across india... and beyond!

Making the [National Park] Rounds

2011-07-03T22:56:00.001-07:00

At some point, I came to an odd realization: I've seen more of the natural wonders of places like Mongolia, Argentina, Nepal, and New Zealand than I have of our very own U.S. of A. This didn't seem right - there's no shortage of natural wonders to see in this country of ours ... so, over the past twelve months, I've started making a conscious effort to check some of the more famous American outdoor sites off the list.

Let's begin in upstate New York just under a year ago - the Niagara Falls:

Iguazu's still bigger, but Niagara is mighty impressive

Traversing this grand country of ours (by rail) for a couple of days brought me to the Great Plains, and pretty soon, I was staring at one of the grandest man-made outdoor sites in the world:

South Dakota's Mount Rushmore

Which brings up some philosophical quandaries - it surely is an outdoor site, but it's not exactly natural... I say as long as it's a National Park, and is one of the more heavily visited of American sites, it belongs on this list!

So, moving right along - likely the single best known of America's natural wonders, and certainly the grandest (no pun intended) is Arizona's Grand Canyon. This one, I'd actually been to once before, but that was all the way back in '99, when I was such an un-seasoned traveler that I didn't even have a digital camera. All fixed on the visit this past March:

The Canyon was glorious and snow-covered shortly after sun-rise on this early spring day

So, Niagara, Rushmore, Grand Canyon... how to round that bunch out? Right - Yellowstone! You don't get a lot more authentic with your outdoor sites than the gigantic tract of land comprising the world's first National Park. So, early June, just under a year since having started this latest journey of discovery at Niagara Falls, I landed in Yellowstone to join my parents for a week of sightseeing at this grand national park.

Yellowstone, looking positively other-wordly with geysers smoking all around

The geysers are constantly going off - this one is simply [and appropriately] named "The Grand," seen sending a powerful spray of water up here

When not exploding, the thermal features are busy smoking (a bit menacingly) and creating an astonishing array of bright colors. The Grand Prismatic Spring pictured

I didn't have much time to research Yellowstone before arriving - it's huge, there's a bunch of geysers, a lot of wildlife - no shortage of sites to see. The details of these sites we learned en route - none disappointed. Yellowstone is actually amazingly vast and diverse, it's not just Old Faithful and the rest of the geyser bunch - traversing the park puts you through an ever-changing cavalcade of scenery: the geysers and the hot springs give way to the lakes, waterfalls, and rivers, which merge into the Canyons, which lead you to Lamar Valley - "America's Serengeti," dubbed so for its wide mixture of wildlife out easily in view. And then, there's the Mammoth step springs up in the North-Western corner of the park, which simply defy classification altogether. Click here for a hundred or so pictures of the best of the park, but a few more of the highlights:

A pair of buffalo playfully fighting early in the morning... all of 20 or so feet away from the road

Mom, dad, welcome to the blog! The three of us at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone - not quite the Grand Canyon, but pretty Grand nonetheless!

And eventually, you might start thinking, "you know, one thing that's missing here? That's some big ol' mountains - up close and personal! There's snowy peaks off on the horizon, but couldn't they have planted them a little closer!?" Well, never fear - just drive South for two or so hours (and the one thing that annoys me about American National Parks is that you do absolutely have to drive everywhere) and you are surrounded by those snowy elusive peaks, smack in the middle of the Grand Teton National Park, dominating the valley of Jackson Hole:

The Teton Range

The mountains rising up above Jenny Lake on a beautiful, sunny day out in the park

And at this point... I think it's safe to say my American National Parks are beginning to catch up to all those other far off lands. Sure Yosemite, which I'm yet to see, makes a strong argument for being in the top five (and it remains high on the list), along with Alaska's Denali, Hawaii's big volcanoes, Florida's Everglades, Montana's Glacier National Park... who knows what else! But a few at a time, and so far, over these past twelve months, I'm off to a good start. Mt. Rainier, right here next to Seattle, continues to beckon to be climbed as well, and that may well be the next piece of American Nature to conquer, as I keep hoping/planning to summit this year... If I can get there before July 24th, it'll even fall within a year of Niagara!

So pretty... so beckoning! Not even nearly as tall as the mountains in Nepal, Bolivia, Peru... it must and shall be conquered!

Still not convinced about the variety of natural wonders to be seen in this vast land of ours? A few more picturesque destinations from the year past:
The Tulip Fields in Washington's Skagit Valley
Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada and the Rocks of Sedona, Arizona
The Mountains of Utah
A different perspective of Mt. Rainier, still just outside of Seattle
The Playa of the Burning Man festival... one of the most spectacularly amazing settings
Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay - did you know it too is now the domain of the National Park Service?
Victoria Island and its Burchart Gardens are in Canada, but I'm willing include the great land up North in this little exhibition!
Devil's Tower, on the great plains of Montana (you're gonna have to scroll down some)

And a couple more natural sites of note rewinding another year back in the way back machine: Lake Tahoe and Crater Lake.

Taliesin West

2011-06-25T00:32:00.000-07:00

I rather hate lumping Taliesin into the 'Arizona's kinda weird' category. Not because Taliesin isn't weird - this workshop and architecture school established by Frank Lloyd Wright certainly is quite weird and unusual, it's just that its airy, geometrical, modern designs are exactly the kinds of weird that I like! But then again, I did enjoy the dateshakes and the ocotillos too, so maybe it does fit after all?

Just take a left on Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd

And in short order, you will arrive at Taliesin West (symbol pictured)

Main building, full of airy, geometrical, modern designs

Frank Lloyd Wright, the uber-famous architect of the early 20th century, had his main base in Wisconsin. He'd named that base Taliesin. At some point (in the 1930's, I think?), he realized that winters really sucked in Wisonsin, so he promptly came out to Phoenix, Arizona, bought a large parcel of land and proceeded to construct Taliesin West - a place that was to become a winter headquarters for his operations. Soon enough, it became a studio and a prestigious architecture school as well. Wright was a lot more into inspiration than he was into details, so he was happy to put through the would be students through rigorous training, but it took another fifty years before the school was to become a fully accredited institution.

These days, Taliesin West continues to function as an architecture school and a design studio. It is now occupied year-round and is a permanent home to some thirty students, but you can also come by and take a fascinating tour - trying not to disturb the work of the students and getting a chance to experience some of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural brilliance firsthand.

One of the buildings in the complex, featuring symmetrical protruding spikes

Inside one of the buidings. Featureing a design drawing of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings

Heloise Crista was once of the students here - now a number of her statues is featured in the courtyard. 'Being in the Moment' pictured here.

And this will conclude the 'Arizona is Weird' introspection. We had a good time in Arizona actually - Grand Canyon, Sedona, seeing friends, going to a couple of spring training games, having a date in Dateland, learning about the life and times of Frank Lloyd Wright... it was all quite interesting. Arizona as a whole though, this land of retired 'snow birds' and immense urban sprawl, did strike me as just a bit nonsensical. All in good fun, of course!

Next stop on the whirlwind adventure of the South West was a weekend in San Diego, but I'd been to San Diego many a time before, what with my parents having lived there for over ten years now, so it doesn't seem quite as interesting and exotic. Besides, it was over two months ago now, and I've since moved to new interesting and exotic sights, seeing how I'm composing all this from right outside the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Naitonal Park, so I'm going to skip posting about San Diego. If you want a quick glimpse at what we did there, including the funky natural environs of San Diego's Wild Animal Park, click here for a full album of the Southwest, including all the best of San Diego!

PS. Yup, it took another three weeks to get from composing this over by Old Faithful to actually posting it - apparently, working does not leave a lot of free time for blogging... Erica may be able to catch you up on adventures in San Diego though, dear Blogosphere. I will aim to post something about Yellowstone eventually - give it another month or two, just to be safe!

Dateland, Arizona

2011-06-25T00:24:00.000-07:00

- Hey Erica, how about a date?

And thus was conceived a stop in the otherwise forgettable desert outpost of Dateland, Arizona. True to its name, the town is famous for its dates ... (for growing dates) ... and for poking fun of its own name. I wish I had more to say about this place... let's see... 20 minutes was plenty of time to see all of Dateland; I had a date shake... we took some funny pictures. I'm pretty sure twenty minutes is enough to drive around Dateland at least three times. Pictures really are worth a thousand words, as I'm clearly struggling to come up with appropriate words to describe this bit of Arizona oddness:

Thanks for choosing Dateland - Be safe. Practice safe dating?

Dateland, what a great place to get off! Giggle.

The sign above would lose some of its charming humor had they simply been consciously making fun of themselves. 'Dateland, Home of the Cougars,' however is entirely unintentional and, thus, entirely, overwhelmingly hillarious!

And thus continues our whirlwind tour of the odd, weird, unusual, and non-sensical bits of the State of Arizona. There were many spots that fit into this category - Dateland was easily my favorite to visit!

The Ocotillo

2011-06-25T00:20:00.000-07:00

an ocotillo is an eight-legged armadillo. Here it is in bloom:

What, you were starting to think Arizona made sense? I've fallen behind on my Arizona nonsense, but now that Jesus didn't show up on May 21st, contrary to Arizona's predictions(*), and the world didn't end, it's time to catch back up a little!

* I know, I know, it was apparently a Mr. Camping of California who'd spread the rumor (uhm, I mean made the clarivoyant, albeit wholly incorrect, prediction), but I saw the sign in Arizona, and it seemed to really belong there... And I've missed you, blog - you too, weird Arizona!

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming...

2011-05-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

... to bring you this Breaking News Bulletin!!!

Osama bin Laden's dead! Right, you knew that... and this probably isn't what you come to read this blog for. Ok, ok, let's try this one: the tulips are blooming! The Washington tulips are blooming!

I'll get back to the Stream of March Nonsense in the deserts of Arizona in a moment, but in April, right here in Washington State, it was time for the annual Skagit Valley Tulip festival, and the tulips were in bloom and on full display. So, while I'm still catching up on the oh so very random, random lives and times of Arizona, a brief interlude for things Pacific Northwest:

The Skagit Valley tulip fields all in bloom, in front of snowy Mt. Baker

Reds and Yellows in long, even rows

Erica and I came out to see the tulips in the middle of April. The tulip pictures were spectacular - pictures with me? Occasionally silly...

A bright hybrid orange sneaks in between the fiery reds

The purple-white's were really awesome!

Want more pictures of beautiful tulips? Here's an entire album, courtesy of Facebook.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming and the nonsense of Arizona. And by now, I, of course, mean 'as soon as I get around to posting next... which should be fairly soon, I hope.'

Prescot, Arizona and the Home of Dr. Evil

2011-05-03T15:35:00.000-07:00

Stream of Nonsense continues...

Did you know that Dr. Evil has a modern and spacious Southwestern Headquarters? It would seem like he does, judging by this visual:

You mean somebody just felt it would be a good idea to build a house looking like this!? Arizona Nonsense! I shall continue to choose to think it's Dr. Evil's not-so-secret Southwestern layer...

We were actually in Prescott to catch up with Cat, whose house bore no resemblance to Dr. Evil Properties. But she had lived in Seattle as recently as three years ago, so the Nonsense may not have gotten into her blood stream quite as much yet.

Hi Cat! Did you know Dr. Evil's winter office is just a mile up the road?

Arizona ... Welcome to the Stream of Nonsense

2011-05-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

Arizona... it is absolutely a gorgeous place. Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Lake Havasu - all lovely. All weird in their own right, but in wonderful, natural ways. Most of the rest of the state? Stream of Nonsense, for no good reason that I could figure out. Take Yuma - it's a roasting hot, dust-filled, inhospitable little spot lying right where California, Arizona, and Mexico come together. Does it have much of anything going for it? Not as far as I can tell. Yet, just as you start approaching it, you find yourself confronted with vast trailer park encampments filled with hundreds of Snowbird RV's... These would be Northernly retirees who have chosen Yuma, Arizona as an ideal place to spend the winter months. Nonsense, I tell you, Nonsense! At least, the little restaurant where we popped in for lunch had been rated as the best place to propose in Yuma... so the town's got that going for it(?) There's also a sushi restaurant we spotted near the highway... nothing quite like sushi in the Arizona desert to make you visualize horrible and immediate food poisoning... We chose to steer clear...

A bit more of the stream of nonsense, in pictures:

An Arizona Cactus snake

A native Southwestern Dragon

Yuma-tainment

What to do for fun down here

Really, you just can't make this shit up!

And finally, the Arizona coup de grace:

Mark your calendars!

Catch the Gun Show sign in the bottom right?

A bit more detail about the AZ stream of Nonsense in the next couple of posts... And I'm even going to meticulously avoid mentioning any Congresswomen getting shot...

Red Rocks

2011-04-27T17:29:00.001-07:00

A weekend in Vegas - the glitz, the glamor, the spectacular shows, the never ending buffets, the incessant slot machines, the drunken bachelorettes... the music, the neon, the traffic, Barry Manilow watching over your every move... Two days is really all you need in Vegas. I was trying to recount, and this was about my seventh or eighth time here, and I had yet to spent more than three days in this Desert Oasis on any single trip. No reason to change now, so on Day 3, Erica and I picked up our rental car and headed out of the city, aiming towards the Valley of Fire.

The name 'Valley of Fire' doesn't exactly exude calm and tranquility, but after just over 48 hours on the Strip, it seemed the most peaceful place on Earth. Well, that may be an exaggeration - I actually found the place to be spectacularly wild and jagged, but it is amazing how a mere 45 minute drive out of the Neon lights of Las Vegas, you end up in what appears to be a remote and quiet nature reserve - the Valley of Fire State Park.

As the name might imply, the park is filled with a variety of rocks, fiery red in color, forming a crazy assortment of jagged and angular shapes, seemingly defying the laws of gravity and the incessant forces of erosion along the way. Highlights of the day:
Erica and I in front of the fiery rocks and blue skies.

Our rental car dominating over the highway, as the asphalt pierces through the rock formations

The Balancing Rock

The Elephant Rock. Can be a little hard to tell in the picture, but it looks an awful lot like a big, thick elephant trunk when you get close

This isn't a named formation. I think it looks an awful lot like the guardian aliens early on in the 'Fifth Element'

The Valley of Fire seemed a good start... time to step up the spectacular though - enter Arizona: specifically, enter the Grand Canyon. In order to catch the sunrise over the Grand Canyon (and come on, you gotta!), we needed to get to the South, more spectacular, rim by about 6 in the morning. Given a little more time, or a little more common sense, one might choose to just come down during the day and stay the night - we left Vegas at midnight and were at the Canyon by 5AM. What did you expect? Safety Third: Go Hard or go Home!

On the way out of Vegas: Erica at the Cathouse in Luxor... Don't ask!

Cat, a friend we'd be staying with in Prescott the following day (ahh, Cat ... Cathouse ... I'm such a genius...) had warned, somewhat cryptically, to expect snow at the Canyon(!) - I chose not to make much of it... We're way down South in Arizona, and it's late March already anyway - what snow can there possibly be to talk about!? The tops of the nearby mountains must've gotten a light sprinkling, and everyone's just freaked out, right!? Not so much...

As we drove through the night, the scenes outside my window evolved from 'light sprinkling' to 'there's several inches of snow on the road now' to 'Holy Crap, are we in a blizzard!?' Good news: if you want to save your $25 park admission fee, arrive at the gates at 4:30 in the morning in the middle of a blizzard. Bad news: Temperature at sunrise: 11 degrees! (yes, Fahrenheit) Making it all worthwhile, the pictures:

The first glimpses of the sun washing over the Western slopes of the Canyon just after 6AM!

The views becoming clearer as the clouds thin out

The Grand Canyon Panorama spectacular!

So, yeah, it was a bit more than a 'light sprinkling in the mountain tops.' Several inches at the Southern Rim was more like it, and that brings us to the view ... which was incomparably spectacular as the first rays of Sun broke through the clouds!

The last time I'd seen the Canyon was on a stiflingly hot day in the middle of June. No snow, no sunrise, no hiking (not even any digital pictures!)... still quite awesome, but the big ol' hole in the ground improved on all counts this time through:

Looking out into the Canyon, snow covering the upper reaches of the walls

Erica, pleased to be here (and happy that it's warmed up since sunrise!)

Merely an optical illusion - I'm not really hanging over the abyss... even if I'd been told it looked a lot like I was.

The South Kaibab Trail took us about halfway down towards the bottom of the Canyon, making me really regret not having done any hiking the last trip! And wanting to come back for even more...

And this brought us to lunch time. The restaurant selection was surprisingly sparse - the quality did not disappoint though, as we headed back to El Tovar, the same lodge where we had had a delicious breakfast at 7 that morning. What was a concern ... was the 170 miles worth of highway that still still lay between us and Prescott. A drive through the night, an hour of [blissful] sleep in the car, a couple of hours of hiking in the fresh mountainous air, followed by a wholly rewarding Beef Stroganoff for lunch ... a good recipe for a four hour drive this does not make. We set off anyway - Erica left firmly in charge of making sure I stayed awake. Geography - good choice, Erica! In fact, we were sufficiently certain of my awakedness to feel compelled to make one last little detour on the way down and catch a glimpse of Sedona - a magical, spiritual, hippie tourism center in the center of the state, renowned for its mystical energy vortexes and [deservedly] famous for the giant rock formations invading the town from all sides:

The Courthouse Butte, presiding over its surroundings. All the biggest rocks have been named around here

Chapel of the Holy Cross, spectacularly nestling itself in amongst the giant rocks

This shot was particularly indicative - Sedona isn't a park, a preserve, not even some remote, inaccessible area - the rocks are just right all over town. At times, simply flanking the highway.

And finally, later that evening we reached Prescott, caught up with Cat, sharing a bottle of wine, and were rewarded with a full night's sleep. Next day's adventures in a post to follow!

No Fear, No Loathing, Just Vegas, Baby, Vegas!

2011-04-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

or how to visit Rome, Paris, Monte Carlo, Egypt, Venice, New York, and the North of Italy all in a single weekend

Authentic it is not... Glitzy, bright, ever-evolving to astounding new levels of outrageous it certainly is: Vegas, the neon-lit oasis in the middle of the desert. Spend a month touring the sights of Europe, or just come here for a weekend:

Paris, France: July of last year; Paris Las Vegas: a fortnight ago

Venice: summer '99; The Venetian, 'authentic,' down to the gondolas on the river, just last month

Bellagio Resort and Casino, in the North of Italy or on the Strip? I passed through the Alps in the North of Italy on the way to Geneva last summer, but not through the town of Bellagio

Caesars Palace Las Vegas or Roma, Italia?

Luxor Las Vegas, or did you just hop across the Mediterranean to see the Pharaohs' ancient tombs in Egypt?

You can, of course, travel to Monte Carlo and New York too, but there was just too much on the Strip to get pictures of everything...

Want to take in all these sights, but don't have three years to roam the Seven Seas? Or the Seven continents? Why, come to Vegas, of course! Elvis awaits. Won't even have to deal with those pesky Euros of a currency, those pesky Europeans who refuse to learn to speak English, and those pesky museums with all of their priceless works of art. Exquisite European cuisine and the high fashion runways of Milano, Paris, and London bear a mention too, but Vegas may just be able to compete with those - after all, if it can be bought, it's on sale in Las Vegas!

Not sure how much more there really is for me to say about Vegas... It was far from my first time here, but I hadn't been in some 5 years, so was intrigued and excited to take in all the new hotels and casinos. More than anything though, I'd been all kinds of responsible ever since September, not having done any serious traveling, and Vegas might still be in these United States of America, but it sure looks and feels like a whole 'nother country ... if not another planet. And it was only Stop #1 on a week-long adventure around the American Southwest that Erica and I were tackling. It was her very first time here, giving me a chance to relive the bright, vivid, seemingly hallucinogenic memories of my first couple of trips here - watching her try and absorb all the lights and sounds all around. Mind blown, as it ever is - the first time in Vegas!

Happy Vegas!

1AM at a dueling pianos bar at Paris Las Vegas. Up next: breakfast, which is [of course] served here from 1 to 11 in the morning. Then back to the hotel for an early night - that would be in bed a bit before 3... The day before wasn't to be such an early night - we began in Seattle at 4AM, getting up bright and early in time for our flight to Vegas ... then were immediately thrust into an onslaught of Slot Machines, Dancing Fountains, Dim Sum, Singing Pirates, Dancing Vixens, high school prom dates, and Cirque du Soleil acrobats of Zumanity ... all the way to a middle of the night excursion to the heart of Old Vegas: Fremont Street, having drinks with Aga and Aneta, my Camp Caribbean camp-mates from Burning Man - all in all, a fitting, appropriate introduction to the life and culture of Sin City! In pictures:

Chilling the way the Romans did (but better dressed) at Caesar's Palace, waiting for my Beijing Noodle #9 Dim Sum lunch

Sunday night: moving on from Zumanity to Bally's classic Vegas Showgirls extravaganza: Jubilee

When I said prom date, I didn't mean some new, quirky, high school prom-themed Vegas musical - no, we met Milarmi, my actual high school prom date, for dinner and a night of catching up. Seeing her for the first time in some 15 years felt awfully surreal. Yet, so very Vegas...

A visit to the 'Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas!' sign also on that evening's agenda

Next goal was to head back to wild, unbridled nature of the Southwest, leaving the glitz and glamour of Vegas' neon lights behind, and heading out to catch a glimpse (and a photograph or two... or a hundred) of the funky red rocks that surround this oasis of hedonism - the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada and the Grand Canyon across the state line in Arizona... trip reports coming soon!

My baby has doors!

2011-04-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

I've missed you, blog! And I'd missed you too, mini! Fortunately, I went to visit the mini (about a month ago) and am only now finally getting around to visiting with the blog to report on the new and improved status of the car. And good news: the end is in site! We are actually getting dangerously close to being done with the body work (and moving on to such other exciting things as paint, engine work, interior, seats, etc... it's a long list still, but hey, progress!)

Last month, I went to see the car, and here's what I found:

The car has doors again! For the first time since Gunnar initially got his hands on her, just about a year ago!

There was a very good reason why he had removed the doors in the first place: a lot of rust. Now all re-skinned and black. Not quite matching the fluorescent yellow of the car, but we're working on that too...

Unfortunately, the next steps will involve sending the car to other mechanics to have some of the other work done, so it's something less than a straight line from here to victory, but baby steps! The stereo is one thing that Gunnar does specialize in, so the mini now features this bitchin' subwoofer in the back:

Also some lovely recessed speakers in the front and ... of course ... the good 'ol Lada stereo that I've brought with me from the depths of Siberia! After installing it myself at some point on the lonely post-Mongol Rally ride to the Pacific coast... The CD player apparently doesn't work anymore, and just looking at the Cyrillic characters on the back was more than enough to scare the people at CarToys away from even trying to open it up, but they did run the rest of the diagnostics, and the things I do care about all still work: AM/FM and the Auxiliary input. And, of course, more important than them all: the Lada logo on the front!

I would normally now move on to regale you with some exciting pictures from a recent trip or two - be they to exotic third world countries, or right back here in Washington State - but this time, we're going to have to wait. There are pictures and blog stories galore coming from a recent trip that featured the American Southwest, including stops in Las Vegas, Valley of Fire, the Grand Canyon, Sedona and Prescott, Arizona, Phoneix, and San Diego. And such luminaries along the way as Yuma, El Centro, and the fairest of them all: Dateland, AZ (home of the Cougars)! Sorry to leave you on a cliff hanger like that, but stay tuned!

A Day in the Life of the Unemployed

2011-02-11T17:07:00.001-08:00

Wednesday, February 9th. 9AM. Beep! My alarm goes off... I scowl at it - Beep! I force myself out of bed. I'd rather not, but, admittedly, 9AM isn't exactly early - for the unemployed amongst us, staying up till 2:30 appears to be a lot easier than getting up before 9. I prefer it that way anyway.

By 9:45, I've had a quick breakfast and it's on to my leisurely day of unemployment: get on the bike and head up to Northgate to visit Gunnar and check on how the mini is doing in his capable hands. Outside, it's sunny, yet a frigid 41 degrees: deciding on a number of layers to wear is a tricky proposition - I settle for erring on the side of hills I'd eventually have to climb through the U District and Green Lake, which are sure to warm me up more than I ever wanted.

After a brief stop at Trader Joe's (turns out the best thing ever is actually Quinoa), I make it up to Gunnar's by 11. The changes in the mini are pretty incremental, but if you look it over closely, some startling things start to emerge: the body no longer has any rust at all, and all the panels that are on it are now properly (and meticulously) fitted.

My baby is all rust free... Check out the shiny new bumper!

The floor is one of the many panels that, at last check (a month ago), was still just very barely in place - now fits better than the one they had put in at the factory.

The 'boot lid' (or the 'trunk door,' as those of us less British might say) has similarly been replaced, adding a matte black new wrinkle to the fluorescent yellow body style... (Just a few more months... just a couple more months, and the fluorescent yellow is all gone!)

In fact, Gunnar and I spend most of the next 30 minutes discussing such seemingly frivolous things as wheel arches and a stereo system. Well, also the rear subframe, and the doors, which are all getting completely replaced...

By 11:45, I'm already running late again, so back on the bike and over to the freeway to catch the bus heading downtown. Now lamenting not having chosen to take more layers, as standing in the shade in Gunnar's garage was a lot colder than it had been on the way up the hill to get there. Well, at least American buses have heating... (I'm looking at you, Bolivia!) The bike is coming with me too, of course, as Seattle buses all come with bike racks. By 12:45, and after having changed buses downtown, I'm back on Eastside and ready to play the 12:30 game at Microsoft (pickup frisbee!). The next hour and a half is running back and forth in the sun, up and down the field, chasing after a little flying disc - it's great fun!

By 2:15 we wrap up and everyone goes back to whatever it is that they do - I'm pretty sure this game regularly attracts equal numbers current Microsoft employees and Microsoft alumni, in various stages of post-corporate evolution (de-volution?). My next step for the day is actually potentially related to employment, as I have a call with a recruiter scheduled for 2:30. (Having recently put my resume up on monster.com, I've been getting a deluge of calls from recruiters - most just fronting for contract positions right back at Microsoft. I'm steadfastly holding out still, but this guy is with a small-ish software company in downtown Seattle, so holds far more appeal. Now to convince him to hire me for a three month contract!) Somewhat inexplicably, the recruiter first tries calling 45 minutes early (I am on the field playing frisbee instead of looking at my phone), but calls again, closer to the appointed time of 2:30, a mere 10 minutes late... We chat for a bit - his company sounds rather enticing (online advertising, in its various forms), and while they're mostly looking for full-time people, they do need contractors on occasion, so he's going to go back and talk to his hiring managers to see if there's a fit.

3 o'clock: that was hard - I just spent 20 minutes trying to work; time to return to aimless unemployment... The Duke - Carolina game is tonight at 6, and we're planning on watching it at Brodie's house here in Redmond - I don't particularly see the point of going back to Seattle just to come back in three hours, so I instead head over to Brodie's nearby Building 50 to take a shower there. (Brodie still has 'My House/Monkey on a String!' in his office - that was the first wakeboarding DVD we all watched upon discovering wakeboarding back 10 year ago!) By about 4, having showered and changed, I've biked the 20 or so minutes to Redmond and head over to the local Post Office. I've got a book to mail for somebody in San Diego for my next errand of the day; you'd better start coming through with some books coming my way soon, Paper Back Swap!

4:30 brings a lunch break at the Redmond Starbucks. I'd been hoping I'd have a little more time here actually, having brought my databases book to read, and having a plethora of things I still need to research online, but instead I've barely got an hour to grab some lunch, catch up on email, and research some more mini fender flares - Gunnar would like for me to actually figure out what I want to do with the car. I'd been aiming to leave by 5:30, instead I finally head out by around 5:45, as it starts getting darker and colder all around. I'm reliving the glory days of some eight years ago, biking along the Sammamish River Trail - the dark doesn't scare me much either: the bike is now equipped with lights. The cold stops being a problem too as I start climbing the hill leading up to Casa de Brodie. Redmond's apparently full of hills... Redmond also claims to be the 'Bicycle Capital of the Pacific Northwest' - maybe they are, maybe they aren't (they're certainly a lot better than nearby Bellevue), but I could use the roads being a little better lit up!

Shortly after 6, I make it up to Brodie's, finding Theo and Tina to have come up as well, and the next 2 and and a half hours go towards watching the Duke-Carolina game. Go to Hell Carolina, Go to Hell! 79-73 final, after Carolina fails to hold on to the large first half lead they had built up! Burn, baby, burn! (I sure hope they still burn benches at the Duke Campus after beating Carolina!). Now, as for getting back to Seattle... bike back down the hill into the center of Redmond (passing by a temperature readout that proclaims 31 degrees!), wait 15 minutes, then catch the 545 back across the bridge to Seattle. By about 10 o'clock I get home for the first time since having left at 9:45 that morning. Five minutes later, having dropped my things off, I run off again, this time to meet Erica at nearby Liberty for some late night sushi and a drink. Actually home a little after midnight...

And so goes a day in the life of today's busily unemployed - 30 minutes worth of potential job research, 13.5 hours of running errands and enjoying the time off. Apparently, I may have to re-appraise my priorities a bit if and when I do actually get a job again! I suppose I'm ready for it... Daily totals: 18.2 miles pedaling; 34.1 miles riding the bus.

And if you've made it all the way here, erstwhile blog reader, I think I'm supposed to now reward you with some pictures of exciting things I've been doing recently and exotic places where said exciting things have been taking place... Unfortunately, I'm afraid exciting and exotic has been hard to come by of late, but here's the finest from the month or so since Utah/San Diego:

Strange Brewfest 2011

Jane, David, Erica, and I went to Port Townsend for the annual Strange Brew Beer Festival at the end of January. A high number of strange brews were on display - 3 different Jalapeno beers and the Beer Bloody Mary, coming out as my personal favorites. The rest of them were strangely smitten by the Peanut Butter Winter Warmer... to each his own, I suppose. More strange from the Festival:

Man on stilts... Costumes were duly encouraged - there was to be a contest Saturday evening

We explored Port Townsend a little... finding such attractions as this old Bell Tower! I really did find it to be a pretty and pleasant coastal town though...

Valentine's Day presented a better than average excuse to go back to Oregon, do more wine tasting in Willamette Valley, and spend a little bit of time in Portland:

The metal umbrella man and I, in front of the Portland courthouse

The post-modern, notably ugly Portland Building, graced by the Goddess Portlandia in the front (really!?)

And finally, back in Seattle, the spoils of war! Spoils of traveling to wine country anyway...

As for the sites and sounds of the good times here in Seattle? Well, every Sunday night, the monks chant at nearby St. Mark's Cathedral. (it's actually just a choir that sings, but 'Monks chant' is more fun to say). I don't have any pictures of the chanting anyway, but I rather liked this shot of the cross:

The monks/choir were really good too!

And on the other end of the serenity scale lies the Seattle Ultimate Carnival - a motley gathering of Seattle's finest, or at least drunken-est, ultimate frisbee players:

Erica, a bit petrified of the multi-colored pants man!

Mark and Justine - making 80's gangsta look good!

Utah: snowy, a bit rainy, kinda creepy... "this is the place!" - Brigham Young

2011-01-19T00:44:00.000-08:00

The noble Bigfoot used to roam the streets of Seattle with impunity, occasionally stealing a kid's lunch to keep himself going, not causing much trouble otherwise. But then, the warning signs went up:

Beware, Seattle!

This left the Bigfoot ill at ease - soon enough he had turned into a fugitive and had been forced to leave the easy-living streets of our emerald city and look for quieter places to roam (and to scare kids for lunch). After long and lonely months of prowling the plains he came upon a vision right out of Bigfoot heaven - a modern city (with inexplicably wide streets), surrounded by snow-capped mountains on all sides. "This is the place!" Bigfoot roared - little did he know that he was eerily mimicking the words uttered by a fever-stricken Brigham Young on the very same spot a hundred and sixty years ago. Soon enough, the Bigfoot learned all about his new Mormon neighbors, who inhabited this gorgeous place, and while he wasn't in any way excited about joining their religious cult, he did do some research and reasoning: the members of the Church were supposed to donate twenty percent of their annual income to the Church. This seemed like a significant downside... But the Bigfoot did not actually have an income, so twenty percent of zero didn't seem all that burdensome. And the Mormons did enjoy having rather large families, so there would never be a shortage of little kids to scare up in the mountains, then steal lunches from. This felt like an upside... even though the Bigfoot reasoned he might have to donate twenty percent of the stolen lunches to the Church. He stayed - this was the place!

In fact, he soon evolved into sort of a local celebrity on the slopes around the Great Salt Lake!

The Bigfoot wanted his buddies to come visit, so he started leaving these ice crop circles as reference markers

The place would really never be the same once the Devastator Ram showed up...

And that's the story of the Bigfoot of Utah... Look it up - it's bound to be on wikipedia by now! And following in Bigfoot's footsteps, Erica, Mara, Mark, and I headed for the scenic mountains and spectacular powder of Utah this past weekend.

View of the mountains encircling the city from the plane

The fog lifting leaves the mountains crystal clear everywhere in the city. I may not be a bed-ridden Mormon leader, but this is definitely the place!

Erica, myself, Mara, and Mark in Salt Lake City

Erica and I landed in Utah early Saturday afternoon and headed straight for Park City - the home of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. Grabbing lunch at a Utah brewery was a not-to-be-missed cultural experience (Utah has finally given up on its ludicrous alcohol laws, which had previously mandated all beer brewed in the state to contain no more than 3.2% of alcohol by volume...), so we stopped for lunch at Squatters in Park City, then made it over to the slopes by about two in the afternoon. Two o'clock is normally an unacceptably late hour to start your day of snowboarding, but the Park City resorts will give you a free lift ticket if you show up bearing a boarding pass from the same day, so it was was still easily worth it. The resort is vast, featuring a maze of runs and chairlifts, and giving us an early glimpse of the Utah powder - unfortunately the advertised closing hour of 9PM failed to mention that only a single run had been equipped with lights for night skiing, so we left around six, not quite having explored the entire resort, but having witnessed a stunningly spectacular sunset over the mountain:

The skies lighting up a bright red over the peaks of Park City

Now, Utah is famous for the amazing, light, fluffy powder, covering the slopes of its mountains, and the following morning, I was excited to be introduced to a full day of said powder! Unfortunately, the weather fates intervened, and we got introduced to the Pineapple Express phenomenon instead - it rained!

Undaunted, we headed for Brighton, having picked up a tip from a local ski shop that Brighton was the highest altitude mountain in the area - fortunately staying in Salt Lake City puts you within a 45 minute drive of a dozen different ski resorts, so you are never short on options (This is the place!). The Pineapple Express bathed the road with sheets of rain on the way up (damn you, Seth Rogan!), but Brighton did prove to be just high enough, as the rain finally turned to snow right as we were entering the parking lot - hooray!

The Sun even peaked through in the middle of the day!

Eventually though, the rains caught up... We stuck with it for a while, locating some of the famed Utah powder in the higher reaches of the mountain - this was almost enough to make me forget about the wet slush down at the bottom, but by 4 o'clock, we were ready to cut our losses and get back to town (and dry off).

Monday arrived - our last day in Utah... the rains had ceased, and the overnight forecast had claimed 5-9 inches of fresh snow - we were all psyched up to get to the mountains. Mark and Mara chose Alta (a fancy-shmancy skiers only establishment), while Erica and I had our sites set on Snowbird - meeting up with Vidas, a fellow hockey player from back in Seattle, and setting off to experience what promised to be one of the best resorts around Salt Lake City. A quick study of the trail map left me feeling downright giddy - the trails were varied and plentiful, including a thorough selection of diamonds, with a nice variety of easier stuff mixed in. Most exciting of all, the mountain had a 'back-side,' and you got to ride on a magic carpet, through a long tunnel to get there! Unfortunately, the fates were back at it ... we got into the nearest lift line (an exceedingly long one at that) ... and soon discovered that this would essentially be the only lift open on this day. The winds at the top were gusting up to 60 mph, so none of the upper mountain lifts would be opening - the tunnel and the magic carpet remained firmly out of reach... On those slopes we could reach, the wind had blown any and all new snow away (the forecasted 5-9 inches had actually resulted in a slightly less awesome 2-3), leaving the trails hard and icy. No shortage of great views though:

Erica, carving up the icy slopes

Afternoon shot of the mountain, when we had located some better, less icy, snow

Sunset over Salt Lake City on the way back home

In the end, the astounding, spectacular Utah powder didn't really materialize over this weekend, which was a little disappointing. I got enough glimpses, that a return trip is easily warranted, but Park City on the first day probably had the best snow. Snowbird, I got to see enough of, that I'm certain, on a nice sunny powder day it shall be absolutely spectacular!

Back to our title - Utah had certainly proven itself to be very snowy and a bit rainy. As for a kinda creepy - Sunday morning we went to see the imposing Salt Lake Mormon Temple, holding a prominent position in the very heart of the city

Tell me the reflecting pool doesn't make it just a little extra creepy! Especially on a somewhat gloomy, gray day like this...

Ok, how about the statue of the kids prancing about on the lawn?

At the top of the Temple, sits the Golden Statue of the Angel Moroni, who had apparently visited Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith, on numerous occasions...

I hope that if there are any Mormons reading this, they know I only kid! But if you take the intersection of the Venn Diagram of the words 'Mormon' and 'Moroni,' you get 'Moron'... I'm just sayin'! The temple definitely creeps you out a little, as well as the imposing, gigantic, very somber LDS office building next door. And we won't even get into the stories of the nearby caves that supposedly contain detailed genealogy records for most of Americans... But, hey, the mountains are beautiful - Brigham Young and Bigfoot were right - this is the place!

After three days I needed a break from the cold and the snow though, so I headed South, arriving on the sunny beaches of San Diego to meet my parents just a few hours after Mark, Mara, and Erica had landed back home in Seattle

San Diego forecast: 81 and sunny - this is also the place!

Bluebird!

2011-01-09T00:17:00.000-08:00

I don't have very much to say - just really wanted to get this picture up to the interweb and be reminded of the sunny beautiful day at Crystal last Thursday... Picture perfect clear view of Mt. Rainier from the top of the hike to Kings out on the high ridge at Crystal mountain... with sun streaming and 3 feet of powder awaiting for the entire ride down the mountain! I think that may very well have been the best powder I've ever ridden on (through?). Utah next weekend - let's hope it can come close! That'll be a trip again, so it may even earn itself a real blog post.

Tell them about...

2011-01-05T17:44:00.000-08:00

... that bus ride across India... that party on the beach in Thailand... that girl you met in the Greek Isles... the steak and red wine asado in Mendoza... scaling Kilimajaro! Tell them about your trip, your adventure!

It's a little catchy, right? Let's hope so - I'd decided that since the website had undergone a semi-professional looking face-lift recently, it might be nice to come up with a slightly more professional, catchy even, maybe, URL, so, voila, we now have: http://www.tellthemabout.com/ (in addition to the old safety3rdblog.com address). For now both URLs will continue to work, and give you the exact same site to play with, but, eventually, I plan to deprecate the safety3rdblog site and just redirect all the traffic to the new site.

Whoa!

2010-12-24T18:16:00.000-08:00

Huh, I've just found a picture from the blog being referenced on another site (which was strangely exciting, to be honest!): here. It's part of a set of surreal' images: http://paintingphotofy.com/q/surreal+painting+3+spheres+suspended/. And in case you still hadn't clicked, this is the picture they found sufficiently surreal to qualify for their collection:

Interesting... that's, of course, mini doors getting painted in Gunnar's garage. Not my mini specifically, but another one he'd been working on, which was, incidentally, getting to be a very similar color to what I envision mine ending up with! Read all about that particular day in October - I refer to the site as very 'surreal' in that post incidentally.

And speaking of the mini, I went to pay it another visit yesterday, and an amazing discovery was made: a floor!

That gaping hole in the floor, which you may just be able to spot in the pictures in the post linked above, has been replaced with a shiny new floor panel! A wholly un-rusted, un-mangled by Mongolian 'roads,' floor panel - awesome! Merry Christmas, dear mini!

Cyrus, myself, and Gunnar appreciating Gunnar's handy work

Let's got for more surreal! Yesterday, there was also a brief excursion to Gas Works park to witness the Christmas Ships on Lake Union, Christmas Carrolling by the Seattle Girl's Choir, aboard one of the ships, included. Sites (no sounds):

The Ships all lit up for the holidays on Lake Union

The Seattle skyline at night.

Gas Works Park in the darkness

Speaking of surreal... Maybe they'll post this picture of Gas Works too?

I'm starting to really appreciate my new camera's ability to take night shots! Also (as I'm about to uphold the finest of Jewish holiday traditions and head out for Chinese food): Merry Christmas!

turkey, basketball, and pinot noir

2010-12-22T18:37:00.000-08:00

There's no use even trying to pretend that I'm really all that busy these days, not working and all - and yet ... I've been meaning to put up this blog post about the Portland trip for almost a month now! And, so far, just couldn't find the time. Well, better late than never, I suppose... Besides, Portland's as far as I've traveled in the past three months, and I've got to try and keep the blog exotic and entertaining somehow!

And so, we begin back where we left off last time - back here in Seattle over Thanksgiving:

The Mu's were hosting, the turkey was delicious, and I ate so much that I had to take a bit of a nap to recover in time for desert.

And having survived the feast of Thanksgiving turkey, it was time to move on to basketball and wine. Basketball being a Duke game, against the University of Oregon down in Portland, and the wine being the delicious Pinot Noir that Oregon's Willamette Valley is so famous for. I recruited Erica to come with me on the Oregon adventure (and to drive...) - the prospects of Pinot Noir doing most of the sales job (as well as my charming personality, obviously...)

Down in Portland, we met up with Shima, whom I knew back from Duke, and headed straight over to Voodoo doughnuts - one of Portland's must-see hole-in-the-wall attractions

In fact, Saturday was largely dedicated to exploring the sites of Portland, as the game was at one, which left plenty of time to wander around the city, yet not enough time to get anywhere out of town. I'd been through Portland a number of times before (most recently on the way to Burning Man just a couple of months ago), but had never actually spent any time in the city itself. So, this was a fun and novel adventure for all of us, but first things first: the game!

The Oregon mascot roaming through the crowds prior to tipoff. We had very good seats...

Duke's Mason Plumlee dominating the opening tip - Duke would go on to dominate the rest of the game too

Singler vs. Singler!

The game was sort of a big deal around these parts: Kyle Singler, Duke's All-American senior, is from Oregon, and his little brother, E.J. is a sophomore starter for Oregon's team. This gigantic poster, covering a side of a building in Portland's Pearl district and picturing both of the brothers Singler, was here to promote. Of course, Oregon's football team was busy being undefeated and ranked #1 in the country at this point in time, so the locals weren't really all that heart broken over the basketball team's loss, or really overly interested by the game - easily half of the crowd was featuring Duke garb on this afternoon. And the other half didn't have much to cheer about... (Let's Go Duke!)

After the game, more pretty shots of Portland

The wineries weren't on the schedule till the next day, but we got got in the mood by visiting Coalition Brewery Saturday night, one of many breweries in Portland; this one justifiably famous for its King Kitty Red (a beer which gracefully combines a funny name with its delicious taste)

Brunch the following morning (Portland's apparently, and deservedly, quite famous for brunch) at the Blossoming Lotus. It honestly didn't seem fair that all of their food could be so astonishingly good while remaining strictly vegan!

And then, it was time for the Pinot Noir! That sweet and delicious nectar that the Oregon wineries are ever so fond of producing. It was Wine Country Thanksgiving in the Willamette Valley this weekend, meaning our tastings were paired with a helping heaping of tasty snacks and some longer than usual winery tours. I approved! We got to visit six or seven wineries over the course of the day - keeping track was becoming difficult after a while, especially since I was forced to do more of the drinking, so as to keep Erica able to drive... you're right, it is a rough life:

The vines at White Rose, starting to wane as the weather gets a bit colder, but looking very dramatic against the bright blue skies

Archery Summit took us on a a tour through their tunnel maze where the barrels are kept

Rain coming down on the way out of Monk's Gate, coloring the scene in a very Renoir-esque French impressionist sort of hue. I liked Monk's Gate best - small and very friendly winery; excellent product!

The striking main house at Lenné, our last stop, as the darkness was starting to fall

Erica going 'wheeeee!' at Lenné

And with that, the weekend was over, it was time to head back to Portland and Seattle and get ready to go to work in the morning... or do whatever it is that I've been doing!

Dinner back in Portland on the way home at the New Old Lompoc Brewery, the maker of the Proletariat Red, which I found to be just right, comrade!

And on back to Seattle... where the Space Needle is getting into the Holiday spirit

The website, evolved

2010-12-15T10:55:00.000-08:00

The website went back live about a month ago, at which point it looked fairly boring, barren, and un-interesting much as it had over its entire lifetime. Obviously, it was time for a significant face lift! I've made a number of updates over the past month, and while the core functionality hasn't changed any, the site looks a lot better (dare I say, almost professional even) - things are better organized, more discoverable, and you now get access to way more information than ever before.

So, check it out: http://www.safety3rdblog.com/ explore, click around, and let me know what you think! And try not to get too dismayed by all the bits that remain unfinished - it'll continue to be a work in progress for a while longer, I'm afraid...

Safety Third!

If you're curious to see what the site looked like before the face lift, there's still a page with the old 'layout' here: http://www.safety3rdblog.com/index2.php.

Winter Wonderland

2010-11-26T00:02:00.000-08:00

The iPhone tried to warn me... In its so very iPhone less-than-entirely-clear manner, but try it did: there's probably snow coming in the next few days, maybe? I refused to believe! Sure, maybe a few sprinkles, but it's Seattle, and it wasn't even Thanksgiving yet - maybe a few flakes here and there during the night and the temperature dropping down near freezing, but nothing worse than that, right? Then it started to snow a little during our (really, really cold) frisbee game early Sunday morning. Then it snowed some more during the day. Nothing accumulated. We went to the nearby St. Mark's Cathedral to hear the monks sing at 9:30 at night - it was bitterly cold, but still no snow. I couldn't see this coming at all:

The view outside my window Monday morning

And it looked gloomy and uncomfortable too... But, hey, it's still only the 22nd of November here in Seattle, how bad can it be? I went to the gym in the afternoon, fully comfortable in the absolutely certain knowledge that later that evening we'd be playing hockey, because the conditions would just get better as things warmed up during the day.

They didn't get better. It actually got colder as the day went along. Hockey was canceled... I was suddenly glad to have talked myself out of riding my bike in the snow that morning.

Ryan and I got stuck in traffic on the 520 bridge for a full two hours on the way back to Seattle after going over to the Eastside in preparation for hockey (and to watch a Duke basketball game). Apparently, noone else had been willing to believe during the day that we'd really, actually be getting hit with a proper snow storm before Thanksgiving, so noone left work early. And now, they were all stuck on the bridge. It didn't look a whole lot better when we finally got across the bridge into Capitol Hill - there was three to four inches of snow everywhere; roads were closed off in places, some turned into temporary homes to cars and buses that had been abandoned in the face of the storm. The temperature dropped into the teens(!) - in Seattle! before Thanksgiving! I couldn't stop thinking of Costa Rica (where I hope to be this coming February again).

Tuesday morning came around, and it was a whole new day:
It was bright, clear, sunny, and very gorgeously snowy! Also, very, very cold - the snow didn't seem in any rush to melt

And that's me braving the snow outside my house, wearing shorts on a nice sunny day?

I went for a stroll around Capitol Hill, finding it to be a weird site - noone seemed to have gone to work; more people on the streets than you'd expect on a normal week day, kids goofing around on their sleds... shops closed; even our neighborhood liquor store! But it was a wonderfully pretty day - in no way gray and depressing like Monday - the mood felt downright festive. I wanted a nice warm cup of soup and a spot by a fire somewhere... I settled for a nice bowl of hot chili in a warm restaurant (sans fireplace). After battling the cold wind for an hour, I turned back for home and found that the sun hadn't done much to melt the snow on the ground, but was having some effect on the trees around the house:

Pretty Winter Wonderland...

At this point, I feel like I ought to be leading this story up to a dramatic climax of some sorts, but I'm afraid I'm just not that good or exciting of a story teller. There wasn't to be much drama - the snow slowly receded over the next few days. I got to play hockey Tuesday night (noting that, at least, most of the hockey players are transplants from places like Canada, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where driving in the snow is a regular fact of life, not a national emergency), coming back home a bit after 11 in the evening, receiving a greeting from the iPhone to the tune of 'the temperature outside remains stuck at 18 degrees'... In the days that followed, that temperature continued to hover right around freezing day and night, but, without fresh reinforcements, the snow started to reluctantly give way, retreating inch by hard fought inch.

Today was Thanksgiving, and by the end of the day, the frozen wastelands finally receded and the temperatures stayed above freezing long enough for most of the ice and snow to melt. We celebrated the occasion with an obnoxious amount of food. And, to our credit, would've done the same no matter how frozen the weather could've stayed!

Lott, feeling very proud of his deep-fried creation

Did you miss the website?

2010-11-16T00:40:00.000-08:00

Probably not, since I haven't actually been traveling anywhere recently, but the site is finally back up: http://www.safety3rdblog.com/ after a much longer than anticipated transition period. No promises as to where we go from here, but it's an accomplishment for today!

A preview

Enter the Dragon

2010-11-08T18:36:00.000-08:00

Bruce Lee, in all of his living glory, on the waterfront in Hong Kong

We'll get back to you in a second, Bruce...

In the mean time... A gorgeous, sunny Seattle day at the tail end of October (weird, right?) - just four days to Halloween, probably a Full Moon too? (nope, not for another three weeks). Full Moon or not, I figured I'd take this pleasant afternoon to get into the Halloween spirit and go visit a nearby cemetery. Lakeview Cemetery is a calm, pleasant, scenic piece of land overlooking Lake Washington in the distance, just a short walk from where I now live.

On a nice clear day like this, you catch a glimpse of the snow-capped Mount Baker from the grounds

Sites of the cemetery

A pretty autumn day here in the Pacific Northwest

As for Bruce... I knew he was buried at Lakeview. Actually, as of a month prior, I only knew that his grave was somewhere in Seattle - when a group of tourists inquired about directions to Bruce Lee's grave, I sent them to Fremont... which is very much the wrong place (sorry!). But I've since checked, and Bruce (along with his son, Brandon) are both buried at Capitol Hill's very own Lakeview Cemetery. I will have to admit a general ignorance of the life and times of Bruce Lee, so I have no idea how much time he had actually spent in Seattle while alive, but, once at Lakeview, I was able to follow a steady progression of other visitors flocking to his grave site to find Bruce's resting place. There's a number of other famous pop culture stars who have met their respective ends here in Seattle (Jimi Hendrix, Curt Cobain, Lane Staley), but if they are buried at Lakeview, I failed to locate their graves. As for the Lee's:

Exit the Dragon? Well, that sure sounds terrible...

A few more bits of recent fun and excitement around these exotic lands of Seattle:

Erica and I fully outfitted for Halloween - I wanted to be a matador when I grew up... She, a crime fighting ballerina!

One... two... ah one, two, three! A little more Halloween, at a party with my Tacomatose teammates

The Gorillaz came to town... and put on an amazing show! Featuring an animated Snoop Dog in the intro

The Space Needle at night just before the Gorillaz show

sun setting over the Pike Place Market and the Pudget Sound

A night out in Post Alley to see some friends in an improv comedy show

Genesee, one of my housemates, improvising some comedy of her own, after the show

Ready! Set!

2010-10-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

Commence Restoration!

Here was the poor toothless, thoroughly disassembled mini when I first returned to see her at the beginning of August:

I'm afraid Gunnar had had his way with her...

meaning specifically that Gunnar had removed all the beat up, rusted out panels that made up a large part of the body. About 50% goes the current estimate. But then, things started looking up! Around Labor Day we had a full order put together for the home office back in England, where 'original' mini parts are still manufactured, and a little over a week ago, a care package arrived from across the ocean.

Naturally, I went to visit, and here's what I found:

If you were expecting more, temper your expectations! But look at that brilliant new nose panel!

Now, as it turns out, when you get 'original' mini parts from the home office in England, they are not original in the sense that they fit. They are sort of in the general vicinity - so just getting that nose panel on took some hours of work, which is where we get back to tempering expectations - probably looking at another 2-3 months of just panel re-installation, and that's not even getting to things like the suspension, the engine, the paint... But for now, the process has commenced, and I'm excited!

As for the painting...

A mildly surreal site in Gunnar's paint room... The green you can glimpse there is roughly the color that will eventually be replacing the fluorescent yellow on the mini - those aren't my doors though...

Remember Burma and Tibet?

2010-10-12T17:56:00.000-07:00

... and the cute Panda bears in China? I hope you do because had you forgotten and tried to go back and look them up again on the blog over the last couple of weeks, you would've certainly found all of my writing, but not any of the pictures... (Thanks, Lott, for catching this!)

Well, the good news is last night, I went through and fixed everything, so the pictures are all back. I even tried to fix my spelling and grammar errors - I do tend to proof-read my posts, usually, but it seems I'm still not all that good at it. There is no bad news - everything is just back. There are some boring technical details, which you are welcome to skip, but I'll type up anyway, just in case you care (and because it gives me a forum to bitch at the governments of Burma and China for their idiotic internet policies): Burma and China aren't the types of countries that particularly encourage free and unfettered expression, such as blogging. They attempt to control it by using a standard, heavy-handed, Communist-style approach: you cannot access blogger.com or blogspot.com from a computer in China or Burma. As with most standard, heavy-handed, Communist-style approaches to solving problems that shouldn't really be problems in the first place, the approach doesn't work. I was obviously able to post from Burma and China - all because there's a million proxy servers out there that computer users of China and Burma utilize to get around their respective governments' idiotic restrictions. In Burma, the proxy would usually be already installed on most of the internet cafe machines... In China, they had wi-fi, so I got it on my laptop. There was, however, an issue - routing all your requests to blogger.com through a server in, say, Holland, made your [already slow] internet connection speeds that much slower, so I gave up on uploading pictures to blogger, putting them on my site instead, then simply referencing them from the blog. It actually took a bit of work to get the process all figured out, but pretty soon, I had it down to a science (which makes it kind of sad that I had to spend three hours undoing all of my cross-site magic last night). And this magical science worked great... all the way until last month, until I had to transfer the site from Arnie's server to one of my own - a process which allowed us to discover that when you cancel your account with 1&1 Hosting (whom I'm reluctant to recommend at this point, btw), they insist on hijacking your domain name for a month and using it to redirect traffic to one of the other sites they are being paid to host (and some nice man in Hyderabad, India will be powerless to do anything about it). This, naturally, means that all the images I had uploaded to my site from Burma and Tibet had now evaporated, so the blog posts that were pointing to them were now picture-less... So, that's the annoying technical reasons - if you are unclear on what the hell I'm talking about (or even if you are), never fear - the photos on the blog are all back now! (Unless you are reading this on Facebook, which imports my blog posts, but doesn't update the imported snapshots when I change them, so if you want to take the time to navigate their ineffective UI to get to some of the posts from last February, you will discover these elusive picture-less posts... But you shouldn't do that! You either don't care at all, in which case you should've stopped reading ten minutes ago, or you'll just use the fairly intuitive navigation tools you get at safety3rd.blogspot.com)

And as a reward for indulging me in my little rant, here's a few of these 'recovered' photographs:

Shwedagon Pagoda - Yangon, Burma

The Golden Rock on Burma's Mount Kyaiktiyo at sunrise

A fisherman on Inle Lake

The plain of Bagan just before sunrise

Snake Temple outside of Mandalay, Burma

Cute pandas in Chengdu, China

Tibet's Potala Palace, flanked by the Himalayas

A terracotta general: Xi'an, China

How To Enjoy The Burning Man Experience From The Comfort Of Your Own Home

2010-10-06T18:57:00.000-07:00

Reprinted from http://www.burningmanseattle.com/stories-about-burning-man... It could be a copyright violation in the real world, in theory, but there are no such legalities in the world of Burning Man! Besides, it's absolutely hilarious... and strangely true!

# Tear down your house. Put it in a truck. Drive 10 hours in any direction. Put the house back together. Invite everyone you meet to come over and party. When they leave, follow them back to their homes, drink all their booze, and break things.
# Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.
# Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
# Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.
# Only use the toilet in a house that is at least 3 blocks away. Drain all the water from the toilet. Only flush it every 3 days. Hide all the toilet paper.
# Set your house thermostat so it’s 50 degrees for the first hour of sleep and 100 degrees the rest of the night.
# Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.
# Mail $200 to the Reno casino of your choice.
# Make a list of all the things you’ll do different next year. Never look at it.
# Search alleys untill you find a couch so unbelievably tacky and nasty filthy that a state college frat house wouldn’t want it. Take a nap on the couch and sleep like you are king of the world.
# Shop at Wal-mart, Cost-Co, and Home Depot until your car is completely packed with stuff. Tell everyone that you’re going to a "Leave-No-Trace" event. Empty your car into a dumpster.
# Spend thousands of dollars and several months of your life building a deeply personal art work. Hide it in a funhouse on the edge of the city. Hire people to come by and alternate saying "I love it" and "this sucks balls". Blow it up.
# Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don’t go to a doctor.
# Walk around your neighborhood and knock on doors until someone offers you cocktails and dinner.
# "Downsize" last year’s camp by adding two geodesic domes, a new sound system, art car, and 20 newbies.
# Lean back in a chair until that point where you’re just about to fall over, but you catch yourself at the last moment. Hold that position for 9 hours.
# Don’t sleep for 5 days. Take a wide variety of hallucinogenic/emotion altering drugs. Pick a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend.
# Set up a DJ system downwind of a three alarm fire. Play a short loop of drum’n'bass until the embers are cold.
# Have a 3 a.m. soul baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you’re hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.
# Spend a whole year rummaging through thrift stores for the perfect, most outrageous costume. Forget to pack it.
# Read "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delany. Read "The City Not Long After" by Pat Murphy. Cut off the bindings, throw all the pages up in the air, and shuffle them back together. Reread "The City After Dhalgren" by Samuel Murphy. Burn it. Read the ashes.
# Listen to music you hate for 168 hours straight, or until you think you are going to scream. Scream. Realize you’ll love the music for the rest of your life.
# Spend 5 months planning a "theme camp" like it’s the invasion of Normandy. Spend Monday-Wednesday building the camp. Spend Thurs-Sunday nowhere near camp because you’re sick of it or can’t find it.
# Bust your ass for a "community." See all the attention get focused on the drama queen crybaby.
# Get so drunk you can’t recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for 5 hours.
# Tell your boss you aren’t coming to work this week but he should "gift" you a paycheck anyway. When he refuses accuse him of not loving the "community".
# Ask your most annoying neighbor to interrupt your fun several times a day with third hand gossip about every horrible thing that’s happened in the last 24 hours. Have them wear khaki.
# Go to a museum. Find one of Salvador Dali’s more disturbing, but beautiful paintings. Climb inside it.

Burning Man 2010

Sometimes dreams really do come true!

2010-10-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

I showed up on the shores of the US of A for the first time almost twenty years ago, in April of 1991. And being 13, I promptly headed across the street to Lexington Mall (which no longer exists, but holy crap(!) - they've got a wikipedia page!) to explore the American musical phenomenon, an experience that ended with me walking out of the store with a tape (yes, I said tape) of Guns'N'Roses, Use Your Illusion I. 1991 was a pretty big year for the band... I proceeded to listen to the tape... a lot! (there were a few Russian tapes mixed into my Walkman repertoire at the time, but they were quickly fading away - hey look, wikipedia also has a page about Наутилус Помпилиус, crazy!) I proceeded to like the music... a lot! I made sure to acquire the rest of the band's albums, even the hard to get European Live disk set(!), upgrading them to CD's in due time, continuing to like everything I heard (well, except for The Spaghetti Incident?, which was terrible!). I never seriously considered seeing them in concert - the videos on MTV were pretty cool, but I can't imagine a big band like them choosing to visit Lexington, Kentucky in those days.

Fast forward almost twenty years to present day. A band named Gun'N'Roses still exists, but the only original member is Axl Rose, who has apparently been enough of an ass to the rest of his former band-mates that they don't appear to wish to have anything more to do with him. They also still make music on occasion - the Chinese Democracy record took more than ten years to finally get released... and was unabashingly awful! So, they were out. On the other hand, there was still Slash, he of the eccentric looks, the floppy hair, the top hat, and the guitar skills to merit having been called one of the top five guitarists of all time... Slash continues to perform, with a band of his own now, continues to have a feud with Axl, and has had nothing to do with The Spaghetti Incident? or Chinese Democracy, I like to think. Instead, he is now touring this land of ours with his own band, and this past Saturday, here he was in good 'ol Seattle, putting on a show.

Not that you can see all that much - cameras weren't allowed at the Showbox, so this is courtesy of my iPhone, but that's Slash, top hat included, right there in the front!

They proceeded to rock the house for some two hours, playing some of their new material, some of their older material, and a whole bunch of Guns'N'Roses original material! Now, I can't tell you if this really qualifies as dreams actually coming true, seeing how I never really thought or dreamt about seeing them in concert back when I was in high school, but today, I can very honestly tell you that I was never expecting to hear 'Welcome to the Jungle,' 'Civil War,' 'Paradise City,' and 'Sweet Child O' Mine' playing live! The new lead singer doesn't quite screech to hit the high notes the way Axl used to, but Slash is still there being badass, and the whole atmosphere is still amazing... electric... insanely loud!

"Sweet Child O' Mine" - Iconic Guns'N'Roses! That's right, the iPhone will do video too!

The band was quite awesome, and surprisingly humble as well - for guys who've been playing huge shows all over the world for the past 25 years, they seemed genuinely excited to be there. They might not command the same audiences they did back in '91, but they did seem quite genuine when thanking all of us for being there! I was excited to be there as well!

School Bus Retirement... continued!

2010-09-21T23:12:00.000-07:00

Previously, we learned just what happens to that dear 'ol school bus, which used to take you to school in the morning, after its job is given to a newer, younger, hipper version. The workaholics continue to ply their trade in South and Central America (sometimes dying there); others are committed to continuing education, so they end up in South Dakota's Custer State Park, teaching tourists about Crazy Horse; the beach bums will go run their own surf camps in Costa Rica, and the ones who just can't let go of the adrenaline rush, join the Demolition Derby in places like Monroe.

Are there other options? Why, yes - some really are artists and hippies at heart, and they've got a place to call home in retirement too: Black Rock City in the Nevada desert! At least for one week out of the year they do anyway...

The Reel Mobile - we be jamming out on the Playa

The Space Bus - honestly, this one looks too much like a normal bus to be here!

On the way to San Francisco - can't tell if this was an Art Car or just somebody's way to transport everything to and from, but definitely a Burning Man vehicle!

Did I Say Done?

2010-09-18T21:57:00.000-07:00

Well, actually there was just one more last stop - after Burning Man, I chose not to return straight to Seattle, instead I headed to San Francisco for a couple of days of recuperation

Looking happy, but exhausted, dusty... mind blown; want sleep, need shower

Now, San Francisco is beautiful, it's exciting - it's full of interesting places to see, fascinating people to meet, I've got a bunch of friends living there...

View onto San Francisco from the bay

The iconic Transamerica Pyramid defines the San Francisco skyline

And as a result, this wasn't going to be my first time in San Francisco - most recently I'd been here just about a year ago, on my great railroad journey up the Pacific Coast. So between being relatively familiar with the place, and still trying re-integrate myself into the real world, I didn't particularly feel like playing tourist was to be my primary goal here - it fit in safely somewhere right behind resting/showering/catching my breath and meeting up with friends. However, by Day 2, I was feeling mildly recovered (physically anyway - mind remained a bit cloudy for at least another week), and the little tourist voice in the back of my head started singing its song again... it actually just kept saying one word over and over: Alcatraz!

The Rock! It may be the best know of San Francisco's attractions, and I'd kept missing it on each of the previous visits

Not sure how much I need to say about Alcatraz - it's only the most famous (and infamous) of American prisons, and it was in operation for a mere 29 years (1934-1963). It housed some of the most famous and notorious convicts of its day - starting with Al Capone back in the 30's. Noone is known to have successfully escaped. If you are curious to learn more, I recommend a trip to San Francisco and a visit to the Rock - the audio tour gives you a pretty good account of the island's history, including the times before, after, and of course, during its time as a Federal prison. The tour is quite well put together, and I actually found the narrative a lot more interesting than most audio guides of this sort. Some things I knew (life in America's most secure prison wasn't a whole lot of fun, but nobody is known to have successfully escaped), some I suspected (the island started life as a fortification for the San Francisco Bay back in the mid-19th century), and some I'd been completely oblivious of (The Rock was a site of an intense native American protest back in the 70's, lasting over a year, and while the Native Americans failed to get custody of Alcatraz, the incident did, apparently, accelerate the programs to transfer more tribal lands back to their original, tribal owners... who have since proceeded to erect gleaming, shining casinos on said tribal lands... but I digress...).

So, as I said, if you want the full history of the place, I recommend a visit, or you can at least start with the wikipedia page. I'll just do pictures and highlights of what I saw:

The main penitentiary building was a large, if fairly bleak-looking structure

Life inside was, well, rather spartan

I had chosen to spend my second day of recovery in San Francisco at a four star hotel downtown. The inmates here got a 5x9 foot cell, including a toilet, a sink, a table, and a cot

Even the lighthouse on Alcatraz somehow looks dramatic! It could just be dramatic bits I remember from The Rock, the movie (does it seem like Sean Connery's career is coming up a lot on the blog?)

The man's watching you! Did I mention noone had successfully escaped? There were inmates who had made it to the fence (and were promptly shot for their troubles). Others had made it all the way to the water (and drowned). I think there are two whose whereabouts are unknown - presumed drowned... or escaped to South America!

These days, Alcatraz is actually the domain of the National Park service, which surprised me, as there's not much of a park here. They do maintain and protect the Rock's greenery, and apparently the island is an important nesting habitat for several species of birds in the Bay...

All in all, I spent about three hours on the island, roaming about, taking in the narrative, observing the very multi-cultured collection of tourists on the island, and watching the weather undergo a dramatic transformation from standard Bay Area gray to sunny, with dramatic blue skies. By 6, I was back in the comforts of my hotel, living the high life some more - they provide a Napa Valley wine tasting every evening... but still somewhat in between the dusty mirage of Black Rock City (most of my clothes still covered in a thick layer of dust) and the real world (I did have a wonderful shower, and was excited to be less than 24 hours away from being back home in Seattle). That evening, I went out to meet Eric and Kristine for dinner nearby

And documented said encounter using the camera on my iPhone... which left quite a bit to be desired in terms of photo quality

The following morning, it was time to complete the last leg of the journey and fly back to Seattle... or so went the plan anyway. I examined my tickets again in the morning - they definitely said I was departing from the Oakland airport at 1 PM. I should arrive an hour early... I checked the BART schedules - it would take an hour to get there. I should also get some lunch beforehand - there's this great little sushi boat restaurant just nearby in Union Square... mmm, sushi. Well, somewhere in the middle of all that, my mind clearly flipped back into Burning Man mode, where time doesn't exist (and I avoided wearing a watch as much as I could) and an hour was lost. Because if your flight's at 1, you should be at the airport 12, and so, you should get on the subway at 11. Instead, I scouted out a train schedule for leaving the city at 12 and settled in for lunch at 11... Lunch was delicious! And at 11:45, I arrived back in my room, stared at my ticket, then at the clock, then at the ticket some more... forced brain to do some basic math... Oh Fuck! Well, the subway/bus was going to get me there in an hour for about $7, time to see how a $70 taxi will do! I told the concierge I needed a taxi to the Oakland airport. He went outside, rounded up a taxi, and told the driver to take me to the airport... Note the slight discrepancy there... Starting to drive towards the San Francisco airport instead of Oakland cost another ten minutes, which I didn't really have... Finally, we pulled up at the Oakland terminal at about 12:35. At least the ride was interesting - the driver had been in Vietnam during the war, as a civilian contractor and had fascinating stories from the time that he was getting published... He also complained about all the Pakistani cab drivers in the Bay Area... I chimed in complaining about the drivers in general all over India. We had a good rapport... and then I paid and took off on a dead run into the airport. Skipping the details, but I made my flight with, oh about 2 minutes to spare. How my bags managed to get onboard, I have no idea, but there they were looking at me on the carousel back in Seattle, just as I was asking the Southwest claims agent whether or not he thought they'd be on the next flight... So, all in all, disaster averted - delicious lunch eaten, interesting conversation with a cab driver had, and Seattle successfully reached! Just a bit of stress mixed in along the way...

Going out in a blaze of Burning Glory ... Man

2010-09-10T00:14:00.000-07:00

Burning Man defies explanation - I feel words will absolutely, utterly fail to do it justice. Trying to get a grasp on it, without having gone, pictures will only mislead and confuse - the place is simply too enormous, too vast, too diverse to capture in any photograph. But, it is absolutely amazing. From the setting in the middle of a hot, barren, and foreboding Nevada desert, to all the very, very different people who come to witness it, to all the amazing and ridiculous art installations, and to its final culmination on Saturday and Sunday nights when the Man and the Temple burn - no matter where you turn, where you look, you never fail to be surprised, to see something downright amazing, never-failingly absolutely unique going on.

Just a few of the things that happened in Black Rock City - in no particular order, in no way suggesting that these are special, this is just what is likely to happen to you at Burning Man - normal parts of 'every day life' here, which make the place as unique and amazing as it is. I watched water burn, I rode a mutant city bus with a large ship installed on top of it, I walked a tight rope, I was shocked by one Joule of energy, which I had myself generated, I stripped off my clothes to do a dance in exchange for an early morning mimosa, I watched people fight in the ThunderDome, I climbed a tower that would've been deemed exceedingly dangerous to be climbed anywhere outside of Black Rock City, I found the fence in the middle of the night, then walked along it looking for corners, finally finding a movie theater in the middle of the desert, and settling in to watch the sun rise at a nearby bus stop ... where an hour later, a bus came by to pick us up, delivering the happiest moment of the week. I slept for an average of three hours a night, I inhaled an inordinate amount of dust from the air every day, I didn't shower, I watched my deodorant actually melt... I was ready to leave when Sunday rolled around, yet I was eager to go back as soon as we were confronted with civilization outside of Black Rock City. I felt free, unrestrained and happy the whole time there! I hung out with some of the most wonderful and interesting people you'll find anywhere on this planet...

We arrived late Tuesday night after a full day drive from Portland, Oregon. Our driver, the dominatrix (yes, that is her actual profession... seemed completely natural, unsurprising, and downright par for the course for this place) pulled up to the gate, presented all of our tickets and shared that she had two BM virgins on board - Laurie and I marched out, feeling just a little bewildered, each rang the gong, then proceeded to roll around in the dust, making a Playa angel and becoming one with the environment. A gigantic yellow moon hung low over us looking in on the spectacle, as an hour long cavalcade of cars was lining up for entry - on Sunday night, the wait had been six grueling hours(!). We found a parking spot on the outskirts of the sprawling Metropolis and wandered into the heart of town. Kyoto street to the center actually felt a lot closer than I had imagined, then rational thoughts ceased to be formed - we rode the Surly Bird around the Playa, passing a brightly lit Butterfly car and a preening Prey Mantis showing off the incredible detail its designers had dedicated to it. We saw The Man, holding its high and central position over the Playa. Laurie and I, the virgins, quietly tried to take it all in - I was absorbing the spectacle slowly, rationally, not feeling overwhelmed just yet, simply finding the scene around us astounding, ridiculous, bewildering. By the time we returned to the RV and went to sleep at 3 in the morning, the crowds had not thinned out at all, the music had not quieted down a single decibel, and the bright, screaming lights in the middle of this desert, a completely desolate piece of land for 51 out of the 52 weeks of the year, did not dim one bit.

The following morning, our happy Portland RV crew split up and we each went to our respective camps. I found Camp Caribbean, met Irina, proceeded to set up my tent ... which suddenly seemed awfully insufficient to house me and all of my things... a week's worth of food, water, clothing, and more. Irina and I headed off to explore the Metropolis in day light - and now, it really begins to blow your mind - there was just too much going on all around! The center of the Playa was closer than I had expected, but the encampment seemed to sprawl forever all around it. The landscape was dotted with insane art cars, incomprehensible, yet often gorgeous, art pieces ... camps that had their own decorations, their own entertainment options, their own food and drink, all of which they were ready to share with you. There's no money on the Playa - you bring things and you share them with the rest of the Black Rock City population, freely and happily. And in the end, free and happy were the strongest emotions that were on display here - you can do anything you want and you, and everyone around you, will be happy about it!

The Paradox in the desert - late Saturday night, the Man was set to burn! The biggest party in this week of partying over-indulgence, and its biggest oxymoron - we had all gathered to camp in this wild and desolate place, supplying all of our own food, water, power, garbage collection, and on this night, 50,000 people had gathered in the middle of the Playa, looking up at The Man, and surrounded by all the sites and sounds of civilization that you should never expect out here! The Man was surrounded by a ring of Art Cars, their music blaring loudly, their lights shining brightly, the drinks on board flowing freely. It was the one party that brought all of us together, making us feel like we weren't in the wild desert at all, but instead at an ornate celebration of our freedom, our freedom to incinerate the very symbol of the place that we had all come to see. Then the fireworks went off, blanketing the statue in their high-tech trails, making you forget about the desert setting that much more, until the flames were unleashed, and leapt up towards the statue, bringing with them a sense of wild nature here in the middle of the night on the Playa; consuming the giant statue in a matter of twenty minutes. The following night, the Temple followed the Man in its fiery course... but the Temple is the spiritual centerpiece of the Playa, and the setting was dramatically different - the Art Cars still patrolled in the background, but the sound systems were off, the lights subdued, the crowds relatively quiet... right up until the last of the Temple tumbled down onto the pile of ashes and glowing ambers, and a primal scream was unleashed... And then we got up and headed back for our camps and vehicles as it was time to leave. For those staying the night, the City remained vibrantly awash in light and sound, drawing in anyone still with the strength and endurance for another night of mayhem.

And finally, Evone, Steve, and I were in our U-Haul truck heading out of the City and on through the night towards San Francisco. Passing the entrance gates in short order, and then, thrust into a continuous traffic jam waiting, struggling to get back onto the paved roads, almost as if the real world was balking at letting us back in. For the three of us it went something like this: we'd pull up to the car in front of us and stop, waiting for it to move again. Which it would do some five to ten minutes later. Which was plenty of time for all three of us to fall asleep. Now, there would be some hundred feet of open dirt between us and the car ahead and either Evone would wake up first and get us up there, or one of Steve and I would wake up, nudge Evone, and we'd go. Rinse and repeat for some three hours until we finally hit the highway and were able to continuously move again, which seemed to help keep Evone focused and awake (while letting Steve and I simply pass out). The Denny's stop in Reno at 4:30 in the morning (along with every other car that had left Black Rock City that night) was a God-send!

Overall, what can I say about the Burning Man experience? In some ways, it did meet some of my expectations - I'm not entirely comfortable dealing with large crowds of people, and being thrust into a crowd of [mostly] strangers, fifty thousand strong, was a bit of a shock. On the other hand, in a lot of ways it exceeded a lot of my expectations - the over-riding feeling I got from everyone there was that of being happy and free, which was amazing, and made it easy and comfortable to get along with these thousands of happy and free strangers. The art, I also hadn't expected (how could you, really!?) - there's so much of of it ... everywhere and all around, it's incredible, astoundingly detailed and brilliantly designed, and all marvelously well fitting with the theme of the Metropolis (the Playa art tour was one of my favorite experiences of the week). As for all the expected downsides - the dust, the heat, the cold at night, the lack of showers? This didn't really register - maybe it was the lack of sleep (leading to lack of focus... or was it the alcohol that led to the constant lack of focus?), maybe I was just used to harsh conditions from places like Mongolia, Egypt, Nepal, Bolivia, etc, but I was able to take the harsh environment in stride... Not to say that I enjoyed the harshness of it - the first shower back in the real world, upon reaching San Francisco, felt like the most wonderful, healing, relaxing, profoundly existential experience, but, while there, I felt I could handle the intense conditions the desert threw at us. So, will there be a sequel next year? Much too early to tell - I'm intrigued about going back into that foreboding environment, meeting again the amazing people I had met this year, and finding more new ones... Then again, I might actually have a real job by next year, so will I be able to just take a week off? Will I want to go through the nightmare of logistics and planning again? What about the dust, heat, desolation, etc... conditions were actually far milder than normal this year? I don't know yet - I made up mind to go all of two weeks prior to the start this year, I'll probably let it go just about that long again next year!

Pictures... They still certainly fail to put anything into proper perspective, but that didn't keep me from taking lots of them. Instead of posting a bunch here, I'll just redirect you to the two photo albums already up on Facebook:

Click above for my main Burning Man album (or follow this link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=32264&id=100001212465813&l=ee701544cb)

And click this picture for an album full of just the Black Rock City art (link here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2078570&id=1046387715&l=a6da389a9a)

America's Pastime

2010-08-28T16:49:00.000-07:00

I was going to write up a post about the baseball games I got to see a while ago, but then I forgot, then some more time passed, and here we are now, with me getting back to it: baseball, the great American Pastime! Not quite as great (or popular) as the NFL these days perhaps, but a nice relaxing way to spend an evening or an afternoon.

I've been to a good number of baseball games before - from San Diego to Seattle to Philadelphia to a lot of places in between (The new Giants Stadium in San Francisco is the best. Though Seattle's very own Safeco Field is up there too), but I had never seen either of the two oldest, venerable, most famous stadiums in the major leagues: Boston's Fenway Park, where the Red Sox play, and Wrigley Field, on the North side of Chicago, home of the green ivy and your favorite lovable losers, the Cubs. So, off I went planning my advance across North America, keeping famous baseball stadiums in mind:

Of course, my first North American stop was New York City

And they've got a fairly famous baseball team here too - something called the Yankees, at the New Yankee Stadium, shown here. I would've actually been more excited to see the old, more historic Yankee Stadium, but that had been replaced by this shining new stadium last year, so that's what we get. I would have been really, really excited to catch a game here (or even at the new Mets Stadium in Queens), but I happened to be in New York during baseball's All Star break, so no games for you! In fact, I even missed the hours for the tour of the stadium... So, enough with the Yankees then - on to Boston!

Boston, the city, I had visited on a number of occasions before, so I wasn't really inclined to do much sight-seeing, I did catch up with Mary Catherine (of Lake Baikal fame) here briefly, but really, my main raison d'etre in Boston was to catch a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, so on a beautiful summer evening, around 7 o'clock, I arrived at my Fenway seat and settled in to watch the Red Sox take on the Texas Rangers

Welcome to Fenway Park! Every game is sold out...

The Green Monster under the lights. I thought you'd be a little bigger, a little more monstrous actually, Green Monster? ('Green Monster' is what they call that big green wall over there, Mom)

My seats weren't very far from the Red Sox bullpen, so here's an action shot of the warm-ups

Unfortunately, the beautiful summer evening did not last, and around the fourth inning, the game was paused indefinitely due to rain. This was all a part of my Egypt hangover month of travel, where each new city I'd arrive in would greet me with rain and clouds after the interminable heat and sunshine that was everywhere in Egypt: Tunis, Naples, Rome, Paris, Bristol, London (of course), New York, Boston, Montreal, Buffalo... they each got me a taste of overcast skies and rain. I stuck with it though, waited out the delay, taking a chance to explore the stadium, and sample the local bratwurst offerings.

An hour later, the action resumed, and we all trooped back to our seats. Sadly, the weather didn't get the memo that we were all back, while the umpires were clearly inclined to try and get the game finished, so we were experiencing a little more New England drizzle than I felt I had really signed up for

The skies continuing to look ominous over Fenway

I put up with the rain for about another inning, and promptly packed up and headed out of the stadium - I'm all for catching a Sox game at Fenway, but getting soaked wasn't part of the plan. Fenway itself was really cool to see - it's certainly very small, very cozy, distinctly old school. The fans used to be known as the most knowledgeable baseball fans in America - as the ticket prices have risen sharply, the most die-hard, most knowledgeable fans have stopped being able to afford tickets, so while there still isn't an empty seat to be found in the house, I didn't necessarily think the makeup of the crowd was any different than what you'd expect at a baseball game anywhere else around the country.

And speaking of anywhere else around the country, a couple of weeks later, after a detour through Canada, I reached Chicago, home of the Cubs. I was once again here for just a single night, staying with Ellen, a new couch-surfing buddy, and we headed off towards Wrigley Field to catch an evening game against the St. Louis Cardinals (somewhat ironically, last time I had been in St. Louis, I caught a game there against the Cubs...).

Approaching Wrigley!

Ellen and I over by our 'seats' - all the games at Wrigley are sold out too, so we ended up with standing room seats, which was actually just fine by us!

National League MVP Albert Pujols taking a swing

'Beyond the Ivy' seats - Wrigley Field feels really small! Part of the reason is that the outfield seats don't go up very high, so the houses beyond the stadium, across Waveland Avenue, get a clear look onto the action

I accessorized in some St. Patrick's Day Cubbies attire and got a picture with Ernie Banks

We once again didn't make it all the way through the game... no rain this time, it's just that it went into extra innings, and we had a visit to Al Capone's old jazz club still ahead of us (which was awesome, by the way). Wrigley Field, I enjoyed even more than Fenway - they are both small, cozy and somehow feel closer and more genuine than most of the gigantic, new, corporate-sponsored stadiums, but Wrigley has a little more of a quiet, relaxed vibe to it than does Fenway. Maybe it's just the ivy on the outfield walls, or maybe it's because the Cubs are the lovable losers (last championship in 1908, next one does not currently appear to be imminent), while the Red Sox have become all smug, corporate, and expensive(!) after breaking through their own curse (read: cheapness of a former owner) and winning a pair of World Series titles in the past ten years.

And that, in short, was my America's Pastime baseball experience. Some day, catching a game at the two New York stadiums needs to happen, but I've gotten the two venues that I really wanted to see out of the way: Fenway and Wrigley! Oh, and I did pass by some other baseball venues along the way, but I wasn't quite so inclined to catch a game at either one of these:

Some fun decorations on the side of the Rogers Stadium in downtown Toronto - generally regarded as a particularly unattractive stadium... At least, I imagine, the CN Tower makes for a nice background

Seeing a game at Denver's Coors Field would be pretty cool actually (and ironically enough, the very same Chicago Cubs were apparently arriving in town just as I was taking off), but I didn't have the time - Seattle was calling by now!

And now that I'm back here in Seattle and not really traveling anymore, a whole new American Pastime has come calling: The Burning Man Festival in the Nevada Desert.

No, I've never been before, and I can't really describe it all that well - if you are not familiar with this particular form of insanity, you are best off just looking at their website and waiting for my blog posts afterward (no, not during!). Irina has gone the past two years, and she seems to absolutely love it, so this year I've decided to join her (and 50,000 of our fellow 'burners') - if she and I made it through Colombia, Israel, and Egypt unscathed, this is bound to go well too, right!?

Go West, Young Man! Even Further West!

2010-08-17T20:25:00.000-07:00

This is Lara:

She was one of my 17 closest friends in Rio de Janeiro over Carnaval last year. Meaning we were in the same 18-person dorm at our Rio hostel. Then I ran into her again in Argentina. And then she went back home to Western Australia, while I proceeded to do all the silly things you read this blog for!

This is Victoria, BC:

Victoria is actually the capital of British Columbia, not Vancouver, and this is the Parliament Building.

The Empress Hotel is the other uber well-known landmark in Victoria.

Lara + Victoria = an excuse for me to travel a little more! Somewhere on the train ride to Denver, a plan was hatched: upon reaching Seattle, I'd keep heading further West and make it across the bay to Victoria and we'd hang out on Vancouver Island for a day. After all, I still had some Canadian cash on hand! More importantly, the following conversation had become all too common of a refrain while I'd been traveling:
- And where are you from?
- Seattle, in the US
- Oh, I visited there - it's beautiful! How do you like Victoria? We thought it was really lovely!
- Well, actually, I still haven't been to Victoria or Vancouver Island... <frowny face>
And catching up with Lara, and her funny Australian accent would be cool too, so after spending Friday in Seattle, I was off again, to nearby Canada bright and early on Saturday morning.

A three hour ferry ride and 45 minute wait for immigration later, and I was back in Canada! Victoria itself is rather peaceful, and pretty, and quiet. It certainly has a pronounced quaint Victorian feel to it (duh!), especially in the summer - with the immaculate houses, lots of flowers, and the imposing Parliament building

Like I said, lots of pretty, brightly-colored flowers! Right in front of Parliament...

The rest of Vancouver Island, the largest island on the Pacific side of North America (and the 43rd largest island in the world - thanks, wikipedia!) is a pretty big adventure destination - from hiking to surfing to bungy jumping, you've got it all available, but I was only here for a day, so there weren't any big outdoorsy adventures on the schedule (other than camping overnight). We did our loop around Victoria, then went for a brief hike, more of a stroll rather, in a park, which hugged the jagged shoreline of a medium-sized lake in the suburbs of Victoria. I can't remember the name of the park or of the lake, but I do remember getting completely disoriented during the hike because the lake is a very, very irregular non-geometric shape... Anyway, I digress, following this non-geometric shape of a lake, we headed off to the Butchart Gardens, arguably the best known attraction of Vancouver Island. The gardens are an enormous, sprawling collection of flower beds, begun by Mrs. Butchart early in the 20th century. When you enter, you get a flower guide, which among other trivia, tells you when the flowers are likely to be in bloom - flowers being what they are, just about everything is in bloom in July/August, so you too should be coming to visit right about now:

There's pretty purple flowers

And really nice white ones... If I could get Lynn to help write this post, she could probably identify each of these flowers, but I can't remember the names...

The Ross Fountain in the back of the Gardens is animated into some exotic shapes and contortions. I was just at the Cirque du Soleil studios in Montreal two weeks ago - this seemed like the sort of thing they would've thought up!

Apparently, girls aren't welcome at the Gardens! I disapprove!

Well, I could let you go on believing that Mrs. Butchart was just mean and didn't want any other women in her garden... but instead, that sign was accompanied by a 'No Boys' sign on the other side of the street - it's just their polite, Canadian, politically correct way of saying 'No Entry,' to anyone... please! The Canadians are very polite - they really are renowned for it all over the world. Consequently you get all the idiot Americans parading around Europe with Canadian patches on their backpacks, thinking that'll make them appear slightly less obnoxious.

It was starting to get a little dark by this time, which was very good news, indeed - it was a Saturday, and as we discovered, The Butchart Gardens puts on a big fireworks display every Saturday in the summer. And this isn't just a shoot all sorts of sparklies into the sky, like we do for Fourth of July (or the Chinese do for Chinese New Year... they do a lot more actually!) - this is more of an old-school show: there's both the normal fireworks lighting up the skies, and lots of animated, firework-ed displays performing little song and dance tricks down on the ground. Not sure how well this shot captures it all, but it gives you an idea:

All in all, the 30 minute show was spectacular, and certainly offered the most creativity and variety of any fireworks show I'd ever seen. They design a new one every season, and have won a number of awards for their efforts

Visited the Ross Fountain again while waiting for the crowds to clear out after the fireworks - the fountain is spectacularly lit up at night

Yup, on the way out, I posed for a picture with a fountain in the shape of a wild pig...

By this time it was getting towards midnight, so we booked it back to our campground and crashed for the night - see the picture of Lara and I at the start of this post in front of our tent, if you are curious about our accommodations, which were surprisingly comfortable, by the way! (thanks for letting me borrow the tent, Lott!) In the morning, we caught a car ferry back to the States via Anacortes, which took long enough to frustrate and annoy me, but we did make it back to Seattle just in time to go get my furniture out of storage and get me moved in to my new place on Capitol Hill. All in all, a success then! If the ferry had taken another 45 minutes, my storage would've closed, and this success would have turned into a spectacular failure, so I like to think I was justified for wishing that the American Customs would move a little faster, but they are world-renowned for being slow and [often excessively] thorough these days. Especially when dealing with an Aussie... sigh...

My new humble abode in Capitol Hill!

I suppose it's not really new actually, but it's certainly new to me. It isn't exactly mine either, as I've got five house-mates, but I have slept in the same place for the past two weeks, in my very own bed, with my very own sheets, and that sure has been nice.

Where school buses go to die

2010-08-16T01:47:00.001-07:00

What happens to that dear 'ol bus that would take you to school and back when you were a kid? Well, apparently, the school buses all have their different personalities, just like the rest of us, and they all go in a number of different ways. And what do a lot of retired Americans do now? Why, they dress up in bright and loud outfits and take a trip to Central America - school buses are no different:

The brightly colored, former school bus is the backbone of the public transportation networks in places like Panama City, Panama. This one is actually from Cochabamba, Bolivia, which is a place that most Americans (and American school buses) don't generally reach, but it certainly looks the part of its Central American brethren.

The ones who invested more time and money into their financial retirement planning during the long days of carting screaming, bratty little kids around the suburbs have a few more options. Instead of working through retirement on the mean streets of Panama City, they are able to afford to settle down in relative peace and comfort not far from the azure waters of the Pacific Ocean, near a Central American beach:

Witness this former North American workhorse now administering a surf camp at the beach town of Tamarindo, Costa Rica. Life under the palm trees is pretty peaceful in Tamarindo!

Unfortunately, life in Central and South America is fraught with danger, and there's constant competition for jobs from newer, younger, fresher immigrants coming across the border from up North, so not everyone can keep up. And when the time comes when you are no longer up to the task of being a brightly painted, suspension-optional transportation kog in a Central American municipality's public transport scheme, you are just put out to pasture in the fields of, say, Western Argentina

With the Andes providing a dramatic backdrop. If you are fortunate, like this guy, your final resting place will be near a National Monument - Puente del Inca here, and within a short hike from Aconcagua, South America's tallest peak

But not all Americans travel outside the country in their retirement years - many simply try to take in the many, many natural sites that North America has to offer. And the school buses are right there with them!

Who knows where this guy started, but he only made it as far as South Dakota, where he was turned into a tourist shuttle for the construction site of the Crazy Horse monument. Definitely missing out on a seriously psychedelic paint job though!

And then, there's a few school buses that were clearly forced to retire much too early - their adrenaline is still rushing, their engines are still roaring, and the fighting spirit is still strong within these ones! Fortunately, there's a place for these restless, competitive types too - it's the All-American institution called the Demolition Derby:

The Battlebus, ready to bring the pain, at the Derby in Monroe, Washington

School buses racin' and bumpin' around the tight corners. Yeah, that shady spot under a palm tree on the beach in Costa Rica may seem nice, but that's not the place for these guys!

Well, apparently these are all the school buses I've got pictures of... and all the witty commentary I have to offer. But my mother is always upset whenever a post doesn't have a single picture of me, so let's solve that - here I am, roughly school-bus aged. Except that I was in Soviet Russia at the time, where there were no school buses, but I digress. Besides, you wouldn't want to see any pictures of me from high school in Kentucky... I'm not sure I even have any!

I'm guessing this is 4th grade, I ought to be wearing my blood red Pioneer tie, but I think fourth grade was when we all got a little rebellious and learned we didn't really have to wear them in these crazy days of Glasnost and Perestroika...

Ok, here's me actually with a one of the buses above too: clicky here!

I'm [kinda] famous...

2010-08-11T00:34:00.001-07:00

Just not quite the way I had ever wanted to become famous. Apparently, I was responsible for (maybe 'involved in' is more appropriate actually) holding up some traffic in Seattle: http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2010/08/10/cdnews-police-scanner-8-10 - the 3:23PM incident at 14th and Yesler is all me, baby! Not that I remember it all that clearly, but I was definitely biking down Yesler, quickly, and there was definitely a white Ford Explorer making a right turn right in front of me... I'll get a look at the police report tomorrow, and I hear they had plenty of witnesses, but I am very curious to know if the guy had his turn signal on, since I'm usually fairly careful and pretty good at avoiding these sorts of things, and I wasn't going so fast that I couldn't have stopped if I had gotten an indication that he was about to turn. That's what I think anyway - we'll find out more tomorrow. At least I had a helmet and health insurance!

As far as the insurance goes, no serious damage appears to have occurred - a number of bumps and bruises that I've been told to put neosporin on, and most likely a mild concussion, but they put me through a CT scanner, and concluded that the insides of my head looked as good as ever, then sent me home. I noted that the CT scanner looked a little like a time machine... I was seriously bored by this time: they ended up keeping me at the hospital for about five hours - Harborview was busy! and thus slow... At least I got to go wakeboarding in the morning before - had been planning to play some hockey too, but that plan went a little astray obviously. Probably should stay away from both of those for the next couple of weeks, unfortunately!

No pictures to show... but you'll be happy to know that I've got a nice big red mark on the left side of my face. But they did keep telling me back in Russia that women are attracted to scars - this is totally my time to shine then, isn't it!?

Americana!

2010-08-08T23:47:00.000-07:00

I left Chicago by train, the same way I had arrived - from Union Station in the heart of the city. The station's waiting hall set a properly All-American scene:

This was making me feel fairly patriotic

So, in this patriotic, all-American spirit, I headed for my one last destination: Mount Rushmore. Actually, I was heading to Denver, then driving to Rushmore, but it just plain wouldn't be an All-American adventure if there was public transportation available...

Mount Rushmore National Monument, in the middle of South Dakota's Black Hills National Forest. This was, incidentally, my first time in South Dakota too...

Rushmore is absolutely unique - I've been trying to think of something to compare it to, but there really isn't anything. The monuments are huge - the faces are each sixty feet tall, and they are carved into one of the tallest peaks in the park. There are, of course, other giant monuments around the world, but all the ones I can think of fall neatly into two distinct categories: religious shines (topped perhaps by The Buddhas of Bayman in Afghanistan... until the Taliban destroyed them in 2001), or pure cults of personality - my favorite is certainly the giant golden Turkmenbashi sun dial in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. (Holy Crap - they are taking down the Golden Turkmenbashi!) Mount Rushmore, however, is neither religious in nature, nor was it constructed to immortalize those building it (or at least authorizing the construction), which, I think, makes it pretty uniquely American. The four Presidents depicted are (from left to right) George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. I think it's safe to say these four were already pretty well immortalized in American history books by the time the monument was completed in 1939. In a related sign of an American oxymoron, accessing Mount Rushmore is free of charge (something that would be inconceivable just about anywhere else in the world) - the parking lot, on the other hand, is privately run and will set you back ten dollars.

In defense of my rather grizzly appearance I'll note that the previous two nights had been spent in a seat on board an amtrak train and in a tent in the South Dakota wilderness. Was starting to look forward to my Denver hotel room by now!

In a mildly ironic twist of fate, Mount Rushmore, this most iconic of All-American monuments is actually located on what has traditionally been Native American land - Sioux land, specifically. Perhaps as a result (or in response?), the tribes are banding together to erect a commemorative monument of their own, not far from Mount Rushmore - Crazy Horse. And you've got to give them credit - they are dreaming big! The mountain chosen as the site, is one of the few that's taller than Rushmore in the area, and, as planned, Crazy Horse will become the tallest monument currently in existence in the world. Now I say 'currently in existence' because they are nowhere near completion - in fact, at the rate they are going (10 workers at the site, not accepting any money from the US government to help with the construction), it is estimated that the monument will take another hundred and fifty years to complete... Nothing highlights your imminent mortality quite like being on a bus and being told that none of you on board, not even the youngest children, will live long enough to see the completed structure, assuming they stick to the current pace.

So far, we've completed Crazy Horse's face - this took about 50 years!

The envisioned model of the entire structure - just another 150 short years! I am a little curious about the slow pace - if money was the only obstacle, you'd think with all the money the tribal casinos are bringing in these days all over the country, that would be an imminently resolvable problem?

Assuming the final statue is eventually carved to the design originally envisioned, will it be the largest monument in the world when eventually finished? Hard to say - China and India currently have competing projects to erect the tallest Buddha statue, but neither reaches the projected height of Crazy Horse (560 feet, or about 171 meters), but what will happen over the next 150 years, assuming it really takes that long? Noone knows for certain... but unless the Taliban come to power in more parts of the world, I think it's safe to say there will be more statues getting erected, and given a century and a half, 171 meters may not be an entirely indomitable limit.

And so, after seeing the two monuments, each representing a different take on the notion of All-American, it was time to pack up my tent and head back to Denver. Now Denver is about a six hour drive from Mount Rushmore; the road passes through parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota along the way... and lemme tell you this ain't the most scenic drive you'll ever take! In fact, unless you are a big fan of vast, flat open spaces and really, really, really straight roads, you may grow kinda bored along the way - I surely did. At least the speed limit on the interstates in 75 mph - they clearly know just how straight, flat, and devoid of compelling scenery the roads are. The immediate area surrounding Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse is legitimately beautiful of course - the lush greens of the Black Hills National Forest and Custer State Part, interspersed with a variety of lakes, rivers, and scraggy mountain ranges... But as soon as you leave those behind, you are left with, well, flatness. Some highlights:

An oil derrick in the middle of the prairie actually seemed like a very appropriate site

The town of Deadwood is within the National Forest - it's famed for its Wild West, Gold Rush days (as the HBO show of the same name reminded us), but these days its attraction is the legalized gambling...

Cargo trains criss-crossing Wyoming

A faint rainbow over Northern Colorado after a brief, but fierce thunderstorm. I later heard about golf ball-sized pieces of hail coming down around Mount Rushmore the following day... breaking windshields(!)

And occasionally, you see a big, seemingly incongruent tower of a mountain over the horizon

Actually, that last one wasn't exactly a random site along the way - that's Devils Tower, another National Monument, just across the border in Northern Wyoming. It probably added another hour or two to the drive back, but I figured as long as I was nearby, it would be a shame to miss it. Plus, it gave me a chance to drive along I-90 for some 30 miles, and that made it feel almost like home (I-90 proceeds all the way West to Seattle).

I don't know a whole lot about Devils Tower honestly - it looks like the neck of a big volcano... and it looks that way no matter how close you are to it, so I didn't see the point of paying to actually enter the grounds of the national park. I've since read that it's actually possible to climb to the top of the Tower, which would have certainly been cool, but I didn't really have time to do it anyway, so back to Denver I went! After snapping a few more pictures...

You don't mess with Texas and you don't mess with 386 meters of Wyoming's Devils Tower!

It's cowboy country, ya know!

One last bit of adventure on the way back from the Tower - I actually had to head North, in the opposite direction at first to find the nearest gas station (these are every bit as uncommon as you might imagine in the eternal flat emptiness of the Great Plains). After filling up, I turned out around, pulled back out onto the highway, and sent my little Hyundai on its way back South... Then things went into slow motion in my head - hey, there's a big white car parked on the side of the road - Crap! It's a cop! - Was I speeding? I wonder how fast I was going? I've no idea what the speed limit in the town of Hulett is! - Fuck! He's pulling out - lights on... So, I was speeding. Technically, if he had waited, he may have had a better catch as I was speeding up (probably not much better though, as I did notice him and slowed back down), but as it turned out, the speed limit in tiny little outposts of civilization (e.g. Hulett; population: 516) in rural Wyoming (is there another kind of Wyoming?) is 30 mph, and I was doing 41. Fortunately, I was polite, and the officer was nice, and after running my rental documents through his computer he let me off with a warning, thus not making this the most expensive gas stop in my life! I did make sure to inquire as to what exactly the speed limits were in future rural Wyoming towns... Fortunately, that knowledge would not be needed any more the rest of the day.

And so, we meet again, mini!

2010-08-06T01:12:00.000-07:00

Being back in Seattle finally, first order of business was, of course, to check in on the ongoing struggle for survival that is the current state of the mini. Ok, not really the very first order of business, but it was pretty high up on the list.

Gunnar, who is the man in charge of the restoration process, had previously sent me a few pictures of the process: see here. But this time I was here to see it for myself, equipped with a camera and everything! I'm pleased to report that I don't appear to have missed much, as I am hoping the gradual process will continue to get covered here on the blog...

Not so surprisingly, the vast majority of the front panels are to be scrapped

Headlights gaping from their open spaces

The trunk panels are going to be all new too... Same with the floor and the doors actually - anything that's been anywhere near the Mongolian soil is more or less in a state where it's cheaper/easier to replace than it is to salvage and repair

GD Engineering still representin' - thanks Zoran!

Dotting the i's, Crossing the t's

2010-07-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

Ever since Sicily, my trip's been taking me to places that I've visited previously - sure Pisa and Switzerland and Quebec and Ontario were all new, but they don't feel quite as radically new as, say, finally reaching Africa and seeing the Pyramids in Egypt. It's more like going through and picking up the pieces that I'd missed before. But before that all starts sounding boring and mundane, never fear - the particular pieces I've been picking to see are pretty damn appealing in their own right - so...

I'd been to Paris several times before (most recently to buy a certain mini automobile), and I've seen all the big museums - Louvre, d'Orsay, Rodin, Versaille, but never the Center George Pompidou, perhaps the premier modern art collection in the world:

June 2010, Check!

The collection the Pompidou houses is certainly amazing and huge - I appear to have developed a greater degree of appreciation for modern art lately, but even I found some of the French exhibits a bit too weird for my tastes...

Moving on - There's lots of bridges around the world, I've seen some interesting and famous ones - some more famous than others. So, I couldn't leave New York this time without having walked the Brooklyn Bridge

consider yourself crossed, t!

In a similar vein, it was about time I finally caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty!

There are some crazy, crazy, weird statues all over the world (especially in South and SE Asia), so I can't possibly be going home without having seen what is arguably the best known statue in the Western World. Certainly in North America...

I didn't go to Easter Island. But I really want to go! So, instead I went to see an exhibit dedicated to it at the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History

The CN Tower of Toronto, Ontario rises to a fairly mind-boggling height of 553 meters above ground

I've seen some of the tallest buildings in the world, but I hadn't seen what, until recently, used to be the tallest of them all (Burj Dubai surpassed it earlier this year) - Toronto's CN Tower is certainly the grandest (and tallest) of the city's landmarks. Unrivaled in height, probably rivaled in appeal by all the restaurants Toronto has to offer...

Hockey - Canada's national past time. And the Stanley Cup, the prize for becoming the champion of the National Hockey League

Sports I've gone to see along the way: muay thai (Thailand), rugby (Fiji), footie (a.k.a. Australian Rules Football), sumo wrestling (Japan), tennis (Argentina), football/soccer (Bolivia), cycling (Bolivia), horse racing (Hong Kong), baseball (USA). I went horse back riding in a few places too, but that hardly looks like a sport when I'm the one doing it... So, what I really should have done is catch a hockey game while in Canada, but it's the NHL's off-season during the summer, so I settled for a visit to the hockey Hall of Fame here in Toronto for a glimpse at all the glory and history of the game...

Moving right along... waterfalls! The Iguazu falls in Argentina are undoubtedly the most awesome waterfall (or a collection of falls rather) in the world. I should see the Victoria Falls in South Africa before making these assertions (Venezuela's Angel Falls too...), but I'm pretty confident. After all, I did go to Buffalo, New York to see the Niagara Falls, the greatest waterfall North America has to offer, and while I wasn't disappointed (was mightily impressed, in fact), Niagara surely pales in comparison to Iguazu!

I recruited Amie to come play my local tour guide... Last time we hung out was back in January, on the beaches of Koh Tao in Thailand - six months later, Buffalo and Niagara Falls! Apparently she now has a job too...

Speaking of big tall buildings, the skyscraper was invented in Chicago, and the city is home to American's tallest building - the Willis Tower (which used to be known as the Sears Tower, until apparently the Sears corporation started running out of money).

I felt Ok about the Sears Tower though, since I'd seen it before...

The locals in Chicago, however, apparently prefer the John Hancock Tower (merely the sixth tallest building in the US), so I made my over to see it.

Actually I met Cynthia for lunch at the Signature Room on the 95th floor, with its amazing views of the Lake Michigan shorelines - the best part about "crossing the t's and dotting the i's" is that traveling in civilized places like Europe and North America, you get to meet up with lots of friends wherever you go!

It's Good to be Back!

2010-07-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

After making it all the way from New York to Denver overland, I finally relented and got on a plane for the final leg of the trip to Seattle and the Pacific Coast. And upon landing, I immediately concluded that it's good to be back!

View of Mt. Rainier in the setting sun on the flight over the Cascades

Canada's Full of Hippies!

2010-07-29T18:05:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Montreal!

After some Greyhound bus-related mis-adventures in Vermont, I finally made it to Montreal. (At about 3 in the morning - Greyhound is not your friend!) What did I know about Montreal prior to arriving? They speak French a lot, and I have friends to visit there - that's about it. The last guidebook I had been traveling with was for Egypt, so I'd become rather open-minded about the places I was getting to these days. So, the following day, having met up with Goose and Sara (at 3 the previous morning), I headed off to explore this new Franco-English speaking land. And the first thing I found along the way? Well, apparently, hippies - proper, frisbee throwing, hacky sack playing, tambourine drumming, weed offering hippies! You'd think you were in San Francisco or Seattle again - I figured I could get along with the people here! No matter which language they spoke...

First stop was the Parque Mont Royal, which, as their website describes, hosts a popular activity called the "Montreal Tam Tam Jam:"

It consists of lots of people drumming away on these hand drums ("tam-tams" in French).

And of others dancing to the rhythms

This was kind of crazy, kind of cool, but it gets better! I headed deeper into the forest (park), in search of Sunday's star attraction - the 'fighting geeks,' as Sara and Goose described them. They aren't hard to find - quite an audience had gathered, so pretty soon I was in a large-ish clearing, watching the following spectacle:

These guys, sadly, do not have a website explaining what it is that they are all about (that I know of - in reality they likely do). But how much of an explanation do we really need? It's a collection of twenty to fifty guys (and girls) who go at each other, utilizing plastic pikes and swords, wrapped in foam! Pretty straightforward, makes for quite a spectacle. While some of it certainly looks like vaguely organized mayhem, quite a few of the participants looked to have a fair bit of actual fencing background - a 'noob' couldn't even touch me, man! On Halloween a couple of years ago, they did apparently get attacked by a crowd of zombies though... I do ever so wish I had been there to witness that battle!

Moving on from the semi-, vaguely-serious to the purely comedic, The Just for Laughs Festival was just finishing up in town that Sunday too. I watched a magician do his act, all in French... still entertaining...

The whole crowd may have been a little high by the time the evening parade rolled around!

As for the rest of Montreal, it's interesting and eclectic - there's a properly French-looking old town, and a nicely preserved old port is on the banks of the river. Montreal used to be Canada's primary Atlantic port as the lakes and rivers connect it all the way to the ocean, but the major ports have moved even further inland along the Great Lakes these days. Apparently, at the turn of the last century, it was also a significant manufacturing and shipping hub - a fact you won't be able to miss while gazing at some of the architecture that highlights the Old Port area:

Then again, they might just all be hippies, so they like having all these grain silos still around!

I mean somebody had to have designed this housing complex, and I'm fairly certain they were high! I liked it a lot though - enough so to pedal all the way out there to get some up-close shots of it

There's also a Biosphere... which, of course, only makes me think of Pauley Shore and the less renowned Baldwin brother (Stephen), who had both stared in the similarly titled movie Bio-Dome

And you can feed raccoons on the street!

As for the friends I was visiting with here in Montreal, they might not be hippies, but they seem to be fitting in pretty well. I got to see just about the entire town thanks to them - from biking past a sprawling amusement park under the Jacques Cartier Bridge to the Cirque du Soleil studios further afield (where Pavel, whom I know going all the way back to Moscow, now works)

Pavel and Olga, at their apartment in the Old City

Goose and Sara, along with Talya and Baby Mireille, after a frisbee game. They apparently needed subs, so I got to play - now looking forward to getting back to Seattle and maybe actually getting some exercise...

On to Toronto, where I was off to hang out with Whelena, Vera, and Tim

Toronto is a bit more serious and buttoned down - I went to see the Provincial Legislature, the CN Tower, the Hockey Hall of Fame, the wineries in the nearby Niagara Valley... joined by hordes of other tourists once again. But Canada's still Canada, so that evening, we were off to see indie rock at a club nearby.

This was Elliot Brood, the opening act. Calexico were the headliners, but everyone seemed to enjoy Elliot Brood better - maybe it's just because they're local and Calexico are Americans, or maybe because they were just better?

Actually, the best part of Toronto was all the all the food and drink we had. I was staying with Tim, with whom I had previously met up traveling in Mendoza, Argentina (wine tasting) and Hong Kong (Chinese food! No, not the tourist crap, good Chinese food). Toronto was sort of a combination of the two - from ethnically diverse including Indian and Chinese Dim Sum, to Cora's for breakfast, to trout and goat cheese mashed potatoes Tim and Whelena had collaborated on (btw, goat cheese + mashed potatoes = really good) to wine tastings along with local cheese in the Niagara Valley... But I'm trying to keep a theme here, so we're focusing on the indie music at this point! I'll have to get back to the Toronto attractions like the CN Tower in another post... Montreal, by the way, does quite well on the culinary front itself, chiming in with poutine - I have now come to accept french fries with gravy, cheese curds, and a variety of additional toppings as a very worthwhile addition to the culinary world from the nation of Canada...

Actually both Montreal and Toronto have some claims to dining fame - Toronto is often described as having the most diverse choice of cuisines available in any city in North America, if not the whole world, while Montreal is said to have the most restaurants per capita. Having witnessed them both, I'm not about to argue with either of these claims!

Bright Lights, Big City

2010-07-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

New York, New York!

The night-time view onto mid-town Manhattan: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the UN (and more), from Nathalie's apartment, where she was kind enough to let me stay for a couple of nights

Times Square on a rainy July day

The Statue of Liberty, flanked by the New Jersey skyline... not quite as imposing as the New York skyline

The iconic Brooklyn Bridge shot!

The rainy day over Times Square eventually turned into a coloful sunset over Lower Manhattan

I walked back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge, then took some more pictures

I went to see the new Yankee Stadium, it just so happened to be on the day that George Steinbrenner, the long-time owner, had passed away - a small memorial out front

The Statue of Liberty

I think this was my fourth or fifth time in New York, but it occurred to me that I'd never actually been to see the Statue of Liberty before, so I made sure to make my way down to Battery Park and towards the statue this time. Taking the ferry to Liberty Island itself was expensive and entailed an hour+ wait. Taking the Staten Island Ferry, which goes right by the Statue, was free and had no wait, plus the huge orange ships were pretty cool, so I followed my aunt's advice and did a commuter drive-by visit to the Statue. Liberty and Ellis Islands get saved for next time!

I met Michelle at Lombardi's Pizza

We were each waiting for a 'table for one,' and decided we'd seem less pathetic if we just got a table for two. Besides, the pizzas are rather sizeable - Lombardi's claims to be the original pizzeria and is a well-established tourist haunt, as the place had been recommended by Jamie, all the way back in London... Somebody else had suggested Lombardi's to Michelle too - she's an interesting girl: had just graduated from Texas A&M University and is at the moment doing an 'Eight Jobs in Eight Weeks' program, where, you guessed it, you work eight different jobs in eight weeks, in eight different cities. Writing a blog and everything and presumably figuring out what you want to do with your life now that college is over, and you are supposedly about to become responsible. She now has a video of me on the blog going on about how you should just travel instead of becoming responsible, but I can't possibly imagine that I sound particularly coherent, so I'll leave finding that blog as an exercise for the reader...

And then I went to see Wicked

I kept hearing about how good the show was, but had missed it when it was playing in Seattle (and then again in London), so I was happy to catch the permanent production on Broadway. The show was, indeed, great, but this sign you see as you are exiting the Gershwin Theater struck home: You are now Leaving Oz. Reality Straight Ahead. Getting back to Seattle and facing reality again is looming closer and closer!

The Seven Wonders of the World

2010-07-17T18:43:00.000-07:00

Have I been everywhere and seen every single remarkable site that the world has to offer? No, I have not. Should this preclude me from declaring what the magical 'Seven Wonders of the World' are? Maybe... but it won't - this is my list, if you disagree with something, feel free to make your own!

I thought about coming up some criteria, but it's really quite easy - the 'wonders of the world' are things that unique and amazing. And these are all man-made structures; wonders of the natural world would be a whole another matter, likely a much harder one. I also tend to favor wonders that are amazing because of what they are, not because of the important/amazing/rare things that had happened there. Otherwise, it should just be Jerusalem, Rome, Athens, and New York for a bit of modern flavor.

So, without further ado, the list:

#1. The Pyramids of Giza: Cairo, Egypt

You have to start with the Pyramids, don't you? It's the only one left of the original Seven Wonders, and they are still going strong - still gigantic, still incomprehensibly ancient. It took us as a civilization over 4,000 years to finally build a structure that was taller than the Pyramids. Egypt has gone through a succession of rulers and overlords since the Pyramids had been constructed - various ones of these lords tried to destroy or alter the Pyramids; they barely made a dent. They are as they had always been - colossal, monumental, huge, imposing... When you see them in person, they are even bigger, than you had imagined.

#2. The Taj Mahal: Agra, India

The jewel of the Indian sub-continent, constructed as a burial shrine to a King's former wife. It's a beautiful, gleaming, almost magical site to behold. The contrast it offers to the slums that dominate the rest of India is striking, but it doesn't, in any way, need any extra points for the contrast - it deserves to be on any list of this kind just for its own unique and magnificent splendor. Criss-crossing India by rickshaw, getting to Agra to see the Taj Mahal was, at least, a three day detour for us, and it was easily worth it.

#3. Angkor Wat: Siem Reap, Cambodia

While the gloden domes of Thailand's famous temples shine in the lights of Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Angkor Wat stands solemnly across the border in Cambodia, in the heart of the former Khmer kingdom. The individual temples of Thailand and Laos may be more beautiful than the less glittering Khmer architecture, but not a single one stands out in my memory quite as strikingly as the ancient Angkor Wat, towering over the jungle from its position near Siem Reap. This wasn't the only Khmer temple I visited, and while the architectural styles are similar, none of the others could even begin to compare to Angkor Wat on sheer size and scale. It's huge, and it just peaks out of the jungle, with a subtle air of mystery, as if a real-life Angelina Jolie - Tomb Raider really is going to emerge from behind the trees any second. It's a stark contrast to Giza, where the Pyramids have been all but swallowed up by the metropolis of Cairo. Of course, Siem Reap isn't much of a metropolis, and Cambodia rolls along at a much slower, quieter pace than Egypt anyway.

#4. Kinkakuji Temple, a.k.a. the Golden Pavilion: Kyoto, Japan.

Just as I was starting to get a little despondent after a month in Japan, complaining that the Japanese architecture, while unique and beautiful, wasn't particularly varied, I finally arrived in Kyoto, the cultural capital of the country. A lot of the structures here were more of the same too (not another five story pagoda!?), but, Kyoto did have a few that very much broke the mold and inspired the imagination. Tops among them is the Golden Pavilion. Actually, I think, it's the golden reflection in the perfectly calm waters, on a clear winter day, that truly sold me. The stark green forest background surely made it one of the most photogenic sites in Japan...

#5. The Eiffel Tower: Paris, France

The structure that finally bested the Pyramids in height? That would be the Eiffel Tower. I think we are all pretty familiar with it by now, so I don't need to try and wax poetic about it - it's the avant garde symbol of modern day France. While Notre Dame, Versailles, and Louvre were the gleaming, golden symbols that the French royalty erected to celebrate their rule, the modern, and relatively spartan in decoration, Eiffel Tower is the symbol of Paris, and of France that I think of. In fact, it's the on the very, very short list of the most striking and memorable sites in all of Europe that immediately come to mind.

#6. St. Basil's Cathedral: Moscow, Russia

Maybe I'm biased having grown up in Moscow. Maybe I overlook the Moscow sites because I take them for granted, having grown up there. I don't know, but while Europe boasts plenty of amazing churches and cathedrals, none is quite as unique as Moscow's St. Basil's with its assortment of beautifully multi-colored domes. Even the other Russian Orthodox churches don't look like this, with their always golden cupolas, and I did emphasize uniqueness among my criteria!

#7. Sydney Opera House: Sydney, Australia

Nobody ever said this was a list of ancient wonders, and for #7, I settled for something modern, unique, and beautiful. Skyscrapers have really become symbols of modern architecture, but they are really not that different from each other. Sydney's Opera House is absolutely unique in its contemporary combination of function and design - sails blowing in the wind, as it's coming in from the harbor. The Eiffel Tower was reviled when first constructed, Shanghai's Oriental Pearl Tower remains ugly, but I doubt anyone didn't admire the beauty and elegance of the Sydney Opera House from the moment it had been completed.

And that's the list! There's plenty I haven't seen yet - the Mayan and Aztec Pyramids, the brand new Burj Dubai Tower, the Moai of Easter Island, even America's very own Mt. Rushmore, just off the top of my head, so I may, some day, decide to adjust the list, but, for now, I'm quite happy with it. Some notable runners-up that didn't quite make the cut:

- The churches of Western Europe: Notre Dame in Paris, London's Westminster Abbey, St. Peter's Basilica at the heart of the Vatican, Sagrada Famillia in Barcelona. None of them quite stood out and separated themselves enough from other similar Cathedrals, in my mind. Sagrada Famillia has a chance, as it's still under construction...

- Machu Picchu is awesome, but it is in large part awesome because it's the 'Lost City of the Incas' and because of its amazing surroundings in the Peruvian mountains. But the actual Incan architecture, especially minus all the gold, that conquistadors so kindly removed/stole, isn't quite astounding enough. The Potala Palace in Tibet falls into the same category - it's mystical and full of history and tradition, but as far as the actual architecture and decoration, I didn't think it was quite up to par. Very compellingly close though...

- Thailand and Burma each has a plethora of amazing temples, but they are hard to separate from each other. As a whole, Bangkok and the plane of Bagan are amazing, but I can't pick an individual temple over the likes of Angkor Wat, Taj Mahal, and Kyoto's Golden Pavilion. In a similar vein, Istanbul, Cairo, and [especially] Samarquand had some amazing Islamic architecture - from the massive spires of the minarets of Istanbul and Cairo to the ancient, mosaic'd madrassahs of Samarquand and Buchara, but that left each of them just good enough to merit mention among the runners-up category.

- Finally, the modern world gives us the Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the Yokohama Landmark Tower in Japan, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, and even the Flora General of Buenos Aires (among others), but amazing as each of those is, I don't think they crack the top seven of amazing!

What a difference ten years makes

2010-07-11T03:01:00.000-07:00

Ok, eleven years... almost to the day, in fact - the last (and only other) time I had been to Rome was back in the summer of 1999, when I was young, naive, and inexperienced in the ways of a world-wide nomad. So, I've changed and evolved since then - turns out Rome has too. Well, in some ways, it hasn't - the Colosseo is still here:

Built in 80AD, it's on a rather slow trajectory of change - an extra eleven years wasn't going to do a whole lot

It feels a bit different on the inside though - more on that below

Hola, Roma!

The atmosphere inside and around the Colosseum, however, changed dramatically - sure, it was a big tourist attraction then too, but compared to today? I felt I had the place all to myself when I went inside eleven years ago. Today, the people of America, and the people of India, and the people of everywhere in between have truly discovered Rome and the Colosseum. I'd love to see the comparison of annual visitor statistics between today and '99 - my guess is that there's several times more visitors that arrive today. Along with them, you get lines (of course), persistent tour guide touts, offering to get you past said lines, and Nigerian men aggressively selling crappy souvenirs. Inside today, it's crowded - sometimes you start to think that maybe picking up a few ancient Gladiator swords and pikes and going out into the ring in order to 'thin out the crowds' a bit wouldn't be such a bad thing. I did have a rather profound headache that morning, following the three bottles of Italian wine Donna and I had split the night before (which didn't feel nearly far enough in the past), so, perhaps, my judgment was a bit clouded on the 'thinning of the crowds' issue...

Other things change in less obviously perceptible ways - take the Vatican. St. Peter's and the Piazza remain the stoic guardians of the Catholic Church, and the same steady flow of tourists comes to gawk at them. Maybe I should say torrent, not flow... but that was just as much the case eleven years ago.

The St. Peter's Basilica - certainly an awesome testament to Papal glory

And the plaza out front... Didn't I see that obelisk some place recently? That's right it was plundered from Egypt...

The State of Vatican is an independent nation (I went by the embassy of the Russian Federation at the Vatican), but you can't get a Vatican stamp in your passport... to my bitter disappointment

The big change from summer of '99 is that now you actually get to see the dome of St. Peter's in all of its glory - and it is, oh, so very remarkably glorious. Back in '99, the Vatican was getting ready to welcome in the New Millennium in style and the entire Cathedral was being renovated - the outside fully encased in construction works. Having now seen it, I've got to admit, the Basilica is quite the site. While the architectural style is by no means unique, it is far bigger, grander, and more lavishly (much more) decorated than any of the other Catholic Cathedrals built in a similar style. The vast colonnaded plaza out front only adds to the already awe-inspiring ambiance...

The Vatican also houses a vast and diverse art collection - the Popes have enjoyed the good life over the years... and eventually one of them thought to turn their personal collection into a museum (and charge a steep admission fee, of course). The steep admission fee has never done much to discourage visitors, and I had planned to see the Sistine Chapel and the Musei Vaticani back in '99, but I was confronted with a threesome of obstacles, which put together, were too much to overcome: it was 30-some degrees (Celsius), the line stretched for at least three hours, and you had to wear long pants to enter...

This is where things change, but subtly. You see, the line is still there, in all of its eternal glory - in fact, I think it stretches almost precisely as far as it did eleven years ago. It's still hot, and you still have to wear long pants. But this time, I had a secret weapon (sort of like holy water, only more useful and technologically advanced) - I was staying at a hostel, the Vatican had embraced the word of the internet, and the hostel showed me how to order a ticket online. For an extra 4 Euro, you get assigned a time, show up at the Vatican at roughly that time, walk past the line, keep walking - it's a long line, walk some more, finally get to the front... "Excuse me sir, I have this ticket?" "Oh, sure go right in - this way!" That was, far and a way, the best 4 Euro I have spent in my entire life!

Oh, and the Vatican museums themselves... It's not just the Sistine Chapel (as I thought going in) - it's so very, very much more: room after room of paintings, sculpture, decorations, archaeological finds, and more. They are hard to describe, honestly, but suffice to say, the collection rivals the finest art exhibits you will find in the Louvre, in Florence, in London... The Egyptian wing may have an arguably finer collection of artifacts than the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (certainly better presented). The works by all the Italian masters are here - the decorations by Michelangelo and the Bernini's statues all immediately jump out at you. And all it takes is standing in line for three and a half hours ... or 4 Euro. Thank you, Hotello di Roma!

The Sistine Chapel. No, you are not allowed to take pictures in here, but everybody else was doing it...

One of the more interesting exhibits they have is a large section of modern religious art. I'm surprised at the mild oxymoron of the term 'modern religious' art, as well as the fact that the Vatican would deign to recognize the existence of such an art form...

The rest of Rome, I found more or less unchanged. It's busy, and vibrant; it's lacking in underground public transportation options, but it isn't lacking in Italians lounging about, cruising around on their Vespas at precarious speeds, not doing much of anything productive. There are ancient sites to see just about anywhere you look, and there's shops offering memorabilia from said sites indeed everywhere you look. Oh, and the food's excellent!

Piazza Navona, with a large Bernini sculpture decorating the fountain

It is called the city of fountains... and the Trevi fountain remains one of the stars

The Spanish Steps, at Piazza di Spagna, are most certainly home to more tourists than steps

Leaving Rome after three days, I was looking to fill in another gap in my earlier Italian itinerary: Pisa, and its precariously leaning tower. Last time I've been to Pisa, I had just enough time to change trains at the station - now I was stopping here for day. Pisa was, apparently, somewhat of your basic Italian backwater town for most of its history - a Cathedral was eventually built, it burned down, it was re-built; a bell tower was added... and then the Tower began to fall over. Slowly. Very slowly - slowly enough for the citizens of Pisa to stabilize it and turn it into a world famous attraction. Today, the tower (which, by the way, is quite remarkable in appearance, aside from the unhealthy lean) continues to stand askew, but it has been stabilized, the crumbling columns have been replaced, and the gradual falling has ceased, suspending the tower in its slightly askew state.

I knew most of the above before ever getting to Pisa. What I learned in Pisa is that there's more to it than just the Tower - there's a whole Piazza del Duomo: a picture-perfect plaza housing the Cathedral. It has rightfully gained the majority of its fame and notoriety for the precariously leaning tower, but the Duomo itself, along with the adjoining Campo dei Miracoli make for a remarkable medieval Italian scene in their own right.

Look - the Tower, it leans! I wasn't actually expecting the Tower to be as big as it is. I don't know why, but somehow I pictured it to be smaller. In reality, it's rather massive - easily visible along the streets before you arrive at the Piazza. The angle of the lean is also far more pronounced than I imagined

The Duomo and the Campo dei Miracoli - the other major characters of the Piazza

Honestly, there's not a whole lot else to see in the town of Pisa, and what you do see doesn't quite stack up to the prime attractions, but the Chiesa di Santa Maria Della Spina on the riverbank is worth a visit

Further noteworthy Pisa: the Nigerian mafia has followed the trail of tourists up here. In Rome they seemed to specialize in cheap umbrellas, crappy sun glasses (and they swap displays of one for the other with remarkable speed and efficiency depending on the conditions overhead), and souvenirs, which are both cheap and crappy. In Pisa, they assault the tourists with offers of Rolexes... and crappy souvenirs. I can't imagine why anyone would want to own a fake Rolex, no matter the price, but I did see someone negotiating on a purchase... people have weird tastes, obviously...

The sites of Pisa really don't need more than two, maybe three hours, so after snapping a few pictures of the Duomo and ducking the 'Rolex' salesmen, I had more than enough time to get back to the hostel and settle in to watch the final qualifying round game of Italy's national team at the World Cup, along with the Italians there. Italy played Slovakia. They had played rather uninspired football previously, so they needed a win. The Slovakians seemed unimpressed. The Italian that I was watching with, seemed despondent (and more than a little cynical) when their team was looking lethargic, down 2-1 deep into the second half. Then Italy scored a goal to tie it up! The whole street erupted in a wild, spontaneous celebration. They appeared intent to teach the South Africans just how to properly use a vuvuzelas in a time of football induced ecstasy... And then the referee ruled it a no goal (offsides - replays confirmed), and we settled into a sort of a dull stupor. In the end, Italy, a 3-2 loser to Slovakia, finished dead last in its group and failed to advance past the group stage for the first time in some 30 years. I don't speak Italian, but I could still tell that even the TV announcers sounded depressed... It could've been worse, I thought - after all, the French not only failed to advance past the group stage, but their team outright mutinied against the coach. The Italians didn't seem particularly encouraged by this neighborly comparison - I heard more about how the National Team's coach had refused to select the Italy's two top players for the squad - one for getting into an altercation with the coach's son, the other for being black... It was a decidedly depressed country on this day!

A Rugby Player and his Salad

2010-07-08T15:17:00.000-07:00

As I was wandering, somewhat aimlessly, around the city of Bristol, I came upon the St Nicholas Farmer's Market. To add to the excitement, 'Street Market Chefs' (a British cooking network-type show, I presume) was filming an episode at the market. I hung around to watch and was rewarded with the amusing image above - the show's celebrity guest, whom the audience around me identified as a former rugby player, doing a taste test for the Street Market Chefs - of course, the meal of the day was a portobellini salad, and while, I admit, it's possible that the man may have discovered the joys of salads in his post-playing days, he sure doesn't look like he'd ever come anywhere near a salad while he was a player! Amanda Lamb, a British television pseudo-celebrity also in the picture... I never caught the rugby player's name.

Later that evening, it was the World Cup semifinals - Spain vs. Germany, while I was, of course, couch-surfing with Patricia and Christian (the two on the right) - she's Spanish, while he's German! My excitement was partly diminished when it turned out that Christian didn't really care about football all that much, so we all proceeded to cheer for Spain.

Diesel Power!

2010-07-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

I must have actually driven a diesel vehicle before at some point. It obviously didn't leave much of a mark, since the only diesel experience I can think of was filling the mini up with Gazole (which I now know is French for diesel, not gasoline!) and learning that that was a rather expensive error to make. That's all changed now though - I'm going to remember this diesel!

I had decided I was going to drive through the French countryside, the Alps, and the Col de Turini (the 'best world's best driving road,' according to Top Gear) on the way up to Geneva. I would have liked a convertible for the trip, in fact I would have very dearly liked the convertible BMW that I used to own, but compromises have to be made, so I ended up with a Renault Megane, a fine sporty little French car, powered by a diesel engine. I called her Megan.

Megan[e] and I in Southern France

I left Montpellier and drove off towards Millau to see the giant bridge. Pretty soon, I was discovering just what we are missing in the States, where we don't have any of these sporty little diesels. It was a six-speed transmission, but in any gear, if you want to accelerate to pass, you just step on the gas, and the car takes off! I was mesmerized... I also had trouble keeping up with the speed limits... On occasion, I did glance at my gas gauge, soon discovering that it was refusing to change. A hundred kilometers passed by, it stubbornly showed the gas tank full. Damn, these things really do get good mileage... Another hundred kilometers passed by - still a full tank of gas! It must be broken!? Fifty K more - hot damn, we are down to 7/8ths! So it works then... this engine just doesn't use any fuel. That's a nice sidebar, of course, but I was here for the roads! I quickly ducked off the Autoroute after the Viaduc and headed deeper into the countryside along a route my map called Gorges du Tarn. True to its name, the road winds through mountains and a river bed following the gorge - the views it offers are spectacular, with little French towns dotting the side of the road, centuries-old church steeples punctuating the skyline at regular intervals. I started to think of what it could be reminding me of, and quickly came up with Albania: the very best roads across the empty deserted (but very similarly green) mountains in that long-lost European country were a lot like the roads here... well maybe the worst stretches of road here, in the South of France. And minus all the churches, of course...

Viaduc de Millau

The road along the Gorges du Tarn

Bright, pretty sunsets above the French countryside, shortly before I had popped into a fancy roadside winery/restaurant for dinner - tres Francaise!

But the drive across the Gorges du Tarn was, as it turned out, rather tame. Picturesque, but very tame indeed. The roads are fairly straight, and the elevation more or less constant. The real star of the driving show was to be Col de Turini, and that's where I headed the following morning. First, I struggled for an hour looking for my hostel in Nice, after arriving at two in the morning, without a map. An hour later, I was sound asleep though, looking forward to making Megan[e] conquer the Alps!

Center of Nice - Quai des Etats-Unis. Nice seemed a lovely sea-side resort town, where I would have liked to have spent more time - I have had more than one person tell me it was their favorite place in Europe... This wasn't in the cards this time through though as I was back on the road shortly after 11. I suppose I'll have to come back.

Oh, they are funny with their 'Do not Enter' signs here in Nice!

So, on I went, driving to the very last exit before the Italian border, then turning off onto a minor road winding up into the hills towards the town of Sospel. Here the road become tinier, windier, and devoid of traffic. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins. I pushed the car up into the rarefied heights of the Alps. I pushed it fairly aggressively in fact; pretty soon, my arms and legs were getting soar from all the shifting - I loved every last second of it! Shortly after leaving Sospel (around hairpin #7 - yes, I kept count), the road arrived at a little church sitting atop a hill. I was a bit reluctant to leave the road, but quite exhilarated to jog up the stairs to get a look at Notre Dame de la Menour and catch a glimpse of the twists and turns I'd conquered leading up to it!

That's my road!

This is called a 'hairpin' turn, mom - it's when the road makes a full 180 degree turn in direction - usually while climbing up or down the mountain

Notre Dame de la Menour, on a mountainside in the middle of nowhere

Jesus still suffering - clearly the man didn't drive up here!

Around hairpin #27, I arrived at the village of Col de Turini - the high point of this section of road. Most other people on the road, not that were many, were German bikers

Little tunnels carved into the rock, as I was heading down

French towns in the High Alps - I believe this was Saint-Martin-Vesubie

At hairpin #40, the Col De Turini section was finished and I stopped for lunch. I figured I could stop counting hairpins at this point, since I was switching to a fairly straight road towards Jausiers. At least my map showed the next section of the road as being fairly straight, on the way up towards Geneva - I drove on, the road was heading up all right - in fact, this "fairly straight road" turned out to be Route de la Bonette - the highest road in Europe, traversing a 2,802 meter pass. It was windy, and twisty, and incredibly scenic. Adrenaline remained in high gear. The scenery now had some new additions - snow banks, spectacular views of the Alps in the distance, an occasional waterfall, and flocks of sheep crossing the road. The Megan[e] and I were excited! The diesel purred to life as I pushed the car up to the top of the 2,800m pass - that's only the highest elevation the road reaches, I got out and climbed the last 100 meters to the top of the peak we were passing, losing a few more degrees of temperature. Suddenly my flip flops, so perfect for the beaches in Nice, seemed a little out of place... And that was before it started to rain and hail. I returned to the car a bit soaked and with some fresh concerns about the windy, twisty road heading down the mountain, now with slicker pavement. Excitement did not, however, wane very much. Fortunately, the rain did wane, as the cloud apparently extended only to the very top of the pass, as after half an hour climbing down the hill, I was once again back to a perfectly dry road. With occasional flocks of sheep, waterfalls, authentic French/Swiss Alps houses, and slow cars that gave me regular chances to push my little diesel into over-drive past them. At one point, I [briefly] found myself behind a Porsche though - he wasn't so slow...

Not the Southern Alps, nor the Japanese Alps - these are the real thing! The ones that Hannibal somehow crossed with a bunch of elephants and without paved roads. I have no idea how they did it!

The Megan[e] blending in with the snow banks, in black and white

A couple of hours later, I was crossing from Italy back to France, this time under the Alps - via the Tunnel de Frejus. A 35km tunnel bored into the mountainside is one of the longest in the world. Speed limit in the tunnel: 70 kph - it takes a while. Cost: $35.10 Euro! In retrrospect, I would have rather skipped it, had I known that was the cost!

And here, the Alps came to an end (the adrenaline rush lived on for a couple of days though). The mini may have made me a little leery of traveling long distances by car any more, but given a good car, and fun roads, and a relatively manageable distance, driving is still an incredibly fun way to get around! But on this day, I was done - after paying a few more tolls (you can't really afford to drive around Europe anymore), I arrived in Geneva just in time to watch the streets explode in celebration after Brazil's World Cup victory over Chile. There's a few things I had imagined about the city of Geneva - crowds of Brazilians out in the streets, wildly cheering on their football team, wasn't high on the list...

Multi-lingual Rescue Operations

2010-07-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

So, there I was enjoying the Switzerland the way it was meant to be enjoyed - climbing up a windy, twisty path in the Alps with a big blue glacier looking down on me invitingly.

That's the glacier!

Lynn and I had just spent an hour hiking to get up here, but she had to turn back at this point, hoping to catch an earlier bus and get back to Geneva in time to take Loki out for a walk (yes, Lynn named her dog after the Norse God of mischief). I kept going, the path quicly turned twisty, windy, narrow, and steeply climbing. I felt this was just fine - I was, in fact, pretty excited about the whole thing. I was just upset that I wouldn't have time to reach the ridge above me and get a glimpse of Mont Blanc... but you can't have everything. Regardless, the path I was happy with. Turns out, not everyone shared in my excitment - the first sign of trouble was when I ran into a Spanish couple hurrying down the mountain and asking me [in Spanish] how far it was to anything down below. My brain initially refused to accept the situation and had to do a double-take - they are not talking to me in French, but I understand, must be English, right? No, don't understand that well - oh, right, Spanish... There's a little restaurant a little ways down below - you can probably get there in twenty minutes, treinta tops! What's going on? Turned out, a little ways up above there was a woman who had broken her leg. I considered the path we were climbing and decided this didn't seem entirely unexpected, unfortunate nonetheless.

By this point, I couldn't climb much further up the mountain anyway if I were to make the last bus back to Martingy, so I settled for simply going up to investigate. I discovered two women, both probably in their 40's or maybe early 50's - one in seemingly good spirits, but with a broken ankle, which was starting to swell; the other seeming a bit frazzled. We chatted a bit - I started with Spanish, they turned out to not be Spanish. Didn't speak any English either, so we were stuck with French - the chatting was rather limited. The frazzled one was on the phone with someone trying to explain where we were - I produced a map and pointed roughly to our location. It didn't seem to help the other end of the line all that much - I wished I knew more French. By now, I figured friends or family, not rescue personnel, had to be on the other end of the line - we started talking about trying to make it down the mountain. I offered that I'd be perfectly happy to take her pack down - I actually think that's all she had really wanted, but through some combination of misunderstandings and my trying to help, we decided to see if she could make it down to the hut-restaurant below herself as well. We tried to come up with some sort of a workable way of getting down without putting any weight on the broken foot, which was a challenge, since the path was tiny, twisty, and steep. Eventually we settled on slow progress with me holding the woman around the waist, while she hopped along on one foot.

By now, I was starting to give up on the bus, figuring I could always hitch-hike my way down to the train station at the bottom of the mountain, so I could play Good Samaritan for a while - maybe learn how to say 'broken ankle' in French. So, we hopped for a while. Not entirely surprisingly, it turned out to be fairly tiring for both of us - we took a break. The frazzled one was worried too. We chatted - they asked about my bus. I, in turn, asked if they had a car taking them down the mountain? No, they were staying somewhere in the mountains and had some sort of a car arrangement (that I wasn't entirely clear on), that would pick them up, if and when they made it down the mountain. Or maybe, they'd send a helicopter... Either way, I should probably go and catch my bus... and see what the Spanish had managed to accomplish down at the hut?

Fine... after a few more assurances of calm and safety, I grabbed her pack, and took off down the mountain. Well, the first thing I actually did was trip myself and watched a rock accelerate at an alarmingly high speed towards my face, but I've still got hands for occasions such as these, so I came away largely unscathed. And proceeded down the mountain, a little more carefully this time. The Spanish were, in fact, waiting down at the bottom of the hill. I tried switching from French to Spanish to explain to them what I had learned, but my brain refused to process language switches quite that quickly - fortunately, they now had somebody that spoke English with them. My brain acquiesced to processing English. A few minutes later, Spanish became acceptable too, so I learned that the Spanish were from Tenerife, and lo and behold, they had been up in the Swiss Alps just last year too, when she had also broken her leg - and had to be airlifted out by helicopter... interesting... Anyway, I headed on down towards my bus, while the English speaker, whom I gathered to be some sort of a guide, hastened up the hill to try and help the two women get down. The people at the restaurant had apparently just shrugged their shoulders at the report of the injury, so a rescue team was probably not imminent. The Swiss seem pretty calm and stoic...

Anyway, I headed down the mountain, reflecting that all I was missing at that point was somebody speaking to me in Russian about what had happened. I've no idea what happened in the end, but from where I had left them, getting down to the little restaurant shouldn't have been all that difficult with the help of the guide. And from the restaurant, they could probably get a stretcher, so she'd be fine, presumably - just a memorable day in the mountains! Probably not even a helicopter ride to add to the excitement... Supposedly, a doctor was coming to see them wherever it was that they were staying.

As for the Alps!

The Trient Glacier stretches for 4.3km in the Mont Blanc Massif, flanked by a pair of snow-capped peaks

I've been to the Southern Alps in New Zealand, and the Japanese Alps in, well, Japan - finally time to see the originals!

Stream of snow-melt heading down from the glacier

Just wouldn't be Switzerland without cows grazing in the mountains, cow-bells ringing

Switzerland, I've discovered, is also rather fond of some utterly random sculpture, like this Minatour in the middle of Martingy

Bienvenue a Paris!

2010-07-06T08:29:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the City of Lights! The Eiffel Tower presiding over in the middle of the night

Or would you prefer a more artsy black and white version of the tower?

How about an artist's rendition of the Tower from the Musee Pompidou?

I like Paris...

Ah the Catholic Church...

2010-07-06T08:13:00.001-07:00

Yes, there are a few things that I understand - for instance:

- the Catholic Church, just like most other religious institutions is constantly competing to win (and keep) the souls (and wallets) of the common man, and building giant, imposing religious structures has always been a sure fire way of proving to the populace that your deity's the most awesomest

- even so, the church itself didn't actually have to build all the awe-inspiring churches and cathedrals that you find scattered all over Europe; lots of them got built by rich nobles, hoping to curry favor from the church. In this life or the next.

I understand all that, but still, sometimes it's just a bit of overkill. Take the French city of Lyon: it's got a nice, beautiful, and appropriately imposing Cathedral:

The Cathedral St-Jean - you'd think it ought to really be enough to convince most mortal commoners that your deity is, in fact, the awesomest

Some beautiful stained glass windows inside too

But here, in Lyon, that was apparently deemed insufficient. Maybe they were feeling a little threatened by all the Protestants across the border in nearby Swiss Geneva. Or maybe the nobles here just had more than their fair share of sins to atone for. Whatever the reason, enough people felt that the Cathedral just wasn't doing its job, and felt obliged to erect a second gigantic church, on a hill directly above the Cathedral St-Jean, and overlooking the entire city of Lyon:

Overkill? Probably... But the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière is certainly a beautiful piece of art in its own right

Equipped with a crypt, bigger than most churches

And a Chapel standing next door - the Virgin Mary guards the city from her perch - she's credited with saving Lyon from both the plague in the 17th century and the Prussians in the 19th century...

Was in necessary? Was the second church the difference between losing dozens of souls (and wallets) to Calvin and his Swiss Protestants? Who knows, but for now, Lyon has a pair of amazing churches. I might not understand the Catholic Church, but it's a good setup for the tourism industry!

Defcon III

2010-07-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

Also known as, fuck off, my dear Mr. 江婷! You probably aren't actually reading though... and it isn't really your fault, you are getting paid by people like the ones here. People who want to increase the ranking of their site among Google search results by artificially increasing the number of sites on the internet that link to their [useless] sites. In the end, it just becomes spam on blogs, when these people hire some Chinese shmuck, like our Dear Mr. 江婷 (who's probably a perfectly nice fellow, when he's not spamming my blog!) to post spam comments on blogs in order to artificially create links to their sites on the internet...

Since I am, however, sick of deleting these comments as soon as they show up, I've turned on comment moderation. This means if you want to leave a comment, it'll be sent to me for review first, before showing up on the blog. There have not been a whole lot of non-spam comments on the blog recently, so it shouldn't affect much, but should you run into this, don't be surprised! And feel free to send angry spam mail to Dear Mr. 江婷, if you like.

That's a mighty big bridge you've got there!

2010-07-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

Viaduc de Millau

This is the Millau Viaduct, a 400+ million Euro project in the South of France completed fairly recently, in December 2004. It's a gigantic bridge, as you can probably appreciate, spanning the valley above the town of Millau. Several records were set over the course of design and construction, it's the tallest bridge in the world (taller than the Eiffel Tower), and has highest support pillar - yeah, somebody does keep track of such things... apparently! The entire project only took about three years from start to finish too, which seems quite impressive. Especially here in France, where the work week is only 35 hours anyway, and that's if we are not on strike that week!

The cool thing about this bridge though is that in addition to the functional part of alleviating traffic in the valley, it's also actually quite a picturesque site to look at... And on that note, some other memorable bridges around the world:

The Coolest (also the Oldest, actually) - the Forth Bridge outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Looking better than ever at night

The Best - San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Who knows if I'm biased or not, but it's hard not to love the looks of this bridge!

The Highest: Viaducto de Polvorilla - a railroad bridge outside of Salta, Argentina, the base is at an altitude of 4,200 meters above sea level

The most, Australian? Sydney's Harbor Bridge, yes it gets bonus points in this 'competition' for having the Sydney Opera House right beside it, life's not fair!

The Most Old School - for all its old world flare, London's Tower Bridge was actually constructed some thirty years later than the Forth Bridge above. I prefer the more modern-looking types, but it's surely quite the famous bridge

Tongariro Crossing, New Zealand - nope, I'm not picking on New Zealand here, I really did very much like these little bridges in the Tongariro National Park of New Zealand. Carrying capacity: one 'tramper,' a.k.a. hiker in the rest of the world.

Some views of the Brooklyn Bridge coming in a couple of weeks, I hope!

We must tear it down, before we build it back up!

2010-06-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

While I'm prancing all around Egypt and Israel, taking trains, boats, buses, and planes, you've been quietly wondering - say, I sure would like to know what ever happened to the mini? Well, never fear, we have an update! Gunnar, back in Seattle, is now fully in charge of running the affairs of the mini. First step of the process is to tear everything that was still left on the car apart (he reports finding even more rust than originally expected, and a bit of dust whose origins are likely Mongolia, or a country whose name ends in stan). Next step will be to put it all back together using new, not-yet-rusted parts and build it up to be better than it had been ever before! And finally, he'll get rid of the fluorescent color... That's all going to take a while, a long while, in the mean time, Step 1:

All that's left is the shell! And the fluorescent yellow...

Hey, didn't there use to be an engine in there?

Dust of ill-defined origins

Amazing Egypt *

2010-06-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, I've been a little hard on Egypt recently. And it probably deserved it too, but I should give [some] credit where [some] credit is due. So, Egypt... the ancient land of Pyramids, the land of amazing Arabic architecture, the land of magical stretches of sand lining the Red Sea.

Starting from the beginning, Irina and I crossed over from Israel and headed straight for the beach town of Dahab. Dahab was easily my favorite spot in Egypt - it's still Egypt, with all the negative connotations that carries in my mind, but, at least, this is a place where backpackers have always come, and while it's all grown up now (with a variety of all-inclusive resorts - we stayed at one of these), the few backpackers that still come to Egypt, do still come here, which gives the place a much more easy going vibe than anywhere else in this country. And then, there's the gorgeous sandy beaches ... it's just a beautiful place to relax for a few days. To wit:

Dahab means 'Golden' in Arabic - the beautiful golden beaches of Dahab, Egypt...

Inside of the Coralia Resort. Definite bonus points for atmosphere!

Zizo! I can't remember what it was that Irina called his position at the resort, but he was definitely in charge of keeping the guests entertained, and he certainly did a great job of it.

Irina in white, meet Irina in black... It's a small world, and there's lots of Russian tourists all over Sinai, some of them named Irina

Just our Irina, being one with the beach

Next stop was Sharm el-Sheikh. I'm certainly not like most other tourists (in my defense, I was slowly winning Irina over to my side), but while millions of tourists descend upon Sharm every year and seem to absolutely love it, I could best describe it as an abomination. An absolute abomination filled with too many people, so many in fact that the locals have long ago become terribly, horribly jaded, making them even more incredibly unpleasant to deal with, than your average Egyptian purveyor of crappy merchandise. And the place looks like an over-grown shopping mall, straight out of the American suburbs, with a bit more neon and loud music thrown in. Subtle, it is not. Over-priced, it is... And yet people seem to love it - I don't really understand people. Anyway, the only worthwhile thing we did here was a camel ride, but I'm punishing Sharm el-Sheikh anyway by not including any pictures, so moving on:

Cairo! Cairo is everything that is right and everything that is wrong with Egypt. Cairo is the home of the Pyramids, the magnificent and mind-bending structures that are over 5,000 years old!

trivia time:
Q: the Great Pyramid of Khufu was 146 meters tall when construction was completed in 2570 BC. When was the first building constructed that was taller than this Pyramid?

A. 1889, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which reached 324m in height. Being in Egypt, you note that our civilization might really not have advanced all that much in the past 5,000 years!

The ancient (well, not that ancient, compared to the Pyramids) mosques are also here, and Christian churches dating back to the times of Jesus. It's the market hub of Egypt, where you can buy anything, and somebody will always be trying to sell you something, usually something you don't actually want. And then there's the streets of Cairo... I'm glad they have a subway system! The traffic is nothing short of amazing - the way these people drive is hard to even describe, but suffice to say that you are taking your life into your own hands every time you try to cross the road. But, we are not focusing on all that right now, today, we are highlighting 'amazing Egypt,' so:

The Great Pyramids of Giza!

The Sphinx stoically guards the Pyramids

You are not supposed to take pictures inside the Pyramids... But I did anyway - take that, Egypt!

Baby Sphinx in nearby Memphis

The Mosque of Mohammed Ali in Cairo

A beautiful courtyard lies behind the Mosque

The Al Azhar Mosque, "the mosque of the most resplendent", the oldest Mosque in Cairo - construction began in 970. Impressive. They tried to make a God-fearing woman out of Irina before letting us enter, can't guarantee it worked.

Man reading the Qur'an in the courtyard of the mosque

Cairo was Irina's last stop - I escorted her to the airport, she took off for her long flight back to the real world, I remained in Egypt. If you've been reading my last few blog posts, that may have been somewhat of a mistake in the grand scheme of things, but let's not forget the amazing, there were certainly more things to see in this country. So, I boarded a 'tourist train' down to Luxor and arrived the following morning, quite comfortably, which was a little surprising. The 'tourist train' is actually pretty good value compared to the rest of the world, but is, of course, ridiculously more expensive than the normal Egyptian trains. This would be perfectly fine with me, if I, as a tourist, wasn't restricted from taking the regular trains... But I digress, Luxor!

Luxor is up the Nile and South of Cairo. Here, you are getting into what was once the Upper Nile, which was, of course, a separate kingdom and spent a lot of time fighting the Lower Nile. And then, they moved their burial sites to the Lower Nile and built the Pyramids... Twist of fate. But most importantly, at this point, Luxor is South of Cairo! And Cairo is in Africa, and it was June, and I thought my brain was going to melt. After I left my things at the hotel and headed out towards the tombs and temples, I passed by a thermometer in the center of the city - it read a remarkable 42 degrees! Celsius! And I actually thought this was Ok. That's 107.6 degrees Fahrenheit, by the way, and this was at 10 in the morning. Now, I could have taken an air conditioned car to see Luxor. This is true, and it would have been almost comfortable. However, it would have involved talking to and negotiating with an Egyptian 'fixer' on the street, who would then proceed to drive like a maniac and somehow disappoint me in the end. I wasn't in the mood, so I rented a bicycle. And proceeded to pedal against the 42 degree heat... and rising. I drank lots of water - I thought it wasn't bad, really. Still do - my brains may have melted... Since it wasn't all that bad, I parked my bike in front of the Temple of Hatshesput and proceeded to hike over a nearby ridge to the Valley of the Kings. I drank lots more water. And I stopped in every bit of shade that I could find. It continued to be miserably hot - actually it got better on the far side of the ridge where there was some wind. When I came down into the Valley of the Kings, the locals seemed pretty impressed that I had walked over the ridge, so I'm still able to impress the populace - that's worth something, right? After wandering around the Valley of the Kings for a little while, refusing to pay for the entire admission ticket (in part because it would have involved walking all the way over to the ticket booth at the main entrance - apparently they don't expect a lot of tourists to hike the goat paths over the ridge), I proceeded to bribe a guard to let me into one of the more far flung tombs (it was pretty impressive) and promptly went back over the ridge to pick up my bike. An hour and a half later, I was back at the Nile and returning the bike back to the rental shop.

This could have been a good time to stop, go back to my hotel (AC'd!) and take a nap. However, I was determined to just spend one day in Luxor, still harboring thoughts and hopes of getting a few more days for diving on the coast), so I headed up to the Temple of Karnak instead. This temple is absolutely amazing - it's gigantic, constructed, and added to over the course of several centuries by a succession of pharaohs and featuring columns grander and thicker than any I had seen in Rome and Athens (more of the how far have we really come in the past 5,000 years?). It was also stiflingly hot at 3 in the afternoon, and most of the temple is in an open area. Very open, very sun-lit, so I sort of dragged myself through the motions of documenting what was there and proceeded to head home. The good news was that I was tired enough that ignoring the touts along the way selling whatever was perfectly easy by now - just a non-chalant No, and moving on...

The final stop on the way home was the Luxor Temple... it did seem interesting, especially since somebody had apparently decided to place a mosque right in the middle of it. I looked at it and rolled over those thoughts in my head. Then I took some pictures of the temple (and the mosque) from the outside and went back to my room for a richly deserved nap!

The Colossi of Memnon greet you at the entrance to Luxor's West Bank

Deir al-Bahri, home of the Temple of Hatshesput. View from above as I was climbing up the ridge

My friend, the guard at the tomb. No, I can't remember whose tomb it actually was - an ancient Pharaoh! The guard was a nice guy too and did his best to have me enjoy my tour of the tomb. On the down side, the man smelled horribly and didn't speak a word of English, but we were able to establish some common ground on terms like Tomba, Pharaoh, and Scarab

The Papyrus Forest of columns at the Temple of Karnak. Really, if we were able to build columns this impressive in 2,500BC, how far have we come as a civilization?

The Luxor Temple, with the Mosque strategically (if perplexingly) placed right in the middle

And finally, the last stop before my Hurghada retreat was Aswan. It's even further South and, thus even hotter. I suppose my brain was fully melted by now, so I didn't care very much. Fortunately, there's not all that much to see in Aswan proper - there's a big mosque, an even bigger Christian Church, and an even bigger yet mosque under construction... Woo-hoo! The attraction here is Abu Simbel, which is another 3 hour bus ride South, almost all the way to the border with Sudan. The thoroughly amazing thing about the Abu Simbel temples is that they were going to be lost forever when Egypt built the Great Dam on the Nile, causing the water levels up the river to rise, and threatening to flood the Temple. To prevent this, international organizations (with a little bit of Egyptian input and assistance) raised a bunch of money and proceeded to cut the entire temple into portable pieces and move the entire thing, piece by freaking piece, to a new location, 65 meters higher, and safely away from the rising waters... Say what you will about the Egyptians, but that's pretty astounding. When you actually get there, very early in the morning - the bus departs Aswan at 3AM(!) and see the temples in person, it becomes even more astounding! Clearly impressed by their abilities, the archaeologists later proceeded to move the Temple of Phillae to higher ground as well. Also impressive, especially since this temple was already flooded when they started, so part of the work had to be done under water...

The Great Temple of Ramses II, dug into the side of a mountain at Abu Simbel is simply astounding. The Pyramids are surely the greatest attraction of Egypt, but I do think this was the most memorable site.

The nearby Temple of Hathor isn't too shabby either

Lake Nasser, the largest man-made lake in the world. This surely seems like a record ripe for the taking by the Chinese - they clearly just don't know about it yet

The artwork decorating the Temple of Philae - once again, considering that this was all created several thousand years before Jesus Christ even came along, it kind of makes a lot of what we've accomplished since pale in comparison a bit

Well, and that's it, really. The other thoroughly amazing part of Egypt is the underwater life in the Red Sea, but I feel like that's been covered thoroughly enough in my earlier posts, so that's Egypt for you! On to Tunisia and Italy!

* India has a long running campaign to promote tourism with the tagline of "Amazing India." Well, Egypt and India have a lot in common - both places that have some fascinating sites to see, yet both places that I was happy to leave after some three weeks in each. The reasons are different, and I've had plenty of people tell me that they had fallen in love with each (after a long adjustment period), but tying 'Amazing Egypt' to 'Amazing India' seems all too appropriate

BOOOOOM! Goes the volcano...

2010-06-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

It starts off as a rumble of not-so-distant thunder. Then the sound quickly escalates into the roar of a jet engine at take off. By now, it has your complete attention, so you are staring at the column of fire (and, well, brimstone) that's shooting twenty or thirty feet up into the air from the top of the crater! That's Stromboli; it does this about every 20 minutes, and has been doing so for the past 40,000 years, roughly. It's a tiny little spec of an island off the coast of Sicily, which is one of the youngest, and thus most active, volcanoes in the world. But it's not real big on huge, destructive lava flows, just a column of fire every 20 minutes to entertain the tourists.

BOOOOOM! It's awesome...

Oh, Italy!

2010-06-17T14:07:00.001-07:00

Remember when you had the Roman Empire? When the only people you couldn't conquer were the ones you couldn't find? How about the Roman Catholic Church? As grand as the Roman Empire was, the church spread its influence even wider! And then what happened? Is that how the Roman Empire actually fell? When the Barbarians figured out that nobody did anything between the hours of 12 and 4 in the afternoon? Cause they sure don't these days. Can I buy a ferry ticket at 2:30? No, come back at 4. Can I get a map of Palermo, from the tourist information kiosk outside the central train station at 1? No, closed till 4. Can I find out about renting a scooter at 3:15? No, somebody'll be here some time after 4... But it sure is pretty! Which just makes you wonder - how did they build all those amazing things if nobody works during the day?

Church of Santo Domenico in Palermo, Sicily

On Egypt, Part III: the Yin and the Yang of Egypt

2010-06-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

I ended up spending a full week in Hurghada - it's not that I actually liked it, no, it was just comfortable, my hotel had AC and internet, and diving was cheap, easy, and nearby. After a couple of dyas of local dive trips though, grander things came calling, and I agreed to go South to Marsa Alam for a day of diving there; after all Marsa Alam is about as good as it gets for diving in Egypt.

Marsa Alam: so beautiful... so empty...

Sting ray on lying on the bottom in Marsa Alam

Coral Reefs, with lots of fish all around

But it is Egypt, so the trip went terribly right from the start - I was taking a bus, instead of a private car (even though I was still paying the price of a private car?), the bus was taking five hours to get there, instead of the three I'd been told, and the bus was two hours late - well, sadly, it was actually only an hour and 57 minutes late as I had set 7AM as my deadline to call the whole thing off, but the bus finally showed up at 6:57. I should have called the whole thing off... instead, I went to Marsa Alam, the Yin of Egypt came along, or the Yin of the people of Egypt is perhaps better. It's a simple pattern really, that never fails to repeat: first they overcharge you, then they proceed to under-deliver...

So, somewhere around hour five of the "three hour trip to Marsa Alam", I was sitting by a window, watching the Red Sea slowly pass by, quietly raging, and passing the time composing the scathing review of the Hurghada tourist services I was going to write (but the passing scenery was nice). Then the Yang arrived: a bunch of kids boarded the bus in Al Quesir. One of them sat down next to me at first, did not speak any English, just called me 'Habibi!' (common term of endearment, literally meaning something like 'my lovely'). A bit of re-shuffling came forth in a few minutes, and I was now sitting next to Said. Said spoke English, made fun of the other kid a little, and explained that they were all heading to the beaches around Marsa Alam to sell newspapers on the water-front. At exorbitantly inflated prices, of course. But since I had no interest in the papers, we just chatted for a bit. Said comes from Cairo, he had attended university there studying to become an accountant, but upon receiving his degree and spending six months looking for work in Cairo, gave up and came out to the coast and sell papers by day and work at a restaurant by evening. I'm sure I would have hated him were he to approach me on the beach and try to sell me yesterday's paper for ten times its cost, but here on the bus, where he wasn't trying to make a sale, he was a genuinely nice kid, and fun to talk to. He explained about the lack of jobs in Cairo, his nine years of studying English which, in reality, does not appear to help much in the job search, and how he liked the Russian girls because they were happy to talk to him, even though he was a mere paper boy - the British, on the other hand, were all stuck up and just thumbed their noses at him... Consequently, his collection of girlfriends presently included two in Russia, one in Switzerland, and an object of affection here in Egypt, who was apparently marrying another, richer, man... I wished him the best of luck with the Russians... The Yang of Egyptians: those exceedingly rare moments when you can have a conversation with an Egyptian man, who is actually not trying to sell you something.

The Yin survived and prospered, of course, as the great under-delivery of Marsa Alam continued right on course when I finally arrived - we were going shore diving, instead of the boat diving I had been promised (shore diving is an interesting experience to try, but is not what I had in mind when agreeing to get on a bus at 5 in the morning... which left at 7. Oh wait, 6:57 actually!) The shore diving, naturally, reduced my desires down to just two dives, instead of the three I thought I was going to be doing, but poor Imad was incredulous that I wanted to pay less for my two dives than I had originally agreed to pay for three. By now, I just laughed at him, fairly openly. His dive master had let the normal prices slip beforehand, so I was paying double anyway. The five hour bus journey back turned into an hour and a half by bus followed by two hours in the back of a cramped ancient Peugeot, whose driver seemed intent to kill us all. I did get a measure of revenge the next day when I yelled at Ali, my fixer, and got him to return a quarter of what I had paid for my disappointing experience. I'm not entirely sure where exactly to place Ali on the Yin/Yang scale as he actually seemed a reasonable fellow, and did come through with both my hotel and the diving in Hurghada. And I did watch him set up the Marsa Alam trip with another 'associate', who didn't looked so reasonable, or trustworthy, actually he had more of a look of a used car salesman. An exceedingly sleazy one at that. I later found him to be utterly incredulous that I had chosen to pay less for my two dives than what had been previously agreed upon as the price for three dives. He may have presented it in somewhat more convoluted terms... Regardless, whether my man Ali really was getting screwed himself or if he was just trying to re-assign blame to make me feel better, getting some of my money back was a major victory (and a minor financial one), especially as that's normally an outright impossible proposition here in Egypt.

On the way back in the evening: Egypt's listening... Somewhat ironic actually - the censorship turns out to be much stricter in Tunisia

So, I filed this whole experience away... Somewhere under 'if you found a place in Egypt that doesn't offend you much, like Hurghada, just stick with it already!' Following that line of reasoning, I promptly decided to skip Alexandria, since I was by now sure that it would be disappointing and frustrating and caught the bus straight to Cairo to get to the airport. Yin and Yang came along for the ride. First up to bat: Yin. The bus is 'scheduled' (as much as schedules exist in this country) for 3 in the afternoon. I arrived at around 2:20 - I didn't have much to do anyway. The bus showed up at about 2:45 and ... promptly left at 2:50. An Egyptian bus might leave two hours later than scheduled, or 10 minutes earlier - plan accordingly, and by that I mean, try not to have any plans riding on the bus arriving (or departing) anywhere at any prescribed time.

But, alas, the bus didn't actually leave Hurghada, he left the bus station, circled through the city to the bus depot, dropped us off and took off, with some vague promises to come back 'shortly'. In the hour that passed, I had time to make friends with the Yang - I met Hany, an Egyptian now working at a hotel in Dubai, but formerly a tour leader in Egypt. An interesting guy to talk to - spoke perfectly good English and was also frustrated with the unreliability of the Egyptian buses. If anybody's going to Dubai (and I certainly would like to some day...), I can hook you up with some help! Hany also, of course, has a Russian girlfriend - in fact, he's on to his second one. But this one is all of 21 years old, so he didn't particularly trust her.

So, Hany, the Yang of Egypt - the man was smart, knowledgeable, easy to talk to, and shared most of my frustrations about the place. He didn't prove to be entirely without some local mis-judgments though, as we talked about car prices in Egypt. Apparently, a Toyota here costs slightly less than it does in the States. But 75,000 Pounds is much more difficult to come by for an Egyptian than the equivalent $13,500 is for an American, he countered. Quite true, I offered, but do you expect Toyota to sell cars at a loss in Egypt out of compassion for the impoverished people of the country? He was definitely still the Yang though - we chatted, he helped me try and figure out where to go upon arriving in Cairo. This was nice... then the bus finally came back: Yin happens... how much is a ticket to Cairo, I had inquired (more than once). Well, prices in Egypt are never posted - it's a little harder to over-charge tourists if you actually post prices, you see - so I first happened to ask my sleazy car salesman. He told my 75 Pounds, I assumed he was lying, just on the off-chance that I would actually ask him to get me the ticket. I figured I'd rather walk to Cairo than ask for his help, but I digress. He was, of course, lying - I asked the ticket office, they said 55 Pounds. I asked Hany, he too said 55. I gave 70 pounds. I got five in change. I complained - Hany translated. The man matter of factly stated that the tourist price was 65 Pounds. I declared Bullshit, Hany apologized, the ticket seller walked away. I figured I had a better shot at getting one of his teeth than getting any money back. Yin happens, you are in the wrong country to be crying over 10 pounds (almost $2 - pick your battles!). The bus approached Cairo, the Yin percolated on board... finally deciding to demonstrate that it's an equal opportunity affliction and can haunt the locals too (especially the ones who stray from the true path of robbing tourists... with a smile): you see, Hany's parents lived not far from the airport. The airport wasn't on the way, but there was a convenient spot along the way for him to get dropped off. And since it wasn't all that far from the airport, I was going to get off there as well, and my taxi to the airport would be cheaper than one from downtown Cairo. Would have been, I should say, as this was an excellent plan, of course, and Hany shared it with the driver, in fluent Egyptian Arabic. The driver signaled his approval. We arrived in downtown Cairo... Remember the smiling kid in Hurghada with the apparent learning disability? The driver probably had the same condition... It's called the Yin of Egypt.

To summarize: Egypt has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to world class attractions - from the ancient temples and Pyramids of Giza, Luxor, and Aswan, to the dynamic cities like Cairo, Alexandria, and (for some) Sharm el-Sheikh, to natural wonders like the Red Sea, the Nile, and the vast deserts. It is absolutely worth visiting. Egypt also has some really nice people. These people, unfortunately, can be hard to find. The vast majority of the people are greedy, lying, unscrupulous bastards, who have heard their politicians talk about the difficult economic conditions of the country (likely caused by the same greedy and unscrupulous people never paying any taxes) long enough to feel it is their absolute right (and responsibility) to extort money from the tourists who come anywhere near them. And if you don't choose to come near them, they will come chase after you. If you ask my advice, I'd just say reward them for their behavior by staying away, but if you do decide to go anyway - the place does have all those amazing attractions after all - take a tour! It will, of course, over-charge and under-deliver too, but at least they'll take care of all the negotiating for you, so you'll get ripped just that one time when you buy the package ticket, and when your bus will be delayed for an hour for no good reason whatsoever (and yes, it will be), you'll have someone to yell at!

The Great Pyramid of Khufu - Giza, Egypt

I'm so excited, my pants are going to split at the seams in three... two... one... now!

The Mosque of Mohammmed Ali (no, not the American boxer!) - Cairo, Egypt

The forest of columns at the Temples of Karnak - Luxor Egypt. To think that all these massive things were built nearly five thousand years ago absolutely blows your mind!

The Great Temple of Ramses II in Abu Simbel

Larger Scale: the Yin and Yang of Northern Africa.

Egypt threw one final piece of smelly Yin my way on my way out, when my flight to Tunis was delayed from 9:30PM to 2:30AM, but five extra hours weren't enough - we finally left another hour later. I could blame TunisAir, the Tunisian airline, but I think it's Egypt's fault! And, eventually, leave we did! And after a couple of hours, we had landed in Tunisia. And yes, of course, Egypt was still being very fresh in my mind, but Tunisia seemed like such an amazing breath of fresh air! Prices are posted, the people are helpful (without expecting a tip in return for their help), the buses are easy to navigate. There is no army of angry, foul-smelling cab drivers offering their services in place of the bus that is "no longer running." People do come up on the street trying to sell something, but when you just say 'No, Thanks,' they actually leave you alone... And every conversation doesn't start with 'Where you come from?' Better yet, the locals go to all the same places that the tourists go, which, keeps the prices in check (helps that they are posted too). I've also met some wonderful people here in Tunis, after finally deciding to give CouchSurfing a chance - they spent a large chunk of their Sunday showing me around the city. CouchSurfing, for the un-initiated, is a website that connects people with couches with other people that want to spend a night or two sleeping on said couches - it's like a community thing. Everybody gets reviews, both the hosts and the surfers, so you, generally, try to not stay with people who get described as rapists and murderers. I'd never used the service myself before, but I've met many a traveler that swears by it - a free place to stay, and you meet interesting local people who are more than happy to show you around their town, time permitting, or at least tell you what to do. Then Irina and I got a place for the night at the Kibbutz on the Dead Sea using CouchSurfing (which worked out incredibly well), so I was ready to give it a try myself, and so far, I'm extremely pleased with the outcome!

But this place does quite well as the Yang to Egypt's Yin of Africa in its own right. It's cleaner, it's greener, it's quieter, it's calmer. The traffic isn't as horrendous as Cairo's; the attractions are better preserved; the people have some understanding of the concept of a queue. The attractions (the ruins of ancient Carthage and the beautifully preserved old city of Sidi Bou Said) might not be quite on the world-class, 7 wonders of the world, par of Egypt, but I've enjoyed the experience of seeing them so much more, that I do very much want to some day return to Tunisia to see the rest of the place. Egypt, on the other hand, the Yin of Africa, remains as a definite 'maybe... if I run out of other places to see.' And if you'd like a haute-couture all-inclusive beach resort vacation? Well, Tunisia has plenty of those on the Mediterranean coast as well.

Mohamed, Nes, Ossuama, and myself at the amphitheater at the ruins of ancient Carthage. Mohamed not quite timing the wait time on his camera correctly...

More ruins of Carthage, and Mediterranean in the background. Nes striking a pose in the foreground

Sidi Abu Said, where there is a law that all the houses must be blue and the decorations must all be in this very shade of blue. The result is gorgeous!

Panoramic view from the top of the hill at Side Abu Said

Central Tunis in the distance

The Clock Tower in Central Tunis as dusk gathers

Mohamed's in art school, takes some great pictures, and can do some fun things with Photoshop