Books Read on the Road

roughly in correct chronological order (of my reading of course, not their publishing):

"Wild Swans" Jung Chang

"Beijing Doll" Chun Sue

"Things Chinese Don't Eat" Xinran

"The Namesake" Jhumpa Lahiri

"Hearing Birds Fly" Louisa Waugh

"In the Steps of Genghis Khan" Stanley Stewart

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" Haruki Murakami

"Amrita" Banana Yoshimoto

"Sumthing of a Mocktale"

"From Heaven Lake" Vikram Seth

"Shantaram" Gregory David Roberts

"The Devil Wears Prada" Jennifer Weisberger

"Such a Long Journey" Rohinton Mistry

"Transmission" Hari Kunzru

"Fiesta" Ernest Hemingway

"Notes from a Small Island" Bill Bryson (unfinished, but challenging enough to slog through)

"Dawn on the Coast" Ann L. Martin

"Ramona Quimby, Age 8" Beverly Cleary

"A Farewell to Arms" Ernest Hemingway

"A Suitable Boy" Vikram Seth

not bad. 

Back in the Western World

and it hasn't been too much of a shock. I think by the time I got here (London) I was so ready for cleanliness, warm showers and food that I know won't make me sick that I didn't have time to be confused. Took the tube in from Heathrow and giggled to myself as the people around me had to sit next to a backpack with filth on it from a variety of places- including, but not limited to the horse head I rode with in Mongolia. Mostly I've enjoyed not worrying about where my passport is, going out for wine, and realizing that not everyone is staring at me. Also, sitting in parks undisturbed by questioning children is nice. London weather hasn't treated me too poorly, and when it does it just provides a good excuse to stay inside and job hunt.

Now, two haikus jointly written while riding on the general class of an Indian train. An interesting experience in space management and the art of time-pass:

sprawled like a raja
sparkling black sweater vest
my mustache, my pride

ma'am, you come here now
the rickshaw rigamarole
eighty rupees gone

The Mother

Jane and I are currently staying at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram's guest house. Who is Sri Aurobindo? This ignorant traveler still doesn't quite know, but I do know that he and "The Mother" - a French woman who made her home here in Pondicherry- co-founded a religion. I also know that stern pictures of them stare down at me from the walls of my room and that sort of freaks me out a bit. Whenever I say something silly I see the Mother in the corner of my eye admonishing me and wondering why I don't just pay more attention to myself and my surroundings since, as I've gathered from her quotes posted around the walls and replenished in the check in area each day, heightened awareness brings us closer to enlightenment. Whatever that means.

India is the only place I've ever been that plays host to such a wide variety of people- foreign tourists with flowing scarves and an appetite for wine, native Tamil people who have no need for shoes, even when they're riding long distance buses, and women covered almost head to toe, but are still in internet cafes- simultaneously, while seeming to give each of them something to be happy about. No wonder "pagal" a Hindi word that I loosely translate as "crazy/mad" is so popularly thrown about in film, that's really one of the only ways to explain this place.

Oh yes, and dirty. Today I had one of those moments where I felt like screaming "LET'S JUST CLEAN THIS BLOODY PLACE UP!" Why, on the coastline, in coconut tree groves, and throughout every city are there piles of filth? Why does every gutter or crevice seem to be filled with repugnant, stagnant, stanky water? I know that there are reasons. This is the world's largest democracy and plays host to more than a billion people and is practically the definition of contradictory, but please, can't we just set up a garbage system that isn't just the poorest and lowest caste people being made to haphazardly pick at and then redistribute waste? China certainly felt more polluted, but India has got dirty cornered.

Enough for now, must get back to the guest house before curfew. Since I breezed through the Babysitter's Club Book I bought on a whim today, I can now settle in for some more highbrow reading and feel slightly better about the Mother's glare.

Editor's Note.

Both parents have pointed out my poor grammar in the last post and as a result I felt that some clarification is in order: blessedly, my Nana did not die in the Salvation Army in Mumbai, rather she died peacefully in London. I just had the misfortune to find out while I was in a nasty, dirty place thousands of miles away, somewhere that I'm pretty sure my Nana would have happily given me money to avoid. In my haste and lack of attention to detail (no read out louds in Goa) I made a mistake which may have been offensive, but in some ways reminds me of Nana's letters where there were always endearing misspellings, none of them painful enough to obscure the sincere meaning behind her words.

Goa

Now that my schedule consists roughly of wake up, read the paper, sit on the beach, eat lunch, sit on the beach, splash about in the warm and calm Arabian Sea, shower, eat dinner, sleep, it seems like I have no excuse for neglecting this space.

India, as usual, has been a series of highs and lows. High- celebrating New Years in the Rajasthani desert, singing songs around the fire while our camels gamboled around, grazing on plants. Low- finding out that my Nana died after having spent a day sick in bed in the Salvation Army in Mumbai, a place where most people (though thankfully not us), get bed bugs. High- hopping tearfully in a cab to the synagogue in Mumbai and being instantly surrounded by Jewish warmth (and of course, some irritating Jews from Scarsdale). Low- hour 11 on a warm Indian train cramped into a seat with a million young Indian men and realizing that the whole car was empty except for the dudes who felt the need to surround us. High- asking them politely why they were all in our space when there were plenty of other seats to take and watching as they scatter.

And it goes on.. I think we have firmly left fort exploration in Rajasthan, which is too bad because it afforded us ample time to wander around hunting for new and exciting names carved into the walls "Raju loves Pinky," and I thoroughly enjoyed my meeting with Mr. Sharma, the resident fort palmologist. I was informed that I am very fertile, have no money problems ahead of me, am healthy and will have a good career. Unfortunately Jane and Donovan both distrusted his reading, but I prefer to ignore the inaccuracies in his reading and focus on the positives that my future has in store.

I think that's about as much writing as my chilled out mind has to offer right now. Off to read the news from New Hampshire...

thursday is sai baba day.

back in Delhi. get off the air china plane (no individual tvs, surly flight attendants) and it smells like India. Walk to the check in, board the escalator and almost immediately get tangled in the melee at the bottom. 2 hours later and we're checked in after much jostling and general disbelief. Ah, India. No matter how many signs proclaiming that this situation is temporary, it's hard not to believe otherwise. Yesterday we wanted to see Om Shanti Om, a real bollywood movie right here in India with SRK, number one hottie. We ask for help and a kind toothless Indian gentleman and a woman whose Indian accent sounded suspiciously like Smita's directed us toward the number 500 bus. "This is in very nice area, you should go there. It should take half hour." We board the bus and toothless man reappears through the window, "this seat is for senior citizens only" he smiles and gestures. Boards the bus and gives us plenty of directions, at one point lightly slaps my cheek, for being a rapscallion, I guess. The story rolls on: throughout the night we manage to miss 3 movies, take 5 rickshaw rides, be in the same mall as Aamir Khan (whose presence causes all movies to be cancelled), get dinner for free from some sai baba fans on the side of the road, have a rickshaw breakdown, switch rickshaws to ride with someone who mysteriously speaks japanese as well as english and hindi and finally make it back to where we started right as the final movie is beginning only to be told that no bags are allowed in the theatre. no lockers, no submitting to a bag check. we collapse into hysterics as our japanese speaking friend ushers us back into the rickshaw for the final ride of the evening, home. No wonder Indian fiction is so damn good.

totemo iidesu-nee!

Saturday night- 8pm. just checked in to brand new capsule hostel, slightly disappointed that capsules are not actually enclosed tube-like structures, rather, they are nice little mini-rooms. I am experiencing a twinge of sadness to leave Kyoto, a place that rapidly zoomed to the top of my list. I love the teeny tiny bars piled on top of each other in unassuming buildings off alleyways that we spent three nights exploring, staying out till 5am on a wednesday and finding people on the streets even as we made our way home. The zen temple that has a 700 year old garden filled with moss and carp so contemplative that they stay completely still. The bike path along a river that is visited by cranes and crossed on large turtle shaped stones. The best meal I may have ever had made in an unassuming restaurant, with food so fresh and delicious that sometimes I laughed when I first tasted it. And real live geishas. I glimpsed two luminescent figures whiz by in a human pulled rickshaw and saw one exiting a job in the Gion neighborhood, where tea houses have played host to wealthy men being entertained by geishas since the 18th century. The combination of history, beauty, energy and care in every thing I have experienced here makes me love Japan more and realize how my outlook has changed since I was 16, when I first came here. Its nice to know that I had some inkling that this place appealed to me in a special way and now that I have grown up I can appreciate the style of living here and wonder if 16 year old me had some special insight. A question I am sure I will continue to ponder as I re-explore Tokyo for the next few days.

Fukuoka

In the Apple store using free internet. It is the Christmas season and the decorations show it. My Japanese is terrible, no surprise there, but I have fun reading what I can and trying to remember basic stuff. The boat was a nice 40 hour ride, lots of reading, very little interaction with others, little movement, some karaoke. Japan is so nice and orderly. The sushi is delicious and so fresh. Fukuoka is filled with fashionable people, canals, interesting architecture and lots of vending machines. Ok, off to explore.

pictures?

that's the horse head we shared a ride with.

Me next to a typical Mongolian religious thing that if it wasn't 7am after a night bus ride i could be more eloquent about.

mongolia, take 2

here i am in erlian, a soul-less border town that seems to fade into endless desert. unlike last time i was here i know when we leave and what to expect when we get into beijing, which is nice. being back in china means no more mutton, but i know i haven't strayed too far from mongolia since a guy next to me is looking at porn online, dirty pictures with the mongolian flag in the background. ah, the complicated nature of national pride. i just tried to post some pictures, but it made the computer shut down so you will have to make do with my words. some mongolian highlights:
- gers look boring from the outside, canvass structures often plopped down in the middle of nowhere, but it turns out that the insides are generally colorful and warm (if there's enough coal to make it through the night).
- there are not a lot of roads in mongolia. even the drive from UB to Kharkorin (the past and future? capital) is done mostly off road. this is generally delightful, except that sometimes you feel a little adrift in the middle of a desert with camels, yaks and sheep roaming around with seemingly more direction than the vehicle you're in.
- our last ride from Kharkorin to UB included the 3 of us, some mongolians who immediately busted out the beer for the ride, a horse head that came into close contact with my bag (hopefully while frozen), lots more meat in bags and a two hour ramble through town before departure to pick up people and their meat.
- there are a few national mongolian songs and they are played everywhere all the time.
- life in a former soviet semi-state is way different than other places that i've been. most obviously due to extensive vodka consumption. life seems more open than in China, you can access what you want on the internet and nothing is deemed "too sexy" for TV, but there is also not the same feeling of hope and opportunity.

more to come, hopefully with pictures at some point.

mongolia

we are here. after many many hours of sitting on a non-moving train around the china/mongolian border, lots of driving through moonscape, too many nasty toilets/holes to talk about and an introduction to new alphabets, we have made it into another country. so far we've holed up with foreigners and protected ourselves against the cold.
Alex almost lost her mind while riding the train and I did what I could to keep her from plotsing, kvelling, or getting agata. But I didn't do very much except for having enough power on my ipod to watch one episode of 30 Rock. As we sat on a ledge outside the train station (we were locked out of our train for a couple hours) the screen kept getting covered over with sand and I had to brush it off. Apparently Mongolia is a desert. But a cold, windy desert. Another suprising fact was that the town we were stalled in (Earlian (sp? - we are entering the portion of the trip where I can't spell the places I am visiting.)) is a shopping destination for people from Ulan-Bator. This is surprising since for us at least it was an 18 hour train ride to get there.

Getting kicked off the computer now....ttyl.

chengdu and bac

we've seen pandas, pimped some rickshaws with foreigners, climbed mount emei and seen pictures of the faux chinese dalai lama at the top, slept in a monastery, seen a very large carved buddha from a filthy beach, missed seeing jane goodall in two cities, eaten thanksgiving dinner and gone to "the bus bar" in beijing- a camoflaged trailer in a parking lot with a land rover bar- oh yeah, and we're off to mongolia at 6am. see you post-detox.

i climbed the great wall!

i thought that the great wall was just going to be a long walk, wrong. jane and i chose to go today which happened to be too foggy to see anything outside of the wall (which is actually good, if i could have seen what i was about to climb i may have just sat down and cried). by the end, after being lifted down from one of the towers by jane and some polish dude (each with a leg in hand) and climbing down another one with a number of onlookers coaching me on the footholds i was happy to reach the end, where it was snowing. besides the fact that it may have been a more challenging climb then i was ready for, it was fabulous to occasionally find myself alone on the wall, sans tourists and hawkers. scarily enough, as the bus got back onto beijing roads, jane and i could both feel the pollution. i am ready for chengdu and environs!

ni hao!

shanghai felt alternately like chinatown, brooklyn, and an amalgamation of american cities with tall buildings. now we're in beijing, after one of the nicest train rides ever, although i could have done without the chinese ballad muzak. we now know the words for rice, the numbers 6-10 and vegetable bun in chinese. we also do a mean reenactment of the announcer on the shanghai metro.

Cool Things I've seen in Portland

• really tall bikes. I asked someone how he got on his (multi-colored, earth flag, anti-war stickered) tall bike today and pointed to his step. someone else told me "faith."i didn't actually see this guy, but plenty of people who look like him.

• weird cars. people like to decorate their cars with tiles and little alien figurines and other bizarro things. so many people, so many crafting opportunities.
  
• international rose test garden! Portland is also known as "Rose City" strange, there must be one nickname for every 25 people in Portland, but this one makes sense since roses grow everywhere and are nurtured. see how happy i am about roses?

• Next to the Rose Garden is this serene Japanese Garden, complete with Yoko Ono inspired wish tree.
• these people like Japanese gardening too, but they have a lot to learn.
• Finally, this is what nerds do on their day off...

Welcome to Bridge City

here is the view from the Burnside bridge on the way to Voodoo Doughnut, best donut shop ever.
here is my new hip haircut.

that's all i've got for now.

I am a bike commuter. That's right, I have joined the ranks of thousands of Portlanders. I read bike maps, I follow bike routes, I hang out at the bike shop and I get passed by lots of people on much fancier road bikes whose legs are ready for hills. Helmet on!

Dance Party USA

Last night we went out. It seems that the 22 other people I'm here with are party animals, and it's nice since we spend about 12+ hours a day together in classes and doing field games and walking the streets talking to people about voting, so sometimes you need to not be talking about politics. Or if you are, you should be playing red state v. blue state flip cup on July 4th, which miraculously ended up in a tie! America wins!

Anyway, I walked the handful of miles from my home to downtown Portland last night and am constantly impressed by the greenery all over the streets and the cats running around. Portland feels like a variety of small towns linked by some big bridges and car busy arteries. Downtown is weird and gritty and the homelessness hub of Portland as well as where the hip clubs and Voodoo donut is, awesome local donut place. It's very bizarre. I think that's all i can do now since I am in class. More later.

Viral Marketing

Doesn't that sound fun? I think it does! I've spent a bunch of today working on it in a collaborative group, I wonder if any of it will work. It does mean that I spent over three hours sitting in an office kitchen and I feel a little funny. Things continue apace. Portland is beautiful, I took a nice walk around the nice neighborhood of Historic Irvington in NE Portland yesterday evening. The well kept lawns were blooming in a way that would make natural lawn types happy and there were lots of big dogs lounging on lawns just lapping up the cool weather. Everyone here seems happy and I'm working on getting used to that. I guess more to come.

So it begins...

I'm back from my two day crash course on PolitiCorps, it was fun and we learned lots of things about health care, rethinking democracy, campaigns, leadership and where we're all from. Admittedly, I have spent so much time at this point making new friends and keeping the old that I feel a little sick of it, but yeah, I'm 22 so hopefully I will get over it soon. It still hasn't set in that I'm in Portland. Since I seem a little stuck, here's a list of things of interest I've learned over the past few days:
Don't sleep with each other! (from two different people)
The US is in 7 trillion dollars worth of debt and 1 trillion seconds ago was 3000 BC. Just to put it in some perspective.
Ultimate frisbee is fun, but will probably be more fun once I'm not scared to get near the actual frisbee.
Our government needs to be dramatically overhauled to better fit our society, and that overhaul is a real possibility.

I have internet now, and Portland has lots of free WiFi, so hopefully we'll meet again sometime soon.