Trans-Mongolia

Lofoten

2010-07-17T10:34:00.000-07:00

Beach at Myrland

Midnight sun

Lars at the mouth of the cave

Maelstrom

Rorbuer at Å

Nusfjord (best preserved Norwegian fishing village)

Hanging fish

Viking longhouse/mead hall

Prow of Viking ship Lofotr

In late June we travelled to the North of Norway in search of midnight sun and adventure. We found a lot of midnight grey and North Atlantic cold. We were, however, also rewarded with a couple glorious days and nights of sun. We flew to Tromsø where we met our friend and had the initial intention of driving further North (Tromsø is at 70 degree N latitude). Instead, in the run up to our departure, it was decided that we should drive South, to Lofoten. This mountainous archipelago stretches over a 100km from the Norwegian mainland into North Atlantic. It is anchored in the West by a speck of an island called Røst which is famous for its rich seabird colonies. There are lots and lots of puffins there.

We rented a hytte (cabin) in the small town (read: cluster of 5 houses) of Myrland on the island of Flakstadøya. It was an idyllic place. We were 200m from the ocean with a white sand beach and a glorious view of mountains to the NE and an unimpeded westerly view for the midnight sun.

Although these islands are firmly situation in the Arctic Circle, the Gulf Stream keeps the temperatures at sea level above freezing for the entire year. The archipelago is, on average, 24 degrees centigrade warmer than places at comparable latitudes around the globe. This does not, however, alter the fact that it is in the Arctic Circle. There is no arable soil, very little in the way of trees, and thus, historically speaking, not particularly amenable to human settlement.

Through the first half of the twentieth century the people here fished. The fishing industry is still quite active, but its modern industrial organization has radically altered the shape of the lives of those who live here. Its scale has, in the space of a generation, eclipsed a way a life. This way of life has been, nevertheless, neatly rendered into a consumable object. Some of the small towns, Nusfjord for example, have been turned into museums allowing one to see how life was once fully organized around fishing; one can stay in fishing cabins (Rorbuer) and go fishing on tours and eat fish and so on. They still dry (cure) fish in the traditional way here. There are elaborate wooden scaffolds from which thousands of fish hang. Another interesting fact is that 80% of all Cod (Bacalao) eaten/served in Italy is caught in Lofoten waters.

The area is ideal for recreation, which is what the oil rich Norwegians with their $7000 mountain bikes, gor-tex anoraks, and fancy camping gear most like to do. We didn’t have bikes, but we did take advantage of the wonderful network of hiking trails whose tendrils lace the nooks and crannies of the mountainous landscape. If we return, I think we’ll rent or bring bikes. It’s an ideal way to take in the breathtaking scenery – mountains whose rock is as old as the earth itself (3 billion years old). It’s quite clear that when God created the earth, God started here.

Lofoton is a fantasyscape that is worthy of the most mythic of narratives. I wonder if the Vikings had one. One can imagine a battle scene with Thor and Odin. Thor tries to strike Odin, he misses and his hammer crashes into the earth – mountains rise and water rushes in around, Odin flees on Slepnir the 8 legged horse. Something like that. Maybe Snorre has written something.

Speaking of Vikings, we went to a Viking museum in the small town (cluster of 8 houses) of Borg. This was nowhere near as hokey as it sounds. The museum is a reconstruction of a Viking longhouse (mead hall) adjacent to the ruins of one the largest such structures found in Norway. It was much more living effort at historical recovery than a Disney-fied experience. There was, thankfully, no horned helmets (Vikings never wore horned helmets, just the Minnesota Vikings and German nationalists with fascist proclivities). The most exciting thing at the museum is a reconstructed Viking ship. It’s a reconstruction of the Gokstad ship, which was found in the Vestfold, dated to ca. 900, and measures 23m (78ft.). The ship is amazing. We, and a French filming crew, got the chance to row it. I’m sure we were only slightly less effective than 20 hardened Viking sailors would have been. When they first reconstructed the ship they entered it in a regatta with other sailing ships. The Viking ship (its name is Lofotr) won in imperious fashion setting a time record for the distance. This museum should be high on your list if you happening to be in this part of the world during this time of year at 1pm (don’t arrive later or you’ll have to watch the others having fun from shore).

We also went out to sea on a monstrously powerful speed boat (it had two 250 Evinrude outboards). The boat's captain -- Lars -- was very cool. He and a guide took us to see some of the old abandoned fish villages inaccessible by road. We also crossed the infamous maelstrom -- inspiration for Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom" and the scene of the climax of Vernes' 20,000 Leagues under the Sea." The tidal currents are incredibly strong there because there's a sea shelf of relatively shallow depth, 70meters or so, surrounded on both sides by depths that exceed 500meters. The water crossing the shelf moves quickly. As one might expect, the fishing in this most dangerous place is always great.

Monti Sibellini and Casteluccio

2009-08-04T02:16:00.000-07:00

Leaving Assisi

2009-07-30T00:18:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we leave Assisi for a weekend in the Monti Sibillini national park. We'll be staying at a refugio at 1500m above sea level. Dinner, breakfast, and a bed comes to 35EUR/person/night. We are in dire need of a few cooler days. When my parents were here last weekend, we took advantage of their car to drive over to Gualdo Tadino and hike in the mountain above the town there. Up at 1200m, there's a run-down church built in the 16th century that used to serve as a church for the hermits who lived on the mountain. It's currently being restored, but it's a dramatic setting for a church. The heat in Assisi, while not oppressive, has been somewhat tiring. Our first hike up Mount Subasio (Assisi is a short way up the mountain) started with little promise: 20% incline for 2km. But when we reached the Eremo delle Carcieri (a hermitage where Francis spent some time), the steep gradient leveled out and we were able to climb to the top with more comfort.

By the time we reached a beautiful lookout point near the top of the mountain, the temperature had gotten much cooler and we were really starting to have a good time - at which point we realized that it was 12:30, and if we wanted to have lunch that day we needed to get ourselves ASAP to a restaurant. Umbria, far more than Tuscany, is still the sort of place where you eat between 12:30 and 2:30 or you don't eat at all. We studied the map (thanks to the local hiking association of Perugia for creating it!) and decided that our best bet was to run the length of Mount Subasio and then descend to a small town called Collepino, just above Spello. This wonderful hiking map even informed us of the name of the restaurant! (The picture below with me jogging was taken during this run.)

We got to Collepino, a delightful town built in stone (the whole town is smaller than a football field), just twenty minutes or so before the restaurant closed. It took us two and a half hours to get through lunch. That's just the pace at which country restaurants roll here! Afterward, we followed the course of the old Roman aqueduct into Spello (a town founded in the first century CE or AD, whichever you prefer). Spello is lovely, although somewhat fuller of tourists than I would have expected, perhaps because Assisi is so close (about 14K by road). We ducked into a church we passed at random. A bent-over Franciscan friar found us admiring the large cross hanging over the altar (school of Giotto) and directed us to the right transept which just happened to contain one of Pinturicchio's greatest works. (Remember, we're standing here in running clothes after covering about 17K on foot.) Finally, we took the train back to Assisi and walked up along the pilgrim route to our hotel. That was a great day.

After spending as much time in Tuscany as we've done, Umbria has come as a discovery in many ways (yeah, I know - we're like 20 years behind, but so what?!). Our experience has been that people are much friendlier and more welcoming here. B's work has involved trips to a number of towns in the region, and we were able to retrace some of his steps with my parents last weekend. Spoleto was fantastic, with an absolutely stunning Romanesque church that had the best-preserved 12th century cross I've ever seen. The frescoes in the apse, done by Fra Filippo Lippi (with some help from his son - don't worry, the father did not remain a Fra...), were spectacular. The coronation of the Virgin shows the absolutely most frightening and theologically problematic vision of the Father (for pictures, see http://www.sacred-destinations.com/italy/spoleto-cathedral). In the small side chapel now serving as a bookstore, there was a lovely little piece of Elijah ascending into heaven in a chariot with his cloak at Elisha's feet - a seldom-seen story.

We then continued on to Montefalco, for one of the greatest treats I've ever had. The former Franciscan church, now a museum, contains a stunning cycle of the life of Francis by Benozzo Gozzoli. See http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/gozzoli/2montefa/index.html for pictures. Scene 6 is especially delightful as Francis drives the demons from Arezzo. Scene 7, where Francis blesses Montefalco against a background of the Umbrian valley with Mount Subasio and Assisi in the background is a stunningly realistic portrayal of a landscape that has changed little to this day. (Montefalco is called the balcony of Umbria precisely because of this view.) Note, in scene 9, where Francis invents the idea of doing mangers at Christmas, the way the hoof of the cow is pulling on Francis' robe.

Now, you might think that a museum containing such a fresco cycle would be absolutely thronged with tourists, and in Florence or Rome, you'd be right. In Montefalco? We were alone. Not only that: the church-museum is simply stuffed with other delightful pictures - from the life of Jerome, the desert fathers, a Madonna della Misericordia (Mary protecting the faithful under her robes, a simultaneously delightful and disturbing image; the worst are the ones as in Nocera Umbra where she's protecting them against the spears hurled by an angry Christ), and more.

Another day we went to Orvieto, where the Duomo has perhaps the most beautiful facade of any church I've ever seen. Other cathedrals are as impressive (for instance, Strasbourg), but the Orvieto Duomo is gorgeous. (Picture at http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duomo_di_Orvieto.) The guidebook calls the mosaics harshly colored, which is fair, but against the dusty gray-green of the Umbrian countryside and the stone of the town, the vivid colors are delightful and almost unbelievable. In the chapel of San Brizio you find one of Luca Signorelli's masterpieces (with a little help from Fra Angelico). (Pictures at http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/s/signorel/brizio/index.html.) The most famous image is of course the devil whispering in the ear of the Antichrist. We found the Resurrection of the Flesh, which is almost like time-lapse photography of resurrection, to be particularly impressive. In Orvieto are also the remains (just the transept) of the first Dominican church - in the monastery attached, Thomas Aquinas taught for a while, so for the first time ever I have set eyes on something that the great dumb ox himself would have seen.

I know we still owe posts about Rome, bike trip, and more, but perhaps this will do for now? Oh, and I do need to describe yesterday's feast at some point!

2009-07-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

Detail from Ottaviano Nelli's fresco cycle of the life of Augustine --

a heretic tearing apart a book of his blasphemous work

Augustine refuting the heretics, Ottaviano Nelli, Gubbio

La basilica di San Francesco, Assisi

Gubbio

2009-07-26T03:54:00.000-07:00

View of the Spoleto Valley from Mount Subasio

Jogging on Mt. Subasio

Palio Daze

2009-07-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

The week of the July Palio is over and the city has calmed. Most of the tourists have left and the only reminders of the four-day ritualized horse race that ended Thursday evening are the drums Tartuca (the winning contrada) and the newspaper headlines about health of horses and the intrigue of the jockeys.

The Palio is the name of the horse race that is held twice a year (July 2 and August 16) by the Sienese in honor of the Virgin Mary (there are some years where a third “extraordinary” Palio is run to commemorate some important event, e.g. the first lunar landing – the Palio of the Moon was won by Oca [the Goose]) . The winner of the race receives the Palio – a painted silk banner. Both the name of the race and the piece of cloth bear the name Palio.

The competitors in the race are the various neighborhoods or precincts of the city that are called contrada (singular) and contrade (pl.). There are 17 contrade in the city, but only 10 run in any given Palio. During the middle ages the contrade were given their coherence by professional solidarity, e.g. the many of the members of the contrada of Onda (the Wave) were carpenters, the members of Oca were dyers, the members of Valdimontone (Ram) were smiths of fine metals, and so on. Today this is less the case, and so the Palio itself has taken over as the external fiction around which contrada life is explicitly oriented. Each contrada has its own social club, church, museum, kitchens, and designated feast days. The habits and rituals of contrada life effectively make the Palio a year round event – the community practices come to a crescendo in the race and the race is the event or the act that constitutes and makes possible the practices – the contrade and the Palio mutually define one another. This was less the case in the middle ages when greater internal coherence lessened the importance of the Palio.

The Palio is an elaborately orchestrated four-day event. Day 1 for us started on Monday with the Trata. This is when 30 or so horses are brought into the city for a set of trial races where they are on display to the captains of the contrade (the individuals chosen to direct the strategic energies of the contrada to win the Palio). The 30 horses run in groups of no more than eight. After they’ve all run the captains may decide to have a group of horses (likely horses that have never run in a Palio before) to have another go. Once all this is finished the captain deliberate for an hour or two and decide which ten horses will run. The best horses will not necessarily be picked. This is especially true if there are a number of enemy pairs in the race (most contrade have one enemy, e.g. Oca and Torre). One way to lose the Palio is to have your enemy win. Thus if your contrada has recently won a Palio and your enemy has not, you would not want a fantastic horse to be in the race because you run the risk of your enemy getting that horse. After the ten horses have been picked they are randomly assigned to the ten contrade that are participating in that particular Palio – this ceremony takes place in the Campo in front of 30,000 people. There is rejoicing and cursing based on the assignments. This year the contrade of Tartuca, Drago, and Istrice got the best horses (horses that had all previously won Palios). Once the horse is assigned it is taken by the members of the contrade back to the contrada to a stall where it will live, guarded under 24hr surveillance, during the days of the Palio.

Once the horses have been assigned the contrade go into contract with jockeys. The better the contrada’s horse, the more ambitiously the contrada will spend on a good jockey. Istrice (the porcupine) went after the best jockey – Trecciolino. He has won 11 Palios. A good jockey does not come cheap. The best are paid upwards of a half a million EUR.

The jockeys and horses first appear together on Monday night, the night of the first trial race – prova. This was, however, rained out. The trial races continue through the days of the Palio – 9:00 in the morning and 19:45 in the evening. The evening events draw enormous crowd (40,000ish). Tempers flare. On Tuesday night a fight broke out between Chiocciola and Tartuca. Many punches were thrown, but very few landed. Such outbreaks are typical and are much more postured and performed than anything else. The older men of the contrade are an internal policing mechanism for the contrade. They do not want the contrada to be penalized so they will work to control the hormones of the younger boys. However, in this case, S saw a man in his 50s being taken away with blood all over.

The penultimate trial race, called the Prova Generale, takes place 24hrs before the Palio. After the race all the running contrade will have huge feasts on the principal streets of their neighborhood. Onda’s feast was on the Via Giovanni Dupre. S and I went to their dinner along with the rest of the group. It was a 4-course meal punctuated by contrada songs and speeches. There was also a thunderstorm that passed through so our table (of about 100) held a long piece of plastic over our heads for about 15min.

One of the tragedies of this year’s Palio happened at the Prova Generale. During the Prova the horse of Civetta (the Owl) pulled up limping after the first big turn. We hadn’t noticed this because our eyes were on the front of the race. The Civettini, however, had. Before the race was over they sprinted across the track to the street where their horse had exited. Their worst nightmares had been realize – the horse (Iesael) was injured and would not be able to run. This came as a particularly hard blow to Civetta, the contrada that bears the ignominious distiction “La Nonna” – Grandmother – because they have not won a Palio since 1979. They cancelled their dinner and cried themselves to sleep. The headline in the newspaper the next morning read: “Civetta in lacrime.” It was sad.

The last prova on the morning of the day of the race is called the provaccia – the bad prova. No one wants to win. After the provaccia there is a “Palio mass” at the church of the Provenzano. The Palio is present for the mass. It’s a great time to get a close up view of the banner.

In the mid-afternoon a long and intricate parade begins. The parade recounts the entirety of Sienese history in addition to showcasing the contrade that are running, those that aren’t, and representatives of the contrade that don’t exist anymore (the so-called “suppressed contrade”). The parade eventually makes its way to the Campo where it reaches a crescendo – flag throwing, drumming, and even a cavalry charge from soldiers that I’m sure were once part of Garibaldi’s army that march on Rome.

Eventually, after much standing in a crowd of 60,000, the horses and jockeys emerge from the Palazzo Pubblico. The mass of people comes to a near complete silence as they wait to hear the order in which the horses will line up. It’s really a rather magical thing. Once the order has become clear the arduous process of getting everyone in place begins. This year it was particularly frustrating – Istrice and Chiocciola were very obstreperous. There were two false starts and lots of jockeying at the starting rope – the canape.

After a good half an hour of this there was clean(ish) start. Tartuca’s horse (Gia de Menhir ridden by Gingillo) got off to a great start and was followed closely by Lupa [she-wolf] around the first curve (San Martino). Soon after, however, the gap increased and continued to do so for the rest of the 73 second race. Gia de Menhir, as the paper later proclaim, was a “war machine”. It ran the second fastest Palio ever. Both Istrice’s and Onda’s horses were injured in the race so they very quickly fell off the pace.

The Tartuchini spilled onto the track, kissed the horse, and carried the jockey on their shoulders as they ran to claim the Palio. They’ve been marching around the city with it ever since.

Watch this year's July Palio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFvKFTuOtJs

Bike trip: Metz to Konstanz

2009-06-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

We're catching up mentally to the point where we can write about the bike trip, now ten days in the past. On June 11, we met up in a hotel in Cologne (LATE at night for B!). On June 12, we went off to the Radstation at the Hauptbahnhof and picked up two bicycles for a week. These were pretty decent trekking bicycles - 24 gears, front suspension, etc. 52EUR for a week - not too bad! We put my large backpack (with the books I need for syllabus prep for the fall inside) in storage, paid for a week, and headed off to Metz in France. We'd deliberately chosen the slow, local trains, partly to save a few euros and partly because it's very easy to load the bicycles on and off those sorts of trains.

In Metz, we were very nervous about whether we would actually manage to connect with our friends J&J, who had been visiting friends in Paris for a few days before joining us for the weekend. Last year, my sister's train from Strasbourg was canceled, the train my friend and I took from Tuebingen was canceled, he left his brand-new weekend pack on the train, we missed connecting with our other friend who came from Heidelberg and became unwell in the course of the day, and in the end it was only by chance that the whole group connected first in Cologne and then in Holland - let's just say that our experience with meeting friends for a bike trip was not great.

However, this time, all was well. We ran into J&J first thing in the station and headed off for lunch. Naturally, by this time it was about 14:30, so there was no fresh, hot food to be had. It is always difficult when first arriving back in France/Italy to remember that outside of very touristy restaurants, you can only eat lunch and dinner at socially acceptable times, and 14:30 is too late most places. So baguette it was.

The Esterhazer Mosel Radweg book had warned us that the first section out of Metz would not be pretty. Thankfully, the book also mentioned the stupendous Chagall windows in the cathedral. But it was both frightening and funny to see that the first road the book directed us to was something that felt much like a highway rather than a calm country road. We all expected that the police would show up any minute to ask us what we thought we were doing. This feeling was only intensified once we got off that road only to find ourselves in the middle of the port (is that the right word when it's on a river? seems unlikely) of Metz next to the trucks. We rode at a leisurely pace toward Thionville. On the way, we had the sort of encounter that belongs in books: with an elderly Frenchman who wanted to tell us that he was all of 80 years old, and he remembered the war - of course, he thought we were German, as did everyone else.

Our way from Thionville was dominated by the four huge cooling towers for the local nuclear reactor. At first, they seemed very distant, but we soon realized that they were quite close, just so huge that the whole landscape had to shift to accommodate their size. We tried for a bed in Cattenom (thankfully, one of the J's was comfortable asking in French) but with no luck, so we crossed the river to Koenigsmacker where the book claimed that the Hotel Lorraine was a rather expensive retreat.

According to the prices posted on the window, however, the hotel was right in our price range. No one was around. There was a sign on the restaurant saying that it was closed on Fridays, but the hotel did not have an equivalent notice. After about half an hour of standing around, trying doors, and ringing doorbells, a kind but rather slow elderly woman appeared and rooms were secured. It was now around 20, and we knew that did we not sit down to dinner shortly, there would be no dinner. We headed back across the river to an outdoor place where all our dreams came true - at any rate, the dreams that involved a piece of roasted meat the size of a head topped with Roquefort cream sauce. (Just B, but still.)

When we returned to the hotel, we could not help noticing that the entire village had turned out for a cover band consisting of four-five old hippies playing American and English classic rock covers. At maximum volume. For hours. And hours.

Have you ever had the experience of walking in somewhere and have LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE PERSON turn to stare at you, despite being clad in ordinary clothing, fully dressed, and in no way unusual otherwise? This was our experience in Koenigsmacker. It was quite terrifying. We had to sit down in the bar for an hour just to kill some time, assuming that at 23 the concert would have to wind down, but no.... not until 2am did those old hippies stop rocking!

More to follow.

2009-06-28T08:14:00.001-07:00

Our view in Siena

2009-06-25T04:29:00.000-07:00

The picture below is the view from our window in Siena. We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner right next to the window, which is pretty fantastic. We have a huge room with arched ceilings and a sofa in the loft. The kitchen is literally in a cupboard, which seems strange at first until you realize that when you close the cupboard, you can't see any of the mess! The cleaning lady seems a little appalled at just how much we cook, but we can't exactly afford to eat out every day or even very often, and in Assisi we won't have access to a kitchen. The other day, we made farro tagiatelle with fresh porcini sauce, which was amazing even though I didn't buy the porcinis the first day I saw them in the store and so was stuck with the dregs. I've never cooked with the fresh version before, so that was fun. Now there are figs - I better make sure to get some before they too disappear. It's been a long time since I was in Italy during this season of the year, and I'd forgotten how good the fruit is: melons, apricots - all at their best. Our favorite restaurant is serving a melon risotto which I have to try next time we go - the first time, all we could focus on was the various porcini dishes. The most fantastic tomatoes are around 2EUR/kilo, so a typical day might see us eating farro salad with tomatoes and pecorino for lunch, and pasta integrale with tomatoes followed by pecorino for dessert for dinner. In the US, I've always had trouble finding farro, although I believe it's available at some health and specialty stores. Farro is around 15% protein, which is high for a grain, but more importantly, it has a nutty flavor and barley-like texture that make me think I'm eating like a true hipster contadino whenever I have it.

Before arriving in Siena last Saturday, we spent one night in Pisa because our flight from Cologne got in late in the evening. B had booked a random B&B which we picked because it was close to the train station and the cheapest place we could find - around 65EUR/night for a private room. It turned out to be one of the most charming places we've ever stayed. B will post a picture later but let me just say that we had a view of the leaning tower from our terrace! The place was an apartment with just two bedrooms and two baths that had obviously just been fixed up with satellite TV, A/C, internet, a kitchen, and, wonder of wonders in Italy, complete night-time silence. Did I mention it was around 100m from the train station? Incredible! We didn't do any sightseeing or even go to our favorite bakery on the other side of the river, since we had to get to Siena, but the place was nice enough to make us want to come back just to stay there again.

The last couple days before we came to Italy were a little crazy. Wednesday evening (the 17th), we arrived in Koblenz, having biked the length of the Mosel river from Metz in France to its end in the Rhine. More about that trip to come. Our posterior sections were not in the best of conditions after six days on rental bikes not built for us. So, on a whim, we decided to return the bikes in Cologne and head to Brussels the next day. Unfortunately, a sad miscommunication about which track our train left from (hello, B, you could have just asked!) meant that we missed the first THALYS we had booked, but luckily we were able to change our ticket without any trouble. To add to the morning's mishaps, just after we left Bonn, the ticket controller came by and informed us that our tickets were not, in fact, valid as far as Cologne - but, unusually for a ticket controller, she told us this "just FYI"! (Next time, B will actually know which Bundesland Cologne is in, and so will I.)

The THALYS was nowhere near as fantastic as we had hoped, addicted as we are to the long-distance comforts of ICE trains, but it was certainly fast. As we sped through both Aachen and Liege, we fondly remembered certain mishaps that occurred on a bike trip there last year (Luik?!?, the ambulance, and so on). We even sped through Verviers, scene of the vending machine pre-dinner dinner.

Brussels was fun. 24 hours there were far too short, and we were too physically tired from biking to do much ambitious sight-seeing, so instead we ate. The strangest experience was going to dinner at Aux Armes des Bruxelles, which is located in the incredibly creepy street Rue des Bouchers, which is lined by three-language menus and touts on both sides of the street, leading to a claustrophobic feeling remedied only by being received into the cool French brasserie nature of the restaurant. I daren't recount exactly what we ate - let it be said that the meal was absolutely spot-on, with the minor exception that my cheese was served at refrigerator rather than room temperature.

Friday morning, we did a leisurely workout in the gym at the hotel (booked on Priceline for a meager 55EUR, although they wanted 21EUR/person for breakfast so we high-tailed it to the bakery just across the street), then hopped on the THALYS back to Cologne, where we picked up the luggage we had deposited there and repacked. Now, my backpack was left in the conventional left-luggage depository, but the lockers are another story. Cologne train station has a fully-automated locker system, where you simply put your bags into a machine, and the machine whisks them away underground to some far-distant locker, then returns them to you when you insert your personalized card in a matter of 40 seconds, to any of the automated locker stations! I'm not explaining this very well, but the coolness of seeing your bags disappear into a locker-sized compartment, then knowing that they travel to some place unknown before coming back to you 30 hours later or whenever is quite fun.

Pictures of some of this will follow at some point, although B has been a bit lazy with the camera. During the first part of the bike trip, our friends J&J took all the pictures, so hopefully we'll get some from them at some point to share.

2009-06-24T02:19:00.000-07:00

2009-06-24T02:16:00.000-07:00

A year has gone

2009-05-21T17:09:00.001-07:00

There has been little real traveling for either of us in the last year. I did go to Florida for a week with a good friend from Norway. We camped in the Everglades for two nights, saw lots of alligators and a crocodile, biked, canoed, and generally had a great time. We also spent time in Miami and in Key West. Otherwise, all my traveling was dissertation or work-related. Last week, we jaunted off to Chicago to look for a place to live in Hyde Park. Our success remains an open question. We also had a chance to spend some time with good friends in Tacoma Park last weekend. The "travel" involved 15 hours round-trip in the car with a very, very patient child belonging to Wheat Thin. The part amidst the travel was wonderful: relaxing hours spent on our friends' porch and a spectacularly intense game of Taboo.

Summer has finally come "for reals" - and new travel plans are in the offing. B has already jetted off to Siena, where he is assisting a class of increasingly young college students to find their way around town. I go to Norway in a week, after which we meet in Cologne, Germany in mid-June. We'll be biking the Mosel Radweg from Metz to Koblenz, then some way along the Rhine. Roman ruins in Trier, Luxembourg, and the beauty of the Moseltal all beckon. Afterward, we return together to Italy through the beginning of August. So we hope to have pictures and stories aplenty to share!

Connecticut Fall

2008-10-13T15:08:00.001-07:00

Summer Sundries

2008-09-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

Markatur

2008-08-03T05:39:00.000-07:00

Råbjørn

Råbjørnhytta

Bjertnesvangen

Bekkestua

Charlemagne, Charlemagne, does whatever Charlemagne does...

2008-08-03T05:32:00.000-07:00

Aachener Dom

Aachener Rathaus

Pentecost bike trip 2008

2008-05-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

5 days
4 nights
3 countries
2 flat tires
1 river: the Rhine
324 kilometers biked
Konstanz (Germany) to Basel (Switzerland) to Colmar (France) to Sasbach (Germany)

2008-05-15T13:06:00.000-07:00

Day 1 - Konstanz to Schaffhausen (52K)

We took a series of local trains filled with bicyclists down to Konstanz early in the morning. Arriving at the shores of Lake Constance (the Bodensee), we enjoyed leftover eggplant in peanut butter sauce. After visiting the house that Jan Hus lived in while waiting to be murdered by the Council of Konstanz, we immediately crossed the border into Switerland and headed to Stein am Rhein.

First Swiss bike sign!

Stein am Rhein. We enjoyed a lunch of vegetarian roesti (for S) and fish and ice coffee for B. The food was great, but not exactly cheap. It turned out to be a good move to have a satisfying lunch, though, because only two minutes out of town, B realized that his rear tire was losing air. We immediately turned around, desperately searching for fellow bikers who might have a pump to fit the tire, but to no avail. The tire was worn entirely through. As we were searching for the tourist information to find a gas station, we passed - miracle of miracles - a bike shop, OPEN on a SUNDAY during PENTECOST. This may seem no big deal to the American mind, but in Europe, this is like finding the Holy Grail. Responding to our urgent entreaties, they agreed "als Ausnahme" (exception) to replace the whole thing - immediately. 61 SFR later, we were good to go. At 5:45, we finally left for Schaffhausen.

By Schaffhausen, only 20K later, we were hungry again. We started searching through the center of town looking for an Asian Imbiss (fast food), only to give up and settle for a generic Italian place when we realized that we were locking our bikes outside a Thai place called Bambus. If you are ever in Schaffhausen, GO! It is delicious - by far the best Asian food we've had since, well, Asia. We shared a vegetarian Tom Kha (galangal) soup, a green mango salad with Thai onions and peanuts (Yam Ma-Muang) and some popia (spring rolls). Wonderful. We biked across the Rhine again, still in Switzerland, and found a campground.

Our teeny, tiny tent. (It weighs less than 3 pounds, so it's good for bicycle camping. Unfortunately, some people were celebrating Pentecost in a rather raucous fashion until late at night next to our tent, so we got almost no sleep.)

Schaffhausen - the Munot fortress.

Day 2 - Schaffhausen to Bad Sackingen (68K)

No grocery stores were open the second day of Pentecost either (Monday), so our delight when we happened on a COOP gas station was considerable. We bought ingredients for breakfast, then bicycled another 6K along the Rhine to the famous Rhine falls, where the Rhine - for no discernible reason - suddenly falls about 23M. A perfect location for breakfast.

We spent the first part of the day crossing in and out of Germany and Switerland through rolling landscapes, sometimes within sight of the Rhine, sometimes not. We were making much better time than the day before as we adjusted to our bikes.

Rapeseed (for oil) is an important and pretty crop.

We made it to Waldshut (in Germany), where we ate very uninspiring, but cheap, pasta for lunch. About 2K outside town, we passed one of the enormous power plants that dot the now tightly controlled Rhine. We biked for a while on sandy roads, and just as we were returning to the main bank, we, or rather B's bicycle tire, encountered the corner of a tiny piece of glass. PSSSHHHSSSHHHT. Luckily it was the other worn-out tire, rather than the brand new one.

This happened just outside Albbruck, which thankfully has a train station. We had decided to continue to Rheinfelden by train and wait there for a bike shop the next day, which would be a regular business day. We were dreading the 6K walk from Rheinfelden to the campground, however. While waiting for the train, we got to talking to R and P and their child Phil, who had also experienced a flat tire and were breaking their excursion. R, in a completely unprecedented move, invited us to stay at his place in Bad Sackingen for the night. We enjoyed take-out Indian and a tour of Bad Sackingen, with its famous wooden bridge (below).

Day 3 - Bad Sackingen to Ottmarsheim (84K)

The next day, after B repaired his own tire at a shop, we said goodbye and crossed the bridge back into Switzerland.

We biked along shady, forested paths by the Rhine until reaching the old Roman settlement of Augustus Raurica (Kaisersaugst), the oldest Roman colony on the Rhine, founded by one of Caesar's field marshals.

There are ruins strewn about the place. The amphitheater has been partially reconstructed, and we ate lunch in it. The area has been under excavation since the 16th century.

A short while later, after a meandering tour through suburbs and past the EM stadium, we reached Basel. We ate ice cream by the cathedral where Erasmus is buried, tried to procure an allergy shot for B (almost, but not quite, successfully), and quickly crossed into France.

Marked as Route 2 in Switzerland, the French have a different sign.

We headed north through the Petit Camargue Alsacienne (a nature reserve along the Canal de Huningue) on spectacularly pleasant bike paths, easily the best we saw on the entire trip. We were now tired and hungry, but knew we needed to reach a certain point on the French side to eat before crossing the Rhine again to camp in Germany.

We reached the small Alsatian town of Ottmarsheim, pulled on city clothes over our biking outfits, and looked for a place to eat. When we walked up to the restaurant below, we saw a sign in the window advertising rooms for around 30 EUR for the night. We exchanged one glance and booked a 28EUR room for the night, then went downstairs to see what was for dinner.

We enjoyed a completely and totally French countryside meal for an unbelievable price (3 courses were 11-12 EUR each). There was little or no choice, but the kitchen was happy to whip up a vegetarian main for S. She started with radishes with the most delicious, creamy butter (eaten with salt on bread), while B enjoyed a plate of cucumber and carrot salad. For a main, B had beef with beans, carrots, and French fries, while S had white asparagus with fried eggs. For dessert, B had simple strawberries with sugar while S had a piece of cheese. The whole experience was like a lovely dream, and even the bathroom down the hall was sparkling clean and used by no one but us. We slept for almost 10 hours from sheer exhaustion, before enjoying a breakfast of coffee, crusty baguette, and butter. No plates were on offer - one simply cut the baguette over the table and wiped the crumbs to the side at the end.

Day 4 - Ottmarsheim to Colmar (73K)

From Ottmarsheim we biked to Neuf-Brisach, a Vauban fortress built on orders from the Sun King himself. where we indulged at a bakery. (All this biking takes energy!) We then left the Rhine route and biked across the countryside to the town of Colmar, a gorgeous, if rather touristy, Alsatian wine town.

Tempted by last night's success, and with our backends not entirely adjusted to days on the bicycle, we called it in early and decided just to stay in Colmar. This time, we found a hotel just outside town (called, curiously, the Sun King - Roi Soleil - but offering nothing reminiscent of him) for 37 EUR. On the way, we passed one of the great French landmarks.

At first, B thought it was an ironic statement of French consumerism modeled on an American prototype (because the Statue of Liberty was located in a roundabout in a strip mall). More prosaically, it turns out that the designer of the Statue of Liberty was a native of Colmar, and that the statue above had only been erected in 2004 to celebrate that aspect of greatness.

We've visited the town twice before (to see the Grunewald crucifixion) so after a picnic in the park, we retired to our hotel to watch the UEFA Cup final, where St. Petersburg deservedly humiliated the Glasgow Rangers.

Day 5 - Colmar to Sasbach (46K)

The weather forecast: rain, rain, rain. Fearing inclement weather, we decided to head back to Breisach am Rhein in Germany to be near a train when the rain started. Of course, as anyone might have predicted, the rain never started. But S's knee was hurting and B's hindside too, so a shorter final day was probably in the cards regardless.

Enjoying the beautiful sunshine, we left Colmar for Breisach, a town on the edge of the Black Forest surrouned by vineyards. The cathedral towers over the town.

After visiting it, we put in the final 15K to Sasbach, a small and inviting village where we enjoyed a final, delicious lunch of fried Camembert with salad, fried fish with salad, and ice cream, accompanied by local drinks. Full, happy, and tired, we took seven different regional trains home with nary a mishap. At 9pm, the rain finally started.

Heidelberger Spieltag

2008-05-06T00:45:00.000-07:00

Berliner Rundgang

2008-04-15T03:07:00.000-07:00

Potsdamer Platz

Gedaechniskirche (Ku-dam)

Berliner Philharmonie

San Francesco

2008-04-03T00:43:00.000-07:00

Ethiopia

2008-03-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

St. George (Lalibela)

Debre Damo Monastery (accessible only by a 15-meter vertical rope climb)

Arid Terrain of the Tigrai Region

2008-03-07T10:06:00.000-08:00

2008-03-01T10:07:00.000-08:00

Bebenhausen round II

J and R arrived this morning.

2008-01-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

(Post)modern Paris, La Defense

2008-01-18T07:33:00.000-08:00

Marka Ski Tur

2008-01-13T03:00:00.000-08:00

Semsvannet

Sandungen

To Sandungen via Gupu

Semsvannet trail head toward Gupu

2007-11-25T07:11:00.000-08:00

Success! B finished the marathon in a great time and S became the most popular spectator in Florence after running the first segment by actually clapping and cheering. Italians are mostly too cool to do that. Porcini mushroom pizza is a great way to celebrate, to be followed by a blow-out meal tonight.

2007-11-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

November sunset on the Arno

We always forget how beautiful Florence is. This is at least our third visit (fifth to Italy) in the less-than-three years we've been dating. We've both been here enough times that we tried to navigate without a map yesterday (our beautiful laminated map of Florence has perhaps disappeared into the cracks of our apartment?!). Unfortunately, we failed.

Florentine food remains as good as ever. In Pisa yesterday we did have to stop by our favorite bakery (sounds pretty good, doesn't it?) for some Pisan ricciarelli and pine nut cookies. This was after going by the Museo San Matteo, which has the most excellent collection of Pisan crosses in the world. The crosses move from late 12th century ones, which still show the upright form of Jesus merely leaning against the cross, to the 13th and 14th century where he hangs, arms stretched, eyes closed, and head leaning down, every agony traced.

By the time we got to Florence, we were starving. So we found an osteria that had an artichoke special for B and a fish carpaccio to fulfil my desire to try something new almost every meal while travelling. The fish had been smoked somehow, and was served with arugula and fennel. Delicious! Today we went to the marathon mall (this is the reason for the trip: while I was able to run in Frankfurt four weeks ago, B came down with food poisoning and couldn't run). The marathon goody bag here was amazing: a technical long-sleeve shirt, warm winter running pants, a gel, a gel wrist pouch, and more. The rain was pouring down as we headed back to the hotel, changed, and then across the river to the Via Santo Spirito, which houses a series of pretty consistently good restaurants. For lunch, then, I had another artichoke salad (B went with the mixed bruschetta, which was very good), my first bowl of ribollita (I know, embarrassing!) and the most amazing fritto misto, consisting of incredibly tasty mushrooms and two whole deep-fried squash blossoms, whose delicate taste and texture absolutely made my day. B went all the way: pasta with white truffles. Mmmmmm! (A favorite cookbook author always quotes her Italian grandmother saying "Fritto, anche un stivalo" [fried, I would eat even an old shoe]. My squash blossoms were nothing like an old shoe.)

Then it was off to the Brancacci Chapel, where Masaccio's frescoes retain their fresh expressiveness and naturalism. We spent the most time enjoying the properly Protestant (or proleptically Protestant) painting of Peter's fish with caesar's coin inside: the attitude of the disciples, Masaccio showing off his technical virtuousity, and down in the corner the picture of Paul visiting Peter in prison (as if!!). Now we're resting up for tomorrow. The fantastic marathon course is tempting me to run the full, but my knee has made it clear that I should stop at the halfway point. It won't be an official result, but at least I can see my time and cheer B on should he survive without vomiting or other accidents.

Bebenhausen

2007-11-17T12:06:00.000-08:00

Bebenhausen I

Bebenhausen II

Bebenhausen III

Snow in Tübingen

2007-10-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

Snow on the roof of the Evangelisches Stift

Snow on the roofs of the buildings Am Markt

We awoke to snow falling this morning. We welcomed it feeling assured that our marathon, which is now only a week away, would be nice and chilly (or at any rate a far cry from the oppressive heat that greeted marathoners in Chicago a few weeks ago).

The semester has just gotten underway, but much of the excitement and sense of new beginnings has past us by, although that today's sermon assured us that faith is always a new beginning (a contention that met a bit of resistance when the text for meditation detailed Joshua's military exploits in Palestine)! The preaching at the Stiftskirche aside, we both feel a bit behind with respect to some of the goals around which our Fall activity has been ostensively structured. S has, however, found the prospect of the upcoming trip back home an incentive to plod ahead with disseration work. For my part the recent work I've picked up has helped to structure my week, but is draining some of the energy that researching and applying to programs demands. I'm teaching six classes a week and will start picking up additional hours as a Hiwi (wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft [research assistant]) for a theologian at the university here as soon as I can collect the requisite paperwork.

2007-10-14T05:57:00.000-07:00

I know I just posted, but here's another.

One of the benefits of training for a marathon (only two weeks to go!) is how much you get to eat. During the last 8 weeks, I've run about 34 miles a week. That's not much when training for a marathon, but given my injury history, I'm so pleased. Not only have I gotten WAY faster (although I am still a tortoise in a world of hares), I also get to eat. All the time. As much as I want. And no, I haven't gained any weight. B's bad eating habits have been rubbing off on me--chocolate, these delicious cream-filled things that one of the half-dozen bakeries within two minutes walk sells--but generally, I've kept it under control.

On Friday, we each did an 8-mile tempo run. Although we were supposed to do a 15-miler today, we had to change it to yesterday as B has a game today. And let me tell you, trying to run 15 miles after doing 8 miles the fastest you've ever gone is no fun at all. So we cut the run "short" at about 12 1/2 miles. We were hurting, and I mean HURTING! Legs, calves, everything--I felt like my lower half was running 7 minute miles while my upper half was running 13 minute miles--no cardiovascular effort, but pain in the lower body! So B just went off to his game. But I, thankfully, have the day off. And I decided that I want sweets!

There's not much in the house so this recipe (without baking powder or sugar, with a bit more honey, and with quantities reduced) with lavender added became the basis for the dessert I just made. SOOOO delicious! Here's the bad part: I just ate the whole thing. If B finds out, he won't be happy! So tomorrow, when the stores open, I'll have to get some more ingredients.

The lavender I got at the local market adds so much to such different recipes! Savory, sweet--a drop of lavender works in many, many contexts.

Now, though, I'm full!

2007-10-14T04:41:00.000-07:00

There hasn't been much news coming from us lately, as we've finally had the chance to start... just settling in. Our sofa and chair arrived this week, we mounted the mirror, but the famed guest bed is not here yet as they could not get it up the stairs. Hopefully, it will arrive in about 8 days. Our twisty-turny stairs are a bit difficult to navigate. Sometimes I think this house looks like the basic structure was built ages and ages ago, and then modifications were just made here and there and on top of each other (at one point, coming up the stairs, you see what seem once to have been doors into the neighboring house, but only the bottom third...?).

Without much exciting to report, let's talk about food. I hate pizza, as everyone who knows me knows. I HATE pizza. It is my most-hated food almost of all time. I do not like it. It's gross! There's too much cheese, too much sauce, and too much useless fat. (Fat exists to add to flavor, not to pool uselessly on top of the far-too-much cheese.) Of course, there are exceptions. When my family used to go to Rome when I was 12-14 years old, there was a pizza place near the Pantheon that sold the most amazing artichoke pizza, which basically consisted of flatbread topped with artichokes and oregano. That was it. And it was good! We'd fight over it in the train! Normally, though, ugh!

On the other hand, I LOVE my own homemade pizza. Yeah, I consider myself a decent cook, but nothing fantastic. My own pizzas, though? Amazing! On Thursday, I was wondering what to make for lunch. We had pretty much nothing in the house other than potatoes, and I was HUNGRY. So, pizza it is. You cut the potatoes super-thin (those big holes on the side of the grater are pretty good for this), cook them until tender over high heat with little oil in a non-stick pan, cut lots of garlic into thin slices and combine with crushed dried chiles, sage, rosemary, and (bear with me) a tiny bit of lavender. Sprinkle over the pizza dough, top with potatoes, add a little salt, some goat cheese, and a sprinkling of parmesan, cook in the super-hot oven for about 7 minutes, and bingo! Pizza. Even better is the version we tried last night: with thin eggplant slices (cooked in a hot oven), spread with a layer of non-fat quark, and dotted (thickly!) with homemade parsley pesto from a mortar. WOW!

I've always made pesto in a food processor (and yes, I know, PESTO is really only made with basil, pine or walnuts, and a mixture of parmesan and pecorino, but whatever!) and am addicted to every version I've ever tried. But one of the best ever is parsley pesto, made of course with flat-leaf parsley (the other kind has no flavor). In the food processor, it takes about 90 seconds to make and comes out really good. Here, I have no food processor, but I do have a mortar and pestle (the heavy marble kind). I tried making basil pesto the other day, but it came out a little stringy (probably because the basil wasn't quite at its peak). So I decided to go for some parsley pesto. I rough-chopped the parsley into the mortar with scissors, added some salt, and started pounding. Soon I was greeted with the most intoxicating of aromas. Throw in a clove or two of garlic, keep pounding, then rough-crush the walnuts and start tossing them in (I think walnuts have more body and stand up better to the earthiness of parsley pesto). Finish with a good drizzle of olive or walnut oil (bought at the regional market last weekend, so I know it came from local trees--cool!). Then stir in a little grated parmesan or pecorino. Amazing, in any form, but perhaps most especially with runny eggs in the morning.

Hey, primitive living has its compensations, right?

2007-10-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

Our new place is everything we could have hoped for minus the fact that it has demanded a lot in the way of human labor to make it livable. Here are a few before and after shots of the bedroom and kitchen (the only two rooms that in anyway approximate completion). Bedroom before

Bedroom after

Kitchen before

Kitchen after

Kitchen before

Kitchen after

2007-10-03T01:57:00.000-07:00

We've moved! Sort of. The stove in our new place came yesterday, but it still has to be connected. The living room is partially oiled (the wood needed some treatment), but we ran out of oil and couldn't get more, so it's not quite finished. We did install a cool closet treatment in the closet room, a couple of racks in the kitchen, and we built a workspace/cart that we got at Ikea yesterday since there are no countertops, cupboards, or anything similar in the kitchen. We have no hot water and the toilet seat is not attached to the toilet. BUT: we have a bed. If we compare the current bed with the king-size bed of days of yore, it shrinks into insignificance. But if we compare it to the mummy-shaped camping mattress in the tiny hole? It suddenly seems like acres of paradise. Although the bells of the Evangelische Stift do not intend to allow us lazybones to sleep beyond seven am, there is little or no traffic here and that is delightful after listening to the 3am road races at the old place. We still go back to the other apartment to cook and shower, but we'll be out of there tomorrow.

It was great to have a visit from an old friend who is also over here in Germany this weekend. Not only were we able to use his strong muscles to help us carry our new (antique) Spanish chest from the Flohmarkt (flea market) to the new apartment, but we were able to eat, talk, and plan dissertations and trips. After he left, B and I headed out for what promised to be a delightful, relaxing 15-16 miler after last weekend's 20plus. I'd carefully planned out a new route that took us past the cloister at Bebenhausen, up through the woods, and back along the Neckar. The first hour or so was as delightful as promised, but then we started having trouble finding the way. This broke things up a bit so that it was hard to settle into a rhythm. As long as we remained in the woods, it wasn't so bad. At the point where we were supposed to be returning along the Neckar, however, it turned out that we were initially returning along the Autobahn. Far less pleasant! Eventually we hit the path that brought us through clinging vegetation along the bottom of a cliff--much nicer than it sounds, except that it was getting dark. Neither of us could figure out why it was getting dark so early, though. Stranded at last on a two-way highway bridge with deceptive footpaths that lead us onto the bridge and then left us, we finally climbed down in the dark and accosted a man with two children and some glow-in-the-dark balloons. We were only a mile and a half from home, but when I turned off the heart rate monitor to check the time, we realized that it was so dark because we had somehow spent 50 minutes along the way looking for the way! In other words, a run that was thankfully, gratefully forgotten as soon as it was over.

Today is a holiday in Germany (Reunification Day), but no one celebrates. Unfortunately, the stores close anyway, so we won't have oil for the floor or screws to attach our new Ikea purchases to the wall (don't get me started on our trek from the Ikea south of Stuttgart to the subway station... sweat, misery, and cross-training with heavy heavy furniture are all involved, plus locals calling us crazy). Coming home to discover that the new bathroom lamp was half missing, the new mirror and towel rack have no screws included, and so on? Not fun! But as I write this over the stable internet connection IN BED!! and watch the sun stream in through our (multiple!) windows onto the wood floor and the newly laid bedroom carpet, who cares?

2007-09-25T11:20:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I attended the Stiftskirche here while B headed south to play lacrosse. We were both pretty sore and miserable after covering a full 32 km/20 miles Saturday evening. We ran from Tübingen to Unterjesingen, to Pfäffingen, to Poltringen, to Wurmlingen, to Rottenburg am Neckar, to Hirschau, and back here. Although I got totally exhausted, and B ended up trying to steal apples from trees to sate his hunger, it was a lovely way to get a sense of the countryside. According to all the weather reports, we are coming to the end of the summery fall weather we've been enjoying, but the beautiful weather has been bringing out people in droves. Our run through Rottenburg was complemented by the presence of medieval knights celebrating medieval week in full dress.

While my Sunday was a restful recovery day, B headed three hours away to play lacrosse with his old team. They won both their games by a substantial margin, but he hasn't stopped moaning and groaning since. Last night, he was even doing it in his sleep, until I (mostly asleep also) tearily begged him to stop so I could get some rest! We both break out in longing exclamations whenever we see a bed larger than the narrow pallet that serves us on more or less alternate nights. We've even started imagining that a full-size bed might be large enough, while back in the US, a king-size was the minimum we could handle.

This evening we headed into the Altstadt to hunt for a grater. Ever since returning from this summer's trip, my favorite meal has been som tam (green papaya salad) and tom yum (spicy sour soup with mushrooms or similar). However, green papayas are quite expensive in Europe. In Norway, we paid 11 Euros for two, while here, the going rate is 1.30 Euros for 100 grams (a large papaya is about 500g). An unorthodox solution, albeit delicious, turns out to be buying very unripe papayas at the local supermarket (YES! there is one!! Right next to the historic nuns' house!!!), which cost 1 Euro each, and using those instead. However. The kitchen, to dignify it with an undeserved name, that we are currently using, does not include a grater. The other day, I made papaya/cucumber salad with a peeler, but it took about an hour and my hand was cramping for some time afterward. So, grater needed. Did everyone but me know that graters can cost over 50 Euros easily? Of course, the Altstadt tends expensive, but that is pretty out of control. Especially when the Verkäuferinnen give you evil looks for not wanting to spend that much! We did find a cheaper one eventually, and just gorged on papaya-cucumber-lime-lemon-habanero salad. Thankfully, the Asian market is just around the corner.

Everytime we go somewhere, we decide just to walk by the new place to look at it. Even though showering in the kitchen and using the bathroom in the room that leads to the attic will be somewhat inconvenient, and we'll miss the cable TV with 42 channels that has been keeping us updated on all soccer events (hello, Mourinho!! and will Klinsi be hired?), we cannot wait to be able to shut the door on each other. Our landlady was wondering how that can be such a necessity after only six months of marriage. Perhaps the camping mattress has something to do with it?

2007-09-21T01:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we furnished pretty much an entire kitchen for a total of 18 euros. This included buying a full set of Ikea pots and pans, never used, small and large plates, coffee cups, a frying set (but that seems made for pasta--easy draining!), a small marble cutting board for cheese, a wooden one for other things, and more. There is such an excellent used store here! We also hopefully found a fridge. Yes, we pretty much have to furnish a whole kitchen, although there is hope that we only have to find a fridge and not a stove as well. The stove may arrive early in the month. Our kitchen, while very stylish (stone floor!), is hardly... modern. Given that we now know that there are documents on the house our new apartment is in that go back 500 years, that is not, perhaps, difficult to explain. (Which also explains why the floor in one of the rooms tilts.) Tempting as it is to go crazy in the used store buying cute individual pieces, we need to get a sofa first so we can build things around it.

B is hoping to start playing lacrosse again soon, while I really want to be able to settle down and get to work. But while there is still so much undone, and we still take turns sleeping on the camping mattress, and space is still so tight, it´s hard. We measured our new place yesterday (some 50+ square meters, just over half the size of the old place), and took a measuring rod to the current one as well. No wonder we feel cramped! It is a beautiful total of 17 square meters (ca 180 square feet). I thought it looked rather like my high school room, where my best friend and I shared 12 square meters, but of course that did not include a kitchen area, bathroom, and shower--so no wonder there´s no room for two beds!

But no more complaining. In two weeks or less, we´ll be living in our charmingly inconvenient 15th or so century apartment.

2007-09-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

We have the apartment. We move in October 4. Everyone who is planning to visit us: you are going to LOVE this place, and there will be plenty of room. Although not perhaps very much furniture!

Disappointing results in the Stadtlauf today, although I beat 2/3 of women and B was in the top 1/6 of men. Still, we were both hoping to run somewhat faster. It got HOT, though, and it took the first half of the first round not to be stepping on people´s feet and trying to pass all the time. We´re still trying to focus on the marathon. But in any case, all disappointment forgotten as we will 1) NOT be paying $2000 just to move in somewhere 2) NOT be staying in an apartment of 250 square feet much longer 3) NOT be dealing with brokers and other suspicious strangers 4) NOT be commuting in from Stuttgart 5) NOT be living outside the Altstadt 6) NOT be using my ENTIRE stipend JUST to pay the rent. So yay!

2007-09-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

We have a lead on an apartment! If we believed in anything superstitious, we´d be requesting lots of good karma or some crap like that, but oh what annoyance, it´s out of our control so all we can do is hope. This place is amazing. In contrast to yesterday´s very expensive one, this apartment is charmingly run-down as it is in a house that is probably several hundred years old. The place is full of beautiful old-fashioned dark wood-work and even has a gorgeous brown ceramic wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The family renting it out has not advertised it (we heard by word of mouth) and the father is a theologian/philosopher who knows Ratzinger, among others. They are Middle Eastern, so instead of setting up an appointment to view the apartment, we were invited for coffee and cake. The mother had baked the cake specially! Turns out we have lots in common and finally, ten minutes before we have to leave, we get to see the apartment upstairs, which is still being renovated but is SO PERFECT: there´s even a view of the Marktplatz. There´s plenty of space, more than we need, and again the shower is in the kitchen and the bathroom in the hall, but in a charming/cute way rather than in the unappealing un-cared-for way of the last place. Plus, the room that the bathroom is in is directly adjacent, and also contains the absolutely most stunning old stairway up to the attic. We have no idea what the rent would be, since that is one of the things that didn´t come up, but I suspect manageable, and it would be flexible in relation to our time here (i.e., not having to pretend that we´re planning to stay forever). As B said, if he had less theological backbone, he´d be tempted to say that we were meant to have this apartment. Although perhaps it is just a mirage? We both agreed that we can stick it out for two more weeks where we currently are IF and only if we have the prospect of this place on the horizon.

We´ll hear on Sunday.

2007-09-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

I Formaggi di Umbria

Artichoke Flowers

2007-09-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

So I knew there was a reason we moved to Tübingen. Admittedly, since we've been here, we've found it difficult to remember what it was. But now it is clear: the Umbrian-Provencal market opened in the Altstadt today. HEAVEN!! Perhaps the highlight was the pasta with truffle sauce (4 EUR), but also the pecorino with grape must, or with truffles, or the horse milk cheese that we bought (at least that's what it seemed to say! It's really good), or the pickled salted lemons from Provence, or the panforte, the amazing bread with walnuts and olives, the unfiltered tasty olive oil, or I know not what. An orgy of eating has reconciled us somewhat to the difficulties of existence (more banking problems, for instance).

The market fills up the entire old city with people from all over the region. While local restaurants take advantage of the massive crowds of people as well, there are plenty of salespeople who speak only French or only Italian. Indeed, the cheese guy asked B if he was really Italian? Which, not so much, but cool. We also stocked up on baby artichokes for only 3.50 EUR per kilo, which we will clean and deepfry tomorrow. We're both running pretty much daily, which leaves B starving all the time, and the fridge here is only half-size, so we do a lot of shopping.

We also saw the most gorgeous apartment ever today. Yes, it's the one with the $2000 fee, and there's pretty much no way we can make it work, but what if we can't find anything else? The apartment is much larger than we had realized, with a separate bedroom, sun on all sides (it's the highest floor), an absolutely amazing kitchen--indeed, the whole place was renovated in April, but the guy who has it now is a commuter and was hardly ever here, so he couldn't justify keeping the place. I don't know if we could get it even if we could somehow borrow the money from somewhere, but it is simply the nicest place I have ever seen to live--nothing over-the-top fancy, just so simple and perfect. And since we've finally found the bike path that follows the Neckar, running would be literally at our feet.

We're both getting a bit nervous about the Stadtlauf on Sunday. Not that I have any intention of racing, due both to my general slowness as well as the fact that we are in the middle of the hardest weeks of marathon training, but it turns out to be such a big deal that it's going to be hard not to get carried away. It's the highlight of the market weekend, all the stores will be open, world champions and Olympic medalists are running, and every newspaper and TV show in the local region is talking about it. Hopefully we'll manage to focus on the fun, cheer each other on (B is running with the fast runners, me half an hour earlier with the slowies), and not injure ourselves. After all, the marathon is the real goal this fall.

2007-09-13T04:28:00.000-07:00

Here is one of the concept cars used to test trial steering mechanisms.

The chic exterior of the Mercedes-Benz Museum.

2007-09-13T03:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we headed off to Stuttgart with my German class for an excursion. Since we've been in Tübingen for all of 10 days, we were itching to move around some more. Kidding! But Stuttgart was great.

We started off in the Haus der Geschichte for Baden-Württemberg. Normally, such history museums are pretty standard: start off with early or pre-history, then have some random historical exhibits, followed by some lousy art which no one really wanted to put in a real museum. But this one is a pretty different story. Shall we just say that this Bundesland is LOADED, and so has spent more money on their museum (which opened in 2003) than any other region I've ever seen?! At the entrance, there's a fabulous map of the region that lights up as you step on it, allowing you to highlight the areas of interest to you as you jump around on the map. The tour through the museum then continues with Napoleon (alliances), poverty post-Napoleon, emigration to the US (numbers in the millions!) in the early and mid-19th century, Württemberg soldiers in the Civil War, consolidation into one country in 1871 (although for some reason that seemed pretty downplayed...), World War I, post-WWII devastation and rebuilding, and so on. The exhibits were excellent--for instance, in the section on the 1848 revolution, the floor tiles are actually loose to give the visitor a feeling of uncertainty! On the final floor there was a series of thematic exhibits showing immigration to BW, how BW despite its lack of natural resources has used inventiveness to get ahead (long exhibit on companies no one has ever heard of, but I'm sure they're making tons of money!), and so on. Most interesting to us was a section on BW thinkers. Lots of Ernst Bloch, including a first edition of Prinzip der Hoffnung. Fascinating stuff belonging to Jaspers, including the letter removing him from his teaching position (sending him into Ruhestand) because he was married to a Jew. Not coincidentally, I think, displayed right next to Heidegger's things. His letter accepting the rectorship of Freiburg. A first edition of the speech he gave when he accepted the position--the one where he famously says that a university must find its own identity and essence in order to adequately support the Nazi state. The letter where he resigns his position the next year. A heil Hitler signature. And, most interestingly, the academic garments he continued to wear at formal functions, signifying his position in the philosophy department, even long after he was removed from teaching after the war. There were also some of Gadamer's belongings, as well as a picture of him and Heidegger together at some elite seminar in Heidelberg. So a little candy shop for philosophy/theology types!

Next we headed out to find some Schwäbisches food. Having filled up on cheese, cream, and white flour (for vegetarians, Schwäbisches Essen is kind of monotonous!), we headed to the Stiftskirche, which was renovated in 2003. Although there has been some kind of church there since at least about 1170, there's little left of the original structure. (Among other things, almost the entire church was bombed during WWII, when 80% of Stuttgart was destroyed as it was an industrial center. A very interesting speech by Helmut Thielicke, the famous German theologian, is on display, where he talks about how much the church has meant to the community and reflects on what God may be trying to teach by allowing the church to be destroyed.) The current structure is stunningly elegant and well-proportioned, one of the most successful mixes of the traditional and modern that I've seen. The cool stone structure is traditional, but the stained-glass windows are (except in the front) kept in gray-green-blue tones to emphasize the starkness of their portrayals of the biblical figures, including a fantastic resurrection/ascention/Christ triumphant. The ceiling is decorated with steel-colored metal kind of stars: difficult to describe, but very effective. The gray pews and organ complete the effect. Absolutely a demonstration of the fact that Protestant churches can be as aesthetically effective and meaningful as any other kind.

Then we headed back to the Staatsgalerie. We had wanted as usual to peruse the collection of older art, but it is currently closed to the public as that section of the building is being restored. The new section, the postmodern building by the English architect James Stirling, was impressive enough on its own, however. The museum has the single most complete collection of Max Beckmann that I have ever seen, including a fabulous juxtaposition of his Auferstehung (resurrection) of 1909 with one from 1916. Most fascinating was perhaps Joseph Beuys' Crucifixion (see this link for an image), where Christ is represented (or absented) by a hanging needle. There were too many other treasures to mention, and by the time we got there we were tired enough that it was clear we will have to return repeatedly to give the collection our full attention.

Our final stop was the Mercedes-Benz museum near the Stuttgart soccer stadium. It is certainly a massive advertising success. Seven plus stories of Mercedes mythology. You are met at the entrance by sharp-suited executive-looking types who have clipboards with information about the day's groups. The free audio guide automatically picks up on your entrance into a new room, and starts describing the collection. The cars are absolutely the shiniest, most gorgeous things you have ever seen, but it gets a bit overloaded after a while. I mean, this is advertising! I can only get so excited... especially when the historical-contextual exhibits make sure to mention that the factories were damaged during WWII, but make no mention whatsoever about why that might be the case. (The fact that the company was designing and producing tanks, for instance. And of course Hitler's cars are not included in the gallery of famous people's cars, although Arnie's is, along with the Papamobile.) But whatever. You even get to keep the fancy lanyard that your audio guide hangs from, so all in all I'd call it successful advertising!

2007-09-11T07:56:00.000-07:00

So I got sent home from German class today. When the teacher tells you that you might as well go home because there´s no point in staying, things are bad indeed. But we´re feeling slightly more optimistic on the apartment front. The place with the bathroom in the hallway (down a flight of stairs, as it turns out) was not too inviting: large, perfectly located, but really run-down and requiring a LOT of work to become habitable. We have appointments to see three more places this week, including the perfect apartment and one that may even be furnished! At the same time, we´re considering whether it might not make more sense just to move to Stuttgart (I would commute), since even downtown there prices seem to be hundreds of Euros less per month. Plus it would be easier for B to find work.

In other words, living on top of each other in a tiny place with little income and few prospects, we´re just where we ought to be on our six-month anniversary. We´ve amused ourselves by writing endings to this story if it were in a book (B would start drinking, I´d get bitter) but since this is only a temporary situation such endings seem a bit over-dramatized.

2007-09-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

Today we got health insurance for me so that B can be co-insured until he gets a job. Then he might have to get insured on his own, although I'm not entirely sure how they would/could check on this. It will double the price. Oh well. At least they charge afterwards (so the first payment won't be until mid-November) and the insurance doesn't start until October 1. The woman at the Krankenkasse was kind enough not to write this on the proof of insurance that she gave us for B to show for his work permit.

I think we're starting to figure out how to deal with all the paperwork here. Today I made copies of everything I could think of, brought them to the post office where I had to prove my identity to get a bank account, to the Krankenkasse for the health insurance, and printed out even more stuff from various bank accounts to take to the Amt (office) on Monday when we will hopefully get B's work permit. Everywhere we've gone, people are very pleased when we have multiple copies of our marriage license, my Zulassungsbescheid (admission to the university), our registration with the city, and so on. Everything has to be documented. B called a vocational school that was looking for a teacher today, and they simply wouldn't accept his qualifications (the Yale degree and so on) unless they had been vetted by the state office here first. And so it goes.

After going to the Krankenkasse, we set off on a hunt for the used bicycle store. I got an adorable old-fashioned brown city bike, while B picked up a road bike. Mine came fully equipped with the legally required lights and with a basket for groceries, but of course B is much more interested in speed so he will have to buy a light to be legal. But the prices were great--40 EUR for mine and 75 for his. We rode the bikes to the running paths on the hill, or part of the way. I'm going to need some training before I can get up there with only 3 gears. B had picked up some delicious food at the market today--salmon, arugula, tomatoes, raspberries, cheese--so we had a lovely dinner just now and are feeling a bit more content with life.

We went to another expensive rental agency today to see if they had anything for us. I have no idea what these agencies do, because this one just gave us two addresses and phone numbers and then if you make a contract, which you do with the owner of the apartment anyway, you come back and pay them over a thousand dollars for what exactly? Turns out one of the two apartments the agency gave us was gone already--maybe the other one too? It's making it more tempting to go for the PERFECT apartment which we know will be available to see on Monday, but what if we can't get it? Plus, the agency fee on that one is UNBELIEVABLE, over two thousand dollars. I don't know how married people do it here. Obviously, it's easier if you're single, because you can rent a room in a shared apartment, of which there are plenty. But for us, that's not really an option, and not only because we're married. I can't take living with other people after living on my own for eight years. Even here, where our apartment is separate from the other rooms on this floor, we've been invaded by fruit flies because the Mitbewohner (other tenants) leave food out in the kitchen for days without cleaning it up. Pretty disgusting!

At least I don't have to go to German class until Tuesday!

2007-09-06T10:22:00.000-07:00

So today I had my first full day of German classes. And, well, this isn't really going to work. The woman organizing my exchange program had promised to put me in a different class and, apparently, promptly forgotten about it. I was placed in the highest of three levels, but unfortunately, that doesn't mean much. Today? We repeated the Plusquamperfektum (we had done), a tense that I learned when I was (I'm not exaggerating) 12 years old. Then we did Futur I and II (will do, will have done)--unfortunately, I seemed to be the only one again who had learned Futur II before. Then we were given a list of irregular verbs to practice. Need I repeat that we were all memorizing those on the train as we commuted to school in junior high, and (even had I wanted) I have never been able to forget them? So it looks like I'll just attend the parts of the class where we might possibly do something I haven't already done a million times, and work on some theological/philosophical writing practice in the afternoons. The other kids (they seem so young!!) who are taking the class are college-age, and not really that focused on learning anyway, so that's even more frustrating to me when I have so much I really need to do and am wasting time in this class.

So I've sent an e-mail to find out if the shower-in-kitchen apartment is still available. I don't know if we could handle that, though. Also, it sounds like there are effectively two bedrooms but no living room--depending on the layout, that might be unpleasant. Another apartment came up today--I'm practically sitting on the phone hoping to hear back from the guy--which would be cheap and well located, but very much still on the small side. Given how difficult it has been living on top of each other even for the few days we've been here, we might not be able to handle a little closet-sized place!

It is cold here. Very cold. I'm trying not to complain after spending a summer being hot! But we've turned the heat on in the apartment! Already! Why did I leave my favorite wool coat in Norway, thinking I wouldn't need it for months? Of course, last week temps were in the high 20s/low 30s C, so maybe this won't last either. On a lighter note, I have a Handy (cellphone) now, and B's old number turns out still to work, so anyone who wants to give us a call and/or donate money to the decent-apartment fund, please get in touch!

2007-09-05T03:56:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Tübingen on Monday, tired after lugging about 60 kilos each of luggage on the plane and then on three different trains. The train we had to run for in the rain? Not a good time. This town is even cuter than I remembered, but it is not going to be easy to find a place to stay. We've been trying to get in touch with a company that is renting out an apartment that looks very ideal for us, but despite having left a message and stopped by, no one has gotten back to us. Very strange. Another apartment has an ideal location, but according to the ad, the shower is in the kitchen and the W/C in the stairwell! Should we call, or not? Votes? (Note: even with these fairly major disadvantages, the rent is still almost $900!! For a 5-600 square foot apartment, half the size of my former apartment.)

We're currently living in a 25 square meter (generously measured) apartment that we rented from an Israeli Arab med student. It is small. Very small. Our stuff is everywhere. The kitchen is a half-sized fridge with two burners and no stove. But we were lucky to get it. The location is right on the edge of the Altstadt (old town), so it is convenient for everything we want.

It is going to be a hassle to get B his work permit here, although we should manage it in the end. As it turns out, because he doesn't have a job yet, I have to prove that I can support him--bank account printouts, proof of my income, etc. But the moment he has work, he has a permit to work, if you know what I mean. Even though I have health insurance, I might have to buy it again here just to get him covered at the student rate--another $75 per month that we don't particularly want to spend! So I'm hoping he gets a job, any job, ASAP, because it's going to be tight if not.

2007-09-05T02:59:00.000-07:00

Here is a row of adorable fairy tale houses that sit on the northern bank of the Neckar. The northern bank of the Neckar marks the southern threshold of the Altstadt -- the area which we are combing for affordable housing. Inside the frame where the midground tree hits the background roofs (way to the left) you'll find the outlines of the Evangelische Stift which was once home to students the likes of Hegel, Holderlin, Schelling and Kepler. Students in Theology still live there. It's most charmingly located.

Boats on the Neckar

This is Am Markt -- the historic center of the city and the heart of the Altstadt. The Rathaus is on the left. The other buildings contain quaint cafes, restuarants, businesses, and apartments.

To the left is the Stiftskirche. These are typical cute buildings in the Altstadt.

2007-08-26T07:05:00.000-07:00

View of Oslofjord from House

2007-08-26T05:43:00.000-07:00

Everyone here in Norway says that the weather has been terrible this summer, but we've seen nothing of it. Sunny, comfortable: no more 36C/90% humidity. (Apparently athletes in Osaka have been collapsing at 33C/78%, so no wonder the running was hard!) We ran five times this week, which may be overdoing it a little but it's so tempting. As I write, I'm looking out at the sails on Oslo fjord. Maybe B will post a picture later, but the truth is that we haven't been anywhere on this trip that is more beautiful than Norway.

1. Most beautiful landscape: in Vietnam, between Sapa and Dien Bien Phu.

2. Noisiest: Hanoi.

3. Friendliest: Nong Kiow, Lao.

4. Furthest from anywhere: Gobi desert, staying with nomad families.

5. Most awesome city: Hong Kong. Not sure most other places are really cities.

6. Most peaceful escape from city: Beijing parks. The city is noisy and busy, but the parks, while full of people, are amazingly relaxing.

7. Worst (and only) sunburn: kayaking in Halong Bay, Vietnam.

8. Places we most want to return to: Laos, Beijing, and Mongolia, in that order.

9. Place we least want to return to: Izmaylovskaya park, Moscow. Or Russia, in general. At least not until we speak Russian.

10. Next major trip: probably the Black Sea.

11. Favorite hotel: Beijing Lotus hostel west of the Forbidden City. It had soft beds, a beautiful courtyard, was outside the main tourist areas, and we had our own shower and A/C. It was just such a blessing after Russia! And after days on the train and in Mongolia with no shower. Second place: the Madison Hotel and Sportclub in Düsseldorf, which also had wonderfully comfortable beds and friendly staff. Third: the five-star Langham Place hotel in Hong Kong with the most excellent views from Mong Kok.

12. Least favorite hotel: Lane Xang, Vientiane, although we didn't end up staying there. Second place: so-called "Old Quarters" hotel in Hanoi, which didn't even exist and had the rudest staff I have ever encountered at a hotel.

13. Least paid for a night's lodging: $5 for a room with own bathroom and scoop shower in Muang Khua (most expensive room in the guesthouse).

14. Cheapest meal (sit-down restaurant): Indian food in Vientiane, where ordering far more food than we could eat and drinks galore left us with a bill of $3 each.

15. Cheapest meal: fried skewers on the street in Beijing. Delicious! I came back from the trip determined to eat less pasta and bread, but am already falling back into wonted habits. I'm making delicious som tam almost every day, but green papaya costs 10EUR/kg in Norway so we've tried to develop a cabbage version which is actually quite good. We also were able to get hold of mangosteen, but they're even more expensive.

16. Most pleasant flight: Air China from Beijing to Guangzhou. Close second was the flight from Bangkok to Tehran, although we were nervous. Very friendly flight attendants on Mahan, although not perhaps the most experienced.

17. Least pleasant segment of the trip: overnight train from Hanoi to Sapa; let it be forgotten and sink into deserved obscurity.

18. Biggest difference everywhere we went from home: the proximity of animals. We've both meant to post on this, and we still might (we'll continue blogging at least until settled in Germany). Even behind my house, you don't have far to go before you encounter horses and cows grazing outside in the summer. But I could easily live much of my life without coming into contact with any animals, especially if I avoided the pasture on the way to the lake. But for most of our trip, that was not an option no matter where we were or what conditions we were staying in. In Russia, wild/stray dogs and cats are everywhere, and you don't have to get far into the countryside before cows are wandering close to houses that may also keep chickens, depending on the area. In Mongolia, the goats were impossible to avoid. My

19. Favorite animal of the trip: the goat that climbed into B's bed after having cleverly gotten through the barrier B had erected. Even in the center of Beijing, it was clear that animals were being raised for food, and we were never very far after that from chickens, goats, water buffaloes, and other animals that live side by side with people. It certainly made it very easy to see how people get bird flu, whether that ever turns into a pandemic or not. I'm also not used to animals just being allowed to graze where they wish, but it makes sense in less-trafficked areas that there is little reason to keep the animals from finding their own sustenance. And drivers are usually prepared for the water buffalo around the corner--it's probably one of the reasons there's so much honking in Vietnam, but maybe people just like noise too...

20. Scariest moment of the trip: dogs in Izmaylovskaya park in Moscow. (How does this keep coming up again?)

2007-08-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

Three styles of Thai stupas Bangkok's Golden Palace: the first and oldest, Sukhothai; Ayudhaya; and Khmer.

2007-08-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

It’s back to 20baht meals since S and B left. The food is often very good for what amounts to less than a dollar, but for some extra baht you can get great service, beautifully presented food, and fun ambiance. It’s hard to convince the locals to go all out on a regular basis, so it was great to have S and B to hop from one good place to the next—everyday! Even if in the delicious food courts in Bangkok malls! Missing the food spree already. Glad you all made it back safe.

2007-08-20T00:19:00.000-07:00

Our safe arrival last night in Düsseldorf was accompanied by intense feelings of relief. Our last 40hrs in Bangkok proved stressful beyond belief. While we were aware that many countries in the Middle East, Iran included, deny visa requests and entry to individuals who have been to the occupied territories (the way Israel is referred to amongst those states who refuse to recognize its existence as legitimate), we did not know that Iran also denies transit to individuals who have been to the occupied territories (we flew the Tehran based Iranian airline Mahan Air). S and I have both been to Israel, but S, lucky her, was travelling on a passport that had not been. We debated everything from ripping out the page to glueing it to the adjacent page to sticking the baggage tickets over the prominent Ben Gurion visa stamps. We decided to nothing hoping that always showing the passport already opened to the picture page would deter the impulse to flip through the other pages. Plan B invovled S practicing phrases of Koranic Arabic that she would use to plead to the authorities in case of emergency. S was right to assume that the Farsi speaking Iranians would understand her basic Arabic, but we found this out by ordering vegetarian lunch at the cafe and not through an unpleasant confrontation with Iranian customs officials. The passport was checked twice and in both instances only the picture page was examined. The drama of the situation was highlighted by the lead story that headlined Iran´s english daily "Iran News" -- "Israel is Flag of Satan". It was a pleasure to read this story as the plane took off on its way to Düssedorf. It was interesting to note in Tehran´s Airport just how few interenational flights actually pass through the country daily. Only one (that we could see from the flight board) flies to Europe (the UK recently revoked Mahan´s license to fly its daily flights to Birmingham and Manchester on safety grounds). The country is isolated and it´s not helping that Condy Rice just took steps to have Iran Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization in order to further control the country.

2007-08-17T04:23:00.000-07:00

Now that B is on the mend, I can get back to blogging about important things like food. I have to mention a couple of things we've eaten recently in case I forget. I just picked up a Thai and a Sichuan cookbook at the best English-language bookstore in Bangkok, but I'm pretty sure neither of these dishes will be in the cookbooks. My Thai favorites, som tam and tom yum, both are, but in the last couple days in Chiang Mai we ate a few unusual things that I don't know if we'll find again. One day we drove out to the national park just north of the city and ate in a bamboo hut by the reservoir there. We ordered as always the som tam (very very phet--hot papaya salad--soooo good!) and the tom yum (seafood hot and sour soup, phet as well of course) and the fried fish with garlic. Along comes a whole deep-fried fish topped with deep-fried strips of green matter (either Thai basil or kaffir lime leaves--for some reason we couldn't tell) and deep-fried pieces of garlic skin! Now, I eat about a head of garlic a day at home, and for all these years I've been tossing the garlic skin when I could have deep-fried it and had an absolute delicacy to enjoy!

Another day we ate in one of the noveau Thai restaurants which served some (reportedly) delicious mussels in a coconut and some lovely crab--these were of course eaten by my dining companions and not by me. In retaliation, I ordered the fried cashew salad which came with chilis, lime, salt, and green onions--the simplest idea ever, but absolutely the perfect thing to serve for a snack. Although we're cutting back on the spicy food for a day or two--the heartburn I had during my last session of speedwork on the treadmill was probably a sign that I should eat blander food instead of demanding everything maximally spicy at every meal. So today we had sticky rice with mango and coconut for a snack--BEST DESSERT EVER, every time.

Bangkok is supposedly one of the most exciting cities in the world, but we have reached the limit of our ability to take in newness, so today we are hanging out in malls.

2007-08-14T00:35:00.000-07:00

No posts for a few days due to anxiety and illness. B's sickness took a turn for the worse early Saturday morning in Vientiane. His fever shot up (although we couldn't find a thermometer that worked, it was clearly high), he developed a very painful headache, and the muscle aches got even worse than they had been. Fortunately, we were scheduled to fly to Chiang Mai that afternoon, but the trip was supposed to start with a tuk-tuk to the bus station, followed by a three-hour or so trip on a non-A/C public bus to Udon Thani in Thailand, then a taxi transfer to the airport. B was clearly in no condition to sustain such a trip, so (leaving aside all thoughts of budgeting as our trip resources have dwindled into almost-nothingness) we hired a private car to take us. That was pretty much the only decision that made the trip bearable for B, because our driver took care of all the immigration formalities both on the Lao and Thai sides of the border while we sat in the car. Standing in the six or so (it seemed) different windows to enter and exit each country is not what you want to do while feverish and in unbearable pain.

When we arrived in Chiang Mai, we headed straight for the hospital across the street from AD's house. We were quickly checked in, saw the doctor (who said he couldn't be sure what was wrong), took a blood test, got the results in about 15 minutes (no malaria, but otherwise inconclusive), picked up drugs, and paid (total: $30). We were told to come back tomorrow for another test, and went home to put B to bed, only to discover that his upper body was now entirely covered by a delightful red rash. Pretty sure of the dengue diagnosis, we filled him up with drugs, and put him to bed. When we went back for our doctor's appointment the next day, however, the doctor decided that it was not dengue but an upper respiratory infection. How he decided that, given that he didn't even listen to B's lungs (and he hasn't been coughing or anything like that!!!) is still a mystery to us. But this time he listened to my impassioned pleas and gave us codeine. B has been on about six different painkillers and tranquillizers until this morning, but he seems to be getting better so we're reducing his dosage (after all, three of the meds are mildly addictive!).

In other words, B has been pretty much in a haze for the last few days, but he's getting better. We're staying with AD, and it's really nice not to be in a hotel for the first time in a couple of months. Her neighborhood is pretty Thai (unlike the extremely expat-heavy areas of Chiang Mai). Right across the street is the lady who makes the best som tam (spicy papaya salad) ever! AD had her leave the crab out (ew!) and add lots of chili (convincing locals you can handle it is always the hard part), I took it home in a plastic bag, and there was a feast.

Yesterday was a holiday in honor of the queen's 75th birthday. In her birthday speech, she called for the separation between religion and politics to continue to be honored here in Thailand: she does not think that Buddhism should be included in the constitution. On Monday morning, the headline in the paper was: "Activists discontinue campaign." In order to honor the queen's wishes, the activists who have been very passionately calling for Buddhism to be in the constitution have decided to end their campaign. We will see whether this affects the constitutional referendum to be held here next weekend (another Monday holiday!).

On Saturday evening, exhausted and emotionally drained, AD and I went out to get a snack after putting B to bed. (He, on huge doses of Valium and opiates, was knocked out!) Right around the corner from her place is one of the coolest restaurants I've ever seen. The entrance is across a small pond with assymetrically placed stepping stones. We sat in a swing in the outdoor area next to the white bunnies hopping around. (Sounds like I took some of his drugs too, but I didn't!) The service was absolutely amazing, and the food delicious. The restaurant is red-themed, filled with red and purple lampshades with the occasional modernist touches. It is interesting to note how much one appreciates good service once one has gotten used to it. It is almost impossible to get used to it in Europe, because outside wildly expensive restaurants, it pretty much does not exist. The whole culture of customer service that is so essential to the development of late capitalism is still primarily an American prerogative--except here (at this restaurant), I would put those waiters head to head against any I've encountered (even at, say, Babbo) in the US. Totally unobtrusive yet utterly attentive: when the waiter brought the mosquito coil to burn near us, I exclaimed approvingly to AD (not to him): two seconds later he was back with mosquito spray just in case I'd forgotten to put some on (which of course I had). Just an example. I can see both why the lifestyle here would be very delightful and very seductive in perhaps unfortunate ways.

2007-08-10T03:55:00.000-07:00

Buddha Park (Leaning Buddha with Archer in foreground)

Buddha Park (Animals genuflecting to the Buddha)

Wat Sisaket Buddha Cloister

Wat Ho Phra Keo Dragon Detail

Sapa Trek on July 30

2007-08-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

I finally have a chance to post! This one about Sapa on July 30. While S & B were on their 10 mile run on the nice paved read, aj. D decided to go for a trek down to the valley and back up to town and meet up with then two hours later. Rainy season, however, made all the tiny little offroads quite muddy. My first turn down the valley transformed my trek into a a delicate balancing act of sliding down the mud. I checked my watch, and realized I had already spent 30 minutes trying not to fall! Behind schedule already, I decided it was best to manouver through the narrow valley roads till I found someplace to climb back up the mountain to the city. At most, I thought I was 30 minutes behind schedule.

After about 20 minutes there was not another tourist in sight. Clearly, these roads were off the well-worn beaten path of other nice paths into villages you must pay a fee to enter. I passed several housing communities, just short of villages. Since adults and adolescents were out working in the fields, there were many, many young children about, being watched by their four year old siblings! It was quite interesting to watch; yet because there were no tourists, there was no place I could get a drink I so desperately needed! The cool waters from nearby streams held me over for a while.

By the time I got to a place where I could see Sapa town, I stumbled onto a little hut selling food and drinks. I interrupted about six men around a table having tea, and they gladly showed me a path back to town. Almost there! I thought.

On this path, there were only villages going to and from the road; no one tried to sell me anything, although I would have gladly bought a drink from them. The nicest little girl saw me struggling the mud, and found me a nice bamboo stick, and generously waited for me to made it up to the road.

I made it back, finally, but 2 and a half hours later. Poor S & B were so worried about me, poor things, sorry! But the dinner afterwards was totally amazing, and we were all in much better moods.

2007-08-09T19:40:00.000-07:00

So AD and B think it was a big mistake to post about how we're feeling sick, but I thought we might as well include that info since we've been giving so many details anyway. I'm feeling much better today, but B's experience over the last week has been that the achiness gets better and worse, so I'm not holding my breath that it's over yet.

Yesterday we went to a couple of the important wats that are right around the corner from here. It was a bit hard at the second wat when the ibuprofen suddenly gave out, but after two restorative fruit shakes (watermelon and lime-mint) I felt better. We decided to try dinner at one of the riverside restaurants. It looked more like a bar, so we were worried about how good the food would be, but as usual, no need for concern. We ordered some steamed fish with a spicy lime sauce (excellent), sticky rice, and two salads, cucumber and papaya, very spicy. Well, the salads were spicy alright! Now, I can eat an entire habanero without crying, and even when B and I tone down the spice of food we cook for friends, it pushes the limits of many people's tolerance. But these salads had me in tears--just a little, but it was awesome. Since Russia, we've been on a hunt for truly spicy food that would challenge us a bit, and yesterday, we found it. Even more to my satisfaction was when the waiter came to clear away the table, and, amazed that we had finished both salads, he said (clearly complimenting us), "You eat spicy! Like Lao people!"

2007-08-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

We're sick! It's hard to tell how sick--maybe just a little--but B has been having muscle aches for over a week and I've had them for two days. Worst-case scenario is dengue fever, but if so we have very mild cases--it just feels like there are little bugs burrowing into bones and muscles. We both are running slight fevers and have headaches, but nothing else--no rash, for instance, so dengue does seem fairly unlikely. We'll be in Thailand where there are good doctors on Saturday, so for now we're taking painkillers and trying to hold out. The really bad news in my mind is that Daddy says not to run until this is gone. What about my marathon? I'll just have to make it up in Norway on the beautiful trails in Marka.

Otherwise, Vientiane (Vin Chang, pronounced) is the most chilled-out capital city in the world, I'm quite certain. We're on a street right in the center, by the Mekong, and there is no traffic. Only a couple of streets seem to carry what could be described as traffic, and my guess is, they're mostly bringing in goods from Thailand which is only 25km away. Now's when we realize just what an effect the lack of infrastructure here has on the local population also: food, drinks, pretty much everything is just a bit cheaper in Vientiane than we've seen so far. Of course, people who live in Vientiane are less likely to be poor than people in very rural areas.

We had dinner last night in the absolutely friendliest restaurant I've ever visited, Fathima's. The proprietor made us feel like royalty, which was especially welcome after the horrible experience we had at the Lane Xang hotel when we arrived. We had called on Monday to reserve a room because the hotel had a fitness center, so we decided it was worth paying a bit more ($33) per night in order to have easy access to it. B had confirmed all of the details when he called, but when we arrived at the hotel--bone weary after a horrible bus ride from Vang Vieng that was supposed to take three hours but took four and a half, muscles/bones aching the whole way--they had no record whatsoever of our reservation.

At first, the manager was totally unhelpful. He must have asked us at least five times whether the person we had spoken with was male or female, when we called, and so on. He didn't seem to want to do anything to rectify the situation whatsoever. (My suspicion is that it was because we were carrying backpacks with raincovers. Backpackers are never popular in more "upscale" places, although the hotel didn't seem very upscale to us.) He kept saying that they would be happy to send us to another hotel (?!? our reservation was here), so finally I burst out crying and magically he decided to upgrade our room instead. The bellboy first took B to what was clearly the manager's own private love nest (mirrors in the ceiling etc) but as B was being shown the room, the manager changed his mind and decided to give us another room, less "upgraded", but that room was not ready yet. B decided to go look at the fitness center, the whole reason we were staying at that hotel: no treadmills. Yes, they advertise that they have a fitness center, but there are no treadmills. So, having waited at least 15 minutes for the second room to get ready, we up and left and checked into another hotel around the corner. This hotel is nothing special, but we have a TV which is nice while we writhe on our beds in discomfort. But it really took the wonderful proprietor of Fathima's to take away the sour taste that was left by the complete lack of professionalism at the Lane Xang hotel. (Now, it would have been another matter if I hadn't had to start crying for the manager to be willing to lift a finger about what was clearly laxity in his own staff's training. Imagine just not writing down a booking!)

I've forgotten to mention the amazing tropical storm that we saw in Vang Vieng. Lightning must have struck several hundred times (seriously)--it was like a strobe light lighting up the mountains. Lightning would flash maybe 6-8 times in a row, then we'd hear thunder as the rain and wind continued to intensify and intensify. It's hard to judge just how severe a storm it was for us non-tropics dwellers, but it was incredible to watch (from our private balcony, at $12/night).

2007-08-07T02:41:00.000-07:00

We would love to see some comments appearing again! We miss feedback--trying to write every time we see an internet cafe is more fun when we think there might be comments!

Just arrived Vang Vieng, spending one night to break the journey to Vientiane. Hard to describe this place--think cheap backpacker heaven and you might start getting there. But whatever--we have a balcony, a view of the Nam Song*, and A/C.

*Edited. I said Mekong originally--my mistake. Now, in Vientiane, we're near the Mekong again.

2007-08-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

Today we biked 30km round trip to Tiger Trails' elephant base camp in Luang Prabang. Many of their elephants have been rescued from the abusive life of logging teak from the jungle. This 3 year old elephant has mistaken S. for a tree trunk.

2007-08-05T04:33:00.000-07:00

Stunning Luang Prabang building: at some point, this is supposed to house the Pra Bang, the golden Buddha statue that gave Luang Prabang its name.

Sinuous dragon staircase up to the wats on Phonsi mountain. These stairs are tiring to climb in the heat of the day!

Laos is filled with monks, mostly young. AD has been on a hunt for senior monks, but no luck yet. Many young Lao men cannot afford to stay in school, so they become monks for a period for the education. Unlike in, say, Thailand, monks in Laos work very hard. We saw young boys clearing brush, replacing roof tiles, sweeping streets, and so on. The wats are always hung with laundry: gorgeous saffron robes drying.

This is one of the wats that gave Luang Prabang its UNESCO World Heritage status. The beauty and complexity of the roof can hardly be reproduced in a picture.

Typical Luang Prabang street: much French colonial. It's not all wats, although they are everywhere!

Another gorgeous wat.

These are the murals of the Buddha's life on the wat right across from our hotel in Luang Prabang. The wat no longer functions directly as a wat; rather, it is a training place for monks to learn traditional Lao crafts. It is supported by NORAD, among others. These murals are used to teach children about the Buddha and his life.

The wat across the street, from a different angle. Every morning we were awoken by the monks' drumming as they walked the streets of Luang Prabang, doing the alms walk where people fill their begging bowls with food. Luang Prabang is filled with signs begging tourists to behave respectfully during this ceremony.

2007-08-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

Long Boats on the Nam Ou (about 80km North of the Mekong)

Nam Ou River between Nong Khiow and Luang Prabang

Charming Bungalow Bed Nong Khiow, Laos

Riverside Bungalow Nong Khiow, Laos

View of Rice Paddies from a Cave Nong Khiow, Laos

2007-08-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

Nam Ou River between Mouang Khua and Nong Khiow, Laos

Nam Ou River Bungalow Mouang Khua, Laos

Kitschy Socialist-realist War Monument at Dien Bien Phu (erected 2004 on the 50th anniversary of the battle)

Elian Hill, Dien Bien Phu (site of the most intense fighting of the battle)

2007-08-03T22:58:00.000-07:00

Leaving Ban Saphoun (the other name of the village I was in when I last posted) was a hard decision, but Luang Prabang is also a stunning city/town. When we arrived in Laos, we ended up in a town called Mouang Khua. We had to exit the bus and get into the longboat to cross the river to get to the town, as there is no bridge for miles. The town is stunningly located on the bank of the Nam Ou river. We stayed in a guesthouse right by the river and enjoyed the silence and the fact that there was nothing to do. In the evening, the electricity came on for four hours, so everyone in town gathered around the television. While travel in Laos is incredible, if you leave Luang Prabang or Vientiane, you do need to be prepared to encounter rats, geckos, or other critters. Plus almost no roads are paved, so travel is very very slow (especially in rainy season as one negotiates parts of the almost washed-out roads). But the country is so delightful that the pace seems rather an advantage than not.

From Mouang Khua, we decided to head downriver to Nong Khiow/Ban Saphoun. We chartered a boat with some Australians and puttered along for about three hours. As we entered the village, I saw some adorable new bungalows on the left bank and knew that this is where we would stay the night. Well. You know those pictures from Balinese resorts that cost $600 per night that show beautiful bungalows with local prints, four-poster beds, your own private terrace overlooking the water, and a stylish bathroom? That's pretty much where we stayed. We and AD had a bungalow each, four-poster bed with pristine white sheets, a writing desk, subtle lighting, the works. This at the exorbitant price of $24 for a double including breakfast. It was paradise.

The resort is owned by a Dane who speaks fluent Lao and has only been open for a year, explaining why it wasn't listed in our book. But it is probably the nicest place I have ever stayed, both for simplicity and ambience. Watching the river flow by was so relaxing, the food was excellent (especially the deep-fried eggplant and the tom yum soup), no one was trying to sell me anything, and there was no honking on the (paved) road as there was hardly any traffic. B and I went out for a quick five-mile run and, for the first time on this entire journey, were not treated as freaks who should be mocked but instead welcomed with smiles and "saibadee!" (Lao for hello) which we returned with enthusiastic smiles and waves. I know this sounds too idyllic to be true, but what can I say? It was awesome. We passed villagers gathering at the waterspouts to wash (the women wearing sarongs), carrying water using the traditional method: two buckets hanging from a stick across the shoulders, classic bamboo stilt houses with space underneath for cooking, water buffaloes, chickens, and storage, a cave we had visited earlier that was used by the villagers during the American bombings and a crater right outside the cave where a bomb hit. It wasn't too hot, because as we're here in rainy season it rains every couple of hours for a little (5-30 minutes, usually) and then clears up for a bit.

I could have stayed forever, but unfortunately, the hotel had a tour group booked the next day and only one room available for more than a night. So off we went on another boat to Luang Prabang. This boat ride was a bit less spectacular than the last, although we joined the Mekong and spent the last half-hour on it, which was amazing: the river is HUGE!!! But the ride was also made somewhat less pleasant by our company. There was a Scot who kept trying to urinate off the back of the boat (but didn't have the sense to go to the very back) so he kept hitting himself and the boat instead of the river, the four identically dressed Poles who literally took pictures (they had two huge cameras and a camcorder) of every single person we passed, including children playing in loincloths who were clearly shy (treating people like animals in a zoo again)--it was an unpleasant reminder of what tourists must look like to Lao: bizarre, rude fools with lots of money. It is terrifying to think of what tourism will do to this country, although it will enrich many people as well, and that is the paradox of travel. Laotians are poor. Really, really poor. The huge bridge over the Nam Ou that links Ban Saphoun and Nong Khiow had perhaps three cars pass over it the entire time we were there, plus a couple of trucks. Maybe 10 motorbikes. Most Laotians are not going hungry, but many, many children die before the age of five of preventable diseases like malaria (endemic). We are taking anti-malarial drugs (Malarone), but at a cost of $5 per pill, the price would have to be reduced to a very small fraction before most people here could afford the drugs. Not to mention that counterfeit drugs (especially for malaria) are a huge problem in Southeast Asia. It wouldn't matter if the drugs were effective, but they often contain only a small amount of effective ingredients and thus contribute to the increasing problem of resistant malaria.

Luang Prabang is already showing the effects of tourism, both good and bad (the city exists now primarily as a tourist destination). The city is gorgeous: containing dozens of wats (Buddhist monasteries, sort of), French colonial buildings, Lao buildings, a mixture of all styles and all preserved due to the lack of money for economic development that Laos has experienced for so long. (Here we call it Lao, because the real name is the Lao People's Democratic Republic, or Lao PDR.) Prices are reasonable, although higher than in the countryside (we are still struggling to spend over $5 each for a big meal with lots of drinks). But there are children roaming the streets constantly selling trinkets. I could almost shoot any tourist who buys them. The children are adorable (and seem mostly adequately dressed and fed), but it is the idiot tourist who feels sorry for them and buys one of their trinkets who is responsible for their being out of school selling crap to tourists and having to humiliate themselves in this way. If there was no market, farming families wouldn't take their children out of school and send them around telling tourists "beautiful hair, would you like to buy?" But I have seen at least 8 children so far roaming the streets here. We were also accosted by a drugged-up beggar wearing only shorts who reached for our purses when we refused to give him money. Many drugs are readily available in Laos (it is, after all, part of the golden triangle) and although the government, responding to US pressure (not accompanied by money) has tried to eradicate opium growing, it remains an important source of income for some, including minorities in the north who have no other way to make money.

Anyway. After days on end of moving around, we are settled in Luang Prabang for a few nights. B, unfortunately, is pretty sick with food poisoning so he's staying in as AD and I take care of business. We're hoping to arrange an elephant ride and maybe some kayaking for Monday. Tomorrow we'll probably wander Luang Prabang looking at buildings (and B will take pictures--he already has some pretty spectacular ones to post). Unfortunately, it is HOT here, and I don't think there is a gym, so some pretty unpleasant running may have to take place. But in mid-week we'll be in Vientiane, which is supposed to have at least one nice gym. Here's hoping!

2007-08-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

We made it out of Vietnam successfully, although it may be hard to believe that it took us 9 1/2 hours to cover 60 miles. Seriously. We booked a private car, or so we thought, from Sapa to Dien Bien Phu. The next morning, a huge minibus showed up. It could have seated 15 plus the driver. There were three of us. There was A/C. It was awesome. The drive is one of the most spectacular I have ever done. More description will follow, but right now we are in the throes of decision-making and have to get business done.

We're in Nong Khiaw in Luang Prabang Province in Laos. The village we were in last night, and this one, are the two most peaceful places I have perhaps ever seen. We were awoken only by the roosters crowing this morning, as there is almost no traffic in either of these places.

Laos is beautiful. And we have much more to say! But it will have to wait.

2007-07-30T05:40:00.000-07:00

We went for 10mile run today through the mountains of Sa Pa. The scenery here is amazing. Thousands of rice paddies hug dramatic mountain scapes. The paddies are terraced and emanate out of the hillsides reiterating the initial geological contour of the mountain. It's a truly stunning sight. Here in Sa Pa one can observe rural life as lived in relative prosperity. It's been nice experiencing a bit of rural Vietnamese life, especially when one considers that an overwhelming number of the country's 83 million people live in the countryside. I imagine Sa Pa is as authentic a place to experience pastoral Vietnam as anywhere else in the country. Here, however, things are strikingly beautiful and there is, both to our advantage and at times annoyance, a rather well developed tourist infrastructure.

This idea of "authentic experience" circulates widely in the marketing of various tourist activities. Every tourist operator in the village advertises trips to "real ethnic-minority villages" where you can go take pictures and buy the wares of the Hmong (silent H) people. It's kind of disturbing that these minorities, ethnicities not entirely integrated into the dominant mode of cultural organization, are treated like animals in a zoo. There are clear imperial overtones to this type of tourism. The mere existence of the infrastructure that enables people to become objects of tourism in this way already illustrates the fact that their "traditional way of life" is anything but traditional. It is supremely modern in the sense that it has adapted to, and is reflexively determined by, western tourism and the global economy. A great example of this was when we were on Olhkon Island, in Lake Baikal in Siberia. There was for sale a day trip to a "traditional Buryiat village". A German couple we met who went on the trip commented on just how awkward and fabricated they found the experience when, upon arrival, the women in the village started changing out of their western clothing in order to dress up "traditionally" for the Westerners!

While we recognize that all "first" to "third" world travel has imperial overtones to the extent that it takes enormous advantage of structural economic inequities, the whole marketing people and their way of life as a commodity for western consumption takes things to another level. It's hard to tell which is worse: the desire to observe people this way or the marketing that attempts to make this desirable.

With this said Sa Pa has been a welcomed changed from Hanoi, both in terms of weather and pace of life. Although people here are just as aggressive on the road and equally ready to indulge use of the horns, there is less traffic volume and this makes things more tolerable.

Tomorrow we are off to Dien Bien Phu -- the famous site of the French defeat in 1954 which effectively ended their colonial presence in Indo-China. From Dien Bien Phu, which is tucked away deep in remote NW of the country, we will cross on Wednesday to Laos. We hope to find a boat some 40km across the border that can float us downstream to Luang Prabang.

2007-07-30T05:29:00.000-07:00

Sa Pa V

Sa Pa VI

Sa Pa VII

2007-07-29T21:11:00.000-07:00

Our overnight train to Sapa was a foretaste of what hell might be like. 6 bunks is always a bit unpleasant, but this could have been ok had the entire car not been occupied by a group of the rudest people we have pretty much ever encountered. They were a Vietnamese troupe travelling to Lao Cai to do some kind of performance: clearly not one where rest, sleep, or quiet is requisite. They partied until almost 4 in the morning, covering the entire train car with cigarettes, beer bottles, and urine. With four other people in the compartment trying to sleep, they talked out loud to each other, talked on their cellphones, sent SMS messages incessantly (without putting the phone on vibrate, so tones sounded every 2 minutes), and generally made the trip so intolerable that in the morning we just stared at each other, thoroughly traumatized and almost unable to believe that anyone could behave so badly. In total, we got no more than a couple hours of sleep, interrupted every few minutes.

In other words, we cannot handle the noise in Vietnam much longer. It is too bad, because the country is delightful in almost every other way. The food is great, many people are friendly, the scenery is amazing, and so on. But even here in Sapa, a small town, the honking and general noise, plus the constant requests to "buy me?" [from me, we think], "excuse me, buy something?" are just too much to take at this point in the trip.

We did have a highlight yesterday: watching Iraq beat Saudi to take the Asian Cup. Our vociferous cheering provided some entertainment for the Vietnamese who, while supporting Iraq, were rather quieter for a change. Of course, halfway through the game the electricity on one side of the street went out, but we just switched to another restaurant on the other side and carried on. We spent most of the day, however, just recovering from the awful journey here and eating in our hotel restaurant, which serves the most amazing grilled fish with dill ever. Their fresh spring rolls with herbs are also amazing, so I think we'll just eat there again today. AD broke out of her normal rhythm of eating a fraction of what B and I do to order a second serving of the shrimp springrolls during the game yesterday, which as far as we could tell contained no shrimp whatsoever but some absolutely delicious mushrooms.

It is very nice to be out of the heat for a day or two. Sapa is at 1600m and is rainy, so it is actually possible to sleep without A/C for a change. Today we'll try to do some hiking and jogging now that the rain appears to be stopping, and tomorrow we leave early in a car for Dien Bien Phu near the Lao border. We have some fairly arduous days of travelling ahead as we turn toward Luang Prabang in Laos, so we decided to splurge on a private car for what promises to be an unpleasant trip. We'll spend a night in Dien Bien Phu, perhaps visiting what is left of the battle site, before taking the 5:30am bus across the Lao border. Dien Bien Phu is only 35km from the border crossing, and the town the bus goes to on the other side is only 75km more, but we can't expect to hit speeds of more than 25km an hour, and that may be optimistic. So we'll see. Then we plan to float on a boat to Luang Prabang, although AD, having done the same in Cambodia, is a little skeptical of the plan. On the way, we might overnight in a hammock in a village--supposedly, that's the best accomodation available. We've broken out the DEET and started taking Malarone, but I think it will be fine. After all, AD says that Laotians are QUIET, and at this point, I'm willing to put up with almost any inconvenience to be rid of noise.

2007-07-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

Sa Pa I

Sa Pa II

Sa Pa III

Sa Pa IV

2007-07-28T03:30:00.000-07:00

Our last two days in Hanoi have been enervating. The heat, the noise, the aggressive salespersons, and general urban rancor have left us longing for a more relaxing rural environment, which we hope to find tomorrow when our night train arrives in Sapa (NW Vietnam near the Chinese border). Here we hope to find cooler weather and more contemplative outdoorsy activity.

As for Hanoi, we spent the last two days here eating, sightseeing, fighting with a recalcitrant hotel staff, and dealing as best we could with the oppressive heat. Yesterday we visited a neo-gothic church (St. Joseph's Cathedral) erected by the French in the late 19th Century. The exterior was in charming disrepair and in the little square just outside entrance Vietnamese children played soccer. Soccer is in the air here as southeast Asia is currently host to the AFC Asian Cup (the finals will take place this Sunday, Iraq vs. Saudi). The inside of the church, like most neo-gothic 19th-century churches, was a little kitschy and overly insistent -- trying to be religious is a way that clearly failed (Nietzsche and Schopenhauer called such churches tombs for an embalmed God). The church only recently resumed services in the early 90s. Many churches in Vietnam faced state persecution after the revolutionaries united the country in 75. This prompted the thought that maybe it's better for the church to be persecuted by the state than to receive its sanction. While pursuing persecution is obviously sinful in the same way pursuing martyrdom is sinful, one must remember that Christianity's original mode of being is religion under siege. So who has done Christianity a greater favor, Constantine or Lenin?

After the church we visited the infamous Hoa Lo Prison, better known by the moniker Hanoi Hilton. This was a prison first designed, built, and used by the French to imprison and torture unruly colonial subjects. It was a pretty horrible place. Although it had been converted into a museum, it did not take much by way of imagination to see just how nasty things were. While the museum did a great job documenting the crimes inflicted by the French on the Vietnamese, it was less than honest when exhibiting the way American prisoners were treated. The rooms dedicated to documenting the lives of American POWs were clearly fabricated. There are staged pictures of GIs receiving letters, eating bountiful Christmas dinners, playing card games, etc. We know, however, some prisoners were tortured. There were pictures of McCain, including one showing the Vietnamese rescuing him from the lake into which he parachuted. In addition to this they also showcased his flight-fatigues. McCain apparently visited here in 2000. Pictures of this visit hang on the wall.

The prison also exhibited photos of protests that took place in France during the 50s and in the States during the 60s and 70s showing the respective domestic war resistance movements. This acted as a historic prompt. S and I looked at each other -- the Iraq war was at the fore of our minds -- and said simultaneously 'we have learned nothing from history, absolutely nothing.' And on that rather sad note, we left the prison.

2007-07-28T03:23:00.000-07:00

Our trip to Halong Bay was pretty much what we needed: a break from the heat and exhaustion of Hanoi, a chance to get out of the city and get some fresh air, and, unfortunately, a chance to experience a night without air conditioning or a fan. We headed out of Hanoi Tuesday morning, riding in a minibus to Halong City, where we embarked on our rather luxurious boat. We had a delicious lunch (they were even able to cater to vegetarians, although the fake shrimp really tasted like plastic--the rest of the food was great) before heading out through the bay to the "Surprise Cave", a pretty hokey but still impressive cave with stalactites and stalagmites (our poor Vietnamese guide! having to pronounce such words was not easy for Han) all over. Afterwards, we looked forward to swimming on a lovely white beach, thinking how refreshing the water would be. It was and it wasn't. Have you ever gotten into the ocean, thinking how lovely the cool water will feel on your skin, then realized that the ocean is as warm as the air? This was our surprise. The ocean was at least 30 Celsius, maybe more! I have never swum in warmer water, and this includes years spent in California and bathing on various sides of the Mediterranean! Still, it was nice just to float, and we also jumped off the roof of the boat (4-5 meters high) straight into the water.

When we checked into our boat room, we were pleasantly surprised to find it beautifully appointed with A/C, en-suite bathroom and shower!, a pristine double bed, and wood panelling everywhere. Another delicious dinner was served us by attentive boat staff, before we lay on the roof on deck chairs watching the lightning over distant mountains and the sky right ahead and then retired to our cabin. It was lovely, much nicer than we could have expected.

The next day, we breakfasted on the boat and then transferred to a smaller boat for our trip on to Cat Ba Island. We swam some more, this time in an area with a bit of a current so the water was slightly cooler. We also had the chance to kayak for an hour or so, although it didn't seem to be a very serious activity. We still managed to sneak off the long way, but the tops of my thighs ended up a bit pinker than I like! Another lovely lunch, before we continued to Monkey Island, where I saw monkeys in the wild for the first time! One with a baby on its chest even stole a juice box! Awesome. We swam off the boat and the beach (getting the theme here?) and then finally arrived on Cat Ba, to check into our supposed three-star hotel. (By now we had discovered that the $80 trip that we took, less than half the price of the trip we had originally enquired about, was not the dirt cheap budget option but supposedly the VIP trip! It was lucky that we didn't know, as we were generally more satisfied with the trip than anyone else.) Looking forward to some A/C and television, we went to our 12th floor room with balcony, one of the nicest rooms in the hotel, only to find that while the lights work, the TV and A/C won't turn on. We call the reception, which informs us that the electricity isn't turned on in the island until 6pm. No problem, we think, it's 5:20--we'll wait. At ten past six we decide to head out for a jog while we wait for electricity, thinking that the chance to jog outside Hanoi is too good to pass up. The harbor front is less trafficked than the city, and somewhat cooler, but a slow 25 minutes still left us dripping with sweat. We go upstairs for a refreshing shower, which is the point where we realize a) there is no electricity; b) the water in the shower is salt water. So rinsing off the salt just isn't working.

At this point, our travel patience is being tried. We call down again to find that the electricity on the whole island is out, minus what comes from generators, which is not enough to power any cooling mechanism. We go down for dinner--again, the food is pretty good--and our guide shows up a half-hour late having been begging the electricity company to please get us A/C! But nothing can be done. We go down the street to find some ice cream and watch the Saudi-Korea game somewhere with a generator powering the TV. Dreading bed, we finally go to the room and take travel sickness pills to try to get sleepier, having run out of regular sleeping pills. (Shared, they have gotten us through some dodgy nights indeed!) It is impossible for me to really sleep until I lie down naked on the balcony--while it's stone, so not exactly soft, there is a cooling breeze that gets me four-five hours of restless sleep while B sprawls inside. A pretty unpleasant night, especially when followed by a refreshing salt-water shower, a rushed breakfast, and a half-hour wait in the dock until another travel group that had been waiting with us in the hotel lobby gets to the dock. Oh well. We steam back to Halong City, napping under the fans on the second boat, have a final lunch in a lovely villa outside the city, and return to Hanoi to meet our friend Ajan Daeng, who is joining us from Thailand after returning from Central America via New York the day before.

Luckily, we manage to meet, only to find that the hotel refuses to honor our reservation, takes us somewhere else wearing enormous backpacks on the backs of motos, clinging to Vietnamese drivers a third of our size, terrified as we roar (it seems) through crowded alleys at breakneck speed. It gets worse when they put two of us, including luggage, on the back of one with a driver! The hotel is horrible, no windows in the rooms and few of the promised amenities, but in return for a promise of nicer accomodation the next day we decide to stay.

After a shower (fresh water!), we go out to dinner at Hanoi Seasons. A real advantage of having a third person around is that we can suddenly order much more food off the menu! AD has trouble keeping up with us as we devour fish in apricot sauce (again), veggie and seafood spring rolls, amazing eggplant with spring onions, and so on.

Yesterday involved some sightseeing, a lot of resting, a disappointing meal at a veggie cafe, and a delicious dinner at an old quarter restaurant, a screaming fight with the hotel staff who refused to move AD to the promised nicer room, paying for a Laos visa to be rushed through in 24 hours, a run at one of Hanoi's nicest hotels, and the Vietnamese celebration of war martyrs and invalids day. B broke 20 minutes for a 5k (I hate him!) while I suffered through a four-mile tempo run and AD napped (literally) in the pool--we are gathering an interesting collection of expensive but delightfully A/C gyms on this trip! Dinner was fabulous: fresh catfish spring rolls (you roll your own with mango, cucumber, and herbs), vegetarian fried spring rolls, green papaya salad, tomato and cucumber salad, eggplant with garlic, fried catfish with dill, fresh lime juice--including drinks, $5 per person.

AD and I head down to a local stage to find out just what the 60th anniversary celebration of war martyrs and invalids day will look like. There is music coming from the stage and a bunch of people (mostly sitting on motos) looking at it expectantly, but it's not clear than anything is actually happening. Suddenly, everybody rushes toward us as we are standing under shelter and it has just started raining. Instantly the stage is packed up, only to be reprepped when the rain stops a few minutes later and everyone comes back. Again suddenly, a troupe of acrobats appears on the stage, the girls dressed in very formfitting white satin outfits and the boys wearing cutoff T-shirts with shiny patterns and tight white pants. They put on an impressive display of athleticism, with boys standing on their hands held up by two other boys, then doing backflips and returning to handstands--it's hard to describe, but it was pretty cool. At first AD and I are the only two people applauding, while loudly discussing whether it's just against Vietnamese culture to applaud (we don't see any other foreigners around), but after the first couple acts, others start to clap also. The girl acrobats generally aren't as impressive as the boys, although one of them turns out to be a very elegant juggler. The acrobatics are equally suddenly interrupted by three boys, one dressed as a woman with a small ponytail, appearing on stage and acting out a small tableau where the woman-boy escapes from the other two while swatting at them with his fan while the two try to grab his hips. They exit stage right with the woman-boy riding on the other two who have turned into something like a human donkey. It's very amusing and confusing at the same time, so when the acrobatics start up again we go back to the A/C room and watch soccer. (Satellite television here includes a seemingly endless number of soccer channels showing classic, recent, and all other kinds of European, Asian, and what-not soccer games.)

Today we have sweated through some sightseeing, as B is describing next to me, and are dreading our evening trip in a six-person compartment (supposedly A/C, but given our hotel's dishonesty so far we have little reason to believe they are telling the truth now... but Sapa is at 1600 meters above sea level so even an outdoor long run might be possible, I hope. We're planning to cross into Laos near Dien Bien Phu, the site of a famous battle against the French, and then perhaps float down the river to Luang Prabang. This should take up most of next week post-Sapa. Apparently accomodation on the way consists of hammocks strung on bungalows (less than $2)--since I have trouble in humidity and AD dislikes critters and squat toilets, this may not be the most pleasant part of our journey but we'll see. Two nights or so in Sapa should help some, we hope, and the Laotians are supposedly very hospitable.

2007-07-26T03:41:00.000-07:00

Fishing on Hanoi's West Lake

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum

Gunner's Memorial (where McCain landed after being shot down)

Plane scraps from downed American and French planes

2007-07-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

Ha Long Bay I (NE Vietnam, appx. 150km East of Hanoi)

Ha Long Bay II

Ha Long Bay III

Ha Long Bay IV

2007-07-23T04:29:00.000-07:00

After chilling all day yesterday (and eating ethnic food from Northern Vietnam), we set off this morning for a war memorial near the West Lake that commemmorates the shooting down of John McCain. I had tried to get up early for a jog, and I did head out about 7:30, but it was not fun at all! Thinking I would beat the sun and join the other joggers around Hoan Kiem Lake, I set off optimistically only to realize 30 seconds after leaving the hotel that I was lost. We're staying in Hanoi's Old Quarter, an area also known as the 36 streets, because each street is a warren of twists and turns that grew up around various trades that were practiced on separate streets. The area has a lot of potential charm, but as it is the center of the backpacking industry in the city one is constantly accosted by moto drivers, cyclo drivers, people selling Vietnamese hats, Vietnamese fruit sellers wishing to be paid for allowing a picture, and on and on. It's a bit annoying, in other words. But, provided with sunglasses and my Shuffle, I thought I would be fine for a half-hour jog. Of course, I didn't bring a map nor did I remember the street address of our hotel. Nor had I beat the sun's heat, by any stretch of the imagination. Ten minutes before I was done, I did finally find the lake, and amused myself by passing a bunch of Vietnamese guys out jogging (just to show off) two minutes before I stopped. Through mostly sheer luck I ended up right back at the hotel, sweaty and dripping. Breakfast at this hotel is quite nice, though--there's fresh limeade (which is ubiquitous here) and Vietnamese coffee (made with that oh-so-unhealthy sweetened condensed milk).

Fortified, we set out for the above-mentioned McCain memorial after booking a trip to Halong Bay for tomorrow. We'll be swimming and kayaking amidst limestone formations on the coast--maybe it won't be as hot, at least we'll be able to cool off swimming, and we'll spend one night on a boat--should be nice, especially as we found a tour for half the price we originally thought it would cost. We also got two of the silk sleeping bags I have long coveted. They're up to $65 each in the US, so I couldn't bring myself to bargain vociferously when we were quoted a price of $6 each--we just got a dollar knocked off each of them. They're just raw silk sewn into a sleeping bag shape, but they're great for heat or as a sleeping bag liner to extend the temperature range downward.

Of course, by the time we hit the West Lake, I was exhausted, hungry, dehydrated, and hungry. Did I mention hungry? (B less so--he's been having some "digestive issues".) We tried to find an Indian restaurant described as excellent value in the book, but after a good half hour or more (why does this ALWAYS happen when we pick a restaurant that seems close, convenient, and cheap?!), we just gave up, looked in the other book, and found that a lovely restaurant described as one of the most pleasant dining experiences in Hanoi was only five minutes walk away. Determined not to worry about prices and just enjoy ourselves, we ordered spring rolls (vegetarian and seafood), steamed fish served with apricots, chilis, pineapple, and absolutely amazing, delicious eggplant in caramel sauce, various fresh juices, sparkling water, Vietnamese coffee, rice dessert, creme caramel, and more. The total (in a SERIOUSLY nice restaurant) came to all of $27 including the 10% service charge. I don't know if we could have eaten more, but we're going back on Thursday when our friend arrives from Thailand!

Afterwards we wandered past the Presidential Palace (a stunning colonial mansion), the Ho Chi Minh memorial--modelled on Lenin's, it is very stylish, but against Ho's own wishes (again, as with Lenin). Ho wished to have his ashes scattered on anonymous mountains in the north, middle, and south of the country. In contrast, you just know that Mao would have LOVED to know that he would be embalmed and admired! The area around the mausoleum is very pleasant (or at least it would be in less humid/hot weather)--wide avenues, leafy trees, sidewalks that are pretty easy to walk on, etc.

What's that about sidewalks? Well, as B has described, the traffic here is pretty abysmal. So it might seem like a natural solution to walk on the sidewalk. But just as in Beijing, the sidewalks are not primarily for walking. They are for parking motos, occasionally riding motos, playing checkers, operating informal (and perhaps illegal, but delicious!) restaurants, threading paper flowers onto funeral wreaths, roasting live squid over an open fire, selling coconuts with straws and sugar cane juice, repairing bicycles, and any one of the million other quasi-businesses that keep a growing, but underdeveloped, economy humming. Delightful though all this sidewalk activity is, it does make it nearly impossible to walk on the sidewalks, but since the streets are already filled with motos, cyclos, bicycles, cars, army trucks, SUVs, carts, and who knows what, there's little room left for people. No wonder 12,400 people were killed in traffic here last year.

In other disturbing news, we're flying Mahan Air from Bangkok to Teheran to Dusseldorf in August when we finish this trip. Except we just learned (off our wonderful satellite television) that the UK has suspended Mahan's license in part because some aircraft ... lack collision avoidance systems?!?! Is that why the tickets were so cheap?

2007-07-23T04:22:00.000-07:00

In the last half decade the Hanoi moto (a larger version of the Italian Vespa) has become ubiquitous. The deleterious effect this has on the environment cannot be over-exaggerated. The noise and exhaust fills the streets, and there seems to be a competetion amongst drivers to see who can honk the loudest, drive most aggressively, and best assert onseself on the road. Such contests are unpleasant enough on regular bikes, but on motorized ones it becomes an entirely different story. As S mentioned in a post on Chinese drivers, the ability to own motorized vehicles has far outpaced the ability of the society to insure that drivers are adequately trained to operate them. The statistics on yearly road carnage are appalling, and in this nation of 83 million people I think things will get worse before getting better.

Minus the oppressive heat and obnoxious drivers, Hanoi is an extremely pleasant city. It has wonderful tree-lined boulevards, well-manicured parks, delightful restaurants, and enticing market stalls. Today we ventured out to Hanoi's lovely West Lake. Two steps out of air-conditioned hotel and we were dripping with sweat. We soldiered on stopping at a military museum that housed a host of fascinating relics from Vietnam's two twentieth-century anti-imperialist wars for independence. The museum outlined the chronology of Vietnam's defeat of the French (which culminated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954) and then its defeat of the Americans and their S. Vienamese proxy army. We saw the tank that entered Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) just as the final American helicopter fled the American Embassy. The museum also houses downed imperial aircraft (Chinook helicopters and an interesting heap of French and American plane scraps).

When we reached the lake we strolled down a causeway dividing the lake and saw a memorial comemorating the place where John McCain parachuted into Hanoi after having been shot down. It was a bit surreal, but totally fascinating to see. It is a little sad to have so much of our sightseeing in this city focused on military history, but it is very much the case that Vietnamese identity has been forged in resistance (to the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the French, and the Americans). This history is still very real and alive even as this Communist society becomes more market-based and consumer orientated.

2007-07-22T03:51:00.000-07:00

Beijing is far and away the most "becoming" or "on the way" city S or I have ever been to. The air of the future wafts through the air (carried, or course, by the smog). There are impressive collections of ancient imperial buildings (the main tourists draws, e.g. the Forbidden City), but the Beijing that is leading China's furious economic development (China's economy is predicted to overtake Germany's No. 3 position by the end of the year) can be found in its ever evolving skyline of corporate towers, banks, swank hotels, and posh shopping centers. Beijing has the feel that New York must have had in the first quarter of the 20th Century: teeming with life and casting itself with the confidence that the world will soon follow suit. And indeed the city evokes the sentiment that we are at the beginning of the end of American global hegemony.

Nowhere can China's global aspirations be better seen than in its proud and intensely focused energy on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The slogan "One World, One Dream" is pasted all over the city and vendors of all sorts are already peddling T-shirts, hats, and other Olympic paraphernalia. All of the major historical monuments are under renovation, which, in the Chinese context, seems to mean rebuilding more than anything else. Much of the Forbidden City is, for instance, in under scaffolding. This didn't disappoint us too much as we share a fundamental allergy for all things imperial and royal (NB: on our week long Paris trip two years ago we willfully avoided Versailles and plan never to go!) There is, after all, only so much interest one can feign in buildings constructed for the purpose of receiving presents on one's birthday! There can be, however, I admit, aesthetic value to such things, but my proletarian sensibilities will always protest.

It is sad that all this construction has resulted in the razing of what many would argue are the most culturally interesting areas of Beijing. These are, namely, the famed Hutongs -- labynthine windy-street neighborhoods that once proliferated in this imperial city, but which now face the threat of extinction as huge boulevards and thoroughfares slice their way through town. This said, some of the Olympic contruction projects are truly amazing. First amongst them is the new National Stadium, which is without a doubt one of the most inspiring architectural forms that we've ever seen (for a picture see: http://www.worldstadia.com/ws/show-page.php?menuCommand=stadium&menuData=827).

2007-07-20T01:26:00.001-07:00

Jade Bridge (Summer Palace)

Summer Palace

Lotus

Hutong Delights (Street Food Anyone?)

2007-07-20T01:19:00.001-07:00

Confucius Temple

Confucius Temple

Lama Monastery (Yuong Lamasery)

Lama Monastery

2007-07-20T01:06:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong

Temple of Heaven

Forbidden City

Forbidden City

2007-07-20T00:54:00.000-07:00

Forbidden City I

Tian'anmen Square

Great Wall (Jinshangling to Simatai)

Great Wall (Jinshangling to Simatai)

2007-07-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

We spent four nights in St Petersburg, three in Moscow, three in Ulaanbaatar, and now six in Beijing, and this is the first time we leave regretting that we didn't have more time. Our only real complaint about Beijing is that it is hard to decide whether it is less attractive not to see the sky at all and suffer from the humidity, or to see the sun as we have done the last two days and be HOT HOT HOT.

Traffic here is crazy, but the ubiquity of taxis has saved us from the worst annoyance. It is perhaps not so strange that traffic is an issue when you realize that in 1998, there were only 300,000 cars on the streets of Beijing. A few years later, that number had doubled. Now there are three million, and another half million are expected to hit the roads by next year. In other words, there are a LOT of inexperienced drivers out there! Might makes right, so bicyclists threaten pedestrians but are themselves threatened by taxis, who have (sometimes) to yield to buses. Honking is constant, both in order to tell people where you are and simply as an expression of annoyance whenever there is traffic. It is totally frustrating to someone who isn't used to it, but perhaps also sometimes to Beijingers. When we were returning from the wall, our driver honked repeatedly at a bicyclist, who clearly had had enough: he flipped our driver off twice, to cheers from all of us in the bus who well understood his frustration.

We're off to Guangzhou (Canton) tonight, then to Hong Kong in the morning. Then we fly to Bangkok and then Hanoi on Saturday. Hopefully we'll find time to do some proper posts soon!

2007-07-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

As a life-long vegetarian, I've eaten a lot of eggplant. A lot! But tonight, the Holy Grail of eggplants appeared to me: the perfect balance of oil, chili, garlic, lemongrass, and ginger. We trekked out to a Sichuan restaurant after spending most of the day hiking the Great Wall. Yes, that great wall (no, it isn't visible from space). We were driven out to Jinshanling, the starting point of a supposed four-hour hike to Simatai, both fairly remote sections of the wall that see only a few tourists each day. (Badaling, the closest to Beijing, is supposedly a madhouse every single day, but simply crawling with people on summer weekends.) It was an amazing trek. Admittedly, we were both literally dripping sweat within about ten minutes--it was 38 Celsius plus probably 95% humidity or more--and we'll post a picture soon (Blogger doesn't work very well for us here in China--we can post, but not read our blog or post pictures). It was stunning--for much of the hike (determined as we were to outkick everyone we came with) we had the wall pretty much to ourselves. We passed thirty towers on the way, climbed up and down more or less restored sections of the wall, sweated and sweated and sweated, and had a fantastic time. Of course, the hike only took us two hours, so we had to go a bit further than intended, but it was incredible.

After the three-hour drive (130km) back to Beijing, we took a taxi somewhere close to this restaurant and continued our search for spicy food. B ordered the chicken with chili, I mean the chili with chicken, we had the aforementioned eggplant (seriously, it was SO GOOD), we ordered some "village pickles" which turned out to contain chicken feet, and a good time was had by all.

Yesterday, we didn't do much sightseeing of the guidebook variety, as we tried to get some errands done and also went to a FANCY gym for a run. The gym, located on the 18th floor of some luxury apartments, was supposedly airconditioned but due to the presence of a swimming pool, the A/C was pretty much ineffective. We persevered nonetheless, determined to get in a run on a treadmill. Beijing is not the best city for running. We still haven't seen the sky since getting here on Friday, and yesterday's air pollution index (96) is just below the 100-level where doctors recommend not performing strenuous exercise outside. So off to the treadmill it was. Thankfully, the rules warned that urinating in the sauna was not permitted. (Getting the noveau riche vibe yet?) The run was hell, but I got through my 8 miles and B tested himself on a 5k (results not to be reported at this early stage).

After eating lunch at the Dai restaurant at which we had had dinner the day before (they gave us a free drink as they were happy to see us again so soon--their cucumbers with garlic, chili, and vinegar are absolutely amazing), we sorted out the Great Wall trip for today and then went to Tiananmen square. Having driven through it several times, this was our first time stopping. The square is reputedly the largest in the world--800x500m, but it doesn't seem nearly that large because Mao's mausoleum is perched in the middle and totally spoils the effect. The police are a constant presence, vigilantly chasing down children flying kites (no, really--our first glimpse of the "heavy-handed" Chinese police) and other malcontents. The square is an impressive example of blocky Communist architecture, but the delightful suprise at the south end is the two old gates from when the Forbidden City really was forbidden. The gates are elegant and imposing at the same time, and speak highly for the ancient Chinese sense of form.

So does, at least in a sense, the Summer Palace that we visited the day before. The dowager empress Cixi, minx that she was, diverted the money for rebuilding it from the Chinese navy. In a supreme stroke of historical irony, not to be believed unless true, she used it to, among other things, build a STONE SHIP, an enduring testament to the might of imperial China. The might, that is, of the empire that fell in part as a result of NOT HAVING A MODERN NAVY. The Summer Palace nowadays is delightful, despite the number of buildings Cixi built for the celebration of her own birthday. It is filled with mainly locals (at least at the far ends), many of whom spend the whole day in the extensive grounds picnicking, listening to the radio, or, as a number of pensioners we saw, collecting empty bottles and cans from the garbage. (No wonder Beijing is so clean, relatively speaking, minus the air of course.)

After our first Dai meal (we had never heard of the ethnic group either, but boy, can they cook) we got scammed on a pile of delicious-looking mangoes that turned out to have no flavor whatsoever. Took another taxi ride home--Beijing taxis are $1.50 for the first three km and about 20 cents for each km after that, so it's hard to resist, especially given the human overcrowding on the buses. During the morning and evening rush hour, there are uniformed guides for every bus at every central bus stop. Wearing orange T-shirts, khaki pants, a red cap, and waving a red triangular flag, they direct people to stand in separate lines for each bus and flag down the bus when it comes--all while wearing immaculate white gloves, of course. The buses are mostly fresh and new-looking, but they are simply so full of people that the temptation to get on them is not great. There are just under 15,000 buses in the city, which carry 8 million passengers per day--you do the math.

We have lots more to tell about Beijing--by far the most interesting place we've been so far--but they are few internet cafes, we can't access our own blog properly, and we're so tired from the humidity that we'll need to wait until Hong Kong (Friday) or Hanoi (Saturday) to fill things in properly.

2007-07-13T05:49:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Beijing today after a hellish train ride from UB. Normally, getting on a train to travel is as relaxing as can be, but yesterday was incredibly hot, and it was not possible to keep the windows open because everything got covered with dust through the long hours through the Gobi. We were spitting and coughing dust. We tried to go to the restaurant car to get a snack, but they threw us out after we waited 20 minutes in favor of a tour group. So we ate ramen, again. Hopefully for the last time on this trip!! The border crossing leaving Mongolia wasn't too bad. On the Chinese side, the book had said that we could get off the train and change money/buy something to eat while the bogies were changed to fit the narrower Chinese gauge, but that turned out to be mistaken. Instead, we all lay there dozing, sweltering in the heat (on incredibly hard beds--and this was soft class!). When our passports were returned at one a.m., we tried to get off the train to get some water, but the psycho attendant kept yelling "five minutes!" at us and pushing us back into the train, so finally we paid a dollar for a half liter and gave up. The day seemed endless.

The morning was far more encouraging. The scenery during the last 2-300 km to Beijing was stunning--just like out of a movie. It was overcast (and/or smoggy), so not too hot and miserable. Lots of cute houses with triangular roofs, people working in triangular/conical hats, smiling work crews waving at the train, policemen marching, and so on. It is only in the last few hundred km of our 8500 km journey by train that it got really interesting to look out the window most of the time! The taiga, steppe, and desert were all pretty monotonous. We really started to get excited about China when a woman showed up selling delicious ripe mangoes on the train, which we devoured in about three seconds.

Beijing is so awesome. We took a taxi from the train station to our hostel, which is in a hutong north-west of the Forbidden City. Hutongs are the traditional Beijing neighborhoods consisting of narrow streets lined with courtyard houses and very small businesses. They are slowly disappearing in favor of tall apartment houses with all the amenities, but the ones in this area are very cute. Our hostel is decorated with red all over, has a lovely courtyard, and we not only have our own bathroom/shower but also air conditioning! We realized the other day that for the 16 nights until we got back from the Gobi, we had only had running water for 12 hours, and we've only had our own bathroom for two other nights on this trip. So we are living in the lap of luxury.

On a recommendation from a hostel worker, we headed out to find something to eat after scrubbing the Gobi dust off us head to toe (I washed my hair three times). At first the restaurant didn't seem to serve very spicy food, but that was soon remedied by how tasty it was. We ordered pickled vegetables (cucumbers, mini bok choy, and something that looked like red carrot--pickled with lovely hot Sichuan peppers) and green melon with garlic and chili, sweet and sour duck (B, of course) and steamed fish (me). I was trying to order fried fish, because I thought the steamed fish might be bland, but it was amazing. This was probably in part because when we started eating, the fish was still alive. (The guy brought it in a plastic bag to see if B approved of it.) B also had fresh pear juice, while I had cucumber juice that I could flavor with sugar as I wished. Including jasmine tea and two beers, the entire meal came to 18 dollars. This with the fresh fish being one of the most expensive items on the menu--market price at 6 dollars.

Satisfied and full, we wandered around for several hours just looking at the city and the people. It feels much homier than many of the places we've been, probably because New Haven, California, and so on have lots of Chinese people and we're only now discovering that they also live in China! So far, Beijing is lovely, smog and all.

2007-07-11T06:29:00.000-07:00

Today marked the beginning of the Nadaam Festival here in UB. There was a great deal of pomp and pageantry at the Stadium. We, however, proved to be bad tourists today. Content to rest up after the exhausting four days in the Gobi, we watched parts of the ceremonies and the wrestling on the large TVs in the Central Post Office where we sent a few postcards and called some of the larger hotels searching, in vain, for an indoor fitness center. As it turned out we were able to run outside today. On our way towards the stadium and the Soviet friendship monument we happened upon a dirt/rock trail that weaved its way through an ugly industrial landscape and also went past a few suburban gers. We had an encounter with a couple of Mongolian children who were riding their bikes, an encounter that was entirely illustrative of what we've found to be the characteristic disposition of most Mongolians. The children greeted us demonstrating their basic competence in English grammar. They then curiously accompanied us for a section of our run. I asked one of the boys if he wanted to race. We did and he was eager to tell me that I lost. I, never being at a loss for a little competition, challenged him to a second round and redeemed myself. After we lost the trail going back onto the road they said good-bye and waved. In another instance with our driver in the Gobi he at one point asked to see our plane tickets and passports. Suspicious, S. and I looked at each other and reluctantly agreed. Our hesitation was soon eclipsed by his genuine show of sincere curiosity. He just wanted to see the various visa stamps and pictures. The cumulative effect of interactions like these have engendered in us a very real sense of relaxation and ease. We have not in anyway felt threatened or insecure in our interactions here.

2007-07-10T05:07:00.000-07:00

Gobi Scape II

Dune Scape

Bactrian Camels

Chinggis Khan Reincarnate

2007-07-10T04:52:00.000-07:00

Gobi Scape I

Lake Baikal (Olkon Island)

Shaman Rocks (Olkhon Island)

Novgorod (Veliky)

2007-07-10T04:32:00.000-07:00

Russia #02 Train (Moscow-Irkutsk)

Churches of the Kremlin

Winter Palace (Hermitage) Square

Red Square (Lenin's Tomb foreground, St. Basil's background)

2007-07-10T00:21:00.000-07:00

We got back from the Gobi at midday today, and are happily settled in to a double room at a centrally located guesthouse. I had reached the end of my patience with strangers after sharing gers for four nights in the Gobi desert. But the trip was fantastic.

We headed out Friday morning, very early. Landed at Dalanzadgad before 8am, and were introduced to our driver. Naturally, he spoke fluent Russian but no English. He offered to have his daughter, who speaks a little English, join us for free, but we offered to pay her a few dollars a day, so we headed by his house to pick her up. When I say house, I mean, of course, ger. Almost no Mongolians live in houses--even those who are pretty settled (in the city, except UB) mostly live in gers, maybe surrounded by a fence. After we picked up his daughter, a very sweet and very shy 17-year-old whose English was at first limited to three or four sentences (but she improved rapidly as she lost some of her shyness!). We went off to a local restaurant, which was decorated with plastic palm trees and served Chinese food, but we were able to score an egg with some fried bread and cabbage salad for breakfast.

Then we were off to purchase food for our journey. After stocking up on ramen, we had some trouble explaining that we also wanted to get some vegetables. Finally we ended up in the market, where we got a bunch of cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and a large watermelon. Then it was off to Yolyn Am, a canyon that famously has ice most of the year (it usually melts some point in mid-July). As I'm from Norway, ice in July didn't seem particularly interesting or exceptional to me, but according to the guidebook, the area was good for hiking, so we'd agreed to go anyway. After being conned into a museum at the park entrance that cost $2 each for looking at some really unattractive stuffed animals, we got to the parking lot near the canyon. During the 2km hike down, we met pretty much every single person we had flown down from UB with. Then it started to rain, a steady, cold drizzle that was sapping all the energy out of us. We had packed the Camelbak with lunch and planned to explore the area for several hours, but after eating some Chinese imitation Pringles under a sort of shelter, we gave up and started back. The only highlight of this relatively depressing experience was seeing an ibex that was grazing up on a cliff.

We got back in the jeep and went to the park entrance, where we were shown into a ger made of concrete and informed that this is where we were spending the night. Warm goat's milk was brought in a thermos and served us in bowls. Realizing that we were spending the night in a souvenir-sales ger left our spirits very low, plus we were cold and wet as we had not really expected rain in the Gobi in July! (Although that is the month with the most precipitation. Since annual precipitation is limited to 130 mm, though, we thought we'd be pretty safe.) After an hour or so, our driver said something about another gorge with ice, and since the rain had stopped, we agreed to go take a look.

At that point, the trip changed. Instead of being a tourist-heavy, silly-sight having, waste of time and money, it became a pretty unique experience. Our driver drove us through a twisting gorge carved by a river that was barely wide enough to get through, driving part of the way in the river. We ran into groups of horses grazing free, hiked up a mountain, and saw wild gazelles racing over the hills. Then we arrived at the herder family with whom we would spend the night, blessedly free of the souvenir ger. We watched (and tried to help a little) as they rounded up the goats for their evening milking. We were served endless bowls of warm goat's milk, and I had some sweet rice porridge while B and the rest ate noodles with dried mutton. (Nothing else.) In the morning, we headed out for another herder's family. On the way, we watched Mongolians herd horses with a motorcycle and used the jeep to try to round up a horse that simply did not want to cooperate.

We hung out at the next herder's family during the day. Went for a run in the afternoon, but it was HOT and we were so full of dairy products as we were being served steaming bowls of goat's milk approximately four times a day. So the run pretty much sucked, especially since I saw a small snake, but we did look at the camels which were everywhere. We also saw more gazelles. We went for a ride on the horses, which was cool also--thinking Chinggis Khan (as he's now called) riding across the world on horses just like our pretty-stepping Mongolian ones. We gave the watermelon to the herder family and were rewarded with squeals from the five boys (is it possible that they were as tired of white food as we were?). Maybe the highlight of that stay was playing pick-up basketball with five Mongolian herder boys, our driver, and his daughter. This is the only time on a basketball court, we suspect, that B (5'9" 1/2) will be the tallest person on the court and able to determine play! And basketball court, by the way, is not quite right--a square marked in the dirt, with a piece of metal twisted to make a somewhat crooked hoop. But the oldest boy was fabulous on interceptions and rebounds, and the next oldest a specialist at three-pointers.

The next day saw us heading to Khongoryn Els, the Gobi sand dunes. Although B has been to the Sahara and I've seen dunes in Death Valley, Wadi Rum, and elsewhere, these really were impressive dunes. Not so much because of their extension, because they're mostly just a few km wide, but because they rise out of the ground, as from nowhere, and climb up to 300m. In front of them runs a very narrow river (you can step across it) that supports a green swath where everyone grazes his (probably) camels. Although we agreed with our driver to go to the dunes at 7pm, we couldn't resist and climbed up in the heat of the day. It was HARD, but the reward--sliding down a mountain of sand that literally hummed under our feet--was well worth it. It was, predictably, much easier to do it again once the sun had sunk somewhat! Leaping down the dunes after watching the sunset was simply amazing. This night and the next were spent in quasi-tourist gers; not the huge, luxurious camps favored by most travellers, but in simple guest gers run by herder families to supplement their herding income and gain some hard cash. (The first two nights, we stayed in the "living room" ger--one family had two, one for cooking and one for entertaining, and the second family had three, with one for sleeping--we felt bad about chasing the families out but they seemed very pleased to have visitors.)

On the forth day, we drove up to Bayanzag ("rich in saxual shrubs"--that's what they're called. They're like little Joshua Trees, sort of). We wandered around the Flaming Cliffs, which look just like a very very very small Grand Canyon/Zion made not of rock but of clay. This is where Roy Chapman Anderson went on his dinosaur-hunting trips in the 1920s and killed 46 vipers in the tent one night, so I was very alert for snakes but saw none. There were beautiful rocks everywhere, and it might not have been very hard to find a dinosaur fossil, but once more the heat was quite exhausting so we had mercy on our driver and headed to the ger. After gorging on ramen to the point of near nausea (finally, we weren't staying in people's "houses" so we could eat our own food), we went out for a sunset run through the saxuals toward the cliffs. It was stunning: one of those classic runs that just makes you happy to be alive, and happy to be in the Gobi, and happy to be in Mongolia.

After a short night, we drove over the bumpy bumpy roads to the airport. There are only about 1700km of paved roads in Mongolia (1800km of railroad), even though Mongolia is the 14th largest country in the world. It is impossible to get around areas like the Gobi without a native driver (or maybe, maybe using GPS) because there are no landmarks to use to navigate. A few hours at the airport, a short flight with the delightfully polite AeroMongolia folks, and we were back in UB.

One final anecdote to illustrate why Mongolia is what it is: after finding a room for the night, we went out to eat lunch just now at an Asian restaurant. When we paid the bill, the girl came back to say that something was wrong. She showed us that we had paid the bill and then left 2500 Togrog over. When we explained that it was for her ("a tip"), she hardly knew what to do with herself. Note that this isn't common, but that it could happen at all... !!

2007-07-05T04:05:00.000-07:00

After settling into our hostel, which is evidently the home of the woman and her daughters who run the place, we set out for the Gandantegchinlen Monastery -- the center of Mongolian Buddhism. At the turn of the century Mongolia housed hundreds of Buddhist monasteries and thousands of Buddhist monks. Buddhism has been the major religion here ever since Kublai Khan made Tibetan Buddhism the official religion of Mongolia 13th-Century. With the Soviet backing the Mongolian People's party and their cohorts laid waste to the country's religious temples after the first World War. The Monastery we visited today survived as a museum. We read today that when Henry Wallace (FDR's VP and Progressive Party presidential candidate in 48') visited Ulaan Baatar in 44' he asked the then Prime Minister to see a religious building, the PM had to scramble embarrassingly to make the one we saw today presentable. The main Temple houses a 23m (enormous) statue of the Buddha. It was very impressive. The original was torn down and brought to Russia to be melted down. It was rebuilt in the 90s with aid from Japan and India.

The two experiences we've had on this trip that have been the most socially and culturally constructed as "religious" have been entering Lenin's Mausoleum and entering this temple. In the first case Lenin's body is on show for a mere 12hrs a week (I suppose they are keeping him from decaying the remainder of the time) and one must queue for an 1 and a half hours with Russians and tourists alike. They let people go in small groups to metal detectors and past the metal detectors the line turns into a trickle. The entirety of Red Square is block off except for the faithful who have so patiently waited. It's quite exhilarating to have the Square to yourself as you approach the tomb. As you enter there are soldiers at every turn to meet you, silently indicating the way as it becomes darker and darker. Finally you emerge into the main room constructed entirely from black marble. A faint red light sets the mood and there in the middle, fully lit, is the man himself, well dressed and dignifiedly composed. You try to walk slow, but are made to move through with great alacrity, forcing the experience immediately into memory. Lenin wished to be buried in St. Petersburg alongside his mother and loathed the idea of the construction of a cult around his personality. Nevertheless, the author of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the great atheist Marxist revolutionary is arrayed like one of the greatest saints of the Catholic Church. But it's more ignominious than that. The fact that they attempt to preserve his appearance is a great affront to the materialist position. At least the Catherine of Siena's head, on full display in the Church of San Domenico in Siena, has be allowed to take its natural course.

How this is related to the second religious experience I'm not sure. The Buddha statue was similarly imposing and it was presented in such a way that is was clearly designed to inspire veneration. One circumambulates spinning prayer wheels and gazing. I thought of idols in both cases. (Although neither to me seemed as idolatrous as the way icons were treated by the faithful in Russia. Perhaps I received the wrong impression, but icons seem to do real religious work in a way that very much raised the suspicion of my protestant sensibilities.) The Buddhism here also incorporates aspects of Shamanism. There was a Shaman pole being venerated by lay people in the middle of the monastic complex, which is now also the primary Buddhist University in Mongolia. We are further finding it interesting to see the way in which Buddhism responded and is responding to the fall of communism. We normally think of religion and Communism as being Christianity and Communism. Being here alters that perspective a bit. Although the Communists we certainly foolish to destroy the rich Buddhist history of this country, they were correct in seeing that populace ought to be literate (or at least have the opportunity to become so). This is something pre-communist Buddhism in Mongolia did not permit. Learning was strictly the occupation of the monastic class.

Mongolia at last

2007-07-05T03:59:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Ulaanbataar this morning after a fairly long journey across the border. In absolute terms, we only came 1000km from Irkutsk. But it took... a while. This was mainly because once we arrived in Naushki, the Russian border town, nothing happened for four hours. We've both crossed many a border on trains before, and usually the border guards are on you so fast you can't blink so that they can be sure that you aren't getting up to any trouble. Our guidebook said that after our passports had been taken, we would be free to wander around. But since everyone seemed to be milling about, and no one came to take our passports, I finally set out in search of a snack or something to drink. (We hadn't forgotten that it was the 4th of July, so we needed an ice cream treat and a toast against imperialism of all kinds.) The farmer's market across the street that we had been promised contained one bunch of dill. Yes, one bunch of dill. This was in contrast to the delightful market we had visited in Irkutsk, which, while low on variety, had delicious tomatoes, radishes, dill, arugula (or something similar), spring onions, and those wonderful homemade cucumber pickles that are simply my favorite thing EVER about Russia. Our salads on the train were amazing, as you can imagine, and occasioned much interest from everyone else who was wandering up and down the corridor eating ramen. But in Naushki we ended up with ramen as well.

We'd been happily surprised to find ourselves alone in the compartment the night before, and since we appeared to be in second class, had pretty much decided that maybe we had paid to have the compartment to ourselves (since that would explain the price--I thought I had indicated to the agency that we didn't want to do that, but that hasn't been the first difficulty). But at Naushki, just as we had fallen asleep for a nap, two Mongolian women and a child wandered in. Oh well. We sat there, and sat there, and sat there. We'd been warned that the process could take up to 12 hours on the Russian side, so we weren't really impatient, but it was HOT. Then there was a thunderstorm. Then it got hot again. I was reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is wildly entertaining but does show Gibbon up to be a bit of an ass.

Finally the guards came and took away our passports. Then they checked our customs forms. No need to go on about the tedious process, or how it was repeated (although rather more speedily) on the Mongolian side. Time spent: 9 1/2 hours. Given the stories we'd been hearing, we probably got off easily. As soon as we got our passports back on the Mongolian side, the two women and the child disappeared, so they had apparently just crashed our compartment for seven or so hours. As usual, the language barrier prevented our discovering this.

As soon as we crossed into Mongolia, the landscape started to change into more rolling grasslands with sharply etched hills. The countryside was dotted with gers surrounded by grazing cattle and horses. About 25% of Mongolians are still true nomads, while others live a semi-nomadic existence. UB has an official population of 800 000, while the unofficial count is about one million (including the "suburban" gers)--more than a third of Mongolia's population of about 2.4 million.

The city is pretty typically Soviet-built, but is clearly a happening place. We keep running into people we've seen before on the Trans-Siberian, so the full tourist rush doesn't seem to be in here yet. Our host (guesthouse and tour person) is very sweet, but totally disorganized. All the booking we thought we had done beforehand had not taken place at all, so we were lucky to snag two of the last three seats on our flights (but before, we'd been told that we couldn't return on the 10th, which is risky. We have tickets to Beijing on the morning of the 12th, and flights from the Gobi are sometimes cancelled due to wind and thus sand). We saw the fighting dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History! We also got plane tickets to the Gobi--we head off early in the morning and return on Tuesday. The guided tour we thought we would have has become a tour simply with jeep and driver, which saves us a little money. We're trying to decide whether we should stay for (touristy) Ulaanbataar Naadam on the 11th or head into the countryside, camp Tuesday, and hunt Wednesday for a local Naadam. Any votes?

B is super-excited because he's gotten some cute Mongolian slippers. We ate a huge lunch at a Chinese place for under $15 for both of us--finally no more Russian prices. In Dalganzad, when we stock up tomorrow, things should be pretty cheap. We're paying for our driver to eat so we don't have to cook for him. Rate: 3000 TG (just under $3) per day. We'll be staying with a nomad family one night (riding a two-humped camel as a tourist must do), which should be cool since it's a little off the beaten path. Our host comes from the South Gobi herself and knows a lot of people there. The rest of the itinerary is pretty standard, but should allow for some nice hiking and perhaps a dinosaur fossil near the Flaming Cliffs? (They're probably mostly gone by now--or rather, professionals have to dig for them, but in the museum we saw a dinosaur nest filled with eggs found nearby as late as 1994.)

It's almost unreal to actually be here. It hardly seems like we can really be in Mongolia, because that is so exotic, but here we are just walking down the streets! There are a few elderly people around in traditional dress, but young people are of course totally Westernized and shop at the "Homeboy" hip-hop shop. But it is so much more relaxing than Russia. In Russia, if you don't speak Russian, you're simply a non-person. Nobody tries to understand you. Nobody wants to help--most people either ignore you or wish you'd just go away and stop bothering them. Here, people seem to be proud of their English and desirous of practicing (such as the monk we chatted with in the monastery this morning, who had only been learning English for a year. He is a student at the Buddhist university here, which offers a major in chanting, of which we heard a great deal when we were up there). Tourism is also an increasingly important source of hard currency for Mongolia, of course, so that has something to do with the difference in attitude. The country is heavily dependent on just a few sources of income. The copper mine in Erdenet supposedly consumes half--yes, HALF--the country's electricity and provides about 40% of its cash. Other income comes from gold and selling trees to China. But the government is pretty eager to keep the tourist dollar coming, and even backpackers seem welcome (increasingly unusual for Asian countries, who are sick of Westerners coming to hang around naked, get drunk/high, and leave little money behind in the local economy).

2007-07-03T01:26:00.001-07:00

PS We booked a hostel in UB for the Nadaam night--a double room with bathroom for $20. All the Lonely Planet recommended hostels are fully booked, but we found some other random place that is right near where we need to pick up our tickets in UB so it shouldn't be too hard to find. Even if it's bad it won't matter much as we'll be out looking at Nadaam after we fly back from the Gobi and then leaving for Beijing early the next morning. Looks like we'll dorm it the first night in UB so that we can get a sense of whether our "tour operator" (who I think is more like some Mongolian guy who speaks English and can arrange things) is really the go-to guy.

Residual Observations

2007-07-03T01:15:00.000-07:00

For a city that was founded the same year as Yale (1703) St. Petersburg is remarkable is every respect. Seldom does a city so young boast so much history. Its writers and muscians are perched high in the pantheon of European cultural acheivement. It also has an impressive architechtural history; its streets, canals, and wide boulevards make it feel at times like Paris, at times Amsterdam, and at times Venice. The city also weathered a devastating 900 day Nazi siege. There are still signs on the streets indicating which side is safer during artillery shellings. The central core of the city, the oldest, most charming, and cleanest part, is very well manicured and quite pleasant. The outer reaches, however, are much more depressing. On our way in from the aiport on the public bus we saw concrete jugnles of Soviet apartmet blocks, and on our long run we found its outlying parks in dismal condition and its building in woeful disrepair. More so than perhaps anyplace either of us have ever been, Russia seems to straddle the threshold of the 1st and 3rd worlds. So clearly one or the other at various moments.

Soviet architecture had three main styles: Constructivism, Stalinist Gothic, and "ugly-concrete". Of the former two there are many wonderful examples in Moscow. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many aesthetically compelling buildings were constructed during Stalin's monumental building campaigns of 30s. The most impressive acheivement of this era was the construction of the Moscow metro which is, hands down, the nicest, most beautiful, most charming and delightful metro ever. The metros are quite literally decorated like palaces. Stalin called them "palaces of the people". They are clean, deep, run often and on time, have chandeliers, and are all thematically decorated with scenes comemorating the revolution, everyday life, and ornaments of socialist realism (which is generally very kitsch and ideological insistent in annoying ways) but seems somehow to work well here.

2007-07-03T00:46:00.000-07:00

So we're comfortably settled at an internet cafe in Irkutsk, tickets in hand and a good meal in our stomachs. Therefore Irkutsk seems like a delightful town at the moment. It seems to be in the midst of a heat-wave, so we really don't want to be outside carrying our backpacks around. We do have to stock up on some food for our next 34 hours on the train--we're taking the "telephone pole" (it stops at every one) tonight to Ulaanbaatar. As far as we can tell, the train will hardly move from tomorrow early afternoon until late evening--it's projected to take seven hours to leave Russia and three hours to enter Mongolia. It looks like our tickets are first class again, even though we ordered second class (this explains why they were so expensive!) but I think we'll be sharing with two others anyway. We're hoping the price of the tickets will weed out the worst drunkards.

It's typical, but unfortunate nonetheless, that just as we're adjusting to Russia, we leave. I was totally intimidated here at first--I even refused to jaywalk (cars or no) in case there was a policeman waiting around the corner somewhere to give me a fine. We were repeatedly warned that many police in Russia supplement their incomes by making up fines to charge foreigners so we should have copies of our visas and passports (which we never got around to making) so that they wouldn't make off with the originals. Given how smooth our interactions with officialdom have been (nonexistent, in other words), it seems like I was a bit overly worried. Olkhon was much more relaxing than Moscow and St. Petersburg, though, because you could tell that no one cared what you did on the island. You could go anywhere, do whatever--no one is watching or minding. Irkutsk is such a mix, what with those downtown wooden houses, occasional gorgeous late 19th century buildings, and new malls housing hipster restaurants for the new Russians, found here as everywhere else, who are growing fat (or, in the case of young girls, alarmingly thin) on oil money etc.

That's something I've been meaning to comment on for a while. Russian girls must be the thinnest Western girls in the entire world. Seriously, Norwegian girls look pretty plump in comparison. It's strange, because the girls are so thin (average size is probably 2--32/4 in Europe), but the women are not. The girls are also so very fashionably dressed! Actually, I haven't followed what's hip for a while, but the girls in Moscow and P'burg looked just like the girls in New York and Paris--or even better in many cases--while here in Irkutsk they look much like the girls in Oslo. I guess the Siberian girls who have set such trends in modelling maybe had a trickle-down effect?

Russia has been such an experience--a real mix of the familiar and delightful with the totally strange. I suppose any country of this size must be like that, but it is also unexpected: so many things are similar to Western Europe that I'm much more surprised when something is genuinely different. And at the same time, nothing is ever so similar that there isn't an undercurrent of strangeness that always keeps one a little off balance.

B finally was able to shave his head and beard yesterday. He borrowed a hairclipper from a German guy and now looks suitably like a Buddhist monk. He shaved his face in the banya. Russian banyas are quite nice, especially when the shower you've been promised in your homestay is nonexistent and people keep telling you that it works fine, but no water comes out! Banya and internet were both quite expensive on Olkhon--$8/hour each--but both seemed quite important. The banya is much like a standard sauna or Roman bath, but after our Sunday evening "bath"--I had a lovely dirt tan from the bike ride, and we bathed in two buckets, one cold and one warm--a real banya was just the ticket. It is of course far too hot to bear inside, so you throw buckets of cold water on yourself and gasp. The banya is heated with a genuine wood fire--wood is one of the things there is plenty!! of here--and, although I don't think I would bother to do it often, given that there was no running water on Olkhon it was an absolute necessity.

It looks like our Gobi trip may be a go--if so, we fly down there on Friday. I think the guy is picking us up from the train station Thursday morning, so we'll get oriented in UB on Thursday before we head down to the desert. The guy wants payment in cash for the tour--I'm not sure how we're supposed to be able to take out $1000, but maybe he knows of an ATM in UB that dispenses dollars?--but he seems pretty reliable although very slow on e-mail. We'll see. My diet in Mongolia is going to be very bland, and I'm already driving B crazy by meditating out loud on how delightful food in Beijing and Vietnam is going to be. Chili! Lime! Fish sauce! Garlic! All elements that have been sorely missing from our diet here. Even the good meals--and the food on Olkhon was quite nice--just don't have as much flavor as we're used to. The fish on Olkhon, which was served twice a day, was delightful, however. It is a small white fish called omul, and you could tell that it was pretty much still wriggling on the plate as you were eating it. Delicious!

Tomorrow will be a pretty hellish day. We expect to spend the entire day hanging around train stations waiting to pass customs. BORING! But we have reading material, so hopefully it won't be too bad. We don't know if we'll have any trouble with our visas when leaving. Our hostel in St. Petersburg claimed that they registered our visas, which is required within 3 business days of arriving, but we're pretty skeptical that they were telling the truth, as every other hostel has had a notice about payment for visa registration. However, we stayed in hotels in Veliky Novgorod and Vladimir (even typing Veliky Novgorod gives me a bit of a pang--the old part of that town was so beautiful!!), so they may well have registered us (as they are legally required to do). Since then, we've been on the move all the time before three business days pass, so we haven't needed to register, and we decided not to on Olkhon because there is supposedly no way for the authorities to check. I think the fine is only 1500 rub ($60) if we have trouble, and it only applies if you try to get a Russian visa again, but I would still prefer not to have problems. So we've saved every receipt and train ticket to show them if they want to know where we've been. We shouldn't have trouble in Mongolia or China, as we both have visas for the latter and I for the former (B doesn't need one--a concession demanded by GWB for agreeing to trade with Mongolia).

So much for the "miscellaneous" post I've been planning to write for a while. Next post from Mongolia (I hope!).

2007-07-02T00:13:00.000-07:00

We've had a lovely time so far on the island. Yesterday we rented bikes and biked up to the tip of the island, Cape Khoboy. It was 43km each way, and we had mountain bikes on a very uneven road (including a section where we had to push the bikes through deep sand). S got tired quite quickly--perhaps we started too fast?--so she was pushing herself to get through, but did finish in the end. It was a lovely ride much of the way, through green pastures with cows grazing and galloping horses. An entire band of horses, including foals, walked right by us on the way home for dinner. The scenery at the top of the island was quite spectacular. It was the first sight we've caught of the broader lake since arriving, because the island is oriented toward the Maloe Moro (the little sea). The more temperate and gentle western landscape supports more people, while the eastern side is rockier, more uneven, and covered with forest. Today we were thinking of going out for a bit of a hike, but we're pretty sore and very tired from yesterday (it was an 8-hour ride) so we've mostly been taking care of business and talking to other travellers. (And eating! We're so hungry!) Tomorrow we head back to Irkutsk, hoping to make it in time to pick up our train tickets to Mongolia (and after that, make our train). We haven't been able to confirm any arrangments to travel to the Gobi, so we're worried that things might get difficult to arrange when we arrive. We also don't have accommodation for our last night in UB, July 11-12, which is the Mongolian national festival Nadaam and is when the vast majority of travellers visit. But these things usually do work out in the end.

2007-06-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

We are currently in the town of Khuzhir in the middle of Olkhon Island in the middle of Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal is not a lake. By definition it is, of course: it contains 1/5 of the world's unfrozen water and will be the earth's fifth ocean eventually. We spent 5 hours on a hydrofoil to get here yesterday. In other words, the lake is huge: 636 km north-south and 1637 m deep (1 mi).

First, the train trip. We were shown to our lovely two-person compartment by the provodnitsa, one of the two women who is responsible for your train carriage (they work in shifts). The compartment was semi-luxuriously decorated, but the main luxury was simply to have it to ourselves. For four night and three days that is pretty essential! We had stocked up on food in the expensive but comprehensive supermarket at the end of our street in Moscow, but at various stations (depending on local time) women would show up and sell home-made food during stops. Most of this was meat-based, of course, but imagine my delight in the middle of Siberia when they showed up with piroshki filled with potatoes and homemade pickled cucumbers! We also found field strawberries at another stop.

Being on the train was delightfully relaxing. You'd think boredom might set in, but not so. The constantly changing landscape accompanied by different styles of architecture and different ethnic compositions of various areas provided some entertainment. Our handcarved chess set, bought in Moscow, provided another way for B to entertain himself (as everyone knows, I'm an atrocious chess player). We'd also stocked up on books in the airport in Oslo, so B read Stendhal and Stefan Zweig while I got through some Dickens and George Eliot. A couple times a day, the train would stop long enough for us to stretch our legs on the platform. Our wagon was filled with foreigners, mostly Germans, which is pretty natural as the cost of a two-person compartment makes it prohibitive for most people (including us, normally!, and for the rest of the trip). Once we entered Siberia, the characteristic wooden houses appeared, decorated with wood carvings and painted blue-and-white shutters.

On Friday morning, we arrived in Irkutsk. It was a slighly dazed arrival, as the time had changed five hours forward since we left Moscow (we are now +12 relative to Eastern standard time). We'd taken sleeping pills the night before to get to bed at a reasonable hour--it is very strange to have the time change while travelling on a train, because so little changes actually--and so we stumbled out of Irkutsk station at 7am local time. We took a tram into the center of town (cost: 24 cents). It is just like the American Wild West must have been: a strange mixture of aged-looking wooden houses and newer, shinier buildings, few paved roads (this is a city of over half a million), Soviet cars and BMWs, etc. I don't know if I've ever been in a city that size that looked so... different. We found a taxi out to the hydrofoil station, which passed a newer and much more ordinary section of the city. The hydrofoil did not accept cards, nor change money, and we did not have enough cash on us for the $60 each tickets. Luckily, a fellow traveller lent us the missing $8. She spoke Russian as well, and thus was able to tell us when we had to change hydrofoils in Listvyanka. We all disembarked at the southern end of Olkhon. Fortunately, someone from the village had come down the 30km to look for passengers as we were dropped off in a deserted pasture with no one else in sight. Our fellow traveller found out that the price was 100 rub ($4) per person to the village, so we hopped into his Soviet "Jeep"(Lada) and off we went.

As we crested the first large hill up from the ferry, we came to a few carved wooden statues decorated with bits of cloth. Our driver informed us that we needed to throw out a kopek to the shamanic statues. He genuflected slightly before driving on. The Buryat people, which mostly lives on the east side of Baikal, venerates this island as one of the five global shamanic energy sources. The island is dotted with (sometimes carved) wooden posts and trees decorated with shamanic bits of cloth. Like Naaman, we bowed when we had to! As we entered the town, our driver pointed out the dwelling of the local shaman as well.

We are staying at the ecofriendly lodge of a former Russian ping-pong champion. Ecofriendly means just that. The shower has to be filled up before using, running water is provided by transferring water from a bucket into a makeshift faucet while using a scoop, and the toilet has a bucket inside that is emptied daily. You shovel sawdust onto your leavings, so it is not as unpleasant as it sounds! The "homestead", as it is called, is a cluster of beautiful wooden buildings in traditional Siberian style, all hand-built and carved, it is clear. (Google Nikita's Homestead Olkhon for details.) Food is included at $30 per day each, and thankfully they cater to vegetarians and people who don't eat meat. (Fish is, naturally, served twice a day.)

The town consists of sometimes stunningly beautiful, sometimes run-down Siberian wooden houses. As we were walking down the main street yesterday, we came upon a cow grazing in the middle of it. Cows, horses, and sheep dot the island, and there are basically no fences to keep them in or out. Nonetheless, the lake is so large that it is drinkable pretty much everywhere.

The lake is stunning in its beauty. Just past Nikita's is a beach that looks as though it belongs on an island in the Pacific, although the water is rather cooler here. We're going to run and hike around the island (we're here until Tuesday morning) and hope to catch a glimpse of the famed nerpa (fresh-water seal) on an expedition to the north before we leave.

Many thanks to Wheat Thin for adding visuals! We hope to add some pictures once B finds his camera cord and we are no longer using the internet at 14 cents per minute in the office of someone's house (since the wireless in the ger [yurt] was down this morning).

Moscow to Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal

2007-06-25T08:58:00.001-07:00

Theotokos of Vladimir

2007-06-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

12th century

2007-06-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

So this won't be a long post, as we're off for the train in under half an hour. We've discovered that we're going to have some trouble picking up our onward train tickets in Irkutsk, so we're desperately trying to see if we can find someone to pick them up for us and meet us at the station. We're offering good money in dollars, people!

Anyway. As mentioned above, our search for paintings here in Moscow has been a bit of a trip. After the huge relief of discovering that we were not going to miss the Trinity, we spent a number of hours going through the contemporary Russian art collection at the New Tretyakov. It has just been reorganized, as it used to be divided into pre- and post-Revolutionary art, but is now chronological, allowing a much better insight into the development of Russian art in the 20th century. Hideous though the building is, the permanent collection is actually quite well organized and marked. Throughout are interspersed televisions showing clips from historical events matching the time of the art (Lenin speaking etc), which provide a super-interesting background note.

The next day, we planned to start with the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, which promised Fayoum portraits and some Rembrandts. But first, it was off to B's priority sight-seeing: Lenin's tomb. In St. Petersburg, an unexpected highlight was the Russian Museum of Political History. It contained a number of exhibits on various political developments in Russia in the last century, until you were suddenly waved into another section and realized that you were standing in Lenin's office that he used during the beginning of the Revolution, looking at the balcony from which he used to address the crowds! I knew, of course, that if B didn't get to see Lenin, he would be hugely disappointed. On Saturday, the entire Red Square area was closed off for military marching/speeches/whatnot, so it was impossible to go then. (The tomb is only open a few days a week from 10-1, presumably in order to allow plenty of time for the continued preservation of the body.) We get to the Kremlin, and see a huge line wending its way out of the Red Square. Can this be it? Indeed. The whole Red Square area is cordoned off for the benefit of the Lenin-goers. No cameras or large bags are allowed, and the check is strict. A good hour or so in line is rewarded with an almost solitary walk across the Red Square to the tomb. It's a pretty cool feeling to walk there with hundreds of people watching enviously from beyond the cordon (especially those not themselves in line!). Upon entering the tomb, it is a shock to the eyes because the light is dim and red. Marble stairs descend down, and at every turn stand three poker-faced Russian soldiers. Creepy as can be! At the bottom, you climb up and walk around Lenin. He looks good, waxy as by repute, but quite fresh and therefore ultra-creepy, especially with the guards monitoring that everyone keeps a constant speed. Out the back are the tombs of a number of luminaries, including Stalin, who for some perverted reason had the biggest bunch of fresh flowers of them all! Gagarin is also there.

Then it was finally off to the Pushkin, but due to faulty signing, we once more ended up in the wrong museum. What are you supposed to think when the building is labelled "Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts"? How are you to guess that the Museum of Private Collections has moved into the building? Most of the private collections were rather dull, but in the bottom was a book illustrator who had collected icons (in case it's not obvious by now, that's what we spend almost all our time on). She had a lovely one of the Novgorod bishop holding his monastery in his hand and presenting it to an approving Christ. Absolutely delicious!

So the Pushkin is next door, we finally discover. We know, thankfully in advance this time, that the room containing the Simone Martinis is closed, but the Fayoum portraits are a real treat. Found in Egypt, they must be some of the earliest portraits of real people (painted while still alive to be used as death masks) in history. Some are cartoonish and unsophisticated, but several--especially one from the second half of the first century--look absolutely realistic and could have been painted recently. Very delightful. The Rembrandts were underwhelming, but still ok. Off to lunch, which is a constant obsession as we continue our tour through the ethnic restaurants of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Uzbek Friday night, and yesterday Chinese/Indian. After lunch, we know that we have only a short while left to see the final most important picture of our journey, the Virgin of Vladimir. We had eventually discovered that the Tretyakov now houses it in an attached church, the Church of Nicholas in Tolmachi, which is only open 12-4 (and closed Mondays). As we approach the entrance to the church at 3:20, it looks ominously closed. But aha! We escry a neighboring entrance with a security gate that is clearly marked as the church entrance. It is locked.

Now we start to panic. We head around the building to the next entrance. "Nicholas in Tolmachi?" As so often, the response is a torrent of incomprehensible Russian with no indication whatsoever of what is being said. Down into the main basement of the Tretyakov, where the ticket office is. Over there in the corner! An information desk! Determined to cause a scene if necessary, I head over there, babbling nervously. "Why is the church closed? The Virgin! Tolmachi!" In fluent English, the guard directs us to a barely-marked entrance hidden in the shadows (marked with the single word "Museum"--note that we are currently IN the main museum). Up the stairs. Through the dark, deserted halls. Around corners. Suddenly we find ourselves in the original locked building that we had desperately peered into. Down the stairs. Up the stairs. And there it is! The chapel with the Virgin. More delightful in reality than we expected from pictures. The church was the Tretyakov family's chapel and it also contains a wonderful (Pisan?) cross probably from the late 12th/early 13th century (our guess, as it wasn't signed).

We then gave up on sight-seeing for the day. The emotional exhaustion of the hunt for the Virgin was simply too much. The desperate feeling--"foiled again!!"--left us with no energy for further museuming, so we wandered around the area of the gallery and looked at various onion-domed churches. Then made an early evening of it.

This morning, we went out to the Izmaylovskaya park, since we didn't run on Sunday and wanted to get out in the green. We headed out at 7:15 to get an early start to the park that we were told was a delightful green area ideal for hiking. Stupid guide book. The first thing we encountered in the park was an assortment of feral dogs. (Our tetanus shots are thankfully up to date.) The second thing was piles of broken glass everywhere. And the third was mysteriously circling cars each containing one man and one woman. But we perservered, doing a tempo run (for me, for B it's more like a jog) instead of the planned long run, considering the undesirable conditions.

Today we did the Kremlin, but that will have to wait as I'm out of time again. No more posts until Friday at the earliest, as we hope to be on Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal then. That will be more outdoorsy!

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

2007-06-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and His Son, Ivan, on November 16, 1581. 1885

Detail from Alexander Ivanov, The Appearance of Christ to the People. 1837-1857.

Andrei Rublev's Trinity. Circa 1410.