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

orogenesis and its discontents

The air is thin and the sun is strong.  When it starts setting at 5pm, the air gets chilly. There's a small blanket pressing down on my brain and I'm strangely congested.  I'm in Cusco, a town of 300,000 Peruvians, 11,000 feet above sea level in the Central Andes mountain range.


Easy flight from Toronto to Lima, with a free seat next to me. Met two Peruvian-Canadians on the plane, a professional skateboarder from Vancouver and a friendly woman from Montreal. I met the former while boarding, during which he offered a treatise on the women of Colombia and promptly to take me around Lima. The latter sat in my row and seemed not speak english, so we ended up in French. She warned me to be careful in Lima, which she said was very dangerous. 


Watched Limitless (of limited cinematic value) and the new Gulliver's Travels with Jack Black (of no cinematic value at all). We landed at 12:35am, and the passengers applauded, which reminded me of landing in Tel Aviv on my first adult flight on El Al. 


Lima is not pretty at night. From what I saw the next morning on the way back to the airport, it's not pretty in the morning, either. Lots of police, some of whom appear to be paramilitary. I checked into my hotel, slept for six hours, ran a mile in the gym, and eat a breakfast that includes miso soup and gyoza.


The LAN flight to Cusco is full, but I get an emergency exit row seat with another free one beside me. They serve a cute paper snack box with an enormous chocolate, a slice of cake, and some strange crackers. I try Inka Cola, which is the color of mountain dew and tastes like bubble gum.


My brother (Y) meets me at the airport. I'm lucky to have him as a traveling partner for the week, particularly since he speaks spanish and is spending the summer in Peru. He's arrived the day before, after spending a week in Lima. It's good to see him. 

The South American Way

Toronto Pearson Airport, maple leaf lounge. Hanging out in the lounge for a three hour layover on the way to Peru.

The lounge is packed but still pleasant. Canadian television is focused on grilling the Canucks coach and the death of someone who is referred to as Canada's greatest national hero. Never heard of the guy.

A seven hour flight to Lima awaits me, followed by a midnight arrival in one of the least popular capitols in the developing world.

Five Years Later

I was told that the five-year college reunion is the good one: few people are married with children and there's high turnout. Everyone's in the mood to party, whatever that means. By the ten-year, the children have arrived and fewer people show up.


With this in mind, I went to my five-year college reunion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Took a packed 9:15pm US Airways flight out of DCA to BDL. I'd hoped to split a cab to Middletown, but no dice at 10:30pm. 


Arrived on campus sometime after 11pm. Dropping off my bags in the dorm (where reunion alums can stay), ran into an excited group of folks from my year. Spent the rest of the night enthusiastically running into old friends while an alumnus band played perfectly chosen covers. A wonderful, friendly energy prevailed. In the words of one of my classmates "everyone just needed a break from their lives."

Saturday's main event for the class of 2006 was a reception and dinner in a private tent. More reconnecting, albeit with less enthusiasm. Lots of people are teaching, with grad school as the runner-up. Five years seemed to have a positive effect, interactions were noticeably less awkward, people considerably more secure, and a social generosity seemed to prevails. A larger all-class tent party followed.   


Wesleyan does a nice job of combining reunion and commencement into one weekend, with Sunday for the latter. As the designated speaker, Paul Farmer did a nice job of mixing humor with personal anecdotes from his work in Haiti. One got the sense that Farmer is cut from the same cloth as Wesleyan graduates: irreverent, critical, globally oriented, and focused on improving the world. 

After the ceremony, got Indian food at Udupi Bhavan with L, S ('06 alums) and S' father + grandfather (also alums).   By the time L and I got back to campus at 3ish, it was totally deserted. 


A lifeless and empty college campus is a sad place to wander, particularly after you've spent a weekend wandering its walkways with hundreds of friends and acquaintances. I felt enormous relief when the taxi pulled up to take us to the airport.


Our driver was wearing a tee-shirt from Nicholson, the dorm where L and I spent our first year of college. The 2002-2003 version, our year at Nicholson. 

Sugarloaf For Passover

View Larger Map

Easter Sunday, middle of Passover. Time for a hike on Sugarloaf Mountain, in Maryland.

The hike began uneventfully, a quiet walk up a small mountain on a hot April afternoon. Nice rocks, trees, the usual.

After stopping for lunch a mile or so in, it began to rain gently. We continued.

Within minutes, we were sitting in the middle of full-blown thunderstorm, with flashes of nearby lightning.

We squatted under/near large rocks to avoid lightning strikes and tried to wait out the storm. The downpour accelerated.

We eventually decided to keep hiking in the rain, after being completely soaked. The rain stopped after a few minutes on the trail.

We hiked back to the car in the cool quiet, appreciating the clarity that follows a spring rainstorm in the forest. 

New York and Back Again

Thursday night Acela. Friday wandering Soho and the East Village in the cold rain. Tokyo 7 has moved, and I found a completed building in the former parking lot next to my old apartment on 9th and C. New espresso machine at the 9th Street Espresso. The sandwich from Barnyard didn't taste as crisp.

Found a cool sock shop in Soho where they gave me a glass of scotch for free. Saw Win-Win at the Angelika.

Drinks at the Pegu Club, modeled after a colonial watering hole of the same name in British Burma. Dinner at a French restaurant on Houston. Stopped a by a friend's newly-purchased apartment in a coop, a first for friends in New York.

Saturday was sunny, warmer, and devoted to Brooklyn. Dinner on Smith Street. 

Notes On the Middle West/Upper South

The 1:15pm Delta flight from DCA->CVG left at 2:50pm. My first Delta flight of 2011 and my first with Silver Medallion status. Delta offered an alternative flight through the web, with one segment in First Class. Turned out to be a mechanical problem, which is never reassuring.

CVG  is entirely different as a final destination, rather than as a transfer-point.  I wonder how many cities get more transfer-only visitors (who never actually visit a city) than actual visitors. I've passed through but never visited Dallas, Detroit, and Chicago.

We get into Cincinatti around 5pm. The city is grey, industrial, and very mid-western. My colleague remarks that it looks just like downtown Minneapolis. Do mid-western cities look the same?

There is a large Teacher's union demonstration in Fountain square when we arrive. The speeches boom into my hotel room on the thirteenth floor, the cheers and chanting of the crowd. They seem energized, something about pensions.   Is there is something particularly nasty about the attack on public sector workers in the mid-west?  One envisions 1950's and '60's Cincinnati: prosperous, orderly, friendly, a well-respected public sector. The height of American Power.  Expectations and changing economics, oy.

We eat at a wonderful new French restaurant that I find on yelp. The food is excellent.  I'm impressed.

***

It's raining in Kentucky. We pass fields, cows, horses, and strip-malls. We labor to and successfully find a Starbucks, the great American constant.

After the meeting we drive back to CVG, eat some chili (apparently Cincinatti is famous for Chili), and buy Kentucky-themed souvenirs. Our flight to BWI is delayed and I talk Delta into putting us on the flight to DCA.  I narrowly miss getting upgraded.

Monkey Business

5:40am. Awake.
7:15am US Airways Shuttle: DCA to LGA.
8:55am Starbucks, 29th and Park Avenue. Dancing crazy woman. Jazz. Delicious Energy.
-Work-
1:19pm hail taxi slightly south of Canal Street.
~1:47pm Sprinting from the security line, I hear the my name on final call for US Airways Shuttle back to DC. I am the last passenger to board.
8:30pm: Tales of life in Saudi Arabia from an ex-consultant over Sushi.
11:25pm: I finish reading The CEO and the Monk: One Company's Journey to Profit and Purpose
11:40pm: Roommate opens package to find stuffed monkey in a ziplock bag with attached thanksgiving card.  

Playing and Watching At War

Went ice skating on Tuesday night in the sculpture garden, paintballing on Saturday somewhere in Virginia. My first time paintballing, intense and wonderfully separate the rest of my existence.  Pumping adrenaline, the fear of being shot by a small orange pellet, a simulation of warfare. Exhilarating moments of victory and teamwork.

Have been watching a Battlestar Galactica, another simulation of warfare. It's a a remarkably satisfying and complex show that plays with morality, humanity, Need to buy a DVD player, and have heard this site is good for LCD TV stands. 


All is Quiet on most other fronts. 

Nice comes a long way

Caught the 8pm US Airways shuttle, last flight to LGA from BOS.  A mostly empty plane,  fell asleep before we left the ground. Got into LGA around 9:20.  I miss Delta. 

Stayed in Times Square at the new Element on 39th street. Studio-style apartments, recently opened. $119 a night, no major complaints. Had late night tea with A, a high school buddy working in finance. As a result of working A LOT, A has taken a liking to celebrating shabbat. Potential topic for doctoral dissertation: relationship between career, aging, and religious observance. 

Slept like a baby, had an early midtown breakfast with N, an old and dear friend. Decided that I like turkey bacon. 

Midtown New York morning traffic/hustle is totally insane. I don't miss it at all. 

Work Work Work.  Only in new york does a meeting end two hours early. 

Took a frozen walk from Union Square to Soho, where I had coffee/dinner at Aroma on Houston. New York has changed a great deal since 2009, for the better. More smaller stores, boutiques, and experimental chains/shops. Energy of recovery/renaissance.

Inadvertently split a taxi with a snowboarding economic consultant whose father grew up in Brooklyn. 

Punjabi cab driver was very amused/confused by the split cab incident, prompting a long conversation that included Indian and German political history, airline industry gossip, and values: he loves Jet Blue/Air India/Lufthansa, was relieved at the assassination of Indira Gandhi, had only recently heard about Adolf Hitler (while on a layover in Frankfurt?) and told me that he's become more religious and less materialistic as he gets older. See above bolded comment.  

Talked the US Airways gate agent into bumping me onto the early flight back to DC without the $50 fee, after an unsuccessful attempt at check-in.  In the words of the TSA agent: nice comes a long way. 

New England Buddha

Our 6:30pm flight from DCA to BOS got cancelled and we plugged ourselves onto the 5:30 flight. US Airways was surprisingly palatable, though I sat in the middle seat.

Spent the evening in the Sheraton Framingham, a pleasant hotel with a remarkable germanic brick facade. Slow elevators, nice staff, and well-booked. Dinner at Samba, a fantastic japanese seafood/steak joint with Argentinian  influences. Some of the best-tasting sushi i'd had in a while.  Remarkable Buddhas, one depicted below.

Young and Resting in New England

Returning to the hotel, got tea with b in the buzzing restaurant. Distant piano music, obscure Sinatra tune. Investigating, I find balding salesman playing "Angel Eyes." He welcomes the accompaniment and we exchange pitches before I head off to sleep.