Writings

New writings from my most recent journals:

July 31 Guangzhou airport 6:24 am I lost a day going over the international date line

Wow! What a flight! Left LAX at at 11:30 pm sharp and landed 15 hours later. It was relatively easy. Leaving at night, a lot of leg room and width, only seven seats across the whole plane,  with two aisles, and only two of us seated next to each other. Had a window seat. Plane didn’t fly over ocean, but instead up through Oregon, Washington, Canada, and then across and down. Odd. Must be the polar route and shorter. Service on the plane was great. Good Asian fish meal. Poor tv with Chinese subtitles. But fairly comfortable overall. Then Guangzhou airport is HUGE! No one speaks English much. Long schleps around the airport and carts and moving sidewalks. Like a ghost town. Found a place open called Red House Leisure Restaurant. Ordered dumplings. First bite I ate in China was spicy HOT! At six in the morning! But I like that. And bought a precious bottle of water. Not sure what the dumpling filling is: don’t ask! I have no Chinese cash yet, but they said in broken English they would take American dollars. 

What does this trip represent to me? Of course, going full circle to where I began teaching at 22. But was I so much a teacher then or more of an adventurer? That was my identity then, as I trekked into the Himalayas past checkpoints and got caught seeing Jomsom, the pinnacle of my known world. Beyond there be dragons! I was an explorer and a sightseer. All over India. To Ceylon. Then Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Crete, Yugoslavia, Germany, London and back to the most exotic, Texas. Living alone as the sole American in a remote village. Learning Nepalese and staying up late recording folk songs that I translated for publication.

Beijing

Walking around the city today I smelled the smells of Beijing and saw intriguing alleyways. I was viscerally reminded of some of the great city walks in literature: TS Eliot captures the sights and sounds of London in The Waste Land, and James Joyce captures the sights and smells of Dublin in both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Leopold Bloom walking around Dublin at lunchtime in Ulysses.I was inspired by these literary creations today, and that’s not contrived to make me sound literate. I was thinking about how these authors captured the feel of each city. They used literary devices to give us the feel of being in each city. And they didn’t settle for conventional representations of a character performing a plot with the city as setting. Instead, they seemed to set out to capture the city itself through the eyes of a character. That was me today, walking along Nanchize Dajie smelling different smells that were not always pleasant, but definitely stimulating and interesting and a total part of the experience. Joyce was once criticized for including the smell of urine in Stephen Daedalus' experience, instead of politely ignoring it. Joyce and Eliot were more truthful than polite, representing urination and its smells. It doesn’t sound earth shattering, though it was at the time and still is, I think, because they went out of their way to capture true experience, not literary convention. 

2012 august 5 Sunday in Kathmandu

So the thing is, things are never like you think they’re going to be. China was very modern with well paved roads and well published rules, but no one followed them, or they had worked out how to drive at the very limit of good sense so that people were rarely hurt. Kathmandu, on the other hand, is chaos which I just have to embrace. For instance, people walked back and forth across the customs checkpoint, while most of us stood politely in line—and for me there’s always a little fear at border crossings. Then Kathmandu Guest House did not have a car waiting, so I had to change money first then find a taxi. I did neither. This guy that I trusted more than yesterday’s Chinese taxi driver swept me into an old mini bus with no shocks and the smell of petrol inside. Hmmm. The next half hour was horrendous. (I’ve seen signs here for thrill seeking, by which I suppose they mean bungee jumping or rafting. No need for that!) I’d forgotten that they drive on the left with the steering wheel on the right (how could I forget that?) and that holy cows are real beings standing in the streets to be avoided, narrowly, by all drivers hurtling through rugged, narrow streets that should be pedestrians-only but have oncoming traffic as well! The road surface is battering, abusive, in its constant thumping, and the close calls are so numerous that they become normal driving.

Thamel district is narrow streets with funky hotels and bars for tourists. Streets are too narrow, there are lots of aggressive rickshaw drivers pestering me to hop in, and scads of foreigners walking near midnight choosing bars to socialize in. I hadn’t remembered all this. The Kathmandu Guest House is disappointing after the Emperor in Beijing, only in that the rooms are not modern but ancient. Still there’s a fan and a flush toilet, so I can’t really complain that much. The structure and grounds are impressive, however, with gardens well manicured and columns painted white over a sunny yellow exterior wall color. Hippies and foreigners galore dot the ramshackle indoor and outdoor seating, speaking many languages, taking themselves seriously. I’m in the heart of tourist but low scale Kathmandu and it’s funky and interesting. In the dawn sun I can see people washing their hair and taking morning tea. A worker with a watering can and a Nehru uniform walks around from floor to floor watering the many potted plants. Birds are everywhere, flying, making sounds. It seems exotic and foreign to me here. I can read the script, Devanagari, a little, and so it doesn’t seem quite as much to shut me out as China. I feel like I’ve come home.