Daytripping

Yesterday, we got up early, about seven. I remembered how much I truly am a morning person. We walked to the bus station and caught a bus to Comitan, the largest city near the Guatemalan border. There, we took a combi to Monte Bello, where we checked out four of the 59 lakes they've got there. The weather wasn't perfect lake weather, a cloud scattered sky playing hide and seek with the sun, but it was beatiful--the lakes we saw clear turquoise with the sun shining on them. They were selling all sorts of random things from Guatemala there, like cigarettes called After Hours,and cardamom gum with Arabic writing on the package, and Guatemalan beer, which I am swilling, above. (More pics here.) It's called Gallo, which means "rooster". Yup. The landscape between Monte Bello and Comitan really struck me on the way back, flat land, overed in flowered brush, cows grazing, random little shacks selling tacos and yard ornaments. And Comitan had one of the most beautiful zocalos (the inevitable square in each city) I've seen in all the cities I've gotten to see in Mexico this last year. This zocalo had amazing fountains, well-pruned trees, beautiful cobbled streets surrounding it. With all that bus-riding I was able to get 100 pages into Orhan Pamuk's "Snow", which is fantastic. And we got back to San Cristobal just in time to be the first customers at mariscos (seafood) night at this amazing quesadilla hole-in-the-wall we've recently become obsessed with. My favorite was the squid and broccoli in cream sauce. Or maybe the crab wrapped in bacon. Or...

first day, new world

This is a picture of the street I will be living on for the next 2.5 mos. Arrived in San Cristobal last night as the sun was setting. The apartment G got for us is beautiful--full of ceramic and clay tiles, wood ceilings, airy, bright walls. The garden we share with the other houses in our complex:


Walked some around town today, saw the main squares, dipped into the market. The city is small, as far as I can tell and streets sit low under the stone sidewalks and houses that line them. There are too many cars on these ancient streets (G says about 400 years old), and so many old Beetles around, I've already revived the "punch buggy" game we used to play in Lebanon when we were younger, punching each other each time we sighted one of those fanciful-looking cars. It's actually pretty fun since G never played before and he takes their profligacy for granted.

The rest of the pics are here.

Los Angeles

City of Angels--what a nice name for a place, huh? I've been there mainly to visit my uncle and aunt and their daughter and her family who live in two apartments relatively near to each other in Beverly Hills--and we spend time in their living rooms and kitchens and then drive around and eat good food and go to the mall and I know it's a place I wouldn't necessarily want to live but I could because it's so big and so varied that there's certainly some neat stuff going on always and there are so many different sorts of people who live there, but there's the whole car thing, the freeway thing, which is what most people talk about when they say why they couldn't or wouldn't live there. But more than that, L.A. is a place in my imagination, thanks to movies and books, and it's had a decided resurgence on that level lately. I just finished reading Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie. It is a novel primarily about Kashmir, but also perhaps about how its characters carry the weight of Kashmir to the U.S., and L.A. in particular, and Rushdie awesomely renders the metropolis, for example:

"That the city had no focal point, he professed hugely to admire. The idea of the center was in his view out-dated, oligarchic, an arrogant anachronism. To believe such a thing was to consign most of life to the periphery, to marginalize and in doing was to devalue. The decentered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blob, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it the true democratic city of the future."

Then also I just finished plowed through Less than Zero, which I would only recommend if you are in the mood for something really fast and pretty depressing and not too well written but fascinating just the same. For those unfamiliar, the novel follows Clay as he goes back to L.A. after four months in college in New Hampshire. He revisits his friends and becomes drawn into a depressing and dehumanizing spiral of sex and drugs and disturbing family interactions that is home. And all along I wanted to know why he was so fucked up, and if he had the power to be his own salvation, and I guess the novel answered these questions but never in much of a way that satisfied me. Though, since it was published in the 80's the book serves as a historical testiment, as well as an intriguing study in first person narration. I'm going to take up American Psycho next, and a little scared about that, but hoping the writing will wow me more, and wondering if I'll have the stomach to read it.

I have been feeling under the weather and last night stayed in, mostly in bed watching "Short Cuts," which Robert Altman made in the late 90's, I guess, based on a few of Raymond Carver's short stories and starring a crazy cast including folks such as Juliane Moore and Robert Downey Jr and Jack Lemmon, and managing to tell the stories of more than twenty characters. I'm about halfway through the 3-hour movie so far and am caught up in all the characters but also a bit bothered by how short the scenes are, though all the shifting around and continuous building of often tenuous connections between characters certainly does paint a varied and fascinating picture of the City of Angels...

point-and-shoot

I was out of the States for a little over a month, in Thailand and Laos. I've been back less than a week and it already feels like forever. It's one of those crazy transition times of my life. I wanted to share the photos. I had visions of myself captioning each one. Visions. But reality is more like I am tired and there are so many other transition-type things to do. If you really want to know, ask me and I'll tell you.

The picture I posted above is my favorite. I took it in the bus station at Chiang Rai. I like how the king's picture is over the end of the word "toilet". I like the monk going into the bathroom and the way the genders are defined and all the colors and the folks, and, well.

I'm not really attuned to taking pictures lately, but I gave it a try, and I had a trusty assistant most of the time. There were lots of moments I wanted to take a photograph but didn't for fear of being that annoying tourist, which I sort of regret...but also it fit the situation.

Without further ado, the links:

1) Photos taken during the three times I ended up in Bangkok.
2) Photos taken during the week I spent alone on some islands down south.
3) Photos taken in Nonkhai, an amazing town in Thailand across the Mekong river from Vientiane. Most of these were taken in this incredible sculpture park we biked to through some really lovely countryside.
4) Photos taken in and around Vientiane and Luang Prabang, Laos's two largest cities.
5) Photos taken in the Luang Namtha Valley. Many of these were taken in an Akha village that we visited during the only guided tour we took over our whole vacation. It was easier for me in this situation to photograph people since we asked and everyone we were with was doing it but it still felt weird.
6) Photos taken as we came back through Thailand from the north.

food log

Due to the fact that I haven't posted in ages, I feel guilty. Also, a certain someone keeps complaining to me how the first thing you see when I go to my blog is a disturbing image from Lebanon. Supposedly it's all a big party there now, so I am misrepresenting. So now, with my 15 minutes remaining on my web timer at the hostel I'm staying at in Bangkok, I am going to attempt a quick post. I'm going to be here in Southeast Asia for about a month. Arrived about 36 hours ago now. Mostly been wandering around the city center, and taking an overnight bus to an island far south tomorrow. Due to some stomach issues I've been having, as well as the amazingness of the food selection here, I've decided to keep a food log. Here is Day 1:

(1 US dollar equals roughly 30 Thai baht)

*vanilla bun -- Hualampang train station -- warm, sweet but not too sweet -- 10b
*pineapple chunks w/chili salt -- Siam Square shopping mall food court -- 10b
*minced pork and kale w/white rice and bottle of pepsi -- spicey! -- canal-side stand w/tables north of Siam Square -- 40b
*small bottle of singha -- western-style bar on soi 11 in Sukumvit -- escaping the sudden rain -- 90b
*mango -- tasty white flesh -- from a tiny storefront around the corner from my hostel -- 5b
*pad thai w/shrimp and split a large singha with a really nice lady from my hostel dorm room headed back to Canada -- noodles delicious and beer refreshing -- tiny restaurant near Hualampang -- 100b
*small box of pomegranate green tea -- very sweet -- 7/11 between Hualampang and my hostel -- 10b

day one total: 270b (not quite $10)

catastrophic days

That is a photo of a dead, somewhat flattened pigeon shoved into a grate, headfirst. Encountered FRIDAY night at the corner of something and Valencia. Pretty devastating. And yesterday (SATURDAY) I saw two more, as I was biking around. Those two were much flatter, small raised discs of pigeon that I rolled by on the asphalt as I rode home from the grocery store.

On MONDAY I went to my cousin's house where they have satellite tv, and on the news there were stock market line graphs flashing downwards across the screen. Seems the market "has an upset stomach," as my father described it yesterday on the phone. And last night I was sitting in front of the same television again. We were watching something called "No Comment" on Euronews, a show that consisted of video coverage with no commentary, not even in a language I can't understand, not even scrolling across the bottom of the screen. There was footage of a mob of black-hoodied people in Prague, beating each other up, against grey walls. And then the cops showed up and then it switched to somewhere in the boondocks of Turkey, where peasants set up camp and hauled things against a stark desert. In the distance behind their tents, there were dunes of dark pebbles, what might have been coal? And all this as my little cousins expended energy at our feet:


On TUESDAY I woke up early and voted. Off-year, so there were like six propositions and of course Gavin Newsom won for mayor, perhaps because, as someone told me later that day, "He's just so damn good-looking," and the roster of people he was running against read like a variety show line-up. The volunteers were sweet, but seemed a little incompetent, and I wondered how voting could be more powerful than certain conversations.

On WEDNESDAY, this happened, but I didn't hear about it until THURSDAY, and even then I was too busy getting painfully drunk with the best coworkers a girl could ask for. And so I started to process it on FRIDAY. 36,000 gallons of oil fuel (which is somewhere in between gasoline and straight-up crude oil) spilled in San Francisco Bay. Unforgivably slow response and the poison spread quickly and far, closing down more than a dozen beaches, seriously the most amazing gems of our city and surrounds. But then this fine SUNDAY morning I happened to click on this. 1,300 tons of oil fuel spilled in the Black Sea after an oil tanker split in half?!

Still the thing that gets me most is that after a nice walk with a friend in yesterday's grey drizzle, about a half a block from my house I encountered a man I often see hanging out on the streets of my neighborhood. He was standing still right in the middle of the sidewalk, facing east, underneath one of those huge black umbrellas, the kind my dad used to have. And as I slowly walked by him, I realized his head was bowed towards his chest and he was sleeping.

modern ruins

In the past week, I have had the pleasure of going to two fascinating places just outside San Francisco--Angel Island:


and Jack London Park:

They are both sites of incredible natural beauty--respectively: an island in the Bay with gorgeous views of the city, and a redwood and eucalyptus forest nestled in some hills above the wineries of Sonoma County. But the thing about each place that most touched my imagination were the modern ruins, pictured above. On Angel Island, in various states of disrepair, the buildings of that island's most recent history as an immigration checkpoint and army base still stand, eerily. And, in Jack London Park, we marveled at and wandered through Jack London's dream home, which burned to the remaining stone foundation just a few weeks before he was to move in. For additional and assorted photos of both of my excursions, go here and here. Better yet, visit the ruins yourself.