The Great, or at Least Pretty Good Wall

When I was a first-year Chinese student I used to have class every morning at 9 in a room containing an enormous, grainy photo of the Great Wall of China. Someone must have turned one of their semester abroad photos into wallpaper and blown it up to about 8x10 feet. I don’t know how they did it but the engineering feat required to make a snapshot that big paled in comparison to the amount of work it was going to take to get me to China. Students who completed first-year Chinese with good enough grades were invited to study in Beijing for the summer on a foreign-study program Dartmouth had set up with Beijing Normal University. I remember that I needed an A- for the spring quarter to make the cut, and for a while there it looked like storming the wall on horseback with several thousand Mongol archers was going to be my only hope of getting into the county. I used to sit in the back corner where I could get a good look at that wall photo and say to myself “If I can just get through this, I get to go see the wall for myself.” And somehow, it worked.

(Well, except I didn’t get to go to China until 1992, but that wasn’t my fault.)

For this reason I’m really glad my experience at the Great Wall on this trip wasn’t my first time there. Because it was a really strange experience.

John and I hired a guide (a driver, really, since foreign visitors aren’t allowed to drive here) to take us three hours outside Beijing to the Simatai section of the wall. That went well: Mr. Johnny was nice, knew a lot about the wall, spoke good English, and seemed to be toning down his creative Beijing driving techniques for his American audience. The setting was beautiful. Simatai is about twice as far from Beijing than the other two developed tourist areas of the wall, and so it gets less traffic and looks a little more unspoiled and touristy than the areas tourist hordes visit. The parking lot was nearly empty except for a few vendors and we congratulated ourselves on spending a few extra bucks to get away from the tourists. We took a gondola nearly to the base of the wall, which here is on top of a steep ridge. A funicular took us further still, and left us with about 15 minutes of walking up steep stairs to get to the towers themselves.

On the way up a friendly couple attached themselves to us. Well, to me, really. John can look really grouchy when he needs to but I seem to have a sweet, slow-moving vibe that people here pick up on. At first, the woman made small talk with me, expressing admiration that I’d come all the way from California, and buttering me up by praising my Chinese. (Proof that flattery will get you everywhere with me, I guess.) But then it got awkward. She told me in Chinese that she and her man had no jobs, and something about kids to put through school. I warned John in English that we were being hustled, but there wasn’t much that could be done. There we were, stuck on a narrow path with no one else around, facing a choice of trudging upward for the next 15 minutes being subjected to a mobile guilt trip or turning back. We continued, trying to ignore the woman and her silent husband, but she persisted in trying fan us and take my arm whenever I stumbled on the oddly tiny steps.

At the top, there were a few other people on the wall, but this lady was our new friend, and we couldn’t shake her, even by refusing to answer direct questions, and even when I once abruptly turned away from her and walked the opposite direction. The unspoken request for money seemed to be hanging over the whole wall like a fogbank, and I literally couldn’t face her.

Finally she pulled out a package of Great Wall postcards asked us directly if we would by some. This overt request finally gave me the chance to say a direct no. She persisted, and I saw John and the man exchange a glance that I couldn’t read—John later said he thought the guy felt sorry for us. It was then that the man spoke up for the first time. I didn’t understand what he said, but the two of them had a ferocious argument about it and finally left us alone. We took the opportunity to scuttle away and barely made the last gondola down the mountain.

On the gondola, it was quiet, and I could hear the cool breeze blowing through the tress. Birds swooped overhead. The motor hummed soothingly, and the view was spectacular. I could look back and see a stretch of the Great Wall that went on for miles, disappearing into the haze. It looked timeless and serene, and suddenly the wretched beggar family seemed very far away. I realized that being on the wall had been a big letdown, but I appreciated the calm moments heading up and down when I was able to take in the view from afar.

Which just goes to show that maybe it really is the journey that counts, not the destination.


Here's my Beijing photo gallery.

Hutongs First

Because I’ve been to Beijing before, I haven’t felt the need to go back to sights I've seen, like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, although John has been getting up early and doing most of that kind of sightseeing. Instead I’ve been catching up with people I know here and trying to see things I either haven’t seen before, or things that may not be around the next time I’m in Beijing, whenever that may be.

Yesterday John and I explored the hutongs a neighborhood that falls into both categories. A hutong is an alley, and I’d never visited this particular warren of them in the Xicheng District northeast of Tiananmen Square. Most of Beijing’s old hutong neighborhoods have been bulldozed and replaced with high-rise apartment buildings. This is probably a good thing for the residents who don’t have to live medievally anymore, but somewhat of a shame from a historical standpoint. Beijing is going through a building spasm right now to get ready for the 2008 Olympics. The authorities seem to be mostly leaving this system of hutongs alone, but only time will tell if it survives the wave of modernization.

John and I turned down the first alley we came to, and spent 45 minutes at a teashop that was only a few steps in. We realized quickly that we’d have to pace ourselves better, but it was worth it. The proprietress saw us admiring a wall full of ceramic tea mugs and spent the next half hour reeling us in gently. She had us sip cup after tiny cup of tea, including oolong, black tea with a sweet, smoky flavor far more complicated than any tea I’d ever tried before, and a brew made by dunking a ball of what looked like dried herbs in boiling water. After a few minutes, the ball opened up into a whole flower—a chrysanthemum, I think. I realized quickly that the $2.50 mugs were a loss leader and that the tea was where the profit was, but it all tasted so good that I didn’t mind. Almost an hour went by with our host praising my meager Chinese to the stars and caffeinating me to the breaking point. I did end up buying some of the black tea, which surprised even me because I’m really a coffee person. But somehow the storeowner had won me over and made me into a tea drinker in one morning.

Fueled by six different kinds of cha, John and I set out to explore further into the neighborhood. It was an appealing maze of twisting alleyways, which is a huge contrast to most of Beijing, which is laid out in an L.A.-style grid of long, wide, straight boulevards. I thought the best part of the day would be walking around the lake in the middle of the district, but the lake turned out to be lined with backpacker-friendly bars where happy hour started at 10am, and pan-Asian noodle houses that reminded John of places that catered to trekkers in Katmandu. There were also aggressive rickshaw drivers anxious to take us on tours of the neighborhood. They all knew only one word of English: “HELLO!,” barked at sea-lion volume, and if it didn’t get their attention, they would yell it louder and grab your arm to make sure you knew they were there. John knew two good tricks to get rid of them, though. The first is to simply break down and take a tour, which buys you an hour with nobody demanding you take his. We chose the second method, which was to rent bicycles. Most of the drivers understood that if we were on bikes we weren’t likely to abandon them to get in their cart, and we could outrun the few aggressive ones who persisted.

Bikes are also a good way to explore the alleys, and it was a joy to ride through narrow passageways and suddenly come out into a small hidden square containing a market and a two-table restaurant with the chef cooking skewers of meat on a tiny grill outside.

We got lost a few times, but that was part of the fun. Finally trudging back the way we’d come that morning, we got an enthusiastic wave and a hello from the tea lady, who seemed genuinely happy to see us again. We had a moment of appreciation for her and her soft-sell approach, and I hope that Beijing’s Olympic modernization drive includes an effort to rediscover a little bit of this kind of old-fashioned marketing.


Here's my Beijing photo gallery.

Past Meets Present

Let’s be honest: Beijing is not a beautiful city.

In fact, it’s dusty, gritty, grimy, polluted, and several other kinds of dirty that I can’t think of the words for just now. In addition, it’s crowded and has the most chaotic traffic I’ve ever encountered. (No, I haven’t been to your hometown, so yes, maybe your drivers are worse, but believe me, this is bad.) The pedestrian is at the absolute bottom of the pecking order, getting to cross the street only when every car, bike, scooter, motorcycle, truck, bicycle rickshaw, taxi, horse-drawn carriage, and pushcart driver who wants to run the red light has done so, To stroll Beijing is to risk death half a dozen ways, ranging from emphysema to being run over by a melon vendor.

But, Beijing is also a city of amazing sights that everyone should see once, and for me, it’s a place full of personal history that I’m glad to return to. I’ve revisited sights I remember from 1992, and connected with two people I am very happy to have seen. One is my host, Tim Pettus, who is the father of a good friend I met while studying Chinese in college. The other is a long-lost friend named Matt, who was my T.A. in freshman year Mandarin class. We’ve been in sporadic touch over the years, but I hadn’t seen him since he graduated from college in the summer of 1990. I remember Matt at 22, wearing jeans and a yellow hoodie that may have been the only warm garment he owned. The man who got out of the taxi cab was wearing a dress shirt and blazer, and carrying a briefcase, simultaneously paying the driver and checking in on his kids by cell phone. But I recognized him instantly, and we had a great time catching up over dinner with his family. He lives here now, having created a life for himself in the suburbs of Beijing. It was strange but beautiful to see someone I remember as a big kid with a house and kids of his own. It reminded me that while it may seem like little changes from day to day, 15 years of days can add up and somehow make you a grown-up without your even realizing it.

Here's my Beijing photo gallery.

Last Day

Pipi and I spent our penultimate evening in Pu Dong, the new area west of the Huang Pu River. This area was farmland until 1990, when plans for development were announced, and I don’t remember much of anything being there in 1992. Now, though, it’s a futuristic business center. Because it’s mostly office buildings, there isn’t a lot for a visitor to do, but it is interesting to walk around, and there are plenty of restaurants. It was already dark when we got there, and the buildings looked particularly surreal. The Pearl Orient tower, a combination TV tower and observation deck, looked like a rocket ship with its glowing purple spheres. Most buildings glowed brightly, even though everyone should already have gone home, but some were completely black, and I realized it was because they weren’t done yet. Everywhere you looked there were cranes, and because construction goes on 24 hours a day here, some of the empty black hulks had welders’ sparks pouring out of windows. It was a strange and eerie sight, but I guess that’s what it takes to put up a whole city in less than 15 years.

The next day Pipi and I spent walking the Old Town district, and the former French Concession. I remember finding the French district overrated in 1992. I had the worst cream puff of my life there (Crisco puff was more like it), and I realized there just wasn’t much French influence left there, for better or for worse. That’s still sort of the case, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of his or her way to visit. Old Town, on the other hand, is very interesting. A lot of people there live somewhat like what we saw near the candy factory, and a lot of it has been renovated and preserved. There’s a section of the old city wall visible. It’s not very old, maybe mid 1800s, but in forward-looking Shanghai, that’s ancient.

In between the French Concession and Old Town is an area called Xin Tian Di, literally “new heaven and earth.” The area is essentially an upscale pedestrian shopping mall with an old Shanghai theme. The storefronts have been constructed (or restored, in many cases; this isn’t a complete sham) to mimic a style of building popular in the early 1900s. There are a lot of Western-style restaurants and cafes, and stores with American and European brands. The Chinese restaurants are pretty upscale, too; Jackie Chan owns a cafÈ in the mall. The restaurants and stores could have been plucked from an outdoor Southern Californian mall, but the architecture is authentically Asian. A small museum devoted to the architecture described Xin Tian Di as a place the Chinese find Western, Americans find foreign, the elderly consider nostalgic, and the young deem hip. In a sense, all of Shanghai is like this, and this mix of Eastern and Western consumer culture is probably something we all should get used to.

Shanghai photo gallery

Down the Rabbit Hole

Is there anyone else out there who likes White Rabbit candy as much as I do? They’re little Tootsie Roll-shaped candies, very chewy. They come wrapped in edible rice paper, and they’re very sweet. The basic flavor is like condensed milk, but you occasionally see mango and sometimes lychee flavor in the United States.

The wrappers on the American candies give a Shanghai address, so Pipi and I made a pilgrimage. The factory was a long walk from a metro stop. The street was easy to find but we didn’t think we’d ever get to the right number until finally I noticed that the high wall we were walking beside had strange little rabbit decorations on top. A few steps later, we realized we could smell the intoxicating scent of hot condensed milk and we knew we were in the right place.

We entered the gate and walked past a guardhouse, where there was a giant map of the complex, all in Chinese. We were allowed to look at that as long as we liked (not that it was much help), but as soon as we went a step further, the guard started yelling. I’m not sure what he said—something about capitalist running dog candy spies, maybe? At any rate, we sweetly explained that we were looking for White Rabbit. We meant the factory, not the candy, but he directed us to a doorway covered in plastic flaps near the main gate. It wasn’t the kind of doorway that said “Factory shop here.” It was more the kind of doorway that said “Here’s where the dangerous machinery is; keep out.” But in fact, it was a little factory store. The main counter inexplicably sold cigarettes, but in the back room, there were bags and bags of White Rabbit, in all kinds of flavors we’d never seen, including mint and yoghurt (both good) and red bean (not so much good).

Afterward, Pipi and I decided to walk around the perimeter of the factory. The front was on a busy street, but the back of it was flanked by a small, poor, crowded residential neighborhood. I saw some people watching TV, and Pipi swears she saw someone on a computer, but for the most part, it was a classic overcrowded Chinese city scene, with communal bathrooms, adults sitting around fanning themselves, and children toddling around wearing pants with a split down the back rather than diapers. It was pretty shockingly squalid, but I was almost relieved to see a glimpse of what I remember China being like after the Emerald City experience of downtown Shanghai.

What made the scene even more poignant was that our next stop was the Shanghai Center, a complex containing both a theater where acrobats perform (our reason for being there), and the Ritz Carlton hotel. Going from a neighborhood of filthy row houses to umpteen stories of opulence, built in a faux Chinese temple style, was a jarring juxtaposition. It made me wonder what elderly Shanghai residents, those old enough to remember the international concessions, think when they see white faces on the streets. Do they see visitors with an honest curiosity about their culture? Or do they see a second wave of Europeans flaunting their wealth and doing as they please?

Shanghai photo gallery

What We’ve Been up To

Pipi keeps asking me what I did when I was in Shanghai last, and the strange thing is, I can’t really remember. I remember walking along the Bund, Shanghai’s famous European-style main drag, and I remember multiple trips to a general-delivery post office to try to pick up an absentee ballot that never came (it’s harder than you might think to vote absentee in a Communist country). I barely even remember where I stayed, except that it was near a cigar factory, and that the bus that went there was always so crowded you couldn’t see out the windows—you just had to start pushing your way to the front as soon as you smelled tobacco. They’re probably still talking about the day I realized I’d never make the door in time and squeezed out a window instead.

Then again, maybe they aren’t. I can’t seem to remember any of my personal history in Shanghai, and the whole city seems to have a similar problem. There aren’t many signs of Shanghai’s history around. This is a city that is looking to the future. And in fact, the first sight we went to see was the Shanghai planning museum. This museum is essentially a big advertisement for a world expo that is being held in Shanghai in 2010, but it’s a really cool one. It’s full of interactive video and virtual reality exhibits showing how fast Shanghai is growing and how quickly it’s modernizing. It’s all spun very positively, but once you know what to look for, it’s hard to ignore the cranes and wrecking balls knocking down old apartment buildings so that new high-rises with plumbing and air conditioning can be built—not necessarily with the same tenants. (I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying it’s interesting.)

We also took a tour of Shanghai’s Jewish history, which sounds like a joke, but isn’t. Jewish real estate moguls built a lot of Shanghai’s famous hotels, like the Peace Hotel (seen in the movie Empire of the Sun). Later, the city sheltered tens of thousands of European Jews fleeing Europe in the 1930s. There’s not a lot of this history left, but you can see bits if you are shown where to look. We were taken to one alley in North Shanghai, for example, that was home to about 1500 Ashkenazi Jews. Today, everyone there is Chinese, but if you look closely, you can still see nail holes in each doorway where a mezuzah (a tiny box holding a Hebrew prayer scroll) once was. It’s very moving, and a little chilling, but still, this story is still a lot happier than that of most Jewish families of the time.

Don’t worry; we’ve done a lot of fun things, too. We took a cruise up the Huang Pu River to the place where it meets the Yangzi River. We shopped Nanjing Lu and discovered the fine art of haggling while shopping for artwork. (The dramatic man who sold Pipi the scroll swore we’d talked him down so far his boss would punish him, but we left before the beatings began.) We made a pilgrimage to the White Rabbit candy factory. We saw the Shanghai Museum, said to be the best museum in China, and I guess I agree even though the coin exhibit was closed for “inner re-arrangement.” I walked around People’s Park early in the morning and watched elderly people start their day by doing Tai Chi as well as badminton and ballroom dancing.

We’ve also eaten ourselves silly, of course. We’ve made discoveries ranging from Shanghai’s trademark Xiaolongbao, which are broth-filled pork dumplings that I think I could eat every day for the rest of my life, to McDonald’s taro pie. Almost every day I have a pork bun for breakfast, unless I have a greasy egg pancake. I missed out this morning, though, because I slept until the outrageous hour of 7:30, when Shanghai is beginning to think about lunch. So it was croissants for Pipi and me. Tough day. At lunch, Pipi and I decided to splurge and go to a famous old restaurant. The food was great—crab dumplings and the best bok choi ever—but the ambiance was so weird we left before dessert. The whole time we were eating the staff were yelling back and forth to each other and throwing plates around setting up for dinner. It made us long for the florescent-lit lunch counters we’d been thinking we needed a break from.

Next up: The French area of Shanghai, Old Town, and Pu Dong, an entire city that has sprung up across the river from Shanghai in the time between my visits.

Shanghai photo gallery

Fractured English

I had always been told that Japan is the world capital of fractured English slogans and t-shirts. Having been to China, I found that hard to believe, and now, having been to both, I am willing to take a stand: China makes the world’s weirdest t-shirts and billboards. Japan may have cornered the market on non-grammatical and charmingly malapropish English phrases (Pocari Sweat sports drink, for example), but China has the monopoly on the just plain weird. For example, I had only been in the country a matter of hours when I saw a middle-aged man at the airport meeting a flight wearing a t-shirt that said “Lesbians Taught Me.” (And believe me, I was dying to see the party he was waiting to meet.)

Later Pipi and I saw a teenaged boy near People’s Park (and within walking distance of the site of the first Chinese communist party meeting) wearing a shirt that said “Commies Aren’t Cool,” and I wonder if we were the only ones who saw the irony in that.

Shanghai photo gallery

Shanghai Surprise

I had a minor anxiety attack on the plane circling Shanghai when suddenly it hit me that I would, in a matter of moments, be back in China. As much as I enjoyed and appreciated my experience backpacking here in 1992, the country also exhausted and exasperated me, and I wondered what in the world I was thinking, not just returning to my personal Waterloo but also dragging along someone I love.

Almost from the second I landed, though, I realized I was in a completely different place. Sometimes, in fact, I wonder if I didn’t get on the wrong plane and end up in, I don’t know, Singapore, maybe. So little is familiar. I miss some of the charming old aspects, like sidewalk tailor stands, and old people shuffling around in blue jackets and caps. And I’m not crazy about all the new developments, like traffic jams and beggars. But for the most part China seems to have taken an enormous (perhaps even great) leap forward. When I was here last, China seemed to be in an awkward adolescent phase, trying really hard to be something it wasn’t ready to be. In 14 years, it’s grown up a lot, and it’s still tripping over its own feet a little, but it’s easy to see what it’s going to be like when it’s a fully grown modern city.

Actually, it’s really just about there. It has most of the trappings of a Western city: Shopping malls, a subway system, Starbucks, skyscrapers, even a Ferrari dealership. Many of the old, backward customs seem to have fallen by the wayside: Nobody spits on the street anymore, and I just realized recently that nobody stares, either. The gawking and the constant chorus of “hello, now we practice English” used to drive me bonkers, but I don’t get a second glance now. The novelty of blue eyes in Shanghai seems to have finally worn off.

It’s not just the skyline and mucus management techniques that have changed, though. The country just seems fundamentally more welcoming. I used to have a stock spiel I would give when someone asked me what was difficult about traveling in China. I would say how in a communist country (and one with no tipping, at that) there was no incentive for anyone to give good service. I would complain about how foreigners were seen as there to be milked for their perceived fortunes (the practice of charging visitors double the Chinese entrance price has fallen by the wayside, too). But now I feel terrible about every bad thing I said about China during its peevish development years.

I keep thinking of a time during my first visit when I was homesick and I passed a long-distance telephone office. I thought how nice it would be to call home. So I went in, and found four women behind a counter playing cards. There was nothing else in the room except for three telephone booths, all inexplicably barricaded off from the rest of the room by a wall of sandbags four feet high. It was hard to get the attention of any of the women, but finally I managed to get one to tear herself away from her card game long enough that I could tell her I wanted to make a phone call. “Phone call?” she snapped incredulously, “To make a phone call, you need to go to the bus station.” That seemed odd, but who knew more about long-distance phone calls than someone who worked at the phone office? So I got on another bus and went to the main station. When I got there and asked about making an international call, they looked at me the way someone might look at you if you went to your local AT&T office and asked when the next bus to New York was leaving. There was no hope of getting what I wanted there. I’d been had by someone who just didn’t want to help me.

Contrast that with the last 24 hours here, when Pipi and I seemed hell-bent on self-sabotage, but were saved from ourselves every time. First I overpaid for dinner by 10 kuai (about 25 cents) and a waitress chased me down and gave me the extra bill back. Then I left an umbrella at a café in a museum, and they found someone to make an announcement about it in English over the loudspeaker. The next morning, Pipi and I were waiting in the lobby of the Peace Hotel for a tour we’d signed up for to begin when a Chinese man sidled up to me and asked my name in broken English. At first I thought he wanted to know if I was part of the tour group, but then I noticed he had Pipi’s credit card in his hand—she’d left it in the ATM outside, and this man had taken it upon himself to ask the name of every wai guo ren in the lobby until he found a match. Getting out of a cab in the afternoon, I dropped my sunglasses in the street and didn’t even notice until I heard a traffic cop yelling “Hello, hello” over and over again. When I finally looked, he made the international finger-circle-around-the-eyes gesture for glasses and pointed to mine lying in the street. When he realized I was a slow-moving foreigner, too frightened to dart into the endless stream of rush-hour bikes and kamikaze cars, he waded into the traffic himself, then came all the way across the intersection to give my sunglasses back to me. It’s true that he had his traffic cop status to protect him—I think in just about any culture you’re in serious trouble if you run over the guy who’s supposed to be protecting people from getting run over—but still, I couldn’t believe someone would risk his life to help someone who isn’t doing a very good job of helping herself. Something has changed in China, and while maybe not all of it is good, it’s definitely making the country an easier place to visit.

Shanghai photo gallery

Tokyo

After arriving in Tokyo, John, Daisuke, Kazuko, and I went directly to the main thing we’d come to see: the annual Sanja festival. Sanjen means “three gods,” The festival is a Shinto celebration of three deities that seem to be the particular favorites of the residents of the Asakusa neighborhood, This area is the closest Tokyo, mostly a sprawling modern city, has to a gothic quarter. It too is full of the post-WWII tile and glass boxes you find everywhere, but somehow the area survived both the war as well as the great earthquake of 1923 better than the rest of the city. It wasn’t all built from scratch in the 1950s, and there are lots of traditional wooden buildings and a few grand temples that still exist.

The festival itself was a surreal affair. It was easily the most flamboyant and fun religious festival I’ve ever attended. The Sanja Masuri neighborhood residents parade around dozens of gilded portable shrines. Each one weighs about a ton. It’s carried by men and women dressed in period costume, this period being the Edo period, from the early 1600s to the mid-1800s. For women that means a robe and leggings, and children wear cute smock-like garments and headbands. (“Everyone looks like a sushi chef today,” said Daisuke.) Grown men, however, wear a short robe and not much else—just a sumo wrestler-style undergarment. It takes some getting used to to see these guys, who on any other day wouldn’t dream of wearing shorts in public, not even wearing pants.

Groups of people dressed like this carry around the shrines, parading them through the neighborhood, They are quite boisterous when they do this, chanting in an exaggerated manner and keeping the shrine moving not just forward, but in a rolling up-and-down motion, too, like it’s a groom at a Jewish wedding. I later found out that back in the day, Asakusa used to be Tokyo’s theater district, so the showmanship makes sense.

After the parade, Daisuke and Kazuko headed home, and John and I grabbed our luggage out of the locker we’d stored it in and went to our hotel. Called the Homeikan, it’s about 100 years old, and started life as a boarding house for nearby Tokyo University. It’s a traditional Ryokan style building, with heavy wood, tatami floors, futon mattresses, and a bathroom down the hall.

It was here that I got my first real taste of the intensive Japanese slipper experience: When you check into the hotel, you leave your shoes on a shelf in the lobby and put on one of dozens of pairs of waiting slippers. You wear these to the door of your room, but not a step farther. When you enter the room, you leave your hallway slippers outside and pad around your room in your socks.

If you should want to use the bathroom, you put your hallway slippers back on and walk to the lav. But there you have to abandon your hallway slippers and step into a pair of bathroom slippers, waiting for you just inside the bathroom door. When you’re done, and this is crucial, you step out of the bathroom slippers and back into hallway slippers, At your room of course, you have to remember to take your slippers off before you enter. I’m glad the hotel is sparsely booked today, because I’m having a lot of trouble with this. I understand the system; it’s just that the slippers are so comfortable and natural that I’m having a hard time being mindful of my feet—I completely forget what I’m wearing the second they’re on. Which in a way is good because I don’t love the idea of wearing communal shoes, even with socks.

After dinner, I went by myself to the Shinjuku district. This is the neighborhood where the movie Lost in Translation took place, and it’s the neighborhood that looks most like I expected. When I got to Tokyo, I was surprised to see that most of it is low and drab. I expected it to be a 21st century maze of neon-lit skyscrapers, but in fact, that’s really only to be found in Shijuku, which is half Tokyo’s business center, and half an entertainment capital. It was a lot like I expected, with Times Square-like neon and thick crowds flowing in and out of video arcades and pachinko parlors. It was interesting, but the sight of so many people having so much fun when I was all alone and barely understood what was going on was a little alienating and put me in a little bit of a funk, so I went home pretty quickly and made a long trans-pacific phone call. Pipi couldn’t be showing up at a better time.

Hakone Area

Today John and Daisuke and I got up early and took the train to the town of Odawara, where Daisuke’s sister and mother live. This town is on the edge of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, which is, as you might guess, the home of Mt. Fuji. Ironically, though, it turns out that the closer you get to Fuji-San, the harder it is to see because mist and mountains block your view. Actually, John says one of the best views is from the beach in Hayama, where he lives.

The Sano family owns a fish-cake factory, and on the way into town we stopped by and said hello to the family, who were still at work. I got to try a fish cake. It was sort of like gefilte fish, and sort of like those processed chicken cutlets you get in school cafeterias. Not bad. What was bad was a treat Daisuke’s sister had just brought back from Okinawa. It was an individually packaged serving of tofu fermented with yeast, called Tohuyou. It looked like a little cube of pate smothered in ketchup, and it smelled like miso paste (so far so good), but it tasted like vegemite, which itself tastes like a salted barnyard, so not so good.

From there John and Daisuke and I went to the grandest hotel in the Hakone area (in fact, it’s one of the grander hotels in Japan), called the Fujiya. It was built starting in 1878, and is an imposing building constructed in a heavy beamed, Craftsman style. (Or so it seemed to me—I know the Craftsman style was actually borrowed from Japan.) Every celebrity in the world seems to have stayed there, from Mark Twain and Helen Keller to John Lennon. (And I’m thinking that would have been quite a dinner party.) Lunch was very continental, with a beef fillet, grilled whole fish, consommé, and crème caramel, served by slick-haired waiters in Tuxedos who looked like they came straight out of Shanghai in 1930.

After that, we saw the town’s other main attraction: hot springs. Japan, like New Zealand and Iceland, has thousands. This particular one was mostly outdoors, with hot but relatively unscented mineral water (no sulfur fumes) spilling over rocks and into big pools about 3 feet deep. Except that it was single sex (the guys had their own area), it reminded me a lot of Orr Hot Springs in Ukiah—another situation where I realize this is the original. I knew the Japanese like their bathwater extremely hot, so I was nervous, but I’m guessing this wasn’t much over 100 F. I was able to stay in a while. It was relaxing, and I pretty quickly forgot that I was stark naked in the company of some of the most etiquette-obsessed people on earth. Everyone relaxed, chatted, washed each other (it’s considered extremely rude to take a bath without being completely clean to start with) and just generally seemed to forget that they were Japanese. Or so it seemed to me, although of course the public bath is one of the older rituals in Japan, and the experience is actually a quintessential Japanese ritual.

I’m glad I didn’t swear of Okinawan food, however, because the other thing Daisuke’s sister brought back from her trip there was some of the best pork I’ve ever had in my life. Okinawa is justly famous for the meat, and it was delicious. We ate it for dinner, along with vegetables and noodles boiled in a hot pot, in a dish called nabe.

Next: Nicole conquers Tokyo.

Enoshima

Today was rainy, so we just took a quick trip by car down the Izu Peninsula in the morning, culminating in the discovery of a great Chinese restaurant a few miles south of Hayama. (Even the Japanese don’t eat Japanese every day.) The highlight for me, though, was stopping at a gas station, and seeing station attendants bowing to patrons. I wish this happened at home--when I pay $35 to fill up my little car, I might appreciate a little bow myself.

After lunch, John drove us to the town of Enoshima. This town is on an island separated from Kamakura by about 100 yards of water. It’s a little on the tacky side, which was interesting to see. I didn’t think the Japanese did tacky, but they do in fact have plastic trinkets representing extinct parts of their culture just like we do. They show things like Samurai swords instead of cowboy iconography, but it’s the same idea. Enoshima did have two fancy hot springs and was apparently the site of the yachting portion of the 1964 Olympic games, but aside from that, I guess I have to say it wasn’t a banner sightseeing day. (We really only went there to pick up flyers about the spas.)

On the way home, thogugh, we stopped at a junk shop in Zushi that was overflowing with beat-up shoji screens, multi-drawered Japanese bureaus needing refinishing, nearly complete sake-cup sets, used kimonos, Godzilla cigarette lighters, and other detritus of daily Japanese life. It was far and away the most culturally illuminating part of the day. A slack-jawed boy who had been playing catch with his buddy the whole time we browsed (“so much for the workaholic stereotype,” John said under his breath) sold me an abacus, which I will have to ask Daisuke how to use.

Dinner was another eye-opener. John and I walked to the port area of Hayama, which is a formerly funky, quickly gentrifying part of town. All the places we wanted to eat were closed for some reason, though, so, starving, we found ourselves in front of a Denny’s, and decided to go in.

John had been before, so he knew what to expect, but I was completely unprepared for a Japanese Dennys. Except for the color scheme and the modest prices, almost nothing was familiar. Beer was served. Waiters bowed. Waves broke against the beach right outside the restaurant. The menu was almost completely Japanese favorites (I had pork stir-fried with ginger, for example), and portions were small.

And no, I don’t know if you get a free meal on your birthday. I didn’t have the vocabulary to ask.

Today's photos

Big in Japan

Today’s main objective was to see the Daibutsu, the Big Buddha of Kamakura. It’s a bronze statue, 30 feet high, constructed in 1252. It’s hollow, and for an extra 20 Yen--about 18 cents--you can go inside.

There are easy ways to get there, including buses and a small local train, but my father is fond of saying that sometimes the hard way is the easy way. This always seemed like a kind of koan to me, so I thought it might apply. I’m pretty sure, though, that we really did pick the hard way. We took a hiking trail that claims to only be 3 kilometers long, but it seemed a lot longer. It was hilly and muddy and flanked by steep drop-offs that reminded me that I’m not in the litigious United States any more. It was also beautiful, passing by various shrines and temples, including one that was a sort of 13th-century women’s shelter. (Women couldn’t get divorced legally, but if they spent 3 years living at this temple, they were declared divorced by local authorities.) We saw lots of torii gates, lots of altars, and lots of people actively praying and making offerings.

After all the walking we did on the trail and in the town of Kamakura, we needed to collapse for a while after lunch, but later in the day we went to a shrine near John’s house in Zushi. It’s a Shinto shrine, right on the water, and it has a haunting Torii gate on a small set of rocks far out to sea. I think the idea is to provide a gateway to the shrine to anyone coming from the water. A number of sculptures are on the shore, and it’s tempting to guess that the people who built it were fishermen looking for protection from the Pacific. Now, however, the only thing anyone on this stretch needs protecting from is all the dogs being walked on the sand. It’s very peaceful and a visit is a nice way to wind down a scurrying-around kind of day.

Here is my photo gallery from today.

First Day

Today, John and I visited Kamakura, a few JR train stops from Hayama. Kamakura is usually described as a good day-trip from Tokyo, but there’s enough to do that it would be better to spend the night. John and I have the luxury of spending three whole days only a few minutes away, so we’re not breaking our necks to see everything. John of course has seen most of this before, but he hasn’t photographed everything he wants to yet, so in a way it’s new to him, too.

We first went to the Hachimangu Shrine, which is at the end of a long, narrow, cherry-tree lined pedestrian walkway. Like all Shinto shrines, it has an enormous Torii gate (wooden, red, with a double crossbar) in front of it. It’s a popular spot for school trips, and it was hard to get photos without little yellow-hatted ducklings all over the place. A few tried out “hellos” on us, but it was refreshing to be in Asia and not feel like a Bigfoot sighting.

The next stop was the Hase Kannon temple, a Buddhist temple dedicated to the goddess of Mercy. The statue of her is 30 feet high and has 11 heads. And it’s 1200 years old. What really makes this temple interesting (I was going to say “unique,” but John says this is actually common) is that the grounds are covered with statues of Jizo. According to John’s partner, Jizo was originally considered a sort of patron saint of travelers, but somehow the concept got caught up in the idea of life being a journey, and now Jizo is known as the guardian of children. At this particular temple, however the statues are left in honor not just of any children, but specifically to remember miscarried or stillborn children. The atmosphere isn’t morbid, but it is solemn, and it’s just another reminder that I’m in a very different kind of place.

On a lighter note, we had lunch at a soba noodle restaurant in the hills overlooking Kamakura. The restaurant, called Raitei, is in a 400-year-old wooden building that used to be a private home in Yokahama (how they ever got it up the hill, which a bus could barely navigate, is beyond me). As if that wasn’t cool enough, the garden surrounding the building is great for walking. I’m not normally a garden kind of gal, but this garden is not centered around the foliage. It’s pretty overgrown, but it hides all sorts of sculptural surprises, and you feel like Indiana Jones when you explore and suddenly find a nest of stone bodhisattvas half reclaimed by vines.

SO far Jizo must be looking out for me, because it’s been a great first day, with no serious jet lag and a lot of really interesting sights.

Here's a link to some photos of the things I've been talking about.

Arrival

I arrived in Tokyo in one piece after a flight unremarkable except for five minutes of terrifying, dinner-tray throwing turbulence. At the airport, I got myself on a train bound for Hayama, the town where John lives, about 2 ½ hours from Narita airport. The town is only about one hour outside of downtown Tokyo, however, making Hayama a far-flung Tokyo bedroom community. It’s very pleasant, just outside of the greater Tokyo urban sprawl zone, and it’s on the beach. Apparently there are great views of Mt. Fuji from the waterfront, but it’s been cloudy, so I haven’t seen this for myself.

I’d been in Japan for less than 12 hours when I committed the worst faux pas possible in Japanese culture: I was sitting at the breakfast table when I realized I was still wearing bathroom slippers. Luckily Daisuke, John’s partner, wasn’t awake yet and John thought it was funny.

At the Airport

A rare Sunday blog entry—I’m at the gate as I type, and don’t know when I’ll be online again. I just spoke to my father on the phone, and he asked me if I thought I had everything I need. I said I thought so, but that if I didn’t, there wouldn’t have been room for it anyway. I packed densely, but not lightly. Everything fit in a small internal frame pack that doubles as a duffel bag, and a smaller day-pack. Which is good news, except that each weighs about 30 pounds. Luckily, a lot of it is made up of some pretty impractical gifts I’ve brought for ex-pats I’m going to impose upon along the way. Gifts include a bottle of champagne, four pounds of lentils (seriously; apparently these are hard to find in Japan), two pounds of coffee beans, and a ceramic jug of maple syrup.

The next time I travel, everyone’s getting gift certificates.

Interestingly, everyone keeps asking me what I’m packing. I find this odd, since I think I’ve pretty clearly demonstrated a complete obliviousness to what constitutes normal clothing choices. Whenever I am in Europe, for example, I am invariably addressed first in German, no matter what country I’m actually in. I’d like to think it’s my blue eyes and pink cheeks. But I know it isn’t. I know it’s my choice in footwear.

So asking me for packing advice is a little bit like asking a guy sleeping in a doorway wearing three hats what vintage you should take to a dinner party. But since people seem to want to know:

• 2 pairs of long pants
  
• 1 pair of ez-wash shorts
  
• 5 solid-colored t-shirts
  
• 1 workout t-shirt
  
• 1 button-down short-sleeved shirt
  
• 1 sweatshirt
  
• 10 pairs of socks, assorted black and white
  
• 1 bathing suit
  
• pjs
  
• gym shorts
  
• sneakers
  
• casual walking shoes
  
• Tevas
  
• 10 pairs unmentionables
  
• Laptop
  
• camera
  
• cellphone
  
• chargers
  
• cables
  
• 6 months worth of backlogged magazines
  
• 4 guidebooks (2 Trans-Siberian, 1 Shanghai, one Japan)
  
• The Kite Runner
  
• An absurd amount of toiletries (six week’s worth) so I am not reduced to having to buy Darkie toothpaste while I’m away.
• Also a jar of Woolite
  
• Assorted other gifts and trinkets, which I will be glad to be rid of. Sometimes giving really does feel good.

Five Days and Counting

This is another quote I can’t verify, not that I haven’t tried. Maybe I made it up, but I don’t think so. I am sure that somewhere I read a quote by Anne Morrow Lindberg where she was reflecting on how the eve of a trip feels. She did like to travel, and was always happy once the trip was really underway, but she said that just before departure, the thought of leaving made her feel like a little snail that someone is attempting to peel from her rock. (I guess we know now why Charles left her at home that time he flew to Paris.)

I’m feeling a little snailish myself right now. I know I’ll be excited once I touch down in Tokyo, but right now? Barnacle city. I feel like I’m still stuck to this rock, and will be until I finish an impossible amount of reading, write an impossible number of pitches, and tie up an impossible number of last-minute details. It may take archeological tools to detach me from my apartment and get me on the plane.

Of course, once I’m on the plane, it will be too late to get any of the trip preparation stuff done. Nothing to do then but relax and watch the movie.

Home Stretch

One last arrangement made: Shanghai hotel reservations. We’re living a little dangerously here. We decided we liked a hotel called the Yangtze Hotel, a big art deco building close to everything. But we’ve read mixed reviews. Some say it’s great, some say construction makes it a nightmare. So I purposely picked a less expensive room, because the descriptions for these rooms don’t boast about the view of Nanjing Lu, the noisy street. I also reserved a room for just one night, hoping we’ll be able to stay all week if we like it. It’s got to beat the hostel next to a cigar factory that I stayed in in 1992

More Devilish Details

The last time I traveled in Asia was 1992. Laptops were the size of carry-on wheelie bags. Digital cameras were the stuff of wide-eyed futuristic predictions (“By 2005, people will carry their photo albums in their pockets. And they’ll be able to fax copies to each other using only their minds!”) Nobody could imagine ipods then. So I honestly couldn’t tell you what a Chinese electrical plug looks like—I never needed to use one. (Although I could tell you every place to buy Walkman batteries from Beijing to Urumqi.)

Now, however, things are different. In a way, that’s good. If, for example, we were for some reason to get a new president, I wouldn’t have to go four days without knowing who it was. (This really happened to me during a ferry trip up the Yangtze River.) Now I could call, e-mail, or probably even download a podcast to find out the news. (Not that I would. I’m over 30; this is enough of a stretch.) But all that takes electronics, and electronics means chargers, and chargers, in Asia, means adaptors. Lots of adaptors.

I’ll be traveling through four countries, so I was imagining carrying a whole suitcase full of voltage converters and plug adaptors. But I found a nifty little device that takes care of the problem. It looks like a big old-fashioned three-prong plug, but it’s got various prongs hidden inside it, which slide out as needed. I’m not explaining that well--here’s a picture. It’s pretty clever. It can be set to fit plugs in 150 countries, including three of the four I’ll be in.

So don’t expect me to IM you from Mongolia. But everywhere else, we’re good to go.

But Can You Get a Good Bagel?

Today I made one of the last arrangements I needed to make for my trip: I reserved a tour of Shanghai’s former Jewish ghetto.

This may sound like a joke, but it isn’t. Before and during WWII, Shanghai, which had been known as The Paris of the East, temporarily became The Casablanca of the East. It was easy to get into without documentation, and so became haven for refugees from all over. A lot of Eastern European Jews ended up there in the late 1930s because it was much easier to gain residency there than it was in Western countries. Virtually all Westerners abandoned Shanghai before the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, but apparently there still are traces of Jewish history to be found there. I confess, I spent several days in Shanghai in 1992 and didn’t notice a kosher thing, but I hadn’t known to look. This time, I’m taking a guided half-day tour, and hoping for better luck.

Wait, What Was She Doing at the Consulate?

The world is divided into those who think this trip is crazy, and those who immediately ask if they can come along. A few of those actually mean it, but until recently, only two have volunteered: P---, and my photographer friend John. Recently added to this list: My mom. I was hoping she’d want to come along, since she speaks some Russian. Also, she’s been this way before, when it was the Soviet Union. I can’t wait to hear her impressions of how it has changed in the last 30 years. I imagine it will put my culture shock over China’s 15-year growth spurt to shame.

That Explains it—Sort Of

My mother just got back from a trip of her own to the Russian consulate in San Francisco, and tells me that that guy who wrote a check for me is indeed on the up and up. Like me, she noticed several people sitting around carrying stacks of other peoples’ passports. I had assumed that these people were tour guides getting visas for clients, but my mom asked a few questions and discovered that most of them are actually professional visa expediters. They don’t make it happen any faster, but they will get the money order for you and stand in line for you if you’ve got a real job that prevents you from spending the morning at the consulate.

The free market may be slow to catch on in Russia itself, but it’s alive and well at the consulate.

Baikal, Sacred Sea of Siberia

The previous tidbits come from a book I found at the library while searching for The Big Red Train Ride. It’s called Baikal, Sacred Sea of Siberia, by Peter Matthiessen. It’s no Snow Leopard, but it is an interesting, quick read about a trip Matthiessen took in 1990.

Boggling Baikal

Lake Baikal isn’t just the deepest lake in the world; it’s also the oldest. Most lakes clog up with sediment and disappear after about 50,000 years or so, but at over 2 million years of age, with over four miles of sediment accumulated at the bottom of the lake, Baikal is still going strong. And still more than a mile deep.

The lake holds about one fifth of the world’s fresh water. If you were to drain it, it would take all the world’s rivers (assuming you could re-route them to pour into the Baikal basin) one year to fill it back up.

Or, you could take the water out of the five North American Great Lakes and use them to refill the lake—that would just about do it.

More Fun Facts

The name Siberia comes from the words “Sib Ir,” which mean “Sleeping Land” in the language of the indigenous Buryat people.

Fun Fact

The name Ulan Baatar means “Red Hero” in Mongolian.

The Gentleman From Finland

Part of my pre-trip preparation involves reading all the books I can about trans-Siberian train travel. I just finished one, called The Gentleman from Finland, by Robert M. Goldstein. It’s not one of the better known trans-Siberian books, but it’s very good. It chronicles a trip the author took on the line in 1987, when things were still very bleak and Soviet. It’s one of those train stories that starts out seeming like a collection of slapstick anecdotes about drunken Russians and stolen shoes, but turns substantial when the author starts to understand the forces driving him to travel across Siberia in November.

Next up: Eric Newby’s The Big Red Train Ride.

More Devilish Details

I made an important purchase today: a Molskine notebook. I hope to bring a laptop along on my trip, but even if I do get it together to buy one before I leave, I still want a notebook for jotting things down old-school style. And for scribbling on trains and on hostel bunks, I just love these pretentious little things beyond all reason. They have a secret pocket inside that’s perfect for business cards, ticket stubs, and other little souvenirs. They come with a bungee cord that holds them shut. (So they don’t accidentally deploy at high velocity? I’m not sure. But it’s great.) I love that they’re ruled. I love that they fit in a pocket. They come with packaging that calls them the “notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, and Chatwin,” and I love that, too. Even though I’m not positive I know which Chatwin they’re talking about, and I never knew Picasso wrote at all.

I will try to save the notebook until my departure, but I may not be able to resist going to a café, ordering a fussy drink (perhaps in French), and scrawling intensely until someone mistakes me for a mysterious woman.

(And if you should accidentally walk into the same café while I’m doing this, it’s okay; you can pretend you don’t know me.)

Fun Fact

Las Vegas means “the Fertile Valleys” in Spanish.

Plus, it’s a Dry Heat

I just got back from a trip to Las Vegas. P. and I made a surgical strike, spending barely 24 hours in the city. The plan was to see a show (Avenue Q) and meet up with some L.A. cousins for a short, sweet trip. And that turned out to be just about right.

I may be the one person in history who found Las Vegas to be less tacky than imagined. I really expected wall-to-wall Liberace-style excess, but it just wasn’t as bad as I expected. We did a smart thing by staying at the Las Vegas Hilton, which is about as low-key as Vegas gets. The swanky properties have Wal-Mart -size casinos and shows by over-the-top personalities like Elton John and Celine Dion. The Hilton, on the other hand, has Barry Manilow as its artist in residence, and a Star Trek-themed casino.

Really my biggest disappointment was discovering that the casinos are all moving towards computerized slot machines. Very few take coins anymore, and there isn’t always a lever to pull. Somehow feeding your credit card into the slot and hitting the spin button just doesn’t have the same tactile reward. And I actually miss handling the filthy coins, but that’s just me.

One good thing about Las Vegas: If I wear my regular clothes in New York City, I feel like a hayseed. But if I wear that same outfit at, say, the New York, New York casino, sure I look like a tourist, but everyone’s a tourist, so I fit right in. I’ve never felt so free to gawk or keep my camera handy at a tourist attraction in my life.

The other good thing about Vegas? Dozens of flights home daily.

No, They’re Just Really Close Friends

The cats? Their names are Tommy (short hair) and Teacake (fluffy guy). Thanks for asking! (What, you'd like to see more photos? Sure, just click here.

The Devil’s in the Details

With airfare, visas, train tickets and hotels taken care of, it’s getting down to the small but crucial details. For example, today was all about lining up the all-important cat sitter. Did Marco Polo have to get someone to clean the litter box before he set out for China? Did Lewis and Clark remember to stop the newspaper while they were away? Did Neil Armstrong have to make sure someone came to water his plants before his trip to the moon? These details have not made it into the annals of recorded history.

But you know there would have been a journal entry if any of them had come home to a cat that hadn’t been fed in a week.

The Streak Ends

I got good news from the other side of the world today (even better than being rejected). Malaysian Airlines wants an article about the Mission District that my photographer friend John and I put together. My first magazine article. They want to use it in their in-flight magazine. A captive audience is better than no audience, so this makes me very happy. It bodes well for us as a creative team, too. Good thing, since we’re about to spend six weeks together researching travel articles!

How Much Would it Have Cost Without the Mirror Writing?

I take back everything I said about the Russian consulate. $100 is a lot of money, but the Russian visa is worth every kopek. It’s a two-page thing of beauty. The main visa is a full-page sticker, with a hologram, multi-colored stamps, and lots of writing I can’t read. What lifts it into the realm of bureaucratic art (and nearly justifies the two-week wait) is the paper stapled onto the next page. It’s so large it had to be folded and still sticks out a little. It’s got two parts, an arrival card and a departure card. Both halves are bi-lingual. The English is a little shaky, but I think it might actually give me license to kill. I’ll have to double-check with someone who reads Cyrillic, but even if I’m wrong on that, my passport is still 10 times cooler than it was when I last saw it.

Visa—for Everywhere You Want to Be

I got P.’s Chinese visa from the consulate. That means I’ve now successfully applied for and received two Chinese visas in the time it takes to get one Russian visa. Stay tuned: Later today I make my first attempt to retrieve my passport at the Russian consulate’s visa office.

Beginner’s Luck

The very first time I bought plane tickets on my own, I nearly got myself arrested. It was the summer of 1992, and I had just graduated from college and liquidated the bank account I’d kept in the town where I went to school. Having a degree in Chinese language and culture but no concept of how to be a grown-up, I hit upon the idea of deferring adulthood by traveling in China for as long as a visa would last me.

So I went to a travel agent in New London, NH, near where my parents and I were spending the summer. I fanned out a dozen hundred-dollar bills on the desk and announced that I wanted a ticket to China. I said I wanted to leave as soon as possible, and that I wasn’t sure when I would be back.

Plunking down a lot of cash and making vague demands to evacuate to a communist country is enough to get you arrested in many towns in New Hampshire. Luckily New London isn’t one of them. What did raise eyebrows was one of the hundred-dollar bills I’d been given a few weeks before by my college bank. I hadn’t noticed, but looking at the stack I’d tried to pay with, it was obvious that one was not like the others. Some of the writing was golden colored, and it was improbably dated 1928.

The agent said he thought it looked a little odd, and added, almost apologetically, that he was probably going to have to call the police. I told him I’d be happy to cooperate, and made a silent vow not act any more weird than I already had.

The agent picked up the phone, and I heard him call down to the station and ask to speak to any officer who knew something about paper money. He nodded and smiled as he spoke, never dropping his Our Town just-folks tone. Not until I heard him say, “no, she’s not going anywhere,” did I realize that I might in fact be going to the one place my parents wanted me to go less than China: jail.

The officer who arrived a few minutes later wasn’t old enough to remember the 1920s, but I guess every police force must have at least one expert on paper money to combat counterfeiters. The two men made small talk and finally got down to the business of examining my bill. The officer confirmed that this was something you didn’t see every day. My bill was a gold certificate. Once upon a time it had been redeemable for a $100 lump of gold. There was a time after the country went off the gold standard that ownership of gold certificates had been illegal, but by the early 90s, the bill was once again perfectly legal tender. (I wish I’d held onto it, though, since today they’re worth considerably more than face value.)

The cop left, and the agent apologetically issued my tickets. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if he made a note of my license plate number as I left.

It wasn’t the very last time I went to a conventional travel agent. I tried it a few more times in the next couple of years. But almost nobody was more happy than I to see the advent of impersonal, mom-and-pop-stopping Web sites like Travelocity come along.

Paper Trail

I just picked up my airline tickets from the good folks at Airtreks. And when I say “picked up,” I mean it. They issue good old-fashioned don’t-lose-’em paper tickets. For the price, though, I don’t mind. They did a great job of booking a lot of one-way tickets on different airlines, literally taking me around the world. This would have been tough on Expedia.

I’ve gotten paper tickets now and then over the years, but I haven’t gone to an office and picked up a stack of tangible tickets since the first time I went to China in 1992. At least this time the police didn’t have to get involved.

Ooops, out of room. I’ll have to tell that story tomorrow.

You’re Right, That Was Mean

The theme for next year’s Lonely Planet essay collection is “The trip that changed my life.” Sorry. But you have to promise not to steal my idea, okay?

If You Shoot for the Moon and Miss….

I just got an e-mail from Don George, Global Editor at Lonely Planet. He was writing to reject an essay I submitted for this year’s Lonely Planet travel literature anthology. That’s pretty disappointing, since I wrote it specifically for the project. But, I am choosing to accentuate the positive. Namely:

1. He said mine made the very final cut. (He may say this to all the girls, but it made me feel good nonetheless. Considering that the final product seems to include essays from writers like Simon Winchester, Tim Cahill, and Pico Iyer, this is close to a landing among the stars situation.)
   
   
2. He tipped me off early on the theme for next year’s collection. (No, I’m not telling. Go get your own essay rejected.)
   
   
3. Did I mention, I just got an e-mail from Don George, Global Editor at Lonely Planet?! After a year of dropping my writing into the Black Hole of Editorial Indifference, this actually does count as some kind of accomplishment. Before you know it, I’ll be getting rejected by Random House and Simon & Schuster.
   

Vive Vivotif Typhoid Vaccine

I was pretty nervous before I headed off to Asia the first time, at the age of 18. I wish I could go back now and tell my younger self that by the time I was on the plane, the hardest part was already behind me (so to speak). I’m talking about the inoculations and medications required for entry to Taiwan.

The tetanus shot was no fun, because tetanus never is. The hepatitis series was rough, injected as they were in a place that, well, let’s just say it was impossible for the doctor to look me in the eye when he did it. Malaria meds were scary because of the horror stories I’d heard about psychological side effects. (Although if they gave me weird dreams, they weren’t sufficiently more strange than my usual teenaged imaginings for me to notice.)

The worst part was the typhoid vaccine. It was one little prick in the arm, barely noticeable. Later that afternoon, however, I suddenly felt unbearably cold on a warm day and started shivering uncontrollably in a movie theater. (Later I was talking to the friend I’d seen the movie with, and we discovered that we remembered almost entirely different movies. The one I’d feverishly imagined sounded like the more interesting of the two.) By the time I dragged myself home, I was bone-tired, burning up with fever, and sick as a dog. It occurred to me that I should write my roommates a note explaining that I’d had a vaccine that had gone horribly wrong, in case one of them discovered me dead, but you might as well have asked me to write a novel. I couldn’t even begin to tackle the task without at least 18 hours of sleep. It was hard for me to imagine that full-blown typhoid fever could make me any sicker than I felt right then.

So I wasn’t looking forward to a visit to The Travel Doctor, a little clinic in Oakland specializing in turning adventure travelers into human dartboards. It was almost all good news, though. It turns out I’m traveling in Japan a few weeks ahead of Japanese encephalitis season. I had a tetanus shot a few years ago, and it’s still good. The hepatitis series I got to go to Cuba in 2003 will protect me through 2018. The greater Shanghai and Beijing areas have been declared malaria free, and the areas I’ll be visiting by train are too far north for malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

The only preventative measure I needed was the dreaded typhoid vaccine, the old one having expired some time ago. But good news there, too: The old vaccine is off the market (“It gave everyone a fever,” the Travel Doctor doctor told me when I complained.) The new one hardly makes anyone shake uncontrollably, and best of all, there’s an oral form. Gluttons for punishment can still choose to have an injection, which has the advantage of being over and done with quickly. But I chose to try the oral form, which consists of four capsules, taken on an empty stomach every other day.

The verdict? It was a little bit inconvenient to keep track of which days I needed to take a pill, and hard for me to time doses two hours after a meal, and one hour before beginning to feed again. (I’m not proud of this, I’m just saying.) But I’d still pick this regimen over a shot any day. The very mild G.I. issues I had were hands-down better than thinking I was going to die of fever. Three cheers for medical science.

Talk to the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace

9am: Chinese consulate opens

9:15am: I arrive. The line to pick up visas is out the door. There is no line for dropping off applications, though.

9:17: P.’s visa application successfully delivered.

9:18: I get in the pick-up line

9:26: I arrive at the front of the line and slap down my credit card to pay the $50 fee.

9:27: My work here is done.

9:30: It begins to rain as I wait for the first of three buses that will take me to the Russian consulate.

10:31: Last of the three buses drops me off at the corner of Union and Baker. It’s only one block from the consulate, but unfortunately, this particular block has a vertical rise of about 80 feet. (They don’t call it Pacific Heights for nothing.)

10:36: Arrive at locked consulate gate. As I am wondering how to get in, I hear the lock buzz open. It’s as if they know I’m there.

10:36:30: Same thing happens at the door to the building. It’s uncanny.

There is no line here, just a few solo travelers and tour guides toting stacks of clients’ passports, keeping a wary eye on anyone trying to jump the invisible queue. The tour guides bicker non-stop about whether Serge or Andre is the one with the glasses until I want to scream. I wonder if situations like this are why there is a sign that says, in English, “Did you know that keeping your voice down will get you to the front of the line faster?” This is clearly a culture with advanced line-standing rituals.

10:39: The guy in the window says “next” and looks directly at me. I wonder if this is the Serge or Andre the tour guides are obsessed with.

10:40: Although I have stacked my documents in the prescribed order (passport, invitation letter, THEN visa application), I am turned away because Serge or Andre will not take a credit card to cover the $100 visa application fee. I also lose style points for neglecting to provide a photocopy of the information page of the passport I’m about to hand over. “Money order or company check” intones Serge or Andre.

10:58: I am on Lombard Street in the rain. Lombard Street in this part of town is not the Crookedest Street in America, just the Seediest. I am on an urban scavenger hunt, trying to find a Kinkos and a bank that will grant me a money order. It is still raining.

11:08: I spy a print shop with a self-service photocopier.

11:22: There is no bank among this row of bars and cheap motels, but there is an ATM. Surely the Russians still like their American greenbacks?

11:41: Serge or Andre and I pretend we have no history. But when it’s time to pay, he’s not pleased by my stack of 20s. “No cash. Money order or company check. I told you.” So he does remember. He looks at his watch, clearly pleased that there’s no way I’ll make it back before the office closes at noon. I wonder if blue jeans still have barter value for Russians.

11:41:15: One of the men I’ve taken for a tour guide pipes up. “I can write you a company check, he says.” He takes out a checkbook, scrawls on it, and hands the check to Serge or Andre. I give the checkbook man my stack of 20s. He hands me a business card. There’s a phone number, a Market Street address, his name, and in the biggest typeface of all, his title: “Visa Aide.”

11:41:18: I realize I’ve just handed $100 cash to a complete stranger. Still, it seems to work for Serge or Andre, who hands me a claim check and tells me to come back April 4. So tune in next week, when we discover whether or not your correspondent has thrown her passport and money in a deep, dark, Russian hole. Perhaps by then we also will have a clearer idea of why the Russians take twice as long and charge twice as much for visas as the commies over on Geary Street.

Ironically, the Penalty for Mistakes is Exile to Siberia

The Russian visa application process, on the other hand, proves that Communism is not really dead. Russia may have instituted market reforms, but their entry requirements are still positively Soviet. The Chinese are content with knowing my address, occupation, and length of stay. The form fits on one page, with spacing like a padded term paper.

The Russian visa application, though, is two dense pages. They want to know the usual stuff, of course, but they also want to know my parents’ full names, where I went to college and what I majored in, a list of all the countries I’ve visited in the last 10 years, and the names and phone numbers of my supervisors at my last two jobs (not counting current employment). Supporting documentation is required, bringing the application to four pages. They want to know who’s paying for my trip. They want to know if I’ve ever served in any army. They want to know if I have health insurance. Most ominously, they want to know if I have “any specialized skills, training or experience related to fire-arms and explosives or to nuclear, biological or chemical activities.”

They also want to know if I’ve ever suffered from “a dangerous physical or mental disorder.” Something tells me I may by the time I have my visa in hand.

Big Brotherly Love

Of course, all the flight and hotel reservations in the world won’t help you if you can’t get into the country. So this week I’ve been trying to chase down visas. Neither Mongolia nor Japan requires visas of American citizens on short trips. (Who knew these two could agree on anything?) But China does, and boy does Russia.

Yesterday I stopped by the Chinese consulate in San Francisco to drop off my visa application. It was an interesting experience, kind of like the DMV only with less despair and more yoga. There were lines, but they went pretty quickly. It took about 30 seconds for the woman at the window to collect my paperwork and tell me to come back Friday to pick up my visa. Easy.

The interesting part is that in front of both the entrances to the visa office were groups of Falun Gong activists. It was the most mellow protest I’d ever seen. A bunch of middle-aged and elderly people stretching. Monday mornings at Curves are more rowdy than that.

That’s one of the few good things about oppressive countries--it’s so easy to be a rebel without actually endangering yourself.

No Going Back Now

Suddenly, it’s all falling into place. I paid for my airline tickets today, so it’s really happening. The flights are all booked and the train tickets are all reserved. That means my itinerary is set. For those following along at home, here’s what it looks like:

May 14: Japan Airlines from San Francisco to Tokyo, arriving Narita on May 15.
(Geeky details: The flight lasts 10 hours and 40 minutes, non-stop. The plane will be a 747. There are two meals.)

This week will be spent in and around Tokyo with my friend John and his S.O., who is Japanese. Stops include Kamakura, Hakone hot spring, and the Sanja festival in Tokyo.

May 21: Japan Airlines from Tokyo to Shanghai.
(Geeky details: The flight lasts three hours and 10 minutes, non-stop. The plane will be a 777. There’s meal.)

I’ll meet P. that same day in Shanghai. Together we will make a pilgrimage to the White Rabbit factory. After that….I don’t know. I’m sure there’s a museum or something.

May 28: China Eastern Airlines from Shanghai to Beijing.
(Geeky details: The non-stop flight lasts one hour and fifty minutes. The plane will be a 737. There’s a snack.)

In Beijing, I will meet up with John, and I also hope to visit the father of a friend who’s teaching math at a middle school there. I’ll also look up a T.A. of mine from college.

June 3: John and I leave Beijing on the Trans-Siberian train #23.

June 4: Arrive in Ulan Batar, Mongolia.
We will spend three nights in the area, two in U.B., and one in a yurt in a nomad camp (apparently cushier than it sounds).

June 7: leave Ulan Batar on train #363.

June 9: Arrive Irkutsk, Russia.
Irkutsk is the jumping-off point for Lake Baikal. We’ll spend one night at a home-stay in Irkutsk proper, and two nights with a Buryat family in the village of Bolshoe Goloustnoe, on the shores of the lake.

June 12: Depart Irkutsk on train #9 (the Baikal).

June 15: Arrive Moscow.
We’ll be staying at the AST Hof Hotel. Anyone been there? My mother visited Moscow during the Soviet days, and her stories have set the expectation bar pretty low. As long as the room is not bugged by the KGB and no one has left fish in the nightstand (I’m not making this up), I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

June 18: Overnight train to St. Petersburg.
Here we’re staying at the Vyborgkskaya Hotel. Again, can anyone out there appraise the dead fish situation at this property?

June 23: Scandinavian Airlines from St. Petersburg to Copenhagen.
(Geeky details: The non-stop flight lasts two hours and five minutes. The plane will be an MD-80. I will have to buy snacks. The terrorists have won.)

Later on June 23: Scandinavian Airlines from Copenhagen to Chicago.
(Geeky details: Non-stop flight is five minutes less than nine hours. Aircraft is an A340. There’s a meal and a snack.)

Later still on June 23: Scandinavian Airlines from Chicago to San Francisco.
(Geeky details: Non-stop, four-and-a-half-hour flight. Because it’s a domestic flight, I will have to pay for food. I hope they take Mongolian tögrögs. Plane is another A340.)

ETA: I should be home around midnight on June 23--or perhaps during the first few minutes of June 24. Nothing like starting out your pride weekend with a sleep deficit.

E-Ticket Ride

I’ve put down deposits. I’ve made reservations. But today I finally made my first real travel purchase. And it’s not even for me. I bought P’s ticket to Shanghai--if “bought” is the word. I got the ticket by using up virtually all my United frequent flyer miles. (No, that’s a good thing.)

It’s amazing how far the process has come. I remember the first time I cashed in miles for a ticket. I think I had to send away for paper certificates saying I qualified. Then I had to take them to an airline office in downtown San Francisco and actually speak to a person, who grumpily gave me a paper ticket in return. (Then I got back in my buggy and trotted back to my apartment in the Barbary Coast.)

This time I was able to check my mileage level online, and automatically deduct the miles. A round-trip e-ticket to Shanghai, on a non-stop flight cost a grand total of $30.68--and about 10 minutes. I didn’t have to leave my house.

That made the horses very happy.

Special Delivery

Incidentally, something like the above scenario happened to me once before. When I was in college, I spent a summer studying Chinese in Taiwan. One day, I got two postcards from my great aunt, who lives in Connecticut. One was dated a month earlier than the other. The one that had taken longer to get there (about 6 weeks, I think) had two postmarks. One was from a Hartford-area post office. The other was from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

More Encouraging Signs

Further evidence that my career is chugging right along: Today I got two rejection letters from the same magazine. (Curiously, one was dated Feb. 7, the other March 2.) They were rejecting two different article ideas that I’d pitched them.

I could look at this as a double dis, of course, but I prefer to think that this means they noticed me twice. They practically know who I am now.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Yeah, But Do They Serve Peanuts?

I’m in the process of planning two extremely different trips. One is my trans-Siberian odyssey. The other is a weekend trip to Vegas in April. And here’s an interesting thing I discovered: According to the Man in Seat Sixty-One site, it’s theoretically possible to travel between Moscow and Beijing--a journey of about 5,000 miles as the iron rooster flies--for as little as $200.

The lowest Travelocity round-trip fare for travel between Oakland and Las Vegas--a journey of 549 miles?

$271.

How Did They Do it in the Dial-up Days?

It took about 40 emails, but from California, I managed to book a trans-Siberian railroad itinerary through a group in China—while keeping my traveling companion, John, in the loop in Laos.

The whole itinerary hasn’t quite fallen into place yet, but the railroad part is set:

June 3, 2006: Depart Beijing train #23 at 07:40
June 4: Arrive Ulan Bator at 13:20. Spend one night at Elstei Ger (yurt) Camp
June 5: Return to Ulan Bator for 2 nights Bayangol Hotel
June 7: Depart Ulan Bator train #363 at 18:40
June 9: Arrive Irkutsk at 08:10 with 1 night homestay in Irkutsk, and two nights at Bolshoe Goloustnoe, on the shores of Lake Baikal
June 12: Depart Irkutsk train #9 at 16:35
June 15: Arrive Moscow at 16:58 with 3 nights AST Hof Hotel
June 18: Depart Moscow night train at 23:55
June 19: Arrive Saint Petersburg at 08:00 with 3 nights Vyborgskaya hotel
June 22: Fly home

Fun Fact

Until 1999, the beauty cream Americans call Oil of Olay was marketed in Asia and Australia under the name Oil of Ulan--as in Ulan Bator.

Itinerary Coming Together

I think we’ve nailed down our stops on the Trans Siberian. I initially wanted to stop just about everywhere, but then I realized there’s only so much I can absorb. On top of the fact that I’ll be visiting Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Moscow, and maybe St. Petersburg, I’m afraid my head will explode if I try too many stops along the way. Of course, it might explode if I don’t stop, too. It’s a fine line kind of thing. But I think we’ll just make two major stops: Ulan Bator, and Lake Baikal. That ought to be enough wide-open space to keep me sane.

This Might Help

One other thing it’s been pointed out I ought to do: Set a departure date. I’ve gotten as far as figuring out what day I’m leaving Beijing on the Trans-Sib: May 23.

All I Have to Do

• Buy airplane tickets
  
• Buy train tickets
  
• Tell friends in Beijing I’m coming
  
• Pack
  

Making a List

I’ve already made a lot of progress toward planning my trip. For instance, I’ve already accomplished these important tasks:

• Started reviewing my rapidly deteriorating Chinese textbooks from college
  
• Duct-taped my rapidly deteriorating Chinese textbooks from college
  
• Listened to my Cui Jian tapes to figure out which ones to replace with CDs in China
  
• Bought a map of Tokyo
  
• Told everyone I’m going (so now I have to)
  

Um, Because It’s There?

Why? What makes me want to take a train all the way across Russia? I’ve actually wanted to take the trans-Siberian railroad since I backpacked through China in 1992. A lot of other backpackers I met had gotten to China this way, and they made it seem really cool.

So yes, there’s a sad suggestion of reclaiming lost youth. I won’t deny that.

Mostly, though, I just really like trains. Not in any special train-spotting kind of way. I don’t mind flying. It’s just that I like the idea of being still for a week, but not actually confined to a seat. I like the fact that you can really see the countryside rolling by. It’s kind of like a road trip without actually having to get behind the wheel in a foreign country. I like that in one trip, while mostly sitting down, I can experience three countries, two of which--Mongolia and Russia--will be new to me. (Don't worry; I do plan to get off the train and walk around.)

I like chatting with people while I travel.

I also like being able to walk away from a conversation if I sit down next to a power-talker by mistake.

Okay, I like vodka, too. So sue me.

Around the World in 30 Days

I appreciate all your concern, but yes, I am serious. I really do plan to take the trans-Siberian railroad this spring. The plan so far is that my partner, Pipi, and I will first travel to Japan, where we have a friend. John is a professional travel photographer I met at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference one summer. He moved to Kamakura, Japan in the fall of 2005, and we plan to visit him there. Kamakura is about an hour from Tokyo by train. Tokyo, quite frankly, frightens me (call it Akira damage), so that sounds about right. We won’t have a lot of time in Japan, so I’d rather save the Neo-city for a trip where I have the time it deserves.

From Japan, Pipi and I will fly to Shanghai. Pipi has always wanted to see Shanghai because she’s interested in city planning, and this city is in the middle of enormous growth. I’ve been there before, and am very curious to see how it has changed.

Pipi probably will have to fly home from Shanghai--it’s the curse of being steadily employed. I’ll continue on to Beijing. Beijing is another city I visited in 1992, and I’m told it is barely recognizable now. I can’t even imagine it full of cars--I remember bikes for days--so I think I’m in for a bit of a shock.

John and I will meet up in Beijing and take the trans-Mongolian train line from there. The end of the line is Moscow, but I hope to also see St. Petersburg. If on the way home I’m routed through a Baltic city, or a Scandinavian capital, so much the better. But I probably won’t mind going straight home by then.

I don’t know exactly what the air route will be, but I assume I’ll be sent west from Moscow, meaning that I will have completed a whole circle around the globe. A pretty neat trick to pull off on a low budget.

Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming

Yes, I did see "The Station Agent." Thanks to everyone who wrote in suggesting it. (And yes, I did like the film.)

All Aboard We Hope You’ve Enjoyed Riding With Us

For those with a short attention span, the shortest scheduled train trip--in the U.S., at least--is the 5-minute, 3.6-mile jaunt from one end of the Princeton Branch Line to the other. Embarkation: Princeton, New Jersey. End of the Line: Princeton Junction, New Jersey.

Fun Fact

The longest possible train journey in the world is from Vila Real de Santo Antonio, Portugal to Saigon. (Okay, Ho Chi Minh City. You say tomato….) That’s 11,092 miles, of which my Trans-Siberian route would be just one weeklong leg. Like I said, I know my limits.

Anthologized

I’m going to be in my first anthology. Someday. A woman in southern California is putting together an anthology called We the People, Too. It’s a collection of essays with a gay/lesbian theme, and I submitted a piece I wrote about gay marriage in California.

I’d love to be smug about my piece winning out over the cutthroat, but unfortunately, the editor seems to be having trouble getting enough submissions. Already the deadline has been extended, and it’s not clear when or even if it will get published. A little help, please? Any non-fiction stories about the gay and lesbian experience in America, your own or someone else’s, are welcome. 1,000 words or less; deadline is June 1. Submit electronically to Stacy Davies at wetheotherpeople@aol.com, or mail it to:

We the People, Too
PO Box 1524
Claremont, CA 91711

Please help make this happen!

Cuckoo for Irkutsk

In the immortal words of David St. Hubbins, there’s a fine line between stupid and clever. More than one person I’ve talked to thinks I might be brushing a toe across the stupid side with my adventure for 2006: taking the trans-Siberian railroad from Beijing to Moscow.

Not, you’ll notice, in the conventional direction, from Moscow to Beijing. Anyone can do that, and when I was in China after college, it seemed like every European backpacker I met there had. No, I’m not just exiling myself to Siberia; I’m doing it backwards. Starting in Beijing, I’ll travel through Mongolia, into Siberia, past Lake Baikal, and on into European Russia. The trip takes seven days without stops, although I’ll definitely be stopping a few times. (I once went on a non-stop trans-Atlantic cruise, and by day five, I was hopefully scanning the horizon for icebergs. I know my limits.)

I’m planning on stopping in Mongolia (because when will I ever be in Mongolia again?), spending a few days around Lake Baikal, and at least having a look around Irkutsk, just because I like to say “Irkutsk” so much.

Stupid? Clever? Insane? Only time will tell. I’m leaving in May. I’ll be posting regarding my trip-planning progress, and ideally from the road itself when the time comes. Stay tuned.

Ground Control to Central Coast Getaway Piece

I guess the strain of ignoring me got to be too much for a certain Long Island-based publication. It took almost nine months, but finally their reserve of indifference ran dry, and they were forced to resort to outright rejection. Today I got back from them not one, not two, but five pieces, the earliest dating from March.

That’s a lot of rejection to process in one day, even if it’s all from one editor. But then again, it’s sort of encouraging, in a way. I had assumed that all these pieces had fallen into the black hole of editorial indifference, but in fact, they were just orbiting in a holding pattern around the editor’s desk. It just goes to show, you never know when ET’s gonna phone home.

And Another Thing

One more reason to hang out at the airport: The international terminal aviation museum. It’s free, and it’s located before the security point, so you don’t have to be traveling to get to it. In fact, I bet a lot of visitors are local. I know that whenever I’m traveling through the international terminal, I’m usually too worried about flight times, meals, passports, pit stops, and keeping track of my various airplane amusements to be bothered with finding the museum. Besides, if I’m in the international terminal, I’m usually headed someplace that’s lousy with museums.

But it’s worth checking out. It’s even worth a trip down from San Francisco on BART. Right now they’ve got an exhibit on the late, great Pan Am. Fun fact: Pan Am’s first-ever scheduled passenger flight, which took place in the early thirties, was a 90-minute hop from Key West to Havana. It cost $50, which must have been a fortune in those days. Interesting, no? There’s more where that came from. Check it out if you get the chance.

The Russians Are Coming at Gate 18

I only know a few people who hang out at airports when they don’t have to, but I’m one of them. It’s more fun than it sounds. It’s possible that all airports are decent places if you’re not jet lagged and worried about missing your flight, but SFO is especially good for passing the time. For one thing, it’s easy to get to by BART, which takes you to the international terminal. As soon as you get off the train you find yourself surrounded by parked jumbo jets from all over the world. This is heaven for plane spotters. (I once saw an Aeroflot jet taxi by and almost started tugging on people’s sleeves.)

There’s also surprisingly good food, all of it located before security, so you don’t need a boarding pass. A lot of San Francisco restaurants have outposts there, so you can get wood-fired pizza, sushi, and real coffee. No Pizza Hut or Starbucks here.

And if you’re lucky, you might get treated to a sight like what I saw there this afternoon. As I was strolling from snack bar to snack bar, I was passed by a procession of statuesque young women all wearing long red wool coats. They all seemed to be blond, and fair, with their hair done up in buns. There were about 20 of them, all trailed by smart little black bags on wheels. These weren’t clumsy roller boards like the proletariat drag around; these bags were more like Gucci purses on casters, and they almost seemed self-propelled, needing only the tiniest flicks of the wrist for control, like show horses.

I realized after a moment that there were a few men in the group, dressed in simple black suits, but they were puny and gawky in comparison to the stunning army of women, and had to trot like terriers to keep up. The women seemed oblivious to their presence, strutting a little like catwalk models, and a little bit like they were parading through Red Square. They looked like Robert Palmer girls as dressed by Raisa Gorbachev. A photographer with a blunderbuss of a camera was following them. One of the women in the rear kept turning and frowning at him with an extremely photogenic pout, and I bet those shots sold like nobody’s business.

I wish I could say they goose-stepped aboard a Tupolev and flew off to their conclave in Minsk, but no such luck. As it turns out, they weren’t even Russian. Their bags all said “Virgin Atlantic” in tiny letters, so they were probably just advance scouts readying for Virgin’s low-budget SFO launch. Still, it beats watching canned CNN and eating TCBY.

Five Writing Days Until Christmas

Anyone else have this problem? The one where you call yourself a writer and yet you can’t get a Christmas card out the door to save your life? Here it is December 19, and gaily-colored pen has not yet touched festive paper.

I’d like to think it’s related to the phenomenon of the New York City writer who suffered a paralyzing three-day block trying to compose the perfect “No radio in car, don’t bother breaking in” sign. (Another possibly apocryphal story, but a good one nonetheless.) Or it may be that part of me thinks my deadline is just too far in the future. I think that in the back of my mind, I’m telling myself I can just put on a pot of coffee Christmas Eve, pull an all-nighter, and still make the December 25 drop-dead date.

Looks like it’s New Year’s cards again for me this year.

Real Celebrities

Okay, okay you celebrity snobs. I’m sensing that reality TV stars don’t count as real celebrities to some of you. Here, then, is a partial list of actual famous people (defined as “celebrities whose 15 minutes are not yet up) I have sighted in Oakland.

Bonnie Raitt, strolling down College Ave. in Rockridge.
Andris Biedrins, forward for the Golden State Warriors, in the elevator of an apartment building next to Lake Merritt.
Mike Dirnt, bass player for Green Day, finishing up breakfast with his daughter at 9am(!), Mama's Royal Cafe.
Andre Ward, gold medal winner in boxing at the 2004 Olympics, having brunch at the Merritt Restaurant.
Angela Davis, eating at Café de Bartolo, Grand Avenue.

And once I saw Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows, waiting for a table at a Chinese Restaurant on College Ave. in Berkeley. Really close to Oakland. I’m counting it.

Oaktown Celebrity Sighting

P. and I were driving around Oakland when a guy on a bike passed us. Right, we were in a motorized vehicle and he passed us under his own power. So that's already impressive. Then I noticed that the rider had a prosthetic leg. And the hugest biceps I have ever seen. This rang a bell. So we gunned it and caught up with him on a straightaway and sure enough--it was Chad, Oaktown homeboy, cancer survivor, and tenth person voted out of Survivor: Vanuatu.

I don’t know Chad’s last name. That’s how it is on reality TV. It’s like Brazilian soccer, or progressive elementary schools. No last names required.

Cart Collision

Metal hits metal
Quite a crowd for 2pm
Frozen OJ rolls

Lackey! Get These Proofs out to the Coast Now!

The mailman’s okay. He came at about 6:40. Like estranged celebrity spouses at the Academy Awards, he and the UPS guy had a carefully choreographed near-miss. So I can stop worrying about him, and go back to my obsessive and unrealistic hope that the FedEx person will stop by my house. It’s not that I’m into the driver; I’ve never even laid eyes on him or her. I just want to be the kind of writer who’s important enough to have materials rushed to her doorstep.

The Postman Always Rings Twice. And I Should Know

Is it wrong to be worried about the mailman? I’m worried about the mailman. He should have been here by 1pm, 2 at the latest. Now it’s after 5, and it’s dark, and it’s also getting harder to park on my street. He drives a minivan, but it’s not going to seem so mini in another half an hour or so when everyone starts getting home from work.

I know it’s a little weird to be so obsessed with my mailman. But I don’t have much else to focus on. It’s just me and the cats at home all day, and frankly, they aren’t much for conversation. (They’re indoor cats, too, so they don’t even ever bring me anything.) The mailman making his appointed rounds is the main punctuation to my afternoon. I realize that I know the sound his master key makes opening all of my building’s mailboxes at once, and I can definitely tell the difference between the throaty slam of all five of them and the tinny, lonelier sound of a neighbor swinging her own box shut. And I find myself listening for those noises, because it’s an excuse to get up out of my chair, and while I’m up, maybe tidy a little, take some recycling down to the bin, and maybe get a snack or something on my way back to my desk, since my monk-like powers of concentration probably won’t allow me to get up again for quite some time.

Now it’s almost 6, and he’s still not here. At this rate, the UPS guy (who drives down my street every evening around 6:30) will be here before him, or maybe at the same time, and that might be awkward. I don’t know. Maybe they’re fine with each other.

But I worry.

Vanity Pays Off

Did you ever Google yourself and find out something you didn’t know? This happened to me today. I typed in my name and about five entries down, under the listings for the only other living American Nicole Clausing I’m aware of (she must be a relation, but it’s hard to believe I share genes with an athlete), was a link to the Christian Science Monitor’s Home Forum page. Turns out something I wrote for the 2004 Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference (it won a minor prize) was published on Friday. Who knew?

Fun fact: The Christian Science Monitor is distributed in 140 countries, meaning my name just went to about 120 places that the rest of me hasn’t gotten to yet.

Biiiiillions and Biiiiillions of Submissions

I got two rejection letters today from the same newspaper, and in the strange universe I live in, where success and failure are not governed by the laws of physics, this qualified as good news.

For months now I’ve been sending out fleets of articles to papers all over the country, only to see them fall into the black hole of editorial indifference. The black hole of editorial indifference, of course, is a force so strong that nothing, not even a rejection letter, can escape it. An article that falls into this black hole is doomed. Like Laika the Russian space dog, it’s on a one-way trip, and you’ll never hear from it again.

But the two articles that got sent back to me today, they’re Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. They planted flags in the alien landscape, left footprints, and came back to tell the tale. At the rate I’m going, there’ll be a Best Western on Mars before I actually get anything accepted by the editor in question, but I’m encouraged. Who knows; maybe if I can launch enough of my missives toward his desk, eventually the number of survivors will reach a critical mass--a colony, if you will--and he’ll find it easier to publish my stories than to keep sending them back to me.

The invasion has begun.