The road more or less traveled

Around the end of the nineteenth century, a tourist from the United States visited the famous Polish rabbi Hafez Hayyim. He was astonished to see that the rabbi's home was just a simple room filled with books. The only furniture was a table and a bench.
"Rabbi, where is your furniture?" asked the tourist.
"Where is yours?" replied Hafez.
"Mine? But I'm only a visitor here."
"So am I," said the rabbi.

This entry is dedicated to my fellow-travelers, whether your mode of transport is plane, boat or mind. I consider 'traveler' to be an inclusive category, for we all share the same mortal journey from cradle to grave. And we are all on board what Bucky Fuller called, 'The Great Spaceship Earth.'

This will be my last writing from Thailand, at least for the immediate future. Fickle finger of fate not withstanding, I fly out of Bangkok International in four days.
In a previous entry I covered the topic of teaching English in Thailand. Now, as my pending departure looms, I would like to address this Country as a travel destination. Well, actually, that's really just a segway into the topic of travel in general. And, o.k. I admit it, that in turn is a segway to more philospophical meanderings.
This particular sojourn has lasted just over one year, although I have been here several times for shorter journeys. I find myself drawn by the land, the people, and the travel-friendly mix of adventure, (relative) comfort, and economic feasibility.
The land is varied, which suits the unpredictable range of my inclinations. Basically, in the north there are jungles and mountains. In the south there are islands and tropical paradises. If I wish to trek through lush folilage, past waterfalls, among elephants and hill tribe villages; I opt for the former. If I wish to lay in the sun, swim in turquoise waters, and just generally chill out; then I land in Bangkok and head south. The bordering Countries are also a lure. Within a day and for under 15 dollars, you can be at the border of Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar.
The people are an even greater attraction for me. I find the Thais to be a beautiful race, both physically and tempermentally. Thailand is known as the land of smiles, and it's a well-deserved moniker. Among their cultural values are friendliness, politeness, and an ever-present to desire to have a fun time.
Asia, in general, has a different cultural zeitgeist than Western countries. I know that's kind of stating the obvious, but it's not something that I can actually put a verbal finger on. It's more of a pervading sensation on the tip of my cognitive tongue. Wow, what a metaphysical mouthful!
Anyway.
Let's say that you've bought my plug and wish to come here for yourself. What should you bring?
First of all (and last of all): Light is good. Less is better. Etcetera.
Having said that, let me mention a few of my favorite items. I won't insult your travel intelligence by listing the obvious, so if you arrive here without your underwear it's not on my head (ugh, I hope not).
Although there is something to be said for traveling blind, I like to carry a guide book. I can look up basic phrases, get a sense of travel options, and it's nice to have a heads-up as regards cultural customs and expectations. Personally, I usually pick up a Lonely Planet guide.
A headlamp ranks high on my desirability list, and Oral B makes a disposable toothbrush that you can slip on your finger. In tropical areas an umbrella is convenient, and small token gifts don't go amiss. In my first aid kit I usually pack a clean syringe, needle and suturing thread.
All right. piddley material stuff aside, do you really need to bring?
A flexible time-frame, and the patience to utilize it.
The ability to live with uncertainty.
The inner strength to gracefully accept the loss of external control.
A sense of perspective. Again, light is better.
In Hesse's book 'Siddhartha,' the main character has no belongings but he lists the three things he does have: The ability to wait, to think, and to fast. These are good qualities for a traveller.
Some bonus extras? A strong stomach. A good bladder, and its equivalent in bowels (it's a blessing to pick and choose elimination times). A sense of (geographical) direction can save you some grief.
In conclusion, I refer back to the dedication and the concept of everyone being a traveler. People can circle the globe, seeing much and perceiving little. Conversely, people can remain geographically stable and still be great mental wanderers.
Perhaps the most important thing to bring on the journey (both inner and outer), is an open
window of possibility. Be prepared to carpe diem with abandon, and allow your plans to be appropriately blown by the winds of change. Construct your expectations of foam, not cement.
The most powerful wanderings keep their horizons hidden, and that is both their mystery and their greatest gift.

Meandering leads to perfection. -Lao Tzu

Way leads to way. -Gandalph

Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God. -Kurt Vonnegut

Land of Misunderstanding

I have an American friend here in China who has been here for six years and she says that nothing in China is what you expect it to be. My three months here have taught me a similar lesson: that many things in China are misunderstood by foreigners.

This month my husband and I have been getting into the performance business. Pancho is a performer and is studying acrobatics here at a school in Beijing. In Mexico he performed almost every night mainly doing fire shows and stilt acts. We stumbled onto a performance gig in China when a lady approached our friend because she saw his juggling pins sticking out of his backpack. Well the lady is now well known to us and is the president of an event planning company here in Beijing. She had us perform in Shanghai last weekend at an event for a famous watch company. But please allow me to digress. In preparation for the show we did in Shanghai I decided that I would learn to walk on stilts. I had wanted to learn for over a year but it just seemed that there was never time. So Pancho and I set out to make a set of stilts for me to use and learn with. We got the metal, the Velcro, the bolts and all that we needed was the wood to make the foot piece and brace. We thought it would be an easy errand, until we realized that there isn't any wood in Beijing! For days I went around with a little note my friend wrote for me asking if anyone knew of a carpenter nearby. Always the same answer, although some people thought really hard before replying no. I suppose they were also surprised at the realization that they had never seen a carpenter here in Beijing, much less wood.

One Saturday Pancho, Denya (my daughter) and I set out to find the wood we needed. It was only three weeks to the show and time was running out. We stopped at a construction site, of which there are plenty in Beijing, and saw a huge beautiful, amazing pile of wood. Pancho showed the workmen the drawings of the pieces we needed and after a lengthy discussion that no one understood we left empty-handed. Feeling disheartened we kept going on our bikes until I noticed a cart at the side of the road stacked with wood. Salvation! We called the owner away from his checkers game and showed him the note asking about a carpenter. He excitedly indicated himself. We showed him the drawings of what we needed and he nodded eagerly. So we gestured that he lead the way to his workshop where the land of wood awaited. He went ahead.

Since he was driving a cart of wood the going was slow and after a while Denya became fussy in her bike seat. But we couldn't stop now. At each intersection the carpenter would indicate to follow him straight ahead and I would nod and we would follow. We rode for about forty-five minutes and I told Pancho that the carpenter didnâ??t seem so sure of where to go. But we agreed that first he was probably going to another shop to buy the wood before heading to his workshop to cut it. By this time we were very far from home and Denya was nodding off in her seat. At each stop Pancho and I would prop her head up so she wouldn't feel uncomfortable. Then the carpenter pulled a loop on us; that's right, he circled back on himself! Pancho told me to stop and get off the bike. We approached the carpenter and asked what was going on. Why did he go in a full circle? The carpenter replied (in Chinese) and we countered in English by thanking him for taking us on a wild goose chase.

As we rode off I looked back and saw that the carpenter was sincerely confused. Strange, I thought.

About a half an hour later it hit me. He thought we were taking him to the workshop and wood. The note asked if he was a carpenter, he said yes. At every intersection he would look back and signal which way to go, only he wasn't signaling, he was asking, and I was nodding and replying yes each time he asked! Pancho and I couldn't believe what had just happened. It seemed so far fetched. Now we found ourselves still without any wood and shocked at the incident.

After the long bike ride that day I bought a cellular phone so that if I ever have any doubt I can call a bilingual friend to get the real story. So far I've used it many times and in many strange situations.

We eventually found the wood later that day. We went to Shanghai and we had a wonderful fire show prepared with a beautiful stilt dancer (that's me in the middle of the photo). Unfortunately, the show was an outdoor event and when it started raining the stage was too slippery for the stilts! Disappointing, but I know I'll have other opportunities to walk on my stilts and this adventure was a lesson in more than just stilt walking.

Adjusting in Bethel, AK

It's a strange feeling that you get when you're walking to work in -10 temperatures with a -30 wind chill. There's nothing anyone in my home town of Richmond, Virginia could have done to prepare me for that. I would usually only have a ten minute walk each morning, but when I can actually see the wind whip around me in the darkness as I concentrate so hard on not slipping on the icy roads, it quickly turns into a twenty minute journey. Not to mention the entire time I'm walking I can't help but to think of how bad my hair is going to look when I get to the office and undo my many layers. That's the girly-girl in me. Probably my main characteristic that screams "Not from Bethel, Alaska!"

It wasn't really a hard transition moving to "the bush" (as people like to call it out here.) It was just different. I knew most of what I was getting myself into. I knew it wasn"t the pretty scenic Alaska everyone always talks about, and I knew I was going to be more isolated than I have ever been. In a way that's the part that excited me the most about moving out here.
In the midst of all the research my friends and I did on Bethel, one of my best friends, Arya, read somewhere that only twenty percent of the buildings have indoor plumbing. I remember him turning to me and giving me this look like, "Ummm, and you're okay with that?" "It can't be much worse than using port-a-potties at a concert." I thought. But to my surprise (a very delightful surprise), there is plumbing in Bethel. So I get to use a real toilet, not just a bucket. Most of the villages surrounding Bethel don't have plumbing. They use 'honey-buckets' which are basically 5-gallon buckets with a trash-bag liner and a seat on the top. And many use rain water for drinking and showering. In Bethel the water is pretty rough, since it is hauled in by trucks. A lot of people order water coolers, like the kind in offices, for drinking water in their homes. So it takes adjusting.

But my biggest adjustment wasn't the water being a little smelly, or even the sun shining on my face at midnight. Honestly, my biggest adjustment was probably having an 8-5 job, since I was used to sleeping in on most days. I started volunteering in Bethel at the end of April, just following three months of post-graduation freedom. (Also known as waiting tables and bar hopping most nights out of the week.) So I needed to get away. Five years of art school (okay so six years, three different majors) with little travel off of the east coast, led to a degree in Interior Architecture and the burning desire to start traveling as much as I can while I'm alive and healthy.

When Did the Geyser Get Broke?

Given the medium by which you're reading this, I probably shouldn't speak lightly of the internet right at the start--but I do spend too much time wandering pointlessly around the online world. It is a malady you have probably encountered yourself. This wandering has its uses, of course, since often enough, out among the pop-up boxes, spyware, dead links, and outright fraud, a person can find pieces of writing that get the mind working. Recently, I had this experience with a short piece that ran on Vagabonding, a blog belonging to travel writer Rolf Potts. Titled "The Tourist Is Always the Other Guy," it takes up, with some exasperation, the old distinction between a tourist and a traveler.

A "tourist" was once simply a person who went on one of the first package tours during the nineteenth century, but the word went rapidly downhill, until it came nearly to mean "buffoon." "Traveler" became the alternative term for those who thought of themselves as vacationing with aristocratic sophistication. A traveler is Ernest Hemingway going to Spain for the bullfights and the trout fishing; a tourist is the clueless Clark Griswold of the National Lampoon Vacation movies. Potts no longer entirely buys the distinction. He quotes fellow travel writer Daisann McLane, who explains that "We think a 'traveler' is cool, the 'tourist' is not, and there's a lot of snobbery attached to identifying oneself as the former. But I think we should let that go. We are all tourists. If you can afford a round trip ticket to Laos, and you go there for personal stimulation, not for a job, even if you end up staying for six months on the floor of a Hmong hut in a remote village, you're still a tourist."

Potts, in the end, decides that "the tourist-traveler dichotomy will never go away, no matter how irritating it becomes. The heart of this dichotomy, of course, lies in our own insecurities about travel. In the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton's character, who has been crashing support-group meetings to boost his self-esteem, drops the t-word when another crasher, named Marla, starts showing up at the meetings. 'Marla, the big tourist,' he mutters. 'Her lie reflected my lie.' Similarly, we all travel with the knowledge that, by definition, a person journeying to a foreign place is an outsider, a dilettante, a superficial presence. Other travelers (i.e. "tourists") only remind us of that fact. And that's why we go to such great pains to make distinctions and split hairs." In practice, he finds, if a vacationer looks like a hippie, that person is a traveler; the suburbanite is the tourist.

Potts leaves me wanting more, though, because he considers the question only from the point of view of the wayfarer. Anyone who has spent any time staying put and dealing with the vacationing public on the job knows that there are travelers, and then there are travelers, some better, some worse. And then there are tourists.

The crucial question, as we know, is whether the wayfarer in question is driving with a full tank, as it were. Another advantage of the internet is the way things never quite die there. The following comes from a list of questions that tourists--yes, tourists--have asked rangers in various national parks. The list dates from the mid-1990s, but is really for the ages. At Grand Canyon: "Was this man-made? Do you light it up at night?" Everglades: "Are the alligators real? Are the baby alligators for sale? Where are all the rides?" Denali: "What time do you feed the bears? How often do you mow the tundra?" Yosemite: "Where are the cages for the animals? What time do you turn on Yosemite Falls?" Yellowstone: "Does Old Faithful erupt at night? How do you turn it on? When does the guy who turns it on get to sleep?"

This version of the list comes from the Urban Legends Reference Pages, the folks who investigate internet rumors and pronounce on their truth or falsity; they have refused to make a definite pronouncement about this one, but I can tell them that I was asked all those Yellowstone questions myself when I worked there, some repeatedly. I've seen other, similar lists, including one I wrote myself once, and a feature they share in common is that you can find in them a theme. Yes, the questions are dumb, but they also give the impression that the tourists asking the questions believe themselves to be in a totally artificial environment, a wilderness version of Disneyland. In other words, they're not paying attention, are traveling while half asleep. Any discussion of "tourist" versus "traveler" needs to take this inattention into account: the traveler is one who is alert, a condition that is not dependent on social class or style or any other superficial marker.

I wrote, in my last entry, that to live intensely is one way to be certain of living well. This entry drew an objection from a friend at UC Davis who comes from Billings, Montana. He wrote an email saying that "Yes, the 'lived life,' getting the most experience out of life, is definitely best. But why must it involve national parks and hiking? As someone growing up in Montana, that is familiar, and experiencing the unfamiliar--urban, ethnic environments--is much more exciting to me. Eating sushi, going to the symphony, riding a subway--this to me is experiencing life to its fullest." He forced me to refine my thinking. About the most intense week, for me, of this decade so far was the trip I made to a convention in New York City to interview for teaching positions a couple of years ago. I'm also well aware of the advantages of the big city, like reliable electricity, and jobs.

Still, I can't help but notice that, in a city, nearly all experiences are made for you by others, usually for a price, and so a crucial quality of independence is lost. That includes the high-cultural brainiac stuff: you go to the Museum of Modern Art exhibit titled "Dung: A Retrospective," and even if you conclude that it is, well, a bunch of dung, you still went and took it seriously because the art elite told you to. In addition, you're always on guard in a city, constantly aware of the potential for interpersonal embarrassment (a problem in small towns too, of course). In really crowded circumstances, this turns into a kind of paranoia: you become convinced that your fly is unzipped, then, with the slyness of a thief, search out a way to hide so that no one notices when you make the Tug of Reassurance. And the noise, the jostling, the traffic; after a while, you're just shell-shocked. You can have an adventure in a city. It's easier there to get into a knife-versus-broken-bottle fight with an agitated schizophrenic who thinks you're a space alien come to steal his plasma. You can have your mind and senses turned on completely in the city same as in the country, although in the city it's liable to happen most memorably when the bus runs over your toes.

Of course, this is all partly a matter of individual preference. Still, after a long day in the urban blare, you are as out of it as the national park tourists who asked the rangers those silly questions. The senses blink off one by one. There are often good reasons to endure this reduction, and when that is the case, let the mind be the last to go. Then again, some of the best times I've ever had in cities happened when my mind was as disabled as I could make it, but that's another story.

Toddler Wisdom, Shoe Perfection, and Going Somewhere

"... the thousands upon thousands who are like me are those who have yet to find the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls..."
-Seymour Krim

A few years ago, when he was three, my nephew Ian liked to say, "I want to go Somewhere." And, when Ian said it, you knew it was Somewhere with a capital "S."

Hey, Buddy, who doesn't?

It excited me to see that at the ripe age of three, wanderlust grew strong in this young Jedi.

I like looking at Ian, now five, more precocious, and more determined to make his little dreams come true. Scratch that, they are huge dreams, and they are all possible for him right now. The dreams don't compete with each other, but together all of his dreams propel him forward simultaneously. I mean why settle on just one, right? This brings me to the quotation above.

It comes from a favorite essay, "For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business." Seymour Krim wrote this treatise in the 70s after a life time of "settling." Some would debate his "settling." Krim experienced success as a phenomenal essayist and longtime contributor to "The New Yorker." No slouch, but he still had longings and dreams to be more, to do more and to constantly reinvent the self.

Hey, Buddy, who doesn't?

Every now and then I get that feeling of "Crap. What am I going to do with my life?" It's as if I'm not doing "it" right now: as if I'm not Somewhere, and that a subtle reinvention will be the answer.

So lately, I've been thinking about going back to school. Certainly additional education will take me Somewhere and will help me find that professional skin. I still have lots of dreams, but unlike Ian, mine compete and don't feel like they can coexist. Should I become a librarian, a lawyer, maybe? When I think about changing my life, and certainly this isn't the first time, I get excited for a while, then I think of the reality of going back to school and then I think about something completely different and much much more pleasant like buying a new pair of shoes. I mean there's a commitment and a little reinvention. Why settle for just one pair of shoes to fit the riot in my soul, Seymour Krim? Why not have multiple pairs for my mood and whimsy?

So this weekend I am going shoe shopping. My shoe shopping record is 3 pairs in one day. On that day of triumph, I was ably assisted by my good friend Teri. It's important to have a good support system. Teri was there to talk me through each pair and to let out an enthusiastic little clap each time I handed the plastic over. For some of you, I know that buying 3 pairs in one day might not be much of a record, but keep in mind Montana is no Jimmy Choo Mecca, folks.

So I'll keep you posted on whether or not I choose a slight variation on my growing collection of practical (yawn) clogs, or if I strike out and buy those completely impractical Apple-Green Steve Madden boots. If I am going to start on an endless me, if I'm going to go Somewhere, why not do it with an amazing array of shoes? I better call Teri, I feel the need to make my nephew proud.