Alone and melancholy at 35,000 feet can bring out the emotion. Most of the time I can deal with being by myself – an all too familiar trend – but being lonely is where I struggle. Stuck on an airplane, with hours of solitary confinement and too much time to think, seems to stir up memories of recent and long ago losses. It’s difficult not to acknowledge there’s been too many.
I nearly always think about my mom and dad along with Betts and Fred and even my grandma, whose death didn’t sink in until I was on an airplane. I’ve had to learn to set aside the frustration that comes with facing things you have no control over and I am thankful for all the memories from them that stick with me still. I wish the journey with them could have lasted longer but I have no complaints about the ride. Just the same, I’d give anything just to see them all again and tell them I love them one more time.
Tonight is a bit different, though. I can’t shake two strong feelings, try as I might. One is a flood of feelings about Bill brought on, perhaps, by hearing a song I connect to him, the Wind Beneath My Wings sung by the sweet-voiced Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole who himself died young with far too much life left to offer.
I really shouldn’t be this bad off when I’m thinking about Bill because I had more time with him than probably anyone in his life except for Sue. Cass and Janee lost so much by his early death but I know they feel fortunate they had such a close relationship with their father. Of course that’s the point of this particular tragedy: because he gave so much is the reason he is so missed
Curiosity and nosiness makes it nearly impossible not to occasionally visit Cass and Janee’s My Space sites to see what they’re up to. Both have their father listed as their hero and a goofy picture of him as goofy is how he will end up being most remembered. I can’t tell you how it pains me to see a comment written by Janee on how much she misses her father. I wish I could reach through to the other end of the computer and hug the little Creep. I know she’d tell me it’s OK, but it’s damn sure far from being OK.
Thinking about the weaker moments for Sue and their kids’ nearly breaks the heart because I know about my weaker moments. No word has yet been invented to explain in proper terms what should be said about the shock of Bill’s passing so I’ll borrow a line from one of our favorite movies said in the spirit of utter contradiction, “He will not be missed.” One day the tears will dry up.
The other depressing and common agenda item I can’t get away from tonight is ruminating about the number of my friends who are no longer much a part of my life. Some have been lost out of our mutual laziness, some have moved, some have moved on, and still others have passed away. Some friendships proved to be more fragile than should be the case and others’ bodies proved to be more fragile as well, no matter how much they were abused.
Even my kids have had to endure loss beyond their grandparents and uncle. One lost a crying shoulder and the other the promise of a harbor in a tempest. Losing people shouldn’t be such a big part of their young lives but I suspect they have become stronger people and have so much of their life ahead of them, including learning to love again.
And I guess that’s the lesson here – we’re supposed to gain strength from loss and grow closer together. I think we have, too. Mrs. Laz and I have never been closer; longing for the river to skate away on as we reach the empty-nested part of our relationship. The Boy works with me and we’ve found we have shared ideals of business and life and are actually more open to each other’s political views then we’d ever admit. And the Girl and I have become so close we’ve developed our own language patched together from all the great movie classics such as Zoolander and Anchorman – much to the chagrin of Mrs. Laz who wasn’t given the secret decoder ring. I’m actually happy she didn’t get the apartment she wanted because it gives us two more months of watching AI and AI, two things we’ll always remember, I suspect.
As for friends, I actually told Mr. Sladed I loved him just in case he’d lost sight of that, because I sure haven’t. And that goes for the Wop too; what a pleasure it is to finally be working together. I’m even fortunate to have old and new friends to work with, a stroke of luck that can’t be ignored.
It’s difficult not to notice there is a plan or a certain serendipity developing here. As we lose people, our hearts are opened to allow more room for others. The spark that Bill left in all he touched, and the friends who passed our way have given us all the ability to love better and love more, even if they only stayed for a short visit. I’m even slightly cheered up by this discovery, although that will about do it for long plane rides for a while.
Monday, March 27, 2006
My Least Favorite Places
In all the words I spent writing about my favorite places (including too much time spent complaining about places I didn’t like), I thought it would be worthwhile to have a larger discussion of my least favorite places. There are more than a few.
Surprisingly I just returned from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, a war-torn area that still struggles with ethnic and border disputes, and they don’t make the list. I’ve been to worse places, to be sure.
One of them is Kiev in 2005, a much worse city than Kiev was 15 years before. The new Kiev has the feel of a corrupt, lawless city of too many people who have nothing to do except scam the weak and unprotected. There are roughly three million people who live in the city and I think they were all at the airport in black leather jackets offering to take my bags to their car and to god knows where. There could be no trusting this wretched bunch. Orange Revolution notwithstanding, there is no short-term hope for the place. And if they want to continue to complain about how cold they are because Russia won’t sell them natural gas at one-third the market price, they can put on their orange scarves to keep warm.
There are some who say Paris is for lovers by I say Paris is for lovers of garbage. There are few filthier cities. When there was a garbage strike a few years ago it was difficult to notice the difference. Paris is a xenophobe’s paradise because huge numbers of immigrants and refuges have recently made it their home. This melting pot of millions has never melted and instead have all settled in their own homogenous neighborhoods. You drive through one section populated by northern Africans followed by a shanty area of central Africans until you run into a variety of disparate and unforgiving Middle Easterners. Occasionally you bump into a Parisian – or, better, their car bumps into you – but they never stick around long enough to exchange pleasantries as they’re trying to navigate the quickest way to the French enclave of the city. Seriously, look at a photo of the Mona Lisa, watch a Truffaut movie, and spend all your money on French perfume at the local mall and you’ll have no real reason to go to Paris.
Athens is another place to stay clear of. I know, it has all this great, ancient history covered in great and ancient dirt. Granted we were there in 2000 as the city was totally under construction awaiting a throng of soon-to-be unhappy tourists and athletes for the Olympics. Of course unhappy is the only way to describe the residents of Greece. Unless you’re on an over-crowded ferry heading for one of the nearby islands, there is not much in Athens to make you happy. The traffic is horrendous with irritated driver’s hands placed firmly on their horns as if this mélange of noise could possibly move the traffic one inch. As another qualifier (and to avoid an angry letter from Mari, Ari and Celeste) it should be noted that we were there shortly after our peace-loving President Clinton had just finished bombing the crap out of the Balkans, causing literally millions of Macedonians and other refuges to join the crowd in Athens and lend their hand to the important ongoing honking. This made Americans very unwanted, a point brought close to home during a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of a taxi trip to a Hard Rock Café. There was one pleasant moment at our hotel – and not the one the kids are thinking about – when we had a wonderful dinner on the roof of our hotel with our Parisian friend Jean (okay, there’s one reason to go to Paris, but even he eventually moved out of town). The weather was perfect and we had an unobstructed view of the light show at the Parthenon. The food wasn’t that bad, either. Of course this was the same hotel where a British diplomat had been gunned down a few months earlier, diminishing the perks of topless sunbathers at the pool (so I heard).
Sonsanate and San Salvador, with apologies to my partner Max, were no garden spots. Sonsanate makes the list if for no other reason than its hopeless poverty. I know there are more impoverished places and giving in to the fact that the people who lived there didn’t seem to realize they were impoverished, it still broke your heart to see. Perhaps more troubling was the knowledge that it wouldn’t take more than a week’s worth of automatic teller charges in the U.S. to make a year's difference in Sonsanate. I was more bothered by San Salvador because there was a lot of poverty and some huge wealth and the people there know the difference. Crime is rampant and it’s difficult to feel safe anywhere. The wealthy have razor wire over the walls that surround their home, much of it left over from the civil war that nearly wrecked the country a decade ago. The middle class, such as it is, pool their resources to pay for heavily armed security 24/7, which only serves to drive the bandits to the neighboring streets whose residents can’t afford the security.
I know there is a certain segment out there who loves Amsterdam. I just don’t like the city or that particular segment who loves it. Sure, there are cultural amenities to Amsterdam such as the Van Gogh and Rembrandt museums, and plenty of good, classical concerts. It’s just that they’re all overridden by the graffiti on the outside of the museums and the local permissiveness that attracts people who crave permissiveness. With low cost airlines targeting Amsterdam, it has become the Tijuana of Europe for badly-behaved bachelor parties, inebriated miscreants and serious drug users (although t
he Harold and Kumar types who still giggle that they can get some legal pot, man, can be charming). Because of the beer flowing out of all sides of the drinkers, the city was forced to install outdoor and very public urinals to better organize the public urination off the walls of businesses and restaurants and out in the open where, I suppose, they believe it belongs. Where else can the ladies get an outside glimpse of the inside of a men’s room but in Amsterdam? And then there are the rows of “cabins” where Eastern European, Russian and African women show what they have to sell. Okay, it’s fun to see it once, but after awhile it gets sort of boring. It’s not like you’d want to do anything other than walk down the alleys and avoid direct eye contact, unless spending 300 euro to get 10 minutes of detached sex with a stranger is attractive to you. Not that I know it costs 300 euro; it’s just a guess. I know there are lovely sides of Amsterdam – the canals, the history, the work ethic. I suppose the people who live there learn to put up with the section of the city that is a monument to tolerance and progressive thought. It’s just not for me.
There are a number of other cities that are pretty disgusting, but they have some overriding charm to make up for the deficiencies elsewhere. St. Petersburg, Russia is a frightful place for the most part, but there are areas that are unbelievably rich in culture and history. Bucharest, with its attempt to mix huge numbers of gypsies with gypsy-haters and which holds the world’s worst architecture by the world’s worst dictator/architect still has sections of the city untouched by crazy communist leaders where you can enjoy a coffee and snack at a number of outdoor cafes. Romanians like to call their capital the “Little Paris” and fortunately they modeled much of it on the old Paris just in time before people will start to call Paris the “Little Bucharest.” Tirana is a dusty dump (see below) and there is no excuse for the place. The Albanian capital has been made all the more distasteful by a new government (that we help get elected) trying to outdo the corruption of the last corrupt government; a difficult task indeed.
The U.S. has its ugly cities too. Drive around any city or town in Texas, save for Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, and there is no place you’d less rather be. Midland/Odessa is downright scary it’s so ugly, El Paso makes Juarez livable, and East Texas is something out of To Kill a Mockingbird. Large sections of Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago will make any reasonable person long for the natural beauty of Tirana. And don’t get me started on New Orleans. What a dump that place is, and that was before the hurricane.
Understanding I just insulted millions of people (although I suspect the people of Tirana would wholeheartedly agree with me); I also recognize there every place has something of redeemable value. It may be more difficult to find it, but I’m sure it’s there.
Surprisingly I just returned from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, a war-torn area that still struggles with ethnic and border disputes, and they don’t make the list. I’ve been to worse places, to be sure.
One of them is Kiev in 2005, a much worse city than Kiev was 15 years before. The new Kiev has the feel of a corrupt, lawless city of too many people who have nothing to do except scam the weak and unprotected. There are roughly three million people who live in the city and I think they were all at the airport in black leather jackets offering to take my bags to their car and to god knows where. There could be no trusting this wretched bunch. Orange Revolution notwithstanding, there is no short-term hope for the place. And if they want to continue to complain about how cold they are because Russia won’t sell them natural gas at one-third the market price, they can put on their orange scarves to keep warm.
There are some who say Paris is for lovers by I say Paris is for lovers of garbage. There are few filthier cities. When there was a garbage strike a few years ago it was difficult to notice the difference. Paris is a xenophobe’s paradise because huge numbers of immigrants and refuges have recently made it their home. This melting pot of millions has never melted and instead have all settled in their own homogenous neighborhoods. You drive through one section populated by northern Africans followed by a shanty area of central Africans until you run into a variety of disparate and unforgiving Middle Easterners. Occasionally you bump into a Parisian – or, better, their car bumps into you – but they never stick around long enough to exchange pleasantries as they’re trying to navigate the quickest way to the French enclave of the city. Seriously, look at a photo of the Mona Lisa, watch a Truffaut movie, and spend all your money on French perfume at the local mall and you’ll have no real reason to go to Paris.
Athens is another place to stay clear of. I know, it has all this great, ancient history covered in great and ancient dirt. Granted we were there in 2000 as the city was totally under construction awaiting a throng of soon-to-be unhappy tourists and athletes for the Olympics. Of course unhappy is the only way to describe the residents of Greece. Unless you’re on an over-crowded ferry heading for one of the nearby islands, there is not much in Athens to make you happy. The traffic is horrendous with irritated driver’s hands placed firmly on their horns as if this mélange of noise could possibly move the traffic one inch. As another qualifier (and to avoid an angry letter from Mari, Ari and Celeste) it should be noted that we were there shortly after our peace-loving President Clinton had just finished bombing the crap out of the Balkans, causing literally millions of Macedonians and other refuges to join the crowd in Athens and lend their hand to the important ongoing honking. This made Americans very unwanted, a point brought close to home during a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of a taxi trip to a Hard Rock Café. There was one pleasant moment at our hotel – and not the one the kids are thinking about – when we had a wonderful dinner on the roof of our hotel with our Parisian friend Jean (okay, there’s one reason to go to Paris, but even he eventually moved out of town). The weather was perfect and we had an unobstructed view of the light show at the Parthenon. The food wasn’t that bad, either. Of course this was the same hotel where a British diplomat had been gunned down a few months earlier, diminishing the perks of topless sunbathers at the pool (so I heard).
Sonsanate and San Salvador, with apologies to my partner Max, were no garden spots. Sonsanate makes the list if for no other reason than its hopeless poverty. I know there are more impoverished places and giving in to the fact that the people who lived there didn’t seem to realize they were impoverished, it still broke your heart to see. Perhaps more troubling was the knowledge that it wouldn’t take more than a week’s worth of automatic teller charges in the U.S. to make a year's difference in Sonsanate. I was more bothered by San Salvador because there was a lot of poverty and some huge wealth and the people there know the difference. Crime is rampant and it’s difficult to feel safe anywhere. The wealthy have razor wire over the walls that surround their home, much of it left over from the civil war that nearly wrecked the country a decade ago. The middle class, such as it is, pool their resources to pay for heavily armed security 24/7, which only serves to drive the bandits to the neighboring streets whose residents can’t afford the security.
I know there is a certain segment out there who loves Amsterdam. I just don’t like the city or that particular segment who loves it. Sure, there are cultural amenities to Amsterdam such as the Van Gogh and Rembrandt museums, and plenty of good, classical concerts. It’s just that they’re all overridden by the graffiti on the outside of the museums and the local permissiveness that attracts people who crave permissiveness. With low cost airlines targeting Amsterdam, it has become the Tijuana of Europe for badly-behaved bachelor parties, inebriated miscreants and serious drug users (although t
he Harold and Kumar types who still giggle that they can get some legal pot, man, can be charming). Because of the beer flowing out of all sides of the drinkers, the city was forced to install outdoor and very public urinals to better organize the public urination off the walls of businesses and restaurants and out in the open where, I suppose, they believe it belongs. Where else can the ladies get an outside glimpse of the inside of a men’s room but in Amsterdam? And then there are the rows of “cabins” where Eastern European, Russian and African women show what they have to sell. Okay, it’s fun to see it once, but after awhile it gets sort of boring. It’s not like you’d want to do anything other than walk down the alleys and avoid direct eye contact, unless spending 300 euro to get 10 minutes of detached sex with a stranger is attractive to you. Not that I know it costs 300 euro; it’s just a guess. I know there are lovely sides of Amsterdam – the canals, the history, the work ethic. I suppose the people who live there learn to put up with the section of the city that is a monument to tolerance and progressive thought. It’s just not for me.There are a number of other cities that are pretty disgusting, but they have some overriding charm to make up for the deficiencies elsewhere. St. Petersburg, Russia is a frightful place for the most part, but there are areas that are unbelievably rich in culture and history. Bucharest, with its attempt to mix huge numbers of gypsies with gypsy-haters and which holds the world’s worst architecture by the world’s worst dictator/architect still has sections of the city untouched by crazy communist leaders where you can enjoy a coffee and snack at a number of outdoor cafes. Romanians like to call their capital the “Little Paris” and fortunately they modeled much of it on the old Paris just in time before people will start to call Paris the “Little Bucharest.” Tirana is a dusty dump (see below) and there is no excuse for the place. The Albanian capital has been made all the more distasteful by a new government (that we help get elected) trying to outdo the corruption of the last corrupt government; a difficult task indeed.
The U.S. has its ugly cities too. Drive around any city or town in Texas, save for Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, and there is no place you’d less rather be. Midland/Odessa is downright scary it’s so ugly, El Paso makes Juarez livable, and East Texas is something out of To Kill a Mockingbird. Large sections of Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago will make any reasonable person long for the natural beauty of Tirana. And don’t get me started on New Orleans. What a dump that place is, and that was before the hurricane.
Understanding I just insulted millions of people (although I suspect the people of Tirana would wholeheartedly agree with me); I also recognize there every place has something of redeemable value. It may be more difficult to find it, but I’m sure it’s there.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Laz Logic
Mrs. Laz and I were having an intellectual debate that was fascinating. Well, fascinating to me that I am alive and able to write about it. One could say I was being a bit controversial or “having fuzzy logic,” but I prefer to believe I was thinking outside the box, engaging in intellectual discourse or perhaps breaking down barriers of all thought. And still I am fascinated that my fingers are free to type and free of hairline fractures that usually occur following such intellectual wanderings that begin with, “Dear, I was thinking …”
I can’t lay claim to the general thesis of the theory I presented to Mrs. Laz; that belongs to someone else. However, I took the premise to a more practical use by attempting to put it in motion – as all pioneers feel the urge to do. And it was the very same “urge” part that drew a bare-knuckled beat-down by the Mrs. And in the sanctity of my home own too!
In the interest of science I will present my research to you, dear readers, and hopefully this will help Mankind (or at least one man).
We begin with two key facts:
Fact No. 1: The definition of marriage is a union of two people, a man and a woman.
Fact No 2: Gay, Lesbian and Transgender activists don’t like the part of Fact. No. 1 that limits their options regarding the two sexes. And so they rallied and rumbled and bullied cowering politicians (not a difficult task, mind you), went to court, yelled a little more, stomped their feet, held their breath, and had a number of jurisdictions agree with them: marriage should not be so exclusive as to be just between men and women. What’s wrong with two men, or two women, or two sexually confused humans, they asked? In fact I believe the final demands of Gays, Lesbians and Transgender people were to define marriage as just between two mammals -- and I think they’re pretty flexible on that point, too.
And so they largely got their way by declaring their definition of marriage to be a right. I still like Kinky Friedman’s comment that gays should be able to marry so they can have the same right to be as miserable as the rest of us. But that was before I was spraying Bactine on the heavy cuts about my head and neck as I was, apparently, taking this theorem to its next logical conclusion. Naturally all men of Science and High Thought have had to suffer for being ahead of their time and I am no different. Unfortunately for Newton and Socrates Bactine wasn’t invented, as Newton may have needed it to salve a bump on his head and Socrates, well, actually, Socrates may have had to drink it. I’m glad I had Bactine at the ready, but it still stings!
Which leads us to Fact No. 3: If marriage is no longer defined as that between a man and a woman, we should no longer be bound by the union of “two people” either. If we’re breaking down half the equation and have gotten over the “man and women” thing, then we should have no problem declaring the random number of two as no longer “operative.” (Ohhhhh, funny story about that. When President Clinton’s first press secretary Dee Dee Myers was asked about a statement she had made a day earlier regarding Hillary’s cattle future’s problem that had proven to be a lie, Dee Dee was questioned about it by the press. She simply said the answer she had given the day before “was no longer operative.” That’s much better than saying it was a lie, don’t you think?).
OK, keep your focus fellow scientists. We’re back to the Multiple Party Marriages or MPM as I like to now call them. Aside from the ungrateful swipe by my hostile bookkeeper that I couldn’t “handle” more than one woman (first we kill all the accountants!), you can’t debate the logic that one breakdown of the marriage equations leads to a breakdown of the other. Well, to be fair, you can only debate this theory if you’re wearing protective head gear and a padded jock strap.
I have come to find that men, in general, are out front of women in accepting this new paradigm. Men have supported my radical thinking while women have cast scorn on the idea and, I might add, cast more than a few household items at me. But all such shifts in great thinking begin this way: with a few believers before the other, slower people come around.
The only part of my theory that isn’t working out is the part about women not being too keen on the whole more than one spouse part. Why, what would happen if my logic is sound but no women were willing to participate? I don’t think I calculated this divergence of opinion when I ran my chaos theories, at least in the context of behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems (e.g. women). It’s the Butterfly Effect all over again. I guess it’s back to the drawing board and my studies. I’ll need books and tools and volunteers for study, but where do I find them?
I can’t lay claim to the general thesis of the theory I presented to Mrs. Laz; that belongs to someone else. However, I took the premise to a more practical use by attempting to put it in motion – as all pioneers feel the urge to do. And it was the very same “urge” part that drew a bare-knuckled beat-down by the Mrs. And in the sanctity of my home own too!
In the interest of science I will present my research to you, dear readers, and hopefully this will help Mankind (or at least one man).
We begin with two key facts:
Fact No. 1: The definition of marriage is a union of two people, a man and a woman.
Fact No 2: Gay, Lesbian and Transgender activists don’t like the part of Fact. No. 1 that limits their options regarding the two sexes. And so they rallied and rumbled and bullied cowering politicians (not a difficult task, mind you), went to court, yelled a little more, stomped their feet, held their breath, and had a number of jurisdictions agree with them: marriage should not be so exclusive as to be just between men and women. What’s wrong with two men, or two women, or two sexually confused humans, they asked? In fact I believe the final demands of Gays, Lesbians and Transgender people were to define marriage as just between two mammals -- and I think they’re pretty flexible on that point, too.
And so they largely got their way by declaring their definition of marriage to be a right. I still like Kinky Friedman’s comment that gays should be able to marry so they can have the same right to be as miserable as the rest of us. But that was before I was spraying Bactine on the heavy cuts about my head and neck as I was, apparently, taking this theorem to its next logical conclusion. Naturally all men of Science and High Thought have had to suffer for being ahead of their time and I am no different. Unfortunately for Newton and Socrates Bactine wasn’t invented, as Newton may have needed it to salve a bump on his head and Socrates, well, actually, Socrates may have had to drink it. I’m glad I had Bactine at the ready, but it still stings!
Which leads us to Fact No. 3: If marriage is no longer defined as that between a man and a woman, we should no longer be bound by the union of “two people” either. If we’re breaking down half the equation and have gotten over the “man and women” thing, then we should have no problem declaring the random number of two as no longer “operative.” (Ohhhhh, funny story about that. When President Clinton’s first press secretary Dee Dee Myers was asked about a statement she had made a day earlier regarding Hillary’s cattle future’s problem that had proven to be a lie, Dee Dee was questioned about it by the press. She simply said the answer she had given the day before “was no longer operative.” That’s much better than saying it was a lie, don’t you think?).
OK, keep your focus fellow scientists. We’re back to the Multiple Party Marriages or MPM as I like to now call them. Aside from the ungrateful swipe by my hostile bookkeeper that I couldn’t “handle” more than one woman (first we kill all the accountants!), you can’t debate the logic that one breakdown of the marriage equations leads to a breakdown of the other. Well, to be fair, you can only debate this theory if you’re wearing protective head gear and a padded jock strap.
I have come to find that men, in general, are out front of women in accepting this new paradigm. Men have supported my radical thinking while women have cast scorn on the idea and, I might add, cast more than a few household items at me. But all such shifts in great thinking begin this way: with a few believers before the other, slower people come around.
The only part of my theory that isn’t working out is the part about women not being too keen on the whole more than one spouse part. Why, what would happen if my logic is sound but no women were willing to participate? I don’t think I calculated this divergence of opinion when I ran my chaos theories, at least in the context of behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems (e.g. women). It’s the Butterfly Effect all over again. I guess it’s back to the drawing board and my studies. I’ll need books and tools and volunteers for study, but where do I find them?
Monday, March 06, 2006
My Favorite Places
Lately, a lot of people have been asking me about places I’ve been and, particularly, which places and countries I like the best.
It should first be noted that I go to a lot of the same places a lot of the time and therefore haven’t picked up any special worldly knowledge. I haven’t been to Africa or the Middle East and my travels to Asia are a bit suspect (I had a bewildered taxi driver take me a few feet into the Asian section of Istanbul so I could rightly say I’d been to Asia). I have been to nearly 50 countries and there were a lot of dull ones among them like Luxembourg, Albania, and Canada.
I don’t know which country or countries I prefer. I suppose I like certain things about all of them just as I like certain things about the U.S. New Zealand and Scotland have by far the friendliest people. France has the snootiest people but make up for it with good wine, warm baguettes and croissants, and the best drivers driving in reverse on the planet.
The Germans have surprisingly good food and very unfriendly people, especially if you don’t take the time to learn their language (and why would you want to take the time to use words twice as long in German as in English?).
I have a couple of good memories in Munich; one at a Kriskrendlemart (sp.), a holiday craft show where someone scooped a cup into a big bucket of simmering wine and spices and gave me something called Glühwein. It will cure what ails you, especially on a cold winter day. The other memory is of a solitary violinist playing a Handel piece in an alley off the main shopping road. It was beautiful as the music bounced off the ancient walls of the shops above him. It all came to an abrupt end when a group of inebriated soccer hooligans came charging through the alley, knocking the violinist and his music to the ground as sort of an instant critical review of the concert. Apparently Glühwein and Handel don’t mix well.
Speaking of inebriation, Ireland is the country with the most drunks, although Sweden comes in a close second. Walking near any bar or restaurant in any town or city in Ireland requires the walker to be sober and have a nimble gait less he step in the many puddles of vomit along the sidewalk. And what keeps the average Irish drinker on the sidewalk, you ask? The clever Irish have placed side rails along the busier roads to keep the drinkers and socializers from stumbling into oncoming traffic (or French vacationers driving in reverse).
As for the Swedes, it has come to the attention of the Swedish Government’s Alcoholic Consumption and Warnings Your Mother Gave You but You Ignored Department that Swedes drink too much. They actually have a government agency that tracks the amount of alcohol each Swede consumes. You drink too much and you get a visit and a stern letter from an agency busybody. The Swedish solution? Denmark is only a short drive or ferry away and no such busybodyness exists in Denmark so they take the quick jaunt and drink it up, crashing cars and breaking curios and such. It should be noted the Danes have disliked the Swedes outside of their public drunkeness. Apparently, I was told, the Swedish King said something unpolite to the Danish Queen in 1206 and things haven’t been right between the two neighbors since. What has followed is a bunch of loud Swedes and annoyed Danes; entertainment you can’t get at home at any price.
I have gotten to know some places better than others by either living there for a while or because the host government was foolish enough to give me a multiple-entry visa. The foolishness went both ways as I chose to spend a great deal of time in Russia and its nearby republics, now countries that had the good sense to leave Russia when the same good sense escaped me. Nobody had a gun to my head when I domiciled in Romania for six months either. The two countries share this much: they make you appreciate capitalism and some semblance of Democracy a great deal more. Kissing the passport control floor at LAX is not uncommon for returning travelers to these countries.
The biggest mistake we all made about Russia was in thinking they just wanted to be like us. They didn’t. They wanted to be like the Swedes (except for the strict alcohol consumption codes) because they had bought into the whole “cradle to grave” society. They didn’t want to have to work or give up potatoes and Vodka, they simply wanted to be able to get their cranky government off their back and travel whenever they wanted just to reinforce the world view of Russians.
I once asked the obvious question to a woman about why the Soviet Union fell. We were standing near the entry of the “Hammer Center,” a hotel and restaurant complex that was a shrine to free marketers but off limits to the average Russian. She talked about how frustrating it was to see all the goodies the West had to offer through the window of the Hammer Center but no right to take part in spending $400 for a pair of shoes. So the Russians had a revolution to buy uncomfortable footwear and a $60 steak. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, you could buy a pizza at a place called Pizza Hat. I guess there was a revolution just because some entrepreneur needed to buy a vowel.
Since Romania and Russia were Communists countries, they had a few things in common: an overabundance of moles, poor dental care and astonishingly ugly sofas. I have no inside information on the moles but the high degree of tooth decay and gingivitis comes from a rational fear of the dentist. Since the trademark of all Communist countries is for all workers in the Worker’s Paradise to be employed by the State, there was no need to be a better, more caring dentist than the next. Imagine dental care by the Department of Motor Vehicles and you have imagined a Soviet dentist. The offshoot is that Novocain costs the State money and is therefore superfluous. Without the Novocain, surprisingly few people filled out those silly tooth-shaped postcards to remind them of their next dental appointment, which was good for the State since the lack of repeat business further lowered costs so there was more money to keep Lenin looking green in his tomb.
I also can’t explain the prevalence of the astonishingly ugly sofa. It seems the ideal sofa in former Communist countries has a tree-full of carving and gilt and is upholstered in plush, petit point, plaid, and paisley as if Donald Trump, Madame Pompadour, Queen Victoria and the Doors had gotten together to start a decorating firm. You see the astonishingly ugly sofa everywhere. In the homes of the well-off and otherwise; hotel lobbies; office reception areas; furniture-store windows (of course) and, most spectacularly, on local sitcoms. One actor sits down and makes an exasperated face while the other actors gesticulate comically. I couldn’t understand what was going on in these sitcoms, but I could tell it was a lot more charming than Oprah.
Bad driving on bad and very wide roads also seems to be a consistent theme in formerly Communist countries. Whether in Moscow, Warsaw, Bucharest or Kiev, crossing a major intersection alive takes bravery and guile, or blindness, since the only way I was willing to act as a pedestrian is with my eyes closed. The traffic is too scary otherwise. I was taught in high school that it was good to be an aggressive driver. I think drivers in Eastern Europe and Russia are taught to drive angry. If you try to cross a major street in Russia or Romania, you will note quite quickly that drivers, without expression, speed up and aim for you. A simple street crossing reminds one of that old video game “Frogger.” Except you get across the street more often on the computer.
Not all is bad in these countries. Moscow has become as fashionable and trendy as any city in the world. Housing prices have skyrocketed and the rich have been buying up apartment buildings and huge houses with astonishingly ugly sofas like hotcakes. And they buy it all in cash; which has the upside of cutting down on receiving 30 letters each day explaining how they’re paying too much for their mortgage. I once asked someone, “who can afford these places,” and I was told, “Officials and prostitutes.” “Aren’t they one and the same?” I asked.
I was in Kiev during the start of the so-called Orange Revolution. The Revolution’s spontaneity couldn’t have been better planned. Before the results of the elections were announced, there suddenly appeared 200,000 people with orange scarves and the secret code to show up at the right time in Independence Square. Also, someone just happened to have a couple of Jumbo Trons in their trunk so angry speechmakers could make angry speeches. The best part is that the rubes in the world press bought the spontaneity angle so the newly anointed Ukrainian government decided it needed to keep the joke going and tried to run a government. Governments are difficult enough to run but when your whole plan revolves around calling the former government all sorts of bad names, trouble is on the horizon. The new government was able to get the “Own a Black Mercedes and BMWs on $400-Per-Month-Scheme” in place before the country tanked, so they had that going for them.
Albania may be the sorriest of a lot of sorry former Communist states. If wealth was measured in dust, Albania would be the Beverly Hills of the world. I don’t know where the dust comes from or where it settles, but it is constantly coming from somewhere and apparently never settling. Albania is the only country that decided to exit a Communist economy and dip its toe in capitalism by creating a massive, country-wide pyramid scheme. When it predictably collapsed, the entire country went on a looting spree, taking everything that wasn’t nailed down including the astonishingly ugly sofas (fortunately for future generations of Albanians, dust can’t be nailed down). After a while, the looting came to an end. When asked why the people stopped, one Albanian man simply said, “We were done.”
On the other side of the world, I was able to spend 10 delightful weeks in New Zealand. New Zealand is the Bigfoot of countries; hiding behind rocks and trees in fear of being discovered. Kiwis (as people from New Zealand are known) live in this tormented contradiction of enjoying their isolation but, at the same time, wondering if the world knows they’re still alive. When I mentioned I enjoyed the movie The Whale Rider, the Kiwis couldn’t believe I had seen it. They still can’t believe they are interesting enough for a busy American to take the time to notice.
Kellen and I were working on the elections in New Zealand. Besides the obvious side show that is politics, we were amused by the dire predictions of a country headed to hell by the opposition government (our client and still in opposition). If Americans only had to worry about the minor annoyances of the kind of government that angers the Kiwis, all the fun would go out of politics. Since there are only 2.8 million voters in New Zealand, the government is run like one large condo association with the same amount of general goofiness consistent with a Landscape Committee. But it still runs better than Congress
All the same, I found the mix of unrivaled natural beauty, every season available within a one-hour plane ride, friendly natives, and the availability of all the creature comforts of home in New Zealand to be the perfect blend to the best place to live or visit. Scotland comes in a close second with summer in Sweden not far behind. All of which is to say I spent a lot of time writing about places not to go and far too little time discussing nice places to visit.
However, I have come to believe that “nice” isn’t always the best reason to travel somewhere. I prefer interesting places with long histories where the locals feel the need to do something extra to keep you from going to Euro Disney. I also tend to like smaller cities. With that in mind, my favorite places are:
Krakow, Poland
Bruges, Belgium
San Sebastian, Spain
Wellington, New Zealand
Sibiu, Romania
Koblenz, Germany
Galway, Ireland
Avallon/Vezaly, France
But there is no place like home.
It should first be noted that I go to a lot of the same places a lot of the time and therefore haven’t picked up any special worldly knowledge. I haven’t been to Africa or the Middle East and my travels to Asia are a bit suspect (I had a bewildered taxi driver take me a few feet into the Asian section of Istanbul so I could rightly say I’d been to Asia). I have been to nearly 50 countries and there were a lot of dull ones among them like Luxembourg, Albania, and Canada.
I don’t know which country or countries I prefer. I suppose I like certain things about all of them just as I like certain things about the U.S. New Zealand and Scotland have by far the friendliest people. France has the snootiest people but make up for it with good wine, warm baguettes and croissants, and the best drivers driving in reverse on the planet.
The Germans have surprisingly good food and very unfriendly people, especially if you don’t take the time to learn their language (and why would you want to take the time to use words twice as long in German as in English?).
I have a couple of good memories in Munich; one at a Kriskrendlemart (sp.), a holiday craft show where someone scooped a cup into a big bucket of simmering wine and spices and gave me something called Glühwein. It will cure what ails you, especially on a cold winter day. The other memory is of a solitary violinist playing a Handel piece in an alley off the main shopping road. It was beautiful as the music bounced off the ancient walls of the shops above him. It all came to an abrupt end when a group of inebriated soccer hooligans came charging through the alley, knocking the violinist and his music to the ground as sort of an instant critical review of the concert. Apparently Glühwein and Handel don’t mix well.
Speaking of inebriation, Ireland is the country with the most drunks, although Sweden comes in a close second. Walking near any bar or restaurant in any town or city in Ireland requires the walker to be sober and have a nimble gait less he step in the many puddles of vomit along the sidewalk. And what keeps the average Irish drinker on the sidewalk, you ask? The clever Irish have placed side rails along the busier roads to keep the drinkers and socializers from stumbling into oncoming traffic (or French vacationers driving in reverse).
As for the Swedes, it has come to the attention of the Swedish Government’s Alcoholic Consumption and Warnings Your Mother Gave You but You Ignored Department that Swedes drink too much. They actually have a government agency that tracks the amount of alcohol each Swede consumes. You drink too much and you get a visit and a stern letter from an agency busybody. The Swedish solution? Denmark is only a short drive or ferry away and no such busybodyness exists in Denmark so they take the quick jaunt and drink it up, crashing cars and breaking curios and such. It should be noted the Danes have disliked the Swedes outside of their public drunkeness. Apparently, I was told, the Swedish King said something unpolite to the Danish Queen in 1206 and things haven’t been right between the two neighbors since. What has followed is a bunch of loud Swedes and annoyed Danes; entertainment you can’t get at home at any price.
I have gotten to know some places better than others by either living there for a while or because the host government was foolish enough to give me a multiple-entry visa. The foolishness went both ways as I chose to spend a great deal of time in Russia and its nearby republics, now countries that had the good sense to leave Russia when the same good sense escaped me. Nobody had a gun to my head when I domiciled in Romania for six months either. The two countries share this much: they make you appreciate capitalism and some semblance of Democracy a great deal more. Kissing the passport control floor at LAX is not uncommon for returning travelers to these countries.
The biggest mistake we all made about Russia was in thinking they just wanted to be like us. They didn’t. They wanted to be like the Swedes (except for the strict alcohol consumption codes) because they had bought into the whole “cradle to grave” society. They didn’t want to have to work or give up potatoes and Vodka, they simply wanted to be able to get their cranky government off their back and travel whenever they wanted just to reinforce the world view of Russians.
I once asked the obvious question to a woman about why the Soviet Union fell. We were standing near the entry of the “Hammer Center,” a hotel and restaurant complex that was a shrine to free marketers but off limits to the average Russian. She talked about how frustrating it was to see all the goodies the West had to offer through the window of the Hammer Center but no right to take part in spending $400 for a pair of shoes. So the Russians had a revolution to buy uncomfortable footwear and a $60 steak. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, you could buy a pizza at a place called Pizza Hat. I guess there was a revolution just because some entrepreneur needed to buy a vowel.
Since Romania and Russia were Communists countries, they had a few things in common: an overabundance of moles, poor dental care and astonishingly ugly sofas. I have no inside information on the moles but the high degree of tooth decay and gingivitis comes from a rational fear of the dentist. Since the trademark of all Communist countries is for all workers in the Worker’s Paradise to be employed by the State, there was no need to be a better, more caring dentist than the next. Imagine dental care by the Department of Motor Vehicles and you have imagined a Soviet dentist. The offshoot is that Novocain costs the State money and is therefore superfluous. Without the Novocain, surprisingly few people filled out those silly tooth-shaped postcards to remind them of their next dental appointment, which was good for the State since the lack of repeat business further lowered costs so there was more money to keep Lenin looking green in his tomb.
I also can’t explain the prevalence of the astonishingly ugly sofa. It seems the ideal sofa in former Communist countries has a tree-full of carving and gilt and is upholstered in plush, petit point, plaid, and paisley as if Donald Trump, Madame Pompadour, Queen Victoria and the Doors had gotten together to start a decorating firm. You see the astonishingly ugly sofa everywhere. In the homes of the well-off and otherwise; hotel lobbies; office reception areas; furniture-store windows (of course) and, most spectacularly, on local sitcoms. One actor sits down and makes an exasperated face while the other actors gesticulate comically. I couldn’t understand what was going on in these sitcoms, but I could tell it was a lot more charming than Oprah.
Bad driving on bad and very wide roads also seems to be a consistent theme in formerly Communist countries. Whether in Moscow, Warsaw, Bucharest or Kiev, crossing a major intersection alive takes bravery and guile, or blindness, since the only way I was willing to act as a pedestrian is with my eyes closed. The traffic is too scary otherwise. I was taught in high school that it was good to be an aggressive driver. I think drivers in Eastern Europe and Russia are taught to drive angry. If you try to cross a major street in Russia or Romania, you will note quite quickly that drivers, without expression, speed up and aim for you. A simple street crossing reminds one of that old video game “Frogger.” Except you get across the street more often on the computer.
Not all is bad in these countries. Moscow has become as fashionable and trendy as any city in the world. Housing prices have skyrocketed and the rich have been buying up apartment buildings and huge houses with astonishingly ugly sofas like hotcakes. And they buy it all in cash; which has the upside of cutting down on receiving 30 letters each day explaining how they’re paying too much for their mortgage. I once asked someone, “who can afford these places,” and I was told, “Officials and prostitutes.” “Aren’t they one and the same?” I asked.
I was in Kiev during the start of the so-called Orange Revolution. The Revolution’s spontaneity couldn’t have been better planned. Before the results of the elections were announced, there suddenly appeared 200,000 people with orange scarves and the secret code to show up at the right time in Independence Square. Also, someone just happened to have a couple of Jumbo Trons in their trunk so angry speechmakers could make angry speeches. The best part is that the rubes in the world press bought the spontaneity angle so the newly anointed Ukrainian government decided it needed to keep the joke going and tried to run a government. Governments are difficult enough to run but when your whole plan revolves around calling the former government all sorts of bad names, trouble is on the horizon. The new government was able to get the “Own a Black Mercedes and BMWs on $400-Per-Month-Scheme” in place before the country tanked, so they had that going for them.
Albania may be the sorriest of a lot of sorry former Communist states. If wealth was measured in dust, Albania would be the Beverly Hills of the world. I don’t know where the dust comes from or where it settles, but it is constantly coming from somewhere and apparently never settling. Albania is the only country that decided to exit a Communist economy and dip its toe in capitalism by creating a massive, country-wide pyramid scheme. When it predictably collapsed, the entire country went on a looting spree, taking everything that wasn’t nailed down including the astonishingly ugly sofas (fortunately for future generations of Albanians, dust can’t be nailed down). After a while, the looting came to an end. When asked why the people stopped, one Albanian man simply said, “We were done.”
On the other side of the world, I was able to spend 10 delightful weeks in New Zealand. New Zealand is the Bigfoot of countries; hiding behind rocks and trees in fear of being discovered. Kiwis (as people from New Zealand are known) live in this tormented contradiction of enjoying their isolation but, at the same time, wondering if the world knows they’re still alive. When I mentioned I enjoyed the movie The Whale Rider, the Kiwis couldn’t believe I had seen it. They still can’t believe they are interesting enough for a busy American to take the time to notice.
Kellen and I were working on the elections in New Zealand. Besides the obvious side show that is politics, we were amused by the dire predictions of a country headed to hell by the opposition government (our client and still in opposition). If Americans only had to worry about the minor annoyances of the kind of government that angers the Kiwis, all the fun would go out of politics. Since there are only 2.8 million voters in New Zealand, the government is run like one large condo association with the same amount of general goofiness consistent with a Landscape Committee. But it still runs better than Congress
All the same, I found the mix of unrivaled natural beauty, every season available within a one-hour plane ride, friendly natives, and the availability of all the creature comforts of home in New Zealand to be the perfect blend to the best place to live or visit. Scotland comes in a close second with summer in Sweden not far behind. All of which is to say I spent a lot of time writing about places not to go and far too little time discussing nice places to visit.
However, I have come to believe that “nice” isn’t always the best reason to travel somewhere. I prefer interesting places with long histories where the locals feel the need to do something extra to keep you from going to Euro Disney. I also tend to like smaller cities. With that in mind, my favorite places are:
Krakow, Poland
Bruges, Belgium
San Sebastian, Spain
Wellington, New Zealand
Sibiu, Romania
Koblenz, Germany
Galway, Ireland
Avallon/Vezaly, France
But there is no place like home.
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