bypassed Salt Lake City, hooking up with I-80 to head for Nevada. As I drove past the lake and the salt flats yet another storm was brewing over the Nevada hills. Ribbons of lightning snaked to the ground in front of me, and the setting sun silhouetted wisps of rain falling from the clouds. The storm had passed by the time I got to West Wendover, just over the border in Nevada, where I spent the night.

Wendover is actually an interesting phenomenon. There are two towns, one in Utah and one in Nevada. The one in Utah has a salt-flat racetrack, but not much else. Just over the border West Wendover is practically the Wild West, with all the vices one is deprived of in Utah on offer in Nevada.

The next day � yesterday � I finished my journey. First I crossed Nevada. It was about 410 miles, but they rolled away quickly. This is partly because out west (after Kansas City) the speed limits tend to be 75. So you don't have to be speeding to go fast. And Nevada is a series of valleys and basins stretched out before you. As you descend into one valley you can see up ahead, 15-30 miles, to the little ridge at the end, separating it from the next one. Once you cross that crest, a new valley appears, offering a completely different view. Also along the way are tiny towns, offering food and fuel, and breaking up the monotony of the drive. I ended up veering off into Wells, a former stop along the railroad, and saw some of its dusty history reflected in its old buildings. It was too early to go into it, but there was also an information center describing the journeys taken by the westward settlers. It took me three days to go from Independence, MO, to California. What it must have been like for the horse-drawn wagons, crossing interminable and inhospitable landscape, with no Burger Kings and gas stations to alight their route...

The border town on the other side of the state is Verdi, where I also stopped. Whereas Wendover is more of a hardscrabble, blue collar oasis in the desert, Verdi, on the edge of the Sierras with its well-healed Lake Tahoe-vacationing Californian and Reno suburbanite clientele, has a much different feel to it. Continuing on just a bit I-80 climbs to Donner Pass, and then descends through the gold-laden reddish Sierra foothills into the Sacramento Valley. The road by then gets very wide, with many lanes of urban drivers, and continues that way until its end. Once over the ridge between Fairfield and Vallejo, I caught my first glimpse of the Bay Area: its shimmering waters sparkling in the sunset, Mount Tamalpais' tree-lined hair draping down Marin, the suburban sprawl creeping up the region's hillsides. I kept going, over the new Zampa Bridge, around the Albany curve into Berkeley, where now I could finally see the ocean waving to me from under the Golden Gate.

More notes from the roadtrip...

+ Door to door, Boston to Berkeley, it was 3401 miles.

+ I stopped in McDonalds exactly 0 times, thus proving it's possible to drive across the country on the interstate and not have to eat in one. In fact I ate french fries only once a day, and only because I wanted to. With most fast food restaurants now serving salads, there are healthier choices than non-stop grease as one works their way across the interstates.

+ I used 88.5 gallons of gas, at the atrocious price of $195.01* (it got increasingly atrocious the further west I travelled, from a low in the $1.90s to nearly $2.50). Fortunately I think I got in the low 30s in terms of gas mileage, which is pretty good for a 10 year old car (and would likely have been even better had I not had a bike strapped to the back to ruin the fine Sentra aerodynamic stylings.)

(* Actually, I used more than that. This figure does not include the gas used to drive from Boston to NJ, or the little bit I burned off driving to Berkeley after filling the tank in Fairfield. Also, I think I'm missing a receipt.)

+ I stayed in 3 Super 8's, at the annoying cumulative price of 170.84. I probably could have done it cheaper - there were some cheap Motel 6's that I passed - but after last year's dog show fiasco (when there were no motels with vacancies within 30 miles of Youngstown, OH, where I was ready to end my travel day) this year I decided to plan my journey in advance and book rooms where I thought I'd stop. And where I knew some to be.

+ I passed through the Indianapolis area, stopping once just to the southwest for a meal. Everyone there was gearing up for the upcoming race. The KFC, for example, planned to open at 7am that day so people could pick up their orders.

+ My favorite sign seen on the journey was in Nevada, on I-80 somewhere east of Battle Mountain. The billboard read something like, "The Washington Post voted Battle Mountain the armpit of America. Make us your pit stop." Alas, I did all my stopping in Wells and Winnemucca so there was no need.

On the Conglomerate, Gordon Smith was discussing his impressions from visiting Auschwitz. (I also recommend reading the original post he cited, and some of its comments.)

I weighed in in the comments on my experience visiting Dachau:

One of the best Holocaust museums I've ever seen was at Dachau. In the main building, which has survived, there is a series of exhibits on the history of the period. Starting from about WWI, the exhibits slowly snake around the large room, showing how bit by bit over time things would change. The changes were so slow and incremental, and often each one seeming so reasonable in its own context, it was hard to realize, except once at the end, looking back across the room, just how mammoth the departure from reasonable things had come to be.

(The exhibits were all described in German, but there was a $30 book with the English translations. As a student traveler such an expenditure was quite a luxury, but it was definitely worth having. The book contains pictures of the exhibits along with its descriptions, so it's like having a portable version of the museum.)

Much is gone at Dachau. The barracks are mere foundational outlines, with just a few reconstructed. The creamatorium is still there, though, and still in operation as a building (not as a creamatorium, but the groundskeepers use the basement office).

But much of the impact of visiting Dachau comes just from being there, of being in a place where so many went in and never came out, while you yourself are able to pass in and out of those giant "arbeit macht frei" gates as freely as you want.

The other writer also described the emotional state one has before travelling to a place like this, noting how nerves were frayed and he and his companion were sniping at each other. I was travelling alone on my Dachau visit, but on the bus ride over there were several other Americans to commiserate with somberly. We were already in quite a mood: TWA Flight 800 had just blown up, and news about it was slowly leaking into Germany. It was a tragedy we felt connected to in some way, although it was hard to explain why, or to even know how to feel. We weren't there, and we didn't know anyone who was, but somehow it felt like we had a right to be profoundly sad.

I love traveling to places I've never been to before. And I love going to Huey Lewis and the News concerts. So when the band's summer tour schedule came out and I saw that they would be playing in North Dakota - a place I'd never been to before - it seemed like the perfect occasion to rectify that oversight and go see North Dakota.

North Dakota, you say? What's in North Dakota? Apparently not much. At least not in southeast North Dakota, where the concerts were. I flew into Fargo and drove about an hour south, practically to the South Dakota border (it didn't appear there's much over there either), where the Dakota Magic casino would be hosting the band for two nights.

I was told that the casino would be visible from the freeway, and it was. But at first I could hardly believe I was in the right place. It was a low building, a mere three stories at its highest point. And other than a convenience store/gas station in its parking lot, there was nothing else around at all. No restaurants, no houses, no nothing. There were no other structures as far as I could see, just empty fields rimmed by groves of trees. It made me wonder - and I think the band may have wondered this as well - where all the people were going to come from when they performed for not just one, but two nights. I've seen them at casinos before, even casinos pretty much in the middle of nowhere. But there were always visible bits of cosmopolitan infrastructure in the vicinity, or at least within 30 miles. And the hotels were usually high-rise ones, and not small low-flung motels.

But after I got over my initial shock, the place grew on me. I had expected there to be emptiness in North Dakota. And I'd really wanted to see what empty was like, since everywhere else I go (even the Nevada desert and Kansas) seems to have omnipresent signs of commercialization every couple dozen miles. Or at least more terrain features. But North Dakota is open and empty, and even open emptiness is something to see.

The hotel-casino also had its own charm. It sort of looked like it had been designed by people who had never been to one before and had just imagined what one should be like. In some ways it was typical, in others it was unique (for instance, while the restaurant served free sodas, it charged gamblers for their cocktails - even when they were just watery juice). But the people who worked there were clearly very proud of the place.

It was sort of funny: when I had ordered my concert tickets the clerk at the box office was amazed that I'd be coming from so far to be there. She asked me to come to the box office to say hi when I got there. So I did. I was so exotic... She showed me off to her coworkers as the woman who'd come all the way from California. And they all really wanted to know how I liked the place. I begged off the question at first while I was still unsure (saying something like, "I've only been here 10 minutes, but so far so good!") but later on I came to truly enjoy being there. It wasn't as slick as some other casino resorts, but in a way that was nice. It had a more homey personality, while still having enough necessary comforts to make being there pleasant.

(Of course, with only two restaurants (one being a buffet that made Sizzler look like a five-star restaurant) and a small casino and an even tinier swimming pool, had I stayed any more than the few days I probably would have been crawling the walls. But it was just fine for a weekend.)

Also, unlike the other Indian Casinos I'd been to, this one actually had real Indians. It appeared to be on reservation land, and many of the people who worked there seemed to be Indians. Indian gaming didn't seem to be just an excuse to have gambling; it really seemed like this establishment could be the economic engine for the community. It also might explain some of the unique architecture of the building. A North Dakotan explained to me later that the local Indians favored round buildings. While a round casino floor seemed less than optimum for a casino design, it may have been built that way to reflect the local cultural tradition.

And to be fair, the region isn't completely devoid of any sights to see. Apparently there are some historic forts, and up in Fargo is the Roger Maris museum. But I got there late on Friday, and Sunday was the day I left, so that just left Saturday for tourism. Unfortunately Saturday was pretty dreary, and I just couldn't bring myself to drive two hours up interstate I'd already seen just to visit these places. Instead I took a walk, taking in the ambience of nothing but the birds, the bugs, the wind and the rain. I even walked all the way to South Dakota (full disclosure: it was about 50 yards away from the hotel...).

But even though there was no neighborhood population to draw from, the concerts did attract people. Friday the theater wasn't quite full, but Saturday had a good turnout. The first night about 90% of the crowd was seeing the band for the first time. On Saturday it seemed like 60%, possibly because it included some veterans from Friday. Anyway, like moths to flame people converged upon the venue, some driving many hours to do it.

(I met one woman who lived 5 hours away. She'd stayed in the hotel the night between the shows, but she didn't have a room after the second one. So I let her crash on the spare bed in my room after the concert instead of driving all that way late at night and tired. Bars close down in North Dakota at 12:30 - even at the casino - and apparently everyone on the roads at that hour is probably drunk, so it was nice to save her from that. And it paid forward the favor that another fan had once done for me after an Atlantic City concert, when she let me stay on her extra bed when I had no hotel room and an hours-long drive ahead of me.)

As for me, maybe it would have been better if I'd gotten out to see a little more. (I did also manage to detour to Minnesota on the way back to the airport, just to get a superficial impression of what the place was like.) But it was a nice change to just hole up there for a few days, away from everything. There was no Internet at the hotel and only spotty cell phone coverage, so I was forced to relearn how to live without being connected 24/7. I really enjoyed my trip though, so it must have worked... I guess being in the middle of nowhere sometimes turns out to be the perfect place to be.

For reasons I no longer remember, when I bought my plane ticket to come home from the Huey Lewis and the News concerts in North Dakota (via Denver, a necessary connection) I booked it for the 3:30 flight. Perhaps I thought I'd spend the day sightseeing, or perhaps there were no cheap seats left on the 12:30 flight due to the phalanx of band members who'd already been booked on it. As it happened, the band's crew was booked on the 3:30 flight as well, also perhaps due to the phalanx that had taken all the seats on the earlier one.

(I'm kidding about the phalanx. Kind of. There are nine bandmembers plus a crew member who travels with them. But on a 50-person plane, that's a lot of seats getting taken up by one party.)

Anyway, one of the guys in the crew got the bright idea to try to standby on an earlier flight. Knowing the 12:30 flight was pretty full, he suggested the flight before it. I had a rental car, so I could shuttle me and him and some of the other crew members up to the airport in the morning to try to get out sooner.

But in calling the airline, he discovered that the only flight before the 12:30 one was at 6:55am. Which would have meant that we'd need to leave the hotel by 5am. To give a frame of reference, the concert the night before didn't even end until around 10pm, and then he had work to do packing up, and I had unwinding to do after all that dancing around. If we pursued this plan, it would have meant getting only a few hours of sleep. Once informed of this, two of the crew members originally interested in this plan immediately became uninterested. Then the remaining one and I, after discussing it, also changed our mind because the pain-benefit ratio just didn't seem to be favorable enough to justify the sleep-deprivation torture.

But I still wanted to get out earlier. I felt sufficiently "done" with my trip to North Dakota, and I was looking forward to going home and taking care of Seriously Important Things like buying groceries for the week. So I left the hotel around 9:30am and raced up to the airport to get myself on the top of the standby list for the 12:30 flight. There are many variables that determine one's priority on the list, but one of them is check-in order. Another is Premier status in United's Mileage Plus program, which, committed (and loyal) traveler I am, I have. Anyway, I did what I could so that if there were any available seats on that plane, one of them would be mine.

The band came up in a van some time later, with those three crew members hitching a ride on it in hopes of also standing-by on the earlier flight. It's actually an interesting thing, watching the band travel. The massive amount of logistics to get 15-20 people, gear, and luggage from place to place is pretty incredible. I'm a bit in awe of how they do it. And they do it a lot -- the band covers quite a bit of ground as they tour.

Unfortunately this roadworthiness was my undoing. Because as people checked in for the 12:30 flight, there came to be only three seats left for stand-by. Which all got taken up by the three crew members thanks to their hoity-toity 1K Mileage Plus status, which, even though they had checked in later than I had, stomped all over my puny little Premier status. My 25,000 flown miles the year before were just no match for their 100,000...

It was all very friendly though. They knew I wanted to get on the flight, and the assistant tour manager even took it upon herself to ask the airline if they could still squeeze me on. But when check-in got closed and the gate agent gave out the boarding passes to the three crew members, it pretty much boiled down to, "You three can go. Passenger Gellis, you're screwed."

There was one last chance, however. The computer showed a full flight, but if not everyone was in their seats when the plane was ready to close, I could still get on. As the clock ticked and ticked, there was still one seat left. The gate agent made an announcement, "Passenger Verdun, please proceed to the plane for immediate boarding."

The clocked ticked some more. No passenger. Some more ticking. I got excited. Tick tick tick...

Then, slowly sauntering across the room came the wayward passenger, acting completely oblivious to the huge inconvenience he about to cause me by taking his rightfully paid-for seat. Jerk.

And that was it, there was nowhere else to put me. The plane closed up and pulled away, and then promptly parked on the tarmac for an hour while weather in Denver delayed the departure. I meanwhile camped out in the terminal, where at least there was Internet and electricity. (In fact, there were some nice little desk booths there in the waiting area to use, but I digress.)

Eventually the remaining crew members arrived for the 3:30 flight so at least there were people to talk to, but unfortunately the 3:30 flight had now turned into the 4:10 flight. That weather, which had held up the earlier outbound flight, had also held up the inbound one we needed to board. Quickly, quickly, once the plane arrived they cleared it out and loaded us in, hoping to take off before we lost our landing slot. But it was still going to be close for all the connections.

As we taxied after landing, the flight attendant had all of us with connections raise our hands so that the other people could see who they should let get out first. Ask a gate agent to radio ahead to our flights that we're on our way, the flight attendant also advised. Good idea. Except that the gate agent looked at us like we had three heads when we asked her to do that. We were suddenly faced with an instantaneous decision: stand there and convince her that radioing ahead was the right thing to do, or dash through half an airport terminal. Most of us opted for the latter, yelling back at her our destinations ("San Franciscoooooooooo...") in case she felt at all inclined to help us out after all.

Meanwhile, we had arrived at gate 67. My next flight was over 35 gates away, with a gigantic food court and other miscellaneous non-gated areas to traverse as well. Oh, and did I mention that my rolling suitcase stopped rolling on this trip? The wheels turned, but the handle no longer raised. I could either be the Hunchback of Denver Airport as I wheeled the thing along, or I could literally carry my carry-on luggage. Neither rendered me as fleet-footed as I really needed to be. As the airport loudspeakers boomed increasingly menacing announcements ("Flight 595 to San Francisco is boarding NOW. Get your ass over here THIS INSTANT!" (slightly paraphrased)) I limped and lumbered along, all the while wondering what my life would have been like at that moment had I caught that earlier flight... Finally, and breathlessly, I arrived at my gate. Where I boarded and then sat there for at least 20 minutes before we went anywhere.

But the weather had now cleared, and two hours after takeoff I was back in San Francisco. And now I'm home. Without groceries. The end.

Edit 6/24: I'm an idiot. It just dawned on me that my suitcase converted into a backpack. That would have made it MUCH easier to carry around through the Denver airport. I would have had to adjust a bit since I also had a daypack, but, still, it would have been much more manageable to strap the suitcase onto my back than lug it awkwardly by the handholds.

Maybe I deserved to get bumped from that earlier flight as some sort of pre-emptively meted-out punishment for being such a dork...

Edit 6/26: You know, the more I think about it the more I think my airport adventure was the karmic backslap of the travel gods reminding me who's boss. When I had been packing I was very rushed, and I over-stuffed my suitcase with more than I'd need for a short weekend trip because I didn't have time to make better decisions about what I'd actually need. I decided it didn't matter, though, because if the suitcase ended up heavy it's not like I was going to be carrying it anywhere.

I think that decision was the root of my troubles, right there.

Sometime last year, as part of my networking activities, I went into San Francisco to meet a lawyer for lunch. There's this pedestrian area near the financial district with lots of restaurants, including a purportedly French one. We dined there, but I was caught off guard by the accents of the waiters. They all had these supposedly French accents - but there was something wrong with them. They seemed to not be the accents of actual French-speaking people trying to speak English, but rather people using the accents that Americans expect a francophone to have when speaking English.

These accents are not the same. A native French speaker naturally will change vowels, emphasis, and some consonants in a way that reflects how they are normally attuned to using their voices. But it's not what the American ear expects a French person to sound like. Our concept of a French accent puts those vowels, consonants, and emphases in completely different places - places which might be impossible (if not also incredibly unlikely) - for a native French-speaker to achieve.

Having lived in France and known quite a few English-speaking French people, I have some idea of how they normally sound. And they don't sound like these waiters. I thought it was sort of amusing, and told my companion, that the waiters somehow felt they needed to use such a contrived affectation in order to shmooze with the clientele.

But that was last year, and I'd forgotten about it until yesterday when I met a friend for lunch and we went there. (He speaks French himself, although he is not a native speaker.) We had a different waiter than I'd had the last time, but he had the exact same ridiculous accent. I would never, of course, make fun of anyone's actual accent, but affectations deserve skewering. Especially one designed to con us into buying into the authenticity of the restaurant.

I mean, as I told my friend, if he were really French, why would he have had that confused look on his face when I asked for butter on my ham sandwich? The French eat jambon et beurre (ham and butter) sandwiches all the time.

We didn't have much contact with our waiter, which was fine because I was really there to catch up with an old friend and not so much to taunt the waitstaff. But when the waiter returned with the credit card receipt and forgot to leave a pen, I told my friend he should ask for un stylo, just to see what would happen.

Apparently, however, my friend was even less up for taunting the waitstaff than I was, and so didn't.

But if I ever go back, next time I think I'm going to order entirely in French.

Remember that lush canyon I described driving through in Utah earlier this summer?

It blew up.

Fortunately (for me - it was also fortunate no one got killed) I wasn't planning to do the return trip via the same route. There are a few things that any roadtrip needs to be successful, and one of them is an actual road. (A 30-foot deep crater is a poor substitute.)

The final insult, I thought, was driving out of California in a gigantic traffic jam. It took hours longer than it should have to get from the Bay Area to the Sierra foothills. "Thanks a lot, California," I thought, "for making that my final California memory."

But California wasn't done with me yet, because the delay put me in the high Sierras in late afternoon sunlight. I'd never seen them that color before. But by any objective standard they were gorgeous. And yet I had to leave them behind.

California is such a jerk.

My car is currently resting quietly in my dad's driveway. After leaving Berkeley Friday afternoon, I pulled into New Jersey yesterday (Monday) afternoon, not 72 hours later. I'm very glad not to be driving anymore, although I will have to go to Boston later this week. But first I breathe...

It's particularly hard going west to east, because you keep losing hours as the time zones change. The question is whether you lose driving hours, or sleeping hours. Unfortunately, I'd already lost a lot of sleeping hours before I got started, and then lost even more en route � thanks to a really loud Super8 in Winnemucca. (At first I thought the upstairs neighbors were just early risers when I began to hear footfalls before 5am. Then, as the noise continued through 6am, I began to think they were early risers who ran marathons, and were getting in a practice run right then.) As a result I couldn't get through the 1000+ miles I'd intended to do the next day, finishing about 50 miles short of my preferred Nebraska destination. Fortunately I managed to catch up the next day and got to where I wanted to be in Ohio.

Of the states that I-80 passes through, I liked some more than others. California alternated from stifling hot, flat and congested to gorgeous and soaring. Nevada is wall-to-wall desert, but I find the desert so striking that even though I've been on that route about a half a dozen times, I still find it captivating. Same with Utah. Wyoming did impress me more this time around than the last, perhaps because I knew better what to expect. But I still did have a few concerns about Wyoming: for one, the truck stop at the end of the exit ramp in Evanston that I really like � the one who managed to keep me from running out of gas the last time through � apparently is out of business. I was heartbroken. It also used to have an A&W franchise, and I was looking forward all through Utah to being refreshed by some nice, non-caffeinated soda when I passed through. (I don't drink caffeine when I drive long distances to cut down on the pit stop frequency. Instead I try to stop every 150-200 miles, to refuel, refresh, and, er, restroom...) The other problem was that once again, as I got to Laramie and Cheyenne, there were storm clouds brewing. Given that last time these clouds spawned a tornado, I was a little nervous. Plus, unlike last time when it was during the day, now it was getting dark. Tornadoes are scary enough when you can see them � I wasn't looking forward to encountering one that I couldn�t. So I can't say I really like that part of Wyoming, as every time I pass through there I end up terrified...

On the positive side, however, as I climbed through the ochre hills east of Laramie, the blazing sunset cracked through the storm clouds to turn the hills the most brilliant shade of orange I'd ever seen. Contrasting against the lavender sky, I was practically blinded by their brilliance. Unfortunately, once I reached the top, the clouds had thickened into a dark fog that blanked the road, and thus made a long drive even more tedious. I've often noticed how in the Midwest, the sky seems much lower than it does on the coasts. And that night it was extremely low to the ground indeed.

The next state was Nebraska. Most of the people I met in Nebraska were very nice, but the terrain was not nearly as enjoyable to look at as Kansas to the south or Iowa to the east. Iowa was very nice, with rolling green cornfields. However, the edges of Iowa were unpleasant � way too crowded for the capacity of the roads to handle. This was particularly true in Council Bluffs. Also one of the worst moments of the whole trip happened at the eastern edge.

I'd accidentally let my gas gauge drop too far. (I was trying to cross the whole state on one tank.) Stressed that at any moment I was going to stall I pulled off at one place but I had to leave when I discovered it wouldn't take credit cards. At the next place I pulled up to a truck stop that was packed. Cars were queued up by the pumps, and I joined the end of one. However, while I was waiting some jerk got on line at the other end, thereby cutting me in line. Then, when I finally got to the pump, I had to walk through a puddle. Which I realized too late was a puddle of gasoline! It got all over my shoes, which got all over the floor of my car, which made the car reek of gas fumes. I tried to wipe off my feet on the mulch of the nearby landscaping, but it didn't work. Plus it made me wonder if I'd now accidentally turned my Tevas into a bomb...

All told, the downfall of western civilization was clearly manifest in that moment. There were all the ingredients: machinations, environmental degradation, and incivility. It was not a shining moment for the species, I dare say...

Illinois was the next state, and it was not the giant construction zone I feared it to be. In fact, all the delays I'd endured too years ago have left behind some pretty nice road. Then the rest � Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania � all passed by unobtrusively until I finally got to New Jersey and home.

I "bought" a bike from the girl I sublet from (I gave her 100 euros, and she'll give it back when I give her the bike). It's an odd bike, an old-style 3-speed that no longer has two of them. It has a handbrake for the front wheel, and a pedal-brake for the back. I can hardly remember when I last rode a bike with a pedal-brake. I think I was 8... Meanwhile it's much heavier than my nice road bike, and much harder to start and stop. In fact, when I first got on it I had a hard time figuring out how to ride it! You'd have thought I'd have never done this before...

But eventually I got the hang of it (er, kind of...), especially after we lowered the seat, and soon we were tooling around Hamburg. Hamburg is an extremely bike-friendly city. Everyone rides. (And most people ride bikes like mine.) It's also mostly flat, so the riding is easy. Plus you are allowed to ride on the sidewalk. (Many sidewalks even have specially-marked sections for bikes.)

Hamburg also has a lot of water. It's on the Elbe river, which is wide enough to have a port, and it has a large lake with connected canals in the middle of the city. We rode our bikes to the north of the lake until we found a place to rent a canoe. Then for an hour we paddled across the lake and through the maze of canals. Some were quiet and still and serene, and others were like the autobahn for light watercraft as hundreds of other people took to the water on one of the last nice summer days for a long while.

I'd forgotten how nice night trains can be. I used to take them quite a bit, particularly on my marathon post-graduation 6-week trip through Europe in 1996. I think I took about 14 night trains within a month. (Actually, it was probably more like 15 if we include the Rome fiasco, plus a night boat was also taken between Helsinki and Stockholm.) My thinking always was, you have to sleep and you have to travel � why not do both at the same time? Plus the couchettes cost no more than a hostel bed, and it saved me the trouble of having to find one. In any case, this is why I opted to take a night train to Poland.

Shortly before 9 this morning the train pulled into the Central station in Warsaw. Immediately it reminded me of the Prague train station when I was there in 1995. Cavernous, with straight, rigid geometry and smooth, faux-marble concrete surfaces everywhere. Tucked in between columns and staircases were lots of kiosks, the kind that proliferated in communist environments. Only while 20 years ago they were probably minimally stocked, today they are stuffed with all sorts of modern consumables.

Two levels upstairs from where the trains arrive is the huge main hall, which itself showed signs of both Warsaw's past and present. For instance, there were several ATMS, but the one I used squeaked... There was also a new, modern "Relay" news shop, where I bought a Wired magazine (for too much money) so I could break my large bills from the ATM. The woman at the tourist information booth said my tram would cost 2.40, and I'd read somewhere that they don't take large bills.

I only had three hours to spend in Warsaw before catching my next train. I figured I'd do a nice loop, walking to the Jewish cemetery, then to the old town, then on to my train. What I hadn't realized was just how huge Warsaw is. The map that made it look like a compact place must have been on a far smaller scale than I'd thought. Tiny streets on the map turned out to be 4-lane affairs. In fact, it took me a half hour alone to figure out how to cross them... Clearly I was going to have to curtail my plans, so instead I decided to first do a dry run to find the hotel I'd need the next night when I returned. And good thing I did too, as it completely blended in to the neighborhood. No sign, and the door was set off from the street and behind another building. Still, it wasn't far from the station, and not too hard to find again since it's the only one with a three-story tall statute of Wallace and Grommit in front of it.

But before I got that far, after I emerged from the station I was stopped by the view. Modern Warsaw is enormous, and what's in it is on an enormous scale. Including the abominable Stalinist building looming across from the train station. Among the many criticisms of Stalin one needs to include architectural taste. This is a behemoth of a building in some perverted art deco style, like the Empire State Building but shorter, more sprawling (it has wings like tentacles), and with more gargoyles. I remember seeing a similar building in 1992 at the University of Moscow and thinking it was the ugliest building I'd ever seen. Unfortunately, my travels in the former communist-bloc countries have led me to see several more just like it.

Once out on the street, however, the architecture was a mix. Even in the center of the city, where there has been the most recent investment, there was a strange amalgamation of modern Europe and Moscow. The urban planning, with its relentlessly rectangular buildings, pedestrian setbacks, and ubiquitous kiosks was straight out of the 1960s and 70s. But then there were also the skyscrapers under construction, the newly-paved and well-marked roads, legible and omnipresent street signs, and a KFC and Pizza Hut right behind the H&M and C&A stores and next door to the doner kebab shops.

After I got my bearings I walked around a little. I walked just a bit past the Stalin monstrosity, behind a church, and to the only synagogue in Warsaw to survive the war. It was surrounded by a few other Jewish establishments, including a theater, restaurant, cultural center, and Kosher store in the basement of the temple. The synagogue itself wasn't open (note: it was the day after Yom Kippur) so I walked back towards the station. On my way I bought groceries for the trip. The stores are fully stocked with the same things you can find in Germany, except with far fewer (in fact, objectively, too few) shopping carts and cashiers.

Once laden with my snacks, I found the tram. What I didn't find, however, was how to pay for the ride. I was really embarrassed when I discovered that the driver didn't take money, yet I had no ticket to validate. The woman at the tourist office, when she told me what tram to take and how much it cost, couldn't have also told me how to pay for it? Apparently not... So it seems I was a fare cheat, though completely unintentionally.

Fortunately it was a short trip and no fare inspectors boarded. (I got nervous when I saw the guy shilling for the Polish Red Cross, but then I realized that he wasn't a real authority figure, and paying him was entirely optional...) Meanwhile a young man sat down next to me at some point and saw me looking at my map. I showed him where I was going (the eastern train station), fully expecting the tram to take me all the way there. But before we reached it he told me to follow him off the train and he'd walk me to it through the side streets. Despite the fact that there was no common vocabulary between us, this all got communicated smoothly. And I'm glad it did, because I'm not sure I would have found the train station otherwise.

My train came along, on time, and I boarded. It was really crowded, but I squished in to a compartment with seven other people. (Edit 10/17: it turns out it was crowded because most people got on at the Central station. Apparently I didn't need to go to this other one after all.) The two young men spoke English, but they mostly stood in the hall so we didn't talk much. One other older man seemed eager to make contact though, so we conversed a little. The best common language, it turned out, was not English or German, but Russian. I'm really glad I learned it � it's come in handy so many times. If only I could actually remember it though... In our conversation it did become clear that I come from Boston but used to live in New Jersey, and that he has relatives in Edmonton, Canada. I'm not entirely sure exactly what was said to get this across, but does it really matter?

Posted 10/18, written 10/14.

I did it again � I picked a spot on the map, and then went to go see what it was like.

The point I went to see was Suwalki, a town in the very northeast of Poland. In fact, it's so northeastern that it hasn't always been part of Poland. Within the past two centuries it's also been claimed by Russia and Lithuania.

It's a bit off the beaten trail. My Lonely Planet Eastern Europe book didn't even list it, and it takes at least 5 hours to get to by train. (However, that says more about the speed of the train than the distance... It goes pretty fast to Bialystok, which is about two-thirds the way there, then turns into a local train and goes much slower the rest of the way. Plus they have to change the engine at some point because the tracks are no longer electrified.) I came up yesterday afternoon and reached town just after sunset. Fortunately, a college student going home for the weekend had entered my compartment (everyone else had disembarked by then) and helped me sort out a taxi. (He recommended against taking the public bus after dark.)

Before we arrived in Suwalki though we talked off and on for about an hour, to the extent his English would permit. At one point the conversation stalled when I asked him if Poland had changed a lot since joining the EU last year. Actually, the conversation stalled often, but this time it stalled because he didn't know the word "change." Most of the time if he didn't know a word I would abandon the topic, but this I felt was an important word and looked up something in my travel phrasebook that would give him some idea what it meant. I thought I must have succeeded, because soon he gave the unforgettable exclamation, "I know what change is." Studied philosophers themselves have been less certain... But either he still didn't understand, or there has been no change in the last year, because he just kind of shrugged. Probably it was some combination of both, I think, because later in the conversation when I asked him about the economy directly he said it was bad. "It was a lot better under socialism," he added. He was mostly making reference to employment, though, and I can imagine that it would have been true, that once the government stopped being the economy and everyone had to play the capitalist game it was difficult for everyone to compete. On the other hand, I suspect that with the EU connection there are more EU-funded enterprises and projects now, and it may in fact be easier for local businesses to compete in Europe now than it was without the EU membership.

The taxi then took me to my hotel. It was a perfectly fine hotel for my purposes: clean, cheap, comfortable. It even had a TV, and for the first time since I've been in Europe I watched a little. Mostly a BBC World Report on guinea worms in Africa (grotesque human parasites that can be at least 10 cm long that painfully bore themselves out of people's legs) and a French program where it tracked a Chinese au pair as she settled in with � and apparently immediately fell out with, though for reasons unexplained � the family she worked for.

I didn't watch any German TV, but I did get some practice speaking it that evening. When I was checking in earlier I realized the men behind me were not speaking Polish but German. "Are you German?" I asked them, in German. They were. They were also very nice, and later that evening joined me at my table for dinner.

Dinner and breakfast were both included in the $33 room price, and they were both very good (especially the dinner). The waitress brought me a menu, which was all in Polish. I looked at it and blurted out that I couldn't read it. So instead we agreed she would decide. She chose pretty well: a cauliflower-potato soup, and for the main course some sort of beef-rolled pate with a sweet and sour sauce. There was also a plate with three salads (red cabbage, carrot, and some sort of dill salad). Breakfast was also nice � a scrambled egg, bread with butter and something that looked like cream cheese, coffee and tea, some crudit�s, cheese, and cold cuts. However I was a little concerned that it might have been prepared and left out unrefrigerated for a while. I got this impression from the tables in the other dining room, which had been laid out the night before. Not just with table settings, but the first course...

I was nearly done when the men came in but I stayed while they joined me at my table. While they ate we talked, about 80% in German. It's amazing what struggling in Polish does to my confidence in German. I keep thinking to myself, "You know, I could say what I needed in German..." The men were there because there is a narrow-gauge train in the area, and they are train buffs. (Or "trainspotters," as I guess the British term would be.) The hotel gets a lot of visitors, Polish and European, who come to enjoy the region's many lakes and forests.

I wasn't there for that though. The reason I was there is because a part of my family came from Suwalki. The Gellis side, in fact, including the great-grandmother for whom I was named. The story goes that when she was a young teenager some Russian soldiers made a pass at her, which led to her being expeditiously married off to my great-grandfather. They then had many children, several of them there and the rest (including my grandfather) after emigrating to New York.

All day as I was wandering around I found myself looking at the town and wondering what of what I was looking at the first Chaya Gellis had also seen. Certainly not all of what I saw: not the brand-new service station or freshly-laid brick sidewalks. Nor the communist-built hopelessly rectangular apartment blocks. And perhaps not even the train station, which wasn't built until 1899. (Edit 10/23: Actually she did see that. I've since found out that she left in 1905.) But Suwalki doesn't appear to have been greatly touched by war, and though a lot has changed because things were added, not so much seems to have been lost. The original architecture along the main street, for instance, is probably the same that she might have passed. As are many of the low, wooden houses along the town's periphery.

However, something important has been lost since then.

The first stop I made after leaving the hotel and walking around the small lake behind it was at the Jewish cemetery. The cemetery is still there, but the grave stones are mostly gone. Wave after wave of anti-Semitic attack has left most of the markers toppled, broken, or completely missing. Some effort has been made to rehabilitate the cemetery: some of the broken grave stones have been restored and formed into a large monument in the middle. There is also a smaller monument near the entrance dedicated to Holocaust victims. But other than a few clusters of graves here and there, the cemetery was but an empty field and a far cry from the immaculate adjacent Catholic cemetery, or even the smaller Orthodox one. It's unclear whether anyone really cares for this cemetery at all, though it's not too overgrown. But it is clear that the waves of attacks desecrating the cemetery have not abated, judging by the piles of broken glass from smashed beer bottles near the monuments. It was everywhere, not just in one small spot. A shard even got caught in my shoe, and I could hear it clicking on the sidewalk as I walked away.

And when we talk about what is missing from Suwalki we should realize that before the war there were 5400 Jews in Suwalki, yet today I could find not one surviving synagogue.

(When I had asked the hotel clerk about what to see when I walked around the town, and whether the cemetery had any Jewish people in it, she said to me in another unforgettable sentence, "What are Jewish people?" Oy vey... I suspect she just didn't know the word, and if I could have thought of the Polish one she would have given me a better answer. But still, if there actually WERE any Jewish people she might have had reason to learn the word. In the cemetery there were a few graves from the 1960s, and one from 1986, but nothing more recent that I could find.)

Continuing on with my day I walked to the town center and main street, taking pictures of anything I thought might show my great-grandmother's world to other relatives. I walked to the top of the street, turned right, went a few more blocks, and then ate lunch it what appears to be a brand new McDonalds. I don't think my great-grandmother saw that... but mostly, I didn't take a picture because it looks like every other suburban McDonalds. It did appear, however, to be across the street from a prison.

After lunch I stopped by an Internet caf� to check my email, bought a few more postcards (my thinking with postcards is, "Why should *I* have to take all the pictures? Why not get a professional to do it?") and then went back to the hotel.

Actually, I didn't go back right away. I walked a little past it to see what was beyond. But I was tired and didn't go far. As I turned to go back the wind must have blown a glass bottle into the street, and a car immediately ran over it and broke it. Concerned that cars were going to get flats, I thought about finding a broom to clean it up. But that thought made me angry. If I was going to sweep up any glass, it would have been at the cemetery. Still, I made some effort to help and tried moving it out of the way with my shoe. But an oncoming car in the same lane, who could see me from a long way away (the street was straight, and I was uphill) refused to yield. So I had to, and as he passed he seemed to curse at me. The thought that immediately popped into my head was, "Fine! You people like broken glass so much? I hope you like it in your tires!" I couldn't help but find the crunch of his tires as he rode over the glass somewhat satisfying.

But as I said, I was tired by then. I'd walked a lot, and most of the people I met there were perfectly nice. Still, it was time to call it a trip, and I went back to the hotel where they called me a taxi to go back to the train.

Posted 10/18, written 10/15.

Edit 11/12: Pictures are posted here.

It was nice, when I got off the train in Warsaw, to be able to walk around like I knew where I was going. And actually know where I was going... I stopped off first at the KFC for dinner (I was curious) and then found Wallace and Grommit � I mean, my hotel. (I also discovered that it did have a sign after all, but one that was only visible at night when it was lit up.)

The hotel was interesting. I'd stay there again (location, location, location) but the interiors of the rooms had some questionable aesthetics. Lots of brown... I felt like I'd stepped into someone's den sometime in the 1970s...

The room included breakfast, which was an elaborate buffet: cold cuts, all sorts of cheeses, hard boiled eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, cereals, fruit, coffee cake, breads with butter and jams, sausage and some other hot meats, juice, tea, coffee... Sadly I only had about 20 minutes to enjoy it.

The room also had a TV, which I stayed up too late watching. There was a great musical cabaret show in a Polish channel, which featured a string quartet that performed Canadian Brass-style (classical musical training, expressed with a sense of humor). Then I watched a bit of Mad About You dubbed in German. Sorry to say, there's a vast difference between Paul Reiser saying in his sarcastic New York accent, "Excuse me?" and a dubbed Germanic voice instead saying, "Entschuldigung?" Still, this was better than the German sitcom that seemed to be one long stupid joke about the husband failing to have an erection. Meanwhile, on BBC World, the sky was still falling. OK, I know there are bad things in the world and it's good that someone tells us about them, but, still, the BBC was a bit much. The happiest segment I saw them show during the whole two days I watched was on advances in artificial limbs, which is only a happy subject if you don't stop to consider why people actually need artificial limbs.

Then another Polish channel had a movie that was mostly in Polish but subtitled in English. It wasn't very good. It was one of those morose European flicks full of melodramatic silences and a darkened city full of no one but the movie's sinister people. (I wonder, though, if this is not because European filmmakers can't afford the extras needed to make a place look populated?) I've seen French films like this too, though they usually include some gloomy dialog where the protagonist waif explains how her parents had both killed themselves and that's why she's throwing herself into the clutches of an emotionally-scarred man three times her age. Or at least the one I saw in Suwalki was like this...

Anyway, in the Polish movie at one point one bad guy suddenly starts speaking to the other bad guy in English. I'm not sure why; they seemed to both be Polish. Maybe they thought it sounded tougher? They thought wrong. The older one, his accent was ok, but his pacing was off. Perhaps he couldn't really speak English and he learned his lines phonetically, which would explain the erratic diction. I wouldn't make fun of someone's language limitations, but I think it's perfectly legitimate to criticize the filmmaker who wrote his dreadful dialog and directed the performance. The "sit your ass down!" demand was delivered so out of sync from the way any English-speaking heavy would have said it that I was surprised the other bad guy didn't start giggling. (I did.) Then he punctuated his threat with, "Dig it?" I get the sense that the filmmaker perhaps once stayed in my hotel and got confused about what decade it was... "Capiche?" would have been much more contextually appropriate, but I guess then he wouldn't really be speaking English. And then how could the other bad guy take him seriously?

Posted 10/18, written 10/16.

The train I was running late for at breakfast was from Warsaw to Krakow. Once in Krakow, I then needed to change to some form of transport to take me to Auschwitz. However, I had no good information on how to do this. Even my Lonely Planet Eastern Europe book let me down. (The Polish chapter generally needs a lot of updating, if they haven't already done so.) It was hard to tell how close to the camp the train would get me, or how I would bridge the distance in any case. The book suggested taking a bus instead, but I couldn't find the bus stop in the confusion of Krakow Glowny and instead opted to take the train.

Which naturally turned out fine. When I got off the train in the town, I and all the other tourists converged on the train information guy. (There were no other signs or sources of information.) He couldn't speak English, and this wasn't his purview, but he knew all our questions and what the answers should be. (How to get there, and how to get back.) I ended up splitting a taxi with three other English-speaking people since it seemed easier than taking a bus. The cabbie charged us 15 zloty instead of the usual 10 ("It's a holiday," he said) and so we arrived at the camp by taxi.

It turns out that it had been a good choice to take the taxi because I got there just in time for an English tour. It started with a 15 minute film, and then the guide walked us through several buildings. We then took the shuttle to Birkenau, 3 kilometers away, which is the place everyone really thinks about when they say, "Auschwitz."

Unfortunately my trip was rushed, and I was preoccupied with worrying about how I would get back to Krakow in time for my night train. In the end, when the tour ended in Birkenau, I took another cab (again 15 zloty!) back to the train station. The train was an easy 40 minute trip to Trzebenia, but the train we transferred to for the rest of the journey was packed. I boarded it like I would a crowded B-line train in Boston...

Arriving in Krakow I had about an hour and a half to spare. My initial impression of Krakow in the morning had not been good. The area around the train platforms was decidedly uncharming, and disconnected from any sort of central station area. I'm not sure I even believed then that any existed, and in the morning I had no time to explore. But at night I did, and I was curious. So I followed the path away from the platforms, and found at the end of the Victorian-style covered pathway a nice old restored station building. The overall aesthetic reminded me a lot of Disneyland, actually...

By then I was hungry so I wandered down a road to find some food. What I found was a lot of gorgeous, old, lit-up buildings. My initial impression of Krakow now seemed entirely wrong. It seemed like a quaint, medieval-feeling European city worth another visit (although perhaps maybe not for another year or so, to give them time to finish up some of the infrastructure construction they are working on).

In fact, Auschwitz should probably be visited again sometime when I have more time. The trip to Suwalki really sucked up most of my weekend � although that's fine, I'm really glad I went. But then I had to rush to get to Auschwitz (and, really, who wants to rush to go there???) and I couldn't really connect to the place because I was so distracted about the logistics of leaving.

At one point I worried that I'd perhaps somehow ruined the Auschwitz experience by doing the trip like I had. Then I mentally slapped myself, because how to you "ruin" Auschwitz? I perhaps failed to fully absorb the dramatic depths of its horrors, but not entirely. My memories of Birkenau in particular come to me in flashes. These camps need to be seen in person to really understand their scale. In some ways it's a scale more vast than you can imagine (for instance, it took 10 minutes at a rapid pace to walk from the end of the train tracks by the gas chambers back to the gate house), and in some ways it's also smaller (though the gas chambers/crematoria were crumbled ruins, they were smaller than I imagined). Having been there at least it will give better context to other Holocaust history I learn.

Still, if the experience seemed anticlimactic, I think there are several reasons. On my end, in addition to my distraction, I'd also seen another concentration camp that week. There was probably a saturation problem. But I've also heard others criticize the presentation of Auschwitz. It's hard to put my finger on it, but there's something about it that's disengaging. I liked my guide, so that wasn't really the problem. I think it may have something to do with the logistics. It should feel very dramatic to enter those gates. But it's such a confusing hassle to get there and figure out what's going on that it's hard to be emotionally wired to take it in properly. Also, you sort of stumble into these places. Whereas in Neuengamme and Dachau the entrances were themselves more dramatic. And maybe, too, the area could be better curated as a museum. The 15 minute film about the camp's liberation, though necessarily awful in its content, I thought was one of the blandest Holocaust films I've ever seen. Furthermore, ever since the Neuengamme guide pointed out that pictures of camp life were actually SS propaganda, I've not been able to take them as seriously as realistic representations of the horrors of the camp. However bad they may look, the reality was worse.

But as I said, the guide was good, and her tour was peppered with anecdotes explaining the psychological torture inflicted by the SS as much as the physical. It was also good to get her personal insight on some of these matters. In Suwalki I had noticed that the WWII memorials never referred to Nazis or Germans. They always used some form of the word, "Hitlerowcowy." I asked her what it meant and why they seemed to always use it. Apparently it means, "Hitler's People," and she thinks it's more accurate than saying either Germans or Nazis. With the latter, she pointed out, who were they? They were a political party. But that's like saying "communists." It's a party too, and it isn't even clear of which country. As far as using the term "Germans," it tars too many people. The atrocities themselves were only carried out by Hitler's People. On the other hand, she said she has started using the term "Germans" to make it clear that she does not mean Poles. She said she gets offended when people ask her how many Poles served in the camp. First of all, she noted, a Pole couldn't be in the SS even if they wanted to be � it was reserved only for Aryans, and Poles are Slavic. Secondly, they were victims too. The country was divided and fought over by Hitler and Stalin, the government was in exile, and Poles themselves were deported and imprisoned. Around the camp 5000 people were displaced as punishment for helping an early Auschwitz escapee. They were sent away, and their houses dismantled (the SS then used the bricks to build Birkenau).

Still, I suspect the history of Poles and Jews from that period is more complex than any one representation might capture.

Written for the most part 10/17, posted 10/18.

In Krakow I decided to have Chinese food for dinner. Or at least the Polish approximation of Chinese food... After dinner I went back to the train station to catch my night train back to Germany. And that's when things got annoying. The trip up until that point had worked out really well: trains were caught, hotels found, destinations visited, weather fine (true it rained a bit in Auschwitz, but the gloom was sort of fitting).

But now, at my train, the conductor seemed to be saying that my ticket was not good. Well, not that it was no good, but that it didn't cover the part of the journey from Krakow to the German border. Um, yes it does, I fruitlessly argued. I showed him the itinerary that the Deutsche Bahn agent in Hamburg had printed out for me, where we discussed that I needed a train from Hamburg to Warsaw (having transferred in Hannover), Warsaw to Suwalki, Suwalki to Warsaw, Warsaw to Krakow, and Krakow to Hamburg with a change in Berlin. I could demonstrate that it was the intent of both parties � me to purchase, and her to sell me, a ticket valid for that itinerary. But no dice. I asked him to infer that it would have made no sense at all for me to have a ticket with a huge hole in it � why would I have bought a ticket that covered almost the entire loop but not all of it? Especially since there was no need to buy the Suwalki parts in Germany � it was the international parts that were most important to purchase earlier. But no dice there either, and in fact he said I was lucky they let me travel from Warsaw to Krakow because he didn't think the ticket was good for that part either.

European train tickets are a bit opaque. The way it generally works is that you buy a ticket that covers traveling the distance, but not a specific seat. For a specific seat you make a reservation. For a seated train it's usually a nominal cost, and has the advantage of meaning you get a seat no matter how crowded the train. For some trains though reservations are optional, for others mandatory, and for others they aren't possible at all. For a night train they are mandatory, at least if you want a bed, because you have to pay extra for that. So I had my couchette all reserved and paid for, that part was no problem. Yet still he was telling me that, though the agent had sold me a couchette, she had not remembered to sell me a ticket?

The complication was twofold: that it had been a complicated itinerary, and that it had been significantly discounted based on German rail promotions. The problem with the former is that the conductor couldn't figure out from what was written on the ticket that it covered this particular train. He said it didn't, and compared it to another ticket which had different markings on it. I can't account for the different markings, but I still insist my ticket was valid. But he further didn't believe it was because the ticket was cheaper than he thought it should be. I tried explaining the promotions involved, but no luck there either. In the end, the only way I was going to get to take the train was to buy another ticket from him. I scrounged 15 euros and 7 zloty and got on with my journey.

You may be asking yourself, I can tell, what language did this conversation take place in? The answer is Polish, a language I don't speak. Fortunately, a girl had come upon me and offered to translate. She was very nice and very insistent in making my arguments to the conductor. The whole thing stretched about an hour (we continued once the train was moving) and she was very persistent, but in the end the argument was lost.

Upon arriving in Berlin I had two hours to spend, so I tried complaining to Deutsche Bahn. But they told me to wait until Hamburg since I still needed the ticket for the last part of the trip. Instead I went to Alexanderplatz, a place I recognized being in about 9 years ago. It looks different now, with all the construction they've done. If it weren't for the TV tower I might not have recognized it.

Meanwhile, back at Berlin Ostbahnhof, I made what I thought was an incredible discovery: Dunkin Donuts. And not just Dunkin Donuts, but chocolate creme filled, which I can't even reliably find in the US, not even in Boston where there's a Dunkin Donuts every 50 feet...

The rest of the journey back was uneventful, and back at the station in Hamburg where I'd bought my ticket I went in to complain about the problem. The woman said the ticket should have been valid, and couldn't explain why the conductor didn't accept it. We filled out a form and it will go to Berlin, where perhaps they will decide to refund my 17 euros. I'll believe it when I see it, but that's not really the operative detail here. What is important is that I EXPLAINED THE WHOLE THING IN GERMAN!!!! And she understood!

I had been worried, before my trip, that going somewhere with a different language was just going to confuse me. But it seems instead to have loosened up the inner-workings of my brain and made the German possible. Being in Poland and only knowing about seven words of Polish (all of which I learned while there) contrasted mightily with being in Germany where I am vastly more literate, and can speak entire sentences. So I think my trip was a good thing for my German language skills and didn't confuse me at all.

Attending my French course immediately upon arrival, however...

These are some pictures from my trip to Suwalki.

A modern, brand new gas stations with the cleanest restrooms I've ever seen anywhere. (Notice, also, the brand new cobblestone sidewalks outside of it. New sidewalks are being installed in a lot of places.)

The train station built in 1895.

The main street, demonstrating the typical architecture along it.

Two sidestreets, one pedestrian.

A traditional wooden house. There were several in the town, this one being across the street from the cemetery.

The cemetery in Suwalki used to be "in" the city, and as the city got larger it got moved "outside" of town. However, it's a short and easy walk from anywhere in the town center to the cemetery.

The cemetery is divided into thirds. One third is the Catholic cemetery. It is jammed full of ornate and well-maintained grave sites. Large marble tombs with flowers and landscaping and polished stones fill the area. It looks like this:

Over the wall is the Orthodox cemetery. It is much more barren, although there are a few clusters of graves. Some are clearly quite old (look in the background towards the left, in the trees) and some are more recent.

Then this is the Jewish cemetery, which is now little more than an open field. Many gravestones were salvaged and formed into a monument, and some still remain in their original places, and there is a Holocaust memorial at the entrance, but this is the Jewish cemetery, which stands out in striking contrast to the others.

Not pictured, because I didn't like how the photos came out: either of the two old churches in the downtown, the town square, or the ancient, abandoned Orthodox church.

Edit 2/20/06: I have uploaded some zip files with the rest of my pictures. Sorry they are huge - I didn't want to lose the picture quality by making them smaller. I divided them up into four categories:

Town Center
Town Outskirts
Cemetery Area
Railroad Area

On the upside, I did rotate them so they shouldn't be upside down anymore...

Every time I'm in the Frankfurt airport I hate it more and more.

You'd think that having now been there several times I would have gained from the experience. Sadly it's not the case. The airport is labyrinth and confusing. There are security checks and passport controls everywhere, presenting time consuming bottlenecks to make even the most prompt of passengers late for their flights. Meanwhile boarding gate information is guarded like a trade secret, and luggage carts are prevented from going pretty much anywhere you might like to take them.

Whereas San Francisco Airport is fabulous. Not only do takeoffs and landings reward travelers with breathtaking views of the Bay Area, but the airport itself is sleek, modern, and fairly easy to traverse. OK, so the AirTrain is a little unintuitive and poorly labeled. But once you get the hang on it you can see that it follows a consistent logic. And riding it around gives a terrific birds-eye view of the airport operation.

Much of the airport was redone within just the past few years, so everything is modern and suitable for today's needs. The international terminal itself is brand new and very useable. The main entrance hall is a gigantic room with enough check-in areas for many 747s worth of passengers to all queue up simultaneously (as opposed to, say, the LAX international terminal or the old terminal at Charles De Gaulle, where even two 727s worth of passengers would cause traffic flow to ground to a halt). It's bright and airy, and built on rollers in case of earthquake. If it has any infirmities at all, it's that it might be too big, but it was built anticipating more passengers that the economy currently supports. Of course, when they come back, the airport will be ready.

Posted 11/22, written 11/21.

I'm back. Miss me?

Last Friday I took off for San Francisco. By Monday afternoon I was back in Germany. If you blinked, you might not even have noticed...

It was time for the annual pilgrimage to Big Game. And despite being seriously inconveniently located this year, a pilgrimage is a pilgrimage. Anyway, it's not unprecedented for me to make the commute from Europe � when I lived in France I came back for it then too. Granted, I think I stayed longer in California the last time, but this year I chose to make the trip as short as possible because I want to enjoy my remaining time in Germany.

Still, if anyone knows how to make the most of a compressed trip, it's me. After waking up around 4:30am on Friday, I took the U-Bahn to the Hamburg Airport (it's interesting to see who rides the U-Bahn at that hour... lots of blue collar workers I never see riding it during more conventional commute hours), where I got a 6:40am flight (stand-by is a good thing), and yet barely had enough time to transfer to my next flight in Frankfurt thanks to the understaffed extra security check apparently (so the sign says) required by the United States. (Of course, anal though the US may be about airport security checks, I don't think it's US policy to mandate one x-ray machine for a 747's worth of people. I think the airport came up with that policy on its own.) But I caught the flight, and then about 10 hours later showed up in San Francisco (where I had four voicemails from Orbitz telling me my flight status, which was of minimal use to me since I was already sitting on these planes when they called me to tell me what time they were going to take off, and anyway, it was an American number they were calling and I clearly wasn't there to answer it...).

I decided to rent a car this time so I could dash around the Bay Area doing whatever errands I wanted conveniently. That evening I met a friend for dinner, but unfortunately by then jetlag had started to interfere with the blood supply to my brain, so our conversation became limited at a certain point by my inability to speak English. I did find it odd this weekend, however, to be somewhere where speaking German was neither necessary nor useful. I kept having to suppress my instinct to try. (It was very confusing...)

The next morning I woke up (at 3am, which was not what I planned) and decided to enjoy breakfast at the IHOP attached to my motel, where upon arrival I immediately noticed the neatest handwriting I've ever seen on the framed xerox copy of the failing health inspector's report that was on display near the entrance. I briefly contemplated not eating there as a result, but I was really looking forward to some pancakes. So I rationalized that they'd probably fixed the problems by now, and my breakfast probably wouldn't kill me. Well, maybe the cholesterol would, but not right away.

Then I ran two more errands, including a quick jaunt to Fry's Electronics. If you've ever lived near one you'll know of what I speak. It's geek paradise. Every kind of electronic component and device is available there, somewhere. I decided to buy a plug adapter for a Chinese plug to go into a German outlet. A student here has this setup, but her adapter is broken and keeps splitting in half and falling on the floor. I decided to see if Fry's would sell a new one, and of course it did...

Then, at last, it was time for Big Game. I drove into $tanfurd � sorry, "Stanford" � and parked somewhere in the eucalyptus grove near the stadium. The one nice thing about the game being there is that it's a really good place to tailgate. Much better than Cal, actually, where tailgating really isn't very practical (because parking itself isn't very practical). My friend who's been hosting Big Game tailgates for centuries (give or take) was in his usual place, and it was nice to converge with lots of people I rarely get to see anymore. Now that we've all scattered, it's nice to have this occasion to come back together. This is partly why I'm so religious about it; there's something reassuring about knowing that no matter where I am or what I'm doing, on the last Saturday before Thanksgiving I will ALWAYS be there.

The game itself was fun. Cal had half the seats, it seemed, which is a little unusual because normally the home team has about 2/3rds of it. But last year at Cal, when we were great and Stanford wasn't, we had more like 85% of the seats filled. Which is too bad, in a way, because what fun is a rivalry if the other team doesn't show up?

But once again, Cal was pretty good and Stanford wasn't. We won 27-3.

By then it was pretty late, because the game hadn't started until 4pm, and I was pretty much jetlagged toast once again. I stayed over at my friend's house � whose father is a recently minted lawyer himself (he gave me bar tips!) � and then the next morning drove back to the airport. At 2:15pm Sunday I took off for Germany, and arrived on Monday 10 minutes late for my French class. (I tried to standby on the earlier flight from Frankfurt to Hamburg, but Lufthansa seems to like to channel US Air's stupidity on that front and wouldn't let me change unless I paid a lot of money for "reticketing." So instead I ended up late for class.)

I expect to struggle with jetlag for some time, now that I'm back, but I think it's more of a general sleep deficit than anything else. I was running behind even before I took off for the weekend. But I'm also recharged � I had fun, and I got to enjoy a weekend in the sun. I am therefore the only person in Hamburg right now with any palor...

It is sort of existentially confusing, however. It's hard to believe I went anywhere. It was just a weekend � most of my classmates didn't even notice I was gone. It's hard to believe I was, now that I'm back in my German life. But I was indeed. I just spent two days in California. Air travel is a wonderful thing, letting people live two lives at once.

It's dawned on me that I've actually experienced very little of Germany in my time here. Other than two hours in Berlin, I've hardly traveled. And, with my days consisting of doing little more than going from home to school and back, I've seen very little of Hamburg. So I've decided to get out a little more.

The other day I did this by stopping by two of the Christmas markets that have been set up in squares and plazas around the city. The biggest appears to be at the Rathaus (city hall). Germans do seem to love their fairs � throughout the whole time I've been here there's been one "temporary" collection of food and souvenir stalls after another. During the summer there was one around the Alster lake, I've seen them on the university campus, and now they are the Christmas markets. But though some of the same fare is common to all (eg, bratwursts roasting on a large grill hanging over a charcoaled-wood fire under a tent, roasted and/or candied nuts, frosted shaped gingerbread cookies, etc.) some of it does vary seasonally.

So for lunch I first stopped off at the potato pancake stall. Three pancakes with applesauce for 3.50. They were yummy. German potato pancakes are a bit like American hashbrowns, although a little more substantive. (Although what I don't understand is why, given the German taste for fried potatoes, the German McDonalds don't sell hashbrowns for breakfast.) Next I stopped at a stall that sold fresh roasted chestnuts. Despite seeing them constantly roasting on carts all over Manhattan, I don't remember ever having tried them. I bought the "probiert" (trial) portion for 1.50 and still had more than I could possibly consume. I liked them a little, but not enough to have again. Then, at the Gaensemarkt Christmas market I finally tried one of those large gingerbread cookies. I liked the frosting, but I found the cookie a little bitter.

Germany definitely gets very into its Christmas season, what with all the markets and such. I actually find that I don't like the way they smell, though, and I think that�s because of all the Gluehwein (spiced wine). But I may like the way it tastes, because tonight at school some was on offer. We all stood around outside, drinking warm wine, which is a fairly enjoyable way to experience the season. I, however, drink too slowly so my wine kept getting cold, but that's ok. It's all about getting to taste the different things Germany has to offer, and now I can check this off my list...

Shortly after writing the last post I stuffed my laptop into my bag and took off for the airport. I was hoping to have left it behind, but I had been at school and so the logistics of doing that were just too complicated. At the same time, I had absolutely no desire to turn it on at any time for any reason at all over the next few days. Never mind surfing the internet - I didn't even want to boot it up for music or word processing or checking my calendar. I have been glued to this device for months, and for the health of the relationship we both needed a break.

Fortunately, even if I'd had difficulty resisting its temptations I would not have been able to succumb, for I did not have the proper plug converter for Ireland. (And the battery no longer keeps a charge.)

Yes, that's where I was off to, to see my friend from high school and her mom. "You're only going to Ireland for two days!" people at school asked me incredulously. Well, why not? After all, I only take three to see Cambodia...

One of my favorite joys in life is to be met at the airport by someone I like, and so it was very nice, as well as somewhat random, to be met by my friend in Dublin Airport (it was also very exciting that for a change I got to exit through the BLUE "EU Traveller" channel when I left customs...). Not that I was surprised to see her - indeed I would have been unhappy if she had not been there! - but it's interesting that we have such a tremendously geographically unspecific relationship. In the years that I've known her we've met and hung out in all sorts of far-flung cities all over the place. This was just one more.

Unfortunately Dublin airport is on the other side of the city from where her mom lives, and unfortunately Dublin traffic is insanely awful so it took us a while to get there. And dissuaded us from spending much time in the city. But that was ok because there were people and places to see in County Wicklow, where we were. We spent time with some of her old friends from Ireland that I'd never gotten to meet before, and the next day we toured a ruined monastery tucked away in the hills by two glacier-formed lakes. We were fortunate because the weather was very nice during the time I was there: pretty sunny, and warmer than Hamburg. The food, however, was another story.

I do think junk food is much better in Ireland than Germany. More interesting "crisps" packets, and loads of interesting and tasty chocolate concoctions, mostly brought to us by the wonderful Cadbury company. These things do not exist so much in Germany, where we are forced to eat nothing but paprika-covered potato chips (maybe pretzels if we're lucky) and Mars bars.

On the other hand, German food by and large is dramatically cheaper and much better. Which is not to say that German food is so awesome, but that my encounters with Irish food were so dreadful - perhaps made more so by the usurious prices charged for such unremarkable offerings. The pizza we had one evening was unforgiveable in a cheese and "tomato" sauce kind of way (though the crust was ok), I found the fish and chips extremely flavorless, and the ever-so-trendy "Mao" restaurant we visited had the culinary subtlety of a mallet. It was supposedly a Thai restaurant, although perhaps "Asian Fusion" might better describe its aspirations, yet there was a dearth of actual Asian people working in the restaurant. Or at least none in charge of the kitchen, and the few who were on staff seemed to be Korean. (The rest of the staff seemed to be Eastern European.) The duck soup was tolerable, but the rare beef salad had such a poorly-balanced and tart dressing that my peeling and eating a lime directly would have been a more flavorful experience. Definitely not worth the exorbitant sums charged for it, but then it was hard to find anything much cheaper. Even the fish and chips from the tiny take-away show were 6.90 euros, about two euros more than equivalent (and tastier) offerings you'd find in Germany.

And then there was the Great Dessert Fiasco that followed my mostly inedible lime-drenched dinner. I was still hungry (naturally) so I proposed we find a place that did coffee and dessert. Yet others wanted a beer. So if only we could find a place with both... Which, amazingly, we did! Still, perhaps we should have been put off by the fact that the interior decor of this uber-trendy estabishment (EVERYTHING in Ireland seems to be recently redone for optimum trendiness) made it look like a hair salon. But the menu was so tempting, promising hot chocolates and crepes and all sorts of yummy things (as well as beer and wine). Yet better it should have offered chopped liver and mushrooms, rather than dashing our taste expectations on the hard, cold rocks of reality and their disgraceful excuse for pancakes. Now, pancakes can come in many forms - eg, French-style wide and thin, or American small and plump. But hard and cold is not an acceptable form in any country where I've ever had them. Except, apparently, Ireland.

Well, maybe I'm being too hard. I did have two tolerable meals during my short time there. But things still were annoyingly expensive. And we never did get a chance to try out the Irish excuse for Chinese take-away.

But I'm getting sidetracked, since my time there was not completely spent attempting to eat - it also involved driving! I finally got to do something I'd always wanted to (legally) attempt: driving a car on the wrong side of the road... And more than that, to be able to drive a reverse-configured stick shift. My friend had rented a Toyota mini of some sort and we put me on the contract, so the second day I got to try it out. The gear shift is exactly the same as on an American car (meaning the lower gears are still on the left) and the peddles are the same as well. But you need to use your left hand to toggle the gears. This took a little getting used to, but was not so bad. Still, I think it might have made more sense to have the lower gears on the right because it was a bit of a reach to get into the lower ones. Normally when you drive you spend more time fiddling with the lower ones than the upper ones, so it would seem to make more sense to have the ones you play around with less further away, like on American cars. But oh well, no one asked me...

Harder to get used to was the driving on the opposite side of the road, yet it wasn't really too bad, especially with the steering wheel being on the right. What made it hard was that the roads are very narrow, so there was little room for error. Still, I did well, only hitting the curb once (ok, maybe twice) the whole time.

But then I quit while I was ahead and went back to Germany, waking up at the crack of dawn to take the train in. Actually, it wasn't the crack of dawn, per se, because that didn't occur until after 8am! Europe is a strange, dark place... But I got to the airport on time, caught my flight (on Aer Lingus - first time I've ever flown them), and landed back in Hamburg less than two hours later, an overtired heap. I limped back to my apartment and took a nap for a while. In the evening, after it became dark again (didn't have to wait long...), I went out to the river to meet a friend from school. There we boarded a series of commuter ferries for an impromptu tour of the harbor. The river is quite large at Hamburg - wide and deep - and large cargo ships cruise its waters, while others get drydocked for maintenance. It was a pretty night, very clear, and the lit up city was pleasant to look at as we tooled along its length.

But that was the last of my tourism for the remains of my "vacation," as the friend I was going to visit Berlin with the next day had to cancel. I was initially disappointed, but later I decided I was somewhat relieved because I was pretty tired and would have had a very long day doing it. I was mostly saddened that my scenic tour of cities ending with "-in" would be incomplete, but then again, it's not like I saw all that much of Dublin either. Instead I slept in and then did something I've not done in ages: read for pleasure! I've been shlepping around a 5 or 6 volume tome of Douglas Adams novels with me for YEARS, and finally, FINALLY, got around to reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I wonder how many years it will be before I get to the second installment? (Edit 12/18: Not so long, apparently, as I read it this morning...)

So all that took a little more than 72 hours total, and now I am back on my computer, catching up on all the things I've neglected for the last three days.

Eh. It was worth it.

Having never quite made it out of town again, I was determined to see something of the town where I'd lived for four months before I soon quit it. And hang out one last time with some of the friends I wouldn't get to see again for a long, long time. Last week there was the harbor "cruise" with one of them, Saturday I had gluehwein and a nice German dinner with another, and then on Sunday another friend came over to cook dinner - the dinner she hadn't been able to make the night she hadn't been able to find my party... Monday also afforded the chance to catch up with still more people, leaving just Tuesday as the last opportunity to do so.

In the morning a friend met up with me at my place, and kindly mopped my kitchen floor. Then we went to Wal-Mart, where I astounded him with the magic of American consumerism: the ability to return things (an otherwise foreign concept in Germany, but no problem at all at Wal-Mart). After that it was off to school to give back my locker and building keys, and then it was time to see the sights. Well, actually it was time for lunch. But after that it was time for the sights.

The first stop was the museum of Hamburg history. We managed to both get in on student rates even though I'd just turned in my student ID card (it was also my building key): my friend showed his Bucerius card, and I showed them the Bucerius sweatshirt I was wearing.

Once in we spent many hours there (it was a big museum). I was disappointed that the exhibit on history from 1860-1945 was closed for renovation, but there was a nice exhibit on the Jews of Hamburg. I had not before realized the influence of Sephardic Portuguese Jews on the area.

Even though it was all interesting, it's pretty tiring to walk all over a museum. We perked up a bit when we went outside to walk around the park. Even at 4:30 it was pretty dark (a very annoying feature of northern Europe), but that didn't stop us from playing on the nearby playground. It had some really long zip-wire swings that we tried out a few times, and then I went down a very long, twisty, enclosed, and (need I also add) incredibly dark slide. There was also a jungle gym of sorts made out of tense rope that we climbed on, also in the darkness just to add an extra element of risk and stupidity to our day.

Next to the playground there was an outdoor ice skating rink. There seems to be several of these around Hamburg, and my friend (a native) used to go to them a lot before he went to law school. You could tell, because he acclimated much more quickly than I did once he got on the ice. (Me, I think I had to cast my mind back to the Girl Scouts to remember the last time I went skating...) But that was a fun and impromptu way to spend an hour.

After that we headed in the direction of the Rathaus (city hall). The idea was to visit the Bucerius Kunst Forum next door. The same foundation that built Bucerius Law School also built a small gallery that features one well-curated art exhibit at a time. As Bucerius students we can get in for free. But we never actually got there, seeing how we got sidetracked on the long walk over by a bookstore. Instead we ducked into the Rathaus so I could see its lobby (the Rathaus is a building that survived the bombings of WWII) and then ran an errand at the Christmas market.

By then we were both fading fast from all the walking around we were doing. We popped into McDonalds for dinner, with the idea that I'd be able to treat us to ice cream with the free coupons I had. But due to a communications snafu and general level of fatigue that didn't quite happen. Instead I inhaled my french fries while my friend accidentally took a nap. I was sort of jealous, and had I not had a burger in front of me might have done the same. (It did lead me to make the mental note, however, that, in the future, for scintillating dinnertime conversation it's best not to exhaust your companion beforehand.)

Clearly the day was now over, and he took me home to finish packing. Still, obviously, and embarrassingly, there's a lot that I didn't ever manage to see. I guess that means I'll have to come back.

Posted 12/22.

Nope, I still don't like the Frankfurt airport. A complete pain in the ass to transfer through. Even though the security line moved faster than last time (this time I also wielded my Star Alliance status to go in the even quicker line) it still involved working up a sweat, rushing from one flight to the next across tarmacs and terminals. And woe be the traveler (like me) with unrollable carry-ons: the airport offers luggage carts, but puts barriers up every 50 meters or so to thus prevent you from rolling your bags throughout your entire journey.

I did find it amusing to read in the inflight magazine that Lufthansa thinks it's ready to start using its new monstrous double-decker Airbus planes as early as next year. (Flying into Hamburg you can sometimes see the Airbus factory, with those gigantic aeronautical whales parked on the tarmac.) Lufthansa plans to configure theirs to hold over 500 people. Lately they were cheered to discover that "everything" worked when they tried landing one at the Frankfurt airport in October. Apparently this meant they were able to land it, pull it up to a gate, have the jetways reach the doors, and managed to elevate the catering trucks sufficiently to service it. However I saw nothing that indicated they've figured out how they are planning to get 500 people through the airport in time to make their connections. I think they might want to put some thought into that before they declare that "everything" is fine.

I did also read some good news, though, in the international airport department: apparently the first phase of renovations is complete for Charles de Gaulle's space-age looking but otherwise ineffective terminal 1. Unfortunately, there are three more phases to go. And I think they may have started this one while I was still living there - in 1998! But I do commend their efforts.

I also commend Newark airport, whose international arrivals terminal I just tried out for the first time. I haven't thoroughly tested it, nor tried to change planes from it, but for people planning to stay in New Jersey for a while it seemed decent.

Posted 12/22, written 12/21.

Yesterday I saw Ground Zero for the first time.

I guess I'd probably caught a glimpse of it twice before: once driving past to get to the West Side Highway, and once in October 2001 when the ferry line passed nearby (you could still see the smoldering pile of debris and twisted steel silhouetted in the morning light, even from the river). But I'd never seen it up close. At least not since it became Ground Zero. I do have a very vivid memory of walking up from the river, through the World Financial Center, over the pedestrian bridge, and past the towers in June of 2001. I remember thinking about stopping for sushi for lunch and decided against it for the moment. I have a very specific memory of thinking to myself, "That's ok, I can always come back."

But I hadn't been back. I'm not entirely sure why; it just never came up, I guess. Whenever I went to the city I'd always had other things to do.

But they've recently reopened the World Trade Center PATH train line, and since I was headed to lower Manhattan it made sense to take it. I'd not realized before, however, that the train line actually enters Ground Zero. (I knew that it used enter the World Trade Center area, but I didn't know that it still did after it was reopened.) Most of the time there's nothing to see out the windows of the train - it's underground or underwater - so I was startled when all of a sudden it pulled around the corner and out into daylight, and suddenly I could see out the window that we were in the wide open pits where the buildings had once stood.

I made myself a little late to my lunch appointment because I felt I had to look around. Everything now is so cleaned up it almost looks like nothing's wrong. And I think for visitors who had never been there when the towers were standing it's hard for them to really grasp what was lost. But I can tell. I stood there on the eastern side, looking back towards the World Financial Center buildings I'd walked past on that sunny day in June, and I could see them perfectly clearly. Yet I knew I wasn't supposed to - I never had been able to see them from this vantage before, and something was very wrong that now I could.

I just posted a paean to United Airlines on Larry Ribstein's blog in response to his suggestion that it be thrown to the corporate dissolution wolves. On edit: in the comments he backed away from that suggestion.

He apparently just flew them, didn't have a particularly good experience, and is now embittered. I'm sorry he didn't have a good experience but it does bring to mind something I'd observed before, about who is likely to have a good air travel experience and who is not.

Basically, people who fly a lot will have a much better experience. Even on the same flight: people who fly more often will have a much more satisfying experience than those who fly more occasionally.

Some of that is due to the loyalty rewards. Frequent customers of the same airline get some perks, like better seats. But mostly frequent customers benefit from knowing the airline's system. Every airline has it's own way of processing thousands of passengers daily through its airports. It's a system that focuses on making sure that large volumes of people get to where they need. It's not a system that can afford to focus all its attentions on passengers one at a time. Now, it can and does attend to individual needs (wheelchairs, etc.) but that's part of what's necessary to do to process the large volumes of people. The most upset customers I've seen at airport counters are the ones who demand that the airline focus its entire resources on their particular travel experience. And that just can't happen. Unless the airline is some sort of luxury charter, it's going to have to make resource allocation decisions based on the greater good.

There's actually nothing necessarily wrong with this kind of priority. It doesn't mean that passengers are treated like cattle. Individual needs can still get met, but they get met within the context of what is possible within the system. In my experience, nearly anything is possible, but a traveler needs to know how to ask for it. The trouble with inexperienced flyers is that they don't know the vocabulary of the system, so they don't know how to present their request in a way that would work within in.

I'm not sure that airlines having such a system is necessarily a bad thing. If the exercise of routing large volumes of people through airports were haphazard or ad hoc, whether or not one had a successful travel experience would be left entirely up to chance. At least now, as long as the system is effective and not arbitrary, the predictability leads to a certain equitability among travelers. By letting airlines focus on the collective needs of the (potentially) several hundred people on a flight rather than the individual needs, it is more likely that all those people will have a successful journey.

Still, perhaps it is worth taking steps to make sure that even inexperienced travelers should be able to have positive travel experiences. It's not good if successful air travel depends on overcoming a steep learning curve. But in my experience I don't think the problems result from an obtuseness of the system as much as an obtuseness of the passengers. The ones I've seen be most upset are people who seem not to recognize (or care) that there are dozens and dozens of people all in the same situation, and that their own best chance for satisfaction depends on the airline's ability to satisfy all of them. It's not that their travel story requires their mastery of a particular airline's operational system but merely their acknowledgement that one might even exist, and it isn't out to get them.

Edited.

Today's weather, which involves large quantities of falling snow, reminds me of one of my "Why I like United Airlines" stories:

When I was an undergrad in California, I often took my winter breaks in New Jersey. One year I also decided to pop over to England to visit a friend studying in Cambridge. It was a fun trip: first we spent New Year's Eve with others in his program, and then we popped over to France for a few days. Once back in England I caught a tedious bus service to Heathrow for my flight back to New Jersey, where I was planning to spend a few more days before my return flight to California.

I got to Heathrow and went to check in. I was plenty early and there was only one other woman in line with me. She started saying, though, how her daughter in New York said there was a big storm coming and she'd be surprised if we'd be able to get there without delay. But this was the first I'd heard of it (although, granted, it might have been because it wasn't exactly a big story in France…) and the weather in London was so benign that it was hard to conceive of it being otherwise anywhere else. And the airline was going ahead and checking us in anyway.

In Heathrow the wait usually seems to involve a series of waiting rooms - you don't end up at the gate all at once. But all morning we kept getting called to the next location, until finally we were called for boarding. Upon reaching the gate, however, we were confronted by an airport staff member who said, "What are you doing here? This flight isn't going anywhere."

He was right. It, along with every other flight to the United States east of the Rockies, had been cancelled. But we'd already gone through security and immigration, so it wasn't quite clear what would happen to us. We wandered back in the only direction we could go - to the transfers room. Immigration officials then demanded our landing cards. "We don't have any," we explained. "We never landed, because we never took off." Confused and blustering, the officials nevertheless backed off and let us through.

The airline then rounded us up and put us on buses to go to a nearby hotel which happened to have a United reservations desk in the lobby. We lined up to get rebooked the next day.

At first some of the business people on line were very grumbly. "You don't understand," they complained. "I have to be at some Very Important Meeting tomorrow." But later that day, as the pictures of Manhattan being completely shut down started to come in, they stopped grumbling and started enjoying their time off, since it was apparent that their meetings would have been cancelled anyway.

The only people who were not able to relax were the people with destinations in places other than the US. One woman was trying to get to Japan, where it was not snowing, and where they would not be sympathetic to her missing work as a result of it. So the airline ended up rerouting her eastward to get her out quicker.

Meanwhile, everyone else kicked back for the duration. Our rooms were taken care of, and the airline gave us vouchers for our meals in the hotel restaurants. After the first day they moved us to another hotel that was even better - this one had a swimming pool.

But it did become a little tedious after a while. (And a little claustrophobic: part of me was inwardly screaming, "Just get me off this damn island!") The flights for the next day had all been cancelled, and they refused to rebook for the day after so they could make sure the flights we got on would actually leave. All the airlines were also running into problems now with having more flights out than aircraft back in, so it would take them some time to get this all sorted. My problem, though, was that by the time I would have gotten back to New Jersey I would have missed my flight to California. So I decided that rather than asking them to return me to New Jersey, I'd ask them to send me to the other side of the continent. "Can you just get me to California?" No problem, they said, and put me on a Virgin flight to Los Angeles. The problem was that I had a suitcase left behind in New Jersey, but they agreed to waive the excess baggage fee for when my mom came out to visit in a few weeks and could bring it.

So all in all, I had a very nice time, and was very impressed with how well United had taken care of us. My only costs for the whole thing were for phone calls back home. But lest I feel guilty about their expense, shortly thereafter they announced record profits. And I've been a loyal customer ever since.

Still, it's now the benchmark I hold United to. They've performed marvelously before; I expect no less from them now.

The moot court competition was much more fun to do because I was doing it with a friend. When we're not busy harassing each other about each other's baseball team of choice, we tend to get along pretty well. Still, I can't remember when the last time was when I traveled with someone. True, when I visited Ireland I met my friend there, but we'd come in on separate flights. As was the case in Bangkok, when we didn't even get there the same day... But traveling with someone from Point A to Point B, by plane, is sort of unfamiliar territory for me. Although it was convenient to have someone around who could keep an eye on the suitcases…

The school had booked us on Continental, which at first concerned me. After all, Continental has no reason to be nice to me. And I used to avoid it like the plague. But it was actually pretty nice. They let us fly out on an earlier flight without any problem - something that USAir and Alaska Air stupidly do not - so they get points in my book for that, at least. The flight down to Nashville had us changing planes in Newark, which still feels a little strange to me. I'm not used to Newark being a transit airport - I'm used to it being a destination. I'm also not used to being able to look out the window as we approach and recognize anything familiar (at least not of New Jersey, as I can usually figure out the New York skyline when I can see it…). But as we were nearing the airport I suddenly looked down and saw a landmark I recognized: the Sheraton Crossroads. "There's the Sheraton Crossroads!" I exclaimed. "I had a high school dance there! And Huey Lewis and the News played there once!" (At the Pathmark Tennis Open next door.)

Then once I had that landmark spotted, I could figure out some others. "There's Route 17! There's Ramsey! There's where the Bradlees was where I bought my first Huey Lewis record!" Next I spied the local train line, and with that I could identify a lot more. "There's Huffman's farm! There's the end of my street!" And then, accidentally quoting one of my favorite lines from the movie Hot Shots, I blurted out, "I can see my house from here!" Yep, there it was. Right next to "the intersection where I got hit by a car!"

OK, I guess that was kind of silly. But in all the years I've flown in and out of Newark, I'd never managed to see my house. Which always struck me as odd, because when I used to play in my backyard I'd constantly see planes fly over. We definitely seemed to be under one of the approaches to the airport, but I guess just the one for southerly-traveling planes. Since normally when I fly into Newark I'm flying in from either the west or the south, I guess that's why I never saw my house. Anyway, I found this all very exciting…

Eventually we got to Nashville, where it was dark (for the moment). We caught a cab to our hotel, which was just a quick walk down the street from the Vanderbilt law school. The next day was pretty much spent at the competition, but since we weren't in the finals on Friday afternoon we had some time to walk around during the afternoon. We ended up walking a loop from the hotel to the river, skirting through the edge of the Music Row neighborhood and then going through the historic downtown area. From there we walked north (and uphill) to the capitol building, and then worked our way back to the hotel.

There were some old things to see on the way. For instance, some buildings near the river seem original, as do some near the railroad tracks. However, Nashville has an awful lot of historic plaques around town saying something to the extent of, "Here stood a historic building of historic importance until 1979, when we knocked it down to build this office building."

On the whole, Nashville seemed like a very nice but poorly planned city. For instance, it was a terrible place for pedestrians. Sidewalks would suddenly end at high traffic intersections, with no signs, crosswalks, or traffic lights to help guide us safely across. We may have broken 12,000 local traffic laws trying to get where we were going, but at least we lived to tell about it…

We were scheduled to fly out early Saturday afternoon, and though we wanted to try to get out on an earlier flight, we decided to first take an hour in the morning to walk in the other direction about a mile to check out the Parthenon. Nashville has an art museum built in a building that's a replica of the Parthenon in Greece, right down to the Elgin Marbles decorating its eaves. We didn't have time to go inside, but we did ascertain that the outside did indeed look very Parthenon-like (at least to the extent we could determine it, since neither of us have seen the real thing).

Once back at the airport we tried to get out on an earlier flight routed through Newark, but alas, there was only one seat available on it, and I decided it would probably be best if I didn't ditch Mike in Tennessee. So we ended up on our regularly-scheduled flight to Cleveland. Once in Cleveland we heard them announce that they were overbooked on the flight to Boston and were looking for volunteers to get bumped, so we ended up trading in our seats for $500 vouchers on future flights. I'm very glad we did this, as I was wondering how I was going to pay for all the trips I want to take this year… (On the other hand, this means I'll be flying Continental again…)

Part of the arrangement required them sending us to Newark that evening, so it turns out we got to visit New Jersey again after all. They put us up in the airport Howard Johnson's and then we flew back to Boston the next morning. Unfortunately these arrangements meant that our time in Cleveland was extremely pointless. We didn't even have a chance to go see anything, not even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Instead we channeled the Sex Pistols and didn't go, meaning that over the course of the weekend we'd successfully managed to avoid no less than two music hall of fames, since we didn't go to the Country Music one in Nashville either. (Of course, for that one we weren't even slightly tempted.)

Still, even though we didn't see much in Nashville, it does seem like we got a feel for the place. It was kind of like what I observed in Germany when I went to the competition at WHU: you could either visit a place by looking at its museums, or you could visit a place by meeting its people. And that's what we did - meet the people who call Nashville home and see what their lives were like. Particularly the judges, all but one of whom were members of the local bar. As they spoke to us afterwards with their southern accents, recounting their southern experiences, I felt like we were visiting their world. A world apart from our Yankee one, and yet exactly the same. For all our regional cultural differences, we were still united by a common law.

The intellectual property geek in me liked this sign. Trademark infringement, yay or nay? (I think nay, but I'll reserve final judgment till we finish the course.)

The Church's Chicken lover in me also liked the sign. (Logo is in the middle, just to the right of the Jeep one.) Best fast food fried chicken ever. The restaurants tend to be inefficiently run and the food is sometimes overpriced, but it's the most juicy and flavorful fried chicken I've ever had at a fast food restaurant. Maybe even any other restaurant too. MUCH better than Popeye's or KFC, at any rate. It seems to be a southern chain, although I came to know it because there were three in the Bay Area near where I used to live. I also saw them in Galveston and Bay St. Louis, although sadly I think that one may be closed for now. There was at least one in Nashville that we saw, in fact just about a block away from the billboard, but we didn't have time to go. Too bad, it's yummy.

The sign on this plaque reads:

Captain John Gordon - 1763-1819- First Postmaster of Nashville 1796-1797

Born in Virginia, came to Nashville in 1782. Became a noted defender against the Indians of old Fort Nashboro and the frontier settlements. Captain of a spy company of the Davidson County regiment. Participated in the Nickajack Expedition, which ended Indian atrocities on the Cumberland. As captain of the spies, reporting only to General Jackson. He distinguished himself in every battle of Jackson's Creek Campaign. In 1814 he performed alone a mission of great danger. As Jackson's special envoy to the Spanish Governor of Pensacola, which resulted in the capture of Pensacola and the cession of Florida to the United States. He led his company during the Seminole War of 1817-18. Buried at Columbia, Tenn.

Erected by Division of History
State of Tennessee 1932
And descendents of John Gordon

This plaque was placed in 1932. Would it still have been placed today?

And then there was this...

I now have a new language in my passport: Chinese. I'm in Hong Kong.

I've been here about a day so far, and I already like it a lot. I think it compares favorably to both Tokyo and Bangkok. With regard to the latter, it seems a little more orderly, somewhat less polluted, and a tad bit less crowded. With regard to the former, I think it's just prettier from a topological standpoint, with lots of soaring ridges and open waters, plus I think it's easier to get around as a non-native tourist. Japan was pretty cryptic if you didn't read Japanese. Hong Kong is less so because there's more ambient English on signs and in announcements, plus most people can speak it to some degree if you need it (apparently they all begin learning it in kindergarten).

On the other hand, I think I liked the food better in Tokyo. In Tokyo you could eat just about anything, including a variety of native dishes. In Hong Kong you can find anything, but the prevalent native cuisine doesn't strike me as particularly varied. I'm struck by how plain everything is - lots and lots of barbequed meat, with just rice or a noodle and a few pieces of bok choy. So far I haven't encountered any particularly interestingly flavored sauces. But then again, I've only been here a day, so we'll see. On the other hand, so far the only place I've found which serves salads or anything with fresh fruit or vegetables is McDonalds… There are, however, bakeries everywhere, many with not only various sweet buns but also delicate French patisseries. Unfortunately my favorite Chinese dessert - sesame balls - seems not to be of the region, as I can't find any anywhere (instead I'm forced to settle for almond or walnut cookies, my runner-up favorite Chinese dessert).

But as I said, I've only been here a day. I flew in yesterday, landing at the brand new (or at least pretty darn new) airport. It's a very usable airport as far as I can tell right now. It's amazing what can be accomplished when you can build airports from scratch on gigantic portions of land… My only objection is that there were not a lot of ATMs available in the arrivals terminal, which turned out to be a problem when my withdrawal transaction wouldn't go through. But other than that, it was all very smooth getting out and getting transportation to my hotel.

Actually it's not really a hotel. It's a "guest house," and much more hostel-like. Hence the title to this post, because it's run by the YWCA. The YWCA and YMCA seem to have a bunch of guest houses all over the city. I suppose as these things go they're probably fairly affordable, though they are a bit spartan. The beds are kind of hard and the bathroom is in the hall, but it's pretty clean and safe and offers pretty much all the basics that you need, plus it's not too far to walk from the subway.

Today I took the subway a few stops and went to the history museum. It's a very good museum, and it was enhanced by the excellent free tour that was provided. In the airport I'd picked up several pamphlets put out by the Hong Kong tourist authority. One of them indicated a list of several cultural activities people could do for free. They included everything from Tai Chi classes, to harbor cruises, to various tours led by guides. I caught the one at the museum and very much enjoyed it.

After the museum tour was over I began to walk towards Victoria Harbor. My guest house is in Kowloon, as is the museum. I though I might take the ferry over to Hong Kong island. However, I was jetlagged and started dragging (I'd accidentally been up since 3am!). And then it started raining. So after eating lunch somewhere involving soup, noodles, and roast goose, and after waiting out the rain with a hot chocolate at Starbucks… I went back to the hotel instead.

(A note about Hong Kong: Hong Kong is a region comprised of several parts. There is Hong Kong island, which was taken over by Britain in the 1800s following one of the Opium Wars. There is also Kowloon peninsula, which the British also subsequently took over. However, because of the topography - namely sheer hillsides - there was not a lot of usable land available to use. So two things happened: one, much of the water was infilled to create more buildable land, and two, Britain gained control of even more land through a 99-year lease from China. Much of this land is called the New Territories and connects Kowloon peninsula to the mainland. It also included various islands, some of which, like the one the airport and Disneyland is connected to, are quite large. When the lease expired in 1997, Britain gave up the whole region, since it was not possible to sustain Kowloon and Hong Kong island without the additional land, and because the treaty that had given Britain control of those parts in the first place was not equitable. Hong Kong is now a Special Administrative Region of China, meaning that it is Chinese territory, but it is governed locally in much the same way that it was when the British were in control. According to the tour guide, not much changed following the handover in 1997 but I wonder how long the status quo can remain. Though the policy is stated as "one country, two systems" it does seem that the dichotomy in liberties available in Hong Kong versus the mainland must create some tensions. I thought it interesting to note, for instance, that on tv there were commercials both telling people that they needed to get their new ID cards, and also that they should be aware of their human rights. On the other hand, it's not necessarily in China's interest to make Hong Kong more Chinese. Right now Hong Kong seems to serve as a front door to China. It's Chinese, but it operates more as a Western locale. Businesses like doing business there because it's predictable to them, more so than dealing in China proper would be. So it's in China's interest to make sure they continue to feel comfortable there.)

There are people in the world who would be impressed by this: I've now visited every Disneyland in the world. Last year I did Tokyo, on several occasions I've done Paris, in the 1990s I did LA a few times, and as a kid I went to Orlando. Today I added Hong Kong.

It was both better and worse than I expected. It was better in that it was vastly less crowded than I expected. I'd heard horror stories of people climbing the fences to get in, but either everyone's all been scared off, or no one really felt like coming on a dreary Sunday in March. While some people there were tourists (like me), I suspect visitors are mostly locals who could decide to do this on a whim.

It was also less boring than I expected. Or at the very least, I was not bored being there. I was worried though because the park is very small, and there aren't a whole lot of rides. And it turns out that it's worse than that, because not only are there not very many rides, but the rides that are there are pretty boring. Even Space Mountain, the only roller coaster, was a letdown (it's not nearly as good as the one in France). There was one ride that I liked however: Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters. It wasn't that the ride itself was interesting, but it was interactive. You got to shoot stuff with a laser gun and run up a score. It was like being inside a videogame. I ended up riding it five times… But everything else was pretty forgettable. I did skip the flying Dumbo ride and the spinning teacups, but I even went so far as to ride the circumnavigating train and the merry-go-round. Still nothing was all that exciting. The revolving space ships were boring, the jungle cruise was completely unfunny, Winnie the Pooh was pointless… And the park is missing some seminal rides that all the others have, like the haunted house, Pirates of the Caribbean, and "It's a Small World," which seems like it most certainly should belong someplace like here. However the park will soon be adding Autopia, so at least that's something.

Since there wasn't much to do, I decided to take in the available shows and parades. Normally I avoid that kind of stuff - I'm there for the rides! - but it wasn't like I was sacrificing doing something I might have liked better. And Disney does do these things well, particularly with respect to effects and illusions (e.g., the show "Mickey's PhilharMagic" offered my first experience with smell-o-vision).

Plus the shows supported my real reason for going to Disneyland yesterday. It wasn't that Disneyland offered a kind of fun I couldn't get anywhere else (obviously I could have had more fun at any other Disneyland…) but that it was the only time I'd get to see Disneyland in Hong Kong. From a cultural standpoint, it's fascinating. How does Disneyland play in these other places?

For one thing, there's the language issue. In France, for instance, that means that some of the characters have different names (e.g., Chip and Dale are Tic and Tac). Then there's always the question of how much will be translated into the native language, and how much will remain in English. Then there's the question of how much the language really matters, for even some times when I couldn't understand what was being said, I still completely understood what was being said…

There's the issue of food: American, or local, or some combination of the two? In Hong Kong most of the restaurants did Chinese food, but each of them did Chinese food from a different region of China. Then within each restaurant there was a counter for ordering "noodles" (usually some form of soup or dim sum), BBQ (some sort of meat, like pork, chicken, or duck) over rice, and "wok," which included various stir-fry dishes. There was also a restaurant with American food, where I discovered that no matter where in the world Disney is, it consistently manages to ruin fried chicken.

Then there's the issue of how people interact with the park. How to they handle lines? Are they pushy? Are they polite? And how to the little kids interact with this world? (In my estimation, exactly the same everywhere.)

As I write this it's nearly 10am in Hong Kong on 3/27. Which means that it's nearly 9pm in Boston, and 6 pm in California, on 3/26. While I'm working on my today, everyone else I know is awake and still working on their yesterday. Thanks to the Internet, so can I. I can live two days at once…

Pretty cool, huh? Well, I guess it depends on how good a day it is… If you're having a bad day, you probably wouldn't want to live it twice. But sometimes time zones can work out in your favor. Like on my 18th birthday, which began in Russia and ended in New Jersey. Meaning that I got a 36-hour birthday. What better day to have made longer than the one when you're special?

Meanwhile, I've noted that my flight back from Hong Kong will take 13 minutes…

I can't help but notice how many ads I see related to public health. PSA's flashing on the screens in the subway warning people not to touch live birds. Billboards warning against Dengue Fever. Commercials on television warning about foot and mouth disease…

But those aren't the only advertisements I've seen particular to Hong Kong. On TV I've also seen commercials talking about how everyone must get their new state IDs. Along with commercials reminding everyone to know their human rights.

And then there were the ads I saw in the subway. Ads with hotlines for gender and sexuality. Ads advising people to stop corruption. Ads requesting people not turn a blind eye to money laundering…

Yesterday (it was "yesterday," wasn't it?) when I went to check in for my flight home I got my first spontaneous bump up to business class ever. Well, it's about time, United. Over 300,000 lifetime miles flown, Premier member since 1999… what were you waiting for?

I have a few theories. One, that United has been reading my blog and is thrilled that someone has been publicly standing up for the company for a change. Or two, that it somehow senses that I will be soon entering a profession with high discretionary income and flush employers who can pay for business travel, and it wanted to give me a peek at what I've been missing flying coach all these years. It's sort of like crack - the first hit is free, so that you suddenly think you can't live without it. Who can possibly go back to coach after experiencing the luxury of a business class seat?

True, I did feel like a kid in a candy store a bit. The two best parts were getting to hang out in the Red Carpet Club before the flight (never gotten to do that before) and that it was a 747 and I got to ride in the hump! I've never even seen what it was like upstairs before, and now I got to ride back from Asia in the upper bunk, so to speak.

On the other hand, you'd expect with the larger seats you'd be able to get more sleep. But that didn't account for the guy next to me who snored for the ENTIRE FLIGHT. Actually, it wasn't really snoring as much as what sounded like his larynx exploding every 53 seconds. So much for arriving well-rested… Also, and I recognize that United just went through a bankruptcy, but it positions itself in the market as something better than a bargain carrier. And yet in terms of amenities it's getting a little chintzy and frayed around the edges. Coach class on Singapore Air and Thai Airlines, apart from the seats, is more like business class on United. (Standing out with Thai is the food, and with Singapore the entertainment.) Even 777 coach class on United does better with the entertainment. I really don't understand why United hasn't yet refitted the coach seats on the 747 with the in-seat tvs. And now that Internet service can be offered in-flight, it seems like they should provide plugs in all the seats so that people can use it. I'm sure the cut United would get from people purchasing the service would make it worth the investment. Since United is serious about competing in the Asian market, it seems like it really should do these things to keep from losing out.

(But that was something else I did like about the business class seat, getting to use the in-seat outlet. It's not a regular outlet - it's a DC one. But a couple of years ago after I lost my laptop cord I bought a travel one that had adapters for DC current. I'd used it once in a car, but this was the first time I ever got to use it in the plane.)

Also, the weakest link in the whole semi-circumnavigational exercise was the last leg, Chicago to Boston. In the end I wasn't really affected other than being an hour late, but apparently there'd been a bunch of flight cancellations which made the seat assignment process more intense than usual. In situations like that I would recommend that United have more than one gate agent trying to handle everything. If you want people to work with you, you'll have to give them something to work with.

I already found out (the hard way) that Spanish oreos were no good. FYI - neither are Chinese...

As our last hurrah before the bar, a friend and I took the day to go to Cape Cod. But not for a day at the beach - for a bike trip. A respectable, significant mileage bike trip (all told about 40 miles). I haven't done one of those in years, I don't think. Definitely not since my bike and I were both in Boston together. In fact, this marked the first time I've ever really ridden around New England at all.

Fortunately the Cape is a pretty nice place to ride, and today was a gorgeous summer day to do this: temp in the low 80s, low humidity, calm winds, nary a cloud... To get there we took the high-speed catamaran ferry. Well, after the initial snafu of missing the 8:30am ferry because it apparently was the 8:00 ferry... But then we went over to the other line at caught the 9:00am one. An hour and a half later, we were there, in Provincetown (on the northern tip of the Cape). Then we hopped the bikes and rode down to Wellfleet, about 15 miles away, along the way discovering that cape Cod isn't quite as flat as you might expect... There we ate lunch (where I discovered that M&M pancakes weren't quite all I remembered...), and then we biked the 15 miles back north.

I really, really, really wanted to swim as part of this excursion, but we didn't have enough time to find and bike to an ocean-front beach. So instead we went to one of the bay side beaches. The bay is an interesting swimming experience because it is very shallow for a very long way out. But that was ok with me. I only had 15 minutes anyway, so I floated around a bit. It was fantastically refreshing. Getting out I told my friend it was the best 15 minutes of my life... (Oddly enough, he didn't believe me...). Then it was back to town for a quick ice cream followed by boarding the 4:00pm ferry back. On board the ferry people were very nice and happy to explain all about how the boat worked, different landmarks we saw coming back into port, etc. And it was a lovely day on the water.

Back in Boston came the only annoying part of the trip: navigating Boston on a bike. As the new construction gets finished the bike situation gets better, but it's still a hodgepodge of all sorts of maze-like streets and menacing automobiles. We eventually ended up by Storrow Drive, which was bustling with people coming to see the rehearsal for the July 4th Boston Pops concert.

Soon, however, we came home. Where I am now stiff, greasy, sunburned, and bruised - but satisfied.

The end.

My trip to China yesterday began as all trips to China begin - by being met at the airport by a tall German. Oh, is that not how most of them begin? Too bad, because it was enormously helpful to have him there. Of course it was just really nice to see him too. He was a friend I met at Bucerius who's doing a summer internship in Shanghai, and he nicely offered to pick me up at the airport. Never mind that being met at airports is one of my favorite things in the world, it made entering this strange, new place where I can't read or speak the language much less traumatic. Especially since getting to my hotel was no small feat. At first we were hampered by the fact that he'd managed to lose the printout he made of the map pinpointing the hotel somewhere on the subway. But that turned out to be ok, since it turned out that the location shown on the map and the actual location of the hotel bore no relation to each other. Still, eventually we got there, and eventually the non-English speaking staff decided to honor the reservation, and it didn't turn out to be in such a bad location after all, but it all seemed a little too arduous given how hot and tired I was at the time.

On the upside, the hotel was located between where my friend lives and where he works, so he was able to help orient me to the area. It's in Pudong, the "new" Shanghai area that's been subject to massive development in recent years. An easy bus ride from the hotel west and you end up at the Orient Pearl TV tower. I'm not sure why so many countries are so enamored with tall, bulbous TV towers, but they do often afford nice views of their respective cities. So today I paid too much to ascend to the penultimate bulbous sphere and finally got my first good look at Shanghai.

Afterwards I walked around the area for a bit. It seems to be developing more like the US than Europe. What I mean is that while there's obviously some thought being put into the street plan and the need to preserve open park space, each building rises up separately from its own footing. Whereas in places like La Defense, or even Crystal City in Virginia, developments are systems of towers and plazas, with one plan for cars and another for pedestrians. But here it looks like not enough thought has really been given to pedestrian flow. They share the streets with the cars, but I'm not sure that's a good arrangement for either constituency. Especially given Chinese driving habits...

I decided to fjord the traffic anyway and made my way to the nearby mall. It looked like pretty much every other mall in the world (US, Israel, Europe), although in my experience it's really only American malls that ever offer anyplace to sit down. The top floor of this mall was full of restaurants, so I ate at a Chinese fast food one. I was a little worried about having had a fountain soda though because it had ice, and you can't drink the tap water in Shanghai. But it's really hot here, I was really thirsty, and my two-word Chinese vocabulary does not include how to ask for no ice. So hopefully I'll live.

After lunch I then went to the supermarket in the basement (a typical feature of malls in Europe and Japan) to find something to take back for dinner since I didn't imagine I'd have the energy to go out later. Problem: no refrigeration. But except for the free block of cheddar cheese they were giving out... I think everything else (sliced pineapple, pistachios, pea snacks (pulverized peas reconstituted into pod-like shapes and sold like potato chips), and oranges) should survive a few hours in the air conditioned room.

Written 8/5, posted 8/7.

Foreign travel seems to beget more foreign travel. One of the reasons I came to China at all is because one my friends from the Bucerius program was from Shanghai, and so today I visited her.

We agreed to meet at 10am in front of the KFC at the Ruffles Shopping Center. I got there in plenty of time but still managed to be late because it turns out I was waiting in front of the wrong KFC. The shopping center around the corner also had one, you see. In fact, there are a ton of American fast food outlets all over Shanghai. Mostly McDonalds and KFC, and every 500 feet or so... plus lots of Starbucks, at least one Burger King and word has it that Dairy Queen has also recently arrived.

Once our paths finally crossed we went over to the Shanghai Museum where we saw all the exhibits, including one on Assyria on loan from the British Museum. Unfortunately the exhibit on coins was closed, which was too bad because I'd been watching episode 4 of a documentary on Chinese coins in the hotel and I was looking forward to learning what I'd missed in episodes 1-3...

Then we went to some sort of noodle soup restaurant. They bring you out a big bowl of hot broth, a separate bowl of noodles, and a tray of 12 small bowls filled with ingredients for you to thrown in (e.g., sprouts, chicken, Chinese sausage, mushrooms, bamboo, a tiny egg, etc.) After that we went to the Old City, which I didn't really like since (a) it was a recreation and not original, and (b) it was kind of a tourist trap. We did go to the garden that they've recreated there, which, though still too crowded, offered some respite from the heat and tumult on the streets.

Our next mission was to find a nice piece of cake at one of the patisseries all over Shanghai. We found one at the Ruffles Center, but there was no place to sit there nor anything to drink, so we went to a Starbucks for a frappuccino and a seat to go along with our cake.

By then we'd run out of steam so we went back to her apartment where her parents were eager to meet me. Unfortunately I was pretty tired and not my usual charming, boisterous self and thus unable to fully enjoy the enormous dinner they cooked. There were plates of goose meat, shrimp, clams, fish, edamame (not called that there), cucumber, bamboo, lotus and meat pancakes, some sort of river fish of undetermined English name (though my money is on freshwater eel), mushrooms, some sort of melon soup, two kinds of sesame dumpling-like desserts, watermelon slices, enormous grapes, and some sort of cold bean-barley soup. There's also the possibility I'm forgetting something... I did the best I could, but I still ended up getting teased for being a light eater.

Eventually it was time for me to leave and go back to my hotel. But it was a really nice day and nice to spend time with my friend. It was weird in a way, because here I was half a world away from anywhere I might belong, but hanging out with my friend it was almost hard to tell because we have law school in common. Yeah, sure, her career path in China will be different than mine, but not all that different considering that she gets her internships with the same American firms that my American friends work at in the US. Plus we have the Bucerius program between us, something that stood apart from the rest of our home law school experiences anyway. It's interesting the way the law becomes a unifying force, and I think it's probably good.

Written 8/6, posted 8/7

Today's adventure was to get myself from Shanghai to Harbin. I'll write more later about Harbin but today was strictly about getting to it. Tomorrow will be about actually seeing it. Unlike the last few days when I had China-savvy friends to assist me, today's adventure was done entirely solo. And like my adventure of plunging into Cambodia on my own, it worked out. And was probably just as dumb.

Well, I'm joking. It's just travel - there's nothing innately hard about traveling. You pretty much just get into your vehicle and wait for it to reach its destination. There's not much else you can do. The hard part is just managing to put yourself in the right vehicle...

If this all sounds like foreshadowing, it's not. I did get myself into the right vehicle(s). I just wasn't entirely sure that was the case at various points...

I started out catching a cab from the Super 8 in Shanghai. One of the cleaning women there made it her personal mission to help me out, taking it upon herself to carry my suitcase down the stairs, running out to hail me the taxi... Then I worried that the cab driver and I were not of like minds as to the destination. I wanted to go to the airport "Maglev" train (the high-speed magnetically-levitated train). However, apparently in Chinese it's not called "Maglev," so giving directions was sadly not so straightforward. But I got there, and I boarded the train, and then I figured out how to check-in for Shanghai Air. It wasn't too bad flying them, actually. There was sufficient English to help me out, there's nothing tremendously different about flying in China than in the US, and on a 2.5 hour flight they served a hot meal (ok, that part's different...).

All that was the easy part of my day. More complicated was trying to figure out what to do with myself upon reaching the Harbin airport, which is nowhere near Harbin. My Rough Guide said there was an airport bus but otherwise gave no information. So while shooing away eager cab drivers who wanted to drive me (which, according to the guidebook, would have cost 150 yuan), I tried to find the airport bus, which would only cost 20. Eventually I did, but the lack of any English signs attached to it had me worried for quite a while that the bus I had boarded would deposit me somewhere other than where I wanted to be. Fortunately it eventually put me exactly where I expected. And the girl next to me, whose English vocabulary was twice the size of my Chinese one, was eventually able to reassure me that it would so I didn't spend the whole ride stressed out. (Only the first third of it.)

Then I caught a cab, which I was now able to do like a determined pro, also because my friend had written my hotel's address in Chinese for me. Not having to actually speak to anybody in China makes traveling there so much easier... Of course I'm joking, because I would never recommend being so uncommunicative as a deliberate strategy. It's amazing the amount of communication that can pass between two determined parties, whether it's the girl explaining the bus stops to me or the maid telling me to be careful because the stairs are slippery. For that last example I have no idea what she actually said, but I do know what she said...

I'm now ensconced in an over-priced Holiday Inn near the neighborhood I'll explore tomorrow. At $50/night it's practically a fortune in China, but the creature comforts it offers are nice to enjoy right now. Besides, when you consider that in the US a Motel 6 costs about as much, it's practically a steal...

My last post was made at the business center inside the Holiday Inn hotel where I was staying. As I got up to leave, the woman who was apparently the attendant for the business center told me there would be a 75 yuan (~ $10) charge for my hour and a half use of the computer. Um... what? A charge?? Since when???

(A) When I asked at check-in whether there was a computer the woman made no mention of there being a charge,
(B) there was a sign in the lobby advertising how wireless access was free,
(C) the last hotel I stayed at in China offered free use of a computer,
(D) the last hotel I stayed at with a "business center" allowed free use of it,
(E) there was not a single shred of paper in my room or sign in the business center itself notifying me of the charges, and
(F) the attendant never mentioned it until I was ready to leave.

For all these reasons I won the argument with the hotel not to be charged. But it was uncomfortable. The attendant apparently was supposed to have told me the rate and didn't, so by complaining I think I accidentally got her into trouble and I feel bad about that. On the other hand, 75 yuan is pretty expensive even by US standards. And you just can't stick guests with hidden fees. The way I saw it, if this had simply been a misunderstanding between cultures, of my American expectations running afoul of the way things are done in China, I would have been in the wrong to complain. Lesson learned, albeit expensively. But this was a hotel very much trying to play "western," and as such I didn't think it at all out of line to make it play "western" properly. Given the disproportionate price of everything connected with the hotel as compared to what the costs would be in the local economy, the American brand name, the American satisfaction guarantee noted on a placard in the bathroom... the hotel is obviously exploiting westerners' desire for the predictability of western hostelry. So I felt it reasonable to hold it accountable for meeting those expectations accordingly.

(Then again, I was hot/tired/cranky after traveling, and which is not a good time to mess with me... On the other hand, by virtue of it being a hotel it should have expected its guests to be hot/tired/cranky at some point and not trifled with them...)

But I note this saga because it was just one of many occasions yesterday where the juxtaposition of East and West became glaringly apparent. The city of Harbin itself is another example. Although the Qin dynasty may have ruled from the general area of Harbin (the city is in the center of the northeast wing of China) it was mostly Europeans - particularly Russians - who developed it into the city it is today starting a little over 100 years ago. Though it became almost 100% Chinese after communism arrived in 1949, plenty of vestiges of its Russian-ness remain in its overall city plan and surviving architecture. Particularly near the river lots of near-century old European-style buildings remain, with most of them marked with plaques identifying in Chinese and English when and why they were built. Though Shanghai also has European-style buildings, Harbin differs in that it wasn't really developed that way by a colonial power. While Harbin may have briefly been under the control of Russia, I don't think it was long ruled by it. I think it was settled mostly by Russian tradespeople who saw it as being a good crossroads, near as it is to Siberia, Korea, Mongolia, and the rest of China to the south.

In fact Harbin today again takes its place as a crossroads. Back when I had decided to go visit it on my trip I thought I'd find a sleepy little town falling to pieces after its original residents were all driven off. Instead I found a bustling metropolis of more than 9 million people, with commercial enterprise everywhere. For instance on the boulevard driving in from the airport there are gleaming new shops of just about every automobile maker imaginable. The main artery in the old section is now a pedestrian shopping zone, with department stores and boutiques and American fast food restaurants taking up new residence in those old Russian buildings. In fact Harbin provides many outlets for purchasing Russian goods (I purchased a matroshka doll of Chinese government leaders to add to my collection), while at the same time hosting at least two of those quintessentially American outlets: Wal-Mart.

While it recently made news that Wal-Mart is about to throw in the towel in Germany, it's expanding in China. (Interestingly so are unions of Chinese Wal-Mart workers, which the Chinese news channel said are constitutionally protected, but that's an issue for discussion for another day.) I decided I had to see what Wal-Mart was like in China, so I went in. The bottom floor was a grocery store, but like no American grocery store I've ever seen. Not only did Wal-Mart carry ingredients unimaginable in Arkansas, but the way it sold them - in gross - would never happen in the US. There were bins and bins of frozen fish. Bins of chopped meat, that consumers would scoop out what they wanted and put into their own bags. Only some meat was pre-packaged and the rest was out for the customers to wrap themselves.

Half of the second floor was dry-good groceries, and the rest of the store was the miscellaneous household goods that you'd normally expect. I decided I would try to buy something made in the USA, you know, for revenge... And I couldn't. There wasn't a single American thing in the whole damn store. There were American goods, yes, but they were all made somewhere outside of the US under license and then imported into China (if that's not where they were made). In thinking about it, I suppose that makes sense. It's both cheaper to produce and cheaper to ship if made locally. There's little that the US could offer that would be so special as to make it worth the higher production and shipping costs to get it to China. But I guess I hadn't expected it to be this way since in Europe you can often find things produced in the US that are imported into Europe and then re-labelled locally.

So my fabulous plan was very nearly stymied until I found the one shelf in the entire store with imported products. They came from all over the world, not just the US (and interestingly the bottles of Jack Daniels and cola apparently came from Great Britain). The American products were pretty much just packages of microwave popcorn (whose grease had soaked through the packaging), Frank's Hot Sauce, French's mustard, and Swiss Miss hot chocolate packets. I think that was pretty much it. I bought the hot chocolate just for the principle of the thing, since I really have no call for mustard right now. And I also bought a bottle of the local Harbin beer. It says its the oldest beer in China. I don't know if that's true, but I thought it was quite good. Now I say this as someone who doesn't really like beer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt if you must, but I find my taste tends to run towards blander, light beers because I don't like the bitterness. This beer seemed to have that proper bitter taste that beer fans seem to like, but was the smoothest beer I have ever drunk. No aftertaste to contort my face - the taste at the beginning was the taste at the end and each sip slipped right down. I would definitely drink it again if I could get it in the US.

But my day wasn't about drinking beer and eating KFC in China (or watching the previous day's Yankee game live on satellite tv, which was a waste of time since it was already the next day where I was so I should already have known how it turned out...). It was about seeing the city and seeing what it had kept of its past. One of the most ornate examples that has been preserved is the former Orthodox church St. Sophia, now the city's museum of art and architecture. There used to be hundreds of different churches and temples all over Harbin - Orthodox, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, etc. This one still had some of its interior decorative painting still visible, although now the walls were hung with pictures of old Harbin, rather than religious icons (although there were a few).

I did find the introductory signs near the entrance inadvertently amusing though: full-on propaganda, not wanting to validate the pre-communist order to things, it nonetheless expressed that it was important to preserve the city's history, even if it wasn't good history, which I think is a good attitude for modern China to have. But in railing about the classism of the past, how the poor were left to fend for their own meager subsistence while the rich spent money "like water," I couldn't help but note the irony of the town now being so consumed with commercialism once again.

Although it was a little expensive to get there, I spent only a short time in Harbin. One day was spent getting to it, the next day was spent seeing its old downtown area, and the next day was spent traveling away from it. Had I spent a few more days there I might have been able to see the somewhat nearby nature preserve (apparently it has some Siberian tigers) or the WWII war crimes site (where Japanese soldiers perpetrated Menegele-like experiments on Chinese people), assuming I could have figured out how to get there. I had my hands full just trying to figure out how to get to/from the airport. Harbin does seem to get a lot of foreign travelers (especially from Japan, Korea, and Russia) but since most of them are likely business people traveling with expense accounts, they are charged accordingly. As a result I didn't find Harbin a particularly affordable place, although the taxis may have been a bit cheaper there than in other cities in China.

In any case, the rule of thumb for sane traveling is that travel days are travel days, and nothing else should be expected from them. The traveling is enough of an adventure itself. On this occasion I woke up in Harbin very early to catch a cab to the CAAC hotel, from where I caught the airport bus, which got me to the airport ridiculously early for my flight to Beijing, where I had to figure out yet another airport bus and then find my hotel. It all worked (correct bus line was boarded, hotel was located) but it was kind of messy. Beijing is supposed to get an airport train in time for the Olympics, and it really needs it. The city is just way too massive and teeming to easily insert yourself into without some infrastructure to help pry it open for you.

I'd thought I had it pretty well worked out though. My hotel was near the train station, Beijing Zhan, which my guidebook said the airport bus stopped at, and I had the address written in Chinese characters (necessary if you need to hail a cab). But I didn't know where it was exactly with respect to the train station, and I also underestimated just how spread out things in Beijing are. It was sort of like Warsaw in that respect, where small blocks on my guidebook's map were actually 1/2 a kilometer long... I stumbled off the bus when it reached its apparent (final?) stop somewhere slightly west of the train station. Prevented from reaching the sidewalk by all sorts of gates and barriers, I ended up walking in the street (a pretty big street) towards the station entrance, thinking I could find a cab there to take me the rest of the way since I didn't have the slightest idea where to go. The problem was that I couldn't find the taxi stand. Buses, cars, bikes, tuk-tuks, taxis, and throngs of people all converged in front of the station in a confused mess, and I couldn't see any pattern to it that would indicate where taxis might be queuing. It turns out there was a taxi stand a bit further on, but I had already given up and hailed the first one I saw, thereby apparently forcing him to get dispensation from the monitoring police to pick up this unauthorized fare. It was a quick 10 yuan for him though, because after making the next right, and then the next right after that, we quickly arrived at my apparently walking-distance hotel. I was a little nervous upon arrival, though. I expected it to be on some big street; but instead it was tucked off of a little lane behind the train station. But it was fine. The hotel itself was fairly new, and there was nothing wrong or unsafe with the neighborhood. On closer inspection it all seemed pretty residential.

The hotel is the yellow building on the left.

It had an interior courtyard done Roman-style.

The inside of the second room.

The room I had booked wasn't ready when I checked in so they gave me a different room for the first night. Conveniently, this room had a computer with Internet access in it, so I spent the rest of the evening putzing around with it. But not before making my way back to the station to pick up some dinner from the KFC in it. KFC in China is ubiquitous, possibly even more ubiquitous than McDonalds. And I think it's safe to say that there are more public portraits of the Colonel hanging up around China these days than Chairman Mao. Why even on this evening I had a choice about going to this KFC, or the one across the street...

But the cross-section of people I had to wander through in the plaza in front of the station seemed like a representative sample of today's China. There were travelers of all stripes (mostly Chinese but some Western), commuters, peasants, police, vendors, people with suitcases, people with bundles and boxes. Rich China, poor China, new China, old China. It's a country in transition, and that evening on the Beijing Zhan plaza was a window into it.

The next morning in Beijing before heading out I changed rooms to the one I'd reserved, one that didn't have a computer. While this change was bad for my blogging, it was good for my sightseeing. I walked back to the train station, where there was a subway stop. The subway felt much different than Shanghai's, which itself was like Hong Kong's, having apparently been built by the same company. That one was all modern and streamlined; this one by contrast reminded me of the ones in Russia, with its austere marble-like interiors and flimsy paper tickets. (They do, however, also seem to use the stored-value RFID cards.) The thing about Beijing generally is that even if the rest of modern China makes you forget, Beijing reminds you that China is still a communist country. Though modern development is rampant and foreign commercial endeavors abound, Beijing is still largely shaped by its post-1949 past. Hence the strong aesthetic reminiscent of places like Warsaw and Moscow, and hence the inhuman scale it presents itself on to tourists.

Then again, Beijing has always had a thing for massive scale, as evidenced by the Forbidden City, which is where I spent most of the day. To get to it I first needed to walk north through the enormous Tianamen Square, doing my best to avoid what my guidebook warned were hustlers (Chinese people who would approach you unbidden and say, "Hi, where are you from?" which was a social habit I encountered nowhere else in China but here) and souvenir vendors and even just the crowds of people themselves. I also gaped at the incredibly long line snaking around of people waiting to see Mao in his mausoleum. I'm not great at making these kinds of estimates, but I'd have to think that the line was at least a kilometer long.

Still heading north I eventually entered a large, ancient gate yet still was not yet inside the Forbidden City. More northerly walking was necessary just to hit the ticket booth, and then once inside, even with four hours or so of walking more I still never reached the backside of the complex. Then again, part of that was because I was poking around some of the passages and "palaces" located to the side of the main north-south axis. The Forbidden City, now called the Palace Museum, is where Chinese emperors lived for 500 years. It's a walled city, where commoners were kept out, and filled internally with more walls and temples and "palaces" (residential-type buildings where wives and concubines and such lived), with complexes within complexes. It's hard to describe how vast it all is, though. Everything is very spread out and isolated by design. But I liked that about it, even when the skies did open up with thunder and lightning and pour down buckets and buckets of water. At the time I was off in some quiet wing and could take cover under an awning. It was peaceful there, watching the rain come down, away from the bustle and noise and pollution of Beijing. The weather all over China during my trip had been hot and sticky, and coupled with the air pollution I found the atmosphere in Beijing particularly to be suffocating. Being caught in the rain in some quiet, ancient courtyard was a nice change. (All the buildings also are protected by lightning rods, so the thunder wasn't a concern.) I wasn't alone there, but I've noticed that in China, if you are in a space with fewer than a dozen other people around you, for all intents and purposes you can consider yourself "alone"...

The only problem with the weather was that so much rain fell that certain parts of the complex got kind of flooded. Not in any damaging way, but in ways that involved wading through large puddles here and there. So after having already spent many hours there and being drained of energy I eventually left and made my deceptively long way back to the hotel. The hotel conveniently had a restaurant in it so I was able to get some takeout for my room. Inconveniently there was very little I could recognize on the menu - even the English version of the menu they had given me. I really wasn't up for eating things like turtle... but I still wasn't sure what I had ordered. Happily it turned out to be sweet and sour pork, which was pretty good.

This trip was different from most of my other trips in several ways. For one, it involved China... For another, I spent more than a week in a country I was not living in. And, perhaps most distinctively, I didn't do this trip alone.

I did pieces of it by myself, but in addition to seeing my friends in Shanghai, for the second half (or so) of this trip I was joined by Koichi, who came in from Japan in time to join me for my second full day in Beijing. I'm not really used to traveling with other people, but when I'd gone to visit him in Japan the year before it had demonstrated that we could travel around in Asia a bit without killing each other... So we figured this could work. Besides, with his 3 semesters of Chinese language study and native Japanese language skills he was fairly literate, which made ordering food in restaurants and riding buses a little more predictable. His company enabled some marathon Uno games during our downtimes, which would not have been nearly so exciting had I been on my own...

Anyway, on this next day we decided to do a tour of some of the things outside of Beijing. While my guidebook said you could get to them on your own, we decided it was worth spending ~$25 to not have to deal with the shlep. There are tours offered everywhere; we went with the one offered in our hotel. Interestingly most of the tours are for Chinese people. There are Western tourists in China, and increasingly there will be more, but most of the tourist infrastructure seems designed to handle intra-China tourists, not just in Beijing but all over. I thought this was kind of nice, since while things may have been "touristy," because it was Chinese touristy it still had an air of authenticity that other touristy places don't often have. On the other hand, it could also mean that your tour will be in Chinese... Although in this case our tour guide provided an English translation to the 5 non-Chinese people on board the bus.

The first, albeit unadvertised, stop on the tour was at some official jade factory where some pushy English-speaking guides rushed us through a few presentation rooms so we would have lots of time to buy things in the gift shop. But soon we arrived at the Great Wall, at Badaling. Badaling is apparently one of the more touristy spots to see the Wall, I think because it's one of the more convenient spots to get to from Beijing. While I find being harassed by souvenir vendors really annoying, the Wall was still the Wall and I was even somewhat impressed by the vendors who had lugged their goods up so high onto it. Where we were there really was a lot of climbing involved. We hiked up about 20 minutes and could have kept going if we weren't worried about being able to come down in time to meet our bus. The views from where we were supposedly were spectacular, but we wouldn't know because we were shrouded in a thick fog. But like the weather the day before at the Forbidden City, it enhanced the experience. It felt nice and ethereal to climb into the quiet, white stillness.

When we returned to the bus the guide told us about an old saying that went something like, "Once you've visited the Great Wall you can call yourself a man." As far as I can tell, though, the experience doesn't seem to have the gender transformative properties the saying would seem to suggest...

Next stop was lunch, where they took us to a multi-level Chinese restaurant that seemed to have many banquet rooms. Lunch was included in the tour price, so they sat us all at 3 large tables and dropped a bunch of different dishes on the lazysusan before us: a soup, a fish dish, rice, some sort of meat and cabbage dish, a sweet and sour dish or two, some red bean paste-filled egg rolls (my favorite), and probably some other stuff I was forgetting. It was all family-style with sharing, which was nice, except that the Chinese don't really believe in serving utensils. People kept helping themselves with their own chopsticks.

Speaking of health and hygiene, the next stop was at some sort of Chinese herbal medicine outfit. I'm not quite sure how better to describe it. They brought us into a classroom of sorts, where two "nurses" gave a quick overview in English and Chinese about the wonders of Chinese medicine. Then everyone applauded when two "professor doctors" came into the room to give free examinations. It's not that I don't think there's not merit to Chinese medicine. Its approach to homeopathy and balance can provide benefits overlooked by Western medicine. But that doesn't mean this place wasn't a racket. I let them do a free diagnosis on me, just to see what they would say. The "doctor" did the three-finger touch of my wrist, looked at my complexion, looked at the color of my tongue, asked me my age and where I was from, and then asked about a few symptoms they thought I had. "Tired?" Yeah... "Pain in back or shoulder?" OK, that one was spot on because at the time I had a big knot in my shoulder. But from all this they decreed that I had a kidney imbalance and needed to take the requisite red pill. Also they could give me a 30-day prescription for Drug # 309, which "conveniently" was available in their pharmacy downstairs. "What is in this pill?" I asked. "All natural ingredients. Made from trees and leaves." "I know, but which?" They wouldn't tell me. Anyway, there's no way I'm ingesting mysterious, unknown substances, even if my kidneys truly are out of whack, and the impetus to ply me with drugs rather than provide any holistic treatment (even my US doctor asked me about the bar exam when I talked about being tired...) made it no better than Western medicine and set off my "scam" warning bells.

But the rest of the tour was ok. There was one other official stop, at the underground Ming tombs where several emperors had been buried. Unfortunately soldiers in the latter half of the 20th Century had raided the tombs and taken the treasure. They also burned the corpses. Today China takes its history more seriously and takes measures to preserve it. On the other hand, there are still tensions. Our tour guide, a young woman, talked about how the young generation was full of optimism for China's future - the darkness their parents and grandparents felt from the Cultural Revolution would be no more. At the same time, from my time in China I gleaned that many younger Chinese people seem to feel burdened by the history. With such an ancient nation there's history everywhere, and some people would like to not be so beholden to it and instead be able to drive on straight to a modern future. Unfortunately if they are not careful, China will lose its connections to its past and not be able to get back. Even now, despite its long history, it's hard to find things (particularly structures) in China that date back more than a couple of hundred years, and of those that remain many were rebuilt only within the last century. Even in Europe you can find structures that are one or two thousand years old, but in China even the things that are old seem much less so.

The tour guide in Beijing gave us a recommendation for where to get Peking Duck, but by the time we got back from the tour I needed food that was more expedient. Since I'd already tried out the restaurant in the hotel, I convinced Koichi to walk a block and a half to the restaurant on the ground floor of the big hotel on the corner. They handed us a glossy menu with pictures, but Koichi still had to read the captions to figure out what each dish really was. Even doing that though the meal did not come out quite how we expected. Too much food, and way too much MSG. (It wasn't just the menu that was glossy; the food was too…). The only high point was that I finally found sesame balls (unfortunately, they weren't very good – too much red bean paste). In the future we resolved to order more sensibly, picking out a meat dish we could both live with and ordering a vegetable dish to go with it, along with some rice.

Conveniently, flying eliminated the need to track down a meal, since they always served lunch on the flights, and the next day we had our flight to Xian. The tour guide had advised us to get out very early in order to catch the airport bus (traffic in Beijing is terrible) and gave us directions for where to catch it. It was in walking distance, but also deceptively far. Technically it was maybe only 2-3 blocks away, but I think it worked out to being at least a mile of walking, dragging our suitcases up and down stairways and ramps, over and under gigantic boulevards. But given the traffic jams we still had to wade through it was much better that we walked than if we'd tried to take a taxi.

The airport bus was based at a large hotel on one of Beijing's bigger streets. Like most of the buildings there it was set back from the street. Beijing isn't like Manhattan, with all the buildings right up against the curb; instead each property is like its own quiet island in a river of commotion. By the time we got to it it was getting ready to leave, so finding seats was a problem. We had to split up, and some people waved me to a free seat near them in the back. I ended up talking to them the whole way, which probably annoyed the people around us but oh well. They were a young Polish couple currently living in Warsaw who had been traveling around, so we had lots to talk about.

I thought Xian might be like Harbin but I was wrong: Xian expects tourists and is more set up for them. The airport bus, for instance, is marked in English and plenty of English-speaking people are there to advise tourists how to take it. They also sell tours, and since we were satisfied with the Beijing one we decided to book one for Xian. Though we were sure we could book another one elsewhere, this one seemed just as good as the next. “The tour is in English?” we asked, and they said yes.

Xian is an interesting city. Although Harbin and Shanghai have European architecture, Xian has more of a European city feel. It's big, bigger than you realize (even in ancient times it was the first city to have more than a million people), but it is well-planned and balanced with public spaces and squares so it feels less harsh. An ancient capital along the Silk Road, it was once a walled city, and even today the old part still has its wall surrounding it. Intersecting the city are big boulevards that extend out from the suburbs and meet in the center of the walled area at the Bell Temple (sort of like a Chinese Charles de Gaulle Etoille). The roads, radiating north, south, east, and west from the temple, are named accordingly.

We had two days in Xian, not counting the travel days, so the next day we decided to look at local things. In the morning we caught a city bus headed to the south of the city to see the Big Goose Pagoda. The pagoda itself was inside a larger complex, and that complex was inside a larger park area. That area was designed hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and today it still keeps its character as a public park filled with fountains, public sculpture, and open spaces. A sort of Asiatic Jardin du Luxembourg, in a way. The main roads leading up to it were being repaved and landscaped and it's clear that they've recently sunk some money into it to make it a really nice place. It had a visitor center where we could see old pictures of the city. What was amazing to realize from them, however, was how recently Xian was developed. We had made fun of our hotel room, for instance, because it was in a worn, crappy-looking building with tired interiors that looked like they were hip in the 70s. But we could see from the aerial shots that our building could not be older than 20, maybe 25 years. Even as recently as the 80s the town center, now a bustling, modern commercial area, was a series of low-rise buildings and houses. Nearly everything that we saw now was new, probably built within the last 15 years and maybe closer to the last 5. But in a way that is good, because, as my guidebook noted, modern architecture in China used to involve ugly concrete buildings with bathroom tiles stuck to the exteriors (e.g., our hotel). But the latest development seems to have much more sensible modern architecture and is much more aesthetically pleasing and usable. However, the recent development may come at a price: the infiltration of Western commercial interests. We kept noticing at the park large café umbrellas advertising KFC, and even an electronic trolley was covered in advertising for it. So we were hardly surprised when we walked out the northern side and found an actual, two-story KFC in one of the park buildings…

We decided to skip the Small Goose Pagoda and instead took the bus back north to the southern gate of the city. The walls were somewhat recently renovated and now you can walk on top of them around the entire perimeter. We didn't do that, but what I've since found out is that you can bike along the wall and that might have been fun. Oh well. Instead we walked along the outside in one of the park areas they've established. As near as I can tell the wall is ringed by a strip of open park space, and apparently also a moat. These features also give the city a very livable quality to it.

So I liked Xian, but I was starting to need some down/alone time, so I ended up parking myself in an enormous cybercafe as Koichi roamed around that evening on his own. Later on in the trip I did see a little more of the city (like walking through the Drum Temple into the edge of the Muslim Quarter) but I guess it's just as well that I didn't see everything since it means I may just have to go back.

When we had booked the tour for Xian they told us it would be in English. But early the morning of it, when the tour guide called to say when she'd be coming to pick us up at our hotel, it became clear that she would not be speaking English to us. But she managed to say that she would give our number to her colleagues and someone who did speak English would call us instead. Just to be sure, though, we called them, and they assured us that someone who spoke English would indeed pick us up. But then, way earlier than we expected, we got a call telling us they were downstairs already. So we went down and met the guide, who tried to load us on the bus. "English?" we asked, incredulously after watching everyone else board. "No English," she said. Uh huh…

To their credit they didn't just blow us off. They apparently called their office to find out what the story was and then got another tour guide, who would not be speaking English to us but who did technically speak a bit more of it, to explain to us to go back to our hotel to wait for the English-speaking guide to call us. Which perhaps is what would have happened all along, but it was hard to tell and we suddenly became worried that we wouldn't get on any bus. What we really wanted was the organized transport to the sites out of town, more than we really cared about the explanations. But then the English-speaking tour guide showed up after all and it all worked out. He picked us up in an overcrowded minivan, which then took us to the actual bus. I ended up squished in the backseat between people speaking some sort of Semitic language. At first it was very awkward - I was a stranger who had totally invaded their space. But I was curious about where they were from, so I asked them. "Israel." "Oh, I've been there!" (This is getting to be quite a regular exclamation from me upon inquiries like these...) That broke the ice and I chatted with them throughout the day.

This tour was different than the one in Beijing because it wasn't inclusive. It covered the bus and the guide, but not entrance fees or lunch. I suddenly felt very cheap, and even though technically some of these places only cost a few dollars, I decided to skip some of them (which was also necessary because we didn't actually have enough cash between us for both of us to see everything). The first stop was some ancient baths, which sounds interesting but the guidebook said was nothing special. Koichi went in and liked it, but I stayed outside and hung out with the Israelis. We talked about the most recent terrorist threat (they hadn't heard about it) and a little about the war (the bombs were still falling on Haifa) and a little about my relatives (the ones who had come from Harbin), whom I've lost touch with. One of the girls said if I could get her their names she would try to look them up.

Then I think the bus went to a museum, although this was one of the sites that sort of blended into everything else. It wasn't a bad museum (my guidebook liked it) but by then I'd seen a lot of artifacts. Oh, and there had been another stop: the official terra cotta factory. Like the jade factory it seems to be an official place where they do these crafts and then charge tourists Western prices for items in their enormous gift shops. But the explanation on how the terra cotta soldiers are made was helpful for later when we got to see the original ones.

But before we got to the site of the terra cotta warriors we ended up at a lunch place. It was a bit chaotic: an enormous room with large tables that we somewhat randomly sat at. The menu was also all in Chinese, except for one paper that listed a few things in English, yet without any prices. Hoping for the best, gastronomically and financially, Koichi and I picked out the fried vegetable dish (sort of standard Chinese collard greens) and a dish that turned out to be sweet and sour pork. (It's a hard thing to order over there, since everyone translates it into English differently.) Everyone ate, and then the bill came, which was a mess because some meals had been cheap and some were really expensive. Fortunately ours was in the middle, but some people got some sticker shock, plus it was really awkward to try to sort this out with strangers. As well as difficult, since the bill was all in Chinese.

After lunch we crossed the street and went into the grounds of the terra cotta soldiers' museum. In the 1970s a farmer had tried to sink a well and accidentally pulled out a fragment of soldier. In fact, the story goes that he pulled out a head and used it as a scarecrow for a while. But then he showed it to local officials, who ended up doing a big excavation. The area is now housed under a big hangar-like building, because what they found when they dug was an enormous underground tomb complex guarded by thousands of life-sized terra cotta soldiers. They haven't even dug them all up yet, but the display is already massive.

Our guides, who were very nice if maybe not so adept with keeping the group together, started us out by giving us some explanations and then we had some time to wander before meeting up again to go back to the bus. Unfortunately not everyone met up at the rendezvous point. One of these absent people was a Japanese man who may not have understood the instruction. The other people were some stupid Spaniards, if I may editorialize, who chattered away on the bus while the guide was talking and then took off on their own once we got inside and thus never heard any further instructions about where to meet up. As a result, the whole group got delayed while the guides tried to figure out where they were. Eventually they had us take the park shuttle back to the parking lot, where we discovered the Spaniards, and if I seem a bit hostile to them it's because they yelled at the guide for being late, when it had really been their fault that everything got fouled up. Unfortunately we were never able to find the Japanese man, which is concerning, although we did wait quite a while and one guide stayed behind to search again. We hope he just gave up at some point and took a cab back to town.

The tour bus made for an interesting group, though. As far as I could tell I was only one of two Americans. There were scads of Spaniards, the Israelis, several Japanese, some Swedes, two Irish people, plus lots more people whose origin I never ascertained. The guides spoke English well enough to be understandable on the tour, but it's clearly a skill they were still developing. As a result it was hard for some of these tourists who didn't speak English as their first language either to connect with them. But I could, particularly with the male guide. He would patiently wait while I patiently tried to find a way to make the gist of my questions come across. This apparently earned his trust, because there was a point where I actually translated English for English in order to help him answer a question a non-native English-speaking tourist had asked. After the person had asked the question, and the guide had clearly not understood, he looked towards me to help him out. So I restated it, capturing the essence of what the person had wanted to know, and then the guide was able to give his answer.

There was one more stop on the tour before we got back to the city, which was a scaled-down recreation of an ancient emperor's tomb. It was kind of cheesy visually, but informative historically as they explained how and why it was made. It had been a spectacular undertaking, with rivers of mercury and mountains of gold under a ceiling of diamond constellations, all combining to represent the Chinese empire.

And then it was time to go back to Xian, where we arrived at the Bell Tower at dusk. The lights were starting to come on and the streets come alive in those early evening hours. It was a little hazy, but otherwise quite pleasant. We walked around a teeny bit, then grabbed dinner and went back to the hotel to play Uno.

With Koichi's help my 3-word Chinese vocabulary exploded into about 15-20 written (e.g.: "east," "center," "not," "gate," "mouth" (and the related words "entrance" and "exit"), "product," "month"/"moon," "eye") and spoken (e.g.: "hello," "thank you," "north," "south," "east," "west," "center," "capital") words. Unfortunately my vocabulary did not include the word for "shampoo." Now, normally that wasn't a problem. At all of these hotels there would be a set of complimentary toiletries and accessories (kind of wasteful actually; in fact, the news said that Beijing hotels during the Olympics, in efforts to be more "green," would not be giving them out) and the shampoo generally came in the little bottles, clearly marked in English. Except at the Super 8 where the shampoo and the body wash were in the more economical labeled bins mounted to the shower wall. Of course, I couldn't read the labels. So I guessed. One was milky white and smelled like coconut. The other was blue and smelled more detergeant-y. I decided the former was shampoo and the latter body wash and proceeded accordingly.

After we left Xian we flew back to Shanghai. Koichi had never been there and wanted to see it, and my return flight was to leave from there anyway. We ended up back at the Super 8, which wasn't so bad because this time I knew where it was. I came to like its location. It did require a bus and subway ride into the city center, but it was redeemed by being in a less congested and touristy area. In the middle of Pudong it was at the center of this new China being built and interesting in its own right as a front row seat on the transition. But seeing how it was still a bit away from the commercial skyscrapers it was not someplace that tourists would be likely to overrun.

Of course, Koichi wanted to see the rest of Shanghai too, so after settling in we took the subway across the river, whereupon we walked to the Bund. The Bund is the boulevard along the river built up by Western interests 75-100 years ago. Across the street there's a promenade that runs along the riverfront. It's very pretty, especially looking across to the shiny, colored skyscrapers sprouting up in Pudong. You just have to ignore the deplorable state of the river.

Then we walked back towards the center of the city and People's (Renmin) Square, where we were to meet my friends at the other KFC for an international dinner (the four of us all were of different nationalities). Unfortunately the Chinese friend was ill and unable to make it. So since the other friend was living in Pudong, we went back to the new mall to search out dinner. (There's lots of restaurants in it.)

My friend seems to be really enjoying China, and is quite fearless about what he eats. I was not so fearless. Some of that was because I was fatigued, which I suspect meant that I was more likely to be vulnerable to some under-prepared food. I was also really nervous about the water, and after smelling the Hutong River up close my attitude hardly changed. I really couldn't tell what would be safe to eat and what wasn't, even in modern, Western places where I feared anything with ice in it. I noticed in the grocery store that certain goods - especially, though not necessarily ones produced by Western ventures - bore a "Q" on them as apparently some sort of quality seal. So it strikes me that China is taking food safety seriously. (The Chinese news channel referred to "standards for export," which gives some indication as to why they might care.) Goods with the "Q" symbol seem to cost a little bit more than those without it.

But in restaurants you were on your own. I hoped that glossy restaurants in glossy new malls would be more likely to be hygienic, but there was no guarantee. I might have been just fine, or even better off, with the vastly cheaper street food. But because I was afraid of exposing myself to something unhealthy, I wasn't eating all that much in general. And that meant I couldn't afford to get a meal wrong. Thus the gravitation to things that were familiar, and (particularly near the end of my trip) more fast food. On the other hand, I still had plenty of adventurous meals.

This particular meal turned out to be only semi-adventurous. At first we almost went to a hotpot restaurant. But we had to leave it when we realized we had no idea how to order a hotpot meal, and no one's Chinese or English skills were good enough to overcome this problem. So we went to a more regular place instead. My friend was a little concerned about us leaving the first place without ordering, because apparently that is seen as quite rude, but the dining gods got their revenge at the next place when they asked us if we'd like a knife and fork… (OK, it was well intended, but still! We were all chopstick-savvy...)

The next morning we were going to take a river cruise, but that idea got nixed because we couldn't quite figure out where to go for one. I would have looked it up, but I no longer had my guidebook. The Israelis in Xian had a long way to go on their China exploration trip and were being seriously let down by their guidebook (I think it was a Lonely Planet, which is surprising because usually Lonely Planet is quite good.) On the bus back they were borrowing my Rough Guide, which, though a little outdated (lots of prices have since been raised on the tourist sites) and a little incomplete, detail-wise, had so far served me pretty well. At this point, with only my return to Shanghai left in my trip, I decided I didn't need the book anymore and told them to keep it. They look thrilled. They offered to mail it back to me. I said that was silly - it would only just get dusty on my bookshelf - but the next time I visited Israel they could give it back to me. They agreed. So it turns out I missed it a little on my last day in Shanghai (particularly the historical explanations in the back that I hadn't sufficiently studied) but this is the kind of thing you need to do if you're going to wander around the world hither and yon. You need to build up the travel karma points when you can.

The other reason I wasn't so keen to sail on the river was because of the river itself. It's really a problem, what China has done to its waterways. The pollution is often such that they can't be fished, and the water certainly can't be drunk from the tap. This is true all over China, and poses the biggest barrier to it being a fully modern country. It's practically bizarre, particularly in Shanghai: how do you get this bright, new metropolis, where the running water isn't potable? It's not a quaint juxtaposition of Old China-New China; it's a serious problem.

So instead of the river cruise we went to the obviously pretty new Science and Technology museum, which was easily findable at the Science and Technology subway stop. It was a great museum, although a little expensive. It wasn't too bad for us, but for a Chinese salary it must have been a stretch. (The tour guide in Xian said that the higher prices for the historical areas were becoming unaffordable for the average Chinese person.) Anyway, the museum was really interesting in two main ways: one, that as a museum it had interesting exhibits. The usual science and technology subjects, but presented in interesting ways in an interesting building. There was, for example, a gigantic wing that was a greenhouse you could wander through on labyrinth paths. The second significant way it was interesting was in its descriptions. There were plenty of English captions, pretty well written, but the propaganda that showed through was really amusing. In the health exhibit, for instance, it cited the WHO (I think that's the source it used) saying that well-being included more than physiology. Apparently the word "moral" somehow ended up in the description of the necessary healthy lifestyle, although WHO hadn't appeared to have defined it. The museum defined it, however, by talking about how it required "obedience" and "patriotism" and other such qualities.

There also was an exhibit on ecology, which cheered me. One part of it talked about rehabilitative efforts being performed on the Shanghai river. Apparently, it says, fish have recently started living in it again, and they've stopped dumping untreated sewage in the river. That's great. And if the propaganda is to be believed, China may be taking the issue seriously. Which is also great. But it has a long way to go before the water situation will be ok. Or the air situation. While China's recent development boom has allowed it to develop in more efficient and less-polluting ways, it's still putting a big burden on the environment. A billion people driving cars, for instance, is not a good thing for the air. Of course not that many people drive cars today, but if that's the goal then those thick, suffocating days are going to get much worse.

After the museum we went back to the hotel so I could shower (in the water, such as it is). I had Koichi take a look at the bins in the shower, and he informed me that they were the opposite of what I had surmised. I felt disappointed in myself at first for having guessed wrong, but on my next shower I opted to continue to use them as I had been. I don't know what I was dumping in my hair, but it made it feel all silky...

For more fun with toiletries, Koichi attempted to ask one of the hotels for more toilet paper (as pictured right on the right). It worked on one occasion, but on the next one they instead delivered the object on the left. It looks like an air freshener, although I forget what it was exactly. But the point is, it was *not* toilet paper, nor a sufficient toilet paper substitute...

With the security mess I had no idea what to expect at the airport and tried to get there really early. I arrived with 2.5 hours to spare and found check-in already chaotic. I can't quite tell, however, whether it was because of the added security measures or just because of the Chinese predilection to not line up for things in an orderly way. People are pushy and cut and stand much closer behind you than your sense of personal space might be comfortable with. So to get by you basically need to push back. Or, as in this case, flash your United Premier card, which is my key for making travel sane...

This was a Star Alliance frequent flier mileage ticket anyway, booked on Air Canada through Toronto. Thus I didn't quite get to experience the madness of an international flight to the US. Air Canada by policy banned the liquids, but I'm not sure the security line checked for them. There was a separate security line for passengers on American, United, and Northwest, and I got the impression that they were scrutinized to a greater degree. Which is kind of interesting, because everyone ends up in the same waiting hall on the other side... (What's also interesting is that Koichi, by flying Northwest back to Japan, may have been more scrutinized than I was flying by Air Canada back to the US.)

I used to think I liked the Shanghai airport because it's modern and easily connected to the city by train, but I've since decided that it's dull. And confusing, as different flights from different airlines used the same podium and you can't really figure out whom you should be talking to. (It is also now decorated with gigantic posters everywhere warning Americans not to pack liquids.)

But eventually the flight boarded, and apparently we even left slightly early. The flight was ok, although I wasn't particularly impressed with Air Canada's food (although the flight attendants were all politely concerned that I hadn't finished and don't worry, they could come back later to take my tray...). But I really became unimpressed with Air Canada upon arrival to Toronto. The flight itinerary had allowed for 1.5 hours to change planes to continue to Boston. The flight was somewhat late so it ended up there was only about an hour to change. The flight attendants were really helpful, telling me I needed to go to Terminal 2 and letting me move to a seat closer to the door for landing so that I could beat the rush. "Talk to the gate agent," they advised, "who can radio ahead to say you're on your way." But there was not a single gate agent anywhere. In fact there was no bus to Terminal 2. Instead I was forced to officially enter Canada and go through Canadian customs, which I don't think I would have done otherwise, before I saw my first Air Canada employee, who gave me apparently wrong information that my suitcase would be at Terminal 2. Then I found out they wouldn't even let me try to make the connection; apparently they'd already rebooked me for tomorrow and sent my suitcase to the carousel I'd just blown past. "Tomorrow... so you'll put me in a hotel overnight?" "No. The delay wasn't our fault."

At this point I got really upset. Actually, I was already pretty upset because I was missing my flight through no fault of my own, accidentally immigrating into countries I didn't intend to immigrate into, and was getting absolutely no assistance from the airline in trying to meet the itinerary they had sold me. "But you sold me this itinerary! I didn't miss my flight! I got there plenty early for everything and followed all the instructions. I was just sitting there - you were the ones flying the plane! And then you wouldn't even let me try to make the connection!" But they were unmoved. No hotel voucher, not even a meal voucher. Just a forced night in Toronto.

So I camped out in the airport, which wasn't too bad. It's sort of interesting to see the people who work the nightshift. There were a couple of other over-nighters, so the place wasn't abandoned or anything, and I found a reasonably comfortable couch-like surface to sleep on.

But the whole thing was quite wrong. Someone really should have at least met us at the gate. I was fortunate in that I have a passport that lets me enter Canada at will. Not everyone does. Forcing people to enter a country is a very. bad. thing. As it was I still had a customs mess because I had to go back in to get my suitcase when I'd already handed in my declaration card, although they did have a system to help me deal with that. And not everyone I talked to from Air Canada sucked... Some people were very nice. But I still felt thrown to the wolves.

The next morning I went over to the terminal that handles US-bound flights. It was 4:30am and already teeming with travelers. It's an interesting set-up because you actually go through US immigration and customs before boarding the plane, which then lands at the domestic terminals in the US. On the upside the delay meant that by the time I got to Boston the T was running, which saved me the cab fare I was going to have to pay if I'd come in the night before. But the 31-hour trip home didn't exactly do me any favors...

At last, I've finished blogging about my China trip. I may talk about China again, but more on a meta level than on a "today I did this..." level.

For clarity, here is the order the entries should be read in:

• If I'd kept digging that hole in my backyard, this is what I would have found
• Gerd Bucerius would be proud
• Traveling with a 3-word vocabulary
• East meets West again and again and again...
• Beijing Zhan
• Even the Forbidden City has a Starbucks
• The day I became a man
• The Goose Pagoda, brought to you by KFC
• Tour of Babel
• What's the word in Chinese for "shampoo"?
• D'oh, Canada

I also added some pictures that Koichi took. If I ever get my film developed I might post more.

In the meantime, I want to add some details for Googlers:

Hotels:

• The Super 8 in Shanghai was at 151 Miaopu Rd, Pudong.
• The hotel in Harbin was the Holiday Inn. It was across the street from the pedestrian area.
• The hotel in Beijing was the Beijing Zhongan Hotel.
• The hotel in Xian was the City Hotel (I think it has a different name in Chinese, but everyone knows it as the City Hotel). It was half a block or so from the Bell Tower on Nan Dajie (the south road).

Prices ranged from $20-$50 a night for rooms that could take two people and were perfectly comfortable. (The one in Xian even had a refrigerator.) With better planning it's probably possible to find more closer to the lower end of the price range. Some of the airports did seem to have desks that provided day-of booking services that may have been competitive, although we didn't try them. We picked places that were possible to pre-book from where we were, although that did seem to make some prices less competitive and sometimes required that we pre-pay. Oddly enough the Super 8 was logistically the most difficult to book remotely, and it's unclear whether the front desk recognized the reservation we'd made (I'm not sure if it wasn't in their system, or if they just couldn't read my printout). And it didn't seem able to take American credit cards so I had to pay in cash.

Hotels almost uniformly also require a deposit. Harbin required one equivalent to the cost of the stay, although they would accept it through a hold on my credit card. The other hotels all required 200 yuan in cash. Save the receipt they give you for it, and when you check out they'll give you the money when you hand it back to them.

Airport buses:

In Harbin, go downstairs. There is a kiosk that sells tickets. The bus is across from it. It makes many stops but eventually ends at the CAAC hotel (possibly also called the Swan Hotel), where you can easily catch a cab to wherever you want to go. To go back to the airport, do this in reverse. (Buy the ticket from the kiosk outside the hotel.)

In Beijing follow the signs in English. Go to one of the kiosks to buy your ticket (there are several outside the door and one by the buses themselves). There are a lot of lines to choose from, but the staff speaks English and can help. Still, it might be best to ask your hotel for its opinions and directions for the last mile. To go back to the airport, you can catch a bus from the International Hotel (though there may be other locations as well). Buy the ticket from a kiosk on the west side of the hotel.

In Xian, as you leave there are some information desks where the airport bus is noted in English and the staff can answer questions about it. Buy the ticket on the bus. To return to the airport, you can catch the bus from the Melody Hotel that's on the southwest side of the roundabout at the Bell Tower.

Note that buses tend to run from the airport when full, but going back they may only run hourly. Many also make intermediate stops, although going back, if they're full, they may not stop.

Airplanes:

Shanghai Air and Air China are perfectly fine to fly. Both served a hot meal on their midday 1.5-2.5 hour flights, although the Air China one might have been a little nicer. They also both seem to fly 737s, although their fleets may not be made up of them exclusively. Seats appeared to have been assigned in order of check-in for both airlines. You can usually only check-in starting 1.5 hours before the flight. Airlines at some airports share the same counters. Note also that certain flights only check in at certain podiums. (In other words, your Air China flight be at one podium and another Air China flight will be at the one next to it.) The people doing check-in understand requests for window seats. In fact, the English skills encountered seemed to be fine (or at least functional for this purpose), both at check-in and on the plane. Watch for their weight limits for luggage. There also are the standard carry-on limitations, but no one seemed too strict about them. China does seem to limit how much fluid you can bring with you on the plane. Again, enforcement varied, but be prepared to jettison your water. They will serve the usual beverages on the plane, albeit in very small portions.

There's plenty of English in the airports in Beijing, Shanghai, and Xian. Harbin, not so much.

Taxis:

At transportation hubs (train stations, airports) take the ones at the taxi stand. There's usually a flat fee for the meter to drop of 8-12 yuan that covers some distance, then it's 1.5-2 yuan per kilometer thereafter. Note that sometimes drivers will take a longer (and therefore more expensive) way because it's on faster roads. For best results, have your destination written in Chinese. Don't expect cab drivers to read or speak English, although those who are learning may want to practice.

Sanitation:

Squat toilets abound, and even when you find regular toilets (if in doubt, follow the signs for handicapped toilets; that's often where they are) they may have been used by people who really only know how to use squat toilets. The nicer public toilets (eg, in new department stores, museums, airports, etc.) are well-attended (and generally have more regular toilets), but the attendants may be more pre-occupied with meticulously washing the walls than the commodes.

Note that unlike in the US where one line forms for the next available stall, in China people tend to line up for a particular stall. This can be interesting when the stall you picked turns out to be squat. (This line behavior also exhibits itself in other contexts.)

If you think you might like to use toilet paper, bring your own. I brought some with me that I got at a camping store, which meant I had a nice size roll that was coreless, so it didn't take up much room in my luggage. It's not a problem in hotels, but lots of public restrooms seemed not to have it. Or had it in a big roll on a wall out by the sinks.

Guidebooks:

I was pretty happy with my Rough Guide to China, although naturally it wasn't perfect and some of the prices listed were outdated. I heard less than good things about other guidebooks.

As usual, I appreciate that Kristin linked to me in the Law School Round-up. My eligibility for such linkage is rapidly running out, but I'm always flattered to see such visible signs that people are reading, particularly when they also include the recommendation that others read too.

But I also appreciate how she linked to me. She said I "just got back from somewhere really cool." I guess if I think about it going to China is really cool. And maybe that makes me feel better about it. Because otherwise I am remarkably blasé. Some of that emotion is because now that I've been there, it's not so far-off-and-scary anymore. China is a completely manageable place to me. (Er, well, mostly manageable, since I still don't speak Chinese...)

And a lot of it is because I went there kicking and screaming, and it shows. It's not that I didn't want to go to China. It's just that I'm not so sure I was really up for that kind of travel at this point in my life. I think I went in no small part because I caved to outside pressure. "Everyone does a bar trip," people told me. "This is the best time you'll ever have to take a trip of a lifetime like that."

Of course, as a friend of mine whom I whined to correctly noted, "But what they don't understand is that you do a 'trip of a lifetime' every 3 months." I actually don't quite get the concept of "trip of a lifetime." The world is out there - just go visit it! It's not like it's hard. Every day, what do you do? You eat, you sleep, you breathe… These things are all just as easy to do in Timbuktu as they are at home. Yeah, maybe there's more pollution and you have to be a bit more mindful about what you eat, but it's not like you will cease to metabolize just because you are somewhere else on the globe. Or that the people you will meet over there are scary monsters looking to turn you into soup at the earliest opportunity. Yes, there's crime, but newsflash: there's crime everywhere. Just because people may be different and have different cultural norms doesn't mean that they're out to get you.

On the other hand, world-traveling can be tiring. It's a lot of newness to absorb, it can be expensive, and it swallows up lots of time. It's this time factor which prompts the advice to take a bar trip now, because in theory you have the time (and after you start working you may never again). But don't underestimate post-bar burn-out. You've just spent three years dealing with an awful lot of newness, and the last three months cramming even more of it in your brain. You are tired, mentally and physically. You will need to recover and recharge. You must do that, first and foremost. The world can wait; you need to take care of yourself. While you "may never get the chance again" to wander hither and yon, for the same reasons, you may never get the chance to take this kind of break.

Then again, the whole "never get a chance" notion is ridiculous. Of course you can travel! If you want to, you will find a way. I myself am Exhibit A in how you don't have to cram in all your exciting globetrotting adventures before you're 26 (Eurail pricing structure be damned). And travel does not need to necessarily take enormous amounts of time to do. (Behold, the 3-day Cambodia trip.)

Of course, even knowing all that, I still went. I mean, it wasn't horrible. I am glad I went, and with more and more retrospect I'll be more and more glad. But it would have been a much more appropriate choice if I'd already had a job lined up. That would have done two important things: given my future some definition (including some finite schedule constraints), and given me the likely prospect of an income. Traveling around on bar loans is just no fun. I nickel-and-dimed myself to death, and it took a lot away from the experience. Arguably (to use another apt cliché, sorry) I was penny-wise/pound-foolish about it, but it was the best I could do.

In any case, I have now resolved that the next bar trip will not involve heretofore mysterious locales. I'm giving serious thought to Disneyworld...

You may remember I've complained about United's outsourcing before. Here's yet another example of why it was an atrocious business decision:

Backstory: I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to get to Albany by Friday, March 2 in time to be interviewed and sworn in if I don't get to start the journey until after the bar exam is finished in Sacramento on March 1.

Me: [long explanation that I need to go from somewhere in Northern California the evening of the 1st to arrive in Albany before 9am on the second, would this somehow be possible?]

Agent: [ignoring all that and telling me about an existing reservation instead.]

Me: [having to explain it all over again. Adding also that I'm very flexible; I could depart from Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Modesto, etc.]

Agent: How about Los Angeles?

Me: Um, I'm flexible, but not that flexible. It's ok if the itinerary includes LAX, but you'd have to fly me there.

[more discussion, none of it fruitful because given my criteria there's nothing that seems to get me to Albany in time... drat]

Me: Tell you what, let's try another city near Albany instead.

Agent: [tells me about some flight from San Francisco to Atlanta]

Me: Why are you telling me about a flight to Atlanta? I don't want to go to Atlanta!

Agent: Well we don't have many flights to Georgia.

Me: Why are you talking about Georgia???

Agent: Isn't that where Albany is?

(You know, this really isn't necessarily a problem with outsourcing, per se, nor is it necessarily a problem with outsourcing to India either. The problem is that it was outsourced to people without a native grasp of US geography and that there is apparently a complete lack of supervision and training to make sure they learn it sufficiently competantly in order to successfully route travellers around a nation they otherwise know nothing about. It would of course be just as bad if American reservations agents were similarly ignorant of the American landscape, although it does strike me as at least a little less likely to be a problem if the agents actually lived here. But either way, if United really wants to stick with the offshore call center it can, but it can't abdicate all oversight of its performance, which unfortunately it seems it has.)

A few years ago I had a job that I left to go to France. The day before I was to fly out, the people I worked with took me out to lunch at a steak place. I never finish my steak in one meal, so I had leftovers to take on the plane with me. Which was great, because the plane was stuck on the tarmac for 3 hours, and while everyone else was hungry and cranky, I got to snack on prime rib.

The Thursday before Christmas the guy I've been working for took his staff out to lunch at a nice place, where I also had steak and took my leftovers with me (pre-cut, seasoned with salt and pepper, and carried in a paper coffee cup with a plastic fork that stuck out the vent hole in the lid). Which again was very handy, because the flight was delayed.

I even got to have steak on the flight back. We spent Christmas Eve with my grandma, and my mom had brought a roast beef for dinner. Thus, plenty of leftovers to eat on the plane.

All in all, I'd say that steak is great airplane food, when you can arrange it. Though as I learned on my flight returning from Seattle, where my friend and I had dined at an Outback, trying to bring leftover mashed potatoes along with the steak can be tricky. To the TSA agent's credit, she did notice them. To her even bigger credit, she didn't seize them. It's stupid enough they take people's toothpaste - they don't need to take people's lunches away too.

While I am still seriously annoyed with United - or perhaps more accurately, saddened by what I think amounts to United's undermining of its own business - I'm not sure I'm ready to run into the arms of another air carrier. Specifically, the carrier I'm not sure I'm ready to engage in a serious relationship with is Continental, whom I flew to NY/NJ for Christmas.

Don't get me wrong - lots of things about Continental were very nice. The helpful, friendly, geographically-savvy reservations agents, for instance. The fact that they served a meal on the flight that was at minimum edible and at times even yummy. The gate agents, too, whom I found very easy to deal with and who got me appropriately situated on all the planes I wanted to fly.

But my experience returning from Newark has soured me on wanting to pursue this relationship further. The way my Christmas Day unfolded I had lots and lots of time to get to the airport to fly home. So when I got there, I asked at the check-in counter (which was essentially a sparsely-attended line of self-service kiosks) if I could stand-by on an earlier flight. Yes, for $25, was the answer.

"You're kidding me, right? The last time I flew you I could fly stand-by, no problem! Only US Airways is foolish enough to charge their customers for solving their operations problems for them." The agents grunted that they've always charged. Which I found hard to believe since it wasn't even a year ago since I'd last flown them and they'd let me stand-by on what was also a more effective routing than I was originally ticketed.

Standing there, stymied, at the check-in counter the problem I had right then was that when I'd met my mom for Christmas, she'd brought me some things from Boston I had regretted leaving behind when I'd moved to California. So I now had an extra suitcase and figured I'd need to check my luggage. With United, they put a special tag on the checked luggage of people who put themselves on the stand-by list so that if they get a seat on the earlier flight their bags can be easily pulled off the later one and put on the one they actually catch. But Continental refused to do that, unless I paid. Having already paid nearly $700 for this trip, however, I wasn't about to give them a penny more.

Angry that Continental was enforcing a policy that was a) so stupid, and b) without notice to me, I did the only thing I could to protect my interests. I checked in for my later flight, and then took all my bags with me into the gate area. It wasn't really all that much - I was able to repack and consolidate everything from the extra bag (except for my largish, 32-year old and necessarily fragile teddy bear) into my legitimately carry-on other bags. But even before I did that, I went up to the gate agent for the earlier flight, where I overheard her tell the people in front of me that they couldn't stand-by on it because they'd already checked their bags. But for me, when it was my turn, because I hadn't given up my bags, she gave me a boarding pass. For free.

So where does that leave me and Continental? I'm not sure. Ultimately they did the right thing, but I have absolutely no faith that they'd do the right thing again. Air travel is stressful; the thing you want most from it is predictability. Yet it doesn't seem that Continental can provide it. Oh, sure, I might still be able to stand-by if I needed to, but because there's the risk that they'll parrot US Airways - whom I'm naturally unwilling to fly except for the most cheap of cheap fares - I can't book a flight on Continental and bank on that predictability. Which is too bad for them, because otherwise I was starting to like them enough to give them my "when I'm annoyed at United" business. But at this point I'm much better off as a traveler sticking with the devil I know.

A week ago or so I was outside looking up at the sky, where I saw a plane passing overhead. It looked from its orientation and its contrails to be a 747 heading towards Japan.

I was jealous. "They're getting to go somewhere!" But soon it would be my turn. Last Tuesday I headed off to Florida.

It was the usual inducement: three Huey Lewis and the News concerts. I was a little nervous about making this trip, given what an emotional train wreck they were for me before I took the bar the last time, but I longed for the change of scenery and realized I could use the occasion to see a whole bunch of relatives who live down there and whom therefore I almost never get to see. Plus, as it got closer I did start to get excited about the concerts, because who am I kidding - even if I start the concerts in tears, by the end their music always makes me smile.

I landed in Orlando, where I rented a car - a shiny blue Chevy Cobalt - from Alamo (not Thrifty). I think it's the first American car I've not hated driving. It was easy to handle, with a well-designed dashboard. The only downside was that the headrest forced my neck into an acute angle...

The next day I started heading west, where I met a cousin I've never met before but who's been working on a huge genealogy project for the Gellis side of the family, which is a huge family (my great-grandmother raised 10 kids). Then it was on to Clearwater, where after getting very lost I eventually found my hotel.

I've driven in Florida several times before, but I never remember being as irritated by it as I was on this trip. I've now concluded that road engineers are a bunch of wild monkeys, and the parking garage architects are all on crack. Particularly given the number of clueless tourists arriving in rental cars and driving on its roads there's really no excuse for everything to be so poorly marked. I probably got lost at least once a day through no fault of my own. The worst occasion was the first night when it cost me 10 miles and $2 in tolls after I got forced onto the Turnpike while trying to get to my hotel a block away...

The day after the concert in Clearwater I met up with another fan and I drove us a couple hundred miles to the Fort Lauderdale area. Hollywood, actually. You've probably all heard of Hollywood, and an infamous hotel there. Which is where we were staying, because that's where that night's concert was to be. When the news about Anna Nicole broke last week it was so strange, since originally it'd all seemed like some random hotel-casino we would be heading to, but now it appeared our previously anonymous hostelry was the epicenter of a major news event. We were really curious now, wondering what it would be like.

It wasn't that great. Not because of the previous week - the only obvious sign that anything had happened was a 24/7 security guard keeping everyone away from the room - but because the hotel was the Hard Rock hotel/casino, and there was just too much hard rock everywhere. In the elevators. In the rooms. In every single public space. It was almost impossible to escape, and after the show when a bunch of us were looking for a quiet place to get a drink in, we very nearly failed. It was enough to make you start to hate rock and roll, I commented, ironically enough to some members of Huey Lewis and the News... I really can't not recommend this place enough (it had a boring casino too), although I do have to say that the rooms themselves were very nice. There were very comfortable, squishy beds and some very nice interior decoration, particularly with the sleek and modern bathrooms. Yet still probably not worth the money they charge.

The concert was slated to start at 8, and I was fortunate to score a decent seat that day, which amusingly enough turned out to be in the same row as the other fan, who'd bought hers months before... But first I had to forge through Miami rush hour because I was off to meet another cousin for dinner. It was at a very nice Italian place, whose business has dropped off somewhat recently due to the fact that their street has been ripped up (which we discovered once we got there). My cousin commented that the restaurant had good curb appeal, but I pointed out that it didn't actually have a curb...

Then it was a mad dash sprint (which I lamented, because I hated rushing off like that) to wade through the still lingering traffic back up to the casino, where I got to my seat just in time for the show. The casino shows are kind of interesting because the crowds are different than at regular venues, particularly on the arena floor. There's often fewer actual fans and many more gamblers who get tickets as comps. As is somewhat typical that night lots of people left once people started dancing because they didn't want to stand the whole time. Also as is somewhat typical lots of people were really, really drunk. Happy drunk, sort of oozing around the floor, but sort of beyond the grip of any inhibitions. I've learned how to make this kind of situation work for me, though, and how to sort of be able to slide forward into a better spot while the ushers all look for bigger fish to fry with their rule enforcements. Call me opportunistic if you must, but it's also necessary because most of the people oozing around in front of me are usually a foot taller so I have to do something in order to be able to see.

The next day it was off to Boca Raton to see even more Gellis cousins (I told you there were a lot.) One of their kids and her family were also visiting so that's four more cousins as well... They were running around going Temple shopping because they'd just moved to the area. Boca Raton apparently has 19 temples, which is interesting particularly in light of Jews once having been banned from living there. But it also meant that when I ran an errand at a local post office, to finally mail a package off to Israel that I'd been procrastinating doing for several months, I picked probably the best post office in the entire US to do that from, since they apparently are always sending packages to Israel from there.

I had a very nice time visiting my cousins, and was thrilled to discover that they were both lawyers. In fact, it's very romantic how they met: one of them needed to borrow a book the other one had - Prosser on Torts. (Well, at least *I* think that's romantic...) I also found it amusing that they'd had the same Wills professor, and even 50-60 years later they could still laugh about how boring he was...

After visiting them, the next day I started heading back north, first stopping off to visit my great uncle - my grandfather's last remaining brother. My grandfather died when I was 8, so it was nice to spend time with my great uncle because it made me feel closer to my grandpa. (Meanwhile his daughter was also visiting, so it was still more cousins I got to see. I think the final tally was 11 over the course of the whole trip.)

Then again I had to dash (ugh) because I had a 2-3 hour trip in front of me to head back up to Orlando. I got there and pulled into the lot at Universal Studios, which I have no interest in ever visiting again and would not have done this time had HLN not been playing there that night. The rampant commercialism was just so distasteful. Major branding everywhere, as if the brand somehow made everything better. The food would taste sweeter, people's lives would be happier... This is what Western Civilization had come to? (The people who worked at Universal were very nice, though.)

Fortunately I had decided to defend myself against the onslaught of commercialism by wearing a Hong Kong Disneyland shirt to Universal Studios park, because life's too short not to mess with major entertainment companies at every possible opportunity... I had no interest in going on any rides or anything, so instead I bought an After 5 ticket and spent my time finding a good spot by the stage (it was general admission) and waiting for the show to begin.

It was a nice show, of course, but the most fascinating aspect was that there were ASL interpreters. I'd never seen HLN lyrics put into sign language before. As I wrote on the HLN fan board the signs were really more of an interpretation than a translation. Even though ASL communicates words spoken in English it has a different grammar, so like any good translation it was really a reinterpretation of the lyrics' general meaning rather than a straight literal translation of each word. It was really fascinating to watch. So I did, instead of Huey...

But I am feeling better about going to their concerts, and plotting how to see some more later this year. I feel a little more comfortable with the social aspect, helped out somewhat by the fact that I *am* a lawyer, now, dammit, and being consciously aware of that helps me find the backbone to stand up for myself better when I need to. And I still love the shows. Even though I've seen so many there's always something new to unwrap and discover, so to speak. Seeing these concerts really renewed my appreciation.

For their music, and for just doing what they do. Of course Florida was there, and I could have visited my family any time. But there's always inertia, and it was so nice to have the concerts be the instigation to get out and go visit the world. I've made similar trips to see them quite a few times now - to the UK, to Mississippi, to North Dakota, and now to Florida - and looking back at them all, I'm still so glad that I did.

People who know me well know that if I decide to do something and actually execute on it within two weeks, for me that's being spontaneous. As I've noted before, I'm not really a "go-with-the-flow" kind of person - I much prefer to call my shot and then make it happen. But it's good to stretch from time to time and see what life is like without so much micromanaging. Surely being open and flexible has its rewards.

This weekend's trip to Los Angeles was already fairly spontaneous, at least by my usual standards. Needing 600 more frequent flier miles to renew my United Premier status I decided it would make sense to accrue them by going somewhere close and cheap. Los Angeles seemed to fit the bill, especially with the Cal football game scheduled to be played down there against UCLA.

The airfare wasn't too oppressive, although it wasn't a total bargain either. There was a flight that would have been about $60 cheaper, but after several days of hemming and hawing, at the last moment I decided to book the later and more expensive one home so I'd have time to do something down there in the evening. I only planned on this being a day trip, but it seemed like it should at least be a full day trip.

Apart from the plane ticket, however, nearly all the logistical details were left to chance. Including the rental car, which turned out to be something of a problem as rates varied widely and it ended up costing me an extra $15-$20 more by having dragged my feet. That was with Dollar. I can't remember if I've had issues with Dollar before, but I know I've had some concerns with the generally cheaper rental car companies (except Enterprise, which has often been quite good). So I decided to try Avis instead, where for about the same money I thought I could deal with a better company. Given that I was unable to phone Dollar to cancel the reservation (their website wouldn't load on my mobile browser such that I could look up a number for them, and the number listed on the airport courtesy phones was disconnected) this was probably a good call.

Except that Avis wasn't quite as perfect as I'd hoped. Their rental contract is really confusing, where it looks like you are agreeing to a much higher price than quoted with the reservation. They also did something that drives me crazy: "upgrading" the tiny economy car I booked to something bigger. As a small person, I like driving smaller cars as I find them more easily maneuverable. And why would I want to pay to fuel more car than I need? In this case though Avis made it worth my while in coming up with an upgrade I could live with: a Nissan Altima hybrid. As an owner of a Sentra I'm already inclined to like Nissans, but it was the hybrid aspect that really excited me as I've never driven one before. And thus had to be shown how to turn it on... (You don't turn a key, you press a button.)

Unfortunately I wasn't all that impressed with the car. For one thing, the design of the rear window created an enormous blind spot. For another, the brakes were so sensitive that I basically lurched around LA the whole rest of the day. On the other hand, it was nice to be in electrical mode and know I wasn't polluting LA any more than it already was. On the other, other hand, though, I didn't think the mileage economy turned out to be all that great. Unless the math is wrong somewhere, I drove 70 miles and put in at least two gallons of gas to refill the tank. I already get that kind of mileage with my Sentra. So while 35 mpg isn't terrible, it's not the 45-50 I was expecting.

Interestingly, however, cars' ability to generate electricity did turn out to be a running theme to the day. A Cal fan friend of mine was planning to drive down for the game too, but his arrival was severely delayed by his alternator failing somewhere near Bakersfield. Which sucked for him, but put into motion a series of events that made the game much more fun for both of us.

For various silly reasons I decided I wanted to see what the Beverly Hills/Hollywood area looked like while I was down there. Perhaps I've been there before, but I had no specific recollection. So I decided to detour through it on my way to Pasadena. In Beverly Hills there was some sort of art fair there in a park, so on a whim I stopped off to check it out. Some of the art there was very interesting, but the major feature of the occasion for me was the crepe-sucre I bought for breakfast from a stand staffed by actual French people. French restaurants in the US aren't always all that French, so I appreciated that this one was.

From there I walked a few blocks into downtown Beverly Hills to do what all the beautiful people do in Beverly Hills: go shopping. Yes, even I do that on occasion, and on this occasion I was on a quest to find sunglasses, since the ones I'd picked up a few months earlier in Florida had been sat on a few too many times to still be useful. Plus I figured that any sunglasses I bought in Beverly Hills would be inherently trendy. True, I did buy them at a Rite Aid, but it was a Rite Aid in Beverly Hills, ok?

By now I was running late for the game. And my friend was still working his way south. Coincidentally, though, we both managed to converge on the stadium at about the same time, yet at opposite ends of it. We both also still needed tickets (since this was one of the other logistics I hadn't worked out in advance of the trip), and set about, each of us in our own inimitable way, to acquire the single that we needed. We figured we'd then coordinate a meet-up sometime later.

I've experienced travel kismet a few times before, most recently on my CLE trip back East where, through totally random circumstances and lots of luck, I ended up seated next to a friend of mine on the return flight. It was particularly coincidental seeing how we'd made our plane reservations separately; I hadn't even known he was going to be in the area until almost that week (it's not like he often is); and the return flight we'd both booked - for the same date and time - was an odd, non-direct routing through Dulles that no one who travels from San Francisco to New York is ever likely to take. Moreover, it required some creative problem-solving by a gate agent to manage to maneuver the seating assignments of a completely packed plane so we could then sit next to each other. But I knew it would all work out. See, a few days before, when I'd learned we'd be on the same flight, I decided it would be fun to bring along a deck of cards to amuse ourselves on the long trip. Only I didn't have a deck of cards, forgot to ask to borrow one, and never had time to run to the store. It looked like it would be a cardless flight, at least up until the final Friday afternoon when, as I raced through Newark Penn Station to take my final post-CLE class commute, a representative of New Jersey Transit thrust some promotional schwag into my hand. And what was this schwag? Why, a NJ Transit deck of cards, of course! At that point I knew it was certain my friend and I would end up sitting together.

Anyway, back in Pasadena I'd bought my ticket (at a negotiated discount, since the game was already underway), entered the stadium, and started to buy some refreshments. First I bought some popcorn, and then I got on a different line to buy a soda. As I awaited my turn I happened to turn my head - and there saw my friend entering the stadium. It was very random, particularly when you consider how large the stadium was. He could have entered any gate at any time. I could have bought soda from any concession stand at any time. I also could easily have been looking elsewhere, even right where I was. But, no, the fates conspired to ensure we could enjoy the rest of the game in each other's company, which really was the only enjoyable thing about the game, since, sadly, the final score didn't itself qualify.

But apart from that outcome I was having a nice day so far, playing everything by ear. Except the next part wasn't played by ear, it had been planned. Back to Beverly Hills I fjorded the freeways, where I met a former law student and East Coast transplant friend at Nate N'Al's, a Jewish(-style?) deli. It's hard to find decent deli in California, but this place seems ok.

It was a nice chat, comparing career frustrations. Well, the frustrations aren't so pleasant, but it's always nice to talk to people who can understand and empathize. Soon, though, it was time to get back in the hybrid and head back to the airport. Although I had issues with the car, I was glad I had it with me in Beverly Hills. I blended in. It was shiny and black and, as a hybrid, inherently cool. And therefore so was I. (Right?)

But the coolness was only temporary, and I dropped off the car and checked in for my flight. Which, thanks to an equipment switch was now overbooked. I volunteered my seat, got a night in the airport Mariott (nice, squishy beds - too bad I didn't get enough time to enjoy sleeping in them), and caught a flight up this morning. Plus $350 in vouchers to spend on a future (spontaneous?) adventure.

Note: Last night it was really windy - the hotel pool had pretty sizeable waves - and on the radio yesterday they broke in with an emergency broadcast announcement with a high surf advisory. (It interrupted a Neil Diamond song; at first I thought the emergency broadcast buzzer was a joke.) But I had no idea about what was going on in Malibu until I got home later today.

Edit 10/23: It is really weird to have spent such a nice day somewhere and then have had all hell break loose immediately upon departure.

When I met my friend, the displaced New Yorker, in Beverly Hills last week our conversation immediately turned to the traffic. I'm not sure it was even all that bad on Saturday, compared to what it's normally like, but from what I did experience I was aghast (no pun intended).

Understand, I'm used to crappy driving infrastructure. I did learn to drive in New Jersey, after all, and I recently spent a few years driving around Boston. But driving in the Bay Area is so much easier. Yeah, sometimes there's not enough capacity. But the roads by and large are well-signed and well-designed. I always thought these qualities were a California thing, but having now spent some time with the Los Angeles infrastructure I no longer think so. It's not the traffic there that's the problem, per se. In fact, I think the traffic is actually the consequence of the problem.

For example, at one point I was on I-10, which seemed to have unmarked frontage lanes. But only sometimes. And the exits were marked with numbers, but you could only see them if you happened to be in the frontage lane. Meanwhile even surface streets were problematic, generally lacking guarded left turns or any sort of useful signage that could possibly give non-local drivers any indication of where they were or where they needed to go. (In fact, it might have even been better if there had been fewer signs, instead of the few that there were that started to direct drivers and then left them stranded.) As a result there's so much confusion that gridlock results. It's not that there's so many cars on the streets; it's that there's so many cars that can't move.

The effect of all this is that Los Angeles is a broken city. My friend and I both shared the opinion that individual pockets of LA are very nice. (I liked Pasadena, for instance.) But traversing from one pocket to another is untenable. My friend lamented how little he goes out these days, even though he technically has the time. The draw of the destination has to be really strong in order to justify the stress of trying to get to it. The result of this situation then is that even though Los Angeles is a town full of vibrant, talented people, they're all balkanized into their own local neighborhoods. Despite the massiveness of the city and all it has to offer, because people are largely stuck where they are LA is missing that pulsating urban energy that nourishes cosmopolitan life in other, more functional and traversable cities, and that's a shame.

I suppose decades of historical evolution and bad choices have brought LA to this point. No one woke up one day and decided to deliberately build a defective city. But it seems like in California, with its sensible road engineers, something could be done. Certainly there should be a better mass transit infrastructure, to make people less reliant on their cars. But even for the cars that remain, improving the roads can at least improve the flow so when people find the need to drive somewhere they actually can.

It's the age old conflict: one can have time, or one can have money. This month I had lots of the former and not so much of the latter. On the other hand, I did have frequent flier miles...

It was hard to believe that I hadn't been abroad since returning from China over a year ago, or in Europe at all since returning from Hamburg in 2005. Obviously this situation could not stand...

Thanks to my current interest in the career of Stephen Fry I've spent the last few weeks more immersed than usual in English television largely thanks to the Internet, where I've been able to watch every single episode of QI (a very funny English quiz show he hosts), all of his documentaries, lots of his pre-A Bit of Fry and Laurie comedy and altogether hours and hours of fantastic English television. And all for free! Oh, the horror...

But look at it this way, British Broadcasting Company: Had I not gotten to see all this television, I never would have had my curiosity so piqued about the country that produced it. In other words, were it not for all this Internet "piracy," I was all set to visit France instead.

Of course, a trip to England did make a nice bookend to the Great Change since the last time I went was just as it was beginning. Like the last trip I was induced to travel this time because of the influence of a performer. But that time it was an American one, and the trip itself largely seemed very American, like we had just all packed up our American lives and transplanted them over there. This time I thought it would be better to immerse myself as deeply into English life as possible.

I arrived around midday Christmas Eve. My seatmate on the flight over, also traveling on frequent flier miles, would a few days later be continuing onto France so I gave her a list of things to experience in Paris, a list I realize is getting increasingly outdated as more time passes between the present and my last visit in 2003. (Perhaps there's some French tv on YouTube I should watch? Perhaps something starring a 6'5 Etienne Frire?) However despite having been to London a few times before I didn't feel I knew the city well enough to give her tips about it. In fact I didn't even realize myself just how ill-advised it was to travel there over Christmas. Nothing is open. But maybe that's just as well since you couldn't get to anything anyway, what with every form of public transport completely idled. I don't understand that: on major holidays people like to visit each other - how are they to do so if they can't get around? Everyone seems to be locked within their neighborhoods, which, particularly in such an ethnically pluralistic city as London, seems to border on cruel.

But, it's England, and things there are different from the US. Which is why it was worth the trip in the first place. No point in having a change in scenery if the new scenery is no different than where you started. Anyway, I wasn't particularly inconvenienced once I got settled in and acquired groceries. My hostel had warned me when I checked in on the 24th, "If you want to eat tomorrow you'd better get food today." Even the neighborhood McDonalds across from the Kings Cross train station would be closed(!). So after I checked in I rushed back out to track down a supermarket. Fortunately I have a map of London that happens to list where every Tesco is. Unfortunately this map is from 1999, and the first Tesco I sought out today turns out to be but a hole in the ground...

Fortunately I found another one near Leicester Square. Unfortunately it was nearly completely out of food. Even grocery stores in 1992 Russia had more vegetables... But I managed to get what I needed and then spent the remaining late afternoon hours wandering the Covent Garden area as throngs of shoppers tried to make last minute purchases before the shops all closed - many as early as 4pm! How very unamerican it all seemed, to shut down even when there were so many potential customers ready, willing, and able (if not also desperate) to buy things. England is certainly not a country that favors procrastinators...

I had forgotten to send Santa the address to my hostel so Christmas itself was a low-key affair. But with nowhere to go anyway I just kicked back in the lounge. It's an interesting hostel - slightly upscale, with more grown-ups as guests than young backpackers. Rooms have only 5 to 8 beds in them with en suite bathrooms and are clean, comfortable, and reasonably safe. (Maybe not so quiet though if your roommate happens to snore...) There were lots of interesting people to talk to in the lounge - Brits, even - as we all sat around watching British television all day, including the Queen's annual Christmas speech (her fiftieth televised one), a rather nihilistic Doctor Who Christmas episode, two even more nihilistic EastEnders Christmas episodes, and a 25th anniversary reunion special of To the Manor Born, which I'm sure WGBH will soon be bringing over to disappoint American viewers everywhere (there were some really funny moments in this episode, but sadly not enough of them). Meanwhile I ate all the food I'd brought in the day before. Good, decent, English food. Like a Tesco Shephard's Pie... And a Christmas pudding I got from Harrod's. In fact, I've been eating a lot of English food as part of the whole travel experience. In Covent Garden the day before I'd come upon a pastie stall. I'd never had a pastie before and was thinking about daring to try one when a little girl came away clutching her steaming pastie-filled sachet, sighing in her English accent, "There's nothing in the world like a warm pastie..." Turns out she might be right.

The other odd thing about English television on Christmas was the commercials. I saw no less than five, maybe even six, consecutive sofa commercials during a single commercial break. Boxing Day is apparently a big sale day in England, but where it differs from the US is that apparently everyone uses it to buy big ticket items. I guess that's a good use of a sale day, but I didn't even know there could possibly be so many couch commercials out there in the world...

My own Boxing Day plans involved first meeting up with an English friend at Victoria Station. Unfortunately our rendezvous nearly turned into an unrequited disaster as we experienced a complete collapse of all information technology. E.g., not only did I not have a cell phone that worked in England, I didn't even have his phone number... I did have a laptop from which I sent him email, but then Hotmail decided not to bother to deliver any of it. Compounding these problems I also had no idea what train he was coming in on, and, since we've only met once before, little idea what he looked like... Of course, I have successfully met men at train stations in London under even sketchier circumstances before (wait, that came out wrong...), and like then this time it all ended up working out too.

This friend, one of the Stephens of this trip, had done me an enormous favor, vis a vis one of the other Stephens. Through some fortuitous googling after I'd already planned the trip I discovered that Stephen Fry had written a pantomime that was currently being performed at the Old Vic. Given my current interest in his work I thought it would be nice to see it. Besides, I'd never seen an English pantomime before, which, as I discovered through some additional googling, is itself an English Christmas tradition. So, as they say, when in Rome... er, London... It was too close to the performance date to buy my own ticket online, so my friend was kind enough to buy it for me. Of course, there was an awkward moment in our email exchange when he wrote, "Let me know if you still fancy it and I can have a word with a mate in London to pop along to the box office." Sure I knew what he meant but I had no idea how to phrase a response answer that wouldn't sound like I was mocking him...

The show wasn't until the evening, so I walked around for a while beforehand. I was curious to see what Belgravia was like since it was a setting used by Hugh Laurie in his novel. But it turns out I already knew...

My first trip to London had been with my mom and sister when I was 17. In a bit of wise parenting my mom had allowed me two days to myself so she wouldn't have a sullen teenager on her hands for the days we were together. One day I went to Oxford, and the other I spent wandering around London. I remember at one point walking around the neighborhood near our hotel searching for something for dinner and completely failing to find anything suitably casual or affordable. It was really an incredibly boring neighborhood. Which I realized the other day, as I stumbled out of Belgravia only to find myself directly in front of the Intercontinental, was this very same incredibly boring neighborhood.

Not everything on that trip had been so dull, thankfully, and I did spend a lot of time in the Piccadilly Circus area exploring all the book and record stores for items relating to Huey Lewis and the News. But times change, tastes change... and this time I found myself in one of the same large bookstores I'd been in before but in a section I'd never ever thought to approach: the law section.

It was so strange: I found myself positively giddy standing before all those law books, like a kid in a candystore. If this isn't evidence of the Great Change, I don't know what is. As I looked at all these books on English law I realized I desperately wanted to know everything inside them. Moreover, as I flipped through them I realized I could know everything inside them. The specifics were often different from American law (although not always - Rylands v. Fletcher, anyone?) but case law is case law and I do know how to read case law.

I resisted the enormous temptation to buy any or all of these books and instead headed over to the Paul boulangerie I'd earlier seen in Leicester Square. Paul is a French chain of artisan boulangers. When I'd given recommendations to the fellow traveler heading to France I had included the suggestion to have a baguette sandwich there. It's not my favorite boulangerie in Paris (for that you need to find the tiny anonymous place in Courbevoie across the street from the studio apartment I lived in for two months), but it is definitely better than most. So, to scratch my "Were it not for YouTube I'd be in France" itch, I went there for a sandwich jambon et beurre. Sadly, however, I chickened out on using French with the francophonic clerks and instead just spoke embarrassingly incompetent English. Which was too bad, since their English was perfectly fine.

Soon it was time for the pantomime. I think I may write about it separately at some point, but my most important thought is that I was immensely glad I went. All details of the production aside, which were generally quite good, as a foreign tourist it was fascinating to see something so of the place I was visiting. Watching the audience watch the play was just as entertaining to me as my watching the play itself.

I began my last full day in London by seeing the movie St. Trinian's. It too was very English. I can't imagine it will ever make it over to America, although Colin Firth fans might want to try track it down somehow. (Much of the movie seems to involve humiliating his character - and potentially also him. At one point he kills a character named Mr. Darcy. One wonders, given Colin Firth's strange self-referential career trajectory, if he might have wished to do so himself...) Most of it involves satirizing very English things (public schools, quiz shows, English celebrities, etc.) that would only really make sense or be funny to people who knew enough about them to have some sort of cultural reference. Thankfully because I watched all those QI episodes I at least understood Stephen Fry's quizmaster cameo and its implicit self-mockery... but most other Americans probably wouldn't have. Interestingly the movie seems to have largely been panned by local press, most of whom seem to feel the original did not require a remake. But for my part, while I've never seen the original, I thought this particular version stood reasonably well on its own. Perhaps not BAFTA-worthy, but sufficiently entertaining nonetheless.

It was very strange though, seeing the movie. I saw it at 11:30am for a mere 5.50 early bird rate -- at Piccadilly Circus no less. But just a few hundred yards down the road at Leicester Square the matinee price would have been over 12 pounds! It was good that I'd saved my pennies though, because I was about to spend them when it was back to the bookstore for me...

Because who needs a souvenir t-shirt when instead you can bring home English law books? I got three small subject summaries on tort law, contract law, and English constitutional law, and a big textbook-like thing on intellectual property because, yes, I really am that much of a geek. (Interestingly there were no books on "Property," like in the US. Instead there were books on "Land." I didn't get one, but I wonder if that was the right call. There's a lot of unintuitive nuance to English land law I'd be curious about, but judging by the bits of it that have made it into American property law it probably would have been so esoterically cryptic as to reduce me to tears...)

Then I also got some paperbacks. This is really unprecedented for me. I rarely buy books. Hell, I rarely even read books... But lately I've been rediscovering just how pleasurable it is to enjoy good ones. So I got Hugh Laurie's because I really liked it and now won't have to run to the library whenever I want to enjoy the language again, Stephen Fry's memoir and poetry books for the same reason, Michael Palin's Python diaries, and a Terry Pratchett novel. That last one was sort of spontaneous; I'd never read anything of his before. But England seems to have this annoying predilection for 3-for-2 sales. "Buy three of something you'd never want three of, and the third one is free..." In this case though two of my desired books were part of the 3-for-2 promotion so I essentially bought them and then got another book for free. Of the possibilities to chose from it was a toss-up between the Terry Pratchett novel or one by Ben Elton (a Fry and Laurie peer) but I opted for the former partly because I'm annoyed with Ben Elton over his Maybe Baby movie, a movie that I really wanted to like but couldn't, and partly because coincidentally I've randomly been running across Terry Pratchett's name quite a lot lately, sometimes for silly reasons, and sometimes for more somber ones.

My next stop was Kensington, which is where I was when I heard about the Benazir Bhutto assassination. Particularly after reading Ann Althouse's justifiable excoriation of American tv news that seemed to completely miss the significance of it, I was glad I was somewhere where I able to see the BBC's much more globally-aware coverage.

There was one more very English thing left to do on my trip, which was to meet up with my friend again in a pub to watch some English football. Manchester City (his team) v. Blackburn (I think?), who managed to force a tie thanks to an extremely offsides player who got away with it. Oh, but first we went to a different pub for what turned out to be some of the worst fish and chips I've ever had. O'Neill's is a chain of Irish pubs which advertises that it's about traditional pub food with that little extra Irish touch, where "touch" apparently means "Guinness." However they were supposed to add the beer to the batter, not to the cook, who must have had several before producing what appeared on our plates...

And that was pretty much the end of the English part of my trip. The next day it was time to fly back to the US, detouring to NJ in order to see some of my family before heading back home to California. Unfortunately it turned out that I didn't get to see the third intended Stephen of the trip after all: my dad. Oh well, I guess I will on the next trip, as I'm sure there'll be lots more Stephens in the future to lure me away again.