Travels With Odney

Grosse Pointe Bill

2008-12-02T00:00:00.011-05:00

I guess I have trouble taking the whole reunion thing seriously. A few years ago, when Council Rock High School began collecting alumni information on the class of '88, I listed my career as "CIA Dentist." It's still in the book. While that might have pleased me -- and it did -- it also virtually guaranteed that I remained hidden from anyone who might have been trying to locate me using that method.

It wasn't a dismissal of those people, mind you, so much as it was a rejection of the whole idea of memorializing a time period in my life that I'd pretty much like to flush down the memory hole forever.

Let me explain. Since I was 17, I've kept a fairly regular diary. I am fascinated by dreams, and tend to record them when I have time. After I graduated from college in 1995, I recorded more than 300 versions of the same dream. The details are slightly different each time, but the plot is basically the same: I am my current age, and though I've graduated from college, some academic police force has discovered that I didn't properly graduate from high school, and I have to go back (at my current age) to complete either German or trigonometry.

I'll leave thorough analysis of that dream cycle to the team of psychoanalysts who treat me on a regular basis, but suffice to say it's a dream about anxiety, and anxiety and high school were the yin and yang of my teenage existence.

Not all of it was bad, of course. I didn't mean to lose touch with everyone. But prior to the advent of facebook, that's exactly what happened. As of 2007, I had fallen out of contact with everyone I knew in high school, baby and bathwater.

That brings me to the present. The Friday after Thanksgiving was the eminently miss-able 20-year reunion of the 1988 senior class of Council Rock High School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Apparently, some kind of fight broke out, but this is what happens when your graduating class (908 people) is larger than some towns in Iowa. Saturday was the much more important reunion of the Bill Behun Comedy Team, a group of my friends that formed senior year to perform comedy and skewer the pretensions of one Bill Behun. Even by the usual standards of teenage pretension, Bill Behun was a colossus: He wore suit jackets and jeans, sported John Lennon-glasses and had his hair in a ponytail, and despite a clear lack of evidence that he was born in England, would regularly utter British-isms like "'lo love" and pronounce "schedule" like shed-yool. Nonetheless, Bill was something exotic in our suburban world, and he had a knack for wooing the kind of brainy girls I swooned over in high school. I can't speak for the rest of the group, but even while throwing darts at him, there was a part of me that envied his ability to carve out such a rich identity (even if some of it was made up) in that unforgiving environment. It was probably more than a bit cruel, but when we performed, we adopted his uniform, and while it was not our chief reason for being, Bill provided an umbrella for our self-referential and absurdist brand of comedy.

I admit to feeling some harbingers of anxiety Saturday night as I approached the home of Brian Klaus, the leader of our group and the one responsible for getting the reunion together. I feared there was one of three ways this was gonna go down:

a)An orgy of lame nostalgia-tripping "Remember when we went to Olga's Kitchen, and everyone ordered stuff that began with Olga's name, like Olga Burger, Olga fries, Olga Cola and, for dessert, Olgurt? Yeah, that was pretty funny, wasn't it? Good times."

b)Awkward attempts to bridge lost time "So, you're an actor, huh? That must be fun. Here are pictures of my cherubic children."

c)A dysfunctional meltdown. The group included three former couples who used to date, a bunch of strong-willed guys who experienced creative tension even over the question of which fast-food joint to eat at, and Bill, always something of a wild card.

Like everyone else, I am happy to report that none of that happened. I had a big goofy grin on my face the entire time, and it came from actively enjoying these people in the present, not from rehashing the past. Although that was fun, too. We watched the film we made during the cusp between high school and college, titled
"The Last Temptation of Bill." The movie is really quite horrible, but fun to revisit in a "Rocky Horror" kind of way (I am looking at the camera in every single fracking scene I'm in! I have to believe my acting has improved since then.) In addition to five of the six members of the BBC (sans the elusive Gary Schwartz, Orlando's "champion of the underdog."), real Bill and movie Bill (the wonderful Jeff Cothren), there were several people who played roles in the movie and a couple of newcomers.

I had forgotten how funny we all were -- funny in very different ways -- and how enjoyable it was to riff of each other. It was interesting to see all the ways we've changed and haven't. But mostly it was just fun. Despite it all, I'm still a pretty shy guy. At most parties, I'm eyeballing the door after the first hour. This one, I didn't want to end.

Hopefully, we can make this happen again before we're 58, although the 40th reunion of the BBC in the year 2028 sounds kind of funny too.

This post is brought to you in amazing triple-blog format. See Brian's posts here and here, and Jeff's here.

Brother, Can you Spare Some Chicken Noodle?

2008-09-30T17:14:00.003-04:00

According to news reports, the only stock to rise after Wall Street collapsed yesterday was Campbell's Soup.

Is this a harbinger of things to come?

White Candidate, Dead Pubs

2008-09-23T16:44:00.006-04:00

My little corner of the publishing empire where I work rests uncomfortably close to a non-descript reference shelf marked "Dead Pubs." This is the place where we keep bound copies of newsletters and books that, for one reason or another, didn't make it. It is, to coin a phrase, the place where publications go to die.

I was staring out at the shelf from my cubicle the other day, noting the array of blue binders, all tagged with four letter acronyms the company uses to name its many compliance publications. One row in particular stood out. Side by side were binders labeled "SPEC," "TMAN," "TRAN" "TRAD," and my favorite, "TOOL".

Then it hit me: Don't these all sound like names of Palin children?

I did a little research and discovered that most of you, as usual, are way ahead of me. Scroll down a little bit to find the "Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator."

For the record, I am Stinger Assassin Palin. I can live with that.

Epilogue: The Rainbow and the Bear

2008-09-14T19:01:00.012-04:00

"Big bear! Big, big bear! Big bear..chase..me!"
--John Candy, "The Great Outdoors"

I'll get to the part about the bear soon enough.

I don't remember much about Mammoth Hot Springs. The area is similar to Geyser Country, with smoking pools of water in prismatic hues of orange and blue. Like the Plitvice Lakes, which I recently visited in Croatia, the area is formed by sculpted mounds of travertine, a form of limestone that is dissolved and carried to the surface by boiling water and forms layer after layer of steaming rock.

We saw a regal-looking bull elk with an ornate crown, it's royalty only somewhat diminished by the tag dangling from one of its antlers. And I went swimming -- again. This time, the Boiling River lived up to its name. The swimming area is a series of spa-like holes separated by rock walls, where the scalding Boiling River hot spring blends into the cold rushing water of the Gardiner River. You have to skeeter through a jarring mix of very hot and very cold water before you get to a comfortable spot -- it's kind of like taking a shower in England -- but it's worth the effort.

From there, we found our way to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I made the vertigo-inducing trek down the 328 steps of Uncle Tom's Trail -- we had a longer hike planned for the afternoon, so my Dad sat this one out -- where I was greeted by the 308-ft tall Lower Falls. And an amazing rainbow.

After the final hike, four miles past the Lower Falls along the South Rim Trail, we got back in the car and criss-crossed a wide swath of the park we had visited previously: the lush Hayden Valley, the tempestuous Lake Yellowstone, past West Thumb Basin and then south to Grand Teton.

All of which brings me to the bear.

As we approached the Signal Mountain Summit Road, where we spotted two black bears on the first day of our trip, we decided to make one last run in the hope that lightning would strike twice.

At the very top of the road, we spied a small group of people huddled above the wild grasslands that led to the valley below. I couldn't make out what they were looking at, so I asked. A woman pointed to a berry bush not more than 20 feet down. I hadn't looked there because it was so close. And there, much to my excitement, was another black bear, this one looking just slightly older than a cub. It was much closer than the other ones we'd seen, but like the others remained oblivious to our presence.

While looking through the viewfinder of my camera, I noticed that he was making his way closer. He remained unthreatening, blithely munching on leaves and berries. The next photo was taken when he was about 10 feet away. The caption might be, "What big eyes you have!"

Threatening or no, the bear was now a little too close, even for the most enthusiastic photographers among us. Some moved back. Others returned to their cars. I joined 2 or 3 shutterflies who moved to higher ground. I was fiddling with my camera, when I was startled by the sound of rustling in the leaves below the fencepost at the top of the lookout. That's when the bear poked its head through the lowest rung of the fence.

I must have been in slight shock because my first instinct was to take a picture. It's not a very good picture, mind you. But it was taken without amplification or zoom when the beast was not five feet from me. I could have scratched it behind the ears if I wanted to. But luckily, my senses returned and I took five slow, steady paces back.

I walked down from the lookout back to the spot where I first saw the crowd. Those who remained were mostly up near the lookout, trying to capture the excitement from a safe distance. I was more or less by myself -- although people were close by -- when I heard the now familiar, foreboding sound of rustling in the brush. This time, I walked back right away as a second, somewhat larger bear made its way into the middle of the road. It seemed befuddled -- perhaps it was looking for the other bear, a relative? -- before it was shooed off by a Teton fireman who had joined the throng to help ensure safety.

I know it is easy to overdramatize such encounters, as the Onion does hilariously in this parody, but then again, how often does one come within five feet of a bear? I could have been killed! It was a wonderfully adventurous way to cap off a fantastic trip that was full of adventure. As is always true with trips of this kind, exposure only breeds a desire for more -- a wish to delve more deeply, to stay longer and more fully absorb the wonder and purity of this place.

As such, I am left with wonderful memories until I return. Before I finish my travelogue, I want to take a sec and thank those of you who offered invaluable advice and tips before I left, including Donna, Matt, Jim and Laura. Of course, I also want to thank my Dad, who had the foresight and generosity to make it all happen and was a wonderful travel companion for this unforgettable week in the wild. What can I say? Thanks, Dad. I love you.

If you'd like to see more of my photos, go to this link (Unfortunately, the video files are too large to download anywhere but on Youtube). If you see a shot you like that I didn't post, let me know.

Once Upon a Time in the West

2008-09-06T22:22:00.033-04:00

"I've never slept out underneath the stars,
The closest that I came to that was one time my car
Broke down for an hour in the suburbs at night
I lied about being the outdoor type."
--The Lemonheads, "The Outdoor Type"

In summer, the town of Cody, Wyoming -- about an hour east of Yellowstone -- smells vaguely of sulfur from extinct geysers and frequently fills with dust and orange haze emanating from wildfires in the nearby Shoshone National Forest. It's an appropriate setting for a place named for William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody, the cowboy and showman who did more than anyone to popularize the myth of the Wild West. Cody is a haven for bikers and a museum to outlaws of an earlier era, a place where history and kitsch comfortably co-exist.

Before arriving at our hotel, we passed Bork's Guns (Sale!) and a giant statue of a cowboy, surrounded by tumbleweeds, that towered over an ice cream stand. I love stuff like that. It reminded of when I lived in Bangor, Maine, and for three years passed a colossus of Paul Bunyon on my way to work.

We stayed at the historic Irma Hotel, opened in 1902 and named for Buffalo Bill's daughter. The room boasted ancient patriotic wallpaper, classic corner sinks and antique wardrobes and light fittings. There was taxidermy everywhere in the hotel, and I mean everywhere: all manner of mounted heads of deer, elk, bison, and big-horn sheep. It's just the cool thing over there, I guess. Its a facet of decor all over Cody, from hotels and restaurants to museums and even the local visitor center.

I have to admit, it creeped me out a bit. I have nothing against those who hunt for food and obviously, I had little problem eating the results (delicious!), but after passing the 20th mounted animal head, I began to think of that scene in "Planet of the Apes" where Charlton Heston discovers the stuffed human display outside the office of Dr. Zaius.

Cody is primarily a tourist town, but still retains the feel of a rural Western settlement. Like most of the state, it is very conservative. You can usually get a sense of the political mainstream in any given town by perusing the opinion pages of the local paper; this one had a regular column by Ann Coulter -- enough said. Just outside the hotel, next to a sign advertising "Col. Cody's Wild West Emporium," two young born-again Christians stood on a box, bibles in hand, preaching the power of redemption to bikers and other assorted visitors.

The larger-than-life figure of Buffalo Bill is perhaps an ideal prism through which to view the contradictions of the American West. A Union soldier in the Civil War, the youngest rider on the Pony Express and a scout during the Indian Wars, Cody is known primarily for his skill in hunting buffalo (he once bragged that he killed over 4,200 bison in 18 months) and his world famous Wild West Show that traveled the world with the likes of Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley. At the turn of the century in 1900, Cody may have been the most recognizable celebrity on the planet. But toward the end of his life, the bison were nearly extinct and the once-fearsome Indian tribes were almost completely confined to reservations. Before he died nearly penniless due to bad investments, he urged the government to respect all Native American treaties and put an and to the wanton slaughter of buffalo and other game.

These various strands of history come together in Cody's intriguing Buffalo Bill Historical Center. The center is actually five museums in one: the memorabilia-filled Buffalo Bill Museum, the Plains Indian Museum, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, the Draper Museum of Natural History and the Cody Firearms Museum. My Dad and I spent the bulk of our time in the atmospheric and affecting Indian Museum. Many of the ceremonial garments on display, dating back more than a hundred years, are in stunning condition. The art was placed in historical context, something the Cody museum does much more effectively than the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian here in DC.

More poignant were the displays bearing witness to our government's broken treaties, the concerted efforts to erase Native American culture and the wanton slaughter of Indians in shameful episodes such as the massacre at Wounded Knee.

There was a quote on the wall from Sitting Bull. I wish I had written it down, but the gist is that the Indians had been forced to give concession after concession on territory, laws and customs, but that "the White Man would not be satisfied 'til every last one of us has perished from the earth."

The Holocaust of World War II was still fresh in my mind, having several months ago visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Though it had occurred to me before, the Cody museum really drove home how little we as a nation have come to terms with this period. We fought a war over slavery, revisited in the civil rights marches of the 1960s. But we are largely silent about the treatment of the Indian. In school, we talked much more of the plight of the Jews in Europe than the condition of Native Americans here at home.

Where once they were plentiful in this part of the world, I can't recall seeing a single one during my visit. We can split hairs over whether the actions of our government constituted genocide. But surely we can do a better job in our schools of portraying, without propaganda or whitewash,the details of this ugly chapter in our history.

The next day, we visited a complimentary, but entirely different, take on this era called the Historic Trail Town. It's a bit random, but somehow they've taken log cabins, wagons, firearms and other relics and re-assembled them as a one-stop tribute to frontier life. While it's a hodgepodge, the place is very tactile. That's the way I like to see history -- buildings you can walk into and relics displayed the way they were rather than locked beyond glass cases. The 25 buildings, dating from 1879 to 1901, include a schoolhouse, trapper's cabin, general store and saloon. The latter, by the way, is the Rivers Saloon, once frequented by the likes of the Sundance Kid; there are bullet holes in the wooden door from the many gun battles started there. We also saw the hideout of the Hole in the Wall Gang, which included Sundance and other outlaws, as well as the cabin of Curley, the Crow Indian scout of General Custer who survived the battle of Little Big Horn. The western end of the Trail Town includes a number of graves. Among them is the grave of the notorious John Jeremiah "Liver Eating" Johnston, who is believed to have earned his nickname by killing, scalping and eating the livers of the Indians who killed his wife.

From there, we began our way back to Yellowstone. This time, however, we made a detour to the northeast in order to enter the park via the breathtaking Beartooth Highway. I'd read that Charles Kuralt called it "the most beautiful drive in America," and it didn't disappoint.

I've taken roads that go under the mountains or alongside them. But this was my first time on a road that trailed through a mountain's highest elevation. The highway reaches heights of 10,947 feet and is the highest road in the Northern Rockies. The Beartooth traces a series of steep zigzags and switchbacks, rising from 5,200 to 8,000 feet in a matter of 12 miles, all in the most daring landscapes, with glaciers and patches of snow along the way.

Our destination for the day was a hike into the wildlife-rich Lamar Valley, which is rightfully dubbed "America's Serengeti." At this time, I should point out that while I like to hike, I am by no means an expert. I have never taken an overnight hike, for example, nor have I been anyplace so wild that it required a bushwhack. This hike was labeled "moderate" -- good for our speed -- and once again, it was a gorgeous day, sunny with a cool breeze.

Now, I know that markers consisting of a pile of stones are important in hiking. They even have a name, which I don't remember. In addition to not knowing the name, more importantly, I don't know what they signify. Thus, when my father and I reached a fork in the road, and I saw the stone pile on the path leading to our left, I assumed that meant the left path was the way to go.

I was wrong.

About an hour later, after coming to a dead end, we were back to the fork. (Note to self: Next time you see that pile of stones on a hike, don't go that way.) Now confident that we were heading in the right direction, we soon came upon a sight that gave us pause. In the tall grass lay an animal skeleton. Picked clean to the bone and gleaming in hot sun, it was probably the remains of a young calf. Did I mention that there was not a single other hiker in sight?

It is interesting how quickly we become instant experts when we travel, fooled by a few tidbits gleaned from guides and tour books into thinking we really know what we're doing. Thus, my father and I became Cliff Clavins of the veldt. When we passed a lone buffalo grazing high on a bluff, I said to my father, "Must be a male." We were certain that the bird circling above us was an osprey, even though we'd both seen our first just days before. And if a bear came upon us, we were prepared: Talk loud, don't run, don't make eye contact and don't crouch down under any circumstances. Would it work? Who knew, but we were ready.

Or so we thought. Thankfully, the up-close-and-personal encounter that ensued was not with a bear, but a buffalo. As the trail led upwards, a creek gurgling below us, we quickly realized that the bison we spotted on the bluff earlier was stalking us from afar. The creek to our right, we looked up to our left to find our friend staring down at us.

"Must be a male," my Dad said.

The buffalo walked down slowly, and we moved forward. When he reached our path at the bottom of the hill, the buffalo faced a critical moment of decision -- critical for us, that is. He looked at us, looked away, looked at us again , looked away again...and finally wandered off in the other direction toward a grazing herd.

We moved on. The hill leveled off to reveal a vast, grassy plain. We came within 15 feet of a beautiful pronghorn antelope that was, like most of the animals we encountered, grazing alone ("Male?" we both wondered).

About 2 miles in from the start of our walking path, we spotted a foreboding sight in the distance. As we got closer, it came into focus: a huge lone buffalo -- yes, male -- resting regally right in the center of the hiking trail. It was like he was guarding the pass. And he showed no signs whatsoever of wanting to move.

We entertained the idea of heading back, but there were also bison behind us, and there was no guarantee that we wouldn't get the same treatment from them. We decided to stand still and wait it out. The brief clash of wills between Brownstein and bison is captured in the video below. Initially, we thought we were in Very Big Trouble. The buffalo got up and made his way right for us. As he got closer, and we stayed still, the animal, for whatever reason, balked. It headed up the hill and off the path, leaving us to continue onward.

All told, we made it about 4 miles into a 9 mile trail before heading back. On our return, we finally ran into fellow travelers, a group of four middle-aged Germans.

"Have you seen any beers?" one of them asked. From the accent, it wasn't clear if he was talking about wildlife or the nearest Hoffbrauhaus.

Back on the main road, we saw a huge herd of bison bathing in the river. As I snapped some photos, I overhead people talking about another grizzly siting. It was the same story as before: A grizzly, a bison kill, the bear resting on top of the carcass. Actually, the ranger back in Hayden had mentioned something about this sighting several days before. It was supposed to be much closer to the road than the one we saw previously.

So we drove 12 miles or so, where we were slowed down by a caravan of parked vehicles and looky-loos at the side of the road. And there it was, a huge grizzly, this time in plain view. But I barely got a good look before a group of young onlookers -- read "morons" -- decided to move up a hill closer to the bear to get a better view. Mind you, the rangers were at this point so concerned about the proximity of the bear to the crowd that they were carrying rifles.

"Get back!" the ranger yelled. "Get down from there!"

Within moments, the bear dramatically rose up from its quarry and began moving at a quick clip closer to the crowd.

This was too much for the rangers, who sounded the alarm. "Everyone, back in your vehicles! Immediately. Now. Get back in your vehicles and head out!"

It took a while for the crowd to disperse. It wasn't until well after we'd made our way west to Mammoth Hot Springs that I realized that, in all the excitement, I had not gotten a single clear photo of the bear. But there is one, which serves only to prove I was there. Blown up to about 15 times its normal size, you can definitely make out the grizzly.

There are times, of course, when it's better to use your imagination.

More to come.

Geyser Country: Where the Buffalo Roam, and Sometimes Fall In

2008-09-03T01:32:00.035-04:00

"The Park is just a howling wilderness of three thousand square miles, full of all imaginable freaks of a fiery nature."
--Rudyard Kipling

"The hidden pool is nice and cool."
--Gollum

We fell asleep in the tiny burg of West Yellowstone to the sound of wolves plaintively crooning in a nearby sanctuary. The next day, a little pressed for time, we raced to our morning "ranger walk" near Castle Geyser, in the vicinity of Old Faithful.

You really shouldn't rush Yellowstone. If the wondrous sites of wildlife ambling on the sides of the roads aren't enough to drive that point home, the park offers subtle reminders, such as the collection of signs that trail, Burma-Shave like, from the southern entrance of the park:

You saw wildlife
From afar
Until they crashed
Into Your Car
Slow down!

We arrived, a little breathless, just as our ranger was describing how geysers worked. I wish I could tell you I retained the information, but all I seem to remember is that it has something to do with a giant underground volcano. One day, sometime before the Earth is swallowed up by the Sun or 1,000 years from now -- whichever comes first -- the volcano is going to erupt and all hell's gonna break lose. There was also something about plate tectonics and a bit about seismic activity.

For those of you looking for something authoritative, let me refer, once again, to the Rough Guide: The magma created by the volcano boils water deep underground. Sometimes, the water flows unrestricted, cooling off before it reaches the surface. This creates hot springs. But geysers are formed when there's a constriction in the underground plumbing that prevents the water from reaching the surface to cool. The geysers erupt when the groundwater, held down by fissures and narrow channels, forms bubbles that literally blow the water through vents at the top.

And....they're really cool...if you can call anything that reaches temperatures of several hundred degrees, causing instant destruction, cool.

This was the first of three free ranger walks we engaged in, and it was a wonderful introduction to the landscape. Our guide, who reminded me very much of Rick Moranis from "Ghostbusters," got wonderfully geeked out on the subject, peppering his talk with cautionary tales of hapless humans and other creatures that were unlucky enough to fall in these fiery furnaces. Those that plunged to their deaths included bison, a dog, even a Belgian. The rangers gave these geysers playful nicknames like "Bison Stew" and "Hot Dog." (Tastefully, they refrained from naming the pit where the Belgian met his untimely end "Belgian Waffle.")

This brings me to an important point about Yellowstone. There is a fine line, and perhaps a slippery slope, between getting blissed out about the park and immersing yourself in its many mysteries, and being a Complete and Utter Boob. For example, when my girlfriend visited Yellowstone, a tourist dipped his hand in one of the geysers to test the temperature of the water. If you follow the links on YouTube from my bear video, you will find an unintentionally hilarious clip of a family that taunted a black bear until it charged their car and began pawing at the window and chewing on the side mirror; of course, they laughed hysterically the whole time as if they were on some neat ride at Busch Gardens. I tried to exercise good judgment -- I don't think I behaved like a Total Jackass -- but it wasn't until after I shot about 200 photos of a bison herd near the Tetons that I closely read the caveats about how they sometimes charge without warning, 2,000 pounds of horned beast hurtling at you at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour.

This will all become important later in the story.

Back to the ranger walk, where our guide was telling us, "If you're not careful, you might be unlucky enough to have a geyser named after you."

Once again, we were blessed with uncanny luck. As we arrived for the walk, the colossal Grand Geyser began spouting in a series of powerful bursts of water and steam for about 20 minutes. Grand only spouts twice a day, and people are known to wait hours for it to work its magic. Nearby Castle Geyser also went off, blowing silica from a large fortress-like cauldron into a pool streaked in orange, black and yellow flames. In a three-hour period, the predictable but less interesting Old Faithful did her stuff. And just as we were about to leave, I overheard a ranger in the Visitor's Center mention in hushed tones that Beehive, an unpredictable geyser and the one our guide called his favorite, was about to go off in a matter of minutes.

We raced there just in time: Beehive doesn't look like much when inactive, but due to its tight cone and powerful plumbing, it is able to force a narrow spray as high as 200 feet with a noise that sounds like the roaring of a jet engine.

From Old Faithful country, we took a slight detour. Devoted readers of this blog (all five of you) will know that I'm a fan of the water, the more exotic the better. There are two places in and around the park where you can swim in rivers warmed by nearby thermal springs -- both named, somewhat misleadingly, Boiling River.

With good reason, there are rare opportunities for full immersion in this wild park, and I longed to, literally, dive right in.

The first Boiling River is just up from a huge waterfall beneath Firehole Canyon Drive. When I say the name is misleading, that is because the water is initially quite freezing. It takes a few steps before you feel the warmth of the current -- and even that is more like your average swimming pool than a jacuzzi. The current is also not what it appears to be. It looks quite tame until the moment you're in it, and then you're holding on to jagged rocks for dear life for fear of being carried down the river...well, faster than you'd like to be. I was very grateful for my new sandals, and was quickly able to find a quiet place just out of the river's pull. My dad decided to sit this one out. In fact, there were very few people there at all -- a facet of the trip that surprised me pretty consistently.

I took some time to soak it all up, not just the river, but the beauty of this place, the clear water, the sound of the nearby falls, and the mountains rising in the distance amid the faint smell of pine. There are scant moments in life when we sense the compression of time, of life shrinking to a moment and being aware of only that moment, like children at play. It felt, to borrow a line from one of my favorite movies, like I had dipped my head in magic waters.

But there was more to see, from the gurgling mud of Fountain Paint Pots to streams that hissed and flowed orange like some tributary in the depths of hell. I loved the cobalt blue of Sapphire Pool. It had the look of some forbidden destination out of Greek mythology, with its disarmingly benign color masking its deadly power. I wondered if anyone had fallen in, mesmerized by its beauty.

We spent the night at the nondescript Grant Village. The next morning, we headed for the fertile Hayden Valley and another early morning ranger walk. As the sun was rising, we stopped to see (and listen to) a grunting pack of bison, the first of many encounters with the plentiful herds in this area.

Some of the best moments of the day occurred on the drive over. There was a mischievous caravan of bison, evenly spaced on the road from Fishing Bridge to Hayden like they were in some kind of military formation. And there was the breathtaking sight of a solitary male bison bathing in a river beneath shady trees and leaping onto land.

Our walk taught us some interesting facts about the mating practices of the elk and bison in the area. Bison, for example, will often fight over a single female. The male travels alone, we were told; a bison traveling alone will almost never be female. The females stay with the herd, caring for the young and the less mature males. The male elk, by contrast, enjoy something like a harem, traveling and mating with many females at once. I suppose it's low-hanging fruit to note, at this point, that while I retained next to nothing on the mechanics of geysers, I absorbed plentiful detail on the mating habits of Yellowstone's wildlife. Talk amongst yourselves.

This was fascinating, but very quickly preempted by a newsflash: We were informed that less than a mile to the south, a grizzly was laying on top of a fresh bison kill just across the river from the main road. The ranger told us we were free to leave the walk and come back later if we wished. A good many of us, including my father and I, took him up on it.

From a distance of about 300 yards, it was difficult to see. My trusty camera has many virtues, but a powerful telephoto capability is not one of them. My dad brought binoculars, and the bear was clearly visible, but difficult to see because of a)the distance b)the tall grass and c)the fact that it was not moving.

When we rejoined the walk, the ranger told us this was common behavior for the grizzly. After killing the bison, it will lay on top of it to protect the kill from scavengers like wolves and competing predators like other grizzlies. With 2,000 pounds of meat underneath it, a grizzly could feed contentedly for several days, leaving only for the occasional pit stop and to fend off the competition.

As we made our way to lunch at the lodge on Lake Yellowstone, we were halted for about 20 minutes by a bison that evidently confused itself with a pace car, or was merely toying with us. For many miles, it stayed in the right lane without veering, trotting nobly and indifferently ahead of the traffic.

At one stop, I saw what would have been a fantastic photo opportunity which I, with great restraint, decided not to pursue because it probably would have ended with me getting gored by a bison. I spotted about a dozen buffalo laying in and around a circular hot spring. There was something very humorous about this lazy picture. The bison looked like they could have been in Boca Raton talking about Mahjong.

But there was a whole herd separating me from that vision, and I had to let it go.

More to come.

Yonder to Yellowstone (and Grand Teton)

2008-08-30T15:45:00.000-04:00

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs."
--Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It."

"Two little feet to get me 'cross the mountain
two little feet to carry me away into the wood
two little feet, big mountain, and a
cloud comin' down cloud comin' down cloud comin' down"
--Greg Brown, "Two Little Feet"

Sorry about the long hiatus from blogging. With Long Day's Journey into Night over, I no longer have four hours of drunken crying to look forward to after work. In fact, as some of you know, I am about to embark on a different kind of hiatus -- from theater. That is perhaps the subject of another post. But with life about to get back to "normal," I'll theoretically have more time to blog, and hope to shoot off many more in the coming weeks and months.

I can't think of a better way to start than with a grand journey, the reason I started this blog in the first place. A week after the show ended, I flew to Jackson, Wyoming with my dad for our long-awaited jaunt through Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.

The airport at Grand Teton is the only one in the U.S. that stands in the middle of a national park. Thus, immediately upon touchdown, we were confronted by the primordial beauty of these majestic slopes rising high above us. The name of the park, incidentally, means "Big Tits," which I presume is what you get when you allow lonely French fur trappers to go around naming stuff.

For the time of year we went, mid-August, the parks were largely free of crowds. A large percentage of people we ran into were German, Italian or French tourists taking advantage of the weak dollar. In any case, the roads were relatively empty. As much as possible, my dad and I were determined to trek through the many wonderful hiking trails that veered off into the wilderness. Tragically (but good for us), these were even emptier. At times, there was nothing on the trails except for us, a few bison and the occasional osprey -- a fact that added to the adventure. My dad is on the cusp of 70, and I am further from my pre-fight weight and fitness* than I'd like to be (I'm workin on it!), but we did O.K.

*(Back when I fought George Foreman. Remember that? Neither do I.)

After a ferry-trip across Jenny Lake, we began our first trek, a moderate 2 mile hike to Inspiration Point and then to the spectacular, cascading Hidden Falls. It was shortly after we left the falls and I cooled my feet in the crystal clear water that my dad noted the general absence of wildlife. As if on cue -- I mean, less than a minute later -- a family of deer walked right in front of us, a doe and two fawns. It wasn't the first time that I'd be amazed at the fearlessness of the animals we encountered. You get reminded many times that this is their park, and the rules are different here. Of course, I've seen deer before, but never close enough to pet one (Don't worry. I didn't).

That was a precursor to what we saw later on the Signal Mountain Summit Road. As it approached sunset, we took this painfully slow -- speed limit 20 mph -- detour off the Teton Park Road. It was worth it. There are two stops, one facing west toward the mountains at their most majestic and another facing northeast toward Lake Emma Matilda.

About a minute after I took over driving for the day, a large black bear crossed the road ahead of us and disappeared quickly into the woods. On the way down, my dad abruptly told me to stop and pull back a few paces. There, within 100 feet of us, was another black bear. This one was much bigger, probably an adult male due to the collar around its neck that had been placed their by park personnel. Though we stayed for a good twenty minutes, the creature remained blissfully unaware(or was indifferent to) our presence as it tore into various shrubs and berries. You can see it all below, with "In A Big Country" appropriately playing on the radio and my dad doing his best Dr. Dolittle.

That night we dined at the Mural Room of Jackson Lodge, a more upscale inn that was home to several negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviets during the Cold War. The restaurant is named for it's twin "paintings": an Old West mural on one side and a huge picture window opening onto the Tetons on the other. I am a bit of an adventurous eater, so I decided to try some of the unusual game on the menu. I had elk (later in the trip, I'd have bison and wild boar -- all delicious).

The next day, we departed at the sacrum of dawn from Flagg Ranch, just north of the park, to see the sunrise at West Thumb Basin in central Yellowstone. Although it's not as feisty as the geysers in the Old Faithful area -- there are no regular eruptions -- the collection of alien colors reflecting mirror-like onto the lake made for a breathtaking morning. As the sun creeped over the mountains, bathing the landscape in hues of purple and orange, it was hard to miss the beautiful devastation left by the 1988 fire that wiped out long stretches of old wilderness. While that may sound like an oxymoron, there was an odd ethereal quality to the scene, particularly in this light, that made the trees look white. It made me think of what Lothlorien, the haven of the elves in the Lord of the Rings, might look like.

There is another reason for this seeming paradox. The fire burned 36 percent of the park, some 80,000 acres. At the time, there were dire predictions about the devastation of the park's ecosystem. But as were told many times during the trip, the fire was a natural, and even positive, development for the park, clearing out 200 year-old trees for new growth and opening up new habitats for much of the park's wildlife. The biggest losers were the moose, who lost most of the spruce trees that formed their habitat, trees that will take decades to regrow.

We first learned this from the wonderful guide who rowed us down the Snake River for a lazy 2 hour float trip. I don't know about you, but it's been my experience that river guides are always delightfully nuts. Whether its been whitewater in West Virginia or Maine, the people who lead these trips tend to be rugged adventurers and self-taught naturalists who travel the world in search of natural highs and thrills. They are living truly free lives, largely off the grid. Our guide did river trips in the summer and fall, and snowmobile treks in the winter. In his down time, he climbed peaks and traveled rivers around the world. Just days before our trip down the Snake, he had climbed up Grand Teton, the biggest of the big tits, with no instruments whatsoever. "Like the Indians," he said.

We lucked out with the weather: Every day we were there was sunny, in the 70s and 80s, and usually with a cool breeze. The current felt strong, as did the wind, as our guide pointed out several osprey and bald eagles perched along the way.

After the trip, we made our way north and east to the Antelope Flats Road, and then another dirt road that lead to Mormon Row. There lay a series of old wooden structures in various states of disrepair, which the Rough Guide calls without exaggeration "the most photographed barns on Earth." It was our first encounter -- one of many -- with a huge heard of bison in the park. There were easily a hundred there, grazing in the golden fields near the Moulton Barns, with the jagged Tetons rising in the distance.

It was hard not to fall in love with this iconic vision of the Old West, and I was not immune to its charms. The bison, who never fail to communicate in various ways that you are a visitor in their home, seemed bemused by yet another starry-eyed tourist, and obliged me by failing to charge as I snapped hundreds of photos of the herd in various poses.

By night, after a four mile hike into the forests and lily ponds on the Hermitage Point trail, we made our way to Geyser Country. A coyote followed the traffic for many miles.

More to come...

Note: For those of you still getting these on e-mail, you can see pictures and watch videos if you go to the Web site, odneytravels.blogspot.com. For those of you who don't know, if you click on the photos, you can see them at full size.

Long Day's Journey into Shameless Plug

2008-07-15T13:43:00.000-04:00

Hello folks,

Sorry it's been such a long, long time. A good deal of it has been spent tackling this monster of a play, Long Day's Journey into Night, which just opened last weekend.

It's being done by Quotidian Theatre in Bethesda, and directed by Bob Bartlett, whom you may remember from his production of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," where I met Laura.

I think this is a very fulfilling, challenging and committed piece of theater, and I hope you get to see it. If you do, please stop and say hi afterwards.

DCTheatreScene calls it "old-school theater at its best: passionate, honest, intense, complex, and demanding...In less competent hands, Long Day’s Journey would be melodrama, but Quotidian presents us with a show about real people, each of them struggling to save the people they love while keeping their own heads above water."

I play Jamie Tyrone, the cynical, alcoholic son of a faded matinee idol. Favorite line: "Not after I wash my face."

For more information on show times and directions, go the the theatre's web page.

Here's the brief blurb:

Eugene O'Neill's
Long Day's Journey Into Night

O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece recounts the lives of the Tyrone family with a power unmatched on the American stage.

FEATURING: Michael Avolio, Andy Brownstein, Erika Imhoof, Steve LaRocque, and Stephanie Mumford.

DIRECTED BY: Bob Bartlett.

July 11 - August 10, 2008

Please note that evening performances for this production start at 7:30 pm, and matinees at 1:30 pm.

Bride of Facebook

2008-05-13T14:32:00.000-04:00

Via my friend Leta, here's a uniquely British take on Facebook, which I think nails what is so peculiar about the phenomenon. See my own take on the same subject here.

PS: Since my last posting, I have been friended by another former high school girlfriend and the sister of my first love, whose parents hated me and forbade me to see her, who got married and befriended me again later in life, and who died suddenly and tragically at the age of 30. Jessica, wherever you are, I'm sure you'd find this all a little funny.

Cookiepuss Revisited

2008-04-28T19:46:00.000-04:00

If you're like me, and happened to spend a good portion of your childhood in Philadelphia, you're likely to remember a certain voice, a voice that sounded to me like an emphysemic mobster and that comedian Patton Oswalt once likened to "Tom Waits gurgling hot asphalt." The voice would say things that didn't make much sense like, "Tuesday is Sunday at Carvel," always accompanying grainy, home-grown commercials for ice-cream cakes with absurd-sounding names like "Fudgie the Whale" and "Cookiepuss."

Yes, Cookiepuss. There are certain words that are able to conjure an entire sensory encyclopedia from my childhood, like a Northeast suburban version of "Remembrance of Things Past," and Cookiepuss is one them.

Cookiepuss was one of a handful of pre-fab ice-cream cakes that were a staple of birthdays for my friends and I until I was about 8, and we moved away. I had forgotten -- perhaps repressed -- Cookiepuss until several years ago, when Doug Bowles, a castmate in "Assassins", recalled Fudgie the Whale. It wasn't long before my friend Stephen Gregory Smith, who also grew up in PA, and I began reciting the absurd commercials. Tom Carvel was no doubt a kind and gentle old man, but in my mind, I always pictured him as the black sheep of a Mafia family, like Fredo from "The Godfather," with the voice of Krusty the Clown: "Come to Carvel...Tuesday is Sunday....We've got Fudgie the Whale...We've got Cookiepuss..."

Recently, during the production of "Kiss of the Spider Woman," Stephen and I were backstage, and he asked me, "Whatever happened to Cookiepuss?" This evoked the phenomenon once again, and I discovered, not for the first time, that, with or without the voice of Krusty, "Cookiepuss" is just funny. Maybe it's because I have the sense of humor of an 8-year-old, but when castmate Danny Binstock opened a conversation by saying, "I googled Cookiepuss the other day...," I started giggling like a girl. I could be wrong, but I think we may have accidentally stumbled upon one of those rare comedy rules, like the Rule of 3 or the Rule of 7: If you start a sentence with, "I googled Cookiepuss...," it's going to be hilarious -- no matter what follows.

Stephen actually googled Cookiepuss and discovered that the cake, like seemingly everything else in the universe, has it's own Wikipedia entry. Here's what we learned: Cookiepuss is actually a space alien. His original name was "Celestial Person," "C.P." for short, which later came to stand for Cookiepuss. Cookiepuss was born on the planet Birthday. He can fly, but requires a flying saucer for interplanetary travel. This is never explained. I also learned that there were special versions of the cake for St. Patrick's Day ("Cookie O'Puss) and Valentine's Day ("Cupie Puss").

Once again, google is my way of finding out that I'm not alone in my obsessions. Cookiepuss, as it turns out, has been mentioned in episodes of The Family Guy and The Critic. It's also lent its name to a somewhat raunchy, prank-call centered rap by the Beastie Boys, and to a clothing and cosmetic line.

That is what I learned from googling cookiepuss. And I'm still giggling.

Oh, the Humanity: Reflections on Reaching the 100 Friend Mark on Facebook

2008-04-02T14:18:00.000-04:00

"Half the people you see these days are talking on cell phones
Driving off the road and bumping in to doors.
People use to spend quite a bit of time alone
I guess nobody's lonely anymore."
--Greg Brown, "Cept' You and Me, Babe."

"Where have all my friends gone?
They've all disappeared."
--The Jayhawks, "Blue."

I recently passed a curious milestone: I reached the 100th friend marker on Facebook, the internet social networking utility I joined somewhat reluctantly several months ago. The response of said friend, Keith Bridges, artistic director of Charter Theatre, perhaps said it all: "Dude, that's just sad."

There are, in fact, people out there with over 300,400 friends, but why quibble over the math? At what point, exactly, do you become a Facebook whore? But then something happened that got me thinking about this phenomenon, even more than the endless invitations from the site to become a werewolf, a vampire or a zombie, or the quizzes to determine what city, James Bond movie or brand of underwear is most like me -- with answers available only if you have the audacity (or shamelessness) to pass it on to 20 more "friends."

I got a friend request (number 107) from the girl I took to my 9th grade homecoming dance in Milwaukee. Actually, to say I "took" her is a bit misleading, as it suggests that a)I did the asking and b)that I had a vehicle to take her in. Neither was true. I was still at that awkward age where I was much too shy to ask anyone on my own, and even in a recent e-mail, she acknowledged what a good "sport" I was to go along. Adding to the angst was that my sister chaperoned us to the dance and the restaurant beforehand, as I had no car. Photographic evidence of the night (Polaroids show me with a suit my mom dressed me in and an expression similar to those in hostage videos from the Middle East--I had a major stick up my butt) was the source of endless ribbing for years afterward.

The picture that accompanied the request showed her with her baby girl. She located me because we had a "friend" in common, the person who is organizing the 20th reunion at the high school I went to briefly in Milwaukee (which I left after the 9th grade when we moved to Philadelphia, for reasons that had nothing to do with the homecoming dance). I put friend in quotes because my chief memory of this person was a fight we had in the 7th grade during gym. The scene: Outside, playing softball. I was catching, he was pitching. I may have said something like, "Can't you get one over the plate?" He then beamed me in the head with the ball. I rushed toward the mound. Mayhem ensued. Though I think I was operating largely in self-defense, we both got detentions. My "friend" had a reputation for being what we would have then uncharitably called a "spaz," and I will never forget the subtle smile that appeared on the face of my otherwise mild-mannered English teacher when he accosted me in the hall, and asked, "Is it true that you beat up...."

And there was my friend's photo on my computer screen, 20 years older (with tattoos, holding baby boy.)

There are further odd connections in my burgeoning pile of Facebook friends:

*The best friend of a girl I dated in high school in Philadelphia, who unbeknownst to both of us, had been doing props in DC at the same time I was getting back into theater.

*The person who played the loyal lieutenant to my corrupt colonel in an amateur production of "A Few Good Men" in college. He also lives in the area and currently works for the state department.

*Two close high school friends that were part of a comedy troupe I performed in during high school. One is a vice-president of a medicinal rubber company (it's not what you think) and the other is a film director in New York.

*The assignment editor of the newspaper I worked at in Albany, now flak-ing for a local college, whose favorite question was, "Hey Brownstein, where's my page one story?"

I think there needs to be a new word for the weird cognitive dissonance, the sense of compressed time bridged instantaneously, that comes from reconnecting with old memories after getting "friended" on cyberspace. Maybe "webui" or "netstalgia."

Don't get me wrong. For the most part, it's incredibly exciting to have people I was once close to back in my life. In some of these cases, we had previously tried to find each other through more conventional means, and discovered one another purely by accident (or a degree of separation) on Facebook. But it sure makes repression rather difficult. The phrase "The past is not dead; it's not even the past" takes on a whole new meaning when the past sends you e-mail with photo attachments.

A final note: There also needs to be a new word for people on the opposite end of the spectrum. I am not proud of this, but as of this writing, I have 7 Facebook friends whom I've never met, and 15 who I've spoken to only briefly.

What does that say about me?

Perhaps I should put a poll on my blog.

Yes I Can!

2008-02-14T08:24:00.000-05:00

When I go to my girlfriend's place, I tend to leak coins onto the couch. By the time I leave, there's usually a big pile of quarters, nickels and dimes in the corner, sometimes on the floor. It occurred to me the other day that maybe someday I could be president. I, too, have a proven track record of making change.

Election

2008-02-12T17:26:00.000-05:00

Today is primary day in DC, Virginia and Maryland. I offer this...just because I think its funny.

Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days

2008-02-10T00:36:00.000-05:00

The first thing to say is that this movie shook me to the core. It is one of the most well made and well acted movies I've seen in a long time. The second thing to say is that I don't think I will see it again for a long time...maybe ever. That's because, in addition to all of it's well deserved accolades -- including the top prize at Cannes last year -- it is also one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen.

Briefly, "Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days" takes place during one harrowing day in Romania and tells the story of a woman and her friend attempting to get an illegal abortion during the last days of the Communist dictatorship there. In many ways, it echoes my favorite movie of last year, "The Lives of Others," in that it powerfully evokes the brutalization of the Communist system. But this movie, while not quite as good as "Lives," nonetheless speaks more to our political and cultural circumstances in this country, especially in an election year where abortion once again is likely to be the subject of much polarizing rhetoric, division and grandstanding.

When I said the movie was disturbing earlier, I meant that in the best possible sense, in that it is genuinely thought-provoking and that it's images and themes will haunt you and spark conversation long after you leave the theater. Director Cristian Mungiu deserves much credit for his ability to drain every ounce of tension from this situation, and I couldn't keep my eyes off of Anamaria Marinca, who was so believable and sympathetic in her portrayal of the friend whose story anchors the film.

In tone and its sense of lingering claustrophobia and doom, the movie also reminded me a lot of the Hitchcock thriller "Rear Window." But the movie's ability to disturb never rests on cheap thrills, rather from its brutal depiction of a nightmarish scenario that many of us argue about, philosophize on and sometimes even vote on, but (thankfully) seldom experience.

What makes this movie closer to art is that it eschews the easy polarities and arch rhetoric that constitute much of the abortion debate in this country ("pro-life" "pro-choice," "the lives of the unborn," "a woman's right to her own body," "partial birth," "back allies"...and so on) and instead depicts a situation in which everyone involved is brought down by a culture that devalues life in all its forms.

When my sister and I discussed the movie later, we were certain that the director, while offering fodder for all sides of the abortion question, was pro-life. It says something about the subtlety of his approach that I learned later we were wrong: He is adamantly pro-choice. And,just to prove once again that I truly have my finger on the pulse of nothing in this country, I was equally surprised to learn that many pro-life groups were highly critical of the film. There are some people in this world who can forgive anything but subtlety, I guess.

I do find it heartening that this year has brought two movies that have treated the notion of unwanted pregnancy with thoughtfulness, compassion and, yes, subtlety. I absolutely loved "Juno," which delved into roughly the same subject matter. But where "Juno" is acidly funny, light and ultimately heartwarming, "Four Months" is it's mirror opposite: brutal, unsparing and dark, dark, dark.

Anyhow, if you've thought at all about this subject, I urge you to go see this movie. Go see it, and then talk to me later. I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

The Question is Moot

2008-02-07T11:59:00.000-05:00

A few of you have asked me about the whereabouts of the fifth annual Mr. Odney Holiday Mix. It's having,um, technical difficulties, as it were, but is still coming. A surge zapped my hard drive, depriving me of a home computer and (perhaps) destroying my vast encyclopedia of mp3 files. This weekend, I'm taking it up to my brother-in-law's to see if he can fix the computer and, hopefully, recover what was lost from the old hard drive.

So, it will be late obviously, but it'll get there.

If you'd like to be added to the mailing list for the mix or merely want to know what the heck I'm talking about, just e-mail me.

Thanks,

Andy

Trapped in Opryland: Day Three

2008-02-01T18:50:00.000-05:00

For five days, I am staying in the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville for a work conference. It is not the worst hotel I've ever stayed in on business. That label goes to the Circus Circus in Reno, Nevada. Nor is it the tackiest place I've ever been. That would be the Bugaboo Creek steakhouse Laura and I went to off I-95 in Delaware during a moment of hunger-induced desperation. The waitress introduced herself as "Baby back," which she told us was her "Bugaboo name."

"Hi," I said. "I'm Sir Loin. This is my girlfriend, Tube Steak"

No, the Gaylord Opryland Hotel is none of that. It goes out of its way to exude an air of taste and convenience, and mostly succeeds. Underneath it's glassed-in nine acres are waterfalls, tropical plants and a man-made bayou filled with exotic fish. There's 2 dozen restaurants, including 3 very nice ones, 2,400 rooms, 6 pools and about 20 shops devoted to tourist hokum. There's even a country radio station that beams out from here. Opryland once laid claim to being the largest convention center in the world, and its geared for people who don't expect to be seeing much in the way of daylight. The whole place feels like an orbiting biosphere: a little bit country, a little bit Disney, with a dash of Stepford thrown in.

There are a lot of hotels like this that cater to the convention goer, but in those places you can at least take comfort in knowing that there's civilization nearby: a nice restaurant, a downtown to stroll in, or maybe even a little park.

Opryland takes the concept up to 11. We've all been talking about the overwhelming claustrophobia of the place. The closest site of interest, aside from a Shoney's, is the gargantuan Opry Mills Mall -- which is not at all a cure for claustrophobia. A free shuttle takes you there from the hotel. And if you want to splurge and head to downtown Nashville, there is a shuttle that takes you there as well. But the destination is a chain bar that advertises 3 floors of line dancing, which in my mind served only to underscore the Stepford feeling.

As I headed to my room from another fact-filled day of education policy, I noticed a tour heading down the man-made bayou in a boat. There are times like these, dark moments of the soul, where I wish I could commune with Charlton Heston and just rail to the heavens on the savagery of it all. As an aside, I should note that I've always loved those over-the-top moments from movies. One of my favorites is Al Pacino from "And Justice for All": "That man should go straight to f*ckin jail....You're out of order! My client's out of order. This trial is out of order. The whole f*ckin American justice system is out of order." I also just saw "Poltergeist" on TV, and I loved the moment towards the end, where Craig T. Nelson yells out,"YOU ONLY MOVED THE HEADSTONES!!!"

But few things beat the original. So, I'll leave with this:

It depends on what the meaning of ism is

2008-01-24T17:41:00.000-05:00

Anyone who declares him- or herself to have libertarian sympathies is usually hit with one of two knee jerk responses: the first, and most common, is that by virtue of wanting to dramatically shrink the size and influence of the welfare state, you must have no sympathy for the poor, minorities and disadvantaged among us. The second is some variation of: "Without a giant federal bureaucracy, anything is permitted." Or, to paraphrase libertarian Dave Barry, laissez faire is just a slippery slope to dog marriage.

So, it was with considerable dismay that I read the latest troubling revelations concerning presidential candidate Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican. Earlier on this site, while indicating some differences I have with Paul, I generally noted that the popularity of his campaign was a welcome sign that libertarian ideas were taking a foothold in this country.

The other day, I was alerted to a very well-done (albeit troubling) article in Reason magazine that detailed a slew of bigoted rhetoric that appeared in Paul's newsletters during the 80's and 90's. And this isn't just "crying racism," as in the recent flap between Clinton and Obama over the legacy of Martin Luther King. This is vile stuff, including claims that King "seduced underage girls and boys," that black protesters should gather "at a food stamp bureau or a crack house" rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDs sufferers "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

Even worse than the substance is the notion that the bashing of gays and blacks was part of a conscious political strategy among confidantes of Paul to form a coalition with people holding "older conservative values." One essay outlining the strategy called it -- and I'm not making this up -- "Outreach to Rednecks."

This is wrong on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start. In addition to the obvious bigotry and bile inherent in such comments, there's the fact that they feed into people's worst misconceptions about libertarians, namely that we're a bunch of wingnuts who don't care about the poor and whose opposition to state interference is really just nothing more than a thinly-veiled racism. Finally, if you agree that the two-party system has been compromised by relentless pandering (elements of the Republican Party being beholden to Christian mullahs, for instance, or the obeisance of many Democrats to the teacher's unions), libertarians lose moral authority when they make such naked political comprises to achieve power.

Paul has distanced himself from the controversy, calling it "old news" and saying that discussion of the newsletters' content were "hysterical smears aimed at political enemies."

I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it. Reason put it best:

Ron Paul may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists -- and taking "moral responsibility" for that now means more than just uttering the phrase. It means openly grappling with his own past -- acknowledging who said what, and why. Otherwise he risks damaging not only his own reputation, but that of the philosophy to which he has committed his life.

Ominous Parallels

2008-01-16T18:35:00.001-05:00

I am not a big fan of the architecture of the Washington Mall. There are exceptions, of course. I love the stark, cold beauty of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial and the spare elegance of the Jefferson, offset by the tidal basin, so lovely in the Spring when the cherry blossoms bloom. But for the most part, it feels wrong. First of all, it's busy. There are now memorials popping up every year -- after the World War II Memorial, I stopped keeping track -- and they all seem to have been thought up by a committee of political hacks: a little bit of this and a little bit of that, thrown together in an attempt to please the most people while causing the least amount of offense (A cynic might say that's the definition of democracy.)But beyond that, there's an overwhelming Roman triumphalism to the place -- all these huge slabs of marble and giant, outsize statues and pagan symbols that would not have seemed out of place when Julius Caesar returned home from crossing Rubicon more than 2,000 years ago.

The architecture of a nation's capital should say something about its guiding spirit. And at a time when we are slogging through a hugely unpopular war far from home and are regularly accused of wanting to police the world, the buildings around town do little to dispel the notion that we're a giant, hungry Empire.

I was thinking about this when I was driving to Virginia one night and was once again struck by the latest addition to our skyline: The U.S. Air Force Memorial. I mean no offense to our brave men and women in uniform, who deserve our undying gratitude, but this memorial is more than tacky. It's downright scary, especially at night. Unlike the Roman-inspired architecture elsewhere on the mall, this piece is raw, almost bestial. To me, it resembles nothing less than a bony, grasping claw reaching out into the heavens. I was trying to remember what it made me think of, and then it hit me: The Dark Tower, Barad Dur, also known as the home of Sauron, the namesake of the Lord of the Rings.

I don't think these pictures do justice to just how creepy this image is at night -- the memorial, I mean. So, I went online, which I do when I need to confirm that I am not, in fact, crazy, and found the following testimonial. And I quote:

i was driving by washington yesterday night, and this was my first time seeing the memorial live, it scared the hell out of me, it is soo huge and i had my 2 yrs son that when he looked at of the window he started crying...but seriously is it just me or it scares others, it looked to me as a monster claws rising from the earth, something like that.

There you have it. This memorial makes little kids cry. I ask you: Is that the spirit that made America beautiful?

"I turned myself to face me, but I never caught a glimpse."

2007-12-31T12:22:00.000-05:00

It's hard to know what your life is about while you're living it. It's kind of like trying to view your own butt in the mirror -- impossible, unless your ass is huge, in which case you have a whole different set of problems.

Mr. Odney's Holiday Message

2007-12-23T00:45:00.001-05:00

Have a wonderful holiday and Happy New Year!

Ho, ho, ho.

Best,

Andy

PS: The newest installment of the Mr. Odney Holdiay Mix will be coming soon. If you don't know about it, ask.

Shameless Plug, or Getting Medieval on Your Ass

2007-12-05T21:00:00.000-05:00

This Wednesday, after a two-week blitzkrieg rehearsal process, the Folger Theatre opens "The Second Shepherd's Play." It's a wonderfully unique Christmas show that dates from at least the 1500s, making it one of the oldest known comedies in English.

It's been freshly adapted for the Folger by the fantastic director, Mary Hall Surface, and includes period music from the Folger Consort, in addition to singing, dancing, puppetry...and sheep.

The show also represents the long-awaited return to the stage of the lovely and uber-talented Holly Twyford.

I play Mak, a clueless but loveable villain, who gets involved with some unusual business involving said sheep (Hey, it's a family show!).

Favorite Line: "Ye shall get many a thwang."

The Folger has recently posted some interesting podcasts about the show and its history, which includes snippets from one of our early rehearsals (You can hear me in all, but mostly on no. 3.)

The show runs from Dec. 12-30, with matinees on Saturday and Sunday. There are no shows on Monday. For more on tickets, go here. You won't be disappointed.

If you come, please stop and say hi afterwards.

So endeth the shameless plug. Mickle thanks.

A Welcome Political Development

2007-11-26T20:33:00.000-05:00

A famous quote that is sometimes attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, but more often to Winston Churchill, says: “If you are not a liberal at 20, you have no heart.” “If you are not a conservative at 40, you have no brains.”

By that calculus, I guess I haven't grown up much. Reading this piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, I was reminded that Ron Paul was the first person I voted for when I was 18, in the 1988 election that ushered in the Bush Dynasty. I don't know how enamored I am of Ron Paul. I don't agree with everything he says, but I find him to be an honorable politician -- a rarity in Washington, those two words going together -- and moreover, I like what he stands for. At a time of enormous disconnect and disaffection in American politics, where everyone hates the powers that be but we seem unable to rid ourselves of a miserable choice between two nincompoops, I like the idea that libertarianism is catching.

Besides, it represents the rare time that I was actually ahead of a trend.

Also, Dave Barry likes it. So how bad can it be?

It's Picture Time, Kids!

2007-11-25T21:28:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm finally getting the hang of blogger, and in addition to cleaning up some links, I've gone back through the travel posts and added pictures, which I think brings a little something extra to the whole deal.

If you're interested, there's more where that came from here.

I think the video files were too large, so only a few showed up. If, for any reason, you are interested in copies of those, just e-mail me. There's some pretty cool ones of breakdancing in Budapest and the old women who tried to sell me embroidery in Dubrovnik and some sobering ones from Auschwitz.

The first picture on the link is from Plitvice. If you click on it, and go to the bottom left of the next page, there's a link that says "Browse All Albums." That will take you to all of the albums from the trip, which are broken down by city.

I think I will continue with this blog, but for the sake of cutting down on the amount of e-mail in this world, I am going to stop the e-mail function for the travel group after this post. If you want to keep up with the blog, just do what everyone else does and go here.

It may be spotty in the next month because I'm just starting lightning-fast rehearsals for The Second Shepherd's Play, followed by 24 shows in three weeks, in addition to my day job. After that....I'll need another vacation.

Enjoy!

Best,

Me

PS: If any of you have trouble with the comment function on the blog -- it's tricky and tempermental, I've been told -- please e-mail me.

Let Us Take a Moment to Praise Rick Steves

2007-11-13T19:25:00.000-05:00

"Do you have Christmas in France? Christmas. Christmas!"
--Ricky's Mother, "Better Off Dead"

Well, I'm already back to reality and its discontents, and only got done blogging half the trip. Blogging seems to be moving at about half the speed of life, but I guess that's good. Real life is, after all, more important.

Still, there were some final observations and encounters I wanted to share, and I hope you will forgive the hodge-podge, truncated nature of this final travel post, which I'd like to get out before this stuff starts falling down the memory hole.

First off, no account of my adventures abroad would be complete without a nod to Rick Steves, who often felt like a third companion on the trip. Steves is the creator of a popular guidebook on Europe, in addition to the informative, but unfortunately-named PBS show "Europe Through the Back Door." The book promises to help you "experience the culture like a local." Of course, that's impossible. I lived in the UK for five months as a student, and while I can tell you for certain that I thought its theater is the best on the planet while its cuisine is the worst, or that its people will approach you with a cautious reserve until they get to know you and then become friends for life, or that calling the Prime Minister a "twit" in the House of Commons on a weekly basis is OK, but talking loudly on the Tube is considered rude, I'd be hard pressed to explain why all of these things are true. Heck, I've lived in the U.S. my entire life, and I feel I'm just beginning to understand it and all its contradictions. Also, there are so many places I've never seen. For a good part of my life, I didn't think North Dakota really existed, until I was forced to spend a week in Grand Forks.

But I digress. Understanding a people or a culture is nearly a lifelong task. But experiencing those things as a local might is a different kettle of fish, and here Steves, with vivid descriptions and lots of good humor, was invaluable. His guidebook to Eastern Europe introduced me to the magical Plitvice Lakes in Croatia (more on this later), and to the quirky studio of Joze Plecnik in Ljubljana, who designed much of his home city in addition to sites in Prague and Rome, and whose home makes interesting use of light and curved spaces, in addition to showcasing his one-of-a kind inventions. Steves goes on at length about about Plecnik and his influence, yet his studio, which admittedly keeps very odd hours, is missing from local tourist maps. Steves is full of practical advice as well, such as avoiding the "no neck thugs" who run the cab stands at the train stations in most of the large cities we visited, or the value of the "Budapest Card," which in addition to covering all of our public transportation in that city, got us huge discounts at the baths and many of the museums.

So I relied a lot on Rick Steves. Before leaving, I did research on the Internet, in addition to reading guides like Lonely Planet (vast, but superficial) or the Rough Guide (encyclopedic, but hardly user friendly), but Steves was the only guide who was essential on our journeys. It got to the point that Laura and I were referring to him by his first name, as in, "Do you have Rick?" or "It's time to put Rick away now." He saved me countless times (getting through the baths in Budapest) and only steered me wrong once (the Hotel Anna in Prague, with its frosty showers, although I am willing to accept that we were the victims of unfortunate circumstance.)

So, here's a shout out to Rick Steves. Bless your pointy head!

One of Steves’ recommendations was the city of Krakow, which he calls "the next Prague." He urges people to visit now, "just as the tourist infrastructure ramps up, but before it’s swamped with crowds." Sadly, however, of all the places in Eastern Europe that got short shrift on my blitzkrieg tour, Krakow was the most maligned.

I enjoyed the plucky, underdog spirit of the people I encountered there. I loved the Communist-era "Milk Bars," old-style cafeterias where I could get a full dinner of stuffed cabbage and pirogies for 9 zlotys (roughly $3). Because of my desire to see Auschwitz, however, I only really got to spend one day in this dreamy city, something the spunky proprietor of the Pensionjat Trecius rightfully gave me grief about.

"So, did you enjoy your one day tour of Krakow?" she asked with a playful mix of teasing and wounded pride. There wasn't much I could say other than to answer, truthfully, that I wanted to come back.

She was another person who offered perspectives on life after Communism -- although her views differed widely from those of Adam and Rudolph. As a business owner, she didn't express much in the way of nostalgia, remembering bitterly how the Soviets would print massive sums of money to jumpstart the economy, which, in addition to dampening the desire to work better or harder, made it next to impossible to know what various goods and services were worth from day to day -- a clear liability in the business world. "This was a false system," she said, although her co-proprietor said that democracy had brought with it a different set of troubles. He told me that he wants to expand his hotel and open a restaurant in the basement, but that his plans have been held up due to "red tape" and new laws restricting building in the Old Town. It's the kind of frustration many American small business owners would sympathize with.

A random observation: Many of the cities I've visited have their roots in the Middle Ages. Despite their differences, many of them have similar city plans -- a castle high on a hill or a cliff wall, offering protection, and a river dividing the town, allowing for easy commerce. The river areas were common meeting places for trade and open-air produce markets. In many cities, they have retained those functions, but have expanded into giant public spaces, typically closed off to traffic. Whether intentional or not, this set-up has the effect of saving the most serene and picturesque parts of town for aimless strolling, usually on old cobblestone streets, away from the din of buses or cars. It tends to underscore a more peaceful way of life than I'm used to...and it’s these daydreamy public spaces that I always associate with Europe. That pace of life is emphasized in other ways as well. All but the most high-class American restaurants tend to be pretty capitalist: Eat your meal and get out; the more people who can be crammed in, the better. In Eastern Europe -- moreso even than the Western European countries I'd been to -- the meal was something that was supposed to be savored and lingered over. Waiters seemed to actually get insulted if we asked for the check too soon, for example, if we were on our way to a show or a train to another city. The attitude seems to be: “What's the hurry? Stay a while.” The typical dinner in Eastern Europe is meant to last at least two hours. I could get used to that.

By the time I made it to Croatia, I was beginning to feel more comfortable with the transportation system in this part of the world. Nonetheless, this is where all of my careful planning and whirlwind logistics broke down: I was set to arrive in Zagreb at 10 p.m., and leave for Dubrovnik at 5:50 the next morning. I had planned to spend a cranky, uncomfortable night at the airport. But when my flight arrived early, and customs took 2 minutes instead of an expected two hours, I decided to splurge for a hotel. After visiting the information desk, I walked out of the airport at night, luggage in tow (by the way: whoever decided to put wheels on suitcases should receive a knighthood, the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize), across a dark city park and arrived at a local pub, Ivac, where I had a luxurious 5 and half hours of sleep in a room above the establishment with a real bed.

The rest of the trip almost felt like a vacation from my vacation, further from the dark history of the recent past and devoted more to simple scenic beauty and just ambling about.

Dubrovnik felt like a living fairy tale: Perched on a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, the city has retained its medieval stone walls. I spent hours climbing this scenic mile, with the sea on one side and waves of red-tiled roofs on the other, with the occasional church, shrine or orange grove along the way. It felt like a combination of things I experienced on my recent trip to Italy, a cross between Venice and the Cinque Terre on the West coast, with its wonderful hike between the 5 towns.

There's also the Stradun, Dubrovnik's main promenade, with Old World shops and several interesting museums. The street here is made with a polished stone that shimmers hypnotically when it rains. There wasn't much of that, however. I just took it all in and meditated...as I sailed to one of the nearby islands and got a view of the fortress from the sea, or napped on the rocky beach at sunset, with its brilliant hues of purple, orange and gold.

In Dubrovnik, I decided to stay in a soba, or a room in a private home, a form of vacation lodging that is fairly common in Europe (especially in the East) but almost unheard of in the States. Using a handy Web site, I was able to see and price out my place long before I visited. For less than any hotel in the area, I essentially had an apartment, complete with refrigerator and stove. It was decorated with Croatian rugs and needlework, with pictures of Catholic saints on the walls. The bedroom had a skylight that offered a great view of the Old Town's walls. It was, by far, the nicest place I stayed in during the trip. And Stefjan, one of the owners, was extremely friendly, to the point of driving me to the airport at the sacrum of dawn, when finding a cab would have been rather difficult.

But even here, the recent history of war and ethnic conflict was never too far away. At the Pile Gate, the entrance to the Old Town, there is a huge map showing where each of the many bombs fell during the country's recent war with Yugoslavia. Aside from a few pockmarks and the bright, new tiles on the roofs of many of the buildings, however, there is almost no trace of what happened here just over a decade ago, when over two-thirds of Dubrovnik's buildings were damaged and 30,000 people had to flee their homes.

Incidentally, the first shots of that war were fired in the Plitvice Lakes National Park, the next stop on my itinerary. In fact, the war's first casualty was a park policeman, Josip Jovic. As in Dubrovnik, it is hard to reconcile the paradise-on-earth you see in front of you with a place that not long ago was the middle of a war zone. While it is well traveled among Europeans, Plitvice (pronounced PLEET-veet-seh) is virtually unknown to Americans. It feels like a mixture of Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. The park has 16 lakes, strung together by waterfalls and wooden plank walks. The grass is lush, the water strangely clear, and the place is filled with a thin mist and countless cascades.

In some places, the plank walks -- which look like fishing docks -- go right over a small waterfall or take you to the middle of a large one. As I walked through this virtually empty park -- tourist season had ended the month before -- I was struck by how often I noted the lack of guard-rails or warning signs. It struck me, on this trip that offered a meditation on various ideas of freedom (the lack of it, the fight for it, the uses of it) how easily my interior monologue took on the shrill voice of a tort lawyer: "This is a lawsuit waiting to happen." It is hard to separate ourselves from the cultural influences we take for granted, those things that have become so prevalent in our society that we don't even think about them. It then occurred to me that while guard rails might be nice, they'd take away from the beauty of this pristine place, keeping the visitor at more of a distance. One of the things that made this place so interesting was those plank walks that took you right over and under and through the natural beauty of the park.

It is easy to see how some European directors saw in Plitvice a feint echo of the early American West. I remember Adam, our guide in Budapest, telling us how he grew up on German "westerns" that were filmed here, like Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure in Silver Lake), complete with German-speaking Native Americans.

When you travel alone, it is easy to get lost in your own daydreams. Thinking I was alone at one point during my tour of Plitvice, I climbed on top of a stack of wood to get a better view of the park's largest waterfall. Taking in the dull roar of the water into turquoise pools and a layer of mist above, I absentmindedly broke into a song I hadn't thought of since the 80's -- the Hamm's beer jingle
From the land of sky blue waters.
(Waters)
From the land of sky blue waters.
(Waters)
Hamms, the beer refreshing
Hamms, the beer refreshing
Hamms.....

When I finished, I turned around, and was more than a little embarrassed to find a couple of Korean tourists with their cameras trained on me.

"You took pictures?" I asked.

The man shook his head no.

"Video," said the woman with him.

Well, I can only hope it doesn't end up on the Internet.

I was feeling a bit lonely on the bus ride back to Zagreb, eager to share some of my thoughts about the park. Aside from a smattering of Croatians, however, the only other people on the bus were backpackers from Germany. Unfortunately, my German is terribly spotty -- worse than that, actually. For some reason, I can remember how to say "My dog has no nose" (Mein Hund hat keine Nase), which is really not a great entrée into any kind of discussion. I also can say, "Gehe dahin ubler in deine dreckige hole." (Be gone, Evil One, go back to your filthy lair!) Again, not a conversation starter.

Aside from that, I remember random words of no real general use: Waschbar (raccoon), Kartoffel (potato) and Kopf (head).

About an hour away from the park, I had this thought: Do they have Mr. Potato Head in Germany, and is he called Herr Kartoffelkopf?

But I didn't even know how to ask this rather ridiculous question in German. It occurred to me that it was more likely that these backpackers' English would be far better than my German, but then again, what was I going to ask them: "Do they have Mr. Potato Head in Germany, and is he called Herr Kartoffelkopf?” This would have branded me irrevocably as a Gigantic American Tourist Boob, and for the sake of my personal pride and and our rapidly declining international relations, I thought the better of it.

Still, it got me thinking about another aspect of travel that we Americans take for granted: In even the most remote locations, we can typically count on someone with at least a rudimentary knowledge of our language, if not outright fluency. But this isn't true for the Croatian, Czech, Polish, even German speakers of the world. Due to the accident of being part of what once was the largest colony in an Empire on which the sun was never supposed to set, we can expect to travel safe in the knowledge that English is the international language.

So, a few days later, when I took a taxi from Ljubljana to nearby Lake Bled, I was able to enjoy a conversation in English with the affable driver. And whereas it took me about 10 minutes to pronounce "Vrsic" (Vree-shick), the name of a Slovenian mountain pass in the Julian Alps, I followed along as the driver told me excitedly about his recent foray into refereeing an international ping-pong competition for the handicapped in a town near Vrsic. ("In Vree-shick, we have the games for the tables tennis with the people in the chairs with the wheels -- and I judge!")

He told me that the Slovenian president was a journalist, a national hero who was known for exposing a blacklist of dissenters that existing during the former Communist era. He told me of his time in the Yugoslav Army and, pointing to a high peak in the Julian Alps, said, "Climbing this mountain was a big test of endurance for soldiers. We call it witch's teat."

"So you climbed the witch's teat?" I asked.

"Yes!"

Speaking of boobs, in Bled I was reminded that they are not unique to America. Here's a story I will remember the next time someone goes on about how reactionary and ignorant we are in the States. In the middle of Lake Bled, there is a beautiful island with a church that you can get to by taking a pletna boat, a flat-bottomed craft powered by a single standing oarsman. On the pletna boat, I was joined by an attractive Italian couple, who were very nice. They asked me to take a picture of them. And they returned the favor. He told me he was an architect, but was currently serving as a political representative from a town near Venice. On the way back, the subject turned to politics. I was, of course, prepared for the fact that George Bush is hugely unpopular, as is our protracted war with Iraq. But I was not remotely prepared for his highly unusual theory of why we were at war.

"Oil?" I asked.

"Well, yes," he said. "But I also think it is because George Bush is Jewish."

I stared at him for a few seconds, hoping that a punch line was forthcoming. But none came. He told me that George Bush always defends Israel, that he was a member of the Skull and Bones Society that secretly controls everything in America, and that since the Jews also control everything, George Bush must be Jewish. I have to admit, there was a certain insane logic to it, if accepted on its own terms, but I felt the need for further questioning.

"You know, he talks to Jesus," I said. "Before going to war in Iraq, he spoke to Jesus. It's not a very Jewish thing to do."

"Well yes," he said. "But behind the scenes, away from the public, I think he is a Jew."

When I told him I was Jewish, he was quick to explain that he had nothing against Jews, but couldn't help noting that they were disproportionately represented in the upper echelons of business. I had had a conversation like this before, in Turkey a decade ago, with a young student on a bus who asked me innocently. "Is it true that you control everything?" I answered, "If that were true, would I be on a bus like this, sitting next to you?" He reflected for a while, smiled and said, "This is a beautiful thought."

But this wasn't someone who was indoctrinated in a Muslim religious school. This was an educated Italian, from just outside one of that country's most cosmopolitan cities, and a politician to boot. His comments seemed less innocent for that reason, and for the reason that so much of my trip provided evidence of what even passive ignorance of this sort can lead to.

When we left the boat, he shook my hand and said, "Tell George Bush to go home."
I replied, "When I see him, I'll tell him in Hebrew."

Some more random thoughts: I know I have had some fun with the issue of paying to use the bathrooms in Eastern Europe, but the fact is, these restrooms are always clean, something you can not always count on in the States. In fact, the infrastructure in Eastern Europe is much more suited toward the casual traveler. For example, a 3 hour bus-ride typically costs about $5. A cross country train-ride can cost just over $30, but will have comfortable seats and will at least include some interesting scenery. A ride from Washington to New York with Amtrak, by contrast, is likely to cost at least $140 and is bound to be overbooked and crowded, with the scenery pretty much consisting of New Jersey.

A final random thought: Just about any town in the world that caters to tourists will have at least one street performer in native garb playing the pan flute. One of my favorite recent books, a collection by British cartoonist Andy Riley called "Great Lies to Tell Small Kids," suggests that pan flute players throughout the world are secretly deployed from a central base in the Andes Mountains.

Ljubljana (Lyoo-byawn-yah), where I spent the final days of my tour, is a college town, and it has the laid-back, youthful energy of a place like Madison or Austin. I saw at least 6 women over 50 with dyed magenta or blue hair, the kind that American women in their 20's get weird looks for in the workplace. Once again, there is a huge public area, closed to traffic, where the Triple Bridge crosses the river, just below, once again, a castle high on a cliff. But this area felt much more sophisticated and modern than the Old Towns of the other cities I visited, filled with quirky bars and cafes and stylishly dressed students. It was relatively free of tourists and the kinds of businesses that cater exclusively to them. I spent a lot of time hanging around a local produce market, where the president of Slovenia himself is known to shop for the perfect melon.

Before I left, I finally purchased a pelt.

It is hard to wrap up my reactions to such a wonderful vacation, in which I saw so much so quickly, and was given so much to ponder and enjoy. It will now recede into my memories, some of which are encapsulated in photos, which I'll try to share with everyone soon. I don't know if I'll have the time or the energy to continue this blog, but I'd like to. We'll see. In any case, it's been great sharing with everyone, and getting your comments, public and private. Thank you. I wanted to particularly thank some people who made my trip more enjoyable: Gerri and Jack, Mom and Bob, Lois and, of course, the wonderful Laura.

Until next time,

Andy

Oswiecim

2007-11-09T17:18:00.000-05:00

I heard the name Auschwitz not long after arriving by train in Krakow. A man touting a local ˝Jewish tour˝ approached me outside the station and said: ˝Come. We see Auschwitz. Birkenau. See the Jewish Quarter. Schindler´s factory. Just 150 zlotyś˝

Schindler was a reference to Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazi death camps, and whose story formed the basis of Steven Spielberg's movie ˝Schindler´s List.˝ Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish) was, of course, the headquarters of the Nazi extermination camps during World War II, where at least 1 million of the 6 million Jews, most of them from Hungary and Poland, but some from as far away as Norway and Greece, perished from 1942 to 1945.

And here, very soon after setting foot in Krakow, I was confronted with the problem of visiting this terrible place: Like the nearly empty Jewish quarter in Prague with its synagogues turned into museums, or the synagogue Laura and I saw in Pest (also devoid of congregants, also a museum), or the Klezmer music concerts played in Krakow (by musicians who are almost entirely non-Jewish), it felt Auschwitz had the potential to be just another stop in some kind of antiseptic tour of long-forgotten relics, like a macabre Jewish Disneyland where you toured the barracks and the ruins of the crematoria before returning to your hotel and talked of plans for dinner.

I talked a little about this with my new friend Rudoplh, the Hungarian accountant, on the long train ride from Budapest. I had told him about the House of Terror, the former Gestapo and Soviet interrorgation center turned into a museum that Laura and I had visited the previous day.

˝I've seen this building,˝ he says. ˝But I can´t go in there. It is too painful.˝

It suddenly occured to me that I would be visiting Auschwitz the very next day, and wondered whether the cummulative effect of seeing all this horrible history all at once would be desensitizing. It is a problem, really, with the ambitious nature of my whole trip. Unlike Europeans, who typically get 5 weeks of vacation a year, or the crazy Aussies or Kiwis one meets travelling, who sometimes have been on the road for years, the typical American who visits Europe, if he or she goes at all, goes for two weeks. There was so much I wanted to do and see. But it occured to me that maybe it was all a little too much. There were people I knew, many of them Europeans, who told me my intinerary was crazy (˝This trip is crazy,˝ said Michal, a Slovakian who lives in my house, who nonethless urged me to add his home country to my travels.) Even now, as I look at my passport, which was blank last month, and now has close to a dozen stamps from 5 countries, I think its kind of dizzying.

˝I´m going to Auschwitz tomorrow,˝ I told Rudolph.

He seemed thoughtful for a second, and then said, ˝Well, I won´t be going.˝ He told me that he had a lot of ˝sympathy˝ for the Jews, and that such a visit would, once again, be ˝too painful.˝

So, why visit Auschitz? Why visit a concentration camp on your vacation? This wonderful book I´m now reading, and was reading on the bus on the way to Oswiecim, provided an answer. The book, ˝The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million,˝ is something I picked up on a lark in the weeks before leaving for Europe. By Daniel Mendelsohn, ˝The Lost˝ is about the family of his great uncle Schmiel (Samuel), his wife, and their four daughters, who he heard about growing up, but never met, because they perished in and around Belechow, Poland during the Holocaust. Using archival records, and interviews with survivors from as far away as Australia and Sweden, Mendelsohn tells the story of the Holocaust by trying to reconstruct, as best as possible, the lives and final days of these 6 members of his extended family. It was just an intuition, but I thought that reading it would add something to the trip. The book, which I can´t recommend highly enough, is one of the best works of non-fiction I´ve ever read: exceptionally well-written, extremely moving, and more than occassionally profound, it's a great book, and not just if you happen to have an interest in the Holocaust, per se, or Jewish history in general. The book, more than anything, is about families, and the secrets they keep. It is also, at its root, a detective story, one that I´m eagerly paging through now, even though, of course, the ending is never in doubt.

Anyhow, Mendelsohn asks this same question early in his book: Why visit Auschwitz? His answer is twofold: First, to pay respects to the dead, and second, because the whole place amounts to one giant piece of evidence, an answer to all those who have said, and who continue to say, that the Holocaust was not as bad as reported or, even worse, never happened at all.

And, certainly, those motives were among mine as well. But why did I, particularly, want to visit? I have no known relatives who perished there, or anyplace during the Holocaust, as most of my extended family on both sides, from the Ukraine and Macedonia, Greece and Poland, had left those places not long after the onset of World War I. Moreover, I am an atheist, having not practiced the religion I was born into since shortly after my Bar Mitzvah on May 28, 1983.

So, what are my personal reasons? Aside from what Mendelsohn said, the biggest reason I can think of is that Auschwitz, and the Holocaust, seemed unreal to me. I don´t mean that in the same sense that the Holocaust revisionists do: I´ve never doubted the historical truth of what happened there, or that it was as unimaginable as people say it was -- the record is thorough and incontrovertible. But it's because of that word: unimaginable. If you're an American-raised Jew, like me, you've seen Auschwitz in films in civics class (three different times that I can remember), in Sunday school (twice), in countless documentaries like ˝The World at War,˝ narrated by Lawrence Olivier, which I remember my father watching a lot when I was very young, and numerous movies from ˝Sophie's Choice˝ to ˝Schindler´s List.˝ It was simply too big, to removed from my experience, too far away to comprehend. Now that I was in Eastern Europe, I wanted to go and experience this place as something real.

Of course, my thinking was naive. How can I, who considers deprivation not having a hot shower in the morning or not getting e-mails returned in a timely fashion, possibly relate to the unspeakable and unprecedented horrors of the people who were sent here and, with very few exceptions, died here? There was no way.

But I wanted to at least try to bridge that gap between my experience and imagination. I needed to see it. I wanted to get a sense of the scale of the place and hopefully, leave there with a more visceral awareness than I had previously.

When you enter the town of Oswiecim, past farms, and pubs, auto-dealerships and old, run-down Communist-era apartment blocks, there is almost no visual reminder of that town´s place in history. In fact, eveything looks quite normal, if not altogether modern, until you pass through the parking lot, across the carefully manicured lawns, into the museum and out the back door. There, in front of you, set against guard towers and barbed wire, are the cruel words you have seen so many times before: ˝Arbeit Macht Frei,˝ German for ˝Work brings freedom.˝ As our earnest young guide soon told us: ˝Soon after their arrival here, inmates of the camp learned that the only way out was through the chimneys.˝

The Polish guardians of Auschwitz have taken great pains to preserve the site as it was when it was liberated by the Ukranian First Army in 1945, or more appropriately, what it might have looked like months before the Nazis knew the end was inevitable. The crematoria, where the bodies of the gassed were burned after their gold teeth and hair were extracted, were largely destroyed by the Nazis, who feared the reaction of the international community if the full extent of their crimes were exposed. The crematoria lay in rubble, but most of the barracks, privies, guard halls, the house of the commandant, the prisons and most of one of the gas chambers remain intact, with their original German inscriptions on the outside.

But aside from the upkeep, and the inevitable warehousing of certain items of evidence (the hair, the luggage, the artificial limbs, that heartbreaking mountain of shoes, including the tiny shoes of small children), the place is appropriately solemn and unembellished, fitting for what is, in the end, a gigantic cemetary, albeit one without any graves or headstones.

Once again, you are faced with numbers of dead that are too large for the mind to grasp. Just to offer a sense of scale, there are 55,000 names of American soldiers on the Wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC. There are more than 77,000 names of Czech Jews in Pinkhas Synagogue in Prague. At Auschwitz, as its former commandant, Rudolph Hoess testfied in Nuremburg, 9,000 Jews, almost entirely from Hungary, were gassed in a single day during a period of peak activity in 1944.

Auschwitz is actually composed of two camps, Auschwitz I, which housed 20,000 prisoners and the camp´s first experimental gas chamber, and Birkenau, which had room for 100,000 prisoners and many more gas chambers and crematoria. The Nazis turned to the use of Zyklon B gas to kill the Jews when it became evident that the mass shootings and burials that were occuring in places like the Ukraine, Poland and Latvia were hurting troop morale and causing many to have nervous breakdowns.

Auschwitz I is smaller than you think, and the compactness raises questions. For example, the early experimental gas chamber, which we were asked to pass through silently, out of respect for the dead, is just a narrow road across the street from the SS officer´s mess. Those officers were close enough to hear the screams of the dying. The house of Commandant Hoess, where he and his wife lived and outside of which his children played, is less than a football field away. After the war, and according to the wishes of the survivors, Hoess was hanged just outside the building that housed the first gas chamber and crematoria. The gallows remains.

There was the alley where countless summary executions were held, and where, according to survivors, the courtyard filled with blood, and the prisons, from which no one left alive. Some of the barracks have been devoted to exhibits showing the remains of Nazi plunder. Something I had never realized before was the extent to which the extermination of the Jews served two functions: the first, and more well known, was Hitler´s twisted vision of racial purity; but the second was the use of the valuables, jewelry and money -- not to mention hair and gold and silver teeth -- to finance the war effort. If nothing else, my visit to Auschwitz brought home to me how different the Holocaust was from other genocides, which have occured throughout history and continue today. Typically, such incidents are spontaneous acts of savagery and brutality. The Nazis, while doubtless savage and brutal, married their bloodlust to a cruel intelligence that encompassed high-technology, tremendous efficiency and an intricate bureaucracy to keep the machinery of death moving. Learning from past mistakes, the Nazis avoided mass panic by telling people as they entered the cattle cars that they were headed for resettlement in the East. Men going into the first gas chambers were mollified with false promises of work that awaited them when they were done, as they were told, disinfecting in the showers.

There were the suitcases with familiar Jewish names chalked on, last names shared by friends and people I went to school with. There were names like ˝Kafka, Prague˝ and ˝Frank, Amsterdam˝ (neither of them who we think they are) that also rang a familiar bell. One of two times I broke down during my visit -- and this has happened to me at the Holocaust Museum in DC as well -- was seeing the endless array of victim´s shoes. I don´t know why the shoes get to me that way, why they have the power to tug at my emotions after seeing and hearing so many examples of human cruelty and deprivation, but they get to me every time.

The reason that Auschwitz I seems small is that most of the represenations of the camps we have are really of Birkenau, the much larger camp, just a short bus ride away. Birkenau is the camp with the huge guard tower and the dual rail tracks that trail off into the horizon, the end point in a trip to nowhere. Here are the remains of the crematoria and barracks that stretch as far as the eye can see. The barracks we saw was the other time I broke down. The place had a musty, sawdust odor and as I saw the cramped, wooden bunks, where people slept three in a row, often on their sides to make room, I listened as our guide described how those on the bottom bunks, starved and subject to a host of diseases, were food for rats that scurried the floors below. No one wanted the bottom bunks. It was too much to comprehend.

Interestingly, just as we entered Birkenau, there was a huge and moving Catholic procession in honor of the anniversay of the death of St. Maksymillian Kolbe, whose story I knew little of before going to Auschwitz. Kolbe was a political prisoner at Auschwitz, rounded up in the early arrests of priests and the intelligensia who the Nazis thought might be a threat to their rule. Kolbe was a priest at a church in Krakow, the same church, incidentally, where decades later Karl Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, served as archbishop (I would visit that Church, and sit in Wojtyla's favorite pew the next day.) Kolbe, who had expressed some anti-Semitic sentiment in newspaper columns before the war, experienced a profound redemption during his interment in the camp.

When a prisoner tried to escape from Kolbe´s block, the Nazis punished the remaining inmates by selecting 10 of them to put in the Starvation Cell until they died. After the selection, Kolbe offered to replace a man who expressed concern about who would care for his family. The Nazis agreed.

The men were placed in Starvation Cell 18, which I saw. Two weeks later, when the door was opened, only Kolbe had survived. The story spread throughout the camp, and Kolbe became an inspiration. To squelch the hope he had given to other inmates, Kolbe was executed by lethal injection. However, the man Kolbe saved is said to have survived the Holocaust.

The unexpected procession in honor of Kolbe, with prayer and chanting, added poignancy to the occasion and was, for me, a reminder that Auschwitz was not merely a Jewish story.

At the end of our tour, our guide, a young Pole who is studying at the university in Krakow and clearly took his job very seriously, said that we should honor the dead by remembering what we saw and that ˝human life is precious.˝

The next day, my final one in Krakow, I spent in the Old Town. I could have gone to the Jewish Quarter or to a Klezmer concert, but I just didn´t feel right about it. I needed time to process what I had seen and heard, and wanted to get away from the terrible history of that period for a spell.

But it was hard to escape. As I climbed Wawel Hill, I saw the old castle of Kazimierz the Great. Kazimierz, whose name was also given to the Jewish ghetto here, was, according to my guidebook, an enlightened ruler in the 14th century who encouraged Jews to come to Poland and granted them special priveleges -- often related to banking and trade -- at a time when other countries were deporting and scapegoating their Jews.

Something about the story sounded familiar. And when I went on the Internet later that day, I discovered the source, once again a Hollywood movie, ˝Schindler´s List.˝ If you´ve seen the movie, you won´t have forgotten this chilling monologue by SS Kommandant Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes, before the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto:

Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history and you are part of it. Six hundred years ago when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Kazimerz the Great, so called, told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belongings into the city. They settled. They took hold. They prospered in business, science, education, the arts. With nothing they came and with nothing they flourished. For six centuries there has been a Jewish Krakow. Think about it....By this evening those six centuries will be a rumour. They never happened. Today is history.

A rumour. At least in terms of Krakow, and most other major European cities that once had thriving Jewish populations, his words were prescient. So, I didn´t want to go to another empty Jewish quarter, with its synagogues turned into museums for tourists, or to a Klezmer concert with non-Jewish musicians because the Jews are largely vanished from this city, or to anything that is a cold reminder of the impossible abstraction of the Six Million. I tried to cling to what I had seen the day before on an overcast day with chilling rain. I tried to remember that each one of those six million is a story, rich and complex and vital, and that during a horrible decade in the middle of the last century, those stories were lost.

"Eez good for you!"

2007-11-04T16:26:00.000-05:00

"All Aboard. Night train."
-- James Brown, the hardest working man in show business

Laura and I boarded the night train from Prague to Budapest at 11:30 p.m. We had a first-class cabin in a sleeper car, which sounds a lot better than it is. The Orient Express it wasn't. The outside of the car was sprayed with grafitti and the cabin was a tiny room, which Laura compared to a prison cell, with two bunk beds.

We'd been walking around in a daze most of the night. I guess I'm getting old, but the endless walking was starting to take its toll. We complained of assorted aches and pains and instead of the usual restaurant meal, we grabbed some sandwiches,pastries and Fantas from a Czech supermarket and decided to have a late-night feast in our bunks. At that point, just sitting down felt like a luxury, and we both felt extremely grateful. It was kind of like camp, except that twice during the night -- at 3:30 and 5:00 in the morning -- gruff customs officers woke us to check our passports.

This is all to say that we were more than ready upon arriving in Budapest to partake in the city's signature form of entertainment: the baths. There are more than 200 hot springs underneath the city, the reason for its more than 2 dozen baths. And thus far, it's been my favorite part of the trip...by far.

On our first day in town, we had done probably the most ambitious stroll yet, a fantastic tour of a huge swath of the sprawling city -- up hills, through subways and parks -- with Absolute Walking Tours. But like I said, at the end, we were ready to unwind.

They don't make it easy. Getting into the baths is rather byzantine. You pay for either a bath ticket or a swimming pool ticket, although both allow you to do the same things (swim and bathe), but enter from different locations. Towels require a deposit that you get back after handing your towel to a clerk, who hands you another piece of paper that you give to a cashier. You can also rent a suit using the same process, which is why any Hungarian bath is bound to have the largest assemblage of human beings on the planet who shouldn't be wearing Speedo but are nonetheless (Yours truly packed his suit. The international community does not need to see me in Speedo.) And you can pay for a locker in a gender segregated room or for a shared cabin. And if you want a massage, that's another ticket, given to a different cashier. And...wait for it...if you leave before THREE HOURS is up, you get some of your money back....if you hand the right piece of paper to the cashier. All of this makes one of the more relaxing and fun activities I can think of feel a little bit like a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

But, like I said, it was worth it. We went to the Gellert Baths, part of a 19th century hotel. The Art Noveau columns in the swimming pool and elaborate green,blue, and brown mosaics on the walls above the hotter pools make it all seem very decadent and Roman. Our guide from Absolute Tours compared it to "swimming in a theater." You proceed from the swimming pool, where water pours out from the mouths of stone lions, to a series of progessively hotter pools, until the final one, which is heated to 104 degrees. Laura commented that it was one of the most international settings she's been in, and she's lived all over. You hear bits and pieces of conversations in Hungarian, Italian, French, Spanish, even Hebrew. It is not uncommon to see people reading the newspaper or playing chess in the pool.

After spending a good half hour getting all pruney in the hottest pool, I noticed with a mixture of fear and excitement that there was another room we had yet to enter. Once inside, I noticed a very small pool that looked like a jacuzzi, save for the fact that no one was in it. I soon found out why: The water was frigid, probably 50 degrees. I hesitated for a while, until this white-haired woman, who couldn't have been younger than 70, jumped right in after counting to three in French. Once again, I followed...and the woman turned to me and said, this time in English, "Son of a bitch!"

The sensation of going back and forth from the hottest to the coldest pools did wonders for my aching muscles. Laura favorably described it to being subtly pricked with a bunch of tiny needles all over your body. That sounded a little too harsh for me. But it's hard to describe exactly what it did feel like. It felt like...like diving into a pit of koosh balls. It was a very unfamiliar, but pleasant sensation.

Let me go back to the tour for a second. It was very good. Unlike the other cities I'm visiting, Budapest is simply huge, without a single convenient Old Town consolidating the historical sights. As opposed to Krakow and Prague, which have several hundred thousand people, Budapest is a city of millions. So, if nothing else, the Absolute Standard Walk was essential in terms of getting our bearings in this sprawling place and helping acclimate ourselves to the city's subway and cable-car system (One of the best legacies of the Communist era, in all the cities I've visited thus far, is their cheap tram systems. I think it's a lovely way to travel. I don't think it's a coincidence that my two favorite cities in the U.S. -- San Francisco and New Orleans -- both have cable cars.)

But public transportation was just a practical matter. The tour worked because the two guides did not just rattle off a lot of names and dates, but tried to make sense of their city and engage the group on a personal level. In fact, everyone we met in Budapest was exceedingly friendly. For example, when Laura and I arrived at the Hotel Astra just before 9 a.m., after our journey on the night train, the folks at the desk fed us breakfast and allowed us to check in early and shower.

When you look around the faded Communist infrastructure of the city, or learn how poor most of the country is, you wonder how its people can be so mellow and cheerful. It must be the baths.

Anyhow, our tour guides were wonderful. Adam, in particular, a tall lanky Hungarian, was quite fun. He told Laura and I that he was eager to visit the American West, having grown up on German Westerns that were filmed in Croatia's Plitvice Lakes National Park (and where, incidentally, I'll be traveling this Thursday).

"Where can I see Indians?" he asked.

He also shared with us that a lot of Hungarians had a kind of nostalgia for the Communist days. He said then, at least people had job security. He told us that his parents were having trouble paying for their mortgage and their children's school, things that were taken for granted before. "Everything is about money now," he said. He compared the Communist system to a giant lawnmower that made everyone the same and then said something that just stopped me in my tracks: "If you were OK being like everyone else, Communism wasn't so bad. If you wanted to be in an individual, it was not so good."

"In other words," Laura told me, "You wouldn't have done well."

We saw the changing of the guard at Heroes Square, the great Opera House, and climbed many stairs to the castle grounds and St. Stephen's Cathedral, where we had a wonderful view across the Danube of the old Parliament building, much too big now that Hungary is no longer the seat of a vast empire.

We passed a statue of a dark, hooded figure known only as Anonymous, who left Hungarians the record of their founding by the seven hill tribes, led by Arpod...or was it Lothar?

Touching the pen of Anonymous, known as such because we don't know his name, is supposed to give special luck to writers. That was a no brainer for me and yet another tourist photo opportunity.

That night, we had dinner at Tabini Terasz on the Buda side of the river, and I had the best food thus far in the trip: My taste of Laura's veal paprikash. Afterwards, we dashed off to a Hungarian folk music and dance concert, something Laura was very keen to do. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical, my view of regional folk music looking something like this:

But I was pleasantly surprised. It was the music of Bela Bartok, inspired by Hungarian folk traditions -- or was it the other way around? Anyhow, it was spectacular, a weird mixture of Irish step-dancing, German oom-pah, pah slap-dancing, Bulgarian singing and ballet...but with a cowboy spirit -- very competitive and raucous. Laura and I enthusiastically leaped to our feet during the several curtain calls (Personally, I could get used to four, which seems to be the Eastern European standard.)

Our next day, we trekked to the outskirts of the city to see Statue Park, the idea of an ingenious entrepreneur who decided to save in a single place all those ugly, over-size statues of Lenin, Marx and happy workers and soldiers that littered the city before the the Soviet's quiet retreat 2 decades ago. I couldn't help think of it as a garden of fallen idols, in a way. It was weird to see those once larger-than life statues dwarfed by even larger capitalist billboards for perfume and shampoo. I also couldn't help notice that this was the only place in the city where they didn't charge to use the bathroom. If nothing else, I suppose, the fall of Communism has brought with it a recognition of our inalienable right to pee for free.

Laura posed in the front seat of a Trabant, a Soviet era junk car known for continually breaking down, and we watched a creepy black-and-white film made by the KGB to train Hungarian agents on how to spy on their countrymen, which made us both think of the great German movie that came out last year, "The Lives of Others," about the last days of the Stasi, the infamous East German intelligence agency.

We spent the bulk of the day at the Great Market Hall in Pest, a cavernous three floor building where local merchants sell everything from sausage and paprika (everything in Hungary is made with it,it seems) to hand-made wooden chess sets and embroidered scarves and, yes, even fur pelts. This bazaar, unlike any I've been in, is in keeping with the mellow, friendly spirit of the city. The merchants will explain to you how something works or how it's made, but if you move on, there's no attempt at a hard-sell. They just say thank you and goodbye. I didn't get a pelt, but Laura surprised me by buying me one of the Transylvanian chess sets I coveted.

On our last day in the city, we returned to the Gellert Hotel for a final chance to take the waters. This time, I was determined to get the full experience and add a massage to the bill. When we discussed it earlier, Laura was less than enthusiastic about this option. "I'm afraid some giant Eastern European lady is gonna start pounding me," she said. "Eez good for you!" she said with a Slavic accent, a comment I asked her to repeat several times on the trip because it made me giggle so much. So Laura skipped this part, but encouraged me to go ahead.

When I reached the massage area, I was no longer sure this was going to be so good. In addition to a long wait, the first masseuse to emerge was this bald, beefy Hungarian man who wore two large gloves that looked like welding mitts. But it turned out to be fairly gentle -- stop your giggling at home -- and added to the overall relaxation experience.

Our afternoon couldn't have been more different. We went from the baths to the House of Terror. The House of Terror is an amazing museum -- probably the best I've ever experienced -- devoted to the country's "double occupation."

This building was used as a Gestapo headquarters by the Nazi-affiliated Arrow-Cross party during World War II. After the war, and with a low threshold for irony, the country's Communist ˝liberators˝ used it as an intelligence-gathering and interrogation center. Our guide at Absolute Tours chillingly said of the building: "Many people disappeared here."

Outside, votive candles burned beneath the pictures of those who entered the building and never came out. Because of it's location and use, the museum had a powerful "you are there" quality to it. Like the Holocaust Museum in DC, it also was highly interactive, but unlike that museum, was conceptual in addition to being historical. For example, in order to evoke the lean days of the 1950's, when lard on bread was often dinner, bricks meant to look like blocks of lard formed a labryinth of winding corridors in one room. In another room, which once housed the building's voluminous intelligence files, facsimiles of real reports lined the floors, walls and chairs. Proceeding to the lower depths of the building, there were exhibits that needed no embellishment: the torture rooms, with low-hanging wires and electrodes. One cell contained a noose. Another had an open faucet against the wall, which interrogators used to simulate drowning. It was hard not to be overcome with a sense of shame that our own country has adopted methods once used by such brutal regimes.

The exhibit made a persuasive case that the Nazis and the Soviets were flip sides of the same coin. To underscore that point, a video simulated an Arrow Cross agent after the war quickly changing his clothes and adopting the uniform of a Russian solider. It was extremely powerful.

Sadly, that was Laura's last experience on the trip. Because she has less vacation time than me, we'd always planned to say goodbye in Budapest. Still, it was hard. She made the trip much more fun and exciting, and I'll miss her. Eez not so good.

That night, I boarded yet another night train, this time for Krakow, where I shared a spacious second-class compartment with a Hungarian my age named Rudolph. He's an accountant and a marathon runner who was on his way to Poland to take a job with Shell Oil. He offered me some home-made pastry and peppered me with English vocabulary words from the book he was reading, Hardy's "Jude the Obscure." This was one of those events that convinces me that if God does exist, he has a wicked sense of humor. "Jude the Obscure" was one of those books I could never get through in school, and had to rely on Cliffs' Notes to pass muster. So I was of little help to the poor man.

"What is mischty?" he asked.

"Hmmm...."

"Do you know what is blackpot?" he asked.

"Um, can't help you there. Sorry."

He then switched to accounting terms, and I actually felt on surer footing here.

"What is pilfer?"

"Pilfer is when I take money from your pocket."

"What is embezzlement?"

"Well, let's say your my employer. You give me some money, but I spend some of it for myself. That's embezzlement."

"You seem to know a lot about this," he said, and then started to crack up. I guess I'd walked right in to that one, playing straight man to a Hungarian accountant.

After arriving in Krakow, I made my way across a large square to the Pesonjat Trecius, a lovely hotel above a non-descript store front. On the way -- I swear I'm not making this up -- three different people asked me for directions in Polish. I was feeling a little tired after the 11 hour train trip, complete with 6 passport checks (we only passed through 3 countries, so I don't know where the heck the other three people came from), and though there is at least a remote geneological connection to Poland, I was beginning to wonder whether something had happened during my sleep. First, a Hungarian stumps me on English vocabulary words. Then, people start asking me for directions in Polish. How did I become the answer man all of the sudden?

Still, it made me wonder if it wasn't a good time to buy Lotto tickets.

Go ahead: Ask me a question, any question.

The answers are:

11
The Council of Trent
The Hoot-Smalley Tariff
and
b)

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and Buses)

2007-11-01T19:24:00.000-04:00

Note: Sorry it´s been a while. First, there´s been some good real life that got in the way of blogging. And some mishaps, described below, that prevented me, despite my best intentions. Most recently, the problems have been technical. The keyboard is completely different in this part of the world, filled with Teutonic symbols like Ö, and Ő and even Ü. And then, when I´d do something wrong, I´d get error messages in Hungarian, a language even more incomprehensible than Czech, which alerted me to the fact that I´d messed up, but not exactly how. Anyway, we´ve been having a really GÖÖD time.

And now back to our story...

When you travel on a budget, everything doesn´t always go according to plan. Sometimes that´s good and sometimes that´s bad. Good was when the furnicular broke in Prague and Laura and I were forced to take the long way to the castle, through some picturesque woods on a sunny fall day. Bad was when we couldn´t find the bus station Monday morning, couldn´t speak to anyone who might be able to help us, nearly missed it, and yours truly had to ride about two hours sitting on the inside steps on the middle of the bus.

You do see some interesting things from that vantage point, though: At one town, a girl came on carrying a pet rat in a bright pink cage.

Anyway, the arrival in Cesky Krumlov was worth the discomfort. Can I say something more about the weather? I realize that I´m going on and on about it, and should probably just shut up, but here´s the deal: When I read the extended weather forecast for this part of the world before I left, it showed nothing but rain for, like, the next 2,000 years. So our unbelievable record of sun these past few days has been nothing short of remarkable.

This helps in places like Cesky Krumlov that just ooze Old World charm. Though I have never been to Germany, it looks like I imagine some of Germany´s castle-dominated towns like Heidelberg and Rothenberg might look like: high on a hill, with narrow cobblestone streets, and an impressive castle built into the rock above. Add to that the gurgling Vltava river, which bisects the town, and some friendly locals, and it´s a really relaxing place to just amble.

The place looks like Prague´s Old Town, but on a much smaller scale. And the resemblance to Germany makes sense: Many German-speaking people moved here when it was part of the Austrian Hapsburg empire, and it was easy for Hitler to later claim the region -- then known as the Sudetenland -- as rightfully part of Germany. The annexation of the Sudentenland was one of the first land-grabs that ultimately erupted into World War II. After the war, a sort of ethnic-cleansing took place, and many German-speaking people whose families had been here for generations were forced to move to Germany. The town remained virtually empty and untouched during the Communist years, with the exception of a buildup of grit, giving a kind of lost-in-time, faded-over fairytale quality to the place. With its newfound prosperity, the town has again opened up to tourists, and has been used as a backdrop in several movies, most recently ˝The Illusionist.˝

The Pension Mysi Dira, where we stayed, was right on the water. We could hear the peaceful running of the river at night, and a set of picture windows opened up onto it and a view of a huge cathedral and forest below.

Aside from strolling and window shopping, the big draw was the castle, which amongst other notable things, has the oldest fully operational Baroque Theater in the world and a functioning bear pit where a family of three lives year-round -- bears, that is.

At one point, Laura turned to me and said,˝My kids would think it was so cool that we saw a castle with a live bear pit.˝

˝Forget the kids,˝ I said. ˝I think it´s really cool.

The theater, where original works by Mozart were performed, still has its original special-effect machines and set-change devices. Our guide spun a huge wooden wheel to show us how they created the effects of wind and galloping horses, and scraped his feet on a metal grate to simulate the sound of thunder. Backstage, we saw the elaborate system of ropes and pulleys that allowed a series of 8 stage hands to move huge backrops in a matter of seconds.

But mostly, we ambled. An observation: No matter where you go in the world, any town that draws a reasonable share of tourists will have at least one shop that sells hand-made soap.

Discuss.

Another happy accident -- Laura wanted to go to a confectionary shop for some sweets. We both asked for hot chocalate, and got something wonderfully unexpected: a cup of gooey melted chocalate that we had to eat with a spoon. It was richer than chocalate mousse, decadent and amazing.

But since accident karma seems to come in pairs, lest there be an imbalance in the force, I would be remiss if I didn´t tell you about our ride back to Prague.

The tourist office in Cesky Krumlov listed a departure time for the bus of 6:30 p.m. It never came. As we huddled in the evening chill, we waited as the listed 7:15 bus also never came. When a bus finally arrived in the Prague entry lane, Laura used her language skills (she speaks Russian, a sister language) to learn from the driver that the last bus to Prague had come and gone hours before. She defiantly pointed to the schedule, and the driver dismissed her with a wave as the luggage assistant chuckled to herself. We had reserved a room in Prague for the night, and had already paid for a tour in the morning, so we were anxious to return. I knew there was also a train to Prague, and we quickly raced down the hill to flag a taxi, where we found an extremely helpful driver. This guy was a savior. After checking times on his cell phone, he told us that the last train would be leaving in 30 minutes from Cesky Budejovice, some 25 km. away. He drove, in the rain, like a man on a mission, quickly darting through winding, hilly roads as a light rain began to pour.

Once we arrived, he helped carry our luggage into the station and, perhaps sympathizing with our predicament, spoke to the ticket lady in Czech on our behalf. He turned out to be wrong: the train actually arrived at that time, but wouldn´t depart for another hour. But the hassles weren´t over there. Laura searched for a bathroom. The ticket lady told her it had closed an hour earlier. Almost all public restrooms in this part of the world have an attendant who charges a fee for admission. As in the musical ˝Urinetown,˝ you have to pay to pee. And that means that you´re at the mercy of the attendant. That person had, alas, gone home.

Thus, we were both somewhat surly when we arrived after midnight at the Hotel Anna, on the outskirts of Prague´s red light district. When the shower offered nothing but frigid cold water the next morning, I nearly had an Ugly American incident.

A final word on karma: The next day, back at Prague´s Old Town Square, I was doing some shopping when I suddenly found myself surrounded by a throng of Hare Krishnas, singing in Czech. I guess the Hare Krishnas, like hand-made soap stores, are always with us.

Another addendum: I have gotten a few comments (privately) about the Sex Machines Museum in Old Town Square. I swear I was joking about the wooden vibrator! But to show that truth is stranger than blogging, that same night as my encounter with the Hare Krishnas, I found a brochure for the Sex Machines Museum that showed, on page two, a picture of a vibrator, an early German invention made of, yes, wood and metal, looking rather uncomfortably like a flour mixer.

Um...discuss.

The day after our adventure in Ceskzy Krumlov was devoted to a tour of Prague´s Jewish quarter, known as Josevov.

The incredibly-useful Rick Steve´s Guide to Eastern Europe describes Josevov as ˝the most interesting collection of Jewish sites in Europe.˝ While the Nazis decimated Jewish communities in Poland and elsewhere, Prague´s Jews were allowed to collect and archive their treasures. The archivists were ultimately killed in concentration camps but their work survives...part of which was ultimately planned as Hitler´s ˝Museum of the Extinct Jewish Race.˝

Our guide was an affable elderly elf of a man, who spoke quietly and sometimes to just one person in the group, checking off names and dates from thousands of years of history in a way that was often more dizzyzing than illuminating. But he´d obviously been around for a while, and could speak humorously, and movingly, about the lives of Jews and other Czechs under Nazism and Communism. Of Communism, he said: ˝It was like elaborate theater. We pretended to work, and the State pretended to pay us.˝

Of the lives of Jews during World War II and after, he said it was ˝like living on the edge of knife.˝ He related the story of his friend Hannah, whose family had lived in Terezinstadt, the show-camp outside of Prague where Jews and others were interned before going to more deadly camps like Dachau and Auschwitz. Her father was a carpenter. One day, one of the main buildings in the camp collapsed in a bad storm, and the Nazis ordered carpenters to set about rebuilding it. Almost all of the carpenters, now wise to the Nazi´s plans, refused. They were sent to Auschwitz and gassed. Hannah´s father alone agreed...but because he was the only carpenter left, the job took over a year. ˝By that time,˝ the guide said. ˝the war was over. His decision saved his life, and the life of his family.˝

Terezinstadt, incidentally, played a role in prolonging the extent of the Holocaust. It was there the Nazis sent the International Red Cross on a carefully controlled, and pre-planned inspection. The Red Cross´ positive report of that inspection is used to this day by deniers as proof that the Holocaust never happened.

If any further evidence were necessary to contradict such claims, however, it is this place, these formerly functioning synagogues once filled with vital people, talking excitedly and loudly, no doubt interrupting each other...now turned into museums for the tourists. They could no longer function as places of worship because their congregations had been decimated. The names of the victims line the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue, along with the dates of their transport and execution. The names were kept meticulously by Jews whom the Nazis had appointed as overseers of the ghetto, and who made an illicit copy to keep as eventual proof of what had been done under the regime.

It is next to impossible for the brain to accept the magnitude of such numbers like 77,000 killed, close to 3,000 of them children. In such circumstances, you try to hone in on something familiar, to help bring home and make sense of the vastness of such a tragedy. We saw the names of Madeleine Albright´s grandfather and Franz Kafka´s sister. Then Laura showed me the names of Marta and Janna Braunsteinova, Prague Jews who were killed in 1944. They are not even remote relatives -- my father´s extended family came from the Ukraine and had a different name -- but the similarity nonetheless had the effect of making that endless array of names and dates very real: It could have been you or someone you knew.

Architecturally, the best site of the Jewish Quarter is the Sephardic Spanish Synagogue, built in an almost Moorish style of elaborate patterns of five-pointed stars set against a huge dome. But the most evocative is the Old Jewish Cemetary, it´s 12,000 gravestones a reminder that for 300 years, this was the only burial ground allowed for Prague´s Jews. Because of the space, and the Jewish belief that the body should not be moved once buried, the tombs were piled atop each other, making the tombstones crooked and the cemetary a small plateau. One of those buried here is Reb Levi, famous scholar and mystic who is said to have created a golem, a Frankenstein-like creature that can be summoned and commanded at will. Like many people in this part of the planet, our guide had no problem accepting the truth of such stories or that Levi´s gravestone is a powerful guidepost to the spirit world. It is said that if you make a wish there, Levi will make it come true.

I didn´t understand everything our guide said about human beings ˝not being too far removed from the primordial forest˝ or Prague containing ˝outposts of positive energy˝ that our brains have become too complicated to comprehend. Nonetheless, I made a wish to myself and left a coin on Levi´s tomb.

Optimists in the City of Sharp Claws

2007-10-28T21:47:00.000-04:00

"Prague never lets you go... this dear little mother has sharp claws." -- Franz Kafka, real Czech writer of"The Metamorphisis," in which a man slowly turns into a cockroach

"There are moments when optimists should be shot." --Jara Cimrman, fictional Czech hero, who beat Kafka, Vaclav Havel, Martina Navratilova and every other national figure in a poll to find the "Greatest Czech of All Time," and would have won handily if not for the formality that he does not, in fact, exist

Folks,

It is now Monday morning, and I finally have a little time to write after spending two amazing days with Laura in Prague. It is quiet at the Pension u Medvidku, the hotel where we're staying, a medieval shell built atop a bustling brewery in this country that arguably makes the best beer in the world. In a way, the place combines some of the contradictions that make this country so fascinating and unique. It is, first of all, a very old place. The door to our room is bright red with the gold, starry emblem of some long-forgotten noble family on it. It is a huge door, with an ancient metal key, and closes with the cavernous thud of a bank vault -- you half expect Bach's "Tocatta in Fugue" to play whenever you open it a crack. The hotel is also a raucous business, one of the many entrepreuneral enterprises that exploded two decades ago when the Czech Republic exiled its Communists landlords and, seemingly overnight, started welcoming back the tourists.

You could accurately describe the city as Kafka-esque, filled with hovering old buildings and narrow streets that are just barely lit at night. But with the Communists gone, the only hidden menaces are ones of the imagination. There is almost no violent crime here. It was oddly comforting last night when Laura and I, trekking to a restaurant high on a dimly-lit cobblestone lane in the shadow of Prague Castle, smelled the unmistakable odor of pot smoke...coming from the local police barracks.

Because it is one of the few capitals of Europe to escape the bombing of World War II, and because it now is bursting with energy after the fall of Communism, there is this delicious mix of old and new here. It was one of the Eastern-bloc countries to most quickly embrace the West, but it is stubbornly clinging to its own uniqueness...or, more accurately, it is rediscovering it.

It is, to my way of thinking, refreshingly free of so much of the health consciousness and litigiousness we take for granted in the U.S. For example, the escalator leading down into the subway is the fastest I've ever seen -- getting on reminded me of the opening credits to "The Jetson's" where George races off the treadmill and into the wall. I nearly endured a similar fate. When we climbed the 400 winding steps up Petrin Tower, a 200 foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower that stands high above the city, it was hard not to notice that there was hardly anything, aside from a thin metal rail, seperating you from the elements -- no glass, no safety bars, no nothing. It's the kind of thing you'd never see in America. Fear of lawsuits alone would prevent it. (Those of you who know me well know that I have a long and tortured history with going on vacation and periodically forgetting that I have a terrible fear of heights. It happened climbing the pyramids at night. It happened in the hot air balloon in Charlotsville -- we do not need to revisit those regrettable incidents. Of course, it happened again, this time early in the trip. I was white-knuckling the hand-rail at about foot 150 when I stopped for a moment of vertigo, and it was only the nonchalant voices of small children giggling above me that led me to swallow my fear and go on. Well, that and the people grumbling in foreign languages behind me. But I digress...) It was well worth it. We were rewarded, upon reaching the top, with a breathtaking panoramic view of the Old City in all its resplendent fall color.

And everyone smokes here. They smoke in the hotel, the coffee houses, the restaurants. It seems like there are two sections: smoking and black-lung. The Czechs, it seems, had enough of Big Brother under the Soviets, and the attitude now is appropriately laissez-faire.

A final note. Despite shaking off the yoke of Communist tyranny, the Czechs have yet to embrace vowels. That's why the language gives you words like krk (neck), zmrzlina (ice-cream) or even a vowel-less sentence, "Strč prst skrz krk." (Put your finger down your throat--just imagine singing "Behind Blue Eyes" in Czech.) There’s a joke about a Czech man going to see an optometrist. The optometrist points at the letters p r c h l n k v d on his board and asks the man if he can read them. “Read them?” exclaims the Czech. “I know him!” Anyhow, it is not one of the easiest languages to follow or adopt. Parisians, I'm told, are willing to forgo some of their snobbery toward Americans if we at least make an attempt to speak their language. Not so in Prague. Those times I've attempted to speak in Czech have met me with looks of pity and concern -- and occassionally disdain--and are soon followed by answers in perfect English.

Anyhow, back to the story. We arrived in Prague after a night at the Ibis Hotel near Heathrow Airport in London. That came after two unusually stressful and sleep-deprived weeks for me in Washington and a seven-hour flight that, as usual for me, was a form of medieval torture. When you're 6'4, it is very hard to keep your psychological tray table in its upright and locked position when you have a foot of leg room, and the person in front of you is a fidgety recliner.

So we more than a little groggy in the cab en route from Prague Airport to our hotel. Along the way, we passed a lot of grey, depressing urban sprawl, a sign that it will take some time before the stain of Communism is fully erased from this country. After unpacking, we quickly made our way along the banks of Vltava River, past the 14th century Charles Bridge, into the Old Town Square. The square is flanked by the centuries old St. Nicholas and Tyn Churches, a statue to Jan Hus, one of the first protestants who was burned at the stake a century before Martin Luther preached, and the Astronimical Clock, which marks the hour with a crowd-drawing tableua: First, Death tips his hourglass and pulls the cord, ringing the bell; then the windows open and the 12 apostles parade by, acknowledging the gang of onlookers; then a slightly-choked rooster crows. The hour is past.

We perused a store that sold elaborately-carved and painted marionettes, walked around an exhibit of art made with chocalate, and passed a bustling outdoor market that sold everything from figs and chess sets to scarves and large fur pelts (I became obsessed with the notion of not leaving Prague without a pelt). We also idled by the Museum of Sex Machines. I swear, I am not making this up. Though it certainly fired my imagination --"See the first vibrator...made of wood!" I envisioned -- Laura drew the line and said no.

We ate dinner at the Klub Architektu, a wonderful place in a medieval cellar. Most Czech restaurants do not have private tables, and this turned out to be a delightful thing. We shared our meal with a very funny and engaging couple from Stratford-on-Avon, both teachers and musicians. The food here has been unbelievable. It's big on meat -- wild game like rabbit, boar and venison. Laura and I both had lamb braised with raisins and wild mushrooms in a sweet wine sauce, which I downed with an amazing Slovak beer.

From there, we indulged in the local theatre speciality--"Black Light Theatre." It sounded pretty cool, relying on the use of ultraviolet black light to create intricate optical illusions combined with a lot of movement (think Synetic Theater in Washington) and a dash of Theater of the Absurd. There are easily 30 Black Light Theaters in Prague, and we went to one of the most recommended, The Image, which showed a "Best of" retrospective Saturday night. Sadly, it turned out to be mostly a dissapointment, combining two art forms I despise: Benny Hill-style slapstick humor and interpretive dance. It was like an illicit marriage of the worst of high- and low-brow entertainment. Laura didn't like it either. It might have been the performance we saw. And it might have been just us. But the audience went bezerk afterwards --I don't know if I've ever seen that many curtain calls. My perception of the performance was somewhat altered by the fact that into the third routine, my body crashed from exhaustion. I kept dozing and waking up, and fell into one of those half-asleep, half awake fugue states where the action on staged merged into my subconcious and the hurried events of the past two weeks...in a way that could be described as Kafka-esque. It was odd...and I wasn't unhappy to leave.

We had been warned to expect cold weather and lots of rain, and that's why we were pleasantly surprised to wake up Sunday to a beautifully sunny fall day. Being Czech Independence Day, we walked the streets to the intermittent sounds of fireworks and marching music. We passed a powerful memorial, erected in 2002, that served as a reminder of what independence means to this just-recently emancipated country. Called the Monument to Victims of Communism Who Survived, it depicts a series of sculptures that represent how people atrophied under the totalitarian regime: they do not die, but slowly disappear, one limb at time, until the final sculpture at the top of the hill is nothing but a rotted shell.

A happy accident -- the furnicular to the top of the aformentioned Petrin Hill was closed--- meant Laura and I spent two hours (Did I mention it was a spectacular fall day?) walking through a forest lined with fruit trees, with views of palaces and churches everywhere, to the top of the hill. Lots of pictures were taken. (There is no USB port at this computer, so that part will have to wait...until later, if not until I come home. But trust me: It was breathtaking.) At the bottom of the tower is a hysterical exhibit in honor of the fictional Cimrman, who is a great example of the offbeat sense of humor here. Wiseman, inventor, and "autodidact gynecologist," he is known for creating a host of useless objects and for never getting credited for his ideas ("You can't just have two sisters," he told Chekov. "How about three?")

We walked down the cobble-stoned Nerudova Street, where wealthy families are still identified by elaborate murals over their dooors--two violins for an instrument-maker, a set of scales for a lawyer. We climbed the hill to Prague Castle to the sounds of music: classical, choral and, at the top, Czech folk music. Inside the castle grounds, we spent the bulk of our time in St. Vitus Cathedral, a powerful symbol in this largely Roman Catholic country. In addition to some of the first Hapsburg kings, St. Wenceslas (as in the Christmas carol of the Good King) is buried here. In fact, Czech Kings were crowned right in front of Wenceslas' tomb in a chapel with precious jewels as big as paving stones set into the wall. There was also a masterful stained glass window designed by Art Noveau/Art Deco artist Alfons Mucha.

After spending a half hour at the Toy and Barbie Museum, which traced the evolution of European toys from wooden Noah's Ark pieces and scary Aryan child dolls to the perhaps even scarier Barbie, we went back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. This splurge came courtesy of my mom and Bob, who gave the splurge funds as a Christmas/Chanukkah present, and my goodness, it was memorable. After passing the police precinct with the pot smoke, we went to the Restaurace David. To set the ambience: You have to buzz even to get in. It's a quiet candlelit place with Czech art on the walls. It's a place where the waitors meticulously remove and add silverware after every course -- the Czech equivalent, I guess, of the guy who cleans the crumbs off your table, both practices that make me feel like I've done something wrong somehow. We sat near a trio of friendly Italians. Laura, who looked amazing in a fancy black dress, had a Czech meal of wild boar and potato pancakes with blueberries. I had a more international dish of venisson with cranberries. The waiter was friendly, and brought out a patte appetizer and, at the end, a dessert port in a huge glass with a one-foot stem -- both compliments of the chef. Even though the restaurant is too expensive for the average Czech, by American standards it is only mid-range. It was, nonetheless, one of the most memorable evenings we've had together. So thanks, Mom and Bob!

And with that, I'll leave you. Tomorrow we're off to the small town of Cesky Krumlov, about three hours south.

Until later....

Andy

I Be Gone: A Final (Final ) Test of the Emergency Odney System

2007-10-24T22:32:00.000-04:00

"You Will Be Goning On Vacation"
--actual fortune from actual fortune cookie received at a recent Chinese meal

I'm sending this just to test that the automatic e-mail thingy works. The final weeks leading up to a vacation are always hard, but these have felt like the Bataan Death March. I am sleep-deprived, caffeinated and ready to fall down. But pity me not, dear reader, for I am about to embark on a grand adventure. I am about to...gone.

I will sleep on the plane.

Further Trials

2007-10-24T15:04:00.001-04:00

This is to see if the e-mail function works.

Trial and Error

2007-10-24T12:32:00.000-04:00

Well, people have been telling me I should blog for a long time. So, I'm gonna try it this way rather than send e-mail dispatches home.