Carlos said not to go out at night in Guatemala City or oueeeheaah!!!

Who is Carlos, you might wonder? While in Seattle prior to leaving for this trip, Carlos was the "night watchman" at the hotel where I was working, responsible for cleaning, repairing, and, well... I guess "watching" things at the hotel during the night (perhaps good eyesight is requisite for the position?). Carlos is El Salvadorean, and before I left Seattle he explained to me that he used to work for the government in El Salvador prior to emigrating. "What did you do?" I asked. He was part of the "security forces," he elaborated, and as part of the security forces he used to go into factories and take the names of people with "bad ideas." He went on to explain that these "bad ideas" were anything that was moderately leftist or union-sympathizing, and that he never found out where the people went if they were arrested. This type of work sounds awful, of course -- and I am sure that Carlos would agree -- but my understanding is that he picked what he considered to be the least worst of the options before him in El Salvador at that time. Later, Carlos would leave El Salvador and go to Seattle, where often the most pressing issue is which color of Chuck Taylors to buy, or how to redeem my REI dividend.

The above title, then, is the advice that Carlos gave to my friend Matt before he left to meet me in Guatemala. Matt and I would try to avoid Guatemala City if possible; we were not looking for the "Oueeeheaah!!!" in Guatemala, whatever that meant.

After Matt's arrival, we headed directly to Antigua, a UNESCO world heritage site and a city comfortably nestled within an insulated tourist shell. I mean this last part at face value, neither as criticism or as praise. I do not have a knee-jerk reaction against things touristy -- I do, once in a while, if I consider an area to be grossly over-developed or developed without any sensible planning. And really, as someone who has been traveling around for a while, finding myself suddenly surrounded by consumer goods, excellent internet access, and international cuisine can be a welcome relief from the beans, rice, and plantains of daily life in Central America. Also, in a country like Guatemala, heavily-touristed areas are typically safer. Even some of the bakeries in Antigua had armed guards (really).

But I should mention that there is one item which is always available while traveling the world, no matter how far off the beaten track you fancy going: it is Coca-Cola classic. It does not matter where you are on this beautiful, planet Earth, Coca-Cola reps have been there long before you, scouring the area for something to paint red. This is an amazing operation. Who is in charge of painting "Coca-Cola classic" signs on the sides of farm-houses in rural Guatemala, and how much do they pay the farmer for this? Who created the "Coca-Cola" flowerbeds outside the airports in southeast Asia? And who is responsible for the "Coca-Cola bus station" in San Jose, Costa Rica? Or the absolutely gigantic, neon-light Coca-cola bottle in Bucharest that slowly "pours" over the side of an office-building? Or the neon Coca-Cola bottle in Cairo, with the "bubbles" slowly illuminating? Coca-Cola is not a soft-drink company, but rather a marketing company that happens to have a product that you should consider drinking. I bet if you try, you can even remember the jingle.

Back to Antigua: it is touristy in a good way and an excellent city to visit. It is considered to be the best-preserved colonial city in Central America, and the cobble-stone streets certainly keep things moving slowly. Matt and I had plenty of fun simply walking and getting ourselves mildly lost in the city (which is very, very easy in a city that is nearly without street signs). There are many ruins throughout Antigua, many of which are simply gated off and unmarked, and many of them come up unexpectedly. We found a music shop with a selection of guitars, and in an unexpected act of kindness, Matt later snuck off and brought back a travel-sized guitar for me that I had been eyeing. This is one thing I had been severely missing while traveling, and have since barely put the thing down. So thank you again, Matt!

One of our nights in Antigua, we decided to check out an "Open mic" night at the No Se Cafe. We should have taken a tuk-tuk, we later realized, but instead walked, got lost, walked, asked directions, got lost. Eventually we did find the place, only to discover that there was no open-mic night underway, and that Matt had carried his left-handed guitar for nothing. We had a few drinks, then casually asked the bartender why the open-mic night had been discontinued. He looked at Matt's guitar, made the mental connection, rapidly set up an impromptu "stage", cut the background music, and Matt was front and center. It was on.

Let us be clear, here: there were probably a dozen people at this bar besides Matt and me (and yes, that is correct English) -- this was not the Fillmore East. Matt played eight songs or so, a mix of covers and some of his own songs. I had not brough my guitar, but found a right-handed guitar on the wall that was, unbelievably, in tune (communal guitars are never, ever in tune). I contributed roughly the same number of songs as Matt, sticking mostly to covers.

Fortunately for us, three of the individuals at this bar happened to be a very drunk, mother-daughter-son trio from New Jersey or somewhere. The mother was/is a hippie, much to the chagrin of her two children, and she absolutely loved us. She really could not get enough. She ended up paying for nearly all of our bar tab, and every few songs would grab us both by the shoulders and explain how what we were doing was "wonderful." "There just is not enough beauty in the world," she implored, "you both are wonderful." This may sound a bit over the top, but it does feel good to make someone feel that way. Her children were not pleased by her behavior, and from the back of the room were constant admonitions from her daughter to, "Shut up, bitch!", or "Sit down, bitch!" But she never really did shut up, nor did she ever really sit down. She danced a little and sang with us soon as she knew the melody, and continually asked if either of us knew any Janis Joplin or Joni Mitchell or Tracy Chapman. She had the right idea and a good attitude. I finished with La Bamba, the only song in my repertoire that could transcend the Guatemalan/Gringo divide at the bar, and then spent most of the rest of the evening talking to a Cuban piano-player who at one point played with the Buena Vista Social Club. Or maybe he played at the Buena Vista Social Club in Havana. I was never clear on this point. But he had this hair-cut -- I will call it a "trim, firmly-sculpted, white afro" -- which I hope to emulate when I am his age.

From Antigua Matt and I spent a full day of traveling to reach Semuc Champey, Antigua. This trip took an unexpectedly long time -- the teacher's union shut down the entire national highway grid for several hours to protest school privatization reforms -- and at the end of the journey we found ourselves unexpectedly far down a dirt/gravel road on the way to our hotel. The last 25 minutes of the trip were in the back of a pick-up truck, and we arrived after dark, exhausted. Unfortunately (fortunately?) for us, we were informed that there was a large group of young Guatemalan girls staying in the bungalows, and that there was to be a "dance party" later that evening. We had time to take a dip in the river, eat dinner, meet up with three Canadian guys we had met on the bus, and then spent the rest of the evening attempting to learn Guatemalan dances from surprisingly confident 16 year-old Guatemalan girls. (They were there as part of an educational trip to study Guatemalan tourism.) If I were to give us a grade on our dancing that evening, I would give us the same B- that students in high school receive for having a "good attitude," or "strong work ethic." We had no idea what we were doing, but the girls were really nice and tried not to laugh too openly. After a while we turned the tables on them, though, and the five of us proceeded to blow them away with some throwbacks to the 80s. Matt did the "Running Man," and I pulled an M.C. Hammer move I learned in grade-school, as well as something I would call "The Knee-Swapper." I'm sure it has a real name, I just don't know it. The end of the night saw one of the Canadians actively pursuing a 16 year-old Guatemalan girl, who declined his advances. The Canadian then had the gall to voice his disappointment to us, as if we would sympathize or commiserate with him, claiming that the girls had just "teased" him or something. I tried to argue that dancing simply for the sake of dancing can make for a good night, but he was not listening. He decided to leave. Then, as if a highly disapproving and vindictive God had been watching the entire scene, the pedo-Canadian proceeded to fall flat on his face while trying to take a shortcut up a dirt embankment. He actually made a flopping noise. Matt and I deciding to call it an evening.

Semuc Champey is visited for its cascading series of mountain springwater pools. Describing it is difficult, but I will try: it is a national park built around a river. The river completely disappears into a cave, only to reappear out of this underground cave network some 300m "downstream." As a result, there is a section of limestone rock that sits above the river for about 300m, with the water rushing somewhere underneath. It is this 300m of limestone rock that has proceeded to form a cascading series of pools of the clearest, blue-green water I have ever seen. I repeat: it is not river-water that fills these pools, but spring water from the hills. It is stunning to look at -- it looks as if it were sculpted -- and it is even more incredible to swim through, eyes wide open. The only thing I can compare it to -- and this is a pretty lame comparison -- are the parts in The Legend of Zelda for Nintendo 64 where Link is swimming.

Unfortunately, our last night in Semuc Champey saw Matt an I catch a nasty form of food poisoning that sent us to bed with our bodies rejecting food and incipient fevers. Even more unfortunately, we had already purchased tickets for the 5am bus the following morning. Yikes. The first, three-hour leg of this bus-ride was one of the hottest, most-crowded, uncomfortable bus-rides I have taken on this trip. I despise Guatemalan pop music as a result of this bus-ride, which is really too bad. They could not have possibly fit more people into this bus. At one point we pulled over so that one of the workers could check a tire, and it proceeded to blow up in his face while he was examining it. This certainly shouldn't have come as a surprise, as the previous hour had been spent piling more and more people on the roof of the bus, way beyond capacity, and with our bus-driver rallying it around the corners. Anyway, the worker collapsed in momentary shock, his entire face covered in dust, and though this is a very easy way to become blind, everyone laughed at the episode.

Given that both of us were ill, our initial aspirations to make it all the way to our next stop, Lago Atitlan, were thwarted. So we plopped down in Guatemala City and checked into the Holiday Inn. It is absolutely amazing what one night in a good hotel can do for your health. We slept and slept that night, had bottled water delivered as room service, and were generally recovered by the next morning for...

one of the weirdest places I have ever visited. San Pedro is a small town situated on Lago Atitlan, a lake Matt called "the Guatemalan Tahoe." I have never visited Tahoe, but I would call the town, itself, a "Guatemalan Vang Vieng," which is a reference to Laos. It is situated beautifully, but San Pedro is filled hippies, druggies, thieves, a very crazy woman, and all sorts of other characters. All over the place were Mayan women trying to sell us bread, of all things. Matt and I initially considered leaving immediately after arriving, but I think it was a morbid curiosity and a little bit of exhaustion that kept us there. There were some redeeming qualities to the place: two of our evenings were spent soaking in solar-heated hot tubs; we frequented an outstanding Israeli restaurant; and on our last night we discovered an entirely new section of the town, hidden away from the shore. But that was about all that is redeeming about the place. Looking back on San Pedro, I think for young drug-users it is a sort of mecca, the pay-off, the apotheosis after months of long, hard travel. For Matt and I, the surrealness of the place had lost its novelty and we were happy to leave.

On to San Salvador we went, and we were pleasantly surprised. There are areas of San Salvador -- lots of areas, in fact -- where it is not possible to distinguish whether or not you are in the United States or El Salvador. American chains and strip-malls dominate, roads are wide, and the U.S. dollar actually is the El Salvadoran currency. While Matt and I were not necessarily looking for the American in Central America, it is not such a bad city: San Salvador is sub-divided into manageable areas that make it interesting to explore. A question we heard quite a few times was, "What are you doing here?" This is compared to most other places I have visited, where the question is more like, "How long are you here for?" or "Where are you going next?" No, here the question is "What are you doing here?" Most people seem to be surprised that Matt and I had ventured to El Salvador, wondering what sort of allure San Salvador could possibly hold for us. We certainly did not see many other tourists, but we didn't mind.

Our one full day exploring the city began in at a "Mister Donut" chain, where, curiously, they did not have any doughnuts. (I was hungry and annoyed, and very, very close to giving the employees a pedantic speech about the importance of a good supply-chain.) We then toured "the biggest mall in Central America," and then went to el Centro, where we stumbled upon the largest open-air market that I have seen on this trip. It is an incredible market, and Matt walked away with an outstanding library of 70s, 80s, and 90s music video DVDs. At one point someone reached into my bag to see what they could find, but fortunately I was carrying nothing but books. Nice try, sucker! We ended up at a used clothing store -- an El Salvadoran Goodwill -- where, I think, most people wondered what on earth we were doing there. Just shopping, guys! Just shopping! This place was cheap.

The last full day before Matt was to leave for Seattle, he checked us into the Hilton Princess, quite possibly the nicest hotel in all of El Salvador. "You may be traveling," he explained, "but I am on vacation. We're going to do this right." In all this time traveling, not once have I been served cold orange juice in a chilled glass while checking into a dirty youth hostel. Not once. But they gave me orange juice on a silver platter at the Hilton, and the hotel was exquisite. It was so exquisite, in fact, that we had a difficult time leaving it. We soaked in the sauna and hot tub during the afternoon, drank Bloody Marys at the bar, took a nap, went to a Japanese restaurant for a tremendous meal of sushi, then spent the evening in. I went back to the sauna the following morning after Matt had to leave to catch his plane. Check-out time was 1pm, and I checked out at 1pm.

Now Matt has left, and I am still in San Salvador. I am in a (relatively) nice area, at a cozy hostel right across from a French bakery. Last night I saw Spiderman 3, where Tobey goes totally hipster-nasty and where, for two mesmerizing and action-packed hours, I had a sense of contact with the United States again. (There is even a well-positioned, dramatically lit American flag in one of the action sequences.) It was fleeting, but I felt it, especially during the brief, but hilarious characterization of the French. Anyway, it will not be long before I am off traveling once more, traveling once more. And so on.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Belize

Since I last updated this blog, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died. This is a travel blog and not an obituary, but his death, in particular, is worth mentioning. The title of this blog -- "...and so on" -- is plagiarized directly from his novels. Read a couple of his books and you will find that he sprinkles this combination of words throughout quite a few of them. "...And so on" works well as a title to a travel blog, I thought, and beyond that I really just like the way he uses it: often times "and so on" is used abruptly and flippantly at the end of a sentence, when more information is expected, or when it could even, in fact, be useful to the reader. My use of this as a title was an in-joke that I imagined very few people would understand (probably none), and I also used "and so on" directly in a couple of my entries, ending a few sentences in much the same way that Kurt Vonnegut does in his novels. (Or I attempted to, as the case may be.) I had planned to mention all of this in passing as I wrapped up the blog -- as a recent university graduate, not citing sources makes me feel guilty and fills me with shame -- but this is a better time than any. Surely I am joining others in saying, "God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut!" You wrote enjoyable fiction.


My meeting with Joe Barolo at the airport in Belize City was somewhat stressful. Like a good 20's-something traveler, Joe had given me the absolute minimum of information necessary to meet him at the airport. "I arrive around 10 AM," he had written in his last e-mail. It was the Saturday of Easter weekend, and had I not been able to find Joe at the airport, I am not sure how we would have found each other; nearly every business in Belize City was closed for the weekend and neither Joe nor I had phones. After walking circles around the airport to find him, then trying to obtain passenger lists from a Continental airlines representative, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around. "They lost my luggage," Joe said, and indeed they had.

Fortunately, Caye Caulker, Belize is one of the better areas of the world to not have one's luggage. A small island in the Caribbean, there is not a single paved road on the island. Walking too quickly around town will result in constant admonitions from the locals to "Slow down, mon!" , and all transportation is via golf-cart. For the approximately 72 hours that it took for Joe to finally receive his luggage, nobody appeared to notice or care that he was not wearing any shoes.

The main attraction to Caye Caulker is its status as the launching point for diving the world-famous "Blue Hole," which Joe and I, in fact, dived (dove?). We had heard from a couple of people that it was an "okay" dive, and expensive for what the experience actually entailed. Joe and I completely disagreed. The site takes divers immediately down to 130 feet, where it begins to get quite dark and nitrogen narcosis sets in for approximately 50% of the divers (me!). The Blue Hole was formerly a cave, so at this depth divers can swim through giant, overhanging stalactites and look down into what appears to be an unending wall of dark, blue water. This is unlike any dive I have ever experienced, and, as Joe said, it feels as if you are in outer space. The ascent took us through two schools of 8-10 foot reef sharks, lazily swimming above us.

While on Caye Caulker we also took a snorkeling trip and did a hike around the north part of the Caye, where we spent approximately 30 minutes watching a stand off between some sort of injured Belizean hawk and a dog that was mildly interested in ending the injured hawk's life. Joe and I rooted heavily for the dog, but both animals ended up walking away from the confrontation.

Anecdotes never tell the whole story, but I will include one as an example of life on Caye Caulker. Joe and I had picked up breakfast to go -- eggs, beans, and tortillas -- and decided to eat it at the picnic table of the hostel where we were staying. Suddenly, from the side of hostel the proprietress of the hostel piped up: "Young man," she yelled to Joe, "the old man wants to give you some fish." "What?" Joe asked, confused. "The old man wants to give you some fish!" she repeated, and pointed to an old man at the entrance to the hostel's sandy courtyard. There stood a shriveled, hunched-over, nearly toothless old man, and indeed he had two small fishes in his hand and was beckoning Joe. Joe rose from the table, trying to assess logically where this situation was leading. He walked over to the man and had a 5 minute conversation with him. It was a conversation where Joe understood, as he put it, "about 20 words." The man was an alcoholic, and what Joe did glean from the conversation was that the old man wanted to trade the fish for rum. What luck! One of the other hostelers had left a nearly finished bottle of rum on top of the refrigerator, which we happily traded away for the two fish. Naturally, Joe and I had no idea what to do with these fish, so we wrapped them up in an old cereal bag and placed them in the refrigerator with the intent to later barbecue them. We never managed to accomplish this, and unless someone has since cleaned the refrigerator, they are probably in the first stages of decomposition. Oops.

From Caye Caulker we headed inland to Orange Walk, access point to the Mayan ruins of Lamanai. The ruins are visited by a 1.5 hour river boat-ride, which is equally as, if not more , enjoyable than the ruins themselves. We saw a crocodile (briefly), a number of birds, some bats, and many species of white, sweaty, cruise-boaters doing the same trip as us. Unforunately, this portion of the trip coincided with a five day heat wave that was to break 100 degrees every day. Egad. Even the Belizeans were complaining. Ascending a Mayan pyramid in this weather is not really very enjoyable, but we did it anyway. Later we soaked in the pool of our hotel, where, it appeared to Joe and I, most of the gangsters and thugs of Orange Walk hang out smoking cigarettes and spliffs. The hotel where we were staying had outstanding satellite television, and as this was the first time in months that I had access to such a luxury, one of the evenings saw Joe and I watch six hours of television while laying in bed and drinking cuba libres. Felix Hernandez nearly no-hit the Red Sox, and I was snug as a bug.

After a long day of travel, we reached the final destination of our trip: Placencia, Belize. Placencia is one long peninsula and feels like an island. Once again, island mentality prevailed, and Joe and I adapted ourselves and took things as slowly as possible. We rented a tandem bicycle one day,which resulted in more than a few curious glances, and spent many afternoons relaxing, reading, and swimming. We befriended two young Danish girls, and Joe proceeded to introduce them to the Joseph Barolo brand of American jingoism. After somehow persuading them to perform a duet of the Danish national anthem, Joe laughingly informed them that their national anthem sounded "nice, but is not a real national anthem." Joe began many references to America with lines like, "In America, where we invented freedom...", when such a statement was unecessary or not relevant to the story. One of the girls would explain something about Denmark, and Joe would segue with, "Well, in a real country...." Later, they politely asked Joe where he would be flying to from Belize City, and his response was in good form : "Well, I'm flying back to America, so I guess I'm flying to... paradise...?" Somehow the Danish girls tolerated these statements in good humor. Like a good American, Joe ate 6 cheesburgers during his 10 days with me in Belize. A few of them were eaten as post-dinner snacks.

During one evening in Placencia, the scariest event of my trip took place (an apt reader will note that this must be quite scary, indeed, if it was to be more scary than the incident in Thailand with Gremlin the cat). You know how once in a while you will wake up in the middle of the night and think that you see someone in your room? Quickly you realize that it is not a person, in fact, but not before a quick rush of adrenaline surges through your body. In Placencia, and for the first time in my life, I woke up in the middle of the night to find someone actually standing in my room.

Joe and I had a double room at the hotel, with my bed next to the door. I sleep with ear-plugs, but something roused me enough to cause me to turn over and take a look toward the door. The door was open (very stupidly we failed to lock it that night), and about two steps inside the room was a skinny, skull-cap toting Belizean of about 30 years old. He was staring at Joe's bed, not looking at me, but I quickly jumped up in bed and shouted at him, "WHAT DO YOU WANT?!?" At this point I was in a crouching position and looking to see if he had a weapon. He responded to me, but with the ear-plugs still in I could not hear his response, so again I shouted "WHAT DO YOU WANT?!?" Again he answered, more calmly than I had expected, and after removing my ear-plugs he explained he was looking for "water." He went on to tell me that he was getting water for a couple of Germans, and made an inexplicable flapping motion with his hands. It was then that I realized he was drunk or high on something, and I told him that I was not going to give him my only bottle of water. The situation ended bizarrely. He asked if he could have a sip from my water bottle, to which I confusingly obliged, and he explained that his name was Junior and that we should meet him at a dance the following night. He acted like we were friends, repeated that he hoped to see us at the Tipsy Tuna bar that next evening, gave me his knuckles as a sign of comraderie, and left. What the hell had just happened?

Joe certainly could not answer this question. He slept through the whole goddamned thing! How is this possible, you might ask, with my yelling at Junior? I asked Joe the same question, and he responded that he had simply assumed that I was talking to someone through the screen window. What an assumption! At the time he was actually angry at me for doing this in the middle of the night, and about two minutes after Junior had left -- and while I was still trying to slow my heart rate -- Joe grumpily asked me to lock the door. I slept pretty poorly the rest of the night, thinking all the while about Junior and his unquenchable midnight thirst. The following night we went to the bar and I asked around to find Junior, hoping to explain to him the enormity of his error in judgment. Junior was not to be found.

Now I am in Guatemala with a friend of mine from Seattle, Matt. I met up with Matt in Guatemala City two nights ago, and now we are enjoying the quaint, colonial town of Antigua. We will travel together for two weeks, ending in San Salvador, El Salvador, the gem of Central America.

On Costa Rica and Serendipity

I left off waiting for my parents to arrive in slummy San Jose. As I write this entry it is now my last day in San Jose, and I must say that the city is more endearing than I first thought; San Jose, like fine wine, simply takes time. Pregnant street-dwellers aside, the city has a haphazard ecclecticism (this could also read "lack of urban planning") that keeps things, well, interesting.

The night before my parent's arrival I decided to attend a concert/symphony at the National Theater in San Jose, indisputably the nicest building in the entire city. The concert, itself, was unnotable (to a symphonic layman, anyway), except for what happened before entering the building: as I was about to enter through the iron gate that leads to the double-doors of the theater, a black car with tinted windows decided that, in fact, I was not going to enter through the gates at that particular moment. The car wasn't exactly going to run me over -- the driver was driving 5 MPH or so -- but it was very clear that he was not going to stop for me. The vehicle was either official-looking or slightly gangsterish; common sense dictated that I move out of its way. Out of the back of the black car stepped a crisply dressed, albeit short, Costa Rican man. Standing next to me at that point was a Costa Rican guy of about my age who leaned over to whisper to his friend: "El Presidente," he said, pointing at the man who had just exited the vehicle. I looked back at the official-looking man, who had no visible bodyguards, and then asked the Costa Rican boy, "¿El Presidente de que?" "De Costa Rica," he explained, and I realized that I was standing within arm's length of the President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias. I turned to Mr. Arias, said "Hola" to him, and he gave me a polite nod of the head. This was the extent of the exchange; we both then entered the theater (I to the third floor, Mr. Arias to the front row). I would love to have this moment with him again, as there are a thousand things I might have said to the Costa Rican President: "Mr. Arias, as a citizen of the United States of America, it is an honor present to you the McDonald's Chicken McNuggets that, as an American, I carry with me in my pockets. I'm Lovin' It!"

My parents and younger sister arrived the following evening, and the next morning we prop-planed down to Drake Bay in southwest Costa Rica. The town of Drake is undeveloped (our baggage was delivered by tractor to our cabins), and the cabins are designed in a classy, if not minimalistic, fashion. Mornings began with hot, Costa Rican coffee served to our door-step, which overlooked Drake Bay and a rising sun that was early for my tastes (6 AM). The town of Drake serves as a springboard for viewing the absurdly plentiful wildlife of the peninsula, and four of the five days saw our family taking "adventures" to do so. We went SCUBA diving/snorkeling the first day, went for a 2.5 hour hike to a secluded bay for snorkeling on the second day, did a combined horseback ride/zip-line canopy tour that left most of us with horrendously chafed legs and asses on the third day, and on the fourth did a guided tour through Corcovado National Park.

As I mentioned, it is the wildlife that is the draw to this area. We saw three types of monkeys -- spider, howler, and white-faced capuchin -- of which a troupe of the latter decided to spend an evening tromping and stomping the roof and trees of our cabin. We saw a sloth, two crocodiles, birds birds birds (the Scarlet Macaw was king), a Basilisk lizard, Jesus Christ lizards, a racoony sort of thing, and so on. On one of our boat trips (boats are still the preferred method of transportation), we spent about half an hour circling through a pod of 80-100 spotted dolphins, who were polite enough to put on a show for us and left us thankful for the existence of dolphins. After these excursions we enjoyed slow lunches with fresh juice, followed by afternoons of reading and hammocking. Dinners were communal and plentiful, and a beer or two (or gin and tonic or two) was all we needed to put us instantly to sleep not long after last of the sunlight had disappeared. It was a very, very good week with my family.

As the title of this blog mentions serendipity, I will explain the second instance of being at the right place at the right time (for the less perceptive, the first ocurred at the National Theater). After SCUBA diving and snorkeling off of Isla del Cano, a small island off the west coast of Costa Rica, our boat operators dropped us on this (very) small island for lunch. Suddenly, two of my good friends from Seattle, Alex Casey and Ana Torve, walked up and said hello. I had no idea they were in Costa Rica, and last they had heard I was simply "traveling around the world." It was good to see them, and we had about an hour to catch up with each other before their boat zipped them back to the main-land. Sing along! "It's a world of laughter, a world of tears..."

My younger sister and parents flew home, and two days later my buddy Nicko arrived in San Jose . Nicko and I are good friends: we lived in a shared-house together last year, a rental house where Nicko and I managed to spread 125,000 "common mint" seeds in the backyard to see if we could successfully introduce and cultivate this wonderfully invasive species in an urban environment. We were surprised to find that we could not.

We spent a day together in San Jose, and the evening saw us take advantage of one of those San Jose nuances that has caused me to become increasingly fond of the city: there is a video game arcade in San Jose that has video games exclusively from the 80's and early 90's. Street Fighter? Yes. Tekken? You got it. 1943? Dig. I convinced two Canadians to join Nicko and I, and together we drank beer and played video games. Nicko and I placed 4th and 5th, respectively, on the all-time high-score list for "1943."

We then headed to Cahuita on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, a town that is laid back to the point of zombie-hood. The locals have a Caribbean, island-type mentality that contributes to this, but the tourists are not far behind; the oppressive heat, coupled with the copious consumption of marijuana, creates a scene where people seem to be milling about aimlessly all day long. Nicko and I had a very difficult time finding a hotel, as nearly all the hotel owners were nowhere to be found. There is not a paved road in the town, and a couple of drug-selling locals seem to have sampled too much of their own.

Nicko and I were productive, though. Our first day was spent on a beach where, inexplicably, a pack of approximately a dozen horses went racing down the beach; there was no owner in sight. Our second day we took two-hour surf lessons, and on our third day we took a four mile hike through a national park, where we saw a lot of monkeys (and a dead one, still hanging upside down by its tail!).

On day one we also visited the Afro-Caribbean museum of Cahuita, the most improbable museum I have ever seen. Nicko and I first passed this "museum" on rented bicycles: it is in the living room of a dilapidated house, with a bedsheet functioning as a "door" to the living room and music BOOMING out of the house. The music sounded like a Caribbean version of The Doors -- it was very, very keyboard-heavy. As this was unlike any museum I had previously seen (or heard), Nicko and I promptly entered the museum and met Sankey, the owner.

Sankey is a great guy -- he is a big black man with dread-locks and an infectious laugh -- but I have to say that he sort of half-asses it when it comes to entrepreneurship. His "museum" had some old work equipment, as well as an old, Mercedes-Benz bicycle, but it was in the middle of his living room. He also had a sign up for a "sauna" in the back, which didn't seem to ever have existed. According to a local surf-instructor, Sankey also constructed home-made, tent-style accomodations in his backyard for tourists. It was a plan that never took off.

But -- BUT! -- Sankey loves music! It turned out that the keyboard we had heard upon entering the "museum" was Sankey, himself. His real passion was the bass, and after I told Sankey that Nicko plays guitar and I play the keyboard, we arranged a jam session for the following afternoon. Our jam session lasted about three and a half hours and we came up with some pretty good music. All of us were plugged into an amplifier in the living room, and Sanke cranked it up well enough that the neighbors were forced to listen to us. The majority of Sanke's musical repertoire, naturally, is Caribbean music, and his bass-playing reflected that fact. Rhythmically it is a completely different style than anything Nicko and I are used to, but we had a good time with it. Our set ended not too long after a clinically crazy town resident -- a grey-haired, former New Yorker named Michael who somehow managed to get himself down to Cahuita, Costa Rica and then stayed there -- burst in the living room through the bed-sheet door and tried to add his harmonica to the mix. He was terribly drunk and shrieking and almost knocked over the keyboard.

From Cahuita Nicko and I headed to Rio Cuarto, in northern Costa Rica. On my flight from Puerto Rico to Costa Rica I met Carlos Colon, a retired Puerto Rican man of about 45 years-old who now owns a farm in Rio Cuarto. Generously, he extended an invitation for me to visit, and Nicko and I spent two days in Rio Cuarto with him. He treated us to an outstanding, river-lobster dinner in town the first night, and Nicko and I spent a half-day fishing in the lake on his property. (I caught one fish and threw it back.) His farm is 75 acres, he has about thirty head of cattle and a few goats, and everything is green. Absolutely exhausted from fishing (please read this as a joke), Nicko and I retreated to the hills of Rio Cuarto for five hours of thermal pools. We could not find Carlos the following morning, so we caught a bus and headed back to San Jose.

Now I am back in San Jose, Nicko having departed very early this morning. It is my last night in San Jose, and although I would like to celebrate that fact, it is Maundy Thursday and everything -- everything -- is closed. Tomorrow I fly to Belize, where I begin a ten-day excursion with one Joseph Barolo, a friend of mine from California who has been known to wear bunny suits publicly. More to come.

Paris, London, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica -- Oh my!

It has been so long since updating this that I am overwhelmed, simply overwhelmed. The reason for this is that Puerto Rico has some of the worst/most expensive internet access I have come to find.

I left off at Paris, a city that needs absolutely no introduction and, insofar as I know, is the most heavily touristed in the world. It deserves this, of course. And while as Americans we like to pretend that we dislike France or the French (or the French economic model, anyway) I say economics shmeconomics! -- they live well in Paris.

It was only after deciding to go to Paris that I was reminded that a friend of mine from Maple Valley, Washington, Kristen, is living in Paris and working on a Masters Degree at the American University there. She is renting a quintessentially cute, Parisian apartment in the Trocadero area, about a three minute walk from the Eiffel Tower viewing point. In short, she is living something close to the Parisian dream. She has a spare loft-bed where I slept for a few nights, and a kitchen that I was able to use as my own. For the first time since Jerusalem, I felt temporarily "settled." I was very comfortable, Kristen is an excellent hostess, and we prepared spectacular meals together and drank liberal amounts of red wine.

Although I was there for more than week, I will exempt Paris from my blog update right now. If you do not already know about Montmartre, Champs Elysees, or the Notre Dame, etc., etc., etc., then friend, it is time for you to request time off and speak to your travel agent. I had an excellent time in Paris -- a really, really good time -- but here is not the place to talk about it.

From Paris I took a train-ride through the Chunnel to London, where I was to spend one evening before flying to (egad!) Puerto Rico. Fortunately for me, my sister has a good friend living in London, Jen, with whom I was able to stay for the evening. Jen works as a business consultant for Hitachi, contracted for the last two years by the Microsoft Corporation, a quite profitable business based in Redmond, Washington. As a result, she has a very modern, spacious apartment on Portabello street in London, where by morning there is a bustling street market, and by night the bars are crowded. We were able to enjoy both, though Jen had a cold and I was exhausted. She treated me to a delicious (and large) dinner of English/Indian food, acted as an excellent guide while walking the area, and I was sad to have spent just a day with her. London, though, is still outrageously expensive. I was absolutely outraged.

The following morning, on March 3rd, 2007, I embarked upon a flight toward a destination I had no intention of visting: Puerto Rico. Obviously, then, I never resolved the situation with the airlines. I have to admit that part of the reason that I could not settle anything -- that is, could not persuade Expedia, Air India, or American Airlines to do something about switching my ticket -- was out of pride. I had to call each of these companies from a crowded internet cafe in Budapest, where it was quiet enough that everyone, by default, was forced to listen to my end of the conversation. "No, you see, I accidentally booked the ticket for Puerto Rico, but I want to go to Costa Rica." "No, you're right, I did not check it very thoroughly when I confirmed the booking." I sounded pathetic, and had to repeat these lines over and over aain. After making three phone calls to all three companies involved in the transaction -- and explaining to a variety of individuals my unfortunate, self-inflicted predicament -- I gave up and decidedthat I was, in fact, flying to Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico ho! A brief layover at JFK airport in New York -- my first time back in America in 5 1/2 months -- was the first time I have ever felt any degree of reverse culture shock. (For whatever reason I did not notice this after studying in Spain.) This probably had more to do with the fact that my plane disembarked at the same time that a JetBlue flight arrived from Cancun, Mexico, teeming with newly bronzed Americans wearing "Save Water Drink Beer" and "...all I got was this t-shirt" t-shirts. I cannot be overly critical of American culture, though; if I would have had the time, one of my highest priorities was to eat a hamburger while back in America. I didn't have time, though, so instead I ate a Butterfinger. It was so delicious that afterward I decided to write a poem about it. It is titled, "Lay off my Butterfinger":

You are crispety,
You are crunchety,
You are peanut-buttery in a way I had nearly forgotten,
good friend,

You are more important to me than my real fingers,
My Butterfinger.


In London I had picked up a guidebook for Puerto Rico, and over the course of my flight to Puerto Rico I developed a high level of stress: I came to find that Puerto Rico is not for budget travelers. At all. I should have known this, really. First, and foremost, it's America (or kind of, anyway), so naturally it is expensive. Secondly, it is an island. Third, and highly relevant, is the fact that San Juan's port is the biggest cruise terminal in the Western Hemisphere. Yikes. According to the guidebook, the cheapest accomodation in the city was $40 per night. Yikes again. Rental cars are the method of transport for nearly all tourists.

Knowing this, I landed inPuerto Rico at the lovely hour of 1:35 AM and decided to spend the night in the airport. I slept sitting up, with my head on my backpack. This was the last straw for my travel-weary body, and a sore throat enveloped me over the next 48 hours.

At a bus-stop transfer point during my bus-ride into Old San Juan from the airport, I met 88 year-old Gloria Rodriguez. She is a very interesting woman: she was born in Cuba as the daughter of the chief justice (or equivalent) of the Cuban Supreme Court, and knew Fidel Castro personally from college. She and her husband caught the last plane out of Cuba after the revolution. "Fidel changed so much," she kept repeating, "he was never like that before. He was never violent." Actually, she kept repeating herself a lot. Really, she never stopped repeating herself. Gloria was a very nice woman -- that day she was on her way to the San Francisco Cathedral in Old San Juan -- but there is an indisputable fact about her that I soon came to realize: Gloria Rodriguez was senile.

Once in town Gloria and I made it halfway to the cathedral (the cathedral is roughly 400 yards from the bus-stop), when she decided that we (she) needed something to drink. "Para animarnos," she explained. While walking, I would say that we moved at roughly 1/4 the speed at which I would normally walk. We stopped in a cafe where I ordered a hot chocolate and she a coffee, into which she put more sugar than anyone I have ever seen. This is saying something, as in the Middle East they really put a lot of sugar into tea. She spilled the sugar all over the entire table in the process -- her hands shook quite a bit -- and during our stay in the restaurant she proceeded to tell our waiter five times that I was an American. She did this to quite a few other people in the restaurant, which really put me on the spot; there was a lot of smiling and nodding on my part. Not only was my being an American irrelevant to the waiter -- there is no shortage of American tourists in San Juan -- but the restaurant was slammed, as well. People would ignore her, and she would whisper to me that it was because they were crazy (by implication she was not). Gloria finally finished her coffee, and looked down to find that the entire bottom of the large coffee cup was filled with sugar. She then proceeded to spoon out and eat all of the sugar. "I love sugar!" she exclaimed in Spanish. Finally it was time to leave, and she left our waiter four pennies as a "tip." The waiter, I think, wanted to kill Gloria Rodriguez. Though my time with Gloria was a strange three hours of my life, her intentions were good.

I spent two nights in San Juan, mostly recovering from illness and listening to Salsa/Reggaeton music through the walls of the hotel, before heading to Culebra, a small island off the east coast of Puerto Rico. I did this both to escape the high costs of Old San Juan as well as to literally escape, but it turned out that both of these assumptions were not totally correct. Camping on the island was somewhat expensive ($20 per night), and there were typically anywhere from 30-60 other tents at the campgrounds.

It didn't matter, though. Playa Flamenco, the most popular beach on the island (this is relative, of course), is consistently rated one of the top-ten beaches in the Caribbean, and once in a while one of the top-ten in the world. Regardless of what you think about these sorts of ratings, the point is that it's a really nice beach: white sand, blue/green water, a few palm trees, and most importantly, almost no development. It is a Conde Nast sort of beach. The island very, very well preserved , but it is a type of preservation that puts a conservationist in a predicament: the reason it is not developed is that the U.S. Navy used it as a practice ground for aerial bombing and shelling until 1975, so the island is still littered with unexploded ordnance. How's that for conservation? If you ask me, I think it's fantastic, and as a side note I am considering adopting this as a campaign platform for a future term in public office: it will be called the "Bomb everything" conservationist platform. Under my tutelage, the world's rainforests, rivers, and endangered species will be safely protected by high-grade explosives. Who would go near them? "The people have spoken, and the people want BOMBS!!!" Anyway, in Culebra they are slowly being cleared, and as of a few years ago apparently it was not uncommon for the cleared explosives to be periodically detonated in a remote area of the island; the residents would simply hear the explosion and see the accompanying black mushroom cloud.

I spent seven straight days on this beach and allowed myself to deteriorate as a respectable member of society. I did not shave during this week, nor did I take a shower. I wore the same shirt and swimming trunks all day every day (the shirt was a button-up with a collar, if you're thinking that I don't have any class). For whatever reason, by the end of the week this shirt smelled like a doughnut.

My stay at the beach was idyllic, though. After day two I managed to get the best camping spot on the whole beach. (This was objectively corroborated by the half-dozen or so people who, while walking down the beach, stopped to tell me that I had "the best spot on the beach.") It was the only spot with a direct view of the water, and I had the beach's main attraction right in front of me: a rusting tank half-submerged in the white sand. It was quite a view. I bought a massive load of groceries on my way in, so for the most part I did not have to leave and ate quite well; over the course of two mornings I ate an entire box of Fruity Pebbles cereal, and I also ate four more Butterfingers: "Crocante, Cruciente, Cremosa con Cacahuate!" in Spanish. I read a lot, began running again, did some casual star-gazing, slept like a newborn, and met a group of Spring Breakers who improved my opinion about South Carolina. After breakfast in the mornings, I would pop in my iPod and make the half-mile or so walk to the entrance of the campground to "Joe's Ice Shack," where there was hot black coffee. It was 90 degrees every day. I relaxed.

The point is that this is a very, very good place to unwind, to forget about life, to figure "things" out, or to generally disconnect from the rest of the world. And it is easily accessible from the contintental U.S.

Now I am in San Jose, Costa Rica. This city does not have much to see, and has some pretty nasty areas. (I'm sure that there are other cities in Central America that will top this, though.) On the taxi-ride into town last night, block after block of derelicts culminated with a fantastically preganant woman laying on her back in the filthy street, her shirt rolled up to expose her swollen belly. I could not believe my good luck to have seen something so revolting. Tomorrow, though, my parents and younger sister, Shannon, arrive in San Jose, whereupon we will fly to southwest Costa Rica to a town called Drake. There will begin a week of relative luxury of the sort that I have not enjoyed for quite a while. "Take care of me, parents, for I am your son." No more filthy youth hostels, no more crappy street food. It's time for family. And it's time for a gin and tonic.

Budapest, or A Week of Mingling with the Hungarian Bourgeoisie

Budapest. Buda and Pest. This was not part of my "plan" (I put this in quotes because I am not a good "planner" and I did not "plan" Budapest . More on my poor planning below).

I had heard good things about Budapest, of course, but had not heard very much about it. But it was a logical choice: I had five weeks before I needed to be in Costa Rica, and Budapest is relatively close to Bucharest. So I bought the train-ticket.

I was happy to get out of Bucharest. Very happy, in retrospect. Like any large city, I cannot condemn the entire city as " boring" or "lifeless" or " sterile;" I am sure that Bucharest has its "hidden treasures," as the guidebooks like to announce. But I do not have many good things to say about Bucharest. The streets are too wide, the public transportation is not very good (and stops too early), the food is so-so. Bucharest is not a "happening" place, in my opinion. Given recent history, of course, this makes sense. But c'mon, Bucharest , you're so boring ! The stereotype about Romanian women, however, is spot on.

So on to Budapest I decided to go, but not before receiving a lesson about communism. The train-ride was to be overnight, so I made the necessary preparations and arrived at the train-station a full hour early. Buying a ticket for the train, however, was much more difficult than I had anticipated. After buying a sleeper-car "ticket," I attempted to board the train, but was stopped. According to the men in uniform , I had a ticket but not a " reservation." They sent me back to the "Reservations" area, where I spoke to three different 50+ women , each of whom were bored to the point of suicide. They sent me back to where I had originally purchased my "ticket" – a kiosk on the other side of the building – and this woman promptly sent me back to the train. The men at the train tried to send me back to reservations, and I had finally had enough. Like anyone, I enjoy a good walk once in a while , but this was no longer enjoyable . I asked to speak to the conductor , and was flatly denied. "Who do I need to talk to?" I asked. "What can I do to get on this train?"

Finally, one of the men shrugged his shoulders and made a small motion with his hand, indicating that I should board the car nearest to him. This was absolutely not the answer I had wanted – in essence, he was telling me that I could board the train, but the responsibility was not his if I were to get in trouble or get kicked off for it. After boarding the car – not a sleeper-car – and plopping myself down into an uncomfortable seat, I came to the conclusion that the legacy of communism is alive and well in Romania . From start to finish, nobody was responsible for anything that had just transpired.

The room in the train car had seats for six people, but they were generally unoccupied and I was the only occupant who stayed all the way to Budapest . So my room ended up functioning as a revolving door of Romanians. First was a 35 year-old Romanian of Hungarian descent. He was a professional dancer, and throughout the trip he played me a number of Romanian folk-songs and dance videos on his very modern cell phone. In general he was very interested to talk to me, and was deeply in love with his fiance. He left after four hours , and the next man, whose age I would approximate at 75 years, was a man who looked (physically)as if his life had been difficult. He mumbled to himself as he boarded , took gigantic swigs of hard alcohol from a clear-plastic bottle, popped in a cough-drop and laid down flat on his back. He was snoring within three minutes -- what happened to that cough drop? -- and his cheeks sunk far enough into his face that I began to wonder if this would be his last train-ride as a mortal. His mouth was also open, and his lips were curling around his teeth. I would describe his facial expression as " corpse-like." He made it through, though. My last two travel-companions were a husband and wife who smelled like farm.

There are a lot of intangibles that make a city good for traveling. Some of them have nothing to do with the city, itself: the traveler might be jet-lagged or sick, the weather might be terrible, it could be the off-season, etc. But there are also a lot of factors that simply make one city better than others. As soon as I stepped off the train into Budapest at 8 AM, I immediately felt happy to be there. Goodbye Bucharest !

Budapest is a high-class city. It is not a wealthy city – it is not too difficult to travel on the cheap, there– but it is one of the few cities to which I have traveled where, regardless of income, the citizens are universally classy. There is a focus on the arts here that I have not seen anywhere else. It is a liberal city, calling itself the "gay capital" of Central Europe, and for the first time in a very long time, I am seeing hipsters . Yes, real hipsters. Chuck Taylors and all. You could drop them off in Capitol Hill, Seattle, and they would be at home. Well, almost. They are a bit less pasty and are notably less anorexic than their Seattle counterparts.

Days in Budapest generally go roughly like this: mornings are spent at a café, afternoons exploring the sights of the city, dinner is early and possibly Hungarian, and the evening is spent enjoying the fine-arts or the fine-bars (this city ranks a close second to Dublin in the piles of puke that I have seen on the ground on the "mornings after ").

Besides the major sights in Budapest, while there I saw two films (one of them at the nicest movie theater I have ever been to), a ballet ( Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and an opera ( Andre Chenier), with the opera taking place at the Hungarian State Opera House. Acoustically the opera was perfect, and the ballet was a lot of fun. I saw it with Eva, a 21 year-old, gay New Yorker currently studying philosophy in Munich and singing with a Bavarian choir. We spent three days together seeing the sights of Budapest, whereupon she left for 30 hours of train-rides with five train-changes (I subsequently found out that she missed nearly all of them).

Anyway, seeing as the ballet was "Snow White," the theater of the ballet was approximately 50% children, all of whom were laughing and screaming with delight during the show. One of the boys in front of me was wearing his father's tie, and it ended roughly at his knees. Dopey was the indisputable king of the show, a real tour de force with a keen sense of comedic irony and timing. As always in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the prince saved the day by kissing Snow White after she has died, which, if you ask me, is a kiss with grave – very, very grave – moral implications.

I should mention that all four tickets – the movies, the ballet, and the opera – cost me a combined $17.50. Normally I do not mention how "cheap" things are, as everywhere I have been traveling is "cheap." But I do not quite understand this. Are the arts subsidized here? Or is there simply a higher supply of them? Regardless, it is a pricing structure that allows everyone in the city to attend. And everyone here does attend.

So Budapest is a city where, for a short period of time, you, too, feel as if you are a high-class citizen. It is a good feeling. There is a limit to this, though: when I show up to an opera wearing tennis shoes, jeans that I inherited from my father (that have gaping holes in them), and a collar-less shirt, I do not feel "high-class." Instead I feel a little bit like an "idiot." There is a limit to what I can carry while traveling, though, and a suit is not on that list. But most tourists throw themselves wholeheartedly into the act. Today I drank coffee at the most venerated coffeehouse in the city, Gerbeaud, and had the misfortune of sitting next to the two most pretentious New York men I have ever been forced to listen to. One of them, believe it or not, was actually wearing a black turtleneck; at some point, I believe, this man took Pretention 101 at an ivy league school. I was trying to read in this cafe, but their commentary made this impossible. "Why don't we go to the lap pool," suggested the man in black. "Aren't you in the mood for the lap pool?" I am not a praying man, but seeing as God is the only one I know of who is capable of smiting someone, I asked for his help.

I have seen the city very well in seven days, but I will always be happy to come back to Budapest. Any city where hot, mulled wine is served in street-side vendor-carts already has a leg up on the others. Combine mulled wine with a city full of Turkish baths (I literally combined the two one afternoon, in fact), and, my friend, you are in a very good place. Mark my words, though: Budapest is the next Prague -- it is becoming (or has become) an American ex-pat capital, bringing with it both the benefits and detriments of such a status. I am sure there are a lot of people who noticed this before me.

At the beginning of this entry I mentioned that I am a bad "planner," or one who is bad at "planning." In four weeks I meet my parents in San Jose, Costa Rica, which I am excited for. Unfortunately, when booking the ticket for this online – London to San Jose, that is – I entered the wrong airport code: SJU instead of SJO. Easy enough mistake, I would argue. So now, entirely by accident, I am to visit San Juan, Puerto Rico. Oops. When I received the e-mail confirmation from Expedia.com, I could feel my face turn red and my armpits began to itch a little bit. So this is something I have to work on. Both the ticket, that is, as well as my irresponsibility.

Now I am in Paris. I don't really feel the need to comment on this city, though. Hopefully you know it by now. Instead, I would like to go drink some coffee. I really like Paris in the almost-Springtime.

"Ay-Gaz!"

The above quote is part of a sing-songy jingle that is played daily throughout the side-streets of Istanbul. For much of my time there, it was a large part of the mystery of Istanbul.

I hadn't realized until just now, by the way, that it had been over three weeks since updating this. Sorry. Once in a while it is bound to happen. Where I left off was at Istanbul, a city that now rides very, very high on my "places I like a lot" list.

But first I will digress from Istanbul back to Jerusalem, because Israelis, sometimes, can be quite humorous. Staying in Adam's apartment in the market in Jerusalem, I was privy to the daily bartering routine between store-owners and shoppers, truly a sight to behold -- it was in my face every time I walked outside. It was a noisy affair with lots of gesticulating (this was especially true with the older generation), multiple bouts of feigned disgust or disapproval by one or both parties, and finally the purchase was made. I suppose it fit in with the stereotype I had of a Mediterranean-style market.

The flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul was even more mayhem. Typically, in my experience, the "seat belt" sign turns off in an airplane without much fanfare, and people continue about their business. On the El Al flight to Istanbul a full one-third of the passengers immediately stood-up when the sign turned off, and began milling about all over the plane or finding friends in other seats. It was a social event that I was, by default, invited to attend. I didn't see any reason to mill about, so I stayed seated.

After twenty minutes or so it calmed down a little bit, and the stewardesses began to bring coffee and tea to passengers. The older man sitting next to me, as well as quite a few of the other passengers on board, proceeded drink cup after cup after cup, stopping the stewardesses on every pass for refills. Lots of people were doing this. The stewardesses were being hounded on this flight, and it was apparent to me that it was impossible for them to keep up with the demand for tea and coffee. On one pass, the stewardess missed my seat-mate's call for a re-fill, and he began yelling at her in Hebrew as she continued down the plane. With over-exaggerated disgust, he took his plump, old-man sausage of a finger and banged it above his head to illuminate the button requesting assistance. I looked ahead of me, only then realizing that nearly 50% of the rows of seats had done the same. Everyone wanted these stewardess. Everyone needed tea. This was the noisiest flight I have ever been on.

To Istanbul. Oh, Istanbul. It is the most beautiful city I have been to.

I saw the same sights that everyone sees -- the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, and so on -- but with the exception of the Hagia Sophia, I would not necessarily call these the highlights of the city. Istanbul has every perk of the big city: it is very, very beautiful architecturally (the mosques do much for this) and has a Disney-like romance to it; there is water all around; the public transport system is functional in an ad-hoc sort of way; the night-life is booming; Istanbullus are nice and dress fashionably; and the city, as I mentioned previously, has some of the best sweets in the world. The daily prayer calls add to the ambiance. I experienced a "true" Turkish bath, saw a soccer match between the third and fourth place teams in the Turkish soccer league, and was on the losing end of many games of backgammon. At times it was unseasonably warm, other times there were snow flurries. I also met Alper in Istanbul, a 35 year-old, very sociable Turkish man, to whom I am indebted for showing me an excellent time around the city and who has an absurdly good sense of hospitality.

On one day I persuaded Antje, a German girl also going around the world (but again in the opposite direction that I am), to attend a beverage trade-fair to which I had received tickets from a hostel bartender. It was out by the airport in the middle of nowhere. At the entrance I explained that I had worked for K & L Distributors, a beer and liquor distributor -- I really did work for them once -- with the hope that I would be treated like a businessman. I was not. We stood out as foreigners and as non-business persons, but enjoyed some very interesting drinks all the same. And though I always want the best for entrepreneurs (and trade shows are not much fun for them), I can say with certainty that Kurdish milk-alcohol -- with chunks of something floating in it -- will not be successfully exported to the U.S.A. The salesmen at the event liked us, though, and generally wondered how/why the hell we were there. A show-bartender performing in front of a small crowd pulled Antje and I up at different times, and we tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to bartend for the crowd. On the third try I managed to flip a bottle of Malibu Rum into a martini shaker.

From Istanbul I took the train to Bucharest, where I planned to meet Kris, a friend of mine stationed in Romania in the Peace Corps. The train ride from Istanbul to Bucharest was straight out a children's book. My second-class sleeper car felt like first-class, with a sink and just two beds (rather than the six that I am used to). The inside of the car was wood-paneled, the windows opened widely, and away into the night I went. I shared the car with Nico, a recent recipient of a Ph. D in Plant Biology who just finished studying in Puerto Rico. For the seventeen hour train ride he had brought nothing but beer and roasted pumpkin seeds.

Kris surprised me at the train station (where I did not expect to meet him) by sneaking up from behind me and lifting me into the air. He took a good look at me (we had not seen each other in about a year) and first thing he said to me was, "you look insane." Thus commenced our week of childish behavior. I would argue that we did two things that were actually productive during our week together in Romania: one of them was ice-skating, which we did the first night. The second productive activity was when we saw "Blood Diamond," starring a notably thick-necked Leonardo DiCaprio.

The rest of our time together was a series of ill-conceived non-plans. One of our first nights in Bucharest saw us stay inside the youth hostel and play Tiger Woods Golf 2005. Another night in Bucharest, we managed to wait too long to find food, realizing too late that every restaurant in town was closed. Everything, that is, except... MCDONALDS!!! Kris and I each ordered Big Macs and large fries. Kris then decided to order a second Big Mac -- America-style! -- and I followed with another cheeseburger. I then decided to order a McFlurry for the both of us to share -- obviously we were no longer hungry -- and by this time was laughing to the point that I could barely complete the order. And the McDonalds employee? Not impressed by us at all. Nope, I can say objectively that he did not find our behavior as funny I did. Another night in Bucharest we attempted to watch the Super Bowl, but failed to do so and managed to lose Kris' cell phone.

From Bucharest we caught the train to Sighisoara, a Transylvanian town that fits the Transylvanian stereotype perfectly: snow on the ground, castles and cathedrals, very dark at night. At one point I thought I saw a vampire, but it turned out that it was just my friend, Kris, who has a vampire-like countenance. We stayed in Sighisoara for two nights and saw the town pretty decently, as it's quite small. Our last night we made dinner at the hostel with Monica, a friend of Kris' and also a Peace Corps volunteer, and later that evening we stole a handful of Pepto Bismol tablets from her because our tummies hurt.

Arbitrarily, we took the train to Arad, a town of virtually no significance for travelers. It was impulsive and we arrived without a guidebook, map, or phone, knowing nothing about the city except that Casey, another Peace Corps volunteer, lived there. Fortunately Kris managed to contact her, and she gave us a good tour. We also ate macaroni and cheese together. After less than 24 hours in the city, we left the following morning on an 11 hour train ride back to Bucharest.

After a night's sleep in Bucharest, Kris decided that he had had enough of me, and I agreed that I was also tired of him. There was nothing to see in Bucharest of any interest to us, and Kris' apartment was a two hour share-taxi ride away. We were both very tired. So he decided to leave earlier than planned. At the bus-stop where he departed, with both of us realizing that we would not see each other again for at least a year and a half, I told him that "it's time to say something poignant." "This was an ok trip," he replied.

It was just an ok trip! At some point during the trip Kris and I came up with a mantra that we were to repeat on multiple occasions (or try to, anyway) when others would ask us what we were "doing" together in Romania. The reply went like this: "We don't do much. We're not doing anything, really. When we do do something, we don't do very much of it or for very long. What we do do, we don't do it well." This, of course, doesn't answer any of the questions that people could possibly have been asking us. But people were surprisingly willing to allow us to respond with this, and it was very much the truth of our trip.

If you were to take a look at a map of Romania, our trip had no intrinsic logic to it. But once again I will invoke the quote that, "It's not about the destination, but the journey" (or something like that). This trip was not about the destination, because we had none. Nor was it really about the journey, either, since the train-rides, though beautiful, were merely a means to arbitrary destinations. Mostly this trip was about sharing a few beers with my best friend. So in that sense it was very productive.

I am still at the hostel in Bucharest (one of the best hostels I've been to, I must say), surrounded by a bunch of ridiculous characters and trying to figure out my next travel plan. One of these characters is a Romanian model/actor who I caught watching WWE wrestling yesterday. "Ha ha!" He yelled at the television. "Look at him! He brought out the table -- now it is used on him!" Somehow there is dance music going on almost all day, here. There is a resident cat, Flutu, who I continually find in my upper-level bunk-bed.

I am trying to find a way to leave here, and for the first time am floundering. I had been pursuing a travel-plan that included sailing, but this has fallen through and I am left with absolutely no itinerary to speak of. By mid-March I will be in Costa Rica. Until then? I can say with absolute honesty that I have no idea right now. I'll let you know, though!

Halva and Baklava

Although the distance between Jerusalem and Wadi Rum, Jordan is very small, there is a not-so-insignificant swath of land called the "West Bank" that makes traveling between the two complicated. As a result, back through southern Israel I went, entering Jordan at Aqaba.

On the bus-ride south-bound, I met another solo, round-the-world traveler named Stephen, from Australia. He was about my age, but had a somewhat different itinerary: his travel plans were geared toward the biggest parties on planet earth. He had been to the full moon party in Thailand, had gone to Oktoberfest and the World Cup, and next was heading to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. Out of nowhere he asked whether I planned to go to Latvia. "No," I said, "what's in Latvia?" In Latvia Stephen had made the mistake of having a 6 AM night-cap drink at a bar that, upon entering, turned out to be a strip-club. After having his drink, the bouncer proceeded to "bounce" him on the way out the door, breaking two of his ribs, stealing his camera, and forcing him to sign $2500 onto his credit card. His credit card company will not reimburse this because police reports in Latvia are difficult to come by ("So you say you lost your camera, then?"). Snap. I pass this along as my unofficial travel-warning for Latvia.

My first stop in Jordan was Wadi Rum. The guidebook made it sound like a popular tourist destination and this turned out to be absolutely false (in the winter, anyway). There are two restaurants in town, both serving one meal exactly. There are two areas in town to sleep: one is a decrepit "guest-house," the other has only tents. During my three-day stay in Wadi Rum, I saw exactly five other tourists. Luckily, two of them were Korean guys about my age, one of whom spoke English enough to get along, so the three of us spent our time there together. The scenery is unlike anything else I have seen: large islands of sandstone separated by vast expanses of desert. It gave the impression of being a miniature in a movie-set that was much, much too big. "Let's go to that one," one of us would say, pointing to a rock outcropping. An hour later, we would finally arrive at "that one." It is amazingly beautiful, and I think even more so for people (like me) who are not used to this sort of scenery. Two of the nights I spent in town, sleeping in a tent, and the third was spent in a Bedouin tent out in the desert, organized by a local tourist agency and something that many tourists do. All these nights were so cold that I could sleep in one position only. The stars are very clear in the desert.

Continuing in my tradition of quoting non-native English speakers who, for brief moments in time, manage to beautifully penetrate the tangles of the English language, I will quote my Korean friend, Mugo. Mugo spoke English better than he thought he did, but had some difficulty understanding me; he was the liaison between me and his Korean friend, Soo-Hyun. Sitting atop a sand-stone mini-mountain that we had all climbed as the sun was beginning to set, he lit up a cigarette and looked around. "The world is very, very amazing," he sighed.

From Wadi Rum we caught the bus to Petra. On the bus-ride north I met an American named William from Atlanta, also going around the world but in the opposite direction that I am. He had been invited to stay and work in Wadi Rum for a month, but after flipping a coin to decide whether or not to stay, he hopped on the bus. I thought this was pretty funny; this decision -- a very simple decision -- completely changed the course of his trip. We got along pretty well, but this was an otherwise un-notable meeting between travelers, except for one thing: we had been talking for about an hour when he pulled out "Lolita," by Vladimir Nabakov, the book he was currently reading. I laughed and said that it was coincidental that he was reading that book, as it was the last book I had read. He asked what I was currently reading, and I pulled out "Trinity," by Leon Uris. This turned out to be the last book that he had finished. Statistically this is a tremendous coincidence -- really, I cannot emphasize this enough. These books are no longer "popular fiction;" it isn't as if we were reading "The Da Vinci Code" and "Life of Pi." The odds against this are staggering. Sadly, although our initial meeting had such cosmic implications, we parted ways unceremoniously 48 hours later.

Before this departure, however, we visited Petra, the "City of Stone." The "Rose City." Some call it the eighth wonder of the world, but I'm not sure that I would give it that status. It's beautiful and strange, but most of the time I felt that I was just looking at it, just looking. This is probably a personal failure -- I didn't do much research or anything. I would recommend seeing Petra to anyone who is in the region.

William and I did have an amazing experience at Petra, though. We finished our first day by climbing to "The High Place of Sacrifice," which is a place where sacrifices were once made that is also very high (periodically I like to assume my readers are horribly, horribly stupid). As the sun was about to set we met Feriah, a Bedouin trinkets and jewelery vendor, who offered to take walk us back toward town on a route that required a guide. William and I were sceptical, but she insisted that she was not doing it for money -- she wanted to show us the walk.

Away we went, and,as you would expect from a local guide, there were spectacular views that most people do not see. At one point Feriah made a phone call to her brother, and after hanging up invited us to dinner at her house. Uh oh. This is straight out of the guidebooks (in most of the world, anyway); in s.e. Asia there are plenty of warnings about scams that begin exactly this way. But Feriah seemed genuinely nice, and genuinely concerned that we had concerns about this arrangement. I decided it was a good idea, and convinced William of the same.

I will admit that my heart-rate went up as the taxi began to leave town on a windy, mountainous road, and that my heart-rate went up even more as we entered a slum. I have seen poorer in my life, but this was pretty poor. Lots of children running around, a few animals loose that should not have been, and a lot of trash. Feriah led us right into the heart of it, turning into her "house": it was one, apartment-sized room where the entire family lived, ate, and slept. We spoke with Feriah for a while, drank tea, met many of her family members. At one point one of the brothers brought a portable fire-pit inside the room, filled with burning logs and embers. Amazingly, though it was inside, it was entirely smoke-less. Perplexed, William and I asked him how it was possible that he had made a smoke-less fire. He explained to us that he had simply removed the "smoking ones." This really didn't answer the question at all -- if it were this easy all of my fires would be smoke-free -- but we left it at that; I like it better as a Bedouin mystery.

The dinner was absolutely delicious: fresh chicken that had first been cooked, then boiled in milk; rice with an unidentifiable sweet sauce mixed in; and heaps of Bedouin bread (something like thin corn tortillas). William and I stuffed ourselves, then ate more at the request of our guests. Nobody else ate. We could not tell exactly why this was the case (was it customary? Would they eat the left-overs? Had they already eaten?), but we never found out the answer. When I thanked them for everything -- and I thanked them profusely -- the women behaved very deferentially, as if my thanks were unnecessary, or even making them uncomfortable. Feriah offered her only justification for the ridiculous kindness that all of them had shown -- the same line she had used all evening: "You are in my country," she said, "I want to do this for you."

Are you listening to this?

Back to Jerusalem, where things are cozy. Having gone to Jordan and come back, it was a very, very nice feeling to be returning. I can't explain how nice it is after four months of traveling to return to a city that I already knew, and to an apartment (Adam's) that was waiting for me. I am not speaking figuratively when I say that I had a skip in my step. My first stop was the market, and -- you guessed it! -- I went straight for the halva. The halva! Big, heaping blocks of it, cut to size.

For the next two days I treated myself like a king. Conor the Indulgent! By the end of my second stay in Jerusalem I actually had a pretty good relationship with the owner of a felafel stand near the market ("Where did you go? I have not seen you!"). I took full advantage of the fact that I was temporarily living above a market, making entire meals out of figs, olives, cheese, hot nuts, pressed fruits, real fruits, and so on. I watched movies, read quite a lot, and frequented the only cafe I could find in the place. At one point I was drinking tea, the space heater was on, and I was laying in bed watching a movie -- it was then that I realized I had reached the highest possible level of comfortability possible for that moment. This type of behavior is a blasphemous thing to do in a city with so much history, but I had seen enough for one trip to Jerusalem. I regret absolutely nothing.

Now I am in Turkey, and have been for a week. Obviously, then, I am a little bit behind, but this city makes it difficult to want to spend any time at all on a computer. I am not ready at this point to begin wildly throwing superlatives about to describe Istanbul, but they will certainly be coming when I next update this. I have been fueling myself with Baklava and Turkish Delight, tea and Turkish coffee. I think it is about time to ask you, my friends, to please send me a bag of insulin. Please. I am inducing diabetes, here. Unfortunately there is no one here to tell me not to eat Baklava for breakfast, so I am learning these types of lessons the hard way. Pity me, my friends. Please pity me.