Gill Morris's Blog

2010-11-01T06:18:00.003-04:00

As of today, I no longer have to leave the country to log in to Youtube. I also was not near Taksim square when a suicide bomber attacked a police station yesterday.

Overall, a good start to the week! And thanks to those of you who checked in to make sure I was ok.

Expatriation

2010-09-19T10:17:00.009-04:00

More than half a decade ago (!) I used to sing in a number of choirs in Paris. Like extracurricular organizations in every country except the US, their real purpose was not to come together to pursue an artistic/athletic goal. They were simply convenient excuses for drinking societies. The post-practice pilgrimage to the bar was always at least as important as perfecting whatever Bach cantata we were working on.

One evening at Mascotte, the favorite watering hole of one such choir (see the view from across the street at right), an older member of the group pulled me aside. He asked me why an eighteen year old like me was in Paris and not in university, what I was doing with my life, why I'd left the US. As usual, I didn't have very convincing answers.

'It's interesting... I figured I should make some money before college... I have no idea what I want to do with my life...'

He didn't respond for a second. Then ‘You’ – the way he said this implied an intimacy that seemed presumptuous at the time – ‘you’ll become an expatriate.’

What he said next struck me so much that I remember it, almost word for word. At the time, I found him strange and challenging: he was either an ass or eerily prescient. It was only years later, when I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, that I realized he was paraphrasing Bill Gorton, the more or less perpetually drunk traveling companion of the novel's narrator, Jake.

'You - you may not know it now, but you've become an expatriate. Not just for a little bit, but maybe for life. First you'll lose touch with the soil. Then you'll get precious because fake European standards will ruin you. You'll drink yourself to death and become obsessed by sex. You'll spend all your time talking, not working...'

And he saved the direst prediction for last: 'You'll hang around in cafes.'

I can safely report, on the eve of my one-year anniversary of being a full-time expatriate, that only one of these predictions has come true (IMHO). I write this from a cafe - where I am neither drinking nor talking, but working, or was until I took a break to write this.

Hemingway, I discovered recently, was not the only member of the American Literary Canon to have less-than-pleasant things to say about expatriate life. Truman Capote is less predictive and more judgemental:

'Among the planet's most pathetic tribes, sadder than a huddle of homeless Eskimos starving through a winter night seven months long, are those Americans who elect, out of vanity, or for supposedly aesthetic reasons, or because of sexual or financial problems, to make a career of expatriation.'

Some of my favorite expats on a recent boat trip. Not so sad.

The quote, from Answered Prayers, aka the novel that earned Capote a top space on the list of Literature's Bitchiest, is predictably hypocritical. Capote spent years living as an expat before returning to New York to die an untimely death brought on by drink (proving Hemingway's quote might have a little bit more to it).

The fact that I am neither a literary genius nor a member of the bonne monde probably has something to do with the fact that neither of these descriptions of expatriate life mirror mine. Great books will never be written about my exploits. On the other hand, at least I make enough money to pay my own bills.

So, back to working in cafes. One of the great miracles of modern life, up there with genetic engineering and the near-worldwide availability of Chilean Malbecs, must be the ability to work remotely. With my Outlook files backed up on a custom work-tailored gmail account, my documents stored safely in Dropbox, and access to my company's archives through our FTP server, I can work anywhere that has a decent internet connection. Which doesn't happen to include my apartment, where I can only get internet if I hover, creepily, outside my landlady's door to piggyback on her wireless (an action she sanctions, and charges me for).

Of course there are benefits to being in the office, and I am most of the time. However, on days like today - when a precious Indian summer is providing a break from the dreadful Black Sea winter weather which seems to have prematurely set in - heading to the eleventh floor of a skyscraper just doesn't appeal.

The flexibility to work anywhere my company is active - Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Bahamas (?) - and my ongoing like-but-not-love affair with Istanbul (Chilean Malbecs present, but unnecessarily pricey) are combining to convince me that my days in this city may well be drawing to a close. Not before January, or likely even June, but I'm beginning to explore my options. These don't, at the moment, include a return to the US. So, as I close my first full year of being an expatriate, it looks like it won't be my last.

Go ahead and tell me this makes me more pathetic than a huddle of homeless Eskimos starving through a winter night seven months long. I won't believe you. I think I'm right where I belong looking for where I belong.

Absurdistan

2010-08-31T12:13:00.009-04:00

The fact that the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) chose the night of my arrival to stage a jailbreak in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, made me feel strangely welcome. I've never been much of an 'escape to nature' kind of person, so my decision to spend my summer vacation in the Pamir mountains of Badakhshan, the autonomous region of Tajikistan that borders Afghanistan and China, seemed slightly anachronistic. With 25 militant opposition leaders on the loose, though, surely my holiday wouldn't end up being just a hike in the woods?

Well, of course not. But all in all the trip was surprisingly normal. Go to sleep, wake up, eat breakfast, freak out about how beautiful the scenery is. Eat some goat, avoid buying illegal rubies, and inadvertently hire a bloodthirsty member of the Kyrgyz nouveau riche to bribe your way across the border. It's surprising how normal it all can seem when you're in Central Asia.

I don't have time to write down half the stories I'd love to tell but here are, at least, some pictures. The top of this post shows Joe, the friend who joined me on this trip, starting off on a hike from the village of Bulunkul, a frontier town of mud brick houses, yurts, and a surprisingly good volleyball team (the village children put my years of practice on the beach court in Frankfort, MI to shame). Just left is a picture of yours truly looking into Afghanistan from the remains of a 12th century fortress built to defend the Pamiris on the north side of the Oxus river from - well, whoever.

The Oxus, which runs from the Tibet most of the way to the Aral Sea along the borders of Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, was one of the things that drew me to this region. A favorite professor of mine loved to point out how rivers are the great highways of civilization, carving passageways through otherwise impossible landscapes and linking each settlement with the next, progressively, until you reach the ultimate equalizer (the sea). Ancient Oxiana, the area which surrounds the Oxus, was the site of some of Alexander the Great's greatest triumphs. His success over the Bactrians makes him the last (and likely also the first) western invader to win a land war in Afghanistan. The Oxus was also the corridor Marco Polo used on his way from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan and back. He presumably passed by - maybe even stayed in - the fort in the picture.

Today, the Wakhan valley which surrounds the Oxus is best known as a drug smuggling route and a mountain biking destination for those who wish they had been born in the fifties so they could be real hippies. For years it was too isolated and unsexy to attract much humanitarian aid, despite the fact that it is one of the poorest parts of the world. Its sole benefactor was the Aga Khan, a Swiss millionaire who also happens to be the spiritual leader of the Isamaili sect of Islam. The Aga Khan Development Network has established microlending programs, provided health care and training, and built schools to promote the economic development of the Pamir region. We met the children pictured at right on the way back from the fortress, while they were playing in the yard by an Aga Khan school.

Our last stop before passing into Kyrgyzstan was Karakul, a salty turquoise lake that was formed by a meteor some 5 million years ago. Two girls we met on the outskirts of the village demanded I take their picture doing cartwheels and asked me to send it to them when it was developed - though the best address they could provide was 'Anipa, Karakul, Tajikistan.' They then followed us to the shores of the lake, whispering conspiratorially. I think they were wondering why my toenails were [painted] black. Will they now grow up thinking white women have gangrenous toenails? I hope not.

Our next destination was Osh, the biggest city in southern Kyrgyzstan. Osh was the site of bloody riots in June between the ethnic Uzbek majority and nationalist Kyrgyz. It was my first visit to a place so recently touched by violence, and I was unsettled by how little had been cleaned up or repaired. A pair of Poles I met in Dushanbe raved about the bazaar at Osh - the 'best in Central Asia.' Today more than half of the market lies in ruins, bombed out and pocked with bullets. Life goes on, of course, as the picture above illustrates. It's hard to say where blame lies for inciting the ethnic conflict that erupted here in the spring - but apparently there is a video on youtube in which the ousted President's son discusses with someone in the government how much to pay the mercenaries they are hiring to go down and kill anyone they can to try and undermine the current regime (they settled on $1500 a day).

Most disturbingly, noone in this region thinks the violence is over. International Crisis Group issued their latest policy alert on the threat level in Kyrgyzstan and I happen to agree with it completely. A Pamiri student we picked up on our way out of Badakhshan asked how long we intended to stay in Osh and was glad when we told him we'd only be there a day or two. 'Don't come back in the next few weeks,' he warned us. 'Our driver is talking about how many Uzbeks he's going to kill after Ramadan.'

It is a chilling thing to hand over money to someone who aspires to kill others and probably has already - but there was no way to get out of paying the price we agreed on at the start of our ride into Kyrgyzstan. I considered, for the first time, my responsibility in choosing a place like this to travel - a decision that put me in the position of needing to rely on people I found morally reprehensible to get around. It is a decision which conflict journalists must make every day. Does the knowledge one gains, and is able to share, make it worth it?

Traffic

2010-08-25T07:41:00.002-04:00

I recently noticed Blogspot has a new 'stats' feature that allows the blogger to see how many people are visiting the website and what brought them there. Among the search terms that will bring you to Gill Morris's blog are:

buying marijuana in Istanbul
dating a Ukrainian man
Christians in Dongguan

I think this would be excellent material for the next time I play two truths and a lie.

All hail the benevolent dictator

2010-07-30T09:42:00.010-04:00

Foreign Policy, the rag founded by Samuel P. Huntington, has become a lot more fun (and less dignified) recently. First there was the whole zombie thing. It started with the innocent use of the word zombie (ie, reanimated corpse) to describe the proposed three-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis that was being bandied around back in January 09. Then, in August, there was the first of many blog posts by Daniel Drezner: how international relations theorists would cope with zombie attacks, soon followed up with March's Dawn of the Theories of International Politics and Zombies and June's Night of the Living Wonks.

Another favorite topic, after the undead, is failed states. They make for interesting photo essays - from Postcards from Hell to The Worst of the Worst (subtitle: bad dude dictators and general coconut heads) to Planet War. The one that stuck with me most, however, is Lifestyles of the Rich and Tyrannical: a short exploration of the lavish real estate holdings of some of the aforementioned bad dude dictators.

Perhaps it just seems topical. I recently returned from Oman, home to the enigmatic Sultan Qaboos and his (estimated) twenty-four palaces. True, he's had forty years to feather his nest, having deposed his father in 1970. And judging by the looks of his central palace in Muscat (left), I don't blame him for trying again (and again, and again).

Oman is the second-largest country on the Arabian peninsula, and by most accounts its most beautiful. It's remarkably peaceful, especially given it shares a land border with Yemen, is 21 miles from Iran, and hosts a large port in close proximity to Somalia.

I was there for two weeks on a business trip - long enough to learn three phrases in Arabic and meet two members of the royal family (one of which took the opportunity to extol, at length, the virtues of Russian hookers as opposed to Chinese ones).

Writing about economic development in the Gulf states, as I have since December, has been an eye-opening experience. With some notable exceptions, these countries were largely sand dunes populated by nomadic tribes until the middle part of the last century. What the Arabs have been able to produce in the last sixty years - albeit with a lot of help from guest workers - is nothing short of revolutionary. When His Excellency Sultan Qaboos came into power in 1970, less than a third of the country was literate, and its people either lived in a medieval-style fort or a tent (the remains of the former dot the capital's craggy shoreline).

'If you wanted to go outside at night, you had to carry a sword,' my driver, Hashim, told me. He was born sometime in the fifties, though he's not sure exactly when.

Today, 95% of the Omani population is literate and almost everyone speaks fluent English in addition to Arabic. The roads of the capital, Muscat, are wide and nearly traffic-free, there's air conditioning everywhere, and the tap water is potable. Life expectancy is in the 70s and the per capita income is $24k a year. Which, incidentally, is an order of magnitude greater than most of my American college-educated friends made last year.

There are two obvious reasons this kind of supercharged modernization was possible. First, the GCC's rulers - absolute monarchs, or emirs, or sultans - have little need to pander to that pesky bourgeois notion of democracy, thanks to decades of oil-funded public largesse.

In true Maslowian fashion, the idea of democracy doesn't hold much appeal to the generation who are experiencing life in a safe, stable country for the first time. I asked Hashim if he would like to vote:

'Why would I do that?' he said. 'I live a good life.'

The only country in the region to make any concrete steps towards democratic rule is Kuwait, which formed its first elected National Assembly in 1963. The experiment has not been a smooth one. Critics blame the National Assembly for hamstringing Kuwait's development through petty, corrupt, and/or incompetent governance. The decision in January to take over responsibility for all consumer loans - effectively, a bailout for some of the world's least credit-worthy spenders - is only one example of how the short-term interests of politicians worried about reelection are trumping the long-term viability of the country.

I remember writing an essay about how democracy is self-evidently the best form of government back in sophomore year of college. It has since been lost to the sands of time (read: computer failure). I still believe it is, in theory. But subsequent courses back in the Ivory Tower - and, of course, being hit over the head with the disparity between the developing country I live in, a 'democracy', and places like Oman - have made me think a lot more about when and where democracy can be reasonably introduced.

Tocqueville thought democracy would lead us a future of equality and blandness. Robert D. Kaplan, in his excellent, if controversial piece on why democracy is bad for developing countries, has a slightly different vision. Kaplan believes our love of the bottom line will lead us to a globalized, and therefore anarchic, economy, which will necessitate tyrannical rule to restore stability. The tyrant will be The Corporation, or the Military-Industrial complex, as the problems of the world are too vast to be controlled by one bad dude dictator and/or coconut head.

In Oman, at least, the promise of democracy - the premise of democracy - is seen by many as dubious. The financial crisis has if anything strengthened the average Omani's (and Oman-based expat's) conviction that Sultan Qaboos's measured approach to development is best for the country (the country continued to grow and saw a minimum or projects go on hold while neighbors like Dubai tanked). One man I talked to, the Dutch GM of a major oil company's Oman operations, went so far as to call Qaboos 'a philosopher king in the Platonic fashion.'

As an American raised by a Palin-loving ex-Marine (ex-Marine in the Palinic fashion?) on the good old fashioned values of hard work, industry, and disdain of the Washington establishment, I'm uncomfortable with Omani king-worship. And, for that matter, the docility of most of the people in the Gulf in the face of the abuses of their governments. Yet I also realize I grew up in a state that provided me free education, a childhood untouched by violent or arbitrary crime, and an environment where blog posts comparing politicians to soul-sucking zombies are laughed at and not censored.

I'm sure there are plenty of people doing fascinating work on human development. Some day when I don't have 26,000 words of copy to write in a month I might have more time to get into it.

A wise man once told me

2010-06-14T05:15:00.014-04:00

September - my first ferry ride.

In the midst of spring (summer?) cleaning, I rediscovered a book that was part of the press kit at the IMF/WB conference here in October. It’s basically culture porn: close-ups of ancient sculpture, architectural marvels silhouetted in the sunset, rose-water-sweating baklava, the obligatory picture of blurry whirling dervishes. On the first page, an unattributed quote is printed in bright turquoise:

‘When you are far from it, you will search for it like a lover you cannot forget, a passion which leaves you wandering the crowded streets of other cities hoping, but never able, to find just a part of it…’

'It' is, of course, Istanbul, the city which I have now called home for nine months. The longer I stay here, the more puzzled I become at the corpus of literature dedicated to raving about this city. It's gotten to the point where I don't feel like I can open a newspaper without being reassured of just how lucky I am to live here.

Istanbul is by any objective measure a great place to live. The food is good, the weather better (at least nine months out of the year) and there's plenty to do. There is a sense of excitement and edginess about this city that I can't imagine exists other places, or at least not in the same form: where else can you live in such comfort while momentous political change is underway? (Beirut, or Tel Aviv, some might say, but those places are country clubs compared to Istanbul's titanic sprawl.)

October: my first protest.

Yet despite all its charms, I haven't fallen in love with Istanbul. Perhaps this is because love, like taxes, is something I've always assumed I'd figure out when I grow up.

But we have settled into a comfortable friendship, Istanbul and I. In recognition of my nine-month anniversary in this city, here's a sampling of some favorite pictures from my first few months in Istanbul. Who knows, someday, I might even get around to writing about the story behind them. And, perhaps, realize that I've been in love with Istanbul all along. I think that's how it usually happens in the movies.

December: my first visit to a church.

I was not a cute child

2010-05-04T13:34:00.005-04:00

Musing about Cairo in my last post led me to take a trip down memory lane via the scrapbook my mother put together from our time in Egypt. Witness, friends, the horror of my youth.

The tragically oversized glasses, the 'Hard Rock Cafe Cairo' shirt I stole from Edward, the manic gleam in the eyes, as if to say: 'per aspera ad astra!'

Then there is the photo of me sitting imperiously on an obelisk, terrorizing our ill-informed tour guide Hani. I've added that to the previous entry, where it makes more sense.

But the crowning glory of my discoveries was this spreadsheet which I made for my family to study during the trip. This raises a number of questions: did I have any friends in elementary school? Did anyone in my family ever read it? Did the Egyptians really have a God for moisture?

The Cairo-Istanbul connection

2010-04-21T09:43:00.013-04:00

Cairo is so hot right now. Three of my coworkers have taken vacation there in the last month, as has Jennie, one of my fellow-sufferers in Hakan's Turkish classes (yes, I fulfilled my New Year's resolution to resume Turkish classes with my favorite quintolingual chainsmoker). And of course Kate was there in the fall, stealing the hearts of merchants and taking sublime pictures (scroll down for Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan), as she is wont to do.

The review from these highly respected sources runs something like Samuel Johnson's assessment of Paradise Lost: 'it is one of those books the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. No one ever wished it longer than it is.'

Cairo is one of the great cities of history, and the pyramids, like PL, deserve a chance to cast their spell on you. But no one I know seems to want to go back to Cairo. It is disorganised, overrun, filthy. In Kate's words:

'I felt cramped, claustrophobic, uncomfortable [in the Egyptian Museum]. In fact, this is how most of Cairo made me feel. It drew many similarities to feelings and experiences I had in Damascus. The same dirty grittiness of that comes from thousands of years of inhabitance. The same overwhelming numbers crowding streets and buses. You could feel the oppressiveness of the poverty. You could see the differentiation between wealth and the lack of it. You could taste the pollution; the smog hangs over the city like a hot summer haze.'

I visited Cairo in 1998, when I was gripped by an Egyptomania so severe I taught myself how to read hieroglyphs. My family fondly remembers how I would correct our clueless guide, Hani, when he botched the stories behind my favorite temples and archaeological sites.

For my part, I have blocked this aspect of my childhood - obnoxious smartassery - from my memory. What I do remember, though, is disappearing into the upper reaches of the bazaar with my brother Edward one day and being offered a fistful of marijuana for about $5. Even in my childhood innocence I could tell that was a good deal (we didn't take it).

Cairo's bazaar was the thing that bothered my friends the most. The constant heckling, fear of bag snatchers, and wildly inflated prices do not make for a relaxing vacation. Jennie, who returned last week, had plenty of horror stories about the street scene, and shared some during one of Hakan's smoke breaks.

'Cairo,' she concluded, 'makes Istanbul feel as clean and orderly as Copenhagen.'

Petri, a forty-something Dutch businessman who recently joined our class, shook his head. 'If you could have seen Istanbul when I first came here in 1988! It made Cairo look - well, not clean and orderly, but - I suppose cosmopolitan. You couldn't walk a foot in Istanbul with your wallet hanging out of your pocket. You couldn't see the other side of the street for all the smoke. And the hecklers would loop their fingers through your belt loops until you bought something from them.'

I was surprised to hear this. I know Istanbul has gone through significant changes over the last 20-30 years: take, for example, the fact that the population has gone from 2 million to 20 million. But to my mind the Istanbul of 1988 was a relative backwater, a faded ghost town when compared to its past and future vitality. What, I wondered aloud, changed between then and now to make Istanbul the relatively clean, European city it is today? Was there some mayor who cleaned up the streets, Giuliani-style, locking up the crazies and making the peddlers buy permits?

'It's much simpler than that,' said Hakan. 'People got richer.'

Could it be that straightforward? True, Istanbul's population boom corresponded with a massive increase in Turkey's wealth: inflation-adjusted GDP grew from $90 billion to $270 billion in the ten years between 1988 and 1998, and to $734 billion by 2008, according to the World Bank. The structure of the economy changed as well, with more than 15% of the workforce shifting from blue-collar jobs in agriculture and manufacturing to white-collar service jobs.

Yet the World Bank statistics never take into account the black market, which in Turkey is generally estimated to account for 20-25% of all economic activity. Nor does it seem likely that all of Istanbul's 18 million new residents have managed to find jobs more lucrative than begging, petty theft, and selling fake sunglasses. But take a walk down any street outside of Sultanahmet, Istanbul's touristy center, and you'll realize something must have worked. You're more likely to be heckled in Harvard Square than on Istiklal Cd, Istanbul's main shopping and nightlife artery.

Reason No. 25601 I'm glad I moved to Istanbul: it doesn't fit the models I'm used to, and so is constantly intriguing. Reason No. 25602: I have too many pairs of fake Ray-Bans already.

Back to Reality

2010-04-06T05:06:00.005-04:00

The picture above, taken at a gallery opening we happened upon last Thursday, is taken from Kate's latest facebook album. Kate the Intrepid has returned to Istanbul, having ridden through deserts with Bedouin, participated in a Muslim wedding, and guest starred in a Bollywood movie (well, as an extra), among innumerable other adventures. As she enjoys her (dwindling?) days of funemployment, she has more time to update her website, so I would urge anyone still reading this sorry excuse for a blog to check hers out instead.

I hope to be back soon, however, with tales of sprained ankles, the Romanian economy, and gypsy palaces.

Why not? Part II

2010-03-22T09:39:00.017-04:00

One of the joys of moving to a new city is the process of forming a social network. In my book, this joy is slightly greater than shots of antibiotics in painful places, and infinitely less than the joy of cooking.

Making new friends takes work. It involves treading a fine line between proactivity and stalkerville. Despite your best intentions, there's a good chance that at least a few people you call or email - friends of friends, people you met out and about - will think you are nosy/presumptuous/offensive/annoying. Or hitting on them. But when the alternative is sitting alone at home, or going out with the delivery man who misinterpreted your friendly conversation as an unspoken invitation to ring your doorbell in the middle of the night (with, I would imagine, something other than friendly conversation on his mind), sending some awkward emails to people you barely know seems a small price to pay.

Especially when they so often yield great rewards. One recipient of one said awkward email has both become a good friend and pointed me in the direction of the Professional American Women of Istanbul, a networking group.

Despite a deep-seated mistrust of organised groups of women (borne out of a traumatic summer living in an all-girls cabin at band camp in my early adolescence), I decided to give PAWI a try. The first meeting I attended was at the Consul-General's residence, a fortified mansion that looms over an innocent-looking little village a few miles north of the centre of town. I wasn't sure what kind of people I would be meeting - ladies who lunch (here known by the code name 'trailing spouse')? Bra burning careerists? English teachers? - but took a cue from the name and tried to dress Professionally. The only problem was that I was still living out of the backpack I'd taken to China at that point, so the only Profession I could dress for was Starving Artist/Unemployed College Grad.

Thankfully this wasn't an issue as the Professional American Women of Istanbul turned out to be an interesting, and forgiving, mix of the three professions I expected (trailing spouse, starving artists, English teachers), plus a healthy dose of lawyers, entrepreneurs, and executives. I also learned, to my surprise, that the Consul-General was a woman.

'Her husband calls himself the trophy husband,' one woman told me conspiratorially. 'He's quite the charmer.'

I didn't know quite what to say to that and so made an excuse about being thirsty. In the line for tea, I found myself behind the only man in the room. Feeling friendly, I asked him, jokingly, if he was the trophy husband.

'No, I'm not married to Sharon,' the man said, without a trace of a smile. Oops.

'Well, you don't look like one of the caterers,' I said. This too was intended as a joke.

'No,' again. He was not the greatest conversationalist.

'So - what do you do here in Turkey?'

'I'm the Ambassador,' he said. Still no smile.

What kind of aspiring Turkey-based journalist does not recognize the US Ambassador? The answer is: a bad one. I attribute this bit of self-realization, and the career shifts it inspired, to PAWI.

I also have PAWI to thank for finally, finally finding a good answer for the question of why, for the moment, I choose to live abroad. Anyone who has lived abroad has had to contend with friends back at home who simply cannot understand why someone would choose to leave a country with stable democracy, free speech, and the best candy bar selection in the world (the case could be made for either the US or Britain in this respect). Truth be told, it's a question many of us ask ourselves every day - see as evidence the fact that 'Why Istanbul?' is one of the more popular tags in this blog.

To Maureen, who sat next to me at a PAWI networking dinner last week, the answer is simple. 'The way I see it,' she said, 'is this: expats have a fundamentally different mindset to the rest of the world. While the vast majority of people exist in a world where 'why' is the most important and instructive question, we live in a world of 'why not'. Why live abroad? Why not? Why Turkey? Why not?'

Maureen's take on this question is not the first time I've noticed the usefulness of 'why not'. Most memorably, it was the excuse a man named Giles gave me for moving to Gambia when I met him in the summer of 2008, which inspired me to declare 2008 my summer of 'Why not?' (see the blog I contributed to back then, complete with a 'Why not?' post of its own, if you want more context). But Maureen's explanation captures the zeitgeist of expatriate life in a way that has never occurred to me before, and which I will now never forget.

Photo: I walked down the street I used to live in last week and thought this cat had it pretty good. A spot in the sun, a sweet fur coat, a motorcycle: everything you need save opposable thumbs, really.

Rest for the weary

2010-03-13T06:08:00.006-05:00

There are a number of things I wished I'd known before I went to a hospital in Turkey.

First off, would it be too much to expect a hospital to have some saline solution, a contacts case, and a toothbrush and toothpaste if you end up staying the night? Apparently, yes.

Secondly, when given a thermometer, do not put it in your mouth. Doing so will invoke a string of expletives from the nurse, following which you will have to clean your own mouth out with soap. Thermometers go in your armpit.

Third, when you are told you are going septic, don't sweat it. Back when I was on the crew team, the word 'septic' was the kiss of death. A rower traditionally goes septic when he or she has inadvertently allowed a blister to get severely infected. By the time you go septic, your body is in a state of shock and you have hours to live.

In Turkey, by contrast, when you are told you have septic tonsilitis, you have hours to live in the waiting room, at which point you will be admitted, hooked to an IV, and injected with antibiotics via an extremely painful shot in the butt. You will be then left to your own devices for about twelve hours until the nurse sees fit to send a round of antibiotics through the other butt cheek. In my case, this came at the rather unsociable hour of two am.

I woke up on the evening of my first day in the hospital without a fever and able to swallow for the first time in two days. By the time I finished dinner, I was feeling well enough to marvel at the bad taste of whoever decorated the hospital. My room was accessorized with a fainting couch and two Louis XV-meets-Saudi nouveau riche chairs, both upholstered in an executionary black and gold brocade (my friend Gregor was kind enough to volunteer his modeling talents to bring to you the photo at right).

My doctor came in soon after and I asked him what he thought could have caused my dramatic case of tonsilitis.

'Did you have anything cold to drink on Monday?' was his response.

I drink cold water every day, I responded. Was there anything else that might have made me sick?

'I'm pretty sure it was the cold drink,' he said.

Diagnostic services aside, I found the level of care in the hospital comforting. It was certainly better than my only previous experience being hospitalized at Harvard. At the university with (arguably) the best medical school in the world, they routinely forgot to bring my meals, unless I surfaced from my delirium long enough to demand them. I'm pretty sure malnutrition might have had something to do with the fact that it took me twice as long to recover from a similar illness.

I'm mostly better now, though I still have to return to the hospital for injections and had to promise my boss that I would take it easy this weekend. Miraculously - or maybe it just seems miraculous to me - my $60 a month Turkish health plan covered the entire ordeal, something which I wouldn't have been able to expect from my $500 a month US health insurance. All in all, a pretty painless process. Except for those shots of antibiotics. They were a real pain in the ass.

Overheard in Georgia

2010-02-19T03:31:00.005-05:00

I just returned from an eventful long weekend skiing in the Caucasus mountains with Laure and the rest of the Kiev crew. My lovely travel partner Anna W has saved me the trouble of actually having to write about this by giving a detailed blow-by-blow of the trip here.

In place of a coherent narrative, I will allow you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions about the country based on a playlist of songs we heard on our six day misadventure.

Teeny weeny string bikini - Gunther & the Sunshine Girls (in the mashrutka between Sarpi, the Georgian border town, and Batumi, Georgia's main port on the Black Sea)

Oooh... you touch my tra-la-la - Gunther & the Sunshine Girls (man's cell phone ring tone, at a roadside stop on the way to Tbilisi)

She's Got Issues - Offspring (on the ski slope in Gudauri. One of my friends in middle school once
put this on a mix tape he titled 'Gill in Song'. Teenagers can be blunt.)

Smooth - Santana (on the ski slope. Another song I haven't heard since middle school)

Joy to the World (in the restaurant of the nice hotel where the Kievians were staying)

It's the End of the World as we know it - REM (immediately after 'Joy to the World')

Oooh... you touch my tra-la-la - Gunther & the Sunshine Girls (on the ski slope, 2nd day)

F*** a dog in the ass - Blink 182 (on the ski slope, 2nd day)

In short, an extensive list of the late 90s pop-rock and the sexually explicit. I'm still trying to figure out how to craft this into a good metaphor for my time in the country.

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

2010-02-11T04:17:00.007-05:00

You never know what you'll find when you walk out of an apartment in Istanbul. Outside my apartment it's a pretty safe bet that Dirty, the overgrown puppy that someone in my building leaves food for, will be waiting for a quick scratch behind the ears.

Dirty is a stray and so you can’t fault him for living up to his name; neither can you resist petting him when he fixes his tan eyes on you. Thankfully, most mosques have outdoor sinks for washing up, and there are three mosques on my way to work.

Further down the street, I might run into the day’s catch being delivered to Meyra, a trendy restaurant recently reviewed in the NYTimes’ 36 hours in Istanbul (the picture above is from the associated slide show - and happens to be the top of my street). The fish coat the back floor of a van – no packaging, no ice – and the cook picks from the silvery, twitching mess by hand.

There’s a fruit stand right after Meyra with an owner who greets me with a gracious ‘Gunaydın’ (good morning) every day, even though I never buy from him. If I’m lucky, I’ll catch the moustachioed farmer with a donkey-cart full of vegetables at least once a week.

Next stop is the ATM, which dispenses money in four currencies. This is useful when you are paid in pounds, pay rent in euros, pay the credit card bill in dollars, and need Turkish lira for day-to-day expenses.

Last week, I came out of my apartment to find a tank and half a dozen policemen with automatic weapons. My first thought was: how did they get the tank up the steep streets of Cihangir? I’ve gotten used to the police and their fancy toys – the tanks are topped with water cannons instead of real ones, the automatic weapons often fire tear gas – but wasn’t used to finding them so close to home.

This morning the police were gone, but something else was different. It’s a cloudy day, like many this winter, and no warmer than usual, but the air has the unmistakable tang of spring in it. Here in Istanbul people associate seasonal weather with the seas which surround Turkey: Black Sea winters, bleak and rainy; Aegean springs and falls, with their calm and sweet-smelling breezes; and Mediterranean summers where the sun turns all the colors brilliant. The groundhog may have signalled another six weeks of winter back in the US, but we’re not waiting for the equinox here in Turkey – reason number 13,248 I’m glad I moved here.

Apologies for going radio silent. January is a dark, cold month not worth recording, save for an epic visit from my brother Robert and my friend Cory and the consequent road trip through southwestern Turkey, and a weekend trekking through slush with my favorite Romanian Greek English Parisian... but those are stories for another day.

Hipsters, Conservatives, Defaulters (and anarchists!)

2009-12-29T04:05:00.005-05:00

For someone who's spent most of her spare time over the last five years traveling like a penniless bum, I'm very poorly read in the travel classics. I only recently got to Kerouac's On the Road, that dated instruction manual for the would-be hipster. I liked it, I guess - who doesn't like the escapism provided by reading about people more dissolute than you will ever be? - but it doesn't make me long for America. The Road through Denver, New Orleans, New York, and Frisco sounds dull and sordid. Reading about how drunk they all are makes my head hurt. And the diet of apple pie and cheese sounds even less healthy than my current menu of kebabs and dark chocolate.

One thing I have been missing, however, is The Road. There's just something about a change in the air and having everything I need in a backpack that I find intoxicating. It's possible to get too much of it - I'd say I was drunk by the Ukraine and nursed my hangover for much of the beginning of my time in Istanbul - but the trip home for Thanksgiving was the equivalent of ibuprofen and a good night's sleep. I'm ready to start drinking again.

That, and the pollution in Istanbul is getting to me. Artistic wealth, generous inhabitants, and baklava this city has in spades, but emissions controls not so much. My brother Robert is visiting and we spent much of Saturday walking through unexplored neighborhoods and hiking along the top of the 4th century Theodosian walls (the picture to the right is me talking to a dog in the slum next to the northern end of the city walls). Being able to wander aimlessly through centuries of history in a tank top in the middle of winter is a luxury I wouldn't have even dreamed of in my four years of purgatory in freezing Cambridge. But, greedy as always, I would love to be able to spend the day outside and not feel like I smoked a pack of car-exhaust-flavored cigarettes at the end of it.

And so Saturday night Robert and I caught a bus to Edirne. The city was once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, the base from which Mehmet the Conqueror sent his army to take Constantinople in 1453. Today it is best known for being the border station to Greece and Bulgaria. Oh, and the annual oil-wrestling contests in which mostly naked men cover themselves in olive oil and grope each other. In the words of a friend who went last summer, 'it's like the WWF with lube and less clothing.'

The city that most travelers miss - because they are on their way to Istanbul or watching obese oily men perform their homoerotic ballet - has a lot to offer by day and not much by night. I'm taking the word of our hosts Batu and Mutlu (via Couchsurfing, once again) on the night part: there is only one club worth going to, they say, and even that is only really good because you can stop at this sweet kebab stand on your way out. We went. The club walls were covered in fake antiquities. Actually, given the archaeological wealth of this country, they may well have been real. As Eddie Izzard would say, 'there're a lot of them about...'

By day, there are sublimely beautiful mosques to visit, immaculate streets bordered by crumbling houses to meander, and innumerable tea houses to sit at and discuss the future of Turkey. As a border city, it should come as no surprise that the West, and Turkey's relation to it, dominates the conversation.

The general consensus among the Turks I've talked to is that the EU accession process is good for the country. Regardless of whether or not Turkey joins the EU, the process is stimulating reforms that have been a long time coming, such as a revision of the civil code to allow women to work without their spouse's consent (passed in 2001) and reducing (though not eliminating) the amount of jail time you may serve for 'insulting Turkishness' (2002).

Mutlu, whose name translates as Happy, isn't as overly enamored with Westernization as many of the Istanbullians I know. I imagine he appreciates the above reforms - we didn't discuss them - but he thinks that Turkey is held back by the IMF debt it accumulated in 2001. Turkey can't advance, he says, when it doesn't have the money to invest in major projects. Turkey's brave new future can only come about when it stands up to the Western institutions telling it how to spend its money. Presumably by defaulting on its debt.

As a fiscal conservative who relies on a sound financial system, I am obliged to say this is a horrible idea. A pragmatist, however, might say Mutlu's take isn't altogether crazy. Argentina, after all, massively defaulted on its IMF debt in 2001 - and then enjoyed an internally-financed growth rate of 8% a year from 2003 to 2007. Turkey's GDP growth in the same period has hovered around 3% a year. A recent article in the NYT argues that 'strategic default' (granted, for homeowners, not countries) is beneficial not only for the defaulters, but for the economic system as a whole, because it encourages more strategic bartering.

It isn't obvious to my brother, who has now been in Turkey for six days, that Turkey is a poor country. 'This is confusing,' he said as we walked through one of Istanbul's lavish malls on Christmas day. 'Isn't this a developing country?' The bus to Edirne, he noted, had better service than planes in America. A walk through some of Istanbul's slums on Saturday might have tarnished the impression he was getting of Turkey if it hadn't been the kind of rare gorgeous day that can make life in an uninsulated shack seem refreshingly simple, a la Walden Pond. Thoreau could have set up shop here, I found myself thinking, when we found a mattress inside one of the old watch-towers on the city walls.

I hardly have more cred than my brother when it comes to getting to know Turkey's gritty side. The brushes with protestors around the IMF/WB meeting ('A Tale of Two Tuesdays (and anarchists)') were dramatic, to be sure, but it's not the kind of stuff that happens every day. I live in chic Cihangir, the traditional haunt of journalists and gentrified artists. The closest I've come to Istanbul's underbelly is a few tranny sightings on Istiklal Caddesi, the modern city's main drag, and the uncannily perceptive photographs of Sevket Sahintas.

A major factor in my lack of social conscience is my continuing unmastery of the Turkish language. Therefore, in the spirit of this time of year, I am making my first New Year's Resolutions since 2002: I will learn Turkish, and I will get off the familiar paths I've already carved through this city.

To that end, I just emailed Hakan to see if I can enroll in evening courses for January. If I'm going to learn this language and this country, I figure I might as well do it with a chain-smoking anarchist.

Noel Novelties

2009-12-20T15:37:00.010-05:00

Oh, for the warm and fuzzy. The familiar texture of a flowery canvas couch with the cushions all chewed up by the family dog. The thinning oriental rug under sock feet. The sinus-widening scent of fresh pine broiling under plastic lights. A new book read in an old LL Bean vest, made back when they still used goose down for the filling.

Such are the familiar comforts of a New England Christmas, as shown in the picture my mother cruelly sent from our living room earlier today. I'm sitting in my new apartment, watching a thunderstorm over Asia, and worrying about the rain seeping in from under the door to the balcony, which is rotting the floorboards. Is this what they call growing up?

Two consolations: my brother Robert will be coming over to join me for the holidays, assuming he escapes the Snowpocalypse which has shut down the mid-Atlantic coast of the US; and I received my first Christmas present. A friend, back from Kabul, brought over the rather unique Bottle Burqa. Cheeky symbol of women's liberation? You could call it that. Culturally insensitive? Probably. Sitting in pride of place on the living room table? Check.

Crazy Christians!

2009-12-12T19:49:00.008-05:00

When, last spring, I first thought of moving to Istanbul, I talked over the idea with Kate, who I've mentioned quite a few times in this blog. The logic went something like this: instead of moving back in with my parents while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, I would move somewhere where the rent is cheap and maybe get to know a new part of the world. It sounded logical, she said. It even sounded like fun. We flirted with the idea of moving over together, but as our summers took us in different directions – her to work in Boston, me to China and the former Soviet Union – it looked more and more like she would be starting work in New York City and I would be arriving in Istanbul on my own.

Which is what happened, sort of. I arrived in Istanbul and started to look for work, and Kate enrolled in a job training course. Or at least I thought she had until she wrote me and told me she'd found a good fare and bought a ticket to Istanbul.

I didn't manage to keep her in the city for long. Armed with a sturdy backpack and a sense of adventure that makes me look like a hermit, she set off for Syria, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, or so was the plan last time I checked. But first she eased her way into life on the road by exploring Turkey.

It didn't take more than a single entry on her blog to convince me to put my own pack back on. The fact that the correspondent I had been working with had decamped to Pakistan for an indeterminate period, and that flights to Capadoccia, where Kate was, were $30, sealed the deal. I left the next day.

Capadoccia, in central Turkey, has some of the most interesting geology on earth. Four volcanoes covered the region in lava a few millennia ago. Persistent winds wore the soft stone into cone-shaped towers, and rivers carved colorful gorges through layers of pink, white, and yellow lava.

From the 5th century onwards, Capadoccia became a refuge for early Christian sects deemed heretical by the orthodox church. They burrowed into the stone cones and, sometimes, underneath, digging subterranean cities with as many as eight stories. They eeked a living out of miniscule farms fertilized with pigeon droppings. To this day, it is said that a man won't be taken seriously as a suitor unless he has a sizable flock of pigeons.

Many Capadoccia natives have capitalized on the exotic appeal of their homes by turning them into inns. I discovered Kate lounging on a bed of carpets on the deck of the excellent Kelebek Cave Hotel soon after I arrived. Though we were staying at the also excellent Kose Pension - on the roof, no less - she had, characteristically, already made friends in town. Ali, the innkeeper, was pouring wine liberally, and it was established that there was nothing that could possibly be done with the afternoon but watch the colors of the valley change as the sun set.

My second day, we turned to the serious business of exploring. Life in the underground cities could not have been much fun. The tunnels are tiny, designed so that attackers would be forced to move slowly and therefore killed easily. It may be a claustrophobe's nightmare, but the little girl in me thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. Cowboys and Indians seem so quaint compared to cave-dwelling heretics and pagan/Muslim/Orthodox crusaders.

We didn't have to guess at what life would be like in the cone towers because Ali invited us to his friend Apo's place for a barbecue. As the lamb was grilling, Apo showed us his sumptuous (well, for a cave) living room. It was covered in Turkish carpets and tapestries, which I had expected, and had a wireless router, which I had not. Ah, modernity.

Most of Apo's friends didn't speak English, but I bonded with one who was playing a saz, a six-stringed lute-like instrument that is common in Turkey. He showed me some basic chords and we began to sing together, no doubt to the horror of anyone who was listening.

I had trouble falling asleep on my overnight bus home. From the center to Istanbul in the northwest is a solid eleven hour drive through the Anatolian heartland. Occasionally the bus would shudder to a halt next to a roadside stand that had appeared, unannounced, out of the surrounding blackness. A small crowd, usually old women, was waiting at each, clutching small cloth satchels and huddled against the late October chill. They shuffled on board, taking the places of a handful of equally wizened old women who melted into the night outside, and then promptly fell asleep.

I did manage to drift off a little past two, but woke with a start just past three. A woman the color of dusty hills and at least as old had fallen asleep with her head on my chest. She was wearing the drop-seam pants that have recently become fashionable ('genie pants') but are in fact native to this region. The story behind their origin goes something like this: one early Christian sect believed the Messiah could be born again at any time, so they had their women wear drop-seam pants that would catch baby Jesus II when he popped out. The pants would also help hide the baby in case Herod II decided to come try to kill him. Evidently, no one is going to notice you walking around with a baby tucked in your pants.

When I woke up again in Istanbul, the old woman had disappeared back into the countryside, far from the skyscrapers and housing complexes of the city I now call home. Reflexively, I checked for my wallet, but I really didn't need to. As a Turkish friend explained to me, Turks protect guests in their country – they use the word guest, not tourist – with almost religious passion. This is changing in the increasingly developed tourist hubs of Old Istanbul, Izmir, and Troy, but I still feel safer in Turkey than in, say, Paris or New York City. Kate, meanwhile, continues to defy anyone's notion of what is safe for a small blonde woman by hitchhiking around the Middle East. If I could think of a single place in the 'west' where she'd be as safe doing that I'd feel slightly more charitable towards the people who have managed to convince conservative America - make that most of America - that the Muslim world is full of bloodthirsty fanatics.

Reflections, directions

2009-12-02T20:28:00.001-05:00

I have had a lot of 2s recently:

1. I started working 2 jobs;

2. I spent two weeks out of Turkey, most back in the states for Thanksgiving (during which I shared my room with 2 houseguests, in the usual Morris fashion, bringing the total to 22 for the weekend);

3. I mortally offended 2 people at my high school reunion, the first by asking when her baby was due (nope, just fat!) and the second in an argument about why Sarah Palin is, contrary to his opinion, not the best thing to happen to American politics (oh, Greenwich!)

But in much, much more interesting news, my friend Kate has been traveling all in and out of the middle east. I can't get enough of her blog and photos. My friend since we were wee bairns and my best friend since college, Kate is a constant source of inspiration: if you take a look at her blog, maybe she can be for you too.

Rise, traveller

2009-11-15T22:31:00.003-05:00

(originally published in the Greenwich Citizen)

I first noticed him when he crossed the threshold into Hagia Sofia the wrong way. In Buddhist temples, you always enter with your right foot first and leave with your left foot. Since living in China, I've picked up the habit of watching how I enter religious spaces. He stepped in with his left foot first. I followed with my right.

Istanbul's Hagia Sofia isn't much of a religious space any more. The building has gone the way of the nation that surrounds it: an important seat of early Christianity, it converted to Islam and then a secular institution. The Cathedral turned Mosque turned Museum was one of the things that drew me to Istanbul, but I'd put off visiting once I arrived because I was suffering from the Lonely Traveler's Blues. Three hundred and sixty days a year I am happy to explore all the world has to offer. The other five, I wonder why on earth I have left family and friends in all the places I've lived, and hate the idea of surrounding myself with strangers in a foreign city.

It usually passes in a day, sometimes less, but my first few days in Istanbul proved especially trying. It was my own fault, completely. I'd come to the city without a Plan, armed with only a few distant contacts and ghostly potential job leads, and about a hundred different impulses but no specific reason why I had decided to stop in this city, of all places.

It had taken a massive effort of will to get myself to Hagia Sofia, especially when I found out the entry price was 20 lira, or $13, which was my daily budget. It was this strange man stepping over the threshold the wrong way that drew me in as much as anything else.

We followed tandem paths around the building, looking at the same mosaics in different order. I took pictures across the sanctuary while he took pictures of the dome. He wandered over to a window and nudged it open. I had to stand on a ledge to see out. In between the ancient buttressing, you could see the mosque Sultan Ahmet had constructed at the beginning of the 17th century. Some say he built it as a challenge to the old Roman Emperor Justinian's Hagia Sophia, a very visual demonstration that the Muslim Ottomans could match or outdo their 6th century Christian predecessors. But why, I thought, would he have built a structure that looks so similar? In my eyes, the two buildings look like brother and sister: one dressed in pink, one in blue, but obviously from the same family.

Muslims call Christians and Jews 'people of the book,' like themselves. All three faiths believe in one God, arguably the same God. Just as the Christian Bible incorporates the Hebrew Bible as its old testament, the Quran tells the story of Abraham, and Moses, and even Jesus. The view that dominates western media, intentionally or unintentionally – that Christians and Muslims are fundamentally different types of people – makes no sense to me. Over the last two months, every fear I harbored of the rise of militant Islam has been countered by acts of extraordinary generosity and friendship. For every jihadist who is profiled in the news, there must be a million peaceful men, women, and children whose stories never get told. I can't blame the media, though: they have to write what sells, and what sells is and always seems to have been violence and fear.

I made my visit to Hagia Sofia long before I was qualified to make any sort of judgment on the country or the people around me. On that day, I was still nursing my inexplicable Lonely Traveler's Blues, though something was pulling me out of it. Certainly most of the credit must go to the Hagia Sophia and Sultanahmet Mosque, two indescribable monuments to human achievement which cannot fail to inspire. But part of it, too, was my silent museum partner.

We ended up talking, finally, by one of the toppled columns that litter the garden around Hagia Sophia like fallen leaves. I asked if he was Italian. I'd based my guess on the fact that he was wearing the kind of pointed boots I have only ever seen on gay men and Italians. No, he said, he was German, here studying Turkish, and what was I doing in Istanbul?

I don't remember which of my stable of answers I gave him – interest in the Islamic world/medieval history/contemporary EU politics, desire to travel, lower cost of living, love of kebabs – but it was enough to start a conversation that continued for the next four hours. We visited the blue mosque and strolled through the garden outside the Sultans' old harem. As the sun set, we stopped for tea at a cafe looking over the Bosphorus, the bustling strait of water which divides Istanbul's European half from its Asian.

We parted ways soon after that, each pleading dinner commitments, though I know I at least could have easily missed the dinner I had planned. It was better, I thought, to leave things as they were. We'd had a lucky meeting of minds in the heart of old Istanbul, but we had separate lives to return to in the world outside. He was heading back to Germany in five days, I was hoping to find a job that would support me in Istanbul until I went home for Thanksgiving. At the last minute, he gave me his email address, but when I waved goodbye from the bus I was pretty sure it was the last time I would ever see him.

As my bus trundled up the European side of the Bosphorus, I looked at Istanbul with new eyes. Pale mosques, lit by spotlights, glowed yellow, and their reflections danced in the water. There had been nothing particularly remarkable about our meeting, but it revived whatever had been laying dormant since my arrival in Istanbul, and I was finally ready for the city.

Istanbul had apparently decided she was ready for me as well. I found an internship with CNN's correspondent in Istanbul the next day and moved into a fantastic apartment in the center of the city a week later. My neighbors offered to show me around, had me over for dinner, and one, a Greek, invited me to his niece's Christening.

And so the traveler part of me has gone with the lonely blues, at least for now. A new friend of mine recently asked how long I'll be living here. I think I surprised myself as much as her when I said I wasn't sure I'd ever leave. I will live other places, I'm sure, and might never call Istanbul home. I'm not even positive I'll be returning after Thanksgiving. But I will always pass through here, and always be looking forward to my next stay. This is not a place that can be visited once.

A Greenwich Citizen

2009-11-04T12:58:00.005-05:00

As I'm sick of being harangued by the one or two people who actually read this blog about the lack of posts over the last month, I've decided to make like a real writer and recycle old material. I've been writing a biweekly column for The Greenwich Citizen, a local paper from my hometown, since the beginning of August. If you can tolerate the odd bit of Greenwich arcana, please click the links below for a fresh take on some old places. I've tried to insert them in more or less chronological order - apologies for the occasional redundancies.

Go East, Young Woman, and go Crazy with the Country

Dear, Dirty Dongguan

Spot of Golf, Genghis?

O Sad Siberian Night

The Bush-Ahmadinejad Connection

A Country to be Proud Of

Everyone Should Have Experience

(Actually, I have no idea how many people read this blog. At least two, guilty of mentioned haranguing. Please feel free to email or comment to let me know you're reading - I'd love some feedback!)

Kars

2009-11-03T06:16:00.003-05:00

It snowed yesterday morning. Since I moved away from Boston in part to escape winter, this was a discouraging development. To make matters worse, I live in a beautiful high-ceilinged old apartment with gorgeous picture windows that retains about as much heat as a ventilation shaft. I'm too cheap to turn on the gas, which can run to about $200 a month (to give a sense of scale, that's just under the amount I pay for rent), and the only clothes I have were packed with China's tropical heat in mind. I wrote my roommate, who's currently in Kabul, to see if she had any suggestions for avoiding hypothermia.

'Let's look into electric heaters? Isn't that what other poor people do?'

And, in a separate email: 'its so hot here. im so glad i brought that sleepingbag.'

Kabul: temptation rears its ugly head, yet again (see 'The Detroit-Kabul Connection').

Marooned in a Marathon

2009-10-18T07:45:00.002-04:00

In nineteen years as a committed athlete, I never ran more than a mile and a half at a time. My bone density is nonexistent thanks to the years I spent swimming three hours a day instead of engaging in normal childhood activities like jumping rope. I've sprained each of my ankles twice and they still occasionally give out without warning. My shins ache for a week after I run any distance and I never feel like I've gotten a good workout (probably because I can never be bothered to go for longer than a mile and a half).

In other words, I loathe running. I hate it so much I would spend an extra forty-five minutes on the erg, that torture machine for rowers, when the rest of Radcliffe Crew was running the Arsenal loop.

Given the above, it may seem odd that I signed up to do the Istanbul mini-Marathon. But, like Britney Spears, I've stopped trying to justify myself with age... Except my version of growing up entails picking up running instead of unplanned pregnancy, head shaving, and making out with Madonna.

Luckily for my ankles, the start of the marathon was so crowded that running wasn't an option. The huddled masses at the starting line didn't break free until well into the course, and even then the human traffic was denser than your average New York rush hour sidewalk. I did try to run, honestly, but I'm pretty sure my mile and a half threshold still stands.

About a mile in, there was a particularly dense knot of people surrounding something moving low on the ground. My New England resentment of bottlenecking lost out to my burgeoning reporter instincts and I hustled to catch up with them. Turns out there were a pair of midgets (dwarves? I never know the correct term). They were taking three Lilliputian steps for every one of mine and I thought how torturous it must be to do an entire marathon with an ogling entourage. They weren't even getting paid for their pains.

Two miles in, we reached the first bridge over the Bosphorus, the channel of water that divides Istanbul's Asian side from its European. Part of the appeal of the marathon was the opportunity to run from one continent to another on a bridge that is at all other times closed to pedestrians. The sun came out just as I hit the crest of the bridge, turning the water hundreds of meters down a deep turquoise and making the pale stone of the minarets that carpet this city glow. This would be such a beautiful sight if I were not running, I thought.

The end of the bridge marked the halfway point of the run and I grew increasingly bored. I took turns eavesdropping on the people around me until I found some who spoke English.

They were a pair of girls about my age wearing headscarves and jeans. After exchanging the obvious pleasantries - 'hey! you speak English too? Isn't it cool to run over the Bosphorus bridge? What a pretty day!' - we moved on to more pressing questions. Like, why are you doing a marathon in jeans? (why not? We're just walking), Why did you decide to run the marathon? (it was our boyfriends' idea, they're running up ahead), Why do I never see women in headscarves on the street after dark? (blank stare). I didn't feel comfortable asking them why they wore headscarves in the first place without establishing some kind of rapport, but just then we passed a Starbucks and I really needed to go to the bathroom so I nipped in.

I came out of the Starbucks just in time to see the midgets running by. Inspired, I jogged the rest of the way to the finish line.

When you finish a run, even if you walked most of the way AND stopped in Starbucks, you want to have some kind of celebration or recognition. I don't know that many people here yet, though, and certainly noone well enough to expect a slap on the back and a post-marathon beer.

I picked my own poison by moving to a strange city where I didn't know anyone, and lord knows I've moved enough to be used to this by now. But loneliness hits you at the strangest times. Standing just past the finish line, sweating, staring into the sun that shines on this incomparable city at the center of the world, I wondered for neither the first nor the last time what I am doing here.

A Tale of Two Tuesdays (and anarchists)

2009-10-07T05:20:00.004-04:00

Charlemagne once said that to learn another language is to have another soul. If the man speaks the truth, I am on a quest for my fifth soul: I started Turkish classes the Tuesday after I arrived.

Pinching pennies as always, I eschewed the highly recommended but expensive language school that most foreigners attend and found a discount program taught out of a teacher's apartment. Hakan, said teacher, is a wiry-haired anarchist who speaks fluent Russian, Arabic, Turkish, English, and Hebrew. He has absurdly wide nostrils - the phrase 'cocaine pipes' comes to mind - and doesn't seem to own anything that's not black.

The one other student in the class was a Nigerian man who entered Turkey for 'a conference' and never intends to leave. After five minutes of Hakan and me trying and failing to pronounce his name, he said that we could call him Nibs (an odd choice, but at least it wasn't Icemen). Hakan took great pleasure in telling Nibs how to get a job and a visa under the table. He also took great pleasure in teaching us when he felt like taking a break from chain smoking. After the two day free trial I decided this was not the best use of my time and threw my hat to the wind.

The proverbial hat landed at the steps of CNN's closet-sized bureau in Istanbul, and so suddenly I have become an aspiring reporter. A disgruntled student with an uncomfortable shoe gave me my first clip but things began to get really exciting on my third Tuesday in Istanbul.

We spent the morning at the annual meeting of the IMF-World Bank conference, which was remarkable most for its complete lack of inspiration. Most of the work of the conference - keeping the pockets of G7 bankers lined, disenfranchising the poor - had been done behind closed doors in committees and seminars over the weekend. Tuesday and Wednesday were for the press and the public.

As we unpacked the camera gear I noticed the cameraman had packed a gas mask. Fat chance we'll be using this, I remember thinking. We were in a vast conference center protected by a thousands of policemen. They barely let me in the place, even with press accreditation. No shoe-throwing dissidents were going to spoil this party.

Not long after we arrived, I got an email from one of my new friends, a former (?) anarchist turned international lawyer. It was a forward from another anarchist, calling for people to 'make the streets of Istanbul miserable for the people who make our lives miserable.' The action was supposed to begin at 10am. We were doing live shots until noon.

Noon came and we went. I was partially right: no shoe-throwers were getting anywhere close to the conference center. They were being blasted by water cannons mounted on Armored Personnel Carriers on the street outside. But I was wrong about not needed the gas mask.

The center of Istanbul is a maze of ancient streets perfect for two things: touristy aimless wandering and playing cat-and-mouse with cops who want to stop you from vandalizing shops and creating general mayhem. It wasn't hard to figure out where to go. We either followed cops or gravitated towards the spots where lots of police helicopters were buzzing overhead. Protesters wearing scarfs over their face threw rocks through shop windows and at the cops, and the cops returned fire with tear gas and water cannons.

My brother has always claimed that you can go anywhere if you look like you know where you're going. I did not expect this to apply to walking into the middle of a cop-protester skirmish, but our cameraman strapped on his gas mask and walked straight through the police line. Since I'm young and think I'm invincible, I walked right after him, as did my boss and our intern cameraman.

I'm also not an idiot, so after a quick glance I moved away from the action and began to wonder why my throat was burning. It turns out inhaling tear gas kind of feels like having strep throat. You also start crying, which then psychosomatically leads you to panic, and all you can think of is stopping whatever mischief you are up to and running away. Thankfully, the sensation passes after a few minutes. The correspondent, cameraman, and camera intern were hit much worse than me, and if my internet connection were faster I would link to the footage we shot that was briefly the top hit on CNN.com... I leave that to the more enterprising to Google (and if you feel like posting the link below, that would be great). UPDATE: Here it is!

Who knows what the next two Tuesdays will bring?

First impressions

2009-09-27T04:36:00.002-04:00

I arrived in Istanbul on id al-fitr, the last day of Ramadan. Since Ramadan is a month of fasting, I figured I'd be landing in time for the biggest party of the year. Not so. The feast day, called Little Bayram here, is a time to make respectful visits to distant relatives, and feasting is strictly optional.

Greater Bayram (in Arabic, Id al-adha, Feast day of Sacrifice) will be at the end of November this year and sounds much more exciting. It involves slaughtering sheep. Unfortunately, I risk being disowned if I don't go home for Thanksgiving, though now that I think of it, my brother Robert might be up for a ritual sheep slaying...

Istanbul is more religious than I thought it would be. Lots of women are covered up - more by far than there were fifty or even twenty years ago, according to my host's mother. My host is my brother's friend's ex-boyfriend's friend. He grew up in Turkey but went to the US for college, which gives him peculiar bicultural tastes. He hates beer but he likes Family Guy. He expects his Mom to cook at home but he'll cook to impress an American girl (a Turkish girl would consider a man cooking for a woman heresy). Like a European man, he knows how to dress; like an American he thinks it's ok to wear sweatpants in public.

No matter where I go in the city, the call to prayer stops me in my tracks five times a day. It doesn't seem to cast the same spell over the Istanbul natives, which is understandable as they've heard it every day of their lives. I wonder if I'll live in this city long enough for the call to lose its exoticism. I hope so.

This is a boring one

2009-09-25T04:13:00.005-04:00

One of my colleagues in Madrid last summer, Tom, used to work as a steward on a private airline that specialized in flying in and out of conflict zones. Their motto: 'where bullets fly, we do too.' I asked him why on earth he would choose to work for them instead of, say, Delta.

'Simple. I never wanted to get stuck on the Des Moines-Minneapolis route. We were flying Paris to Sarajevo. Wouldn't you rather have your layover in Paris?'

People keep on asking me why I wanted to move to Istanbul. I don't really have an answer for them, but something along the lines of Tom's makes sense. There is nothing wrong with the live-in-Brooklyn/Queens-commute-to-Manhattan life I so nearly embraced alongside three quarters of my graduating class. But for the time being, I want my layover in Paris.

Istanbul isn't even a figurative bridge between East and West. Half the city is literally in Europe and the other half is in Asia. It is the city where the East tries to go West: immigrants have swelled the population of Istanbul from two million to twelve million in the last thirty years. They arrive, realize getting into Europe is not easy, or that Bulgaria and Romania don't hold that much appeal, or that Istanbul is nice enough, and that it's full of nice buildings abandoned in the mid-century purges of Greek and Armenian citizens; they pick the locks, set up camp and never leave.

Then there are the odd ones who come from West to East for all their various reasons. Maybe they want to see what life is like in the spicy and sweet melting-pot of the world. Maybe they want to see if Istanul's latest renaissance will bring it back to the status of international prestige it has always had and lost. This was once Rome. Constantine the Great moved the capital of the empire here in 330 AD, and its rulers called themselves Romans, not Byzantines, until falling to Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. I want to see if it is going to be Rome again.

In other news, because I'm horribly behind, please see Miss Kate Bloomer's blog as she's actually been writing a little about the day-to-day of my/our life over here.

Deportation is a drag

2009-09-20T15:45:00.002-04:00

In the Lonely Planet rundown of facts on Kazakhstan, it lists 'oil, steppe, Borat' as the key features of this Central Asian republic. I got a lot of Borat jokes when I mentioned to American friends that I would be visiting 'his' country. As I got closer, I started getting responses with a little more substance. Among the expat community in the Ukraine, for example, many people have been to Kazakhstan.

'They're great people over there,' said an American diplomat I met, fresh off a two year tour in the country. 'None of this Slavic tendency to depression, none of the southeast Asian urge to try and swindle you. Muslim hospitality, though they're not terribly religious. You'll have a ball.'

'Almaty, the old capital, is as ugly as the Paris suburbs,' said Guillaume, the French artist (see 'Something there is that doesn't love a mummy'). 'Great setting, with those gorgeous mountains in the south, but they've torn down all the pretty stuff and built horrendous apartment buildings.'

'Almaty... great... clubs...' mumbled a drunk English businessman.

I was going to Almaty to visit Emma, a classmate of mine from Harvard who is teaching at a university there. I loved the Ukraine but was definitely looking forward to a familiar face. Unfortunately, the border control had other plans for me. Despite the information on the Kazakh Embassy website and every guidebook and traveler forum I read that said you could get a transit visa at the border if you were staying less than five days, you cannot get a transit visa at the border even if you are staying less than five days. After 45 minutes in the country I was promptly deported back to Kiev.

I went to a pub near the Golden Gates, the historic point of entry into Kiev, with some people I'd met in my first few days in Kiev to wash away my frustration. We happened to run into the American diplomat who had raved about Kazakh hospitality and I told her about my experience.

'Oh, I probably should have told you the border guards are total assholes,' she said. 'They turn away one out of every five Americans, I think just for fun. It was a total nightmare at the embassy. They would turn away dignitaries who had flown half way around the world.'

That might have been good to know, I thought, though I suppose it wouldn't have made much of a difference. At least I was in good company.

'Everyone else is great, though, really, you must go back,' she said. I hope I will have another chance. The flight (with eventual destination of Istanbul) was the last one I booked with the money from my job in China at the beginning of the summer. It may be time for a reality check. But first there's Istanbul.

Pragmatic if not practical

2009-09-20T04:34:00.005-04:00

'Les filles sont fait pour fait l'amour,' was the opening line (and refrain, and pretty much entire text) of French rocker Adanowsky's set at the Moloko Music Festival, the culminating musical event of Kiev's Gogol International Modern Art festival. The song seemed especially fitting here in the Ukraine, where women are as uncannily beautiful as their Muscovite cousins (see 'The Moscow-New York Connection').
To the delight of almost every male expat, and the trepidation their female counterparts, there is a rich tradition of Ukrainian woman – expat man relationships, or so I gathered from the cover story of the Sept. 3 issue of 'What's On Kiev'. The article blithely lays out the pros and cons for each party. Some highlights:

'The delights' Ukrainian women can offer the expat man:
- No matter how ugly, overweight, or out of shape you are, you can probably find yourself a young wife with a face you can't believe and a supple body to die for!

'The dark side'
- Don't allow yourself to entertain the foolish thought that because your Ukrainian wife expects you to be the breadwinner, going off to work every day and earning fortunes (she will expect this, by the way), she's going to be stuck at home being a housewife... she will expect you to hire a nanny, a cleaner, a cook and a maid.
- All Ukrainian women believe that men are bastards. They will fully expect you to be drunk all the time and to be unfaithful in equal amounts. She will treat you as if you are doing all this, even when you're not, which will certainly drive you to drink, and probably drive you to being unfaithful, in the unlikely event you're not already

'The Good' about expat men for Ukrainian women
- Chances are they can give you a better lifestyle than their local counterparts. Then again, an ex-pat in Kiev is never going to be worth what an oligarch's worth, but if you've got no access there, a foreigner's a good option.
- Most western men know it's a bad thing to beat a woman, while statistics show that might not always be the case with Ukrainian men.

The Bad and the Ugly
- He's going to be old. While that might not matter now, try and project into the future and calculate how old he will be when you're his age. He may well be dead by then, but then again, that might not be such a bad thing. After all, you'll have the passport and all his money.
- An expat will not be as generous with his money as his local equivalent. He will tell you it's because he doesn't have the fatalistic attitude to money Ukrainian men have and that he thinks of the future, but you know it's just cause he's a tight bastard and doesn't appreciate how much it costs for you to look the way you do. He simply does not understand!

Naturally, the article was the subject of many conversations among the expat community. I thought it was a joke. On the contrary, said nearly everyone I talked to, it's spot on. Even the Ukrainians I talked to didn't seem to take much umbrage with the fact that it painted their women as gold-diggers. 'Of course women want to be taken care of,' said one man. 'My wife has told me she doesn't want to do anything but play with our children all day. Of course it is my responsibility to provide for them.' 'It's just the reality of life over here,' one woman echoed. 'And it's so true, what they say: foreign men don't understand how much it costs to look good. I used to date an American who said I should get a job if I wanted to spend $2000 a month on spa treatments. How ridiculous is that? I dumped him and started dating a Ukrainian man who owns a spa.'

Everyone should have experience

2009-09-19T14:02:00.001-04:00

(Originally published in The Greenwich Citizen)

The flight from Kiev to Almaty takes five hours, the same amount of time it takes to get from New York to London. Kazakhstan is nearly the size of the continental United States, a fact that both baffles and amazes me. People have been crossing it for thousands of years on various branches of the silk road, but relatively few have chosen to settle here. The names of the civilizations that have risen and fallen in this area evoke the Lord of the Rings: Scythians, Tatars, Zhungars, Huns, Mongols. Kazakh, from the Turkish word for 'adventurer' or 'outlaw', is a relatively recent term, appearing in the 15th century to describe a hodgepodge of ethnicities just starting to develop a collective national identity. I wondered what a Kazakh might look like: were they fair-haired and Germanic looking, like some of their eastern neighbors in Urumqi, China's predominantly Muslim western province? Dark and Slavic, like their Russian neighbors to the north? Mongoloid, with high cheekbones, tan skin, and Asian eyes?

The answer, as far as I could tell from the border, was all of the above. Customs was the farthest I got during my visit to Kazakhstan, having been told mistakenly that I could get a transit visa on arrival. The first customs official looked eerily like the proprietor of a guesthouse where I'd stayed in Mongolia; the one who refused my visa application was blonde and puffy, like he'd had bratwurst for breakfast. The one who spoke enough English to explain that, contrary to the information on the embassy's website, I could not get a transit visa for my stay of less than five days, for reasons that remain unclear, was a friendly Slavic giant named Pavlov. He escorted me to a flight back to Kiev and handed my passport to the stewardess, mumbling a complicated sentence in which the only word I could understand was 'deported'. I was surprised how much the word bothered me. Travel has always been easy for me, a fact I have grown to appreciate more and more after seeing people of different races subject to humiliating 'random' searches and non-American passports being examined skeptically. Noticing I was upset, Pavlov put his hand on my shoulder. 'Don't worry, you,' he said. 'It's experience. Everyone should have experience. Good experience, bad experience. Come back soon.'

My flight to Kazakhstan had been overnight, and so I appreciated being able to see the country pass underneath me on the way back. Almaty, the old cultural capital, is in the southeast; Astana, the current capital, is closer to Russia in the northwest. Between them stretches a vast plateau of Mars-like bleakness. There are some mountains, though the biggest by far are in the southeast, spilling into neighboring Kyrgyzstan. The majority is inhospitable steppe land, occasionally punctured by lakes white with salt. The Soviets used vast swathes of northern Kazakhstan for nuclear testing, and in a twisted way that seems appropriate. If anywhere on earth has to be sacrificed to atomic waste, here seems as good a place as any.

Less than an hour outside Almaty, we fly over a mountain with rings carved by the wind, like a giant terraced field. It is the only thing resembling human habitation I see in four hours, by which point we're flying over Turkmenistan, the Caspian Sea, Russia, and finally the Ukraine.

I'm disappointed to have bungled my first experience of Central Asia. Whenever I mentioned I was going to Kazakhstan, people exclaimed how lucky I was to travel there while it was still relatively undiscovered. The people, they say, are incredibly friendly, a tradition born out of their nomadic heritage. 'When you have only your herd and family for company, you begin to really like strangers,' said a Ukrainian man I met on the train. Almaty, set against the backdrop of the Alatau mountains, is one of the more stunning cities in the world, according to an American diplomat I met in Kiev, and the nightlife rivals Moscow. Astana is quick becoming the Dubai of Central Asia, as foreign investment pours in to get a slice of Kazakhstan's 35 billion barrels of oil (and, potentially, 65 billion more, if the government's estimates are to be believed). It is the most economically advanced country in the region, and by most accounts the stablest. Nursultan Nazarbayev has been 'democratically' elected to head the government since 1989, though not a single election has been declared fair by foreign observers. Growing resentment over the fact that 16% of the country still lives below the poverty line, despite annual growth of around 10% a year, could change that, but for the moment he has a firm grip on power. His ability to forge a multiethnic government with close ties to both western governments and his Russian and Chinese neighbors shows he is a politician of no little importance.

In the end, my deportation was little more than a few hours of hassle and a chance to catch up on some reading. Sympathetic airline personnel didn't charge me for the flight and I got to spend a few extra days in Kiev, a city I am beginning to love. Kazakhstan is not going anywhere. 'Come back,' Pavlov had said as he waved me on to my flight. It won't be long, I hope, before I have the chance.

Something there is that doesn't love a mummy

2009-09-17T16:30:00.002-04:00

I have been thwarted nearly every time I have tried to see dead bodies this summer. I saw one, towards the beginning, at the Changsha Provincial Museum in China, a mummy of some ancient queen. She was lying there as hundreds of tourists were pushing each other - seriously pushing, elbowing too - to get a glimpse of her. Normally Chinese people give me more personal space than they give each other. I call it the sphere of fear (my personal space). But everyone was looking at the mummy, so they didn't notice I wasn't Chinese, and I was bumped around like the rest. Eventually I wormed my way in and looked into the gaping maw of this poor ancient dead woman. It's morbid, by definition, but absolutely fascinating. I was not looking at a vase or a plate or a piece of jewelry but a person who had used all these things, had thought, lived and breathed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. We each define art and history in our own way. Call me twisted - I'll call you crazy for thinking Mark Rothko is worth a second glance (looking at you, Hilary).

When we got to Beijing, then, it was only obvious that we should go and see Mao, who lies mummified in a tomb in Tiananmen Square. Well, it was only obvious to me. Gretchen and Jeanne had no interest in the pilgrimage and made me feel kind of creepy about wanting to. You'd think I'd have grown out of feeling subject to peer pressure. Nope.

Then we got to Moscow. Lenin's body lies in Red Square, in a completely anachronistic Soviet block (har har) among the fanciful old imperial buildings. You used to have to wait for hours to be able to see him, but the queues have died down in recent years and it only takes about 45 minutes. Again, the rest of my party wasn't interested, but I talked about it with an American ex-soldier who I met in my hostel. Somehow our wires crossed and he went without me; I figured I'd go the next day but apparently Mr Lenin does not accept visitors on Mondays.

Here in Kiev there's an impressive collection of mummies of monks underneath the Kievo-Pecherskya Lavra Monastery. It sounds like dead body Mecca: an underground crypt, still lit by candles, with the remains of these venerated holy men an arm's reach from the corridor (not that I'd want to touch them, I'm not thatcreepy). I visited the monastery with Olivier, part of the cultural attache of the French embassy, who was giving a tour to a visiting French artist named Guillaume Reynard and his friend Florence.
I'd forgotten how bitchy French women can be. I'm not talking about my host, Laure, who is a total angel: how else could you describe someone who agreed to host me in her apartment for free after one email exchange over couchsurfing.org? Florence is cast of a different mold. We spoke in French, which I learned in high school and improved when I lived in France from 2004-2005. Not far into our visit, she turned to Olivier and said 'She speaks French like a retarded Parisian' - then turned and gave me a saccharine smile. 'Her French, it's not bad,' chided Olivier, 'and she can understand everything so far as I can tell.' Florence didn't offer an apology.

Just before the gates to the monastery, Florence declared that she was crevée (exhausted) and so we paused for a café before going in. We toured the grounds of the upper monastery, which was stunning in the decaying afternoon light. Much of the cathedral had been reduced to rubble by either the Nazis or the Soviets, noone's really sure. It's been rebuilt in fine form, with only one pocked golden dome (furthest left, above) showing the legacy of the tough twentieth century. It was all well and good, I thought, but where were the mummies?

'Oh, I'm afraid we don't have time because we stopped for café,' said Olivier. 'It closes in fifteen minutes.'

Some sort of divine providence witnessed my pain at missing yet another opportunity to see dead bodies, and so gave me a second chance. My trip to Kazakhstan did not pan out as planned (more on that soon) so I have another three days to revisit the Lavra and improve my unimpressive body count.

A Country to be Proud Of

2009-09-13T13:50:00.005-04:00

(Originally published in the Greenwich Citizen)

I liked the Ukraine from the moment I arrived. I flew in from Stockholm, where a sandwich in the airport costs $20. In Kiev, that same $20 will cover the forty-five minute taxi ride into the city and a beer once you get there.

I don't usually take taxis, no matter how cheap they are: if public transit is a tenth of the price, which it usually is, anything else seems indulgent. I also don't make a habit of getting a beer on arrival, but my plane arrived late and I was scheduled to meet my couchsurfing host, Laure, at a pub at 9pm.

Couchsurfing.org, which I described in greater detail in my previous column, is an online social networking site for travelers of both the armchair and literal variety. It connects budget travelers, or 'surfers', with people who are willing to let them sleep on a spare couch, bed, or section of floor for free. Laure is a thirty-something French diplomat who lives in the posh embassy district just north of Kiev's historic center. When she wasn't dispensing visas to hopeful emigrants, she took me to embassy parties and tacked me on to a private city tour the embassy had arranged for a visiting French artist. Fortune can be so kind when you go looking for it.

I didn't know what to expect of Kiev. I certainly wasn't expecting to find gorgeous white sand beaches in the middle of the city. Their appeal is lessened by the fact that the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown happened a hundred kilometers upstream. Radiation poisoning isn't really my thing, so I skipped the beach and hit the usual tourist sights. Kiev's cathedrals are magnificent orthodox confections, with starry domes and darkly glittering icons in their candlelit interiors. The state museums are average, but Ukraine's oligarchs have a long and faithful history of sharing their acquisitions with the public in sumptuous townhouses: the exhibition of rock star artist Damien Hirst's skeletons in billionaire Viktor Pinchuk's icy modernist gallery was only the coolest of the bunch. A few miles down the road, an international modern art festival was intellectually stimulating during the day and a raging new music party every night. On the street, funky folk art rises next to gorgeous eighteenth century mansions. Ubiquitous kiosks sell the two things essential to Slavic well-being: chocolate and vodka. Hundreds of meters under ground, the subway stations drip with mosaics and chandeliers, like medieval grottoes masquerading as bomb shelters.

Kiev's wealth seemed strange for a country that suffered under Stalin, famine, and the Nazis. I had a hunch I wasn't getting the full story, so I bought a ticket on a 10-hour train ride west to Lviv, near the border with Poland. Against Laure's advice, I traveled fourth class, which meant a seat on a bench in an open carriage. I was surprised to find the carriage mostly empty. A few old men hovered near the bathroom – a puzzling choice, as it reeked of stale sewage - and a shirtless man sat on the bench opposite me eating a neon green bell pepper. He said something in Ukrainian, inhaled deeply, and gave me a wry smile.

'Do you speak English?' I asked in Russian. The two languages are similar enough that people fluent in either one are able to understand each other. Ukrainian is slightly softer: heard from a distance, it can sound like French. I don't speak any Ukrainian but have picked up a little Russian.

'Why yes!' he said, excitedly. 'I think. I have learned it but I have never spoken to a born English speaker.'

I told him his English was excellent, and asked what he had been saying in Ukrainian.

'Oh. I was saying: the toilet, the national smell of Ukraine.' And he laughed.

Ukrainian humor confuses me. You can't call it black humor, because it's depressing rather than ironic. I suppose, when your country was arguably the worst-suffering industrialized nation of the 20th century, a twisted sense of humor comes naturally.

The shirtless man and I spent the rest of the train ride discussing movies, music, and systems of governance. There are so many problems with the Ukrainian state, he said: corruption, flawed educational systems, vanishing social safety net. He still loves his country, though.

'I hate my country, but we can change.' The way, he thinks, is to raise a new generation that does not expect the state to take care of everything, like his does. I brought out my US Passport to show him a quote I'd found inspiring, written on the last page of the visas section:

'Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds... to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.' - Ellison S. Onizuka

He smiled again, this time ruefully. 'You have made me depressed,' he said. 'Sometimes I think it will be easy to change and to make good Ukraine's potential. But we would never have that writing in our passport. I never want to be American, but sometimes I admire you.'

The Bush-Ahmadinejad Connection

2009-09-10T13:30:00.002-04:00

(Originally published in The Greenwich Citizen)

Backpacking, for all its wonders, can be tiring. I took refuge from hostel beds and train bunks at an old friend's house in northern Sweden at the beginning of September. Philip, who sang with me in the Christ Church Choir, has just moved back to his mother's hometown of Östersund, a little more than halfway to the arctic circle from Stockholm. It was a wonderful opportunity to sit back, hammer out some job applications, and revel in those things I never realized I was taking for granted: drinkable tap water, toilets with seats, and relatively unpolluted air.

Sweden, at least in the summer, is pretty close to paradise. I don't like to think of what it would be like in winter, though everyone around here says it's most beautiful in the twilit snowy months when the sun only shines from 11am-2pm. I am not cold lover. The ninth circle of hell, according to Dante, is not the inferno of popular imagination but a ring of ice, where Satan suffers in deep freeze for all eternity. That was pretty much my experience of Boston in January and February. I have no desire to go somewhere even colder.

But back to the summer. It's clear, cool sometimes, and starkly clean. Old barns in romantic states of disrepair dot the hillsides and the lakes – everywhere, lakes! - never seem to stop sparkling. It's a bit like northern Michigan except the roadside greasy spoons are replaced by artisinal cheese shops and gourmet bakeries. You can't have everything.

We went mushroom hunting in the mountains on my first day. Philip's mother insisted that we talk loudly to scare off any bears that might be in the area. I thought this was a bit silly until we came upon a large pile of recently produced bear droppings. I then had a flashback to Werner Herzog's 'Grizzly Man', a documentary about a man who observed Alaskan grizzly bears. He thought they had accepted him into his pack until one ate him alive. We began singing nervously, then raucously, imitating opera singers and post-menopausal community choir members with uncontrolled vibrato.

I spent more than a week being coddled by my surrogate mother's home cooking and broadband internet, but all good things must come to an end, and so I headed south on the 7th September. I spent a night in Uppsala, a medieval university an hour outside Stockholm, with an old friend named Viktor, who did a year abroad at Greenwich High School back in 2001. Other than Viktor, I'd never met a foreign-exchange student before I got to Harvard, which was full of both internationals who had spent years at public schools in the US and Americans who had studied abroad. I'm not sure why foreign exchange is so uncommon in Greenwich, and I think it should change. I fully appreciate that the Greenwich Public Schools offer an excellent education, one that I profited from for thirteen years. But there are millions of intangible things one can gain from time abroad: sensitivity to people of different cultures, gratitude for the smoking ban (a stray cigarette burned a hole in my favorite scarf in the Kiev airport), awareness of the kind of hurdles and benefits that affect people living in different parts of the world.

Spending serious time abroad is different than being well-traveled. Going to a lot of exotic destinations doesn't necessarily mean you have learned about another culture, as any college student on their way back from Cancun can tell you. A semester or a year are better for observing and, eventually, absorbing the rhythm of life of another culture.

If you've already graduated from high school or college, or if time or money constraints make travel difficult, there are other ways to branch out: take couchsurfing. Couchsurfing is sort of like hitchhiking for apartments. Open-minded people who have a spare bed or room can create a profile on couchsurfing.org or its sister site hospitalityclub.org, and travelers can send requests to 'surf' for a night or several. An essential tenet of the community is that you are not to pay for the privilege, or demand payment: it is meant to be an opportunity for cultural exchange or simple altruism. While the potential for abuse is remarkable – the host is giving a set of keys to his/her apartment to a stranger, the hostee is putting his/her personal safety at risk by staying in a stranger's home – reports of abuse have been few and far between. And it's not just a young hippie thing. Though the majority of surfers and hosts are in their twenties and thirties, a growing number of retirees and empty nesters are opening up their homes. I've used the service to sleep for free in Burgos, Moscow, Stockholm, and now Kiev, and never had the slightest problem: on the contrary, I've made some very good friends.

Standard protocol is that you send out five requests a few days before you arrive. One or two won't get back to you, one or two will be busy or out of town, and hopefully, one or two will offer their couch. My host in Stockholm was Meysam, a twenty-nine year old Iranian PhD student who lived in the university dorms in the north of the city. We spent two long nights in the kitchen of his dorm with an Italian woman who lived down the hall, arguing about international security policy and whether it was important to get married before you were thirty. On the latter point we all agreed it wasn't; on the former we had more to talk about. Meysam supports Moussavi, one of the reform candidates that challenged now re-elected Iranian President Ahmadinejad, but he abhors US/UN attempts to dismantle Iran's nuclear development project. 'We have a right to clean, nuclear energy,' he said. 'Why on earth would we make a bomb? It would be suicide. But it's also suicide to rely on outdated, dirty technology as the world is getting warmer.'

The man has a point, I thought. But did he expect the international community to trust Ahmadinejad? Shouldn't there be a revolution against his illegitimate regime?

'Of course the election was to some degree rigged. But you have to respect the rule of law. We've tried in the courts, but they're biased, which sucks. I don't know much about American history, but didn't something similar happen in your country in 2000?'

'I don't think you can compare Bush's election with Ahmadinejad's,' I said.

'But didn't the other candidate, whatever his name was, have more of the popular vote?'

I didn't have a very good response for him.

'Anyway. What I am getting at is that we should not do anything crazy. We will gain support and try at the next election. Maybe we will have a Kerry, but maybe we will have an Obama. We'll see.'

Biting people at country dances

2009-09-07T20:11:00.007-04:00

A second entry on Sweden! I should be writing about the more exotic places, but here is the first place I've actually had time to get things down. I'll get back to the rest someday. In the meantime, I feel like I have to work through in writing the most surreal experience I've had since my drinking contest with a communist party official (see 'A Nation Run by Immortals').

Logdans is a traditional Swedish country dance, sort of like a ceilidh or a square dance. One of Philip's friends invited him last night to the final Logdans of the season. 'If you want to show your American friend some real Swedish culture, this would be a good opportunity,' she said.

We drove to a nearby town and parked Philip's car in a hay field. A pair of women were stumbling toward a dimly lit barn, wearing the sort of dresses only long-legged Swedes and eastern Europeans can get away with. A vague beat floated across the field. I felt like an idiot: Philip's mother had said this was a country thing, and I'd gamely borrowed a pair of jeans and a plaid shirt. Now that it looked like I was going to a rave, I was quite sure I was not wearing the right clothes.

When we got closer, though, I heard the faint twang of country music and saw, to my relief, that the majority of people were wearing jeans. Inside, the floor was packed with couples foxtrotting to the gingham-clad five piece band.
I have not foxtrotted since swing was big in the late nineties. Thankfully, I was swept up by a tall man named Gustav, who propelled me backwards through the crowd with the assurance of a good dancer. Because it was so crowded, we kept on running into people. I muttered 'Excuse me – excuse me – excuse me -' in Swedish but then stopped because no one seemed to care and because Gustav was giving me a strange look.

'Why do you keep telling people not to bite you?' he asked in English.

I blushed crimson. Philip and his mother are training their new dog and so I've picked up a rather strange vocabulary in addition to the usual hello-excuse me-please-thanks: go lie down, roll over, calm down, don't bite. Evidently, my command of even those few words was shaky at best.

Relieved to find he spoke English, I explained myself and I asked him about Logdans. He said in Stockholm, where he's from, it's seen as a total hick thing, but it's still quite popular up here in countrybumpkinville. It should be, I said, it's loads of fun.

'You should come back, then.'

'But it's the last one of the season.'

'You should stay for the next season.'

I need to get out of here before that becomes too tempting.

Fourth Home

2009-08-30T20:04:00.002-04:00

'Frozen yogurt!'
'Drinkable tap water!'
'Paper towels!'
Gretchen and I are like kids on Christmas morning in the arrivals hall of Stockholm airport. I hadn't realized how much I'd been missing all the things just mentioned. Discovering them suddenly, unexpectedly, reduces us to squealing infants.
'Fresh air!'
'Tall, attractive men!'
'Wine gums???'
This last discovery makes this Friday in Sweden the best Christmas I've ever had. Wine gums, a sort of hard gummy candy native to the UK, are for me what a shot up the arm is for a heroin addict.
We're back in the western world after a wonderful but exhausting hiatus of about two months. We're both heading north to Jamtland, a province about halfway up Sweden, where my old friend Philip has just moved, and are planning on some much-needed R&R as we abuse his family's washing machine, internet connection, and kitchen. Gretchen will then be heading down to Italy to do some traditional Eurotripping and I'll be off to Kiev, Almaty, and Istanbul.
There's nothing like being on the road to make you appreciate the little comforts of home. It also serves to broaden your definition of home: when I first lived abroad, in France from 2004-2005, London became the place I'd go to for comfort food and a dose of family time. Gradually, Paris began to feel the same way: I still remember my mother's shock when, over Christmas dinner in Greenwich that year, I mentioned how excited I was to go home.
Here in Sweden, I'm realizing for the first time how much my desire for home can be satisfied with a few things that I can take for granted in the western world – tap water, etc – and a friendly face from my past. Philip and I lived together in a tiny apartment on the 8th floor of a majestic eighteenth century building underneath the Eiffel Tower during my gap year. He finished college this June as well and moved to his mother's home town of Ostersund, Sweden. Philip's been informally adopted into the Morris family for a long time now, so I'm looking forward to getting to know his a little bit better.

I drink for the thirst to come

2009-08-28T19:55:00.001-04:00

The great train journey has ended: Gretchen, Edward, and I arrived in St Petersburg at four the morning on the 25th. The Moscow-St Petersburg line is by various accounts the most trafficked train route in the world, and the Trans-Siberian Lonely Planet (inferior, in my opinion, to the Trans-Siberian Handbook) assured us that extra attention was paid to comfort and cleanliness on the overnight trains. We did not find this to be the case. Perhaps we should have expected when we booked the cheapest seat that we would be sitting in a smelly, dimly-lit and infrequently cleaned car, but we've been spoiled by the quality of the trains in Siberia (see 'Life on the Tracks').
In St Petersburg I remembered that I am no longer a student but a twenty-three year old on a trip around the world. While I firmly believe you should never stop learning, and though I always say you can and should travel at any age, there are some things that are best done when you're young. These include: eating richly while your metabolism can still handle it, dancing until eight in the morning while your feet can still handle it, and kindling intense friendships with people who live on opposite corners of the world while you still think, ingenue-ously, that you will actually keep in touch.
And so I spent tragically little time in the Hermitage, the greatest art museum in the world. I saw, but didn't see enough, of St Petersburg's main sights: the Russia-Disney spires and glittering interiors of the Church of Spilled Blood, named for its location on the sight of Alexander II's assassination (side note: why did so many people want to kill the man who freed the serfs and initiated the Trans-Siberian railway project? Seems like he had some pretty good ideas); St Isaac's Cathedral, like London's St Paul's dressed up in Soviet green and gold; the sky-piercing tower of St Peter & Paul fortress's cathedral; the streets and gardens which play second fiddle only to Paris in Splendor & Magnificence's top 100 list. I did spend time in Cuba Hostel and, thematically, at the dance clubs Fidel and Achtung Baby. I spent a lot of time – some, I feel obligated to point out, in museums – with Paolo, Guy, and Tim, who I met at my hostel. Tim is two years younger than me, from Amsterdam, and manages to support his travel addiction by working IT for six weeks in between travel stints of six months. In other words, he is further proof of my long-standing hunch that Dutch people are the smartest in the world. Guy and Paolo, classmates at Oxford, are at the tail end of a travelfull post-graduate year, both apprehensive and relieved to be starting full-time jobs next week. I've met so many people like them, like myself, who choose to spend their meager savings on independent budget travel. Our future careers (and our debts) will wait for us, so why should we rush to greet them? Why not exploit our expired student cards while we still look like we deserve the discount? Why not see the world while we can sleep on a bench and look like harmless youths instead of vagrants? Why not travel while we can crash on a stranger's couch for free because we don't have a family in tow? The pennies of a twenty-something take you places that a retiree's riches never can. And, of course, vice versa. But I'm optimistic and hope I might try both.

The Moscow-New York Connection

2009-08-25T03:48:00.004-04:00

'I've noticed something,' says my brother as we wait for the subway in one of Moscow's sumptuously decorated stations (above). We don't have to wait long, as it runs on roughly 90 second intervals. I look at my brother, who is obviously trying to put a complex thought into words. 'It's the women in Moscow,' he says. 'They're all beautiful.'

Unlike my brother, I don't have to be a gentleman, and so I can say with impunity that the women in Moscow are not beautiful but gorgeous, smoldering, melt-the-resolve-of-a-priest hot. They have the kind of bodies that I latterly thought existed only on the pages of Maxim magazine. How Russian men function I cannot imagine: every straight American male I know would be unable to tear himself away from the continuous beauty pageant that is the street.

'But there's something else,' says my brother, bringing me out of my reverie. 'They dress themselves so well and do their hair and makeup – they're undeniably trying to get people to look at them. Then when you catch their eye they give you this look of utter scorn, even disgust. It's the same with the women in New York, who, by the way, are the only women I've seen who might even compare to the women here. It's incredibly frustrating.'

I try to argue that women make themselves look beautiful for their own sake, because it makes them feel individual, superior perhaps... and then I realize I'm confirming my brother's point. I'm good at confounding my own arguments, which means my decision not to go to law school is probably a good one.

[For an abrupt change of topic with stretched segue] The women in Moscow aren't the only beautiful thing in town. The city could never be confused with one of those jewels like Paris or Venice where every facade deserves its own postcard, but it packs a punch of its own. There's the vast imperial complex of the Kremlin, where even the J.Crew-watermelon-and-green bell towers look macho; the stunning 'Seven Sisters,' skyscrapers erected by Stalin, which defy all the negative stereotypes of Soviet architecture; the gold onion domes of the Church of Christ the Savior, gloriously reconstructed in 1997, (more on that in a second); the too-big-to-be-ridiculous statue of Peter the Great: in sum, enough evidence that this is one of the mightiest nations in history to earn respect from even the snobbiest Europhile.

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior was torn down by Stalin in 1931 (photo courtesy of wikipedia) to make way for a monument to socialism, to be known as the Palace of the Soviets. After the demolition of the 19th century masterpiece, rather bashful structural engineers informed Stalin that the riverside location would not support the weight of the planned palace, so Stalin had the site turned into a swimming pool instead. This seems to have been a popular way to repurpose those pesky religious buildings: I visited another church that had been reclaimed from swimming pool status a few days later. The tile floors and stadium-style seating centered on the altar were a surreal combination for me, as I spent all of my extracurricular time growing up in either a swimming pool or a church. It seemed like deliberately little effort was spent trying to make the place look like a church again, which made the place almost more holy: wherever two or three are gathered together, right?

Life on the Skids

2009-08-21T03:44:00.003-04:00

Trans-Mongolian veterans we met in Beijing, Ulan Bator, and Irkutsk kept on saying that the three and a half day journey between Irkutsk and Moscow flies by, but you never quite believe that will be the case. Three and a half days in a giant moving bunkbed? Gretchen and I were traveling plaskartny, the lowest class, with sixty bunks packed into an open-plan carriage. We were going for the experience, expecting the kind of broadening discomfort you get from living with absolutely no privacy.

As it turns out, the only source of discomfort was the shortness of the bunks, evidently not engineered for anyone above five foot eight. People talked quietly, played card games, shared meals, and only lit up in the no-man's-land between carriages, sparing me the fifteen packs of second-hand smoke I had expected to inhale over the trip. The bathroom didn't smell – though why would it, really, when the sewage drops straight out onto the tracks – and the carriage was cleaned multiple times a day. Though this is the provodnista (train attendant's) job, at least one or two of the cleanings are usually carried out by the children traveling on the carriage. We learned this when Gretchen was prodded out of her mid-afternoon nap by an excited preteen saying 'Russian tradition! Russian tradition!' and pointing down the corridor. It took her a minute to realize the person wearing the teal cleaning uniform and vacuuming the hall was not Ana, our beloved provodnista, but Nikolas, a boy from a few bunks down. Nikolas has one of those unfortunate 'I skinned a cat and pasted it to my head' mullets that are for some reason fashionable, so I can understand the confusion. I slept through it but caught a shot of another of the kids, Alex, when he did his duty.

O Sad Siberian night!

2009-08-17T13:21:00.003-04:00

(Originally published in The Greenwich Citizen)

One wonders why the western Russians were so eager to conquer Siberia. The cold is the most obvious deterrent to settling in the area: lows in the winter reach the kind of temperature where you can spill your hot coffee and have it shatter when it reaches the ground in a frozen block. When summer finally comes, the flat landscape fills with pools of melted ice that breed mosquitoes straight out of a Victorian horror story. In the words of Kate Marsden, a British nurse who in 1891 rode across Siberia in search of a reported cure for leprosy:

'During the summer the mosquitoes are frightful, both in the night and in the day... Even on the ground you will find them, and, as soon as a stranger comes in, it seems as if the insects make a combined assault on him in large battalions; and, of course, sleep is a thing never dreamed of. After a few days the body swells from their bites into a form that can neither be imagined nor described. They attack your eyes and your face, so that you would hardly be recognised by your dearest friend.'

It is easy to see why Siberia remained a scarcely populated haunt of nomadic tribes and plundering warrior bands for so long. It is also easy to see why, when Siberia finally was annexed, European Russians (those from anywhere west of the Ural mountains, including Moscow and St Petersburg) had to be forced to move there. The first colonists were convicts, sent over to harvest Siberia's vast stores of natural resources of coal, timber, metals, and furs. Serfs, freed in 1861, were encouraged to go east and grow up with the country, but it wasn't until the Trans-Siberian railway was built at the end of the 19th century that people began to settle there in earnest.

Earlier in the century, exile was lent a touch of glamor when the Decembrists, a group of aristocratic revolutionaries, were sent to Siberia after a failed uprising. They settled in what had previously been a little-known hovel toward the eastern end of the Trakt, the great east-west trade route of northern Asia before the Trans-Siberian. The Martha Stewarts of their day, their exile was not an eastward march in chains like the common criminals. They brought servants, families, and the discerning taste (and deep pockets) of imperial Russia to the hinterland and ambitiously set about constructing what would come to be known as the 'Paris of Siberia'.

Irkutsk, as the city is known, is the first major city out of Mongolia on the Beijing-Moscow Trans-Mongolian train. It would be silly to expect much of this 'Paris': a Siberian town, however romantic, is not going to live up to a city that has been one of the cultural capitals of the western world for over a millennium. After the slash-and-burn architecture of China and the tent cities of Mongolia, though, anything more than a hundred years old was bound to look pretty impressive. The red and white facade of the old theater, lit dimly by the cloudy afternoon light, brought to mind the stately architecture of Eastern Europe. The slate roofs and beige stone of some buildings on Karl Marx St did look exactly like a decrepit version of Paris.

The real beauty of Irkutsk lies in its indigenous wooden architecture. Siberia is poor in all traditional building materials save wood, but what it lacks in limestone it more than compensates for in imagination. Houses are decorated like wedding cakes: intricate trim drips from the roof, arabesques frost the outside of windows. Like Russia itself, the houses have not been kept up and will not last. I walked by a half repainted building on the way to the train station, its thick new coat already bubbling over the unprimed wood. It looks better peeling, I remember thinking. At least until it all comes tumbling down.

Clever Marketing

2009-08-16T03:39:00.001-04:00

They call Irkutsk the 'Paris of Siberia'. Given Paris : Siberia :: fertile bed of western intellectual history : region associated with forced exile and mass murder, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Wandering down Lenin St on the sort of cloudy afternoon one associates with doomed love affairs, it was easy to see why people draw the comparison.

As I wrote in an article for the Greenwich Citizen, to which I'll post the link if it ever makes its way online, Irkutsk has a romantic history, but as I don't really feel like writing about it again I encourage you to get the gist from this page.

Postpunk Poems

2009-08-14T21:03:00.003-04:00

Some say thirty million, others as much as sixty million: the numbers of people killed in Siberia in the twentieth century defy comprehension. You'd think, with all that bloodshed, that the land would seem haunted, disgraced, or even vaguely sinister. Surely so much suffering must leave its mark in eternity.

There is something to the old adages that say time heals all wounds, or life goes on. But what strikes me most about Siberia is that neither of those really apply: what wounds there were were small scratches on the vast canvas of Siberia. Nature, if she ever really noticed them, has now buried them. Looking out on the forever-forest that rolls by the train window, I can't think of gulags or exiled Decembrists. All I can think is: the world is a big place, and I'll never know the smallest bit of it.

Just over the Mongolian border into Russia, I notice our compartment has a copy of the monthly magazine 'Sunny Mongolia Today'. I flip to the culture section and discover a set of poems by Galsanukh B entitled 'Advice to God: Postpunk Poems.' From 'Impressionist Melody of Spring Time in Cow's Native Land: Impressionism, Neoclassicism, and the grave of Beatniks in Cow's Native Land':

Today's suffering is the same as tomorrow's suffering.
Yesterday's suffering is the same as today's suffering.

A spot of golf, Ghengis?

2009-08-14T13:10:00.006-04:00

(Originally published in the Greenwich Citizen)

I hear a gasp from the back seat of the taxi.

'Is that a...?' my mother says, her voice full of horror.

'It can't be,' says my brother.

'Does that really say Chinggis Khaan Country Club?'

We're driving through Terelj National Park near the Mongolian capital city Ulan Bator. My mother and brother Edward have decided I can't have all my fun on my own and so have flown over to join me for the Beijing-St Petersburg leg of my journey. Mongolia is our first stop.

In my medieval history classes in college, the Mongols were the Apocolypse That Never Came. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan (sometimes spelled Chinggis Khaan) and his Golden Horde stood poised to destroy what we perhaps indulgently call western civilization. The Horde had devastated Russia and Central Asia, gobbling up the rich Silk Road cities one by one. At the Danube, they suddenly turned back, like a careful drunk who knows his limits. Over the next seven centuries, the Mongol empire gradually shrank to its present limits: a country the size of Western Europe with a quarter of the population of London, cradled on three sides in China's embrace but fiercely, flagrantly proud of its independent culture.

Mongolians share the dark hair and Asiatic features of the Chinese, but the similarities don't persist much further. Mongolians, simply put, have had it rougher. The vast majority of China's population lives in the fertile basins of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, where the most serious risk to society is overpopulation bred by an abundance of resources. Mongolia's geography alternates between high-altitude desert and steppe land, with a few completely uninhabitable mountain ranges thrown in for fun. The distance from any appreciable body of water means there is little water vapor in the air to trap the sun's rays, so the land scorches in the day and freezes at night. The temperature in winter bottoms out around -40°F and peaks in summer around 100°F. In Greenwich, by contrast, the range is around 1°F to 95°F.

Over half the population of the country lives within the capital city's limits. The million or so scattered through the rest of the country are for the most part still nomadic, moving with their herds to make the most of the barely habitable land. Intrigued by the romance of this dying way of life (or perhaps just its novelty), we drove out to Terelj to stay with a nomadic family for a night. We had not imagined, when we headed out into the steppe, that we would be camping next to a country club. The nine holes of the golf course looked alien under the violet mountains and rolling clouds, as did the fence,

designed to keep animals out rather than anything in.

Our tent was perched under a peanut-colored rock face. A giant boulder, like the head of a colossal statue, loomed precariously over our camp, and I joked (a little uneasily) that one small cosmic sneeze is all it would take to return the steppe to uninvaded peace. Then I remembered that Chinggis Khan Country Club is just around the bend and decided it may take a few extra boulders.

Gretchen, who taught with me in China, has stuck with me for this leg of my travels, so my solo journey has now quadrupled. While my mother paints watercolors of the landscape, Gretchen, Edward and I set off for the nearest store on the only mode of transport readily available: horseback. Like true gringos, we have underestimated the amount of water we would consume in a day and half in the steppe. It is my brother's first time on a horse and he is utterly mystified as to why anyone, especially a man, would think this is a fun way to spend an afternoon. I, on the other hand, can think of few places I'd rather be: the breeze is welcome, the wildlife is incredible, and I have never seen so much sky in my life.

If you can get there in the small windows of semi-temperate heat, Mongolia is a traveler's dream. It combines the natural beauty of Africa, the exoticism of inner Asia, and the prices of a Chinese supermarket: a night at our guesthouse in Ulan Bator, including internet and breakfast, set us back six dollars, and our excursion to the national park, including transport, meals, horseback riding, and a night's lodging, cost less than a belt from Vineyard Vines. Most people visit Ulan Bator as a stop on the Trans-Mongolian rail journey from Moscow to Beijing, but a few are beginning to catch on to Mongolia's individual appeal. If anything I've written appeals to your sense of adventure, I'd advise you to carve out your vacation days before the horde of tourists turn descend and turn this place into yet another comfortable outpost of western civilization.

City of Dreams

2009-08-13T20:06:00.004-04:00

Leaving China is almost as traumatic an experience as arriving there - or at least it is if you are going to Mongolia. We spent what seemed like hours (wait, it was) in a between-country limbo sometime in the middle of the night. The customs officials managed to synchronize their visits to our cabin with my sleep cycle, so every fresh appearance startled me out of a shallow dream. Customs officials do not like groggy people. Actually, I don't think they like anyone.
We, by the way, still includes Gretchen, a classmate from college and former teammate, who taught in Dongguan with me, and now my mother and brother Edward, who decided to tag along on possibly the most tedious part of my travels. We've just done the first leg of six days by train from Beijing to Moscow: a thirty-hour journey from Asia's hot capital city to one that will never be. Sorry, Mongolia.

Ulan Bator is a city with an identity crisis. It can't decide if it is newly wealthy or blightedly poor. A lone Dubai-knockoff skyscraper crowns the center of town, either half constructed or half destroyed, I can't tell which. A tent city sticks to the outskirts of the downtown area, but there are power lines running into some of the tents, and satellite dishes outside: their inhabitants can claim neither permanence nor impermanence.
Thanks to the temperature swings I mentioned in my last post, building here can seem like an exercise in faith. It's a leap many people don't seem to bother to take. A little less than half Mongolia's population of three million (or thereabouts) still lives in tents called gers, moving with their herds and the seasons. Another million crowd into Ulan Bator... where they still live in tents, often. Fun for the whole family: play I Spy with the picture below. See if you can find
1. An army truck provided by the USA - always good to try and curry favor with an Alaska-sized country rich in natural resources between Russia and China
2. A car that has never had its emissions tested (trick, it's all of them)
3. A ger

Turmoil or in turmoil?

2009-08-13T19:47:00.001-04:00

A new dimension of hilarity was added to my job search when I discovered Reuters-sponsored AlertNet.

A fantastic website, a noble cause, but who decided which euphemisms to use? Choose one under 'Filter by Emergency':

Afghan Turmoil
Chad Troubles
Iraq in turmoil
Nepal Peace
Thailand Violence
Western Sahara dispute
Very Intense Tropical Storm Hamish

The Middle Ages are alive and well

2009-08-11T09:13:00.002-04:00

You meet the most interesting people traveling. This, for example, is Benedict.

His name is actually Tobias, but as that's a very common name in his home country of Germany he prefers to go by Benedict. Benedict was born too late (1986) to be old enough to climb the Berlin wall before it fell, so he feels he has a 'deficiency' and must climb any and all available walls, preferably forbidden ones.

Benedict is a journey carpenter, part of a medieval guild of construction workers who upon completing their apprenticeship must travel for three years and one day. They are not allowed within 50 kilometers of their home and cannot pay for lodging: they're supposed to camp if no one offers them a bed. They are meant to work for their lodging (and food, if offered), honing their skills under whatever master carpenters they find along the way. They wear a distinctive outfit, unchanged since who knows when, of bell-bottom black pants, black peaked hat, corduroy vest, and white shirtsleeves. Benedict's pants unfortunately rotted in the Chinese heat and his shirt was on the way so he switched to a T-shirt. His traveling gear is not to exceed three bundles that can be strapped to a frame of sticks on his back, a journal for master carpenters to write reviews of his work, and a walking stick.

Most journey carpenters stay in Germany, where their outfits are recognized and hospitality is easy to come by. Because of the aforementioned obsession with walls, however, Benedict decided he had better come to the Great one. He spent five months hitchhiking, training, and working across Eurasia, and arrived in Beijing just in time to catch a minibus to the rather remote Jinshanling section of the wall. The merry minibusers included Gretchen, Jeanne, and myself; a Filipino diplomat currently stationed in Moscow on his way to North Korea; a Brazilian backpacker; a student from Minnesota; and a man and a woman from Barcelona who had never met but were fulfilling the same dream of hiking the wall.

We had plenty of time to bond over the 10km hike from Jinshanling to Simatai, and I learned many fascinating things:
Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, is the capital city with the widest range of annual temperature change, from about -40 degrees Fahrenheit in winter to 100 in the summer.
The Japanese army infested Taiwan with poisonous snakes when it retreated in 1945. Talk about bitter.
The Russian government doesn't read any of the policy briefings produced by the Filipino diplomatic service. Forgive me if I'm not surprised.
The nightlife in Sitges, the Provincetown of Catalonia, is supposedly the best in the world, even if you're not gay.

UPDATE: Journey carpenters are known in Germany as Gesellen, or wayfarers. Apparently they're undergoing a resurgence thanks to the recession.

Oh, Modernity (take 2)!

2009-08-10T09:54:00.008-04:00

It seems four weeks in southern China have gotten into my blood. Here in Beijing, I'm so excited every time I see a foreigner that I grab Gretchen's arm and whisper 'waigoren'! We visit the hip 798 Art District and I hardly know what to order from the western-style restaurants. No lotus? No chicken's feet? What is this thing called 'fettucine'?
798 is one of the cleverer trousit traps designed by the Beijing Olympic Committee. It masquerades as an organic art community a la Brooklyn or East London: bleak warehouses repurposed as art galleries, a place for rich kids to produce Warholian Mao portrains and call themselves cutting edge. Unlike so many places in Beijing, there is money here, and lots of waigoren.
We stumbled upon a gallery opening down an alleyway. The first person I noticed was a barefoot Asian girl straddling a tree. A machine was blowing inky bubbles at her as an insect-skinny man took her picture through a large window. I asked one of the artists if he could explain what he was trying to get at and he replied 'I'm Canadian.' I ate some free hors d'oeuvres and made up my own theories - the artist had already taken care of all the free booze.
We end up splitting a cab to Sanlitun, Beijing's club district, with Matt Hope, a British sculptor with a refreshing lack of pretension. I'm intrigued by anyone who can make a living as an artist, and I peppered him with questions: Why Beijing? (because he has his sculptures built in Chinese factories) Why Chinese factories? (because they're cheap and willing to do limited-run, even one-off productions) What are the factoires like? (the fieriest stage of the Industrial Revolution: he describes a town outside of Dongguan known as Metal city, not to be confused with Leather city and Plastic city, where laborers turn metal in shells of buildings and the furnaces blast onto the street). I couldn't help thinking it sounded like hell.
'No,' said Matt, 'it's just modernisation.'

Dear, dirty Dongguan

2009-08-09T12:59:00.001-04:00

(Originally published in The Greenwich Citizen)

There’s a silver lining to every cloud. My career as a foreign teacher in southern China’s Guangdong province ended early, which means I got to start traveling sooner. Part of the (very generous) compensation package for my job was a ten-day guided tour around Hunan province, Guangdong’s better-looking neighbor to the north. I’m not usually a fan of guided tours: they’re not flexible, they’re not immersive, and they’re not cheap. But it’s hard to say no to something that’s free.

It’s not long before someone on our tour comments that you get what you pay for. By the second day of our trip, we’ve spent eighteen hours on the bus. I think I am the only one in the group who doesn’t mind. I love watching the scenery change, and realizing all the things you miss about a country when you fly over it. Crossing the border from Guangdong into Hunan reminded me of why states have such jagged edges: they follow natural contours in the land, like humans had to before we started dynamiting through hills and stringing suspension bridges across rivers. The Guangdong-Hunan crossing takes us through a range of forest-clad mountains and deep gorges. It is somehow comforting to see that nature has created an area so intimidating that even Chinese industry can’t cultivate it.

Inside Hunan, there’s little to differentiate the highway from the New Jersey Turnpike aside from the roadside advertisements. There aren’t many of them, and those that exist tend to offer industrial goods: mobile phone parts, concrete mix, and in what I can only assume is a blissfully ignorant transliteration, ‘Strong Safe Screws.’ China’s highway system is used almost exclusively for industrial transport. The highway is smooth, fast, and underfunded by the government, which means that the tolls are high – prohibitively high for most Chinese, who rely on trains instead. This will likely change as the booming middle class starts to make enough money to construct that spoiled child of the developed society, the suburb. For the moment, however, we share the road with trucks, tour buses, and the occasional expensive car.

During a rare stretch of bottleneck on the highway, my bus is stuck next to a truck full of hogs. They are piled on top of each other, looking forlorn as prisoners on the way to the guillotine. Which I suppose is more or less appropriate.

The roadside rest stops are all identical. Each has a convenience store, a restaurant with no name, and a bathroom. In the first, the familiar signals for ‘vacant’ and ‘occupied’ were reversed: green meant someone was inside, red meant empty. It reminded me of the years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1956-76) when overzealous members of the Red Guard student movement declared that it didn’t make sense to stop at red lights, since red was the color of the future. From 1966-69, green meant stop and red meant go. The scale of the resultant traffic jams made the Greenwich-New York rush hour commute look like a jaunt on the Autobahn.

Leaving the highway is always an adventure. On the way to a remote village, we spend three hours lurching over potholes and around cows on an uneven dirt road. Hunan is just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and I can imagine the green of the hills being overpowering in sunlight. But sunlight eludes us on all but one day of the tour. In a total of five weeks in China, I have seen a blue sky twice.

I leave the tour in Changsha, best known as the city where Mao converted to Communism. City really isn’t the right word. It’s more of a megatropolis: streets wider than Pennsylvania Avenue, buildings taller than New York’s skyscrapers, and everything under construction. The place already looks decrepit, even though most of these buildings can be no more than ten years old. The whole rhythm of life is accelerated here: buildings spring up in days, so it shouldn’t be surprising if they look ready to fall down in a couple of years.

Dilapidated architecture and squat toilets aside, I’m sad to leave China. It’s impossible to spend more than a month in a country and not fall in love with some parts of it. I’ve just made it to Mongolia, and I find myself missing the chili drenched squid I used to buy on the street and the irate looks my students would give me when I asked them to do grammar exercises. There is so much more to say about China, but, in the familiar words of Stephen Colbert, that’s all the time we have for tonight.

Tall girls in a short country

2009-08-08T13:47:00.003-04:00

Foreigners are still a rare, rare sighting in Hunan province. We are treated like safari animals: people point, take pictures, keep their distance or occasionally try to feed us. Bug-eyed stares are a given. The teachers have each come up with coping mechanisms: Mike take pictures of people taking pictures of us, Amanda waves and smiles for the camera, I make faces for them. We've developed a points system to keep things interesting:
1 point for catching someone blatantly staring at us
2 points for deliberate head turning or stopping to watch us pass
3 points for pointing
4 points for audible recognition, such as shouting 'waigoren' (foreigner) or loudly saying hello
5 points for taking a photo (bonus if the person pretends to focus on something else, then snaps as soon as you enter the frame)
6 points for being a guest star in a home video
And so on. We eventually eliminate the first three tiers as being too frequent to bear counting. Amanda, who is not only a waigoren but is black, is the runaway winner. She is the elusive lionness of our safari.

Being a giraffe of a waigoren – southern Chinese do not often see a woman approaching six feet – is helpful in some cases. People tend to give you more personal space. People snatch up their children before you step on them (I've always had a problem with baby-trampling in the US, they're just so far out of my normal sight line). There is one place, however, where people don't have time to notice if you are a waigoren. It is, apart from the Hong Kong border crossing, the most terrifying place in China for me: the train station.

My first experience at Beijing's colossal domestic hub Peking West nearly scared me out of the country permanently. Fifty yards from the entrance, I was sucked into a slow-moving flood of people pressing towards the narrow gates of the entrance. As we neared the door, gentle shoves degenerated into kicking and clawing as people struggled to get their luggage onto the metal detector first. When I made it through – all in one piece, to my amazement – the mob abruptly dissipated, leaving me wondering if I had exaggerated its savagery. My friend Jenny, who emerged a minute later, was not so forgiving.

'I don't understand how eight millennia of a culture based on respect and self-sacrifice has produced this,' she spat. 'I've been holding onto my Chinese passport [she moved to the states in 1997] out of some sort of misplaced nostalgia. Forget that. I'm applying for US citizenship as soon as I get back to the states.'

Thankfully the Changsha station was not as 'renounce-my-citizenship' violent as Peking West. It probably helped that I was traveling with two other waigoren. Gretchen, descended from the blonde midwestern Amazon gene pool, was good for clearing paths through the horde, and Jeanne, nearly a foot shorter than both of us, burrowed skillfully. We made it onto the train with minimal emotional scarring.

The twenty-one hour train ride passed quickly thanks to a quartet of classical-guitar playing adolescents. Like a Sinic version of the Carter family, they turned the carriage into their tour bus, jamming and practicing well into the evening, pausing long enough to teach me the A and E chords. I'm saving C, D, and G for my upcoming train journeys: one and a half days from Beijing to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia; twenty four hours to Irkutsk, the 'Paris of Siberia'; and three and a half days to Moscow.

Little Red Book Town

2009-08-07T11:56:00.005-04:00

We’ve made it to Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. ‘Changsha is where Mao Zedong was born conversion to Communism’ says a sign at the local museum. The religious terminology is fitting: Mao’s brand of Communism is a religion, both the sense of blind irrational devotion and being an opiate of the masses. Would Lenin be disappointed?
We visit Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace, at the end of a long day of driving. We’re late and the site is closed, but once again guanxi work their magic and a pair of dour-looking army men let us in. We’re not allowed to take photos, so I have to paraphrase some of the signage from memory. ‘Here is the fireplace where Mao would gather his family and enlighten them to the struggle of the Chinese workers.’ I picture a rustic Mao, before his middle-aged paunch, lecturing his little brother as he blithely picks his nose. ‘Here is where the Mao family keeps pigs.’ It’s a big pen inside the handsome house. The Mao family was clearly not poor.
The day is spitting rain. Tourists who do not share our guanxi huddle in little groups, staring. The army men stand at attention like the guards in front of Buckingham palace, who stoically allow tourists to give them bunny ears and snap their picture. No one tries to do the same with the Chinese army guards.
Nearby, a monumental statue of Mao is attended by a group of middle-aged Chinese tourists. There is a small red mat in front and people are taking turns prostrating, touching their foreheads to the damp concrete. It’s fascinating to me that Mao has managed to escape all culpability for the disasters of the Cultural Revolution, at least in the popular imagination. His wife and three other Communist party leaders, known as the Gang of Four, were put on trial, and found guilty of more or less everything that went wrong in China between 1956 and 1978. A quartet of villains for a quarter century of ills. If only all history were so easy to reduce.

A Nation Run by Immortals

2009-08-06T03:24:00.005-04:00

‘I think I’m going to die,’ says Tyler, the youngest of my group of travelers. He’s well on his way to being drunk under the table by the Minister of Foreign Trade for Yueyang City.

Tyler and I, along with eight of the other English teachers, are traveling around Hunan province with the Yao family. The Yaos founded Uniwise Bilingual School in Dongguan ten years ago, and have been importing Harvard students to teach at their ‘Summer Cultural Exchange’ for the last five. Part of the very generous compensation package for the job is a tour around a region of China. Hunan is Guangzhou’s better looking neighbor to the north, best known for being the birthplace of Mao Zedong.

The Yao family’s connections run much further than their local community, which means I was wrong in what I said a few weeks ago about guanxi. Here in Hunan, we’ve been treated to meals by uncles, a student’s mother’s college roommate, and now this government official in Yueyang.

Of all the connections, this is the most prestigious. People here speak of lower-level government officials with the kind of reverence that Americans save for the CEOs of major corporations. They have untouchable wealth, cachet, and influence. They function on an entirely different level from the common person. Which is funny, because they’re all Communists.

One of the things that makes government officials superhuman is their ability to drink more alcohol than science believes possible. Throughout our dinner, the minister challenges each of us to race him in chugging a large shot of beer. I do the math: ten English teachers plus three members of the Yao family means he is drinking thirteen times as much as the rest of us. He eventually singles out Tyler for extra challenges. As the only white male in the group, Tyler has been chosen to defend America’s manhood.

24 bottles of beer in, we all start shouting Disney songs at the top of our lungs. The only other place I have sung like this is on the stretching mat at Weld Boathouse, when my teammates on the Radcliffe Crew needed to let off some steam. ‘Let’s get down to business – to defeat the Huns!’ takes on a new dimension when you’re singing with a member of the CCP.

31 bottles of beer in, I challenge the minister to try and take some pressure off Tyler. The over-carbonated lager goes to my head almost immediately. The minister tells me I’m a pretty American girl, and I reply he’s not bad looking himself. Then I realize I might be drunk, and return to my seat.

38 bottles of beer in, we say goodnight. The minister walks off with his arm slung around Mr Yao’s shoulders, looking jolly but hardly tipsy. One of the teachers, destined for Harvard Med School this fall, remarks absentmindedly: ‘I’d like to get ahold of his liver when he dies.’ One of the Yao sisters responds: ‘Government officials never die.’

Congratulations, Vineyard Vines

2009-08-04T13:36:00.003-04:00

You know you’ve made it as a brand when Chinese factories start making knockoffs.

Requiem for a Sangria

2009-08-04T09:09:00.003-04:00

If you travel frequently, comparisons are inevitable. I took a long bus ride today and read a bit of the journal I kept last summer. I was working in Madrid, which is worlds away from China in every sense except literally. Comparing a typical day there and here in China says a lot about the differences between the two countries:

Sunday, 6 July 2008

Met a musician from Cincinnati named Philip and a Quaker named Sue. Both in their forties, I think. Went to Reina Sofia (big modern art museum) with them.
Pitcher of sangria split three ways for lunch. Mmm.
Went to 2 exhibitions at CaixaForum (free gallery sponsored by Spanish bank). Exhibits on Alphonse Mucha and Charlie Chaplin.
Really need more supportive shoes.
On to the Prado. Depressed by Goya exhibit.
Walked through Retiro park. Hundreds of people come and drum on things in the park on Sundays. Loud.

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Informed that the teachers are being taken to Shenzhen for 7 hours of shopping. I am as enthused as the condemned on execution day.
Walk around shopping area, think deep thoughts.
Take refuge in a Starbucks. Chat with English construction worker named Roy who has blown half a year’s savings to fly over here to see the eclipse. He spent much of the 80s hitchhiking around southeast Asia. Says Cambodia is the most beautiful place in the world.
Pass a street musician on the way back to the bus and wish I had time to stay and listen. Chinese violin is infinitely more tolerable than Chinese opera.

The comparison may not be fair: I did not spend all my Sundays in Spain museum-hopping, nor do I intend to spend every Sunday in China shopping. But it is telling that the supervisors in charge of the teaching program have taken us to a mall each of the past three weekends. And these are not like American malls, where you might find movie theaters or restaurants. Every inch of mall real estate is given over to shops. The idea of spending your leisure time looking at modern art or nursing a jug of sangria in the sun would be quite foreign to most Chinese.

Perhaps this difference in how the two cultures spend their leisure time explains why China is taking off and Europe is, in the rather apocalyptic words of my friend Etienne, ‘dead’ (for a not uncompelling counter-argument, see here). There’s something to be said for a robust consumer culture, or so Obama’s economists keep telling us. But should we be willing to substitute Google for Goya?

Go East, young woman, and go crazy with the country

2009-07-31T12:35:00.004-04:00

(Originally published in the Greenwich Citizen)

This June was not the best time to graduate from college. Employers hired 43,000 fewer recent graduates than they had in 2008. Michael Jackson died. And as if the world weren’t already coming to pieces, the World Health Organization declared that swine flu was a global pandemic.

Given the circumstances, I leapt at a summer job opportunity in China, a country about which I know very little. I somehow escaped high school without a course on world history: the closest GHS came was freshman year’s ‘World Themes,’ which defined the 'world' as the US and Europe. I hardly improved on the record in college, where I focused on comparative government but, yet again, left out China.

Contrary to appearances, I have not been living under a brick, and I was eager to learn more about the country that houses one out of every five living people on this planet. I backpacked around China for ten days last summer with a Chinese-American friend, but the Olympics were in full swing and the entire country was on its best behavior. Factories were shut down to improve air quality, private cars were taken off the road, and guides in white and blue outfits hovered at every corner, eager to direct hapless foreigners to their destinations. I enjoyed myself, but I wanted to see what China was like outside of the big tourist-friendly cities. The job opportunity, teaching English in the heart of Guangdong province, seemed like it would do the trick. Guangdong is the powerhouse of China’s industrial south, adjacent to Hong Kong. Guidebooks describe it as ‘charmless,’ ‘uninteresting,’ and, my favorite, ‘a wasteland.’ I packed my bags.

Just before I flew over, a dispute at a factory in Guangdong sparked riots in Xinjiang, a province in northwestern China that is predominantly Muslim. Around 180 people were killed and 700 injured in some of the worst ethnic violence China has seen in recent years. I’d had a hunch China in the summer of 2009 was going to be very different from my experience in 2008. Now I was certain it would be.

The border crossing from Hong Kong confirmed my suspicions. The cheerful blue-and-white-clad welcomers were replaced with rifle-toting officials who surrounded my bus and pointed what looked like pistols at the forehead of every passenger. They were checking our temperatures – the ‘pistols’ were thermometers – in an effort to make sure that no one with a fever entered the country. Swine flu hysteria was just beginning to hit China.

I never bought in to all the fuss surrounding swine flu: yes, it’s new, and yes, it is highly contagious, but in the end it is a relatively minor illness that tends to pass after a few days and only seriously endangers people already in fragile health. Administrators at my college didn’t share my nonchalance: they banned handshakes and hugs throughout graduation week. But students, professors, and families alike laughed at the heavy-handedness of the policy and universally ignored the ban.

The reaction has not been so light-hearted in China. In a country of 1.3 billion people where 43% of the population lives in extremely crowded cities, it hardly seems worth the effort to try and contain a virus so contagious and relatively innocuous. However, memories of the 2002 SARS epidemic are fresh in China, and many feel that the government did too little too late to adequately address that health scare. The Communist party is taking no risks this time around. Strict quarantine has been imposed on people exhibiting flu-like symptoms. The detention of foreigners, mostly from the US and Great Britain, has kept consulates busy, though in this case at least the Chinese government has the upper hand: it was the American Center for Disease Control which generated so much of the hype around swine flu in the first place.

On July 27th, another counter-flu initiative was sent from the hallowed halls of the Communist Party: all schools, summer camps, and conferences were to be terminated immediately. The logic, if it can be called that, behind the initiative was that children’s parents could take care of them better than summer camp administrators. The reality was that millions of sick people flooded into the national transportation system. But at least they were on their way to becoming their family’s problem instead of the state’s.

The ban shut down my school, of course, so I’m now out of a job in an unfamiliar, flu-crazy country. Let the fun begin.

Drinkin' Beer, Smokin' Buds

2009-07-30T17:26:00.004-04:00

Most people who travel to China take at least a few pictures of what is fondly known as ‘Chingrish’: the bizarre language spewed from online translating software onto tourist-oriented dinner menus and street signs. More often than not, there are enough imaginary words and misplaced adjectives to make Shakespeare blush. ‘DANGREE!’ admonishes a sign next to a cliff. ‘Meatish delight of the baby’, the (cannibalistic?) dinner menu offers. ‘Let pregnant people shit on you,’ instructs a sign on the bus. I could go on.

It’s one thing to try and communicate a message that relates to public safety, and quite another to clothe your body in slogans you don’t understand. But supply meets demand, and lord is there demand for clothes with English catchphrases. From the inane to the inappropriate, here are some highlights from the past week (the second might be my favorite of all time):

Flesh-eating fishes and the Overnight City, part II

2009-07-28T19:33:00.006-04:00

I’ve received some concerned emails about the title of my last blog post. I’m happy to reassure you that I was not making any cryptic metaphors. I took a bath with some flesh-eating fishes last weekend. The sensation of having live animals eating the dead skin off your feet and arms is not something you get to experience every day. The only troubling thing, really, was how ineffective they are. I expected to leave the pool feeling raw and rejuvenated. I should have just bought a pumice stone.

I’m not usually the spa type, but it’s hard to turn down a 90-minute massage when it only costs five dollars. I’m continuously blown away by how cheap labor is in China. Economist Judith Banister estimates that the average factory laborer in China earns 64 cents an hour, compared to $21.11 in the US. But if microeconomics doesn’t interest you, here’s another example. I got a very good haircut my first weekend for 38 RMB, which is about $5.50. A fellow teacher got a thirty minute massage, wash and blow dry for 15RMB, or about $2.20. The off-brand shampoo I bought from the clearance aisle at Walmart (yes, China has had Wal-mart since 1997) cost 42 RMB/$6.15. In other words, China has so many people that skilled labor costs less than common chemicals. On clearance.

In 1979, in an effort to combat overpopulation, the Chinese government declared that couples (with some exceptions) could have no more than one child. Many called it barbaric, but almost everyone who has witnessed the overpopulation of China first-hand calls it necessary. Some parts of the policy, most prominently allegations of forced abortions, can be seen as a violation of fundamental human rights. Because couples who can only have one child prefer sons, who traditionally take care of their parents in old age, there are many reports of female infanticide. And there are chilling implications for the future. An aging population means one grandchild could feasibly be expected to support two parents and four grandparents in old age. Multiply by a quarter of the world’s population, and the stress on the European health care system right now looks as easy to solve as the crossword puzzle in Seventeen Magazine.

My friend Robert pointed out another danger: ‘We’re looking at a rising generation that is almost 75% male. That means at least half the Chinese population will not get a chance to marry – might not even lose their virginity. How excited are you for the world’s most populous nation to be led by a bunch of men with no yin to their yang?’

There are other things keeping me up at night, I told him. But it’s something to consider.

Flesh-eating fishes and the Overnight City, part I

2009-07-26T19:21:00.008-04:00

Guanxi (see last post) came in handy again this weekend: the lawyer for the school happens to be the lawyer at a nearby resort, and somehow I and some other teachers found ourselves installed in lakeside bungalows with a free ticket to the spa. It was even better than the 80 cent DVDs.

The resort was on the outskirts of Shenzhen, a coastal city adjacent to Hong Kong. In 1980, the Chinese government declared Shenzhen a 'special economic zone': a hopeful utopia where western-style market capitalism could blend with Chinese social (and socialist) values, generating prosperity 'capable of satisfying the needs of any person or business,' to quote a tourist guide I picked up.

Like any well-thought out act of social engineering, Shenzhen comes with a creation myth. I will attempt to paraphrase from a variety of disagreeing sources. From the first days of population in the 12th/15th century until the 1970s, the city was a poor/idyllic backwards/wholesome fishing village. Evil British/admirable-efficient-mostly-Chinese Hong Kong pressured/inspired Deng Xiaoping to grant 'Special Economic' status in 1980 in an attempt to resurrect China from the economic disasters wrought by the visionary/bat-crazy Mao Zedong. A windfall of hasty/miraculous foreign investment resulted in unprecedented growth: Shenzhen, colloquially known as the 'Overnight City', has been the fastest-growing urban area in China for the last thirty years. That the city's success revolutionized China's economic system is undisputed. Whether or not that is a good thing is the subject of heated debate.

The drive from Dongguan to Shenzhen carves through the the hills of the Pearl River Delta on China's southwestern coast. I've driven through the Pallisades in New Jersey and the Delaware water gap every summer of my life and always thought of hills as rolling. Here, they rise and fall like mini-mountains, or a choppy sea frozen mid-swell. Many are grooved with terraced rice fields, reminding me for the hundredth time of how long people have been living in China. Some look like they hadn't been cultivated for centuries, but still bear the marks of human hands: trees grow in obedient rows, mountain streams turn at abrupt and useful places. I've never seen such compelling evidence that humans can control the natural world.

Sunshine after an eclipse

2009-07-24T01:25:00.004-04:00

The Chinese word for eclipse translates roughly to 'Moon eats sun'. The entire school had the morning off to watch the twenty-minute event, which was only visible on this side of the world (a cool animation of the trajectory can be found here). We stared at the disappearing sun through thick layers of colored cellophane, which I'm pretty sure is completely insufficient for avoiding retinal damage. This didn't seem to be an issue. Like the young, Chinese people seem to have little care for the future. From toilet paper to computers, everything is made to be expendable. 'Paper' is plastic-based, which means it can't be flushed or recycled, but is carted off in loads of foul-smelling garbage. Electronics are routinely fried by power surges, but they are replaced instead of repaired. Merchants sell fake or faulty goods - admittedly at rock-bottom prices - because the chance of any one consumer coming back to a store repeatedly is small: there is such a multiplicity of goods, and people are so often on the move, that courting consumer confidence hardly seems worth the effort.

But I'm not telling the full story. Of course some people settle, and these people build up tremendously important networks. Anyone who has tried to do business in China will tell you about the importance of guanxi, connections. I'd always thought of China as an almost obsessively meritocratic culture - test after test, heirarchy into heirarchy. I've been surprised to hear people say that top government positions, business contracts, and even University admissions are not earned, but traded.

The supervisor at my school has close guanxi with a DVD seller at the local mall, where she took the English teachers last weekend. The DVDs, which were retailing for around $3, were reduced to 80 cents when she was standing next to the cashier. I took advantage of the discount to buy Sunshine, the mostly overlooked movie Danny Boyle made between 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle manages to take an absurd premise (team of scientist/astronauts on a mission to reignite the sun) with predictable plot development (they go crazy under the pressure), throw in a sort of undead monster (he's good at this - see 28 Days Later), and turn it into one of the most compelling films since Apocolypse Now, which happens to feature an absurd premise (soldiers sent into the jungle to kill a renegade officer), predictable plot development (they go crazy under the pressure), and a half-dead monster-human (Brando, how little we knew ye).

I first saw Apocolypse Now in London. When I returned the movie to a rental place on Earl's Court Rd, the wiry-haired clerk looked at the jacket and laughed.

'That's my movie,' she said.

'What do you mean, your movie?'

'I was the music producer on Apocolypse Now. I chose all the music.'

I was impressed. 'How was that? I mean - what was it like?'

The clerk smiled and waved her hand, as if wafting away the ghost of ganja past. 'It was great. We all just sat around, smoked a lot of spliffs, and listened to a lot of groovy music.'

I wanted to ask her why she was now a clerk in a movie rental place in London, but thought it might be rude. It does make me feel perversely better about being a soon-to-be-unemployed Harvard grad. One more week of teaching! If I can just figure out a way to teach a class of lower-intermediate English level kids about sustainability...

What's in a name?

2009-07-22T00:25:00.002-04:00

A new student arrived last Wednesday. She is from Inner Mongolia. This sets her apart from the majority of students, who are either scholarship students from Dongguan or scions of the newly wealthy in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Guangzhou. At nearly six feet, she is the tallest person I have seen in China. She is sixteen and cannot weigh more than a hundred pounds.

The girl from Mongolia is the only one of my students who did not arrive in class with an English name. Apparently, choosing your American alter ego is the first step in English classes here. I feel guilty making the girl do the same: it feels like cultural imperialism. I said as much to my supervisor and she laughed at me. She asked if I am bothered by the dominance of western classical music in the opera houses in Beijing. That’s different, I told her. Have you ever tried to listen to Chinese opera? Watching a chorus of monkeys being electrocuted would be a more pleasant way to spend an evening. Chinese names, on the other hand, are beautiful and it seems odd to make my young students assume an alternate identity before I teach them.

The girls in my class have chosen names, and manners, straight out of the1950s: bookish Sophie, quiet Michelle, shy Diana, cute Yvonne. Then there’s Kinki. Kinki is nine years old and I have no idea how to tell her that she has a stripper name. I play through the situation in my head: I tell her that Kinki is a very unusual name in America and it might be good to change it. Bewildered, she asks why. I try to explain, and she looks at me like I have just told her Santa Claus touches children in inappropriate places.

My supervisor assures me that I am not the first to have to confront a student over his or her name. Last year, a boy named himself Chair, and steadfastly refused to change it. Two years ago, Icemen (not Iceman) arrived on campus and cried when his teacher changed his name to Henry. The woman who is teaching the sixth level of English let her students pick American names and somehow ended up with a boy named Cha-cha-cha. I didn’t want to take any chances with the girl from Mongolia, so I printed out the top fifty girl’s names in the US right now (FYI, there are going to be a lot of Avas and Makaylas graduating from college in twenty-odd years). In a display of remarkably good taste, she chose Lauren.

I stood next to Lauren as we watched the solar eclipse that arced over Asia this morning. It’s hard to get her to speak more than a few words at a time: she is painfully shy, like many tall girls. On her other side was Jacky Chen, who at seventeen is my oldest student. He is talkative in class, but tongue-tied around Lauren. So much is different over here, but the awkwardness of teenage romance seems to be universal.

Oh, Modernity!

2009-07-19T00:56:00.005-04:00

(Written Wednesday, July 15th) Another day, another typhoon. The concept of surge protectors hasn’t caught on in this corner of southern China. At the first rumble of thunder, there is a flurry of activity: everyone runs to unplug the computers, air conditioners, anything that might be fried by an errant bolt of lightning. This isn’t helpful, however, when the entire school is run on two circuits attached to faulty lightning rods. Yesterday’s typhoon succeeded in frying the entire system.

Teaching children English is never easy. It is especially difficult when the classroom is over one hundred degrees. The slightest movement exhausts you. Thinking makes you sweat. Everything seems to pulse, as if the heat has melted teacher, student, desks, fields, and walls into one big organism.

It’s not that I haven’t been hot places before. I worked in Madrid last summer, where the temperature seldom dipped below a hundred degrees, and I once visited Cairo, where it topped out around one hundred fifteen. But both places were dry. A pair of sunglasses and the hint of a breeze kept the days bearable, even pleasant.

Without power, there is no way to sanitize tap water, which must be boiled before it is safe to drink. Food can’t be cooked or refrigerated, and we’re told not to use running water while the electricians are at work.

The electricians, by the way, are six men who look like they have sprung straight to life out of an eighteenth century woodcut. Clothed in ancient overalls and wide-brimmed hats shaped like the bottom of an onion, they arrive before we have finished breakfast. They dig a hole in the ground to expose a set of thick wires, then squat on their heels and stare at it. When I pass by after morning classes, the only thing that seems to have changed is that they are eating a lunch the school provide. It is late evening before the lights flicker on and the air conditioners sputter back to life.

Feed the artists

2009-07-14T15:05:00.004-04:00

Back to Detroit: the July/August Atlantic featured a modest article entitled ‘Fifteen ways to Fix the World’. One that seems so ridiculous it might actually make sense is to turn Detroit into the capital of the newly proposed high-speed rail network. The factories which spewed GM’s mechanical jalopies could be reconfigured for train production, and no doubt Michigan’s many skilled engineers would like to stay in their homes if jobs will come back. With twelve percent of energy consumption in the US coming from new building projects, refitting existing structures makes as much sense getting vaccinated before going abroad. (I really hope I don’t get Dengue fever. I’ve had enough plague this summer.)

It ain't easy being Steven Chu

2009-07-12T23:37:00.004-04:00

Small explanatory detail: I am teaching English for the summer at a small school in southern China.

At the school’s opening ceremony today, the head teacher opened with the following anecdote:

A very prominent Chinese scientist graduated with a PhD from UCBerkeley and his two younger siblings graduated with PhDs from Harvard. The Berkeley grad went on to win a Nobel Prize. He called his mom to tell her the good news and she said ‘So? You still didn’t graduate from Harvard.’ He went on to be named Secretary of Energy by President Obama. The mother: ‘So? You still didn’t graduate from Harvard.’ He was then invited to speak at the 2009 Harvard commencement, which means he was granted an honorary degree, and finally his mother was proud of him.

I think the Chinese have a skewed sense of the importance of a Harvard education.

The head teacher then turned to my fellow teachers and me with ‘a very interesting question.’ He said he knew a man who was eighty years old and was still so spry that he could leap up onto his roof whenever it needed to be repaired. He also slept only half an hour every night – but when he slept, you could light him on fire and he wouldn’t notice. Finally, he was a man, but he had two breasts that, if you squeezed them, would produce milk.

‘How do you explain that?’

I think the Chinese have a skewed sense of the breadth of a Harvard education.

He spoke in Chinese, which his daughter then translated to English. I know absolutely no Chinese, so his speech mostly sounded like a fundamentalist church on Pentecost. Occasionally, though, words would stick out: ‘Obama,’ ‘Harvard,’ ‘New York’. He also kept on saying something that sounded like ‘niggah’: ‘how-chi-kun-wey-niggah-qin-woah-niggah-wot’. I’m going to have to find someone to translate that word for me.

Update: Apparently ‘niggah’ in Chinese is the equivalent of saying ‘um’ or ‘er’ in English.

Facebook, youtube, myspace, twitter, etc, are not always blocked, but have since the beginning of the recent Uighur-related unrest in Western China. More on that - and less of me being a presumptuous news critic - soon.

The Detroit-Kabul connection

2009-07-11T20:11:00.006-04:00

I flew into Hong Kong under a typhoon warning. I expected drama, but instead was just creeped out by the sepulchral stillness of the white birches lining the highway. There is nothing so terrifying as the calm before the storm.

It didn’t help my feeling of unease when, at the border, masked Chinese border officials pointed what looked very much like pistols at the foreheads of everyone in my bus. They were measuring our temperature in an effort to make sure that no one with swine flu made it into the country.

The Chinese government is not known for doing things halfway. I can open very few of the pages that result from my search for ‘Uighur uprising.’ Facebook and Blogspot, for better or worse among the two most utilized non-porn sites on the internet, have been completely blocked (as have YouTube and Myspace). For the foreseeable future, then, I’m going to be exploiting friends’ good will to smuggle these posts out of the country.

But more on China later. In a trend I foresee continuing, I want to backtrack a few days and an ocean.

On Tuesday, I drove from northern Michigan to Detroit with Jon, a friend of my brother’s who spent four months teaching accounting at Kabul University. Like any delusional idealist who studied post-conflict development in college, I’ve thought it might be interesting to look for work there. I heartily agree with the new philosophy governing (at least in theory) the latest troop surge. The language (Dari, a dialect of Farsi) is nowhere near as intimidating as Arabic. And three other friends who have worked there as civilians rave about the beauty and dynamism of the city. Jon’s take is a little different.

Kabul is, unsurprisingly, a disaster after thirty-odd years of intense conflict, starting with the Soviet invasion in 1979. Bombed-out buildings, no underground sewage, the kind of poverty that makes you ashamed to be human… To top it off, plants not far outside the city process sewage by burning it, giving the air has an abnormally high fecal content. I never thought I would hear about something that made the smog in China sound appealing.

Towards the end of our drive, we passed a gigantic factory on the outskirts of Detroit. Rivers of rust trickled down the side of the building as if it were the victim of a Godfather-style drive-by shooting. With the sun catching the edges of glass in the broken windows, it looked somehow splendid in all its catastrophe.

‘That,’ said Jon, ‘that is what Kabul looks like.’

I think I might like it. Feces notwishtanding.

Poetry of San Francisco

2009-07-09T09:57:00.001-04:00

Graffiti on the front steps of a townhouse on Haight St: 'Pig tested, Big Brother approved.'

Man to woman on street: 'Do you have 25 cents? No? Thanks anyway diablo motherf***ing satanic fingernail-ripping b****.'

Original composition, inspired by my friend Sarah's predilection for haikus (for example, see June 26 post in Euroclass09):

San Francisco sucks
Everyone is so happy
They hog good karma

Man at bus stop: 'Are you homeless?'
Me: 'No, but thanks for asking.'

I really should buy some new clothes. Fortunately, thrifty chic is the norm in China. I take off in a few hours.

3, 2, 1...

2009-07-02T16:32:00.002-04:00

Truly, northern Michigan in summer is one of the most beautiful places in the world (not my leg).

The crystal-clear lakes bring to mind a less pleasant beach experience I had last summer, from a blog I wrote for Harvard's Center for European Studies:
'Qingdao is an old German colony with one of the most unappealing beaches I have ever seen: brown, rocky and weed-strewn, tidepools that smell more like cesspools, and a horizon dominated by ill-conceived modern architecture. After two days, I headed back to Beijing. On my way out of the city, I marveled at its size: it seems like there are enough skyscrapers to house all the jobs in the world. And yet there are cranes everywhere – dormant while the city struts its stuff for the Olympics, but ready to roar back into action. Celtic tigers and lions notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a future not dominated by the Chinese dragon.' (23 Aug. 2008)

I'll be back in China next Friday. Can't wait to see how things have changed.