Alarming Newspaper News

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting on its own possible demise. It seems they need to find a buyer or a whole lot of money lying around soon or the paper will be in dire financial straits.

This is alarming not just because I have a peculiar obsession with getting myself published in this paper, but also because the closing of the Chronicle would obviously be a very bad omen for publishing in general. Here’s hoping they—and other newspapers in trouble—find a way to turn things around.

A Different Perspective

It’s fashionable to mock air travel for being tedious and irritating, and lots of comedians and travel writers (especially those who think they’re also comedians) get easy laughs out of this subject.

Then there is this brave guy who thinks we ought to be enjoying flying more. This clip is pretty interesting, and very funny. Thanks to my sister for sending it my way! (The first few seconds don’t make a lot of sense—what now about the donkey?—and he riffs for a few minutes on other subjects. Flying stuff starts at about the two-minute mark.)

(Oh, and the language is a little crude—sorry!)

So It’s Not Just Me

This guy seems to be a compulsive facebook user, too.

Not Strictly Related, But….

…Has anyone else heard of this Facebook thing?

I’ve been resisting, because I’ve seen it suck the productivity right out of stronger people than myself. But I finally succumbed, and whoa, Nellie, is it ever a time waster. I was right about that.

But it’s also a fabulous tool for reconnecting with people, and for all those who pooh-pooh electronic communication as superficial, I submit that I have known my friend Lisa for 12 years, and we just now realized that we share a fanaticism for the band Squeeze. We figured this out not through a face-to-face conversation, but because in my Facebook profile I’d marked myself as a fan of the band’s lead singer.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it; that there is some socially redeeming value to all the time I now spend on this site.

Some of the site’s features are a little harder to justify, but they are undeniably fun. One feature lets you put virtual pins on a world map to show where you’ve been. You can share your map with your friends and see where your friends have been. I’m pleased to discover that I’m the only one of us who has visited Mongolia, but my African and South-East Asian experience (zilch) does not come close to measuring up to my peers.

As if that’s not enough, the map page also comes with a link to a geography game. I’ve played an online game like it before, but this one gives you a score in the form of a “travel IQ.” Mine was a slightly disappointing 111, but I’m just getting my mouse warmed up. I know I can do better next time. It’ll just take a minute…

More Disarming Digs

I sent another one in. (If the editor feels she’s under siege from me, then I’m accomplishing my goal.) This one’s about the experience of traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad in a sleeper car. If that’s not “disarming,” I don’t know what is.

Disarming Digs

I just submitted a very short piece to the Chronicle. They have a new section on offbeat lodgings, and I wrote in with a description and photo of a Mongolian nomad tent I once spent the night in. That’s got to be offbeat enough to at least warrant a second glance. Here’s hoping.

Why Didn’t I Think of That Part II

Before I interrupted myself with my appreciation of Southwest Airlines and Valentine’s Day, I was musing about getting scooped.

It probably happens to everyone. It happened to me recently—the Chronicle had a story on the Trans-Siberian railroad, which I’ve taken. The author didn’t take the train the whole way across Russia. Instead, he traveled from Moscow to Yekaterinburg and back. The Moscow-Siberia leg was the route traveled by the Czar Nicolas II, on what turned out to be the last trip he ever took—he and his family all met a bad end in Yekaterinburg. So the author presented the story as following in the last footsteps of Russia’s last Czar.

That’s a creative angle, and it was a good story. So I definitely am not saying mine would have been better. I just know it could have been me in the paper, if I’d just been quicker on the draw, or done a better job, or known the editor better, or…well, I don’t really know. You can make yourself crazy trying to figure out why something happened or didn’t happen. All you can do is hope for better luck next time. (You can also hope your trip gets complicated in some amusing and unforeseen way. Everyone likes a good-trip-gone-wrong story.)

Happy Valentine’s Day

Speaking of LUV, I hope everyone has a very happy Valentine’s Day. Pipi and I are going to L.A. to see a play directed by her cousin. We’ll have dinner at a restaurant we like at the Grove, which is Pipi’s favorite mall.

Okay, that sounds kind of funny—favorite mall? But if you grew up in L.A., you’d have a favorite mall, too. And it would probably be the Grove, which is very nice and often good for a celebrity sighting. I grew up in a place where there were only two malls. One we creatively dubbed “the mall,” and the other was “the dead mall,” so I may not be much of a judge, but my inexpert opinion is that even though you can’t get an orange Julius to save your life, the Grove is a pretty good mall.

So happy Valentine’s Day. Here’s wishing everyone love and happiness, or at least some good retail therapy.

LUV is All You Need

They’re not the most glamorous of carriers. In fact, Southwest Airlines, with its folksy flight attendants, orange airplanes, and cutsey stock-ticker symbol (LUV), has probably done more than any other legacy operation to destroy the mystique of air travel.

But LUV is there for you. When something comes up unexpectedly as it did for me this weekend (and is it just me, or is this year already off-the-charts bizarro?), Southwest does make it incredibly easy to change your plans. I just had to bump up a flight for this coming Saturday by a couple of hours. I assumed that I would have to pay the difference between the price of my original flight and the two-day advanced purchace price of the new flight. Since I had to rebook for both Pipi and myself, I thought it might be expensive.

Turns out, there’s a sale going on and the new flight was about half the price of the old one. No, Southwest isn’t going to pay me, but they are letting me change my itinerary absolutely free. That’s a rare thing in these days of baggage fees and peanut surcharges.

It’s official: For flights under 2,000 miles, I LUV Southwest.

Why Didn’t I Think of That?

Last Sunday the San Francisco Chronicle had a cover story on gay and lesbian travel. There was no incredibly creative angle; the main information conveyed was that there exist cruises sailings for gay and lesbian travelers, and that more and more same-sex couples are honeymooning and traveling with children. The author didn’t even go on any gay adventures. This piece was strictly a desk job. I finished the piece thinking, “Well I could have done that.”

So why didn’t I? Because I didn’t think of it. Or rather, it didn’t occur to me that the Chronicle would be interested in a cover story that is an overview of gay travel. I’m not saying I could have done it better; it was a very good article. I’m just saying I could also have done it, but for some reason I didn’t. I’m reminded yet again that so much of this business is having the right idea at the right time. I’m going to have to work on that.

And Now for Something Completely Different

The San Francisco Chronicle has given itself a complete makeover. If you ask me, it looks a little too much like USA Today for my taste, but that’s not important to me. What is important to me is the fact that there are several new departments in the travel section, and a brand new editor to go with them. It’s a great opportunity and I hope to weasel my way in there and pretend like I was there all along. We’ll see how well that works out.

Speaking of India

There’s a new Indian restaurant in Oakland’s Dimond District, which is right next to my neighborhood. It’s called Shaan and it’s pretty good. They bungled our delivery order pretty badly—we got three times as much rice as we asked for, and half as many lassis (wrong flavor, too), but it was all so good we didn’t mind. We will definitely be back when we’re in the mood for something a little healthier than Vik’s.

A Clarification

Every once in a while I’m reminded that I’m not writing in a vacuum. Real people, sometimes not even related to me, check in here and keep me honest.

Yesterday an alert reader noticed that I had a questionable claim in a posting I wrote more than a year ago. In it, I called Kauai the rainiest place in the world because it gets 350 days of rain annually. This may make Kauai the place with the most monotonous weather forecast, but it is not actually the rainiest spot on the globe. Parts of Kauai get about 400 inches of rain a year, which is a lot, but not as much as the village of Mawsynram, in India’s Meghalaya State. This sodden spot gets 467 inches of rain every year, making Mawsynram a strong contender for the world’s rainiest place.

Of course a much more glaring error is my contention in the same posting that we didn’t need any more rain in northern California. In spite of a rainy January, last winter’s rainfall was below average, as I recall. And now we’re in a drought, with very little rain having fallen in January of this year. I take it back! We could use some rain now.

How It’s Done

I just finished reading Trieste, by Jan Morris. It took me a long time to get through, because it’s a dense book, full of centuries’ worth of historical lessons and anecdotes, and because Morris writes in a careful third-person style that’s very different from the zany, personal stories that are popular now.

The time was well spent, though. Morris paints an interesting portrait of Trieste, a city I’ve never been to (and one which, according to a possibly apocryphal 1999 poll, 70% of Italians don’t realize is in Italy). She covers all aspects of Trieste’s history and culture, from the city’s Jewish Diaspora to the city’s relations with its Slavic neighbors and what happened when the city ceased to be an important Adriatic port.

Just when the anecdotes start to get a little cloying and you’re starting to wonder where she’s going with all of them, Morris wraps up the book—her last, she says--with a magnificent chapter that explains why Trieste has been significant to her throughout the years. It’s a beautiful end to not just a book but an entire distinguished writing career. The final chapter manages to tell us a lot about both the author and the city, without being either self-indulgent or dryly historical. In my experience, that’s a hard balance to strike. It’s easy to tell your own story about a place, and easy to impart a history lesson, but very hard to make your own experiences interesting and relevant to a general audience. This book shows how that’s done.

First Things First

Before we go to Australia (Pipi just got the time off, so it’s looking more and more like that will happen), we’ve got a quick trip to L.A. in the works. We’re going down to see a play staged by Pipi’s cousin, Debbie. It’s been getting great reviews and keeps getting extended. We’re very proud of her.

Going to Australia in My Mind

I’ve been paying attention to all things Australian lately because Pipi and I are trying to plan a trip there for this year. Details to follow, if it all comes together.

I also feel I should mention that not everyone celebrated Australia Day on Monday. The country’s Aboriginal population parties on that day about as heartily as America’s indigenous people do on Columbus Day (i.e., not so much) for precisely the same reasons. So don’t think you were the only person not having a knees-up (party) that day.

Happy Australia Day

It has been brought to my attention that in my post-Christmas hibernating mode, I managed to overlook a holiday entirely. (Honestly, after a yuletide season that included many parties, most good but one so awful that all my clothes had to be dry-cleaned afterward, I don’t think I would have been ready for more festivity anyway.)

Monday was Australia Day, and the day came and went at my house with nary a boomerang thrown nor a vegemite container cracked. I’m not sure what I would have done if I had known. I probably would have had a Fosters and watched an offbeat independent film where everyone has unusual names. That sounds like a pretty good plan for the coming weekend, and better late than never. Happy Australia Day, everyone.

One More Thing…

…About water landings. I had never heard of anything like the Hudson River incident, but it turns out that safe water landings aren’t unprecedented. The San Francisco Chronicle had an article a few days ago about a similar situation that occurred in the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii in 1956. A passenger plane lost power in two out of four engines and had to ditch in the open water. Everyone on board survived that crash, too.

Here’s a link to the article.

Remarkably, video exists of the crash and rescue operation, too—someone on board the Coast Guard ship that pulled everyone out of the water had a movie camera.

Xin Nian Kuai Le

Happy Lunar New Year. If you’ve been feeling like you got 2009 off on the wrong foot, tonight you get another chance, when the year of the Ox begins. May it be a prosperous one.

I’m Not Making This Up

And neither is my father. There is apparently an urban legend going around implying that a frozen chicken has the power to destroy a locomotive. It’s not true. They really do use frozen, not fresh poultry to test engines and windshields. (Well, except for the Air Force, which now uses synthetic birds. This story just keeps getting stranger.)

Chicken Gun

I actually did learn one other tidbit of information from the Hudson River plane crash. I learned that because bird strikes are not at all unusual, airplane engine prototypes have to be tested for their resiliency to birds before they go into production.

How do they do this? Well, there’s really only one way. There exists a tool that is a distant cousin of the ball lobbers tennis instructors use. (It has several names; “rooster booster” is my favorite.) Engineers load real chickens (my father says they use frozen ones from the supermarket) into the gun and launch them at high speed directly into the spinning turbines. The engines are required to maintain a certain amount of power after the strike. If they don’t, the engine design goes back to the drawing board before it’s used on a commercial aircraft.

Think about this the next time you see a scientist speaking soberly on the news about the safety testing that airplanes have to go through. Now you have some idea what that guy's doing all day long when he’s not on camera.

The Audacity

Here’s to choosing hope over fear.

The Unlikely Event of a Water Landing

I think we can all agree that this is an amazing story.

There are a few takeaways for me. The first is the reassuring knowledge that airplanes more or less float, at least for a little while. I didn’t know this.

The second is a reminder that pilots are the most unflappable people in the world. This I did know.

The last thing I have gleaned from coverage of this crash is the conviction that New Yorkers can handle a disaster like no other people on earth. An airplane falls out of the sky and nobody panics. The passengers calmly exit the aircraft and stand on the wing in freezing water up to their knees like they’re waiting for a crosstown bus. Ferry commuters start throwing life jackets overboard and pulling people out of the water like they do it every day.

It’s pretty incredible. I worry that if this had happened in the Bay Area no rescue would have happened before a drum circle was organized and social workers had determined that all the victims actually wanted to be saved. I fear that if I had been on the plane, I would not have calmly waited my turn to exit. I’m pretty sure I would have made a scene, and I think it would have been like the scene in Airplane where the passengers are lining up for the chance to slap the hysterical woman.

I don’t always enjoy being in New York City, but I will admit that the people are a lot tougher than I am.

What Changed?

I’m not sure why this article got accepted when others haven’t. I suspect that the subject matter was right—the Chronicle runs a lot of stories about Hawaii because it’s a destination that’s hugely popular with Californians.

One variable that’s impossible to discount is the fact that there’s a new executive travel editor at the Chronicle. I liked the old editor personally—I’ve taken classes from him and run into him several times at networking events, and he seems like a really nice guy. The last time I saw him he told me I was doing some good work, but he just never printed my stories. I think they were mostly a little too urban for him. I’ve had more established travel writers tell me they too had trouble getting him interested in city and culture pieces—he seemed more drawn to stories with an outdoor slant.

The new editor said in her introductory column (which was mostly about shoes) that she’s an urban girl, and I almost turned cartwheels. As soon as I read that I started revising some city stories I’ve had sitting around. I’ve already sent one (Shanghai) and will be sending more. The idea is to get in on the ground floor with a new editor still building up a stable of freelancers. We’ll see how that goes.

Hawaii Article to be Published

Last week I posted a serialized account of my adventure on Haleakala. Later in the week, when I’d gotten a little distance from it, I put the two halves together, tightened it up considerably, said a Hail Mary, and flung it at a couple of editors.

I submitted it first to Travelers’ Tales. They publish anthologies of travel literature. I haven’t heard from them yet, but I wouldn’t expect to—they have long turn-around times.

The other editor I sent it to was at the San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper whose travel section has a long tradition of roundly ignoring me. Yesterday, though, the Chronicle was feeling benevolent and accepted the Hawaii story.

The story is scheduled to run March 8, in a Hawaii-themed issue. It should be in the Departures spot. This is where the editor normally has a column, but it’s not unusual for a guest writer to appear there. I’ll post a link as soon as it’s up.

Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad…

…Especially when a good alternative surfaces.

There were three things I was hoping to do in Maui. One was snorkeling at Molokini, which I did. Another was driving up Haleakala for the sunrise. The sunrise didn’t happen, but the trip did, so I think that qualifies as a good-faith effort. (And it turns out that I got more out of that trip than I even realized—details tomorrow.)

The last thing on my list was driving to Hana. Once we were in Hawaii, though, I started to realize that people weren’t exaggerating when they said it was an all-day thing. It was hard to understand from a distance how this could be, but then I got there and began to see how narrow roads, traffic, and a culture that values not rushing all contribute to making Hana a very long expedition. It didn’t feel right taking a whole day away from a family celebration, so we didn’t make the drive.

Fortunately, we found an alternate trip that seemed to include many of the important elements of the road to Hana, such as great views, real Hawaiian towns, and island-paced progress. For this trip, we drove Route 30 around the northern shore of west Maui.

The road was narrow and twisting, and provided a beautiful view of sea cliffs and the ocean itself. In one particularly harrowing stretch, where you are not, strictly speaking, supposed to take your rental car, the road went down to one lane. In both directions. Because of the curves, so many pullouts had been created that I wondered why they didn’t just go ahead and carve out a whole lane. If everyone goes slowly enough and keeps an eye on the road ahead, it does work out fine.

We stopped at Julia’s Best Banana Bread in the town of Kahakuloa (free samples!). It was very good. The town itself is interesting, too, isolated as it is by the hard drive. Judging from the number of stands set up along the main drag, I’d say the economy seems to be coconut-candy based. I might have liked to have stayed longer, if only to sample more of the local currency.

The nice thing about this drive is that the road intersects with major highways near the airport, so you don’t have to retrace your route. Getting home is much faster than the outbound trip. We were back almost before anyone even noticed we were gone. We didn’t see quite as many waterfalls as we might have on the road to Hana, but I bet the banana bread was better.

Honolua Bay

As great as Molokini was, it isn’t the kind of trip you can do spontaneously, unless you have a boat that can go out on the open sea. It’s also a little expensive. Luckily, it’s not the only snorkeling option on Maui. It’s not even the only great snorkeling option on Maui.

A few days after the Molokini trip, several of us from the wedding party drove to Honolua Bay, on the northern part of west Maui, for a do-it-yourself diving expedition. We rented masks, fins, and snorkels from a dive shop on the way. The guy at the shop was either not very bright or else he was very stoned. Either way, I can’t say I recommend that particular shop, but I do recommend Honolua Bay.

To get there, you just park by the side of the road and walk about five minutes through a patch of jungle that is inexplicably full of chickens. The bay is semi-circular, fairly shallow, and very clear once you’re away from the beach. There weren’t fish everywhere you looked as in the water around Molokini, but there were big, beautiful schools that were fun to watch.

One thing we saw at Honolua that we didn’t see at Molokini were sea turtles. They were enormous and didn’t seem at all bothered by our presence. Honestly, I’m not sure they even noticed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have an underwater camera that day, so I don’t have any photos. Here is a link to other Maui shots, though.

Molokini

Along with the sunrise on Haleakala, one other thing I really wanted to do in Maui was snorkel at Molokini. This was one quest that worked out well.

Molokini is about two and a half miles across the water from Maui. It took about an hour to get there on a catamaran. It would usually take a little less, but the captain stopped the boat and in fact backtracked a little because he sighted a pod of whales that he wanted us to get a look at.

Molokini is not exactly a secret, and the water got a little crowded. Still, the visibility was great and there were a lot of fish. The parts of the crater that are still above water protect the snorkeling area, keeping it very calm. I saw needlefish, puffers, angelfish, lots of coral, and a giant sea cucumber. Eww. On the way back to Maui, we passed through a sea-turtle gathering. All that and it was only lunchtime when we got back to the marina where we’d parked. That was a good morning of sightseeing.

Surfing Goats

Did you know that goats can surf? I didn’t, either, but these are especially cool goats. They live at the Surfing Goat Dairy, in the town of Kula, on Maui. The dairy is in upcountry (i.e., not coastal) Maui. They offer great tours with plenty of cheese tasting.

Surfing Goat makes more varieties, or I guess I should say flavors of cheese than most dairies. What avant-garde chocolate makers are doing with truffles these days, Surfing Goat is doing for goat cheese. They start with a basic creamy chevre base (called “Udderly Delicious”), and add all kinds of things I’ve never seen in cheese before. Some work really well, like the O Sole Mio, which has sun-dried tomatoes in it, and some are a little out there. I never tried the Mandalay blend, for example, which contains apple bananas and curry, but I don’t think I need to. Most of the cheese was really good, though, and the tours are fun. You can feed the goats, who are gentle and friendly, and see them milked.

All the goats (there are about 80 on the farm right now) have names, but unfortunately I didn’t write down what this one is called. She was a character.

Come Back Soon

We stopped at a visitor center about halfway down the mountain. There was a nene (wild goose) crossing sign near the parking lot, but no nene were out in the rain. I worried that this meant the two of us had less sense than a goose. Outside the main building was a silversword plant, a rare succulent that grows only on Hawaiian volcanoes. In Hawaiian, the plant is called ahinahina, which means “very gray.” In spite of the name, it’s normally an attractive plant, especially if you catch it in flower. This one, though, was covered in the withered remains of its once-in-a-lifetime blooming cycle. Wind-battered and rain-spattered, this specimen was not just very gray; it was also very close to death.

Inside, though, all was warm and bright. There was a friendly park ranger named Sandi on duty and she listened patiently while we whined about driving all this way and missing out on the sunrise. When we paused for breath she asked gently if we’d ever heard it said that the journey is more important than the destination. I forced an indulgent smile. Yes, of course I’d heard that, and 99% of the time I agreed. But this was, so far, a hundredth-percentile day, and I was too wet, too cold, and too far from a good cup of coffee to imagine my attitude changing.

Sandi went on, though. The journey we had just taken, she said, from the West Maui coast to the Haleakala summit, was like driving from New Mexico to Alaska, if you considered the number of climate zones you pass through on both trips. Looking at it that way, it was quite a journey we’d had that morning, and maybe a little more appreciation was in order.

Sandi further redeemed herself by giving us some practical information, including the visitor center phone number and the URL for a live summit webcam, both of which might have told us before leaving the hotel that Haleakala was socked in and likely to remain that way all day.

The ranger left us with some last words. “Haleakala is sending you a message,” she assured us. “She wants you to come back.” Sandi let that sink in, then added, “She doesn’t say that to everyone.”

By the time we left the visitor center, Haleakala was driving her point home with an intensity she must reserve for her densest visitors. The pounding rain continued all the way down the mountain and followed us back to the normally dry Ka’anapali coast. It was still raining the next morning. The storm eventually passed, but we got caught up in the excitement and late nights of the family wedding that had brought us to the island, and we never did take Haleakala up on her invitation.

Someday I will, though. It’s not every day a volcano offers you a personal summons, and when Haleakala speaks, I, for one, listen. I don’t know when I’ll be on Maui next, but when I am, I fully intend to get myself to the summit of Haleakala again and finally have that spiritual sunrise experience.

I’m going to check the webcam first, though.

The Darkest Hour is Just After the Dawn

What’s the exact opposite of “spiritual?” I don’t think we have a word for this in our language. Hawaiian does, though, and the word is Haleakala.

Haleakala is, of course, really the name of a dormant volcano on the island of Maui. The House of the Sun is about 10,000 feet high, and is both Maui’s most conspicuous physical feature and one of its biggest attractions. It’s considered especially auspicious to visit the volcano’s summit at dawn. On a good morning, the sun, visible across a massive crater-like depression, appears to rise out of a cauldron of cloud. On a great morning, the mist turns fiery red and orange and the lunar landscape is illuminated in adobe hues. And a couple of times a year, if some of the more hyperbolic descriptions I’ve read are true, angels actually sing. “Spiritual” is a word I encountered repeatedly while researching the Haleakala sunrise experience, and so I put an early-morning trip to the top on the short list of things we absolutely had to do on Maui.

Pipi and I scheduled the trip for our first full day in Hawaii, reasoning that jet-lag would make the early wake-up call less painful. It did, but 3:45 still felt very early to two people who were supposed to be on vacation. Nothing was open, so we made peanut butter breakfast sandwiches and coffee in our room, and set out on the two-hour drive to the top of Haleakala.

For a volcano, Haleakala is pretty easy to drive on. The road is well paved and wide enough for two cars. It’s very dark and curvy, though, and often choked with bicycle-laden vans ferrying riders to the top for the popular 37-mile sunrise coast down the mountain. On the morning we drove it, there was the added challenge of dense fog, which started at about 5,000 feet of elevation.

It was the kind of fog that is so thick it’s hard to imagine that it’s sunny anywhere. And it may not have been. It certainly wasn’t sunny at the top of Haleakala. In fact, it was about as far from sunny as I’ve ever seen. At a little past 6am, it was dark, with a howling wind blowing and fog swirling. Sleet pinged off the car like buckshot. Visibility was about 50 feet. When I finally gathered the courage to get out of the car, I accidentally started down a hiking trail instead of the path to the observatory, but was luckily turned back by a blast of wind that could have knocked down an eight-year-old. I was wearing what at sea level had seen like a nervous-Nellie number of layers, but the cold still took my breath away. As I scurried back to the car with my head down and my hand on my hat, I had a little epiphany, the closest I came to a spiritual moment that whole morning. “This is how people die on mountains,” I said to myself. (And in my head, it didn’t even sound melodramatic.)

When Pipi and I finally found the visitors’ center, with about 20 minutes to spare before theoretical sunrise, we found it already filled with a rainbow coalition of disappointed people from around the globe. I heard sulking in at least three languages. We all milled around until our watches said the sunrise had occurred. It was lighter now, and the sleet had turned to regular rain. It was barely 7am (although we were already thinking about lunch) and already we’d had a big setback. As we got in the car and prepared ourselves for the long, wet plummet back to the coast, I wondered if there were any way to salvage some crumbs of spirituality from the day.

Happy New Year

This is again a short week, but I did want to take a moment to wish everyone a happy New Year! See you in 2009.

Maui Photos

I finally got my Hawaii photos uploaded and labeled. Here they are.

Merry Christmas

I’ll be enjoying a little Christmas break for the next few days, and I hope you all are, too. I wish a very merry Christmas to everyone.

(For your viewing pleasure, a photo taken in Maui. Hawaiian Christmases are especially surreal.)

Geography Quiz Answers

Here are the answers to the geography quiz. How did you do? I got, by my generous reckoning, 26.5 right out of 49. This was by far my best year. It helps that I always read the Chronicle travel section—the editor gets a lot of trivia from stories that appear there. (And sometimes from stories that don’t—I strongly suspect that a rejected article of mine inspired a question about Mongolia that was included several years ago, but I can’t prove it.)

Yuletide Geography Quiz

Some Christmas traditions are enduring. Every year, for example, in a tradition going back to when I was in junior high school, we have a Yule log cake for dessert at Christmas dinner.

Some traditions do fall by the wayside. One thing we don’t do anymore is axe-murder a whole tree. We used to, but now we just use a little potted rosemary bush decorated with gingerbread cutouts. It’s small, tasteful, and sustainable, so it works well for everyone. The only thing I miss about the full-size tree is the ritual argument with my sister over what exactly that dough ornament I made when I was six is supposed to be. (It’s a sheep, so don’t even let her try to tell you it’s a turkey. It’s clearly a sheep. With drumsticks.)

For every tradition that runs its course though, it seems a new one comes along. Here’s one that’s fairly new for me. It may not have the emotional resonance of baking Christmas cookies for Santa, and now that I think of it, there is nothing specifically holiday-ish about it, but it’s something I do every year at Christmastime nonetheless. Please join me in hosting a glass of eggnog (and then discreetly leaving it on a bookcase because nobody really likes more than a few sips of eggnog) and taking the annual San Francisco Chronicle Geography Quiz.

On a Lighter Note

Pipi and I are off to Hawaii today. Her brother is getting married there, and we’ve all decided to make a vacation out of it. I’ll be back late next week. I probably won’t blog while I’m there, but I will put up pictures as soon as I can.

Other Things We Learned the Hard Way

One other example of this kind of thing: After the Indian Ocean earthquake in 2004, we all learned that what we used to call a tidal wave is really supposed to be called a tsunami. I sort of knew that before the event, but all the news coverage really cemented the proper term into my brain.

Mumbai

Like everyone, I’ve been following the news from India. I don’t have much to add to the narrative that hasn’t been said already. I did have one observation, though, and that’s that I noticed that all the news I’ve been reading refers to the city where the attacks took place as Mumbai. For a day or two, most stories clarified that this is the city formerly known as Bombay. But now they’ve stopped, because it’s just understood that we have internalized the new name and don’t need to be reminded anymore.

Mumbai has been known as such since 1996, but I confess, the name change never really took with me until now. But now I’ve heard Mumbai enough that I get it, and I probably won’t make the mistake of calling the city by its outdated name anymore. It’s funny how a tragedy can have the unintended effect of making us a little more cosmopolitan.

Now I need to get to work becoming fluent with the names Kolkata (Calcutta) and Bengaluru (Bangalore). But please, no more violence. I can do this on my own if I put my mind to it.

Bah, Humbug…

…No, that’s too strong, because there are a few really great Christmas pop songs out there. Here are a few that actually make me dawdle if they should come on just as I am getting ready to leave a store.

Christmas Rapping, by the Waitresses
When the song came out, I remember that the thing that impressed me the most was the fact that the song used the word “damn,” which I thought was very daring. But I was 11. Now, I realize that this was actually a group of very good musicians. Note: there is no actual rapping on the song.

2000 Miles, by the Pretenders
This is one of those not-so-merry-Christmas Christmas songs. Brillantly melancholy.

I Believe in Father Christmas, by Greg Lake
Perhaps because the holiday season involves a lot of overindulgance, things that I normally hate in pop music—strings, kettle drums, obvious classical influences, and British terminology—all seem to work here.

River, by Joni Mitchell
I always used to wonder what Christmas was like in warm places, like Los Angeles, and now I know. Kind of bittersweet.

Father Christmas, by the Kinks
The best song ever written about getting mugged while dressed up as Santa Claus. OK, actually the only song ever written about that, but it is really good.

Fairy Tale of New York, by The Pogues with the late, great Kirsty MacColl.
This is another song about dysfunctional Christmas, but this one is funny. The song gets extra points for being sung by a guy who was born on Christmas day.

Do They Know It’s Christmas, by Band Aid
Boy George, George Michael, Duran Duran…it’s the ultimate guilty Christmas pleasure.

The Christians and the Pagans, by Dar Williams
In all seriousness, this is possibly the best secular Christmas song ever. It’s about a family gathering that by rights should have gone horribly wrong. But instead, everyone realizes they have more in common than they ever realized and gets along great. And isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

It’s Beginning to Sound a Lot Like Christmas

Where did November go? It was just here, and then I turned around, and suddenly there’s Christmas music at the grocery store.

I sort of dread this part of the holiday season because Christmas music at the grocery store means I have to start shopping in very short bursts. I can only stand commercial pop holiday music like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” for a minute or so. I think it’s just a coincidence that this is also about how long I can hold my breath, but I’m not sure. What I do know is that for the next few weeks, I will be shopping like I’m diving for abalone. I’ll take a deep breath, dive in, and hope I manage to grab at least one thing before the pain becomes too excruciating.

Happy Thanksgiving

Pipi has a short work week this week, and I’ve decided that I do, too. So let me take this opportunity to wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving. We’ll be in San Francisco with my parents, my sister, and her boyfriend. I truly am thankful that we can all get together so easily these days.

This morning on KFOG listeners were invited to call in and relate Thanksgiving disaster stories. I was tempted to tell my turkey-on-a-train story, but I think the Bay Area has had its fill of that one. On the off chance, though, that there is someone out there on the Internet who hasn’t seen it, here is a little Thanksgiving-themed reading to get you through the rest of the week.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Still Crazy After All These Weeks

One habit I’ve been slow to get back into after moving is walking. For a while it seemed like every afternoon I would find a household project to work on instead of going out. But now, maybe because the days are getting shorter and colder and wetter, I am appreciating the daylight more and trying to get outside as much as I can.

Plus I’m running out projects.

I’ve had a few good walks recently, and am starting to have covered a pretty good radius around my house. I’m making some interesting discoveries. One is the neighborhood crazy yard. Every neighborhood has one, and I located ours towards the end of October. I wasn’t sure at first if the house was full-time crazy, or if Halloween had just gotten a little out of hand. I was suspicious from the start, though, because some of the crazy stuff didn’t seem to be Halloween themed. There seemed to be a lot of holidays going on at once, as well as some pretty eccentric statuary. I went by again in mid-November, and sure enough, still crazy. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that we’re dealing with year-round nuttiness, although I’m interested to see if there are seasonal variations.

Back from the Real World

I’m back in the blogisphere after an absence—I hope nobody missed me too much. I guess I just needed a break.

Actually, there hasn’t been that much to write about. I was writing copy for two web sites, but in the last few weeks, one project came to an end, and the other went on hold because the site isn’t making enough money yet. This is kind of discouraging, but it’s just the way freelancing goes. There is a chance that both projects may have a second phase, but I’m not expecting anything to happen before the end of the year.

Chinese Democracy

Yesterday I said that I was a life-long voter, but I confess that that doesn’t mean I have voted in every election for which I was eligible. I made what I thought was a good faith effort to vote in 1992, but never ended up casting a ballot.

I was on my Chinese walkabout then. I knew I should have arranged an absentee ballot ahead of time, but I didn’t have any idea where I would be at election time.

Once I was in China, I determined that I would probably be in Shanghai at about the time I should be sending my ballot back, so I faxed a request to have an absentee ballot sent to me there.

This plan had so many flaws that I can’t begin to guess which one actually tripped me up. I can’t even be sure the fax ever went through. I had a little trouble with the machine. My Chinese vocabulary didn’t cover telecommunications issues, and the shop owner didn’t speak any English. Amazingly, someone who happened to be there at the same time asked me in excellent French if he could be of any assistance. Together I think we made the fax machine work, but the receipt it spat out was completely unintelligible to me, so I’ll never know.

I remember thinking at the time that U.S. election officials would jump at the chance to literally deliver democracy to China, but it was not to be. I showed up every day for almost a week at the American Express office in Shanghai, but the package didn’t arrive while I was in town. When the election actually happened, I was on a ferry sputtering up the Yangtze River. The Chinese were definitely interested in the election, and several different people told me that Bill Clinton had won, but I had no access to news sources on the boat. It wasn’t until I arrived in Chongching four or five days later that I found out for sure that Ke Lin Dun had beaten Bu Shi (with Pei Lo placing a distant third).

I thought of this on Tuesday night when the results of the latest election were announced on television. We knew the winner just seconds after the polls had closed in California. It’s amazing how quickly they can calculate things these days. It’s also amazing to think about how hard it would have been to put myself in a place where I wouldn’t have been aware of the results of this election.

I Voted

Did you?

One presidential election year—I think it was 1988, when I had just tuned 18--I announced to my parents that I wouldn’t be voting because none of the candidates met with my approval.

My father explained to me that even in a situation where neither of the candidates is all you are hoping for (and I think we can all agree that Dukakis/Bush wasn’t exactly one of those once-in-a-generation matchups), not making a decision means leaving the decision up to someone else.

My father created a life-long voter that day, and I admire him for urging me to exercise my rights even though he knew that my vote would probably cancel out his.

I’m repeating his words in the hope that if you’re thinking of skipping this election, you might reconsider. Maybe you think both the candidates are bums. But one of them is going to be the next president. Wouldn’t you like him to be the bum you chose instead of the bum imposed upon you?

Polls are open until 8pm.

Time Out

It’s not all gnashing of teeth around here. Tonight Pipi and I will be far from the angry corner. We’re told that trick-or-treaters do come to this neighborhood, so we’re staying in tonight to hand out candy.

This may not be the most impressive Halloween display in the neighborhood, but it’s our first ever, so please cut us a little slack.

Bula

The first word every Western visitor to Fiji learns is “bula.” It’s kind of like “aloha.” It’s a versatile word that can stand in for many things, including “hello” and “thank you.”

I think that what bula literally means, though, is “welcome,” and as you can see, Fijians are a very friendly and welcoming bunch. This photograph was taken at a checkpoint near the international airport in Nadi as I was on my way home from Fiji several years ago. There had just been a coup, and I had been invited to Fiji as a journalist to document the fact that the islands were once again safe for tourists.

This soldier was supposed to be guarding the airport and looking for the leader of the coup, who was then still at large. (Somebody did catch him later, but I somehow doubt it was this guy who nabbed him.) I had asked the soldier if I could take his picture because I thought he looked very fierce in his guardhouse, and I thought a photograph would reassure my readers that Fiji was well protected.

I really wanted a picture of him by himself, with his gun and his imposing bulk, but what I got instead was a man transformed into a giant golden retriever, all eager goofiness and affection. I understand that this kind of unguarded openness is common to the people of the South Pacific and I certainly saw a lot of it in Fiji. I really got the sense that everyone I met there would have given me the shirt off his or her back if I had asked.

I’m trying hard to keep that in mind as I deal with a neighborhood that is invaded every evening by Tongans intent on taking something away from me and my community. I confess that I’ve been struggling with some ugly thoughts lately, stemming from the fact that while about 45% of the state backs Proposition 8—a large cross-section of the California population, in other words--virtually all of the people who have gone to the trouble of waving rude signs in my neighborhood are of Tongan descent.

So I did a little research. I learned that there are thought to be about 20,000 Tongans in California, 75% of whom live in the Bay Area. That means there are about 15,000 Tongans here, and only about 100 of them are actively campaigning against gay rights. That’s actually a pretty low bozo rate—less than 1%--which makes me feel better.

But mostly I just like to remember the chorus of “bula” that greeted me at the airport on arrival in the South Pacific and followed me for 10 days across three islands. I’m trying to hold onto the welcome that was extended to me with no regard for whatever strange or maybe even offensive cultural baggage I brought with me from home. I only wish I were doing as good of a job accepting Tongan guests into my neighborhood, but I have to admit, right now it’s hard.

First Time Protesters

The funny thing is I’ve never really been a protester before. Oh, sure, in college I showed up at some Gulf War protests, but everyone does that. I don’t think they let kids graduate if they haven’t, at some point during their four years, protested a Gulf War. But I never really believed that signs and slogans changed the world much.

I still don’t believe they do change things directly, but for once, I feel strongly enough about something that I don’t care. I needed to go out on the corner anyway, partly because I wanted to show that there is resistance to this amendment, and partly because I just needed to make a public scene.

Interestingly, a lot of other people seem to have had the same reaction. Several other people I’ve struck up conversations with have told me that this is their first protest ever. I haven’t asked any of the Yes people, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most of them are otherwise fairly apolitical as well. This just really seems to have gotten all of us here in California pretty riled up.

Signs of the Times

Pipi and I aren’t just sitting around seething. Last night we were out on the corner, too, with a pretty good crowd of like-minded people. I can’t say it was fun—I endured more epithets and slurs in one hour than in the rest of my entire adult life—but it felt like doing something, and I did meet a lot of my neighbors. There are some good, brave people living here and that, at least, makes me feel better.

Suffer the Children

The following isn’t strictly related, in fact isn’t even loosely related to travel, writing, exploration, or cultural discovery. It’s just what’s on my mind and I need to unload.

Lately a group of pro-Proposition 8 protestors have been massing during rush hour at the corner of High and MacArthur Streets in Oakland. This intersection is almost a half a mile from my house, but it’s a major Laurel District thoroughfare, and I seem to have to pass by this group almost any time I go anywhere.

Every time I do, my blood boils. Proposition 8 is a proposed state constitutional amendment that will outlaw gay marriage, a right that, believe it or not, we actually do have in California right now. So every time I go on an errand, I have to pass by this vocal group intent on taking away one of my civil rights. That this group that wants to make me a second-class citizen is composed mostly of people of Tongan descent is just one of the oddities of the situation. Why would a bunch people of color try to impose a separate but equal scenario on anyone else? I don’t get it.

Another thing I don’t get is the fact that most of this group are also Mormon. I know it’s a conservative faith, but you’d think Mormons, of all people, would understand how terrible it feels to have people legislate your relationships.

And it does feel terrible. This is the thing I don’t like to admit, because it gives the bigots power, but it really does hurt. It feels just like junior high school, when the popular kids go out of their way to make it clear how unwelcome you are at their table. This feeling, this shame at being made to feel like you aren’t good enough to be included in something, is apparently one of those things I’m never going to outgrow.

Part of what makes this so painful is the fact that for the Yes on 8 crowd, it’s a big party. They’re out there on the corner dancing, shouting, high-fiving each other, and just generally having a great time.

That hurts, of course; nobody likes to feel that someone’s having fun at their expense, least of all me.

But the thing that’s really disturbing me, that’s actually making me despair a little bit, is the fact that kids are getting involved. These people, pretending that they’re pro family, are dragging their children to the protest. On Thursday night, a large group of adults and children were still out at 9:30pm, when I drove by on my way home from a class.

Now, 9:30 was my bedtime—my weekend bedtime—until I was 14 years old. So here’s the last thing I don’t understand: If these Yes on 8 people are such superior parents, why are their little urchins not in bed at a reasonable hour?

A Room with Access to a View

This is not the view from my house. Like most Oakland residents, I live in what East Bay people call “The Flatlands.” We don’t have any view to speak of out our windows, although I am learning to appreciate living at ground level for the glimpses it provides into our neighbors’ lives. This morning, for example, our firefighter neighbor was pounding something into her lawn with a sledgehammer, though we couldn’t see exactly what, and wasted a good deal of time speculating as to what it could be. But I digress.

The good news is that if you’re feeling energetic, views are not far away. This picture was taken only two blocks from where we live. One of the blocks, though, is very long and graded like a ski jump. The reward for climbing that hill is a view across most of Oakland and the San Francisco Bay, one even better than the one I got the other day.

Walking Down My Street

One of the interesting aspects of moving is that it puts a whole new neighborhood within walking distance of my house. My own new street, in fact, is one that I hadn’t ever been on before we looked at the house. So recently I took a stroll up and down my street so that I could mark it off on my map.

This was harder than it sounds. Where I live, my street is only a few blocks long. Almost a half a mile away, though, the street recurs for about a block. I ended up getting some pretty good exercise just finding my whole street.

¡Obamanos!

I took a great walk yesterday. I was exploring my own neighborhood but I went uphill a little bit and found myself in Redwood Heights, which borders the Laurel District. It’s a wealthy neighborhood full of very large houses, most of them mock Tudor or some other imposing style. It was a little intimidating, but the houses were pretty and I was rewarded for my uphill trudge with a beautiful view of the Oakland flatlands, the bay, and the hills south of San Francisco.

Some of the campaign signs that I saw in Redwood Heights surprised me. There were a lot of “No on 8” signs, just like in my neighborhood. (Proposition 8 is a proposed amendment to the state constitution that will outlaw gay marriage in California. Again.)

There were also a lot of pro-Obama signs. Most of them I’d seen before, but one caught my eye. It just said “¡Obamanos!” I take this to be a play on the Spanish “vamanos,” meaning “let’s go.” I thought that was very clever, and I love that for everyone out there calling him “Osama” or reminding us over and over what his middle name is, there’s another person using his or her powers of name-twisting for good.

Haleakala

The other thing I want to do is ride a bike down Mount Haleakala. You get driven to the top of the volcano very early in the morning to watch the sun rise. Then you are given a bicycle and pointed downhill. You more or less coast back to the bottom.

This is my favorite kind of outdoor adventure--one that has a veneer of athleticism, but which is really all about looking at pretty things. I can look at pretty things all day long and not get tired.

Molokini

The first thing I want to do is snorkel at Molokini. This is a partially sunken volcanic crater in the ocean a few miles from Maui. I saw a picture while I was researching luxury activities in Hawaii and knew instantly I wanted to go there; I just didn’t know when I’d get a chance. I’m told you can go on a sort of escorted scuba dive there, too, without being certified, but I’m not sure I’m brave enough for that. Snorkeling works for me.

Next Big Thing

Pipi and I only have one major trip planned this year, but it’s a good one: We’re going to Maui in December. The occasion is Pipi’s brother’s wedding. This is the wedding that might have taken place in Australia, but we’re not complaining.

Pipi has been to Maui before, but she was pretty young, and I’ve never been at all. I did write a luxury travel description about Maui a few months ago, so I feel like I know it a little. I’m looking forward to doing some of the activities I wrote about, which actually aren’t all that expensive--they just struck me as cool.

Some Good News on the Candy Front

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that White Rabbit candy will relaunch soon. It will have different packaging, the main feature of which is some kind of message from the company saying the product is no longer made with tainted milk.

I guess this is good news. I’m not sure how much safer the new packaging really makes consumers, but I like White Rabbit so much that I may risk it, once in a while anyway.

Flickr Fun

Here’s another interesting web site I find myself part of. This isn’t one of those wayback searches; this item just went up a few weeks ago.

The site is called Now Public, and it appears to be a user-generated news site, sort of like Wikipedia, only for news. Writers troll sites like Flickr for photos, and recently someone found a photo I took in China to use with an article about traffic controls in Beijing.

Several hundred other photos are attached to the story, so I don’t feel like it’s a huge honor, but it’s kind of interesting nonetheless.

Pardon My….Turkish?

If you’ve been to Google’s home page in the last few days, you know it’s their 10th anniversary. As part of this observation, they’ve placed a temporary field on the home page that enables you to see what results would have come up if you had used Google in January of 2001.

I was curious what would happen if I Googled myself using the time-machine box, so I did. It found 113 results, about 20 of which were non-duplicates.

Some hits don’t actually have to do with me; they’re news and statistics about Nicole Clausing the Midwestern soccer star. Some are from my ancient history—mostly tables of content for books I edited 12 or 13 years ago. But the very last one amused me. I’ve seen it before, but I haven’t been able to find it on the Internet for years. It’s a link to an article with my byline—but that’s the only part of the article I can read. The text itself is written in a language I don’t even recognize. Turkish, maybe? If anyone knows, I’d love it if you’d let me know.

I think I know what the article is. I’m sure it’s this article that I remember writing (in English, naturally) many years ago with my Travelocity co-worker, Lisa Zeng. What I can’t explain is why someone would bother to translate it. This is the only thing I’ve ever written that I’m aware of having been translated. I guess it’s an honor, but mostly it’s just a fun mystery.

Even Worse Candy News

I spent three months backpacking in China in the early nineties, and one thing I remember fondly about that time is Cadbury chocolate bars. Cadbury isn’t the best chocolate in the world, but all the other “chocolate” products sold in China in those days tasted like brown crayons in colorful wrappers, so I was grateful for it.

I was so grateful, in fact, that I used to buy one or two every time I saw some for sale, reasoning that I never knew when I would next get the chance to have good chocolate.

It wasn’t until very close to the end of my trip that I realized that Cadbury was pretty much everywhere, and that I was actually consuming candy bars at a far faster rate than I did at home. I had somehow convinced myself that I was experiencing a chocolate famine, when in reality, I was putting away three or four bars a week.

I don’t eat Cadbury that much anymore, but when I do, I have a Proust-like memory of traveling on Chinese trains, and I can remember how good it made me feel to taste something sweet and creamy and familiar so far from home.

I am thinking of all the Cadbury chocolate bars I have eaten in my day because I just read that the company is recalling its Chinese-made chocolate because of fears that it might have been made with tainted milk. I’m not concerned for myself—this was a really long time ago—but I am a little sad to think of all those backpackers out there now, scrunched up on hard-sleeper bunks somewhere in the Chinese countryside, scribbling in their journals after an unsatisfying train dinner, and not being able to pop an overly sweet, oddly light colored piece of mediocre chocolate in their mouths.

They’re probably all sipping Starbucks mochas and not missing mass-market candy at all, but that’s a sad thought in its own way, too.

Interesting Article

Today I stumbled upon an article in Travel + Leisure magazine that caught my attention. It listed the scariest airports in the world to fly in and out of. It seemed to be judging the fear factor from the perspective of pilots, but I imagine that in most cases, the approaches would be pretty scary for a passenger, too. There’s an airport in the mountains of Bhutan that’s so hard to get to, for example, that only eight people in the world are qualified to land there. I think that most passengers would notice the rocks and trees whizzing by the window and be a little alarmed.

A few approaches did take me by surprise, like JFK and Washington National. Who knew these airports were so difficult for pilots? But because of airspace restrictions and traffic from other nearby airports, they are.

I’m pleased to report that I’ve flown into three of the ten scary airports, plus one—Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak—that got an honorary mention even though is no longer in use.

There is one I probably never will get to, though. That’s the one in Lesotho where the runway isn’t long enough, so on takeoff planes sometimes go off the edge of a cliff and plummet until they get enough speed to become airborne. I just don’t need that much adventure in my life.

Not Strictly Related, But….

…This struck me as funny and I wanted to share.

I was at Whole Foods last night, and not even the one in Berkeley. This happened in good old Adams Point, in Oakland.

I was standing in line and someone said over the public-address system, “Would the gentleman who wanted the vegan doughnut holes please return to the deli counter?”

I repeat, this wasn’t even in Berkeley. Vegan doughnuts. What will they think of next?

Bad Day for Bunnies

Lately the papers are just full of bad news. So far, I’ve been considering myself lucky. Lehman Brothers collapsed, but I didn’t have any money invested in them. WaMu folded up, but that wasn’t my bank. There was a devastating hurricane in Texas, but, for now at least, California is not falling into the sea.

Finally, though, something has hit home with me: They’re recalling my beloved White Rabbit candy. Apparently White Rabbits in California are testing high for melamine. This shouldn’t be surprising, because they are, after all, a Chinese candy made primarily from milk, but somehow I’m still shocked. And vaguely worried—I eat a lot of those things. Probably not enough to give myself a kidney stone, but they are made from condensed milk.

I never thought I’d have anything in common with infants in China, but the world turns out to be smaller and stranger then I could ever imagine.

Back at It

I know I kind of disappeared for a while there. I moved, and that disrupted my life more than I imagined it would. It has been a long time since I did this, and it’s taking longer than I expected to find a place for everything.

The upside (aside from liking the new home and new neighborhood better, of course) is that I am getting to know my local café well. I have been working there a lot because if I stay home all I can see are boxes cluttering the living room and it’s all I can do to stop myself from unpacking them.

Things are slowly getting back to normal. I’m back to work—I had a miraculous week off from destination descriptions the week we had to pack—and now, back to blogging. So thanks for your concern. Nothing bad happened—I was just buried under a sea of cardboard boxes.

Oakmore

I’m heading east for now, trying to close the gap between Glenview and the Laurel District. That means right now I’m in Dimond and Oakmore. Dimond I know a little bit already because my favorite grocery store is there, but Oakmore is new to me. I feel like it’s a pretty well kept Oakland secret, almost but not quite in the hills, and cut off from Glenview by a long, skinny park. There’s a little commercial strip I don’t know very well yet, including a pizza place and a produce market that looks good. I always like it when my explorations include lunch.

The Other Day That Lives in Infamy

I just noticed the date today. Are we ever going to be able to write “September 11” without flashing back to that September 11? Probably not. I have a poster on my wall from an art exhibition that closed September 11, 1985, and even that looks weird now. (“We can’t end it then—don’t you know what’s going to happen on that day 16 years later?”)

Connecting the Dots

I haven’t been walking as much as I’d like to lately. I’ve been working pretty hard—for me, at least—and it hasn’t been easy to make the time. Also, Pipi and I have been experimenting with swimming a few mornings a week, leaving me with less time and energy for strolling.

I am getting back into it, though. I’ve finished the Glenview neighborhood, and now I have to decide what to do next. I was working from Glenview westward, but I got distracted by some neighborhoods to the east. I thought we might want to live in either the Dimond or Laurel districts, so I started getting to know those. Now my walking map is a mess, with isolated marked-off areas and half (at best) finished neighborhoods. This offends my orderly sensibilities, but it also motivates me to get walking so I can fill in the blanks. I’m pretty busy tomorrow, but I do want to get out there.

Walking Update

Today I took what I’m sure is the last walk I can walk to from my current neighborhood. This was sort of a way of saying goodbye to the area, because Pipi and I are planning on moving to a different part of Oakland soon.

Amazingly, on my walk today I discovered a street I’d never been down. I thought I had, but nothing looked familiar. That was a surprise to me; finding out that I live within walking distance of a street I’d never, in nine years, actually bothered to walk down.

An Interesting Proposition

I got an email over the weekend from someone who used to work for the luxury travel site that I’ve been writing descriptions for. He said he liked my work, and wondered if I might be interested in helping him write content for a web site he’s starting. This site isn’t about travel at all. It’s going to be for parents of children with special needs, especially autism.

That’s not exactly my field of expertise, but I do find autism a fascinating subject and have read way more about it than I have any real reason to, so I said yes. I don’t know what the time frame is for this project, but I will let you know when things start appearing on the site. (It may not be for a while, because the site isn’t even live yet.)

Oh, and the heat did break. The sun is sinking into a fog bank as I type. Thanks for asking!

Gosh It’s Hot

How many of you have an espresso maker in your office? And someone to make you an iced mocha when you need it? Well, today, I do.

One thing I didn’t think too much about when I started working at home was climate control. It gets warm sometimes in Oakland, but it’s dry and rarely breaks 100, so I thought it would be okay.

And usually it is. What I didn’t think about, though, is the fact that when most people step outside to get lunch on a day that’s 92 degrees, it’s no big deal. When it’s 92 degrees all afternoon in my home office, though, that gets old after about three hours. Also, my cat Tommy likes to sleep under my desk when it’s really hot, and I’ve been worried all day that I’ll fidget and run over his tail with my desk chair. So I had to get out of the house.

This afternoon I’m at a coffeehouse, where it’s considerably cooler. The music is a little distracting, but they’ve got a good British Invasion mix playing so I don’t mind. I’m conscious, which I might not be right now if I were in my apartment, so I don’t think my productivity is taking too much of a hit.

The heat is supposed to break over the weekend.

Destination Summaries

As you might have guessed, I’m deep in a destination description project. I’ve been writing 10 destination blurbs a week for a luxury travel site based in San Francisco. It’s a good gig. It’s kind of draining to become an instant expert on one location before lunch, and then have to write 300 words about another place in the afternoon, but it’s doable.

And as you can see, I’m picking up lots of cocktail-party trivia, so it’s paying all kinds of dividends.

More on Sir Seewoosagur

Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam did have more going for him than his name. (Though I think we can all see it must have given him a pretty big edge.) Ramgoolam was the Mauritian Prime Minister who won independence from Britain. He was a follower of Gandhi, and managed to achieve his country’s freedom completely peacefully. That’s something the United States can’t even claim, so hats off to Sir Seewoosagur on his well-deserved knighthood.

(Ramgoolam, by the way, was preceded as governor-general of Mauritius by Sir Dayendranath Burrenchobay, and succeeded by Sir Veerasamy Ringadoo. They just come up with good names in the Indian Ocean.)

Yes, Sir

Another fun fact discovered while writing destination descriptions for the far-flung corners of the earth: Someday I am going to travel to the island nation of Mauritius, just so that I can have the pleasure of flying into Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport.

I’d go anyway, because Mauritius sounds beautiful, but that name! Did Mr. Ramgoolam get knighted just because he had such a great name?

Friday Fun Fact

Today I learned that although the British Virgin Islands are still a British Overseas Territory, U.S. dollars are the official currency. Does anyone know why this is the case? I sure don’t.

One More Fun Fact

There are a few McDonald’s locations in the world that have been certified kosher. All but one are in Israel.

That one other one? It’s in Buenos Aires. Who knew?

Fun Facts

Today is Namibia Day.

On this day in history, Krakatoa began to erupt (1883), women got the right to vote (1920), and the first major-league baseball game was telecast (1939).

Today is the birthday of Apollinaire, Geraldine Ferraro, Christopher Isherwood, Macaulay Culkin, crossword-puzzle editor Will Shortz, and Branford Marsalis. Oh, and me. So, short post today.

I’m off to eat ice cream.

Good News, Bad News

Recently I heard about two long-lost pieces on the same day. An editor wrote to me to say that she can’t use a Beijing article I sent her ages ago. I’d pretty much figured that out already, so I didn’t mind.

She also said that she’d like to hold onto another piece of mine for a little bit longer. This is an article about Japan that I first sent her months ago. She said it was long, so I shortened it and sent it back. I didn’t really expect that to do any good, but just now she said she’d like to hang on and see if a space opens up for it. I’m patient.

Netcast

A few days ago, I didn’t know exactly what a netcast was. Now I’m in one.

I mentioned earlier in the month that someone asked me for permission to use one of my Flickr photos in a webcast. I was happy to let him have it, and the guy did use it, in this webcast he produced about historic preservation. (It’s about 30 minutes long. The segment I’m part of starts at 8:13, and my photo is at 8:33.)

Not Strictly Related But…

…Has anyone been watching the Olympics?

Pipi and I have been getting up early to watch U.S. women’s soccer. (On TV, they’re always identified as “Football Women.” I like that).

Some really exciting and surprising things have happened. Germany, the 2007 World Cup champion, fell apart and didn’t make it to the final Olympic match. On the other hand, Japan, usually a bracket-padding team, is doing phenomenally well. They made it to the bronze-medal match. In fact, they played Germany for it early this morning in a match-up of the surging underdogs and the surprised superstars. If you know what happened DON’T TELL ME! I recorded it. I normally like the German team, but today I’d like to see Japan win the bronze for effort.

The biggest surprise of all, though, was the performance of the U.S. team. Just a few weeks before the Olympics, our star player, goal machine Abby Wambach, broke her leg. Most people (including me) thought we were doomed, but amazingly, the team won the gold medal this morning.

It was a very exciting game, won on a goal scored by a player who hardly ever scored during the Wambach era. In addition, Hope Solo performed brilliantly. I’ve always found her a little hard to get behind. (I can forgive the immature outburst at the World Cup, but I have a hard time with the eyeliner she wears on the field.) But I have to grudgingly admit, she came up big in goal.

Everyone came up big, which was a beautiful thing to see. The U.S. women came together and played as a team. A year ago, we might as well have been called “The U.S. Wambach Soccer Team.” If we were a rock group, we’d have been Abby and the Assistants. But today, it was a real team effort. And isn’t that what the Olympics are about?

(Yes, I’m talking to you, Mr. Bolt.)

Mission Accomplished

The event at Book Passage turned out to be a lot of fun. Simon Winchester is a very engaging speaker—the kind of guy who can turn a simple question about how he got his start in writing into a half-hour yarn about the first time he met the writer Jan Morris. (Without giving away the punch line, I can say that what I learned is that it isn’t always a good idea to drop in on your mentor unexpectedly.) I picked up his newest book, The Man Who Loved China, which I haven’t started but am looking forward to.

The networking went pretty well, too. I reminded a few editors of my existence, and met someone who might need some help writing and editing content for a travel web site, so that was successful. But I am now returning to my regular hermitic life.

Networking Tonight

I’m going to another of those slightly nerve-wracking networking events tonight. The author Simon Winchester is speaking at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera. His talk is part of the annual Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference, which I’ve been to twice. His talk is the one conference event that’s open to the public. I’m looking forward to his presentation, because I’ve read several of his books and liked them all.

My ulterior motive, though, is that most of the conference faculty will be around that evening. So there should be some opportunity to corner some editors and chat them up. I’m not so good at that, but I will probably have a glass of courage during the talk, which should make me a little chattier. We’ll see how it goes.

Siberia Photos

I recently got one other photo request. This one was from a guy producing an online presentation about Siberian architecture, specifically what he describes as the endangered Siberian “gingerbread” houses. I didn’t realize how endangered they are, because I saw lots in and around Irkutsk. I confess, I don’t fully understand how my Siberia photograph is being used, but I don’t mind. One of these days I’ll Google it and see where it shows up.

Big in Japan

Usually when I get back from a trip, I post photos on the Flickr web site. It’s a fun site that makes it easy to share your photos with other people, as long as they have Internet access. For a long time, I wondered if anyone ever stumbled across my photos without invitation.

Recently I caught on that Flickr will tally statistics for you, if you want them to. So now I know the answer: Yes, strangers do see my photos. Flickr will give you a list of what people are looking at. My most-viewed image (85 visits) is one taken of downtown Shanghai from the top of a TV tower. Second place, with 65 viewings, inexplicably belongs to a sad picture of a makeshift memorial to Anna Nicole Smith.

Just behind that one is a photo that I do like. It’s of a family of Mongolian nomads putting up their tent. It’s not a technically great photo, but I do feel lucky to have been in the right place at the right time to have gotten the shot at all. Sixty-one people (one just yesterday) have viewed it, but even more surprisingly, four people, all strangers to me, have labeled it a favorite. One other person contacted me explaining that he moderates an online group called “Nomadology,” and wondered if he could add it to a group of photos that they like. And just a few weeks ago, someone emailed me from Japan asking permission to include it in a children’s book about nomads he hopes to publish soon. Apparently Flickr is now the poor man’s stock photo agency. I’m flattered. He promised to let me know when the book is published, and I’ll try to get my hands on a copy when (if?) that happens.

I Did It

I dreamed the night before last that I did my reading, and in my dream, it went terribly. (Great—a new anxiety dream scenario. I guess the exam I didn’t study for was getting tired.) My performance wasn’t awful; it was just that everything else in the dream went wrong. I forgot to bring a copy of the story and so I had to go back home for it, which made me late. I had trouble finding the venue, and when I did, it was a tiny classroom hidden upstairs in some dark and depressing school. Only Pipi and a stranger showed up.

I think that in real life, the reading went pretty well. Compared to what I was expecting, it was a smashing success. I got there in plenty of time, with story in hand. The bookstore was well lit, as usual, and lots of people came. In my cheering section I had Pipi, my sister, and several friends. I really appreciate everyone finding a way to rush over there from work. Thank you!

Today’s the Day

I can’t really think about anything else today (which is unfortunate, because I need to write luxury travel descriptions for Fort Meyers and the Maldives), so I will take this opportunity to again mention my reading tonight. Not even to urge you to go—I’ve already made enough of a pest of myself about that. I’m just a little pre-occupied, is all. Real life will resume tomorrow.

Fair Warning

Just to remind everyone, I’m giving a reading at Book Passage in the Ferry Building in San Francisco at 5:30 Monday evening.

I won’t be the only reader, so I don’t know exactly what time I go on. I like to be first, and people are usually happy to let me do that (how they sit through the first couple of readers, sweating bullets the whole time, I’ll never know), but I can’t promise.

Captions

I put captions on the photos. I’m sorry I didn’t do that yesterday. I am working on luxury travel destination descriptions again and don’t have as much time to play with photos (or my blog) as I would like.

Home Again

We’re back from Wisconsin now. Today, however, I’m playing hooky from work because a friend of mine from New Zealand is in town. So I’ll tell you more about America’s Dairyland tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some photos.

Hello, Wisconsin

I’m off to the badger state first thing tomorrow. I think I’m going to treat this as a real vacation, so I probably won’t be blogging until I’m back next week. Have a great weekend!

Fun Fact

Wisconsin produces 25% of the cheese consumed in the United States. My kind of state.

I bring this up because I’m headed there Wednesday morning. My parents have rented a house there, and my sister and I are joining them this week. We’ll be in Oshkosh, on Lake Winnebago. It should be a relaxing and calcium-rich vacation.

Rats

My Great Wall of China article just got rejected by the San Francisco Chronicle.

This was a situation where the editor thought maybe he could integrate some of my article into a feature on China he is planning on running soon, but he just sent me an email apologizing for the fact that it won’t work after all.

That’s disappointing, but he said specifically he hoped I didn’t get discouraged, so I’ll try not to take it too hard. I was actually a very nice rejection, definitely in the top decile, so I certainly won’t take it personally.

Sign of the Times

I found this sad display on Fruitvale Avenue in Oakland. Making Ends Meet has met its end.

This initially struck me as funny—a business that tries to save money runs out of money, ha!--but of course it isn’t a joke; it’s for real. This is just a sign of tough times all over.

Talking to Myself

In anticipation of my August reading, I’m back in the habit of reading out loud to myself every morning. I’m practicing reading my piece so I get used to the sound of my own voice and so that I’m familiar enough with the words that I can look up a lot, and keep moving if I lose my place. I did this before, preparing for a reading last summer, so I know it’s good practice. But I never get used to it, standing in the living room talking to nobody for 10 minutes. I keep imagining that the neighbors are sick of the story, although I doubt they can actually hear me. This just puts me in a strange frame of mind!

In Good--or at Least Famous--Company

I wouldn’t have thought I had anything in common with our nation’s most decorated curmudgeon, but there turns out to be one slim thread that connects us: John McCain can’t get published, either.

Technical Difficulties

I finally got ahold of an article I wrote about Monterey that was published several months ago in Philippine Airlines’ inflight magazine. Unfortunately, I can’t show it to you yet because Comcast changed the way its personal web pages work, and I can’t figure out how to make a new page for it. I’ll try to get that figured out tomorrow. I meant to do it today, but I suspect it will take a call to tech support to get things working, and I’m not in the mood.

Red Room

A few nights ago, I went to an event that might be every writer’s worst nightmare: A party where I didn’t know anyone.

The party was hosted by Red Room, a networking site for writers that I’m a member of. I expected a quiet little salon full of people dressed in black scribbling in notebooks and looking at their shoes, but to my surprise, it was a pretty lively event at Tosca, in North Beach.

Once I got over the shock of seeing so many extroverted writers, I did begin to enjoy myself. There was one really fun aspect to the party, and that was that the cost of admission was one signed book. I dutifully signed a copy of The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007, which includes my Thanksgiving in China story. That felt like cheating a little bit, but I don’t have a book of my own, so it had to do. When I got to the party, I dropped off the book, and got a receipt that entitled me to take someone else’s book on my way out the door.

At the party, I talked to a few people, but not too many because it was pretty loud in the bar and I am not good at high-volume conversations. As I was getting ready to leave, though, I picked up a book by Daniel Handler, one of Red Room’s local celebrity authors. Having his book (Adverbs) in my hand emboldened me to speak to him, so before I left, I found him by consulting the author photo on the back of the book. We had a brief chat, and my impression is that he’s a really nice guy. He started the conversation by apologizing to me—when I walked up to him, he seemed to think he was in my way. I was charmed to see that, big shot though Daniel Handler may be, he still assumes that people approaching him are only doing so in order to get around him.

So I consider the party a success, though I can see I still have some networking skills I could work on, like introducing myself more confidently and having an easily articulated summary of my work ready.

Oh, and I guess I’d better write a book, too.

MIA Piece Accounted For

It wasn’t good news, but at least it was closure. I just got a rejection note about a piece I sent out so long ago that I had forgotten that this particular paper had even received it. I sent the paper an article on Japan at the end of 2007, and I got the rejection last week, 197 days after I first emailed the article.

That may not be a record, but it’s close.

(If you’re wondering how I know how many days had passed, I figured it out with this new time wasting tool.)

Mission Accomplished

I did my reading last night, and I think it went pretty well. I wish I’d had more time to prepare, because I know my delivery wasn’t as seamless as it could have been, and I wasn’t as able to look up at the audience as much as I would have liked. But someone later told me she was surprised to hear that I’d been nervous. So I guess I faked it well enough.

The pieces I read seemed to go over well. People were surprised to find out that neither one had ever been published, so I resolved to try again harder to send them out.

For those of you who missed the reading—and that’s just about everyone, because I didn’t have time to rally the troops—you get another chance next month. I’ll remind you again later, but it’s at the Ferry Building Book Passage location, at 5:30 on August 11. I promise to practice more next time.

I’m Reading! 5:30 PM

I made the cut and I am reading today at Book Passage at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly what time I go on—we won’t decide the set list until just before the event starts. But it’s a great bookstore, with some good places to get a drink afterwards, and I encourage everyone to come down, if you get the chance.