No Arrival / No Departure

India

2010-09-12T18:05:00.001-07:00

As hard as the crash had been, the black case holding the Hari Krishna's staff had barely been scratched. Walking gingerly out of the emergency room's sliding glass door, I carried it for him. In the cool night air we loaded his bags into the trunk of the tipsy good Samaritan's Mercedes. Pausing, he gave me a look and we laughed in the way strangers do when they've been through something nearly inexplicable.

"Do you know it's purpose?" he asked me, gesturing to the case. I shook my head. He pondered a moment.

"It brings you out of this world and places you between this one and next."

I looked it up and down and his explanation gave me chills. I didn't answer, and handed it back to him.

My flight from Amman didn't take me to Delhi straight away. Having my visa delayed had caused me to re-book my flight, and all of a sudden I had 8 hours in Bahrain to kill. I did the most obvious thing one would do when visiting the UAE for the first time - went drinking.

My friend Amna, who had invited me to join her and her friends on the beach in Sharm Al Sheik, lives there with her family and was excited to hear about my last minute visit. She picked me up at the airport in her blue Renault convertible and took me across the bridge into downtown Manama. In my brief glimpse of the city, it was hard not to be impressed by the towering buildings across the island skyline. The literal and figurative rise of the Gulf states is something to see with your own eyes, the urban sprawl and endless strings of familiar chains. Like my adoptive home Los Angeles, it sprang from nowhere in such a short period that everything still gleamed. The signs advertising the city's Grand Prix circuit - a cruel tease.

We went first to her family's place in an older section of the city, where I sat with her Dad and brothers and chatted about my work and my travels over strong Lebanese Arak. Articulate and opinionated, I felt right at home delving into all the esoteric corners of the film business - Amna is a documentary producer and has more than her fair share of informed opinions.

Piling into their SUV, we all headed to a nearby hotel to watch a world cup game at an Irish pub. Long ago inoculated to this kind of surreal cognitive dissonance, I knocked back a few beers with them and relaxed. Best layover ever.

Soon it became time to head back to the airport, and Amna, far more sober than I, dropped me back off with a fond farewell and a promise to return for a longer visit. Making it through security and finding my gate while still slightly intoxicated wasn't the easiest airport experience I've had.

I obviously slept well on the flight, and arrived into Delhi early in the morning. The airport was quiet and I experienced none of the aggressive cab drivers on the curb that I expected. The air was still and cool and surprisingly clean. I called my hostel to let them know I had arrived and they sent a car. A few minutes later a beat-up old van pulled to the curb and the driver showed me a hand-written paper with my name on it. I threw my pack in the seat and jumped in.

The drive through greater Delhi took the better part of an hour. Better things than I could write have been written about the first experience of India, but I'll add simply that they are all true. The poverty is baldly shocking, people living in shacks built from trash or simply just sleeping on the sidewalk. Beggars approach at every intersection, displaying their gruesome handicaps to you. Cows meander blithely through traffic. The smells and sounds are a tidal wave that washes over you. But maybe it was the overnight flight and a growing jaded feeling in me, but I felt little that first morning. All I wanted was to get back to the hostel and get more sleep.

And though it was still morning when I landed, I soon realized my grave mistake in timing with the seasons. Delhi would be gripped in the next few days with a very bad heat wave. The days would reach 120F with as much humidity as I've ever felt. Being outside for more than an hour was an impossibility and even the locals would refuse to go out. Even the stray dogs would huddle under whatever they could find.

The place I had chosen was in a tiny pocket of south-eastern Delhi, quite far from the center of the city but in a quiet area near a local university. But the explosion of India's economy was apparent - what was once described as an empty street by a cab driver that had grown up there had grown into crowded rows of shops and restaurants with a perpetual cab-rickshaw-motorcycle-pedestrian traffic jam.

The place itself seemed an awful lot like a frathouse bred with a yoga studio. Religious iconography hung haphazardly all over the walls and free beer was served promptly at 8pm every night. Hot water, or water at all, as I had grown accustomed, was a rare luxury, and the power would go out several times a day as we all cowered pathetically next to the precious air conditioners.

I was brave enough those first few days to try and sit on the patio and smoke, but - if you ever wondered if those warning labels on lighters about high-temperatures and direct sunlight, wonder no longer. I set mine down at one point and within a few minutes it exploded on the table with a loud pop, showering me with neon-green plastic.

But nobody goes to hostels for the setting, you go to meet other travellers. I immediately bonded with two girls from a university in Boston who were there doing water-quality studies (obvious joke: so you guys drink from the tap and go wait around in the bathroom, right?) They had made some local friends and invited me to go to a house party with them to pose as one of their 'boyfriends' to deter a creepy dude that was hitting on them in between telling them his utterly serious theories about aliens controlling civilization. The nickname stuck, and was amusingly confusing to everyone around when both of them would say "hey boyfriend!" and I'd answer.

My real plan had been to get to a hostel in Delhi and find some people to tour with. Unfortunately, everyone had gotten the memo about the weather except me and the hostel was virtually empty. Undeterred, I set out on my my own. Getting into downtown Delhi involves a complicated negotiation with a rickshaw driver who is willing to drive the 45 minutes into the city center. This is easy for a local and less easy for me, the whitest man in 100 miles. Once there, getting around the congested, construction-filled streets is equally challenging - and people stop you every few feet trying to sell you something or other.

Having said that, those first few days of playing tourist I became a little bit shocked at what I perceived to be a complete lack of curiosity about western tourists. Obviously, this is a big city and naturally people wouldn't be surprised to see a foreigner, but I had been warned that I would get a lot of attention and staring on the streets - but I didn't. In what must be a chicken-and-egg problem, I was also surprised at my own lack of curiosity about the culture around me. After being in so many places for a long while, everything became deja-vu. The sales pitch of the street vendor, the gruff cab drivers, the shouting little boys - it all started to just blend together. My attempts to engage locals in conversation would be politely ignored.

It was a real unravelling of the curious, adventurous spirit that had carried me this far and all the little dramatic moments that had seemed quirky and interesting to me started just getting on my nerves.

Getting a SIM card for my phone was a monstrous exercise in frustration, with a mountain of paperwork involved and it took an entire day of cajoling and strong-arming salesman to get one. It was turned off in a week because, apparently, tourists aren't really allowed to have them.

In a rickshaw one day, my driver ran over a guy's leg, cutting him superficially. It turned into an all-out streetfight, with the two guys throwing punches at each other while a huge crowd of onlookers held them back. I got out of the cab and started walking away, leaving the guy a few bucks for an eventful 20-foot ride.

I took a rickshaw home from a bar early one night with Shreya, one of the two girls that had christened me fake “boyfriend." We had met a guy she was seeing at a swanky local bar, a smartly decorated multi-level club filled with a curious mix of drunken European tourists slurredly mingling and locals dancing in tight circles. The crowd and the music didn't thrill me and I was feeling quite worn out from traipsing around the city that day. I told her I was going to take off and she wanted to share a cab back with me. We bid her french friends adieu and grabbed a rickshaw in the parking lot.

It's a curiously human foible to see patterns in randomness. We desire so strongly to correlate chaos and call it fate. But rationally, I can't believe what happened was anything more or less than a quirk of time and place. If I had left a few minutes before or after, we wouldn't have been where we ended up. And maybe things would have been ok without us, but they might not have been. At the bottom of the equation, no matter how you add it up, fate brought Shreya and I to where we needed to be.

In the darkened intersection, the rickshaw's natural-gas engined idled roughly, drowning out what was otherwise a very quiet night. Across the way, in the lane perpendicular to us, was a large agricultural tractor - the kind with the huge rear wheels and drivers sitting openly astride a huge, rumbling engine. The trailer they pulled behind them was overflowing with sand.

Travelling so fast that it pierced our peripheral vision before we could even flinch, a modern Toyota cab hit the back of the trailer so hard that rose up off the ground and spilled a mass of sand all over the street. The cab instantly became half-size, the whole front end collapsing in on itself, shedding bits of glass and plastic everywhere. The windshield clouded with the white explosion of its front airbags.

"Oh, fuck" is what I believe I said, at that point. Without as much as a backward glance, the tractor peeled off in a howl of diesel smoke, spilling sand everywhere.

I motioned to the opposite curb and Shreya, in Hindi, urged the driver to stop. We waited a long, long moment to see if anyone would emerge from the car, but no one did. That was the point that urgency began to set in. Jumping out we ran to the car and opened the doors.

The driver, dazed but apparently unharmed, stumbled out of the front seat and immediately began to inspect the absolutely catastrophic damage to his cab. We went to the back and pulled the door open, calling in to the passenger to ask if he was alright.

In my life, in the last few months, I have seen a great many surreal things, but the sight of that man pulling himself out of the ruined car ranks very highly. His head was shaved clean as a newborn, except for the small tuft grown long and tied back from the top and he wore only the flowing pink robes of his order. A creased face of a man in sixties, with piercing, curious blue eyes that clearly showed he was as surprised as we were to be pulled from the seat by another Caucasian and a small South Asian woman in a western dress and heels. It is impossible to understate this strange moment.

Nonetheless, we helped him up and made sure he was ok, and with the exception of a small cut on his head he seemed to be. Sitting him down on the curb, we fetched a bottle of water from the back of the car and gave him a drink. Shaking a little, he tried to verbally sort through the last few minutes before the crash. The driver, he said, had not even touched the brakes. A small crowd of onlookers started to form, and they mutely watched the scene unfold.

Before we could even move, he collapsed on the street and began seizing.

Shouting and screaming, we grabbed him and tried to keep him from hitting his head. Shreya and I looked at each other with the exact same thought. Is this man going to die in front of us in the street while we hold him?

I looked up at the crowd and started yelling for them to call an ambulance. Shreya cradled the man's head and pleaded with the shaking man to stay conscious. Everyone pulled out their mobile phones and stared mutely at them, unsure of what to do. After a few horrible seconds, the man seemed to relax and come back. He sat with with some effort again on the curb again.

In the opposite lane, a brand-new Mercedes E-Class screech to a halt and the driver jumped out. A short, bearded Indian man dressed in business clothes ran up to us and told us with deadly certainty that we need to get this man to a hospital, an ambulance would not be coming.

Helping the shaken Hari Krishna into the Mercedes, we closed the passenger door and stood for a few seconds. She leaned in and told me in a hushed voice that she smelled alcohol on the driver's breath. Still tired and wanting nothing more than to be home, we both knew we couldn't leave him. With a sigh, we climbed into the back seat and sped off.

The next few hours we spent wandering in and out of the ER at a nearby hospital. We stood by the man's bed, spoke with him and the hospital staff. Tests determined that he was concussed but otherwise fine. Hours went by, we were there well into the night.

I told him I was from Santa Monica, and he told me he had been there many times, including studying at the temple a few blocks away from where I used to work. The Mercedes driver, have long ago sobered up, told us he owned a series of gas stations in New Jersey, and he felt he hadn't been to temple enough lately so a bit of Samartinism was in order.

The doctor, in an amazing display of bedside manner, told the man drolly as he lay in the hospital bed that he had been very lucky, as car accident victims sometimes seem fine for hours and then die suddenly from internal bleeding in the brain.

We never did find out if the driver was ok, but he left the scene very quickly and is surely in some trouble for causing the accident. We all just hoped he was alright.

Finally, as dawn began to creep into the night sky, we hugged the Hari Krishna goodbye and accepted his gratitude with our relief to have been there to help. He had a plane to catch to Istanbul, where he would continue on to a conference in Italy. Shreya and I wearily found another rickshaw and gratefully return to our hostel. She had a train to catch in a few hours to Lucknow, where her and her friend's study would continue.

That night haunted me for a while, and still does. The kindness in the man's eyes, the gentle acceptance of his fate. I remember talking with Shreya just hours before about altruism, and the kind of people that would help strangers in need. I remember standing at the bar that night drinking Budweiser with Europeans thinking, "I travelled so far... for what?" I thought about what I had left behind in Amman, and how being alone and untethered again started to feel so daunting.

Early the next morning, Shreya woke me up to say goodbye and we embraced tightly, feeling like we'd been friends for years though it had been days. I slept another fitful few hours and then packed my own bags. I had booked a different hostel, closer to the center of Delhi, where I hoped again to find some companions to travel with. The place I chose was called "Smyle Inn" and was located on the infamous backpacker street, walking distance to the train station. The heat remained oppressive and I found with some horror that the new hostel had no air conditioning to speak of. To make matter worse, this street seemed to be under heavy construction and was an unpaved dirt road that in the windy afternoons would be a choking dust storm.

I stayed three nights, trying my best to chat up the other guests and, using the ancient computers in the hostel, attempted to contact local couchsurfers. I had no luck, so I scoured my guidebook to determine my next move.

The conclusion that I eventually came to was to head north, into the mountains, where the weather would be more forgiving. A popular destination that sounded interesting to me was a small town call Dharmsala, the home of the Dalai Lama and the seat of the exiled Tibetan government. For ten dollars, I booked a 12-hour overnight bus ride.

For those who’ve never been on one, describing a very long bus ride is difficult. I hesitate to continue being so negative about my experiences - I’m not visiting Disneyland, after all. But imagine being on an airplane, a very very long flight, with no food, no drinks, and no bathrooms. There’s no light to read by, unless you bring your own, and certainly no in-flight movie. In a move that left me feeling slightly cowardly, I paid extra for air-conditioning. As the bus bounces violently over dirt roads and winds up tight mountain passes, you simple close your eyes and try to make sleep come. I became quite lost in my own head, wandering through the passageways of my memories of what I had seen and left behind. For the first time, I became really homesick.

What finally broke my self-flagellating reverie was the sun. It poked through the horizon in the final few hours of the bus ride, finally giving the passengers a glimpse of what they had come for - the jagged green mountains of northern India, a million miles away from the dusty maze of Delhi.

We wearily and gratefully excited the bus in Dharmsala in the crisp air of the early morning. All of our lungs had a collective moment of joy breathing in the clean smell of the mountains, and the fluttering sound of a dozen identical Lonely Planets being cracked open to look for a hotel. A few of us banded together and shambled with our packs up the long hill from the bus station into Dharmsala proper. This took about 2 minutes, as Dharmsala is 3 streets that intersect in a “square” at its center.

We walked into the first hotel we found, and saw that it was clean and modern, with a picturesque cafe in the middle and good, fast wireless internet. Rooms were eight dollars a night. I said ok, but my companions were on a stricter budget and would later find shared rooms down the street for four dollars.

When I opened the room and set my backpack down, sprawling gratefully out on the bed, I was hit by the most intense feeling of isolation I’d ever felt, being hit like a freight train with the realization of how far I was from anyone that I cared for.

I spent five days in Dharmsala. I got quite sick, finally, and spent a few of them locked in my hotel feeling simply miserable. I stopped sleeping, instead staying up very late scouring the internet for options, communicating home furiously.

I was just tired, worn out. Completely drained of all desire to keep going the way I had been. My next step had been to take another 12 hour bus, and a 3-day jeep trip across a frozen highway into Kashmir, but I just couldn’t do it. I thought long about finding volunteer work of some kind to not just waste the 3-month visa I had fought so hard for in Jordan. But nothing materialized, and all I really wanted was to be home. One night, at about three AM, I broke down and booked a plane ticket.

I bought another bus ticket the next day back to Delhi, and took all the drugs the pharmacy could give me as well as the ones I’d brought, which is a medically dodgy thing to do but such is the state of mind I was in. Within 24 hours, I had come full circle, and was back at the Nirvana Inn, the first hostel where I had stayed, though everyone I knew had long gone. Within 48 hours, I was on a plane to Los Angeles via Amsterdam, 26 hours in transit.

If I’m hard on myself, I’d say that India was too much for me. I’d enjoyed the relatively close distances of smaller middle eastern countries, more tolerable weather and my own feeling of exoticism. But in all fairness, I felt a sense of finality. After four months I was overcome with a desire to try something new.

So, home then, though it would hardly feel like it. More like, just a stop over in a familiar place, before I would leave again.

Jordan

2010-07-26T19:37:00.001-07:00

This is a story in 2 parts.

It began, as mentioned, on the side of the highway. Well, that's not precisely true. I noted something new and strange when I walked into the immigration building on the Jordanian border and the security guard who searched my bag asked my name. After paying the $20 visa fee, he remembered it when I left with a friendly greeting. It felt like night and day, given the treatment I received just a few hundred meters away at the Syrian border. But of course I still had an hour into Amman with a surly cab driver who had long since realized I wasn't real interested in being ripped off more than I had already been.

From the side of the highway I flagged down a cab, who took me the last 10 minutes into the city center. My hotel was located roughly adjacent to a well-known mosque, but finding it was rather more tricky than they made it seem. Deja vu set in as I wound my way through shoe vendors, kabob stands and wheelbarrows filled with fruit being sold by shouting people.

This wouldn't last, Amman is remarkably different from other middle-eastern cities I'd been to - my hotel is situated in the 'downtown' area, which is also, I gathered later, one of the poorer and most conservative sections of the city. Much of the city is built on a series of hills and it gives a natural separation to different neighborhoods. One, for example, was a wealthy, strongly Christian neighborhood that was very westernized - though the soldiers on every street corner with machine guns do a lot to ruin that particular illusion.

The timing of this trip came about because Chris, my friend I stayed with in London, was going to visit and travel with me for a few days. Time was quite short - he only had 6 or so days here and I worried that we wouldn't be able to see much as travel in this part of the world can be unpredictable.

I shouldn't have worried. The hotel we picked at random was organized and professional. They put together day trips for us and arraigned transportation to bus stations and the airport with ease. Compared to some of my other experiences, it was pretty shocking. In fact the smooth, easy nature of the tourist infrastructure in Jordan was unbelievable.

I got in a day earlier than Chris and checked into the hotel (once I found it.) The rooms were spartan but clean, with amazing, modern features like towels and soap. Hot water, however, remained precious and elusive. More than anything, though, I loved the atmosphere - a big common room with couches couches and tables filled with travelers from all over the world. The owner, a Muslim woman of indeterminable age, would bounce into the room like a cartoon character and hold court with all her guests, complaining about the various details of running a hotel and whatever else was on her mind at the time.

That first night I ventured out only a little, instead spending time talking with a Swiss girl of Iranian descent, who spoke Farsi with a curiously German accent and an Italian chef working in Dubai who told wildly improbable but completely entertaining stories. I shared a room with an Irishman with whom I spoke very little but seemed to take some measure of post-culture-shock comfort in our common heritage.

The next morning Chris's flight was due to land, and I advised him to take the bus into town rather than a $30 taxi. This seemed like a good introduction to middle-eastern travel and I expected some horror stories - but of course, this being Jordan, there were none. It was a good reunion - it felt like a lot longer than the few weeks that had passed since I left London. We sat in the common area of the hotel for a while, just catching up and shooting the shit with the other guests.

Rudely, that day, we were interrupted in our excitedly casual conversation by an incredible, violent roar overhead that shook the windows with some force and set off car alarms up and down the street. There was a stunned silence for a few long seconds before we could all find our voices again. We later learned that it was an Israeli fighter jet and must have been flying very, very low to the ground. This, then, was a proper introduction to travel in the middle east.

That, and the grueling few hours we spent exploring the city in the blazing hot sun. Amman is a sprawling, hilly city that is about as un-walkable as they come, but there are some interesting roman ruins nestled tightly into the urban environment that need to be explored on foot.

But in stark contrast with the many of the rest of my experiences, travelling in Jordan was smooth as silk. The hotel had drivers on call to make all of the most common day trips and people would simply sign up for them and split the cost. In this manner a group of us drove out across the shocking green hills to the east and wandered around a castle and an old roman city. This was not without it’s own quirks: our taxi driver took a liking to the Swiss girl from the hotel that had gone along with us and would shout her name every few moments at the top of his lungs and roughly shake the seat of whatever poor soul was on the passenger side. Every culture has it’s own brand of humor and in much of the middle east it seems to involve a lot of pushing and shouting (sometimes biting.)

Another taxi the following day took us to Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have spent the remainder of his life. It was a spectacular view, though we ended up wandering into some kind of monastery by accident and were yelled at. We spent the rest of the afternoon dead floating serenely in the Dead Sea, where the water bears you like a newborn, pushing you to the surface with shocking force. You can’t overstate how strange the experience is, like sitting on a water-chair.

Being us, we naturally managed to sniff out the meager local nightlife. Rallying together a small crew from our hotel, we piled into a few cabs and negotiated with the drivers to take us to one of a few bars in the area. This was harder than it seemed since of course none of the drivers had ever been anywhere near any of these places, for obvious reasons.

Drinking is also stratospherically expensive in the middle east, compared to everything else. In Egypt, bars I went to tended to be dark and well-hidden, filled with men furtively drinking awful, locally-made beer. In Syria, bars were tiny and and crowded with ex-pats, so we bought beer and drank in the park.

In Jordan, they were elaborate and huge, with terraces filled with beautiful young people and expansive views of the hills. It felt so much like Los Angeles that for a bit I couldn’t tell if I liked it or not. But I did, and I would return many times after that.

Anyway, we all got well and truly plastered.

Shrugging off a hangover, we boarded a 6 am bus filled with tourists bound for the legendary Petra.

Much of the world knows this place from Indiana Jones, but that hardly does the place justice. Lonely Planet (“the bible” - called as such because of how tourists clutch it desperately everywhere they go) recommends two full days for it, but we only had one, and it was long.

First things first, you pay. Getting in is a mind-boggling $40, which is about four times what we paid for a hotel room. Secondly, you hike. It’s about a two-hour walk into the site, but the process is so perfectly dream-like, turning from featureless, rocky desert town into a surreal narrow canyon walkway. This must have been deliberate - the builders fully intended this route to inspire awe in their visitors, and they succeed still today.

At this point in the trip, I’d seen a lot of ruins, to make a wild understatement. But today, anytime anyone asks the absolute highlight of the trip, this is what I tell them. The sheer spectacle of this place is without equal, the scale of it and setting and the effort it must have taken to carve into the solid rock cliffs. And more - the dissonance of the oriental Arab architecture mixed directly with the classical roman.

Through a vertical slit of light through the canyons, you see The Treasury, the most iconic of Petra’s buildings. How easy it is to imagine this square as it once was - the resemblance to Wall Street is somewhat uncanny. And further down, the site opens wide to row upon row of caves and temples set into the cliff sides overlooking a roman forum and a wide avenue set with columns. 'Breathtaking' comes to mind.

It comes to mind for a few reasons, actually. As I mentioned there's a lot of hiking involved to even get there. You can take a donkey, but it's a tourist trap (and you look like, yeah, an ass.) Your only other choice to brave the heat and the dust and walk it. We walked that day until our legs were useless. The most brutal of all was the 800-step climb to "the temple" - you feel every single one during the hour or so it took to climb up. 10 minutes or so into the climb someone passing down mentioned that we were "about halfway," which was incredibly, stupidly wrong.

But we didn't stop long once we reached the temple. You can keep going, climbing up rock formations to the peak of the mountain to look down on "the end of the world", a landscape of rocky valleys so alien and foreign that it doesn't seem even a little bit real. We sat for a while and just stared. Then we started the long walk down.

We returned to the hotel later that night for a well-needed shower and went out to eat, ingratiating ourselves with the waiters by slyly drinking beer out of coffee cups and then setting fire to the candle-in-paper-bag put on our table for romantic ambience.

The morning brought another 6am call, a 2-hour taxi ride south to Wadi Rum. Chris had one single-minded goal when coming to the middle-east: ride a damn camel. This desert, famous for its scenic rock formations and the hospitality of its Bedouin residents, seemed conducive to camel-based adventures.

But first we spent the day riding shotgun in a prehistoric Toyota Land Cruiser, driven by a guy who shared my disdain for 4-wheel drive - preferring long, slow drifts across the sand, the tail of the car hanging out like a puppy on a polished floor.

The sights themselves were less interesting - sand dunes, rock formations, some weirdly suspicious ruins. The crumbling wall of T.E. Lawrence's house (he figures prominently in the history of this region, but I suspect he mostly had a good P.R. agent, and Peter O'Toole.) But the setting itself was something pretty special and seemed a million miles from anywhere.

At one point, part of the "tour" consisted of our driver stopping at one rock and pointing to another one far in the distance, suggesting in the best English he could muster that we might find it interesting to walk there to get an idea what it must be like to be lost in the desert. Tempting as it sounded, we declined.

Night coming, we made our way back to the camp where we would spend the night. Our mental image of it was of us and our fellow tourists around a campfire, playing guitars and watching the sunset. Unfortunately, there were no fellow tourists. In fact, it was just us two and four guys from the camp staff. In any case, they made an amazing dinner for us, an Arab dish I'd had many times but never got old - simple rice and chicken cooked so long it falls apart when you grab it. The sunset was as good as you can imagine, the whole landscape set afire by the red sun and then cooling to a dim blue. When the stars came out, they painted the sky in totality, more stars than either of us had ever seen.

We were woken the next morning by the camels and their Sudanese rider. With practiced ease he buckled us in, and the animals rose smoothly with a grumpy snort from their seated position like an elevator. We set off, the route back to town taking about 2 hours. For moments it would become weirdly normal, holding onto the saddle pitching back and forth and chatting about nothing. Then one camel or another would get rowdy and bite his mate on the ass or grumble or fart and we would all just bust out laughing. The most surreal moment came when the guy answered his cell phone and then handed it back to me. I've never recieved a call on the back of a camel before, but I can scratch that off my bucket list now, thank god.

From Wadi Rum we took a taxi south, to the coastal city of Aqaba, where you can sit on the Red Sea and see Israel. We sat and had lunch and drank a beer and watched the glass-bottom boats go past the "family beach", where women clothed from head to toe in black frolicked in the surf with their husbands and children. But, it was too hot to stay, and Chris's flight would leave soon, so we jumped on the next bus back to Amman, back to Abassi, which was already starting to feel like home.

And then, I was on my own again. I didn’t know it then, but this would be something like the beginning of the end of this story.

But of course, even though I bid a sad farewell to my friend, there were still the many familiar faces at Abassi, and more came every day. In the evenings I became like a tour guide for the meager local nightlife in Amman, leading groups up the long staircase to Rainbow street to spend a few hours smoking sheesha and drinking beer and telling stories.

More troublingly, I received more and more reports of people being turned away at the Syrian border. One girl at the hotel had already paid tuition to an Arabic university in Damascus but couldn't get across the border to start classes. And not just American passports - Mexicans, Canadians. For some reason Aussies could still get through, but you try keeping an Aussie down.

Since Syria is the only option for travelling to Lebanon overland and flights to Lebanon pushing $200 and the security situation vis-a-vis Turkish flotillas getting worse, I decided the best idea would simply be to go directly to India. And thus began a process that would take nearly two weeks. It would strand me in Amman, force me to make it a sort of home and give life a weird cast of normality for long enough to poison the well of my wanderlust.

But it was something else, too. I've spoken before of heartbreak, of loneliness and isolation that punctuated my life in LA before I left it behind. It was the promise of the wider world that drew me out into it, the idea that out there I might find a home, a place or a person that would be worth trading my rootless freedom for. And in a way I did find it, though it slipped through my fingers like sand. But it was a taste of what I looked for, a tantalizing promise of the kind of life I had looked for.

One day we drove and drove and drove, out of the city and into the grassy farmlands to the west. We picked a spot under a tree and sat a while, talking and sitting close, hiding from the scornful looks and shouted taunts of the city.

One day I sat in a cafe writing when a coin fell from the sky at my feet. It brought me luck, though I couldn't keep it.

In time my visa came through, and I left Amman with bittersweet regret.

But I had one last thing to do. A friend of a friend, I had heard, was an underground tattoo artist, a practice thoroughly illegal in Jordan. I made a promise to myself when I was young that I would mark the biggest milestones of my life with something to remind myself of what I had learned and never wanted to forget. At 18, on the first of January in the year 2000, I drove to New Hampshire with my friends and got one to remember what my adolescent years taught me. And in the basement of a house in suburban Amman, I marked on my arm what I had learned becoming an adult, a man, 10 years later.

That night, I nursed my throbbing arm, finished a bottle of strong Arak and in my best penmanship wrote a long, sad birthday card. In morning I boarded a plane to Delhi.

Syria

2010-06-17T01:23:00.001-07:00

It was just past 9pm when I crossed the small bridge on a crowded, main street in Aleppo. All through the middle east, I had never felt even the smallest threat in the darkest of alleyways. But, passing briskly by a group of middle-aged men in button-down shirts leaning on the railing, I felt a hand roughly grab the shoulder strap of my bag and pull, hard.

I stopped and looked over at the guy, the tallest of them, with a cocked eyebrow, thinking I was just being harassed playfully. He smiled back, but it wasn't playful. He pulled it again, and started telling me in broken English that he wanted my bag. I told him in regular English to fuck off. His friends moved in and grabbed my arms. He smiled and asked me if I was going to call the police.

It's tempting to talk about this like it was a dramatic physical confrontation, but it wasn't. They just wanted to scare me, thinking I would just back down and hand them my things. But there were only four of them, with no knives or guns in a crowded street. These were not odds that I would worry about. As I was taught, with a flick of a wrist I pulled one hand free and pushed away from the group. They backed off. I turned and started walking the other direction.

One of them, the shortest of the four, came at me, his face contorted and red with anger. He caught my arm and held on, intent on dragging me back to his friends.

There's a move any six year old will learn in his first week of karate: I turned my shoulders and pulled the man's arm across his body, blocking his other arm from doing anything more than scratching his ass. I raised my free arm far back and made a fist. With no way to protect himself from a blow that would carry all the weight I could give, the damage would be catastrophic.

After a long moment I saw in his face that he knew he had made a mistake. He released his grip and backed off. Without pausing I turned and walked away. My pulse, flat as a board before, skyrocketed and my heart felt like it would leap from my throat. The five blocks back to my hostel seemed like a year, with every shadow causing a nervous jump. I sat in the terrace that night and drank a large beer slowly, smoking a dozen cigarettes one after another to calm my buzzing nerves.

I don't tell you this story out of pride. There are a million more graceful ways to handle the situation that in the moment I did not consider. Maybe a smile and a joke to diffuse a tense confrontation. What I did was stupid, and could have been much worse. But I suppose I can't change my nature.

I'm not a violent person, and would never hurt anyone else. No possession is worth enough to justify harming another person. But as visible foreigners in a rough country, we all often speak of the need to show that we are not a low-hanging fruit. We feel responsible for each other. If I let these guys simply take my things and walk away, they will surely be emboldened to do it again to someone else.

But every time I walked by that bridge I wondered if they would be back and I would regret how I handled myself.

"Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth,
and still she lives.

She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires,
and
will see the tombs of a thousand more
before she dies.

Though another claims the name,
old Damascus
is by right,
the Eternal City."

Mark Twain
The Innocents Abroad, 1869

The espresso in the Damascus airport was fantastic. Thick and almost black, with a small layer of crema on the top and so strong that ice-cold it would burn going down. The caffeine made my heart pound, then going on 27 hours without sleep. It was absurdly inexpensive, as is most food in Syria.

Not so much the cabs, who wanted a fortune to drive you in luxury the 30 or so kilometers from the airport to downtown. I chose to take the bus, which cost about a dollar. It was a familiar ride, watching the countryside and the farms turn to buildings and highways. We were dropped in the 'old bus station' which is now just a street next to a fenced-off pile of rubble that was once a station.

Cab drivers swarmed the bus when it pulled in, and I grabbed the guy that seemed to speak the best English. It of course wasn't really good enough and he didn't really understand that I wanted to be taken to Al-Merjeh square, the center of the city, where I had arranged to meet my couchsurfing host.

Couchsurfing is a wonderful tool for meeting expats and travelers and local people interesting in meeting the former two. In conservative countries where young people have few options socially, the internet is the place to gather. I have precious little experience, though, actually calling someone up and crashing on their couch. However, Syria is not listed on any hostel websites, and the 'budget' recommendations by lonely planet seemed qualified and begrudging.

In what would become a pretty common move, I just called him on my cell phone and handed it to the driver.

Damascus is very much two separate cities. The so-called 'new city' is a modern middle-eastern city with little to distinguish it. I can think of almost nothing to say about it.

In contrast, the 'old city' is almost exactly what your imagination would create if given a blank sheet of paper and told to draw the oldest city on the planet. High walls surround it, a visible remnant of 13th century defenses but rebuilt many times before over the ages. Inside, narrow alleys wind through with alarmingly leaning houses shoehorned in one after another.

Just inside the entrance you find yourself in a wide bazaar, typical of any middle-eastern city except for the corrugated steel roof covering it with hundreds of tiny holes that, according to legend, are bullet holes from French air raids during the revolution 100 years ago. Believe that if you will, but it creates a dazzling effect in the dusty afternoon sun, rays of light shining through the open air.

Elsewhere, the requisitely exquisite mosque gives way to sidewalk cafes, where tourists and locals sit smoking and drinking tea and talking away the hours. Continue on through the alleyways and you'll find yourself in the Christian quarter, where the ex-pat Arabic students gather after dark and drink cheap beer in the park and play guitar late into the night.

This was pretty cool, but in my state of extreme sleep deprivation, the level of appreciation was low. When my host suggested that we go home, I was elated.

Little did I know. I followed him from a public bus to a street corner where we hailed a 'microbus' a minivan that follows a specific route. From there we walked another 4 or 5 blocks to his building, a concrete structure that had remained in a shockingly unfinished state for what appeared to be a very long time. I'm speaking literally - his apartment was one of two or three with walls and a door, the rest were bare concrete columns and exposed steel rebar.

This was all fine. I don't have a problem with rough accommodations. My complaint was chiefly that I had been looking for a place to stay in Damascus, not 7 or 8 miles outside the city. My host Rabi, a very nice guy all around, cheerfully pointed out the Lebanese border over the next hill.

I accepted this as another bit of texture in an already quite textured adventure, a tidy little bit hubris that in many ways would characterize my time in Syria.

The next day I woke up feeling like a human again, rather than a bag of organs suspended in molasses. Rabi had long since left for school - he was a pharmacology student at a university even farther away than his house. The ascetic lifestyle necessary to be a student in this part of the world made his generosity in hosting foreign visitors touching. I paid little mind to the offhand remark he made the night before about going out of town the next day to visit his family. He left me a key and wrote out his address so I could get back on my own while he was away. No problem, right?

In my reinvigorated state I found the old city completely charming and spent the entire day wandering without direction, taking photographs and drinking coffee. I discovered stands that sold tiny pizza-looking things for tiny amounts of money and partook liberally of the fresh juice stands that litter every street corner in this part of the world. The bazaar boasts an ice cream shop that is about 115 years old, young by Damascus standards but ancient by ice cream shop standards. I found it a little watery but good - I have no great affinity for dessert and it takes a history lesson to make me try ice cream.

That evening I met with some other couchsurfing people that had contacted me and we sat in one of the town's precious few bars drinking well into the night. I left for home around 1am, jumping in a cab and handing him the paper Rabi had written for me. The driver seemed to know where we were going and we haggled the price down to about three dollars.

Ten minutes later we pulled up out in front of a mosque and the driver motioned to me that we had arrived. I looked at him and shook my head, pointing to the paper. He nodded and pointed to the church.

It dawned on me at that point that Rabi did not an address, there was no name for the road he lived on and no number that would signify which building was his. He had written down his neighborhood and a landmark that most any cab driver would know, a church. I didn't have the first damn clue where I was. Quietly, I started panicking.

Thinking I would start recognizing landmarks I had only seen briefly during the daytime, I asked the driver to go around the block. He did, and I didn't. I decided to just get out and start asking people, so I handed the driver money and a modest tip and jumped out. As I started walking down the street to a shop that looked open, the driver of the cab jumped out of his car and started following me. He chased me down and grabbed my arm.

The conversation was a little hard to follow. In his mind, since I had asked him to drive around the block, I owed him more money. Cab driver math apparently works out such that a 15 kilometer ride plus an extra 50 meters increases the price approximately 50%. I suspect that a foreign face is a variable in that particular equation.

This transaction did not go as smoothly as he hoped. I laughed in his face, and told him he should stop ripping off tourists. He started pushing me around, grabbing my arm and shoving me. I made it quite clear I wasn't intimidated. He started to shout and my panic turned fully into anger. I shouted back, knowing full well he couldn't understand a word, telling him to get back in his fucking car and leave me alone.

Cowed, and probably feeling a little in over his head with the suddenly furious American asshole screaming over two dollars, he suggested meekly that we could go talk to the police. Sure, I said, go get the police. He gestured that we could go together in his car. I laughed at him again, and threw, literally threw, a few coins at him (probably half of what he was asking for.) Satisfied, he left.

I'm not very proud of myself over this episode in retrospect. Moreover, I still had absolutely no idea where I was. Thankfully, I had my cell phone. I called Rabi, apologizing profusely for waking him up - though it sounded like he was out. In the next half hour, I would be given bad directions twice and end up on dead-end streets in what is clearly a poor neighborhood in the middle of the night. Finally, I caught another cab and handed the phone to the driver so Rabi could narrate turn by turn where his house was. I made it inside a bit past three.

In the morning I collected my bags and wrote Rabi a very nice note thanking him for his hospitality and telling him to keep in touch. In another cab I returned to the old city.

The next four days went by in a blur, seeing the city and getting to know the motley group of people that called it home. Damascus enjoys a certain amount of popularity as a place for students to learn Arabic, especially the obscure colloquial forms that are impossible to master without living under the endless stream of slang and idioms. Others are an assortment of people from all over the world, working and living for a variety of reasons. (This statement is about as vague as you can get, but true - it was remarkable to me the number of different answers to basic biographical questions you would get. Given the very small number of gathering places, the characters-per-square-meter measurement was very high indeed.)

Highlights include: a 4am drive up the mountains to overlook the sprawl of the city at night. A night at a club called "La Vida Loca" which was somewhat less than "Loca", except for all the local men taking hookers out for a night on the town. I fell down some stairs and busted my laptop. My new hosts were absolutely awesome, a young student and his family who lived in a very nice neighborhood.

But rather than talking about that, which would be really way more interesting, I'm going to tell you about shoes instead.

Though I live in California now, my New England upbringing lends itself to heavy, waterproof boots much more than the flip-flops that are now my constant companion for the beach life. Long before I uprooted, though, I grew to love the tree-hugging joy of not wearing shoes. I suppose it has a lot to do with the years of east Asian martial-arts that occupied my adolescent years into adulthood.

I understand that this is a certain amount of quackery, but I just can't imagine humans evolving millions of years with a need to strap a slab of rubber to their feet. The foot is a tough thing, and perfectly capable of handling itself, thanks very much. Wrapping it in layers of insulation causes all manners of problems, from posture to circulation. Moreover, the ground is an interesting, textured place that offers it's own tactile experience. Think - cobblestone streets, desert sands, forest undergrowth. You wouldn't go around wearing gloves all the time, right?

Then again, you don't usually grab broken glass by accident, so I concede the point and simply prefer to wear thin-soled shoes. The heel, in particular, drives me insane, because we're not meant to walk on it - the muscles in our legs are immensely strong and the balls of our feet can take quite an impact. The heel, in contrast, is quite fragile and not at all meant to bear the brunt of a stride. So I thought I was pretty smart a few years ago buying shoes that had a thicker sole in the front than the rear, rather than just the thin layer of rubber I was used to.

I also also mention that, by tradition, I walk a lot. My grandfather walked incessantly until just before he passed. My parents walk, without destination, like crazy people. I think nothing of traversing 10 miles in a day on foot, especially when I travel. So after a few months of travelling, my shoes literally fell apart. A very nice old man in Cairo tried to patch them together with some thread an a few nails, but that solution lasted barely more than a week.

Without a second thought I bought some shoes in the old city's vast bazaar, a minimal few strips of leather with a pitifully thin rubber sole, for $20. I failed to consider that my old shoes were much thicker and more supportive. All the muscles I had built up in my feet to allow being nearly barefoot without consequence had long ago lost their resilience.

Within a day or two of walking in them I realized my mistake, and by that time I had surely bruised or broken one of the many sensitive bones in my toes. Walking became excruciatingly painful. Liberal use of surgical tape and paracetemol, a codine derivate that the rest of the world uses in abundance, was of limited help. Not being able to walk very far makes solo travel daunting. Me being myself, I did not think to simply buy different shoes.

A little more self-flagellation: I really fucked up on the bus to Palmyra. As you spend more time in a place you get to know who you can trust and who you can't. Taxi drivers, as a group, will take your kidneys if you blink too long. Bus drivers, though, are generally pretty dependable.

I did not know this, when I decided to head out from Damascus to see Syria's star attraction - a giant ruined city far out in the desert at what was once a crossroads of trade in the ancient world.

It happened like this: I walked into the bus station and a guy immediately asked me if I wanted to go to Palmyra. I said yes, and he asked for about $4 and my passport. I gave it, and lacked change so I gave him $10. He ran out of English and gestured me to follow, out of the station and onto the street where he literally flagged down a passing bus. At this point alarm bells in my head were ringing loud and clear. I walked on and was gestured to sit down, all eyes on the sole foreigner. The driver took my passport and put it on the dashboard, and the bill I had handed the stranger he stuffed in the glove compartment.

At this point I reached my breaking point. I started trying to explain that I wanted to keep my passport and he needed to give me change. This was met with dismissive annoyance, so I started raising my voice. I can only imagine the sight of the obnoxious foreigner loudly demanding his money and his passport while the bus was stopped on a busy city street. They relented almost instantly, and gave me what I asked for. But the look of disgust on everyone's face told me I had overstepped the boundaries of politeness. When the assistant came around to pour water for everyone, he walked by me and turned away. I lacked the language skills to apologize. It was a long, red-faced four hours.

But, Palmyra was worth it. I hired a car for 2 days, and went around to some spectacular ruins. I watched the sunset that night from a castle on a hill. The driver spoke good English, and gave me an excellent and weird introduction to small-town Syrian life. He told me good-naturedly about his clandestine affair with a married woman, and spoke in glowing terms about his new motorcycle. I had the best kabob in my life from a tiny storefront, where the lone cook, an old quiet man, saw a commercial on TV for an expensive restaurant in Abu Dhabi and said he had worked there, many years before.

Late on the second night, I was invited to a local wedding party. This sounds like a touching cultural experience, but in the end it was more than a bit creepy. The food was spectacular, though, and I was given the honor of eating with the groom and his father, which was touching. We ate a huge pile of rice with a roasted whole baby sheep on top of it, with our hands. One of the other guests, a doctor, remarked drolly that I would probably spend the next day in the hospital.

Afterwards, we all gathered out on the street where a singer belted out Arabic tunes and all the men joined arms and danced in a circle. I brought my camera, which I knew was a mistake, and ever time I took a picture all the young boys would run up to me and want a picture or to hold my camera, not in a fun way but a very aggressive sort of angry manner. After a few times, the fathers started intervening and smacking the kids who came near me. This did little to deter them, they seemed to be ok with simply misbehaving and accepting a slap for it.

More than that, though, was that the women in the wedding, the bride and all her family, were locked (locked!) inside the house. I saw a few glimpses of them, a huge group crowded into a few small rooms that cracked the door open to peek out and see the foreigner that had come for no particular reason. I make no judgments about a culture's practices, but it still made my skin crawl.

After an hour, it felt intrusive and strange. I shook the groom's hand told him congratulations and made my exit.

And that brings us to Aleppo. From Palmyra I rode the bus to Homs, Syria's 3rd largest city that as tourist attractions boasts absolutely nothing at all. From Homs I went to Aleppo, where I expected to spend a day or two at most. I ended up spending five.

There are two things that need a lot of care when travelling: feet, as I've mentioned, and the digestive system. Neither of which I'm known to take particularly good care of. So it should come as no surprise that my stomach gave out in Aleppo about the same time my feet did. This happened in a particularly bad way in Aleppo's scenic hilltop castle, an episode of which that I shall make no further mention. As low points go, this was pretty low.

I couldn't do much besides sit in my hostel for a good couple days. Fortunately, it was a roomy and welcoming place. No, wait, the opposite of that. Five dollars a night in Aleppo will get you a balcony overlooking a tire shop in a really bad neighborhood with some plywood nailed over the opening. It was basically a concrete and wood box with a bed and a stool. Whatever. The staff seemed to detest me particularly, except for one very sweet guy who, he explained to me one night, is Kurdish and likes all Americans because of Iraq, and everyone else hated me for precisely the same reason.

Dear George: I appreciate the gesture, but this was not a net benefit to me.

In any case, what I did do was post again on couchsurfing, looking for anyone who could relieve me of boredom. The sole reply I received was from an Armenian girl, a student of English literature at the local university who seemed as enthusiastically bored as I was. I met her and her sister at The Baron Hotel, a once-grand structure built in 1909 and counting the famed T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia") as one of it's guests. We talked a while that afternoon, walking around the more-liberal ("more Christian") section of the city and seeing some old Orthodox churches.

We met again a few times during my long-ish stay in Aleppo, and I grew increasingly shocked by the stares, shouts and deliberate pushing she received, being an uncovered woman walking around with a foreigner. I'm not exaggerating that the harassment was more or less constant in some areas. I wonder if those guys that grabbed my bag hadn't seen me with her. But I wouldn't let it deter me, I enjoyed her company.

Another time, or perhaps in private conversation, I will tell you all about opinion of how women are treated in the middle east, especially in Syria, especially non-Muslim foreigners. I am far from alone in these experiences - one woman in my hostel was in a park when a man walked up to her and licked her face. Another had stones thrown at her. Others spoke glowingly about how men were so friendly and invited them into their homes for tea - I kept my opinion about those stories of warn friendly strangers to myself. As I will now.

My health eventually got better and my time was growing short. I was due in Jordan in a few days to meet Chris, my friend I visited in London, who would be travelling with me for a few days. There was much left to see in Syria, though, and I promised I would return in a few weeks, on my way through to Lebanon.

From Aleppo I traveled to Hama, a small town with some picturesque but ultimately really boring waterwheels. I spent the night there, and the next morning joined a group from the hotel touring a few of the local castles.

If I had paid better attention in school, I would tell you now all about the holy crusades that shaped this region for a good 1300 years or so. Look it up on wikipedia or something. What I can tell you is that they left behind some really spectacular castles. The largest of them, "Krak de Chevaliers" is everything your 10-year-old imagination thinks of medieval castles. It has been rebuilt and used as recently as the 19th century, so it takes very little to picture the gigantic castle's glory days. As anyone should do, I immediately climbed to the tallest tower and simply stood for a long while.

In the morning I returned to Damascus, and sat once again in the old city, soaking it in one last time. I caught up with the few friends I had made and had one last night in the park, drinking cheap beer and smoking endless cigarettes and telling stories of our travels.

I wish I could tell you my last memory of Syria is a fond one, but it is not. Crossing the border with Jordan was a nightmare, with three taxi driver in succession trying to rip me off in the process. Even the Syrian border guards tried to pocket a few dollars from my $10 'exit fee'. The ordeal took an entire day, and finally the driver dropped me off quite literally on the side of the highway and told me to take a cab to my hotel in Amman. I tipped him with my middle finger.

I also wish I could tell you that I would return to Syria, but I didn't and won't. Three days before I crossed the border with Jordan, the government changed the rules regarding foreigners, especially Americans, getting new visas on the border. Some have suggested this is both in response to America's tightening of visa regulations for Syrians, and the US Senate stalling on the confirmation of a new Syrian ambassador.

I received my existing visa by painstakingly applying (and paying $130) to the consulate in California, but it was only single-entry. The visa office in Damascus quite rudely denied my request for a new multiple-entry visa, and confirmed that I would not receive one on the border if I tried.

No looking back now, then, on to Jordan.

Iran

2010-06-10T08:13:00.001-07:00

I was in the subway, floating freely through the narrow corridors lined with nonsense posters on grey walls, when I first saw the fire. It came without warning, the flames licking upwards from nowhere, filling the small space with smoke instantly. I ran, in a panic, into it and not away. To my left I saw a stairway and climbed, my pulse racing, only to find an iron grate blocking my way. In vain I kicked at it, the smoke filling my lungs and choking away my breath.

In that instant of helplessness I awoke, gasping and kicking at the seat in front of me. I was on a bus, bound north through the desert towards Isfahan, the other passengers dead asleep. I felt a moment of pure vertigo, the unreality of the solid world hitting like a wave. Then it settled, and the mountains continued to slowly roll past the window. It was a nightmare as vivid as I've had in many years.

Half an hour later we stopped at a shack in the desert for a break. I smoked a cigarette, noting only to myself the pure irony. Still, the nightmare unnerved me deeply.

The sky was, as it always was, a strange pale grey color with only a tiny hint of blue - a metaphor so painfully obvious I hate to even mention it.

We had left earlier that day from Shiraz, a small, ancient city that had been everything I expected Iran to be. Green grass filled with the young and old, men and women, sprawled out, talking and laughing without fear. Our presence was greeted with a extraordinarily friendly kind of fascination and we wandered freely around the streets making friends with everyone in our path. We had walked through the majestic gate of Persepolis with it's iconic bearded sphinxes and stood below the cliffside tombs of the great kings Darius and Xerxes. I watched an old man worshipfully caress the tombstone of a poet.

It was all over too fast and I longed to stay in Shiraz badly. Unfortunately, things were a little more complicated.

Many of you reading this will be familiar with my personal history with this country. It's impossible to live in southern California and be unaware of the vast number of Persians that call it home. It is a mirror image, in many ways - from the long dusty desert highways to the sprawl of Tehran, a city that lives in the shadow of mountains that could be the San Gabriels through a zoom lens. I spent years with people important to me speaking of it daily with equal part reverence and disgust, love and hate and fear and nostalgia. It loomed like a storm cloud in my mind for so long that I knew I would do whatever it took to go.

My research led me to a travel agent and via email I worked out a timeline and an eye-watering cost - one thousand euro for 8 days. This would get me a visa and accommodations and some inter-city travel but most importantly it would pay for a guide that would be my constant companion. For every other country in the world, you can walk in, stay anywhere you like as long as your visa allows, and walk out. Americans are legally obligated to be lead around like lost puppies.

The reasons for this are best found elsewhere, but I will tell you that the American embassy in Tehran still stands untouched save the bold and colorful lettering on the front pronouncing "DEATH TO USA" and a whimsical rendering of the statue of liberty with a skull face. The building, by the way, is now known on maps as, seriously, "The Den of Espionage."

I boarded the plane in Istanbul without incident and a slept fitful couple of hours. We landed before the sun rose, and I groggily joined the "foreigner" line at passport control. With maybe ten people in line before me, the entire computer system went down. We spent the next three solid hours standing around staring at the walls before anyone heard the magical thump-thump that signified a blessing to enter the Islamic Republic.

Unsurprisingly, when I got to the front and presented my navy-blue passport to the man behind the window, he got a look of nervous irritation and called his boss over. They conferred for a while and then, taking my passport, led me away down a series of corridors and I was asked to sit and wait. As I sat and waited and tried to stay awake two armed policemen approached me and loudly demanded my passport. I tried to explain that another officer had taken it but they didn't speak enough English to understand. As panic began to set in, the first officer return and placated the other two. It was my first and only encounter with the police in Iran - I had been warned that getting through the airport would be the toughest part and so it proved.

The policeman led me again down a series of hallways into a small cubicle where I was fingerprinted using a shockingly awkward windows-based scanner and entered into a database which will undoubtedly come back to haunt me during world-war 3. With the sun having risen hours ago, I was turned loose into the airport where my guide waited with Allison, another American that had made the trip.

It wasn't until Isfahan that I started to grasp how deeply ran the contradictions at the heart of this country. Our guide, on the first day, had made it a point to tell us that he was not there to monitor us, which is one of those statements that you wouldn't need to make if it weren't at least in part false.

I was born with an innate distrust of authority, but generally trusted our guide, partially because he seemed like a nice guy around my age and partially because he was quite open about a number of shockingly personal things that I certainly can't repeat here. He told us without hesitation that he participated in the 2009 riots for fun and took us blithely past the intersection where a young woman was gunned down by a police sniper. He was easy-going in the extreme and largely apathetic about politics.

I still felt an agenda. It was the responsibility of our travel agent to submit an itinerary to the government in order to secure our visas. What they submitted was inexplicable to anyone - a brutal whirlwind through the massive capital city of Tehran and beautiful, friendly Shiraz then a leisurely 5 nights in Isfahan - a sleepy, conservative, religious town. I felt like we were being parked where we were least likely to get into trouble.

Desert faded gradually to suburbs, the mud huts along the lonely highways becoming bare concrete apartment buildings surrounded by the darting and weaving cars and motorbikes of a major middle-eastern city. Our hotel in Isfahan was tastefully decorated with neon lights and flashing strobes, with marble staircases and mirrors covering every flat surface. "The Godfather" theme played in the elevator every time you closed the door.

It was late in the day when we arrived, so our guide pointed us in the direction of the main square and let us wander. I walked around it and wasn't thrilled by the kitschy shops and chatty carpet salesman so I continued on, passing through busy streets with little sense of where I was going. It took three blocks to realize something had changed. Gone were the surprised smiles of passers-by, replaced by chilled expression and a deliberate avoidance of eye contact. It felt different somehow from the anonymity of a big city in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on.

I didn't intend to walk very far but, lost in my thoughts and the scene around, my feet carried me.

What I found knocked me over. A river runs through Isfahan, shallow and still. Fountains spray water high in the air and graceful, anachronistic arched bridges span the distance from shore to shore. Green parks border it, filled with the young and old. It was beautiful in the extreme but the serendipity of stumbling onto it took my breath away.

Walking across a bridge I paused in the middle to look out on the water and feel the breeze on my face.

On the other side I sat in a cafe and had my first in a long series of Iranian hamburgers, a thin layer of beef in a huge roll with pickles and ketchup. I would never have expected how much 'fast food' there is - fried chicken and pizza too. Sometimes it's a strange caricature of its American counterparts. Besides the endless supply of Kabob, beef and lamb mixed and grilled on skewers, such fast food is the staple of restaurants in Iran. Traditional food is cooked at home or eaten on special occasions only. I sampled precious little of it, and honestly - it was better in Los Angeles.

It soon grew dark and I got a cup of tea from a street vendor and sat in a park smoking, watching the sun go down. Young couples around me spoke in hushed tones and families spread blankets down and ate while the children played. It all seemed so happy and normal.

But, in my quiet corner of the park, something else was going on. My first clue should have been the group of young guys that sat down on the same step as me and started playing Queen songs on their cell phones. The group grew larger the darker it got, and finally a few of them approached me.

The first to speak was dressed all in black, with slicked down hair and thick layers of eyeliner. Behind him were two men that wouldn't look out of place in "The Village People." I realized with mild, amused shock that these were openly gay men. They introduced themselves politely and I greeted them, shook their hands.

"Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?" the man in black asked me. I shook my head, and they glanced at each other.

"So, are you gay?"

I laughed and shook my head again. They laughed with me and gave me a chiding look.

"You know... you're in a park for gays."

I look around, and indeed the couples had all moved away after the sun went down. The families had moved to other patches of grass. I was surrounded by a dozen men, all chatting and laughing with each other in a way that seemed somewhat more than friendly.

"Sorry! I was just having a cup of tea and watching the sunset." They all smiled and turned away, no longer interested. I thought a moment and decided this was too interesting an opportunity to let go.

"You know," I offered, "everyone in America laughed when Ahmendinajad said, 'there are no gays in Iran.'"

They howled with laughter and the man in black replied, the humor gone from his voice, "he's so stupid. They would kill us for what we do, but we just want to be free."

I nodded and told him, "we all want you to be free, everyone in the world. You should be free to do what you want, with whoever you like. It's sad and ridiculous what the government says."

He smiled and thanked me, and then we fell silent. One of his friends came up behind him and looked at the conversation going on. His friend gave me an arched eyebrow and said to him in Farsi that his American friend is pretty cute, and then to me: "would you like to see me... later?"

I realized at that point that no one was interested in conversation and politely made my exit.

The next few days our guide led us from palace to mosque and back again. Photogenic though they were, it was repetitive and frustrating. Allison, was equally dissatisfied. Given the tremendous sum of money we paid to get here, it wasn't thrilling. Moreover, we found our frustration with Isfahan growing - people were callous and disinterested. The conservative, reserved nature of the city made real interaction difficult. We both agreed - we didn't come this far to see churches, we wanted to get to know this beautiful country and its people in a way deeper than a postcard.

But by night, we were free to roam, and I returned to the bridges and its parks. Carefully avoiding the area I had been before, I wandered and stuck up conversations with anyone bold enough to say hello. I spoke to two young women, both college students (one studying economics, the other microbiology) who were aghast when I told them where I was from.

"Why would you come here from California?" one gasped. "This country is a prison." She touched the black scarf on her head.

I was about to reply when her mother approached, cloaked head to toe in black. I tried to say hello and keep the conversation going, but the mother turned away and made it clear I should go.

Another night, in Khomeini Square, at the center of the city, I was adopted by an entire family that insisted on feeding me and talking to me as best they could manage well into the night. One father good naturedly, but seriously, offered me to marry his daughter, who looked barely a teenager. I politely declined but happily shared my pack of cigarettes with him and the other group of men who sat apart playing poker on the grass. I spoke at length with an older uncle of the family, who knew English well and wanted nothing more than to talk about how the USA and Iran should be making peace.

As every Iranian I know does, wearing their hearts on their sleeves, his nieces told me that the kind, friendly man's wife had been robbed in Tehran barely a month ago and shot dead in the street.

Every morning Allison and our guide and I would meet for breakfast and swap tales of who we had met and what we'd seen. And then, we would trudge off to photograph another bazaar and another bridge. Our frustration grew.

When our guide admitted to us openly that he had nothing left to show us in Isfahan and didn't know why we had been scheduled to stay here so long, I decided to pull rank. Diplomatically but firmly, I told our guide that we felt like our valuable time was being wasted and if there was nothing more to see we should leave.

An hour later we boarded a bus to Tehran.

Tehran warmed my city-boy heart. Our hotel, simple and clean, was located in an alley behind a tire shop. The neighborhood surrounding it was a collection of auto-parts stores, the streets dirty and littered with trash. It was a one-way street but that didn't really seem to be a rule anyone cared to follow, the motorbikes weaving in between rusty hatchbacks like insects.

I found it amusingly charming for a while, until the first time I had a cab try to drop me off in the middle of the night and the driver couldn't come close to finding it. Walking those streets very late was not something advisable.

Five or six blocks from the hotel would lead you to the main square of downtown. Like many middle eastern cities I would come to visit, this was a hub in geography only and functional rather than aesthetic. Cab drivers congregated there, drinking tea out of large thermoses in their trunks. Stores selling cheap electronics and knock-off DVDs surrounded it, and mysterious people stood in the street after dark selling, I'm guessing, drugs.

For reasons unfathomable, I once saw a chicken cross the road. No joke.

Khomeini square's redeeming quality was its large metro stop. The subway in Tehran is limited but modern and gorgeous, spotlessly clean with high ceilings and, in many places, chandeliers. The cars are recent, efficient and air-conditioned. I found it so curiously juxtaposed with the rest of the city, like Tehran modernizes from the inside-out. (In a few days I would figure out that it modernizes from the outside-in as well.)

Tehran was a world away from the city we left. We were ignored still, but not because of a conservative xenophobia, but because we blended into the vast melting pot of a modern capital. But not too much - people still did a double-take sometimes when we passed, and we were still aliens.

But it was a good thing again. People, especially women, were far from conservative in Tehran. On a bus, a pretty girl stared at me for the whole ride while gossiping and giggling with her friend. I smiled and waved, and my guide SMS'ed me from the next seat - "they're talking about you and wondering what foreign guys are like." Once, I was crossing the street and an entire carload of girls screamed at me. It wasn't bad for the ego.

I became more gun-shy about engaging men, though. One group of men were really keen on telling me about their meticulous workout routines and wanted to know my phone number. I gave it, and one of them texted me repeatedly late at night wanting to know what I was doing. But gaydar is impossible here, men's fashion is so flamboyant in contrast to the women - every couple looks like David Bowie married Emporer Palpatine.

But, even the palaces and mosques and bazaars were somehow more interesting. The last Shah's home, as opulent as all those of his predecessors, was a fascinating slice of history, a portrait of Iran at it's most cosmopolitan. His wife's art collection is still housed there, including a Warhol portrait of Mick Jagger. That it still stands, unmolested, is a powerful testament.

With some new confidence that I could have input into our plans, I pushed our guide to take us up into the mountains. We hiked up a trail filled with people, sitting among rocks and streams, laughing freely and reveling in nature, a world away from the streets below us. Every generation of Persians had climbed these mountains, and every future one would just the same. We sat in a cafe on platforms set inches above a flowing river and reflected on our journey, now in its final days.

That night I made a journey on my own, out to the far suburbs of Tehran, to meet a young English student who wanted to meet a foreign visitor and had invited me to her home. I was interested to speak at length with someone who lived the life of a young woman in this place, so I got on the train. This was not as simple a trip as I had expected, for two reasons. One, I couldn't pronounce the name of the station I wanted, as contained the throaty "guh" sound that my white-bread voice box can't produce. Secondly, it was rush hour, which in Tehran is apocalyptic. It took a full three hours.

We sat in a dimly lit park by her home and talked for several hours that night. We spoke of life and the future, of heartbreak and anger and hope for what would come. She told me of her fury and desperation to leave, to seek a faraway place where she could be free. Many years of toil lay ahead for her, hard work and a lot of luck, just to have what we took for granted every day. It made me angry. The sheer misogyny and oppression of robbing a human being their right to judge for themselves what is right.

I told her she would always have a friend to turn to if she needed one.

We took a drive with her family in her sister's tiny Renault, screeching tires the whole way, one of the most insane rides I've ever been on. Women, her sister explained, while nearly running a taxi off the road, have to be aggressive to be taken seriously. They took me to a huge mall filled with fancy stores, including a gigantic one that looked suspiciously like a Target. We ate pizza with beef and ketchup in the food court.

In life's fashion, it all ended in the least expected way - standing on a balcony very late that night smoking cigarettes one after another and watching the way a blinking red stoplight threw shadows across the trees.

We talked more, of poets and books and life and in a quiet moment I touched her arm, an innocent gesture that a moment later suddenly felt so intimate and dangerous. I thought of my dream, of choking and kicking at the walls.

I left then, my flight was in just a few hours and I would sleep not at all.

In my bones I felt the simultaneous desire to go and to stay, that I knew this place but understood it not at all. I found myself wracking my brain to think of how stay, or return, and in the very next thought relieved to be gone.

But the decision was made for me, long ago. In the quiet dark of the early morning I boarded a plane to Damascus.

See the rest of my photos from Iran on Picasa

Ras Shetan and Sharm Al Sheik

2010-05-25T04:01:00.001-07:00

As the continental plates comprising africa and the middle east tore in two over the last few millions years, a little piece of land remained in the middle. The jagged landscapes of the Sinai peninsula looks the part, and the rippled mountains seem to churn as you pass. For the most part it is uninhabited desert until you reach the Red Sea, where you can almost touch the mountains on the coast of Jordan. It's a beautiful, alien, unspoiled place.

Our destination ultimately was a small stretch of beach called Ras Shetan. Named for a rock formation that juts out and over the sea - in Arabic, 'The Devil's Head.'

This is what we came for: miles and miles from civilization with Spartan accommodations a few meters from the water. Strong, sweet tea and thick smoke. Days and nights spent staring off into the horizon. The easy rhythm of Arabic spoken between old friends. The thick carpets and worn hammocks of our Bedouin hosts. The beat of drums or wail of pipes lasting well into the night. The sunset shining through the clouds and turning the mountains a deep red, giving the sea its name.

I spent much of my time walking or reading or sleeping by the water. The few days drifted easily by.

The nights, however were a different matter. Our accommodations included a roof and a bed and little else. I had no pillow, sheets, towels, nothing like that. No big deal, easily improvised. Not so easy was our lack of mosquito netting. Egyptian mosquitoes are tiny and vicious and seemed to laugh at our pathetic bug spray. Any exposed skin would be instantly covered with bites, ten or twenty in an hour. It was brutal, and by the last few nights I was using every piece of clothing I had to cover myself and must have looked like some kind of fashionable mummy.

Though it was a perfect break - incredible scenery and the relaxed company of new friends, I was feeling ready to move on after a few days. Despite where I call home, I've never developed a taste for the ascetic beach life. The frenetic energy of cities is in my blood - and I'm so pale that a few minutes in the hot sun will leave my skin red and tender.

I decided that I would return to Sharm Al Sheik and sample the tourist vibe before heading back to Cairo. With some comical difficulty I located a cheap hotel far outside of town that had just opened and had beautiful rooms for a very good price. I spent the day on the terrace writing, catching up on this journal and laying the groundwork for some projects that may yet give this trip some greater purpose.

At night I went into town and blew my budget for the day on dinner and water-pipe and a local, very elaborate club called Pascha. The line-up that night had featured an impressive female DJ, which is a welcome rarity, and the club seemed to attract an astounding number of Eastern-Europeans who were some of the worst, most serious dancers I've ever seen. High point: the FIA-GT race from Silverstone on TV at the outside bar, easily won by a Maserati. The low point: attempting to navigate the maze (literally, a maze) the club had setup to buy cheap-ish drinks. As I was leaving, I was slurredly asked by the male part of a British couple if I felt that he had what it took to be an airline pilot - I told him yes, but he should wait until tomorrow.

The next day, thinking I could be clever and save the cost of an evening's hotel, I took the night bus back to Cairo. Well intentioned, but foolish. The 11pm bus was supposed to take 7-9 hours, but the driver went so fast that it took about 5 1/2. As he went over bumps with the throttle pinned to the floor you could feel the front tires of the bus loosing contact with the road. I slept little, and was let out on the side of the road in downtown Cairo well before dawn.

I paid for a room in the first hostel I saw and got some sleep.

Cairo and Giza

2010-05-22T06:38:00.001-07:00

Many of you reading this will be no doubt familiar with the parlance of storytelling structure. This, as we like to say, begins the second act.

In the past few weeks, I've gone to some amazing places, but always in the company of friends or family and always with a pre-arranged place to stay. That is, I had travelled, but it was, with a few notable exceptions, not risky, not an adventure. When I hugged my parents goodbye and set off down the road in Istanbul with only a memory guiding me towards where a hostel had been, it was the real, true start of a new chapter.

So in the interest of telling all of you a good story, I began my second act with a bang. There are many countries friendly to tourists and accessible to the casual, shoe-string traveler - Cairo is none of those things. I knew this full well going in and so it proved. I, of course, speak no Arabic, have no friends there and went in basically completely unprepared.

It felt like cheating, of course, but I made a reservation in advance at a hostel who offered to pick me up at the airport for a reasonable price. The guy did indeed show, with a hand-written sign with my name on it. Remember how I was saying about that cab in Istanbul? This one was worse. An ancient diesel Peugeot 507 that looked like something out of Mad Max.

Of course, it hardly bares mentioning that the drive into downtown Cairo was like the opening lap of the Indy 500 - lanes are a vague suggestion, horns blaring constantly, people drive millimeters from one another and (a concept pervasive in Egyptian culture) a total lack of any sense of "I got here first" right-of-way. It took about half a hot, smog-filled hour and cost me about $11. If this seems high, it bares mentioning that nearly everything in Egypt has two options, and only two - pay for the privilege of immediacy or go for a more crowded, slower option that will be eye-wateringly cheap. Under the circumstances, I chose the former without protest or negotiation on price.

I would later come to regret this as my first wrong move among many in the endless quest to prevent one's self from becoming a giant walking paycheck.

That first day, bleary-eyed and queasy, I walked from my hotel a spitting distance to the Egyptian Museum. This is a misnomer, it's more of a warehouse for the metric tons of mind-boggling ancient crap they've dug out of the ground in the last hundred or so years. Row upon row of artifacts, from the intimate daily things like wigs, combs and musical instruments to the grandiose, solid-gold bling of the pharos and their ilk (you can see them too, in their shriveled up glory.) Everything is unlabeled and haphazardly arraigned in display boxes right out of the 1920s. If Indiana Jones sucker punched some Nazi's in the gift shop, no one would notice (he didn't, too busy hiding in a fridge.)

I spent probably four solid hours wandering around and lamented the fact that no photos could be taken. It really is one of the most amazing collections I've ever seen just by sheer volume, without exaggeration. You want some sarcophagi? We got 15 of them, stacked against the back wall. Death masks? Mummified crocodiles? Boomerangs? Chariots? No problem.

I heard they are building a new, modern museum in Cairo, which is understandable but disappointing. The swashbuckling pre-war archeologists will always be tied to Egypt in the Western imagination and this museum plays that role perfectly.

Afterwards, well, I just picked a direction and started walking. Cairo is an unfailingly safe city and people on the street are very friendly and never threatening. On the whole, the city is so dirty it's almost funny. Everything, the buildings, the cars, look like the were built in the 70s and never washed once. But there's so much life - people are out on the street talking, drinking tea, smoking sheesha (water-pipe) and going about their lives. It had a pulse and a rhythm to it that reminded me of New York, where people seemed to really live in the urban spaces rather than just inhabiting them. It was fun to just walk and soak it in.

Let me digress for a moment and pontificate on something that has been on my mind since long before I left. Allow me to introduce myself - my name is Daniel and I am a white, middle-class American from a relatively affluent family. My travelling budget for a few months is more money by several multiples than entire families will ever, ever have. I have never experienced real poverty first-hand and probably never will.

This is an elephant in the room in any conversation about Cairo and will become very important later on in my story. So let me be clear - I don't know anything about what's it like to be poor and there's a certain danger in any kind of subjective comparison.

What I'm trying to say is - I try really hard to not be like every rich dude who walks through a poor neighborhood and thinks, "well they seem happy. Group picture!" It weighs on me and I don't want to be voyeuristic if I take a picture or remark how dirty something is. I have my own experience and thoughts about what I see in Cairo and they're mine alone, I can't project them onto the people that live there and won't be following me back to my condo by the beach. By the same token, I also refuse to say stupid things like, "be thankful for what you have", because it's equally wrong to project their lives onto mine.

So, to all the kind Egyptians that stopped on the street just to say hello, thanks and sometime if you'd like I'll try to come back and make your lives a little bit better. Not in a try-a-big-mac kind of way, more like when-your-daughter-gets-pneumonia. Cool? Ok, group photo!

The next morning I had once again foolishly taken the expedient option and allowed my hostel to book a car and driver to take me around the pyramids. I was told this would be an air-conditioned van and would cost about $25 but there would be other people taking it also that would share the cost. I agreed without negotiation, thinking that sounded like a good deal. Stupid rookie mistake.

When I showed up in the morning, it was actually the gypsy cab that had picked me up at the airport driving me around all day and I would be the only one on the tour. I didn't know then, but now I can tell you conclusively there is only one way to avoid these situations: make a scene. This is so antiethical to everything we're told about being an American abroad - be polite and patient and soft spoken and never make a scene. People in the Egyptian tourism industry know this and will exploit it ruthlessly.

And you say to yourself - for what, ten bucks? I'm not gonna be a dick to a stranger that seems like a nice guy over ten bucks. And then you, sir or madam, are a giant walking paycheck. Because it only got worse for me from there.

At Giza I was told that I couldn't go in by myself unless I was on a horse. My driver, the nice guy from the hotel, told me that it was too far and dangerous and if I didn't want a horse I could have a camel but they smell bad. I started getting angry at that point, since it was a very obvious lie. But here I am, in fucking Egypt by myself with this dude in a gypsy cab as my only lifeline. So fine, I paid $50 for two hours on a sickly horse with a guide who without comment took me right across the very obvious, very short pedestrian walkway I could have used at any time.

I wised up pretty quickly after that. I was a total dick to the guy who had a conversation with my tour guide, then handed me a Pepsi and after I drank it asked for ten dollars. I gave him two and told him to piss off. At Sakara, the stepped pyramid, when the guys in official looking clothes asked to see my ticket because I required a tour guide, I told them to piss off. I watched them same guys sucker an older couple into paying them $40.

At the end of the tour I was taken to a 'museum of papyrus' which was obviously a small mistranslation since all the priceless treasures seemed to be for sale. Later that day, I tried to buy a plane ticket from a travel agent who, after already booking it and taking my cash, decided to change me an extra $30 in 'taxes and fees' and then pocketed it right in front of me. I was too shocked to even say anything.

Obviously this is not big money but I find this kind of dishonest, predatory behavior disgusting, especially against people who came a long way to see your country.

It was a low point. I didn't even eat dinner that day because I was so furious and the idea of handing another person money turned my stomach. But as I was sitting in the hostel that night, I struck up a conversation with a Frenchman who had been living in Cairo for last year. Skinny and pale, with glasses and a suit that an engineer would wear, I asked him with the frustration clear in my voice - how do you get through the day when everyone is taking advantage of you all the time?

He looked at me with an expression that spoke volumes about a lesson learned the hard way. In this culture, he explained, strength is the most important thing and if you walk into a situation without projecting strength you will get walked on.

From the next day on, this advice would prove to be the most important thing I learned in Egypt and the more I experimented, the more it worked. I never got ripped off badly again in Egypt, and these kinds of experiences are the things that follow you home.

Oh yeah, and the pyramids were cool. But that's a job for photos:

As anyone who has stayed in hostels can tell you, they have a certain "charm." This includes: spotty hot water, weird smells and concrete mattresses. Advice: bring your own soap. The best part, though, is the fascinating mix of people that pass through. If you simply sit and wait, interesting things always happen.

I was sitting in the common area of my medium-grade-seedy hostel when I stuck up a conversation with a friendly girl from Indonesia. She was embarrassingly impressed by my work and stories about the Hollywood life. In due course I found out that was a member of a group of 18 graduate students all staying for the week. They were all 'urban design' students, which to my ignorant brain seemed like a kind of civil engineering with a more human touch. As the nights passed, I met more and more of them and was taken in by how each of them were so remarkably different from the others - 18 people from 16 countries - but proximity and time and a shared mission had made them like family. It was a joy to sit and listen to their familiar banter and it reminded me of the bond I shared with my friends back home, those who had worked so intensely for so many hours over the years alongside me.

One of those nights, over strong Egyptian tea and sweet sheesha smoke, they spoke of the work they were doing in Cairo and its twin city, Giza. A network of government and non-government organization had requested their help in managing what they referred to as 'informal areas' - those that were not governed by zoning laws and civil planning but existed and grew and spread never the less. In short, they were going to go into some of the worst, poorest parts of this massive behemoth of a city and try to make sense of how people were living.

I found this fascinating, and noble, and said as much. Their professor, one of two accompanying them, half in jest, said that I should come with them. Half in jest, I said ok.

As is my nature, I won't let an opportunity for an experience outside the norm slip away. So at 7 am sharp, I met them, their two bodyguards, and a few local government guides at a bus in front of our hotel. At first, I was laughed at good naturedly - my regular presence with them socially had made it seem amusingly natural that I show up while they were working. It was embarrassing a little, but I swallowed my pride because I knew how unique it was to be invited to something sensitive and important.

So throughout the day we drove from place to place, pointing out in a clinical way what each neighborhood represented. One was old, what was once a small village that was simply swallowed up by the city's amoeba-like growth. Another was new, brick and mortar apartment complexes built by hand, springing up like weeds along the highway, with no real attention to regulations or sound construction practices. We walked through a series of crumbling buildings along the edge of the Nile and the local children came out in droves to follow us around, jumping and laughing about this unexpected invasion of their world, such as it was.

At one point a man was lying in the street fixing a car bumped when another car came down the street without warning and ran over his outstretched legs. Everyone screamed and ran to his aid, but he got up and limped around a little, apparently unhurt. At times them and I would lapse into casual conversation as if we were walking down a regular street on a regular day, and moments like these would jolt us out of that, starkly.

But mostly, I hung back, kept my mouth shut and took photos in as tasteful a way as I could. It seemed voyeuristic and insensitive - what kind of asshole takes a picture of a poor person's house because it's crumbling around them? But - it also seemed important to document, to show anyone who would look how these people lived. One by one the students would ask me - what do you think about this? I would say that it breaks my heart, but I'm glad I can see it with my own eyes.

And, let me add, that none of the people we saw were the poorest of the world. They seemed nourished and healthy, the living conditions dirty but suitable. I've witnessed the same and worse in South-Central Los Angeles. But the scale - the sheer numbers, are staggering. Cairo is one of the largest cities on earth, and these conditions are the norm for much of it. (The business-minded part of me was tickled to see a common fixture in even the roughest of these houses - a satellite dish.)

The day concluded with a meeting between the students and a group of local politicians. Had I known this was part of the tour I would have thought twice about coming, since we were escorted into a government building and sat at a long conference table to have a discussion about the work. These local politicians - middle-aged, bearded men all, expressed their reservations about the students' work. Each spoke in turn, and each had a similar message - the people have a right to live as they please, and these neighborhoods have history and value as they currently are.

In conversation later, I was asked what I thought about what was said. I answered honestly, that though I'm an ignorant outsider, I thought it was bullshit. I got the overwhelming impression that given the choice, these politicians would take the status quo. It suited them just fine to keep the people poor and uneducated and living in squalor, because that assured the continuation of their power. Perhaps it came from a good place, a fondness and a desire to tend to their flock, but I doubt very strongly these shepherds would set their sheep free.

But what do I know?

Anyway, at that point I left them to finish their work for the day and took a cab home to the hostel. I slept most of the rest of the day and still somewhat embarrassed at what felt a little invasive, I avoided my new friends for a day or two and explored more of Cairo. I bribed an Imam to let me climb a 1000 year old mosque's minaret for a spectacular view of the city. I visited the citadel and the war museum, which featured an ornately framed oil painting of surface-to-air missiles. I wandered the twisty alleyways of the Islamic bazaar and had tea and cigarettes with old men in tea houses with sawdust floors. I nearly had a fistfight with a guy in the tourist market over a $2 price difference for a pair of socks.

Still, Cairo is a deceptively small town and I ran into the group again on the street the next day, they were lost and looking for our hostel. I showed them the way and they invited me out for drinks and dinner. Beer is hard to find in Cairo, liquor doubly so, but we managed fine and had a long night of cheap pints and good food and better conversation. It was sublime.

The next day I woke up early and a guy from my hostel drove me to the airport. His car had no battery so we pushed-started it in the narrow streets as the sun rose. He drove like a mental patient, even by Cairo standards, but I was too lost in thought to really notice. So it goes - bittersweet to leave a place and people just as they become familiar, but beckoned forward by the promise of something new always on the horizon.

Six days later I return to Cairo. It was just the same as I had left it, but I had other things on my mind. My trip to Iran was looming over me and I was anxious to keep moving. I half-heartedly visited a few more museums, ran some errands and explored some bits of the city I had missed.

One very interesting day-trip was visiting briefly the coastal city of Alexandria. In this part of the world the shadow of Alexander the Great still looms over its history. The city that bares his name, though, is a quiet and scenic town on the Mediterranean. It’s key feature is its library – a huge modern building that houses in grand fashion books and museums and supercomputers. It was impressive, but I still wondered where the millions came from to build it in what is still a very poor country.

I had intended to return on the train in the evening, but tickets sold out. A few fellow couchsurfers, two foreigners and two locals, were trying to get home as well, and we ended up eating dinner and staying quite late (featured entree: pigeon.) Our route back, around 1am, was a ragged old cab stuffed to the gills with people. For the 4-hour trip back, I managed to sleep with my legs folded against the seat in front of me and my neck backwards among the 3 other snoring people in the backseat.

On the very last night I heard that one of the grad students, Paola, from Brazil, was still in town so I dropped her a line and we went out for some water-pipe and tea. She spoke of the work they had done, the sleepless nights and nerve-wracking presentations. But, they had made some real progress and were happy with their results. Hopefully, with a little time and luck they would make a difference in some of these neighborhoods.

I was happy and a bit proud to be a part of it, even just as a witness.

The night ended with a few local friends of Paola's inviting us to a karaoke bar. However, instead of being a party-atmosphere where drunken idiots belt out Sir Mix-A-Lot, it was a random mix of locals that seemed to be trying out for Egyptian Idol, singing pitch-perfect renditions of very slow, sad songs in heavily accented English. We just drank and laughed and had a good time, which people seemed to find a little annoying.

And then, as had at that point become quite a routine part of my life, I woke up very early and caught a cab to the airport, where I would fly to Istanbul again and spend a mind-numbing 8 hour layover drinking coffee and searching in vain for a bench to sleep on before embarking on a very nervous flight into Tehran.

And that is another story I will tell you soon.

Istanbul

2010-05-06T22:59:00.001-07:00

I think there was this moment right as we got off the bus in Istanbul where the pendulum of culture shock swung from one extreme to another with blinding, befuddling speed.

After having been ushered off the bus into the terminal, the crew unloaded everyone's luggage except ours. People started walking away and we stood there looking around. Finally a crew member started to explain to us as best he could that we would catch some kind of shuttle bus. We tried to tell them that no, we didn't need a shuttle, we would just like to get our luggage and a taxi. This didn't translate, and I think they must have assumed if they just ignored us and went ahead with their shuttle bus plan we would go along with it. Clearly they don't know loudmouthed Americans very well, because as the bus started pulling away without us, my parents and I all simultaneously started yelling at the top of our lungs and running after it, banging on the side and the windows. With a look somewhere between bewilderment and disgust, the driver stopped the bus and unloaded our luggage.

Feeling sheepish but irritated at having made a gigantic spectacle of ourselves, we walked out onto the curb and my Dad immediately flagged down the nastiest gypsy cab we saw. An ancient, creaking rusty car of indeterminate eastern-European origin, the toothless driver of similar vintage. Watching him drive, it was clear the gearbox was at this point probably not much more than metallic good-intentions. The floor mats were made of yesterday's newspaper. As we pulled up to our hotel the inside door handle fell off in my Mom's hand. It was, well, authentic. And, the security guard at our very nice hotel looked at us getting out of this cab with an expression that suggested we should probably be decontaminated before he let us in.

Unlike other places I've been thus far, there was real and pressing business in Istanbul. My parents, as part of the planning process, put the word out among some of their international contacts that they would be in the area and wanted to put together a seminar. My father can be best described professionally as a fiber-optics rockstar. You know, those cables that use flexible glass fibers instead of wire because light travels, like, fucking fast. Well my parents have been in the business for so long and my dad has been educating and evangelizing such that he can now pretty much just show up somewhere and people will travel long distances to hear him speak.

I, on the other hand, had made arrangements a few months in advance to pick up my visa to Iran. This process has been so involved and fraught that I wondered if it ever would really happen. If at some point along the way it had stalled or fallen apart, I would have been completely and utterly unsurprised. But step by complicated step, I'd gotten to the point where I would be walking into the Iranian consulate with paperwork in hand and get that magical stamp on my visa.

This is what I should have done first thing, that day, the minute I got off the bus. But as is my wont, I procrastinated. We did some touristy stuff, seeing the famous Blue Mosque and the catacombs and the Grand Bazaar (by Grand they mean holy shit gigantic) and just exploring the city a little. Istanbul is both incredibly walk-able and incredibly tourist friendly. Again, I think there was a misplaced expectation of a bustling, intimidatingly disorganized metropolis filled with people yelling at each other and goats running through the streets. Rather, it's a laid-back city with a European vibe and by far the cleanest streets I've ever seen. (For real. It makes Los Angeles look like the Wall-E garbage planet.)

It wasn't until the second day, while my parents were schmoozing with the captains of industry, that I walked down to the consulate and handed in my papers. At this point it started seeming like an elaborate political scavenger hunt. Go make copies of this, bring a photo of that, go to the bank and give them this. By the way - it's good to be a consulate, they're open 9-11 Monday-Thursday. What a pain in the ass. While I was busy running around collecting all the details, they closed.

That night I responded to the ubiquitous couchsurfing "I'm in town, let's get a drink" post and a few ex-pats and I went out for some beers on the main pedestrian drag. (Imagine, if you know it, the 3rd street promenade - about a mile and a half of it.) The strategy seems to be to just walk down the street and as the various waiters shout at you to come into their bars, you can play them off each other to drive down the price of a watered-down pint of local beer ("Efes" - tagline: "you can't buy anything else! Sucker!")

This turned into a random side conversation with some locals (three guys, a boss and two employees, one of whom made it clear they were getting drunk the boss’s dime) who after a while insisted that we should go to a club with them. The club was actually a rooftop, with a spectacular view and some suit-wearing traditional Turkish musicians interspersed for no particular reason with a Latin DJ. We all got crazy on the dance floor - by now I have some enviable middle-eastern dance moves, don't think I don't. I had a really odd conversation with a girl from Los Angeles at a conference for "panoramic painting" who soberly and without irony agreed with my assessment that it was a weirdly, amusingly specific that ought to be laughed at. When I thought back, the next morning, I realized she was stoned out of her mind and that explains the serene, compliant answers.

I closed the place down.

The next morning, I woke up lazily and we all went for a long, slow breakfast. We walked from the restaurant back to the consulate, where I found out I had more pieces of the scavenger hunt to gather. I looked at the time - 10:45, I had fifteen minutes before they closed AGAIN. I did some quick math and realized that if I didn't get it in that day, given the 24-hour turnaround they quoted me, I would miss my flight to Cairo that sunday. FUCK.

But I got it in, just.

Moral of the story: do not fuck around with consulates. Not ever. Get it done FIRST and EARLY.

Having that big yellow sticker in my passport made everything alright again. So the next few days were a breezy and enjoyable experience. I got the world's most ridiculous haircut. I bought a new, shittier backpack. We ate fish sandwiches off a boat and an expensive but fantastic meal under a bridge. Tourist stuff: a cruise on the Bosphorus, Aya Sofia (which seems to be... some kind of extra giant mosque?), Top Kopi palace.

About that: So in the palace, not listed on any tourist materials whatsoever, they have what they claim to be the prophet Mohammed's bread and tooth. Also, something they claim to be the "rod of Moses" from 1500 BC. Wait, what? Hold the phone. His beard? A 3500 year old stick? Are you kidding?

I've asked several people about this now and the broad consensus seems to be that nobody believe they're actually real. But I assure you they're presented as such, without any kind of discussion of authenticity.

There's something deeper here, above my pay grade, about the difference between Catholics and Muslims. I mean, we built cathedrals around the alleged finger bone of some-or-other saint. We go nuts for the image of Jesus in a water stain. No one seems that awfully impressed. Real or not, they practically put it in a closet.

One other highlight: at the Archaeology museum, we found a display of unearthed gravestones. On tiny signs next to them they had made translations. We may go to hell, but some of them were eye-wateringly funny. “She lived an inoffensive life and didn’t hurt anyone.” “I paid xxx dollars for this grave.” “Anyone caught robbing this grave will be fined.”

But the most moving, sincerely heart-felt inscription was a tomb that had been lovingly carved for a man’s best friend, his dog.

And then, in the final evening before my parents would fly home, we sat on the palace lawn and shared a few drinks, watching the sun dip low. It was such a satisfying and comfortable moment, feeling all the concern and love of parents and the camaraderie of real friendship with people you respect and like.

I saw her, then. I don't want to write about this, but it stuck out so sharply and with such clarity in that moment that it feels dishonest not to. From a distance, it was the perfect ghost of her - the person that in so many ways set me down this path - as a child. All full of grace and energy, the short black hair fluttering in the wind as her mother took photo after photo. This child soaking in all the attention the world could give her. It was like seeing a window back in time to a moment of innocence and hope. This is what I had seen of her all along, an essence of uncorrupted things. A childish kind of hope - I fell in love with it, even though by the time I arrived it was long gone.

That moment settled on me like a dense fog rolling in off the water. It was a silent and small expression of forgiveness, and a goodbye. She wouldn’t trouble my thoughts again in the weeks that followed.

So in the morning I packed up my newer, shittier bag and took the train to stay in a hostel for my first time. Ten euros a night doesn't go far in this town, tell you what. But it was saturday and I made the most of it. In the morning, I had a hungover flight well and truely off the deep end: to Cairo.

Some Changes

2010-05-06T01:23:00.001-07:00

I’ll be the first to tell you that up until now I haven’t been backpacking as much as using an impractical suitcase. This was intentional, being completely aware of my own ignorance how to travel minimally and on a shoestring. Since my parents would be meeting me in Turkey and then leaving back to California afterwards, I had a window of opportunity to swap gear around.

With that in mind, I sent back almost half of the stuff I was carrying, most of which I hadn’t touched. Lesson learned. My dad also very generously let me swap my full-size DSLR with his very compact and cool 3/4 olympus.

Also, and most daringly (stupidly?) sent home my backpack and bought a new one for $7 at the Grand Baazar in Istanbul. It looks and feels every bit as cheap as it was and I don’t expect it to last more than a month or two. When I see a better one I’ll buy it.

On a philosophical level, this is inching closer to my hopes and expectations of how this trip should go – freedom from material things and unburdened (literally and figuratively) by consumption.

My parents and I, a few nights in a row, sat in a restaurant on the main hostel street in Istanbul watching people walking in off buses and taxis carrying what must have been 60-70 pounds worth of stuff, probably 4 or 5 times what I have now. Usually they had two backpacks, one giant on the back and another on the stomach, both filled. I can’t imagine what you would need so badly and couldn’t buy.

I won’t look down on how other people travel, whatever works for you or makes you happy is fine. But for me, if I could get by with a toothbrush, a passport and an ATM card, I would.

Turkey, the Southern Aegean Coast

2010-05-06T00:57:00.001-07:00

In the Summer before I turned 18 I lived in Japan for a few months, with a family of 5, all boys 9-13 years old, in a one-bedroom apartment. This was Kumamoto, a province far to the south, a different island from Tokyo and different in more ways than I have room for here. Perhaps another time I'll write about this experience, but I bring it up because it was, and this is the only word I can think to use, a magical place in such a rare and special way that only a few other times in my life I've felt.

My American peers and I, language students, were virtually the only foreigners we ever saw. The isolation was brutal, especially when, a week in, I developed a lung infection and saw a fever of 105. The temptation to pack it in and go home ran high and my phone bills were well into triple digits. But one by one, each of us fell in love with the rolling hills, the lush, unspoiled greenery, the ancient traditions without irony and pretense. Climb a mountain, and a weathered sign at the top would unceremoniously list people's names that had climbed the mountain every day their whole lives, five thousand, ten thousand times. There were no theme parks, no gift shops, just a simple country life stretching back generations.

The only word I can use is haunted, in the way that the hair stands up on the back of your neck when you stop and touch a piece of stone that almost seems to buzz at all the hands that touched it before. I don't mean, of course, to imply anything metaphysical, but some places and things are just brimming with so many stories and lives that it overwhelms belief.

My parents and I took an early flight from London to Istanbul on a very modern, giant 777. On the way I watched a movie called "The Invention of Lying" with Ricky Gervais that was so incredibly funny and true and sad that I spent the next few days referencing it in conversation what felt like every ten or fifteen minutes. The food: decent.

When we arrived in turkey the staff of the airline made it seem so deadly urgent that we follow them around the airport that it spooked my parents and I badly enough to stand around in a circle at the connecting gate and stare at each other like we may be arrested and shot at any time. This was, in retrospect, ridiculous. In Izmir, a man picked us up at the curb and then drove us to our hotel 2 hours away like the back of his minivan was on fire.

Kusadasi (my keyboard lacks the necessary squiggly lines) is basically a cruise-ship port. During the tourist season, it must fill to the brim with seafaring russian and japanese tourists, but in the off season it was a sleepy town.

We made one crucial mistake that first night: we walked down to the first restaurant at the end of the block from our hotel and ordered some random food. It turned out to be the most popular place with the locals and was spectacular. Fresh fish, caught the same day, presented like a work of art and cooked to order. Fresh salads and bread. Good local wine. Raki, a very strong local liqour so strong that it needs to be cut with water, which renders it a milky white.

This mistake would become clear as the next day we were swept up into a vast and well-oiled machine of the local tourist industry. Bus drivers and tour guides and hotel works workers in a perfect waltz of hustling Americans from one site to another, stopping off at dreadful buffets serving giant tubs of bland caricatures of local food. Explanations of these sites were recited verbose from some tour-guide manual (in some cases literally read verbatim off english signs in front of us) and were basically the extent of their english skills - questions were often ignored completely.

I don't mean this in a bad-review-on-trip-advisor kind of way, it was all basically what we expected from a budget tour package and much more a source of amusement than anything else. We gritted our teeth and went along with the tour-bus. Nothing, nothing, nothing could blunt how spectacular these sites were.

These arrangements got made largely without my input, as history is a big interest of my parents' and I was happy to leave the planning to them. With the help of a travel agent, my Dad more or less picked out a handful of sites, Greek and Roman ruins mostly and the travel agent crafted an itinerary. By and large, these were commonly visited sites, so we ended up on a group tour.

But on the third day, some glitch in the tourist equation sent us off on our own, on a grueling 3 hour minivan ride with our own guide. We were bound for Aphrdesias, far inland from the other sites and much more remote. When we arrived, we were literally the only tourists there, but the place teemed with Turkish schoolchildren and local politicians. We had somehow stumbled onto a festival of some kind - ironically, we would find out later, celebrating tourism. Old ladies were baking bread on the lawn for lunch and kids ran around wearing fez with painted-on moustaches.

I felt it again then, for the first of a few times, walking around those ruins. Haunted, by pleasant ghosts. Maybe it was the remoteness, the isolation, but to see these stones carved so meticulously by a faceless person two thousand years before and then dug up and set on the ground where they once stood was nothing less than spooky. Water had seeped in, cracked the marble. Time had wiped the faces from carved figures. Things have changed: even the sea is gone. But these stones are still alive. It stirred something deep.

All of these places did, in their own way.

In Pergamon, the city on top of the mountain, ruins that overlook a modern city sharing it's name, we listened to the minarets call to prayer from an ancient theater.

In Miletus, we walked through a field of red poppies and across the unearthed foundations to see a reflection of some columns in a pool.

At the temple of Apollo, the columns were bigger than two people could fit their arms around and a hundred feet tall. In Troy, they dug into the earth and showed us where thirteen different cities were built, one on top of another. Whether or not Achilles and Hector fought and died here, a few hundred-thousand others lived and died here. The numbers are easily said but stand in that place and touch the walls and tell me you don't the weight of all that history.

Every time we thought we would be completely sick and tired of looking at old stones in piles, this place would shock us.

And after a few days, we were sorry to go. Not sorry for the mediocre food, or the bedgrudging tour guides or the chatter of fellow tourists, but sorry to leave the atmosphere of the country.

Story time: friday night I was bound and determined to find somewhere to go out and interact with the natives, so to speak. There turned out to be only one bar open and lively so I talked my way in and got a beer ("Efes", the only beer in Turkey, which comes in "dark", "light" and "in a larger bottle.") A veteran, at this point, at walking into bars along where I don't know anyone, I just sat and watched the crowd. A couple awful DJs were spinning a pretty typical set: hip hop, when all the guys would dance with each other and the girls would ignore them, and Turkish music, when everyone in the entire postal code would mob the dance floor. I ended up making friends with the promoter and his 5 roommates, who knew basically everyone there. I think they were a little miffed at how much I could drink and still be relatively sober.

Observation apropos of nothing: Turkish people are the most even-tempered, drama free, reasonable people I've ever met. Serious, hard-working, dependable and utterly unflappable. I had no idea, especially given their proximity to, oh I don't know, Greece? Afghanistan?

London

2010-05-06T00:21:00.001-07:00

I left Miami in a daze, a fog of too much alcohol and too little sleep. As in New York, I brought with me a debt of six years of beautiful California weather - the rain and the bitter, cold wind. It would, of course, later follow me to Amsterdam, but I owe an apology to all Londoners for that first week. But still, it was a good feeling to leave the comfort of the States.

London made the list immediately for a few reasons. Of course, to get to know the city. I like to do that - just go to a city and feel it's pulse, slowly and steadily aquaint myself with its geography and people. Get a taste of life there and see how it agrees with me.

I also had every good intention when I started the trip to think about work and talk to companies on the way. As I got further along in the planning process it became clear that people from larger companies would be less than excited to talk with me if I had no particular idea when I would be interested in working - since I don't.

But if I'm honest, I really just wanted to come have a good time in a big city with my friend Chris.

Think of every cliche about time and how it just slips past us, since we met first on Ghost Rider, a full four years ago and change. At that time, I was working a brutal 'morning' shift in a different department, starting at four in the morning and ending at two in the afternoon or later (so I saw very little of anybody.) We both transitioned onto Spider-Man 3 a few months later, and I moved over to a swing shift that allowed me to see a little more daylight (though of course I still never left work.)

Around the same time, for a variety of reasons, I moved from funky, bohemian Venice to posh, old-money Santa Monica. Chris and I had had some limited interaction at work, but really barely knew one another. A few weeks after moving we ran into each other in the liquor store on the corner of my street. As it turned out, it was our street - he lived less than half a block away.

So then, I took the plane to the train to the tube to a pub, and then I was in London. Catching up on the last few weeks over a pint. London is a beer town - mixed drinks are expensive and weak. Well, everything is expensive, but beer is at least more reliable effective. It's a very different rhythm, people go out and drink very early and go home very early. At 6pm bars are overflowing and then empty by midnight.

Say what you will - the Brits make good use of their time. We saw one woman so drunk she tripped and broke the glass she was holding, then kept drinking out of it.

One drawback I didn't consider - when you're travelling for so long, there is no downtime, no recovery period. No boring tuesday nights when you make hot pockets, do some laundry and watch nonsensical Lost reruns. That first week in London I was so wrecked from Miami that trudging out in the cold and the rain was a tall order indeed. I did my touristic duty, though, visiting museums and Big Ben and Picadilly Square and Trafalgar Square.

One day I had so little motivation that I contacted some local couchsurfing people and just sat in a pub drinking all day and night. This is known to insiders as the 'Columbian incident.'

There were some low points. London is a working city, and very little goes on before sundown. I would have several days in a row where I wouldn't talk to anyone in the daylight hours. Wandering without aim in a city filled with purposeful people can make you feel ghostly, anonymous. I felt a little homesick, a little lonely, a little stupidly sorry for myself. I would wander into an internet cafe and write long, melancholic letters to friends at home.

I spent a lot, too much, time thinking about the chain of events that got me here, with no comfortable answers.

When I started getting frustrated at how down on myself I was being, I took a bus over to the British War Museum and walked through the exhibit about the holocaust. It didn’t exactly cheer me up, but, well, it did something.

But Chris and I found plenty of goofy shit to distract ourselves in the evenings. One night we took the tube out to a bar that was holding a 'pub quiz.' This was a staple of 10th Street Santa Monica life, 'bar trivia' at our local, grungy watering hole. Despite our general ineptitude at retaining random factoids from popular culture, we always did pretty good. This time, dead last by a mile. To be fair, we made it clear to everyone we were Americans, which was to excuse our complete ignorance of anything British and maybe our general stupidity. The last laugh was ours, though. We drank all the other teams under the table.

Chris, by the way, deserves a medal for letting me sleep on the floor of his room in the flat he shares in Islington for almost two weeks. I snore.

And so it went. But in a general kind of way, I didn't fall in love with London in the same way I did with New York nor did the novelty wear thin quickly like Miami. I was reminded in so many ways of Los Angeles, really - a frankly quite ugly city that offers everything in the world at your fingertips if you can spare the money and the patience. It's not a romantic city and as a tourist I found their historical narrative murky and perhaps a little inauthentic. Like, nice giant clock guys.

But after two weeks I knew. In the same way that Los Angeles and I are inextricably linked, I knew I would be back to London. For someone like me, it's an elephant in the room during any discussion about my business and my nebulous plans for the future. Much more so than anywhere else I've been or will go during this trip.

So, this unfinished story will end here.

Guildford, Portsmouth and the Isle Of Wight

2010-04-28T10:03:00.001-07:00

Just as 1999 turned to 2000 I made an impulsive decision to not bother finishing high school. Instead, I applied and was accepted to a small liberal-arts college in the woods and rolling hills of western Massachusetts. I told only a small circle of people and within a few weeks I finished my tour of public education on a chilly Friday afternoon in late January. On Monday, I was a college student.

My first day was the coldest of the year so far, well below zero without wind. My family and I bundled ourselves in warm coats and carried my boxes of books and trash bags filled with (black) clothes into the ugly concrete building that I would call home for the next 3 years. Later, I would move into an apartment shaped like a UFO, literally in the woods. But I stayed in those cold stone dorms for a long time. The thing about my college dorms that made them a little unique is that almost every had a single room. They certainly weren't large rooms, but not having a roommate was a luxury, especially in a place filled with so many special snowflakes like Hampshire College. Unfortunately, I drew the short straw and got assigned a roommate. Fortunately, within a few weeks I had walked in on my roommate and his girlfriend enough times that he decided to move out, leaving me a giant, half-empty room that would not be filled until after the summer break.

This was how I came to meet Gavi. In his last semester, Gavi lived in the single next door. Somehow he had ended up with so much stuff crammed into that tiny room that he could barely open his door. My first memory will always be a head peeking over what seemed to be a full-size couch turned over on its side and pushed in front of the doorframe. I decided that, from someone in his first semester to someone in his last semester, I would swap rooms.

Gavi and I would spend countless hours just talking or working and hanging with all the people. That first semester was an insane, magical time for me, as I can imagine the first taste of college is for everyone. The cast of characters that paraded through my life could fill this page and many more, but that's for another day. Those times didn't last and college was never as fun as it was that year.

Story time: I lost a bet that semester and Gavi and a few of my friends duct-taped me to the door of my room and covered me in shaving cream. This was of course video-taped, and thereafter I would get recognized by people now and as the duct-tape door guy. There were no drugs or alcohol involved, believe it or not.

Epilogue: As tends to happen, I eventually met a girl and we ended up running around Japan that summer. I could have attended my high school graduation and prom if I had been so inclined, but I skipped them. As everyone I grew up with donned tuxedos and silky dresses, I rode the bullet train north to Kyoto. I was 18, and there was such a sense of youthful adventure at that time.

That was a hundred lifetimes ago, or so it feels like. For Gavi, it was many, many more. We lost touch not long after I moved to LA. I remember the last phone call - walking down Venice boulevard with a girl I hardly knew, Gavi launching into some insane story about life back in Boston and handing the phone over to her so she could say hi. Everyone laughing. Gavi has that effect on people.

Years later, we would reconnect on Facebook. I found out he was studying psychology in the English countryside. When I decided to travel through London, we made plans to meet up.

I caught the afternoon train on Thursday. It was quite empty so I grabbed a seat by the window and watched urban jungle gradually change to grass and trees and sheep. There is a shade of green in the country that exists nowhere else in the world, and every little village is carefully authentic as it has been for a few hundred years. London of course bears the scars of hundreds of years of fire and bombs, but the country is, even at its most inhabited, little changed from the days where druids built stone circles there was a castle on every hilltop.

Gavi lives and studies in Guildford, and hour by train. We met in a small cafe and talked for a few hours, catching up on almost 10 years of our lives. In the evening, we took the train to Portsmouth, a town on the coast known for charming pubs and old ships. The tourist season had not nearly started yet and we had no trouble booking a 'bed & breakfast' near the water. That evening we walked along the stone walls of an old fort and watched the sun setting, talking all the while of life and love and how things change, or don't. Despite backgrounds and decisions that couldn't be more different, we found that 10 years had brought us to remarkably similar circumstances.

I know that's a rhetorical fallacy, you can find parallels in any set of circumstances in the same way that a broken clock is right twice a day, but I think we're fundamentally similar people. Listening to his story I saw that he and I shared the same tendency to both fight and support organized systems and bureaucracies. That is - maintain a fundamental and unwavering cynicism about the world around us but harbor a suspicion that things should just work as advertised if only we worked hard enough and had enough patience. Begrudgingly, we're both in our own ways straddling the line between being skeptics and suckers.

Our first, crisp morning in Portsmouth we got up early and caught the HOVERCRAFT. Yeah, that's right, the hovercraft. What? I'm expecting about 50% of the people reading this to be as excited as I was. And yes, it's every bit as awesome as it sounds.

Thing is, Portsmouth is cool and all but it's also only a mile from The Isle of Wight. From watching Top Gear, I know this to be a beautiful, remote island with lots of windy roads you can do powerslides on. And it's only 10 minutes on the HOVERCRAFT. Unfortunately, Top Gear did not tell me that it's actually an absolutely gigantic island with lots of expensive tourist traps and really very few scenic ocean vistas. Compounding our problem was that it was friday and Gavi, being a practicing Orthodox Jew, had to be home by sundown for Shabbat. Regardless, we pressed on with our plan and chose a tourist trap, some kind of wildlife preserve that advertised the ability to feed penguins. Pretty awesome, right? The hovercraft and penguins? I'm glad we can agree on this.

We had to bus it there, which dropped us on on the side of some random road. It was surprisingly hard to find from there, which wasn't a good sign. When we got there, though, we found what was basically an all-bird zoo, plus a few wallabies. For a pound we were given a bag of feed for the scary-aggressive ducks. The penguins were worth the trip, though I strongly suspect that they were just using me to get to the fish. Typical.

We headed back as the sun started dipping low in the sky. A bus, to a train, to a train. Getting on the platform back to Guildford, I hesitated a second too long and the door slammed shut between us. I frantically tried to open it as the train pulled away, but it sped off. I caught the next one 20 minutes later and as I got off Gavi was there waiting for me. We took one last picture, leaning back with arms outstretched and hugged goodbye.

Amsterdam

2010-04-18T15:55:00.001-07:00

The pillow fight broke out at 17:00, right on time. In the minutes leading up to it people milled around holding large, rectangular shopping bags and looking inconspicuous. Miraculously, the clouds had parted just hours before after days of rain. A mild sun lit the city's most central square, filled with a thousand tourists. A lone, lame street performer juggled earnestly, blissfully unaware that he was about to be definitively upstaged. At the sound of a whistle all hell broke loose. Neither man, woman, child nor chicken would be spared a fierce beating. None would ever sleep soundly again. What was once a gentle place to lay one's head became a weapon to vaporize dignity and pummel all within reach into absurdity.

Later that night, the streets would be littered with bedding and feathers. A bit later than that, I would be mistaken for a lesbian.

(Bonus: witness the saga of the best shower in history.)

I'll back up. In fact, I'm skipping ahead. I flew into London from Miami in the last days of april. As in new york, I brought with me dreadful weather - bitter cold, wind and endless rain. I spent 4 days doing virtually nothing but recovering from the Miami train wreck. Well, that's not strictly true, but it belongs to it's own entry and it will get one. But the following weekend my friend and host Chris had the easter weekend off and we made the sober and conservative decision to go to Amsterdam.

We considered taking the fun route - an all-night ferry with casinos, bars and clubs. But given the time constraint, we opted to fly instead. With that solved, we tried to figure out where to stay. The holiday weekend had booked up most of the hostels and the rest were prohibitively expensive. It seemed like a perfect time to try couchsurfing. I wrote maybe 5 or 6 people a short message saying that two professional guys in our late 20s were on holiday and wanted to stay a few nights. I got a few messages politely declining for various reasons and one saying yes. Robert, our prospective host, sent along an address and some directions. I printed out the directions, tucked them in my bag and let Robert know what time to expect us. I wouldn't hear from Robert again, which was mildly alarming but we decided it would be fine.

Naturally, our plane was late and we took the wrong train from the airport. No one in the train station seemed to know how to get to the address on the paper. I learned something important about couchsurfing that day: always print out a map. Secondly: get a phone number. Finally we located a tram stop with the same name and hopped off. A guy on the street gave us a general idea of a direction and we set off walking. I think we finally found the place around midnight. Robert answered on the first buzz, he had been watching TV with a glass of wine and waiting for us. A single email and we were inside this guy's house.

For the most part, it looked like an ikea catalogue, not really in a bad way - clean and open. A big two-bedroom condo 10 minutes from the city. Everything was new, he had just moved in. Robert described his work as mobile app development, and told us that amsterdam was making an effort to become a creative center in europe. In his early 30s, he seemed an easy-going, practical guy. His brother, however, makes showers.

Had we not been told, we would have assumed that Robert had bought a prop from a 1970s sci-fi movie and left it in his bathroom. The shower was all chrome and curved glass, with doors that slid open along the curve of the shower to reveal several knobs without labels and a computer screen. Yeah, a computer screen. It had a radio, a temperature readout and several buttons to control an integrated sauna. With a straight face, Robert told us it had an optional intercom system that he didn't spring for. I can imagine what you would say into a microphone in the shower, except perhaps to phone the mothership. Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience as my first time really couchsurfing. We had a few beers and some laughs and got along fine. I think by the end we probably overstayed our welcome a bit - especially when I got locked out at 4am and had to ring the doorbell. But I'll get back to that.

That first day was, of course, raining and cold and miserable. I apologized, assuming it was my fault. We broke out our umbrellas and caught up with a free walking tour that Chris had taken in a few other European cities and reccomended. It took no small effort to stick with the tour in the rain, especially as every third storefront beckoned us with the possibility of spending a few euro to waste away the rest of the day giggling and staring off into space.

But we stuck with it till the end, learning all about the history of the city - including the magic bread, the boob in the street by the church and all the many ways that urine shapes public space. I won't waste time reiterating them for you. Except - it's pretty astonishing the volume of urine that needs to be managed on a daily basis. There are places all over that provide a small privacy screen on very busy streets where you can literally piss into a hole in the ground. It is, in fact, pretty awesome. So awesome that, during the 70s, a group of women protested that they too should be able to piss in public. Upon being declined, they threatened to piss on the largest bridge in amsterdam if their demands weren't met. The government called their bluff, but it was no bluff. You go, ladies. So the city did indeed build public, free bathrooms for women around the city providing some privacy. In short order, these became a wonderful tool for drug addicts and rapists. So they're now sealed, but still all over the city. See what I mean? Never before have I been in a city that's so thoroughly obsessed with urine.

You'll notice, by the way, that I didn't take that many pictures. I don't know if I mentioned this before but it was raining like a motherf!@#er the whole goddamn time.

It did clear up, miraculously, though, a few hours later. I take this as evidence that God is a fan of random silliness. While researching things to do in Amsterdam, I saw on Facebook that a number of my friends around the world had RSVP'ed to similarly named events in a number of different cities all centered around something called World Pillowfight Day. It was something I'd heard of, but never been to before. I knew there had to be one in Amsterdam and sure enough there was. Saturday, 5pm in the center of town. Chris and I both agreed there was no way we could miss it. Upon being told our plans, our host gave us the first of what would be many dubious looks that seemed to say, you guys are how old again?

As for the fight, the pictures speak for themselves:

In the aftermath, we brushed all the feathers off that covered us and everything else and went drinking in the red light district.

I know you've heard of this, the part of Amsterdam where prostitution is essentially legal and wildly popular. The only thing I can say about it is that I don't necessarily have any ethical problem with prostitution as an occupation. My problem with the red light district is that it is extraordinarily creepy and not sexy or sensual in any way shape or form. Take strip clubs - love them or hate them, it's only theater and you're paying money (a lot of it) to be teased, it's an act. This is no act, of course, and that makes the nuts and bolts of the business very different.

In a strip club the economics are simple - the girl is always trying to up-sell. Come have a private dance, spend more time, have another girl join us. With these girls, there is no up-sell because they're giving up the goods immediately. So the game for them is speed of transaction. The more guys in one night, the more money they make. Which is incredibly disgusting.
And the women look the part - even the prettiest ones are haggard and have a dead, predatory stare. The working conditions are designed for safety and speed so they look quite a bit like hospital rooms. We were told by our tour guide that on occasion the girls will make the guy do their business from behind a plastic sheet. It sounds really romantic and fun.

But who am I to question someone else's good time?

There are some great bars in the area, though, and we managed to stir up plenty of trouble. At one point we ducked into a dutch bar with Robert and a friend of his. I couldn't stop laughing at how serious everyone was, all tall blonde people with neutral expressions dancing stiffly to weird dance-music covers of American 80s pop songs. We did end up meeting up with some people from our tour group earlier that day, ironically all college students from Boston. Apparently, they told us, they had made dinner plans but in the intervening time between the tour ending and that evening they had gone into one of the 'koffee' shops and eaten some muffins of a certain special variety. They were a bit strong and they all had had a good long nap.

All but one of them ditched us to go home at around 2am, which was when a lot of bars started closing, if you can believe it. The three of us walked around for a while before finding an open bar that was still pretty crowded. We pushed through without really looking around and ordered 3 pints of heinekin. I saw a sign at the back of the bar advertising what looked like a cheap house shot, 2 euros for something called, and I know how this sounds, CLIT ON FIRE. Now, maybe it says a lot about me and my modern attitudes towards women that this name didn't really shock me, or maybe I was just, er, really drunk. But I ordered 3 of them. The bartender, a tall brunette, gave me a funny look, leaned across the bar and shouted, "ARE YOU A LESBIAN?" I spent a disoriented moment trying to determine if this was a trick question and decided in the interest of international diplomacy that I would answer in the negative. A moment later we started looking around at the other patrons in the room and realized that yes, in fact, we were in a gay bar. By the way, the shots? Really freaking gross.

The following morning we nursed our hangovers a while and decided the best cure would be more beer. The heineken brewery then. I can tell you very definitively that heineken has no particular history to speak of. None. We saw some token old stuff and they tried to explain the brewing process at least 3 times, each more stupid than the next. It got to the point where we were taken on a movie ride with a shaking platform and bubbles falling from the ceiling and a man describing how we, the beer, were being processed. I swear to god, it was called BREW YOU. Chris turned to me halfway through and said he thought he might vomit. I couldn't imagine that really detracting from the experience at all. The upside however was that our 15 euro ticket bought us 3 half-pints. Along the way, we ran into the same group of girls from the night before, who announced they didn't really like beer and we could have their drink tickets...

When we eventually sobered up, we walked the few blocks to the Van Gogh museum. It was still raining and miserable and there was a line well out the door, but it was worth every minute. Of the 700 or so paintings of his that exist, 200 are there. Early student works that were, the accompanying plaques told us, complete shit. Bizzare japanese woodblock style painting that were inspired by parisian magazine covers of the time. My favorite, though, was a still-life painting of a vase with a flower in it, next to a glass case containing the vase in the painting.

Naturally, having long ago decided what kind of weekend this would be, we took our newly sober selves back into the center of the town to join a pub crawl. Back into the red light district, we went to bar after bar drinking pints and shots and living up to every ridiculous stereotype of the drunken foreigners that we were. But, for me, and I'm at a loss to explain why, I remained stone cold sober no matter how much I drank. Late in the night, long after people started drifting away from the group and staggering back to their hostels, I was completely lucid.

As the bars and shops started closing, I began to feel a frustrated restlessness. Chris went home with the key and said he would let me in when I called. I wandered, not in any direction, just walked the streets alone, following the canals and letting my mind wander. It's a cheap and lazy metaphor but literally true that being as lost in the world as I felt in my mind was deeply peaceful and satisfying. I can't tell you exactly what that feeling was or how I could get it again, but to be unburdened and aimless was a momentary kind of heaven.

But, the reality of the situation eventually set in. The sun was threatening to come up, I had 15 euro in cash, no working debit or credit cards and the trains had stopped running long ago. I knew the address of Robert's house, but not a clue how to get there. I hailed a cab and told the driver I would give him 15 euro to get me as close the address as he could. Unfortunately, he had never heard of that street. We put our trust in his navigation system, then. Sure enough, he got me there with a few euro to spare, which I gratefully left as a tip. Standing out in front of Robert's house, I phoned Chris.

Nothing. I tried again, nothing. His phone had died. My phone started beeping urgently, then died as well. I was standing out on the doorstep for a while, contemplating whether it was cold enough to just simply sit down and wait. I decided that offending our gracious host was the only sane option, so with some regret I rang the doorbell. A few minutes later, I rang again. This time Robert appeared, opening the door in his underwear and smiling wearily. I apologized very profusely and then promptly passed out on the couch, in my clothes.

An hour or two later, Chris woke me up. We had a flight to catch and a weary trek back to London.

Miami

2010-04-07T10:48:00.001-07:00

In Miami we danced and sang like children under the moonlight and the bright sun. The sweaty, dark rooms where lights flashed and the easy bite of expensive liquor made hours slip by until a stumble into the rudely unexpected dawn. Gazing out to sea from rooftop bars with music so loud it echoes off the horizon. Hand in the air, a primal yell, trying to touch the moon. Feeling exactly the right kind of lonely freedom.

And serendipity: I left something behind in Miami, on the beach in the cold wind, like grains of sand through your fingers. But that story is one of a few I can’t tell here.

My plane touched down in the afternoon hours of monday. This was a full day and a half before my friend Nate would arrive, and I needed to find some things to do to kill time. This was pretty hard, especially without a car. I ended up taking the bus to downtown for $2 instead of a $25 cab fare. This seemed like a small victory, but later a bit ridiculous as the cost of this leg of the trip was astronomical, relatively speaking. I would continue to attempt to take the bus later on, but it was so painfully slow that I eventually gave up on it altogether.

In any case I checked into my temporary hotel and set about exploring downtown miami. This took about 20 minutes. Then I came back to my hotel and sat down to write and sort through pictures. The day blew by.

The next day I set off to miami beach. Again I took the bus, which was more than an hour to go something like 6 miles. Miami beach was much more amenable, with big crowds of people on the streets and cafes on the sidewalks. It was quite a bit like the promenade and venice beach but the ocean was on the wrong side. I found a cheap and good sandwich place, ate lunch near our hotel and bought a good amount of bad liquor and some plastic bottles.

I was there with Nate, my friend from volunteering with the Obama campaign in the northern suburbs of Las Vegas. He and I, like many of us, had kept in touch and hung out a lot since the election. More than a few people had expressed interest in Miami, but only Nate and I followed through. He had been going through a lot in the last year and this experience seemed to let him off a leash. I wasn’t really prepared for how much he would be in his element.

So it goes like this: the winter music conference is a trade show more or less entirely about house music. And as a soap conference intrinsically means a lot of washing, a house music conference means a whole shit ton of parties. So you can imagine I had the noblest of bohemian intentions when I signed up. Mind you, house isn't really my favorite genre - I listen to a lot of everything, but given my druthers I'll take a certain kind of british rock or a more vocal and melodic form of electronic music called trance. There were enough good trance DJs coming that it was worth it and I picked up a few new favorites along the way.

But really, the experience for the vast majority of it was showing up solo to an event, drinking enough to relax (or filling up said plastic bottles with something strong and cheap) and maybe striking up a conversation with a stranger. For someone with a good amount of natural shyness like myself, it was an intense rollercoaster. More often than I'd like to admit, I would perch myself in a corner with a beer and just chill. When the music was good it was bliss and when it wasn't I was quite lonely. But when the music was really good, there's no place I'd rather be, no matter the company. It may surprise some of you to know: I can dance. Not well, but it happens.

I'm sure you're wondering about the experience a single dude would have with girls here. Those of you reading this that know me know that, well, I do ok. Not great, just ok. And it was really no different from going to a constant streams of bars and clubs in Los Angeles. Drinks and cover charges were too expensive to catch a younger crowd so it skewed older, late 20s and early 30s. A lot of plastic surgery, more than I've seen in all my years in LA by a large margin.

And of course, the sheer number of single guys there on the prowl puts any reasonable single girl on guard. I watched a really amusing scene of a group of guys trying to ask a really provocatively dressed girl if she was a hooker. She very politely interrupted her cell phone conversation as she clip-clopped down the street in skyscraper heels to tell them that, no, she wasn't one. They apparently interpreted that as being not a denial but merely her opening negotation and followed her down the street quoting prices. She seemed to take it in, er, stride.

So it seemed like being a gentleman and attempting to give out innocent compliments was generally met with skepticism and hostility. Being sincere and modest and polite never seems to play too well in these kinds of crowds. But I managed to have some good conversation with interesting people, nevertheless.

This is my favorite story of the week: I had a long conversation in our hotel bar with a woman from Venezuela. She was married with kids so it wasn't flirtatous, just a conversation. I told her about my travels and my work and she was quite fascinated. Hold on, she says, I want you to meet my friends.

Turns out in the same hotel is some kind of big-deal fashion show and her friends are models. I'm suddenly surrounded by south american women in expensive clothes that in heels tower far over me. I tell them my whole story again and they're aghast. They're all articulate and interesting and I'm enjoying this very innocent and fun exchange. You should come hang out with us at the 'W', one of them suggests. I say sure, I'll meet them there soon. They take off and I say I'll call them later.

Later in the week I would find out that the W is spoken of in hushed tones in Miami Beach as being the most exclusive and selective club in the city. I had assumed it was just some hotel bar, but no, it was a neon box filled with beautiful people. And me, in my cheap shirt and ripped jeans, showing up at the door later that same night in front of a line of resentful people and waltzing in with these models in front of a red-faced doorman who wanted nothing more than to physically eject me from his fiefdom. It was a moment I'll never forget.

I can't say I remember much about the inside. It was nothing special, loud and crowded. We did a few shots of expensive tequila and left to sit by the pool. I left not long after, I had a show I couldn't miss. But it was a high - I knew if I had been aggressive with them I would have been ignored. I did what came naturally and made some interesting friends in a funny situation. The doorman's face was so completely priceless. Sometimes nice guys finish first, asshole.

But let's not pretend I wasn't frustrated by the attention-whore nature of the whole affair. I told myself I was there to listen to music first and foremost but standing around by myself in crowded bars for hours, drinking ludicrously priced drinks after paying stupid high cover charges wasn't always that fun. I lost my patience a few times. I can't change myself in a social butterfly, nor would I want to, and that aspect of the experience was a sore spot at times. My friend Nate was in his element though, and when I caught up with him (which was not easy) it was an endless stream of handshakes and names I didn't remember seconds after I heard them.

Those few little moments, though, where the solitude makes letting yourself go all the more easy made it all worthwhile.

Eventually the conference with a hundred tiny parties in hotels and clubs gave way to the main event, a festival with most all the top DJs in the world - Tiesto, Guetta, Armin, those guys. I heard from somewhere it was a hundred thousand people. I've been to a few of these in Los Angeles, but this was someting else. Probably twice as many acts in half as much space. I remember just wandering around, jumping from tent to tent and just being blown away by the quality and variety of the artists. So amazing, and so worth the trip.

If I did it again, and I want to, I would come for much less time and have a much sharper focus rather than bouncing around from place to place. I would also bring more money. And it would be a blast to bring along a group, but if I had to do it alone again - I would, without question.

Then right on time it was Sunday and I somewhat literally pulled Nate from a group of friends doing cheap whiskey shots from stolen restaurant glasses with us and jumped into a $25 cab to the airport. I shut off my iphone for the last time and dug out my passport from my bag. Goodbye USA, hello London.

New York City, part 2

2010-04-07T10:42:00.001-07:00

I had a day to kill between coming back from boston and flying out to miami, so I decided I would walk from mid-town to lower manhattan to see two spots I felt were important.

It’s very impossible to ignore this enormous, gaping hole in the ground. I expected to be pretty inoculated to this stuff by now, but I just wasn’t. It hit me in the gut.

I don't mean for this to take too much of a melancholic turn, but it was a train of thought that persisted that day.

I was just turning 20 that year, my second of college. I can recall so vividly what my life was like at that point because it was so scattered and odd at that time. I don't generally do anything the normal way, and my college experience was no different. I went to what they liked to call 'progressive' school, with no grades or tests and a campus in the middle of the woods.

Being the person I am, I rebelled against even this. I socialized very little and kept mostly to myself and a small circle of friends, dated one girl for almost the entire four years. My time was taken up in large part with studying and a weird collection of hobbies, including keeping weird varieties of fish and practicing obscure asian martial arts. I was of course an insufferable nerd but shied away from letting that dictate the rest of my identity. The picture to keep in your mind is of me with very long hair tied back, an all-black wardrobe under a long black coat. I wasn't shy exactly, just so completely inwardly focused that I never had any real desire to open up to anyone. (Including my girlfriend during this period, who says of that time - "I honestly had no idea who you really were.")

So you can imagine the emotional impact that the towers falling in manhattan had on me - none. I heard the news with shock and confusion but little real emotion. It's callous to say, but all the impassioned speeches and heartfelt words didn't move me. I don't mean to imply cruelty or disregard, just a vague numbness that characterized that period and wouldn't be pierced even by tragedy of such an epic scale.

Of course that's being too hard on myself - I'm hardly the first person to be self-centered at 19. And of course I am now as well, let's be honest, but it was something that occurred to me standing there looking into what can only be described as a wound in a beautiful city. I held a moment of silence, long overdue.

Lastly, it would be too big an omission for me not to mention the deeply mixed feelings it gave me about my plans to travel through the middle east. A nascent thought, and not one I can articulate yet.

I also made a point to jump on the ferry to Liberty Island to see the statue of liberty. I wanted to see it with a fresh set of eyes, having put in at least a decade and a half between the last time I saw it. Undeniably impressive. Of course, the USA being what it is, it was a extra charge to go inside, and there were two giant gift shops on the tiny island. Asian tourists of course all bought a green foam crown and ran around on the grass. It was a beautiful day for it.

However, there was a muslim family on the ferry, a wife with a tight headscarf and a tall, bearded husband pushing a stroller with a young infant. They baby started screaming very loudly and the mother desperately tried to calm it, but I felt their shame and embarrassment and panic. I couldn’t help thinking the last thing they wanted in this place was to be the center of attention and if they looked or were dressed differently it wouldn’t have the same immediate panic.

So then, I say goodbye to the northeast and head south to Miami. It’s cheating, of course – Miami has already come and gone and I’m sitting here in London writing this. I continue to debate the format of this blog – I leave out so many little details and interesting stuff that I would share but it would be haphazard. Things will change when I’m truly off on my own after Turkey, but until then I’ll continue to be introspective rather than anecdotal.

I picked up a copy of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood in the airport and it was haunting. I read it in a few nights like I sometimes do, in a feverish insomnia. I did the same with The Road and it left me unimpressed. There’s something interesting about that contrast but I can’t say what, exactly.

Boston

2010-03-24T18:42:00.001-07:00

Good to be home.

The experience of going from new york to boston was unseasonably dramatic. The clouds parted, the sun shone down and all of a sudden it was spring.

It had been 5 years since the last time I visited and things had changed quite a bit. And really, the last time I spent any significant time on my own here was probably 8 years ago, so you can imagine my disorientation. They've been pretty busy, what with the bridges and tunnels and all that. Still, it still held the same charm it always has. Boston is by a huge margin the prettiest city I know. It was nice just to be there.

There was also some novelty in revisiting places from my childhood. The science museum, the aquarium. The bunker hill monument, 100 yards from the house in which I born. The USS constitution, silent now but my memories will always be of it's cannons. So many memories of so many places. (Everything looks a bit smaller.)

A family friend generously let me stay in her house while she is out of town, which meant I had the place essentially to myself. With the exception of a few meals with old friends, this was my first real taste of solo travel. While the positives and negatives are pretty obvious, one thing I didn't anticipate was how comforting the constant monologue that loops in my head at all times can be. Introspection and thoughtfulness can be a perfectly valid way to spend your time and I'm glad I convinced myself of that.

In the last few years my attention span has been absolutely decimated by the constant stream of stimulation. Typical: email, chat and 2 phones demanding my attention, all the while wearing headphones invariably playing the most frenetic music I could find. As these days go by, I can feel that slipping away. Restoring some sense of serenity was among the biggest reasons why I left.

In one other area, abject failure thus far. I need to learn to talk to strangers and not be so aloof. I need to lose the unapproachable demeanor when the circumstances call for it. I'm no schmoozer and never will be, but it'd be awful nice to strike up conversations. Amusingly, it's less to do with shyness than it is a constant assumption on my part that people just don't want to be bothered. Which is probably true, but believe you me by the end of this experience I will happily make a pain in the ass of myself for no reason other than feeling like it. Or I'll just start (keep...) talking to myself. (Shut up.)

So yeah, Boston.

I was off the bus maybe 20 minutes when these two kids with molasses-thick accents come up behind me on the subway platform. They look me up and down and one goes, "yo that bag look fuckin' serious." I turned around and smiled politely. (Aloof, right?) The train arrived and as we start boarding the other one says, "just push on in there, I got your back." Not a threat, really, just hassling me. I guess I must look like a tourist. Who knew.

Typical Boston. I got so many weird looks walking around with that huge pack, way more than I did in New York. But that's the city, deeply conservative in many ways. Full of earnest, hard-working people in fleeces. Disdain for the irrational, the superfluous. I'm far from an expert in the demographics, but there is something palpably different about the relationship between economic classes. It isn't the same efficient tolerance I saw in New York, but a more deeply rooted tolerance and respect. Despite all the academics and bankers and entrepreneurs, the soul of Boston is in it's working class.

Or maybe that's just my read, showing my white middle-class guilt again. But I see it in myself, that conservative new-england work ethic. Really, I'm laughing at myself in the backpack too. But I have my reasons. And moreover, I break ranks with my fellow Bostonians in believing that people should be allowed to do whatever they want and not be judged.

People here are also obsessed obsessed with old shit, especially architecture. I had a conversation on the bus (progress!) with a woman in her late 50s who turned out to be a couchsurfer. She lamented not having the funds to travel more since her daughter was in a private college. She then went on to describe how her and her husband (who, ironically, works on microsoft's 'cloud computing' solution, but has too many meetings to take time off) are painstakingly and expensively restoring an old Victorian mansion. I'll never understand that compulsion. (See? Judgment. I am from around here after all.)

But really, everyone seems to want to live in Restoration Hardware. And how could you not? Boston is the genuine embodiment of that aesthetic. It's so completely antithetical to Los Angeles's ugly sprawl.
The North End, for example, hasn't changed in 300 years and is still an authentically italian neighborhood. You would be forgiven for thinking that the curmudgeonly old men sitting outside restaurants smoking cigarettes, drinking espresso and yelling at traffic were bussed in every morning by the chamber of commerce for effect. (Note to Los Angeles: do this.)

But no, they're real people. As most are, without the pretense and theater I've gotten so used to in the west.

Speaking of couchsurfing, I hosted a guy and his friend at my place right before I left. They were walking across the country. Rather than raising money or using it as a platform to raise awareness for a cause, they were doing simply for the sake of inspiration. I didn't really understand it at the time, but I think I do now.
Just, that there's value in irrationality for it's own sake. To push us out of the grooves we've worn in the path. Tempts us to try the unknown, to open ourself to the unfamiliar. Fall in love.

Boston is impossible not to fall in love with, for these reasons. Nothing makes much sense in maddening and frustrating ways - the roads, the subway, the weather. You can't help but appreciate the paths it sometimes forces you down. When you run into a friend on the subway, the serendipity is a sweet, lasting bond. When the skies finally clear on a spring day, it seems the entire city finds a plot of grass and falls asleep with a book in the shade.

In my small way, I feel a part of this. To travel for no practical reason, it's tough to be less rational. But it moves people. And that feels worthwhile. I hope that when I reach places like Syria, Iran, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, I hope that my story carries that much more weight. For now, it’s just nice that people will interrupt their lives to share a meal or a drink (or a lot of drinks) with me because I’m on my way.

I'll put it this way: You can paint a wall white and leave it be, or you can paint a mural. You could get up, go to work, cash your paychecks and tick off the days, or you can go do something different. If we draw the timeline of our lives, then travel is a work of art. Know what I mean?

Gallery Changes

2010-03-22T21:19:00.000-07:00

MobileMe is really annoying and difficult to use so I'm switching over to picasa. Really Steve? You can't even caption pictures? Or view them at their native resolution? I like the iphone app, but this is my last week with the iphone.

Photoshop Elements is also too slow on my netbook, so I'm ditching that as well.

The previous entries' galleries will stay for now, but I've transferred them over to picasa:

Catalina & Newport

Downtown LA

NYC

New York City

2010-03-19T09:18:00.001-07:00

It was like, 4 days before anyone told me that this was the worst weather they could remember. Here I am thinking I'm maybe being a giant pussy after so much time in sunny-and-seventy-two southern california.

I really doubted my own memory of the northeast. The rain is supposed to fall downwards, right? Not be blown sideways into your face? Witness the horror of some kind of umbrella holocaust, the broken bodies littering every street corner. You do forget these little details about life up here, where you live and die by the weather.

Getting ahead of myself.

I woke up on my last Santa Monica morning at 4am. My parents drove me into the airport, as is their wont. Here's me:

I stressed about carrying my backpack on the plane, but then I remembered all the ludicrous rolling/folding/kitchen sink suitcases that everyone has now and just did it. I suspect I won't get away with that on some domestic Jordanian puddle jumper, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

On bus to grand central, staring out the window and thinking to myself how different the colors are, muted and grey. None of the deep reds and greens of california. The moment I walked into the station I breathed a big sigh of relief. To just stand on the periphery and be among the bustle of new york city felt so palpably satisfying. I couldn't help but smile.

That first night was clear and beautiful. My gracious host met me in front of her building. We had been friends when I first moved to Los Angeles and knew absolutely no one. She's since become a busy lawyer and a even busier manhattan socialite. (I never knew so many different kinds of food, clothes and furniture could be delivered via the internet. What a world we live in!)

We turned right around and went to dinner with her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend at a fancily decorated 'indian-latin fusion' restaurant. The food was excellent and served on funny-shaped dishes with complicated serving instructions. By far the highlight of the meal was our waiter's moustache, which was quite waxed and pointed. We all speculated he would be tying a blonde to some train tracks after dinner.

Equally surreal but no less fun was the bar we went afterwards that was accessed through a phone booth in the back of a underground hot dog stand. Try the bacon whiskey.

So, I should say that in planning this leg of the trip I had a lot of good intentions about making some business contacts in the new york post-production world, but by the time I started really getting into the nitty-gritty of bugging people, it became clear no one was really that interested in talking to someone that might be looking for work sometime in the distant future, maybe. Also, my shots from Alice didn't come through fast enough to get them on a reel, so it became less than relevant. Also, I'm super lazy and have no desire to start thinking about working again.

The next few afternoons I spent just wandering. I think it says a lot about my personality that I feel most comfortable just picking a direction and walking. I don't even really like taking the subway or the bus, because that means you have a destination in mind. I'll roughly pick somewhere I want to go and just start walking. I seem to start slowing down around 4 or 5 miles in, and then I get coffee, which is as popeye is to spinach.

But as ridiculous as it sounds, it's fun for me to just be there, watch the people go by and feel the pulse of the city. Coming straight from Los Angeles makes comparisons inevitable and the best I can offer is this: New Yorkers are an intrinsic part of the urban space rather than just existing in it and on top of it. You get so used to dodging and being dodged. People move out of the way when you pass. Cars watch out for pedestrians and anticipate jaywalking. Everyone, of all races, classes and genders, moves with a keen sense of efficiency and purpose.

I can see why people dislike it. It's a peculiar kind of anonymity, where everyone seems to assume that everyone has very important business to rush off to. I felt right at home, but then I've been known to stalk down the 3rd street promenade like I'm hunting sarah connor.

Also, on an interestingly related note, very few people use cell phones in public, compared to LA.

I did end up going to the MOMA exhibit of tim burton's work, which was very frustrating to do solo, since I desperately wanted to rant and rave about my experience in this area. It wasn't really as interesting, though, as the woman sitting in the lobby having staring contests with people:

One of the other interesting things we did, besides eating an entire pig and partying at the science museum, is went to a live performance of a 'radio show' where it was performed on stage but not actually broadcast. There was some Q&A, a few live music sets from a band I didn't know called 'Cursive' and an obligatory homo-erotic radio drama. Kathleen got her name picked out of a hat to answer some questions and win prizes. Which she did, but has yet to collect. It was really well done and worth checking out: http://radiohappyhour.com/

The other thing I wanted to mention is that photography is hard. One thing that always bothered me is that the actual technique and science behind a camera is very simple, there just simply aren't that many variables to play with. The thing is, cameras aren't really all that good at doing them for you. I'm not really very good at them either, but it really seems like after 100 years we still have people in a laboratory shooting grey cards and then handing what they make to a photographer who has several decades of experience telling him what f-stop a cloudy day will require.

I have some experience with creating and using tools designed by technicians for artists, and this frustrates me. But I will reserve suggesting solutions until I'm rich and famous.

Also: pestering random people on the street is hard. Sometimes I surprise myself at how timid I can be. I better get over that.

Also: I didn’t take that many pictures because it was raining like a mother$*#&er the whole time.

So, the persistent question in mind is, of course, would I live there? In as much as I don't want to live anywhere for a long while, I would move here in a heartbeat. It's too many great things to ignore. Going back to LA after being here would be tough. But I'm so early in this process that saying definitively is silly.

One last note: I sat across from a couple over dinner who told me a story. They had gotten married, and decided to backpack around the world. After a year and a half or so they had ended up on the coast of australia and were in a used bookstore. The husband picks up, at random, a copy of an LSAT prep book. Fast forward a few years later, he is just starting out as a corporate lawyer in a successful manhattan firm. We had always planned to keep travelling, his wife said, but it never happened.

This, to me, is the quintessence of a genuine life story - a curious mix of serendipity, hard work, the trappings of success and a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia for what was and might have been.

Los Angeles and Southern California

2010-03-15T23:17:00.001-07:00

This is kind of a bullshit entry. I'm in New York City right now, but I thought I'd give some parting thoughts and photos from my last few months in Los Angeles. Seems a fitting way to start this thing.

I moved to LA six years ago from Boston - though strictly speaking, I had been living basically full time in Amherst, western massachuetts, for a few years. I left for california probably hours after the ink was dry on the paperwork certifying my college experience as over. The weather was so poor the day I started the cross-country drive that we had to swap a van for an SUV and I had to leave half of my crap behind. I had no particular problem with that.

The drive itself was easy. My brother drove most of the way and we listened to so many episodes of This American Life that I began to have dreams narrated drolly by Ira Glass. I'll also never forget the transformative moment somewhere below the mason-dixon line when we pulled off the road and hosed off all the salt that had accumulated on the car as we exited the region of the country still covered by snow and began the long trek across the south-west.

My first few months in california were dominated by the job search. I spent a few weeks up in Davis visiting my girlfriend at the time, an area so boring you'll want to beat your forehead against some drywall just to make noise. Fortunately, before long I found a laughably low-paying job in Venice at a place called Digital Domain and found a genuinely shit-hole apartment in mar vista to live in. The job, the apartment and the relationship moved on pretty quickly from there.

I only tell this boring story to illustrate the fact that I came to Los Angeles quite empty handed.

The years since then have been some of the best and worst I've had. I've called this place home during a time in my life when I've grown into a artist and, in so many ways, a man. That's platitudinous to say, and a little embarrassing, but true.

What is also embarrassing and true and something I am seldom honest about is that I failed so spectacularly to carve out a place here to truly call home. Not for lack of trying. I'm speaking, of course, about heartbreak. Serial and ridiculous, it's been both my own fault and others', but there's no getting around how prominently this thread figures into the story of my time in Los Angeles. I have fallen down, gotten back up and fallen down again, in this regard.

To say I'm not angry would be a lie. To say it hasn't, in large part, driven me away would also be lie. I am angry and sad - but I have promised myself to let it motivate me forward rather than weighing me down. Good things must come from bad, eventually.

Having said that, the vastly vastly dominant force in this period of my life has been developing a career in visual effects, starting with that shit job at DD and eventually moving to Sony Imageworks where I painstakingly worked my way into a position where I was actually carrying out effects work on feature-films. I couldn't be more proud of what I accomplished over these few years and have had so much support from friends and family. To those I've shared blood and tears with, and those with whom I raised more than a few glasses, you know how much I appreciate it.

In the course of all this, I discovered something important. Work should allow one the freedom to live as one chooses and not dictate how one's life is lived. We should all be allowed to buy our freedom. If a house in orange county and a porsche and a housewife with eight kids is your poison, then so be it. Myself, I don't know yet what I want from life, what would give some meaning, so I'll keep searching and working when I need to, and only when I need to. Working for the sake of working is foolish.

That's all I'm gonna say about the last 6 crazy years. Enough about me.

Los Angeles is a beautiful city with so many pockets of greatness. Don't let the vapidity of its residents fool you, there is substance if you look. You only need drive - 1 mile or 100, to find what you're looking for. Then sober your ass up and drive home.

One thing I will never forget about Los Angeles is the disrespect of the working class and the poor. Another thing I'll never forget is the widespread apathy about the right of gays to marry.

In spite of everything, you were home. Thanks for all the great sunsets. See you when I come back around.

First Things First

2010-03-12T06:32:00.001-08:00

Hello from an airplane. I'm inbound to New York City. I wanted to write some about my intentions and ideas about the next few months.

There's this one question that nobody asks me: why are you leaving?

This isn't surprising. Travel is a compelling thing. I've worked enough over the last few years to comfortably justify a good long time off in faraway places. I have no particular attachments that would obligate me to stay in any particular place. You're young, people say, this is the perfect time to do it. Soon you'll be married and have kids and a house and you won't be able to do it.

It's not quite that simple. But let me digress for a moment.

One thing I hear a lot is it will change you so much.

I agree. It's an experience fully intended to challenge and galvanize, strip away preconceived notions and comfortable stereotypes. But it won't change my life - that's already happened. I wouldn't be sitting here, writing this, if the bedrock of my life wasn't significantly and permanently shifted. And even then - let's admit to the possibility that I always felt this way and it is my perceptions that changed. Put another way, I'm not doing this because I want to. I'm doing it because it's the only natural thing for me to do.

So, off I go. To wander, to feel some freedom. To have some fun, of course, but also to be an artist and create work that I find authentic. It's not a story about a break from my normal life, it is my normal life. I don't want this to be the time to do this, I want every day to be that time.

Many of you who know me will know how many times I've said this in the past few months - the trappings of material wealth and middle-class stability have brought me not an ounce of happiness. Money spent on time with friends and family, travelling and eating and drinking and screwing around has been worth every penny.

Hence the title. There won't be a beginning and an end. Only, another day, another place, another story.

At least that's the intention. And I know it all sounds a little ridiculous, a little adolescent. But the proof will be in the telling, in the process. You'll see.

So, rather than recounting every detail and showing you a hundred pictures of the white guy in foreign lands, I'll try to make this a story about an experience happening through my eyes. I would like to share that, as much as I can.

What Home Looks Like

2010-03-01T17:25:00.001-08:00

Obligatory. I’ve made small annotations here and there, but mostly it’s clearly the work of a noob backpacker. My general philosophy is to keep costs down as much as possible while allowing for some general piece of mind and flexibility to create what I need to create – photographs, writing, drawings. Also: nothing "just in case" that I couldn't buy in any decent sized city. As is always the case with travel, some things will be discarded and others acquired.
I’ll update in a few months with some thoughts about all this crap.

Packing

65+10 L Pack
Schwag messenger bag
Cloth tote bag
Toiletries bag
Smaller cloth bag
2 Trash bags
Various ziplocs
Mesh laundry bag
Bill clip wallet
Half-cube

The idea of buying and carrying around containers for your crap seems somehow ridiculous to me, but I had some of these things already and only bought a few things. The pack is obviously a specialized item, but I bought a bigger one than I needed to allow some flexibility. I also chose this particular pack because of a zippered lower section that I can lock.

Clothes

2 short sleeve shirts
Long sleeve shirt
button down shirt
2 pairs fancy-shmancy underwear
Jeans
Slacks
Leather Belt
Board shorts
Athletic shorts
Sweater
Sweatshirt
Baseball cap
Sport coat jacket
Earth slip-on shoes

Again, nothing bought except the underwear, which is comfortable and easily washed. Note that I’m only bringing one pair of shoes. If I need any others, or any other articles of clothing, I’ll buy them. I haven’t included some winter gear that I’ll bring to new york and london because I’ll be sending them back in turkey.

Photography

Sony alpha a330
Case
18-55 lens w/ hood, lens cap holder
55-200 lens w/ ditto
Lens case
Polarized Filter
2 Ex batteries
Battery Charger
4 8gb sd cards
Lens pen
Usb cable

This is as cheap and minimal a photography setup as I could manage while allowing for the artistic freedom I’m looking for.

Computing/Communications

Netbook w/charger
Cellphone w/charger
4 gb, 8 gb usb drive
Ipod shuffle
Bluetooth headset
Travel surge protector
International outlet adapter

Everything as compact and cheap as I could get it. The usb drives will hold scans of important papers and serve as a backup solutions for photos when I have trouble accessing fast enough internet to upload them.

Safety/Security

Laptop Lock
Cable Lock
travel padlocks
Mini flashlight
Luggage tag
Steripen
Pacsafe bag

I wish I could leave all of this at home.

Sketching/Notes

Moleskine notebooks
4 graphite solid pencils
Sharpener
3 small gummy erasers
2 ballpoint pens
Light pen

Nice to have. Once upon a time I was an art student and sitting at a cafe sketching seems like a nice idea.

Misc/McGuyver Shit

Key belt loop
2 fabric key chains
Assorted keyrings
Saran wrap
tape wrapped around pens
Velcro straps
Safety Pins
Small zip ties, tie wraps
Bookmark
Water bottle

Doesn’t really take up a lot of space, and easily discarded if not needed. Somehow I imagine that it’ll come in handy. I’m probably wrong.

Toiletries

Razor
Earplugs
Glasses
Chapstick
Travel toothpaste
Toothbrush
Floss Picks
Mouthwash
Contacts/solution
Travel aspirin packets
Sink stopper
Comb
2 small grooming scissors
Contact rewetting drops
Moisturizer
Tissues
Travel tide packets
Condoms
Cotton swabs
Body wash
Nail clipper
Immodium
Wide-spectrum antibotics
Malaria pills

This is a needlessly exhaustive list, obviously.

Some items of note:

I own and love an iphone 3gs, but it won't be coming with me. It's flash, expensive and heavy for what it is. It would be by far the single most expensive thing I'd bring and I'd be pretty pissed if I lost it, unlike basically everything else here.
I'm waiting to see how available FAST internet is where I'm going before I commit to a backup solution, but cloud storage seems the most reliable and cost-effective. Google in particular has very reasonable rates. As a backup, I have some usb thumb drives and will probably buy a few more along the way. I'll be shooting JPG, so it's not such a huge deal. All my documents will be done via offline google docs in chrome. Pretty slick.
If you haven't clicked on the pictures already, I'm using mobileme galleries for my photo hosting. I like the presentation and ease of use. It isn't well integrated into windows, obviously, but I can live with that.
I spent under $1k to buy stuff I didn't have already. I sold some stuff on craigslist to offset most of this cost. Besides books, furniture, kitchen stuff, a shitbox car and a modest amount of clothes I'll put in storage, this is basically everything I own.
It weighs in a hair over 25 pounds.