Burmese Mugs

Boiling water poured into a Burmese Mug with goji berry tea bag.

Red tinted glass unevenly shaped, an oddity of craftsmanship.

Purchased at the Na Gar Glass factory, outskirts of Yangon. 

As the water is poured, there is a pop.

hot reddish liquid floods the counter. 

Democracy? Or just a mess?

My first missed flight of 2011

Missed my 7:20pm Southwest flight out of BWI due to traffic and rain. My first miss of 2011, hopefully my last. 

I have missed one flight per year in 2009, 2010, and 2011. 

Southwest put me on a flight to HOU, Houston Hobby. Arrived to find mostly booked hotels, spent the night at the airport La Quinta, a first. No restaurant or way to order food, so  the manager gave me some delicious cold pizza. 

Today: HOU->DAL: Dallas Love, where I discovered but did not sample meat-topped Breakfast Pizza  

DAL ->SAT: sat next to a Sports Agent who had served in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. 

SAT->ATL: Amazing Pulled Pork Sandwich and entertaining Gingrich interview on CNN

ATL-> DCA.... 

We hit terrible turbulence from ATL->DCA, flying directly into a thunderstorm. The plane bounced around and the pilot repeatedly loudspeakered with soothing comments. His landing was brilliant but we sat on the tarmac for what seemed like 30 minutes.  

Six airports in the last 24 hours. There's no place like home.  

comings, goings, lizards, bridges.

New York for September 11th. In and out of JFK on Delta. Hiked down an empty West side highway for the memorial at Stuyvesant High School. Downtown Manhattan was mobbed that afternoon, with police barricade, cameras, unscheduled public art displays. Frenetic, emotional, even political energies.  Taxi to Park Slope for a musical memorial at Congregation Beth Elohim. As always, Brooklyn was an oasis of calm and tranquility.

Poughkeepsie by way of White Plains. Setting sun, Hudson River, mid-September.

Twenty-four hours in Pittsburgh. Rainy, quiet, right-wing taxi drivers. Had an awesome sandwich downtown, and saw old family friends recently relocated from New York. They don't miss the subway.

Bonita Springs, Florida. Somewhere between Naples and Fort Myers, on the Southwestern coast of Florida. Lizards, humidity, golf courses, everglades. Quick thunderstorms, a warm sun above.

Jacksonsville, Florida. Bridges. Ran two of them on an early morning jog with a colleague, getting lost in between. Delicious chocolate-covered popcorn. Passed a luxury building on the riverfront advertising a two bedroom for $1400 a month.   Escargot for dinner at a French Restaurant in San Marco, which seems to be the cool neighborhood, or one of them.

Scattering

The Stuyvesant Spectator (my high school newspaper), asked me for reflections for the 10-year anniversary of September 11th.   Reprinted without permission. 

***

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

-John Updike

WASHINGTON, D.C. 

I’m not kidding. Like many of my classmates, I no longer live in New York. We’ve traded in our metrocards, discovered wider boulevards, and learned to stop casually ordering Pizza or Bagels. It’s a different world down here. The pace is slower, the buildings lower, and Stuyvesant is a half-street in Upper Chevy Chase. 

I run into other alumni frequently, randomly, and purposefully. They stand on line in the old Marine Terminal at LaGuardia the Saturday after Thanksgiving, hurry outside a law library in Foggy Bottom, even meander on my rooftop. When I find myself in San Francisco or Raleigh-Durham I seek them out as if they were prelates of a secret order.  We examine our expatriate existences, trade updates on our classmates with a combination of pride and competitive interest, and mutter about quality of life.

Sometimes we talk about that day and how it impacted, impacts, might still impact us. Often it hangs perceptibly in the air and we inhale silent, unseen particles of the past. While we have no scientific basis for comparison, there is a theory that our class is special, somehow chosen. We are sown, we scatter. We re-root, we return.

I keep a metrocard in my nightstand

After the Rain

It rained. Torrents. Buckets. A white storm. I saw a flock of small brown birds floating in the wind like leaves on a fall day. A taste of the apocalypse, remarks a older and wiser colleague.

Attended a dinner in Georgetown with a Middle Eastern diplomat. When I emerged, the rain had stopped.

Walked up Wisconsin Avenue, which was ablaze for a DC fashion night. An artist asked me to engage one of the models in a shop window dressed as a boxer.

Got a ride home in one of the event pedicabs driven by a young Turk from Istanbul planning to study minerological engineering at Virginia Tech. 

DC is not without a certain charm.

Happenings

Friday night. Amtrak. Soho. West Village. Friends. Cocktails. Pizza. Water.

Saturday heat. Brunch. Brooklyn. Lincoln Center. Horse puppets.

Sunday rain. Beginners.  Happy. Dinner out.

Monday sun. Barbecue. Hot Dogs. Hamburgers. Watermelon. US Airways. DCA. Fireworks from the Metro.  

The North American Way

I'm back. Easy flight to Washington, though there were no border agents on duty when we landed sometime after midnight. When I finally got placed in line to see an agent, I almost thanked him in Spanish. Got home sometime after 1am. Fascinating Indian taxi driver whose father has worked for Indian Airlines and had thus traveled a lot as a kid.

Trying to resist the urge to see my surroundings as normal.

Panamanian Purgatory

Tocumen International Airport, Panama. Air Margaritaville Bar and Grille. Sara Bareilles playing in the background. Have emerged into the airport terminal to forage for food while spending the day in the COPA/Continental Presidents Club, a vacationing purgatory.  The lounge apparently won some sort of award in 2010, which makes one wonder about the qualifications of lounge judges. Since 11am I have:

• Watched the end of a Wimbledon match
• Fallen asleep to professional golf
• Tried to fall asleep to two middle-aged Americans playing cards.
• Consumed the vast majority of the New York Times Film Section online. 
• Chatted with a former roommate who is traveling in India. 
• Explored the vast annals of Wikipedia.  

How did I get here?

My 7am COPA flight from Lima landed sometime after ten, and I disembarked to discover a frenetic Panana airport beehive, with no mention of my upcoming flight  on the departure screens. After hiking over to the terminal on my boarding pass, it became clear that
a. my flight to Cancun (enroute to Dulles) was delayed, likely due to El Nino.
b. most of the Panamanian airport staff speak no more than ten words of English
c. the above staff had a relaxed atitude to getting me back to DC.
d. I had lounge access.

After my first two hours in the lounge, I was called to the front desk by a suited man, who provided a $10.00 voucher to the food court and told me that they were working on rerouting my ticket. Twenty minutes later, I was put on a direct evening flight to Washington. After some quick googling, I decided not to chance a visit to the Canal.

My flight to DC boards in two hours.

Macchu Picchu and Back again

Resting in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, next to the Urubamba River. Totally exhausted from yesterday's adventures. Some highlights:

• Seeing Macchu Piccu. An amazingly intact ruined city discovered almost exactly 100 year ago by Hiram Bingham, a Yale professor and later Governor and Senator. Great tour guide, a 29 year-old named Carlos. Our tour group was called Chaquis, the Quecha (Incan) word for runner.  The Incans were a pretty fascinating people. They had a labor tax on the peoples ruled, were good farmers, ate/used a lot of coca, and built a bunch of sturdy stone structures. There's still a great of mystery around Macchu Piccu: the name and purpose of the city are unknown. 

The Chasqui

• Climbing the actual mountain for which the site is named, which towers 2000 feet above the site. Hard hike up mountain steps, which at times were almost vertical and without safety rails. We ran into an archeologist who studies Easter Island and is convinced that the Macchu Piccu site is primarily religious. We summited after two grueling hours. The mountain top was cold and beautiful. 
• Crazy costumed dancer in on train back to Ollanta. Then the train crew a did fashion show of the merchandise, catwalk style. The performer participated.  They served a very tasty pasta salad. There was no differance between the Vistadome and Autowagon train services. 
• The taxi driver who picked us from the Ollanta train station brought his two little kids along for the ride. Cute and hyper, neither spoke a word of english. Key lesson: regardless of culture, kids like the iPad. 

Hot water

We're in Aguas Calientes, a town at the base of Macchu Picchu. We left Cusco by minibus this morning, stopping in Pisac, a town of 900 that is famous only for its market and an exquisite set of ruins that hang in the mountains above.

We spent hours hiking around the archeological site, a collection of a few ruined settlements, sets of Incan farming steps, stone pathways, and a small tunnel in the side of mountain. The Incans clearly were expert masons: much of the stonework seemed like it had been built in the past hundred years.

We taxied through the Sacred Valley to Ollanta (full spelling involves the word Tambo and a y) and boarded a cute two-car train to Aguas Calientes. Comfy seats, half-windowed viewing ceiling, and a little snack and drink served in a colorful straw basket. The ride from Ollanta is less than two hours and is punctuated by recorded announcements that frequently mention that this is an unforgettable journey.

Aguas Calientes is a small riverside town in the middle of the jungle. There are no cars and tons of hotels, hostels, restaurants, massage parlours, and shops. We're staying a place called Rupawasi ecolodge, which is not unlike staying in a treehouse with art-laden walls. The hotel's restaurant is magnificent: a cozy, well-lit culinary temple.

Tomorrow we wake before dawn to see a wonder of the world. Tonight we'll fall asleep to the rushing of Urubamba river.

Tomorrow, we