Asia/California 2023

 Part 1.  California

Since my last  travel blog, From Sri Lanka in 2018, I've managed several major trips (Sicily, France, Crete, northern Italy, Portugal, northern Spain, France again, Mexico City, the American west (several times)) and too many minor ones to mention, yet I failed to produce blogs about any of it.  I guess the bloom is off the blogging rose,  but this time I'm going to really try to overcome my senescent lethargy, and produce something readable.  Really.

The idea for 2023, effectively post-covid, was to 1) escape the winter, and 2) keep the aging skiing muscles from atrophying - seemingly contradictory goals.  The solution was to head to equatorial Asia with a 2 week stopover in snowy California.  And it really was snowy this year - so much so that our prospects of making it up to the Sierras weren't looking good when we left NY in mid January.  Weeks of precipitation had clogged up most of California, but somehow our timing was golden, and we drove up to Tahoe on dry roads and skiied Heavenly Valley and Kirkwood without any injuries to our declining bodies.  I don't know how much longer I can do this, but every year skiing proves itself to be like riding a bike - once you learn it you never forget it.  

Part 2.  Singapore

Our good luck held until our flight to Singapore pulled away from the gate at SFO, and then promptly returned to it.  The pilot invoked, ominously, mechanical problems.  I've been through this before.  It usually involves wheeling in a new airplane and a 12 hour delay.  But this time they fixed it, whatever it was, and 3 hours later we got off the ground for our 17h flight.  Despite flying steerage, we had great seats - basically a whole row to ourselves, all the movies you could watch, all the food you'd care to eat.  Flying all over the world like this is highly politically incorrect, frivolously burning barrels of fossil fuel, but it's really my only ecological crime, and I promise to cut back soon.  Very soon.  Really.  I promise

I expected Singapore to be modern, prosperous and expensive.  But I didn't expect that it had allowed technology to run amock.  Instead of passing out a universally standard index card-size immigration form to arriving passengers, like every other country, Singapore makes planeloads of weary travelers (did I mention that the flight was 17 hours?) scan a QR code, with their foreign, probably de-charged smartphone (no smartphone, no entry), download an app, launch it, scroll through pages of trivia, and electronically submit a virtual entry form before - not instead of - scanning your passport and being photographed and fingerprinted.  No paper forms accepted. In fact, no paper forms existed.  Singaporeans born today will evidently grow up with no knowledge of pen and paper, as you and I have grown up ignorant of oil lamps and chamber pots.  

Still, the modernity of the place does not disappoint.  One ride on the metro makes a New Yorker look down and slowly shake his head.  What have we been doing for the last century, as the world passed us by and figured out how to live?  How can we be happy, proud even, about our antiquated urban transport that is, by comparison, such an embarrassment?  E.g., no one gets shoved onto the tracks in Singapore, primarily because they aren't all psychopaths, but also because the broad, clean, well-lit platforms are separated from the tracks with sliding glass partitions that open in coordination with the opning train doors: A half-century-old technology that New York can't even be bothered to consider, let alone implement.  I guess I expected that, and the gleaming skyscrapers, the clean, manicured streets, the  orderly traffic, the utter lack of visible poverty, etc etc.  What I didn't expect is that it's an English-speaking city.  Not a city with a former British connection and thus with many people who can speak English, like, say, Hong Kong, but an English language city, like New York.  The road signs are in English; the TV is in English; the restaurant menus are in English.  Thank you Sir Thomas Raffles.  

I think that in that sense it must be unique in Asia.  But more startlingly, it's on the equator for fucks sake.  Maybe at the latitude of California or Scandanavia it wouldn't seem so out of place, but on the equator!?  Where's the torpor?  Where's the squalor?  How do they do it??  Well, I guess we know how they do it - enlightened fascism, shall I call it?  It's gotta make me rethink my unyielding opposition to authority.  Not enough to flip me over to the dark side - just rethink.  

Speaking of rethinking, we had an interesting afternoon with Aaron, an expat American we knew 20 years ago when we would occasionally show up at one of Cindy's houses on the same weekend.  Seems he is now in the wooden furniture business in Singapore, and he relieved us of any naive hopes we may still harbor about saving the natural world. According to Aaron, outside of Europe and America, and maybe even there too, all commerce is 100% currupt.  Re his little corner of it, he assured us that any written attestation on environmental sustainability barely rises to the level of a joke.  Embossed labels guaranteeing whatever is environmentally fashionable at the moment are offered up with every natural product he buys.  Want an affidavit certifying that the mahogany tabletops you're offering as part of that Danish coffee table set are made from trees farmed in Florida?  The Indonesian lumber company will gladly supply it along with the shipping container of logs clear cut from ancient rain forests on Borneo.  But there is a bright side, at least for us.  We don't have to lament the sad world our grandchildren will inherit, because we don't have any.

We had allocated only a few days for expensive Singapore, and then decided to start our planned train journey across Malaysia by flying to Kuala Lumpur.  Part of the motivation for that was to give us another shot at the Singapore airport, which we couldn't really appreciate the first time through, basically experienced as a frustrating effort to get out of the airport.  But this time we had several hours to take in the full splendor of what air travel should be.  I wish it had been longer.  

Part 3.   Malaysia

The authoritarian dictatorship of Singapore has brought incredible prosperity in a few decades.  Commie/crypto-fascist/Orwellian China did more good for more people than anyone anywhere anytime.  And yet, I loathe those regimes to their immoral cores.  But at least it makes you think, like, is there a tradeoff between morality and prosperity?  Here in Malaysia the Muslim government orchestrates the usual oppression of non muslims, and Malaysia is the most racist jewhating country outside of the Middle East, but they've built an architecturally impressive country, and the trains run on time.  So here in Asia, you could at least understand handing over your soul to the likes of Xi Jinping in exchange for a ticket out of millennia of rural destitude.  But what do our American fascists, i.e. Republicans,  offer us?  Shut down social security and medicare.  Women turn over their bodies to the state.  A police state for the poor, A theocracy for the middle class, no trains for anyone.  A bleak dystopia - and that's their sunny side.  And millions of people are lining up to trade their souls for that.  What's wrong with us?

A note about the jewhating racist Malaysians.  They couldn't be nicer to us, even though 60% of them think the Jews control the world financial system (Hitler would be proud) and virtually all of them think the Jews stole Judea from the arabs, and they should give it back and return to Auschwitz.  It forces me to think in a way I'd rather ignore.  The fact that a majority of the people I pass on the street here want me dead is more than disconcerting.  Of course, it doesn't come up.  Don't ask don't tell.  I'm a Jew and an atheist, but the racists couldn't care less about theology.  Atheist is no get-out-of-the-oven-free card.  My American passport, my shiksa wife, provide superficial protection.  I feel shame for participating in the sham.

Still, I can't avoid thinking about being so consensually loathed.  Blacks in America, particularly in red states, must feel this sort of thing, but it's not the same.  A black person buying a condominium in a white neighborhood in Tallahassee is well aware that most of his neighbors think he's unfit for anything more than cleaning their streets or cooking their fries, or for being their slave, for that matter.  But no one wants him dead.  They just want him to stay in his place in society - his low place, way below them.  The veiled woman who cheerfully sold me a ticket for the fast train to Penang wouldn't tell me to sit in the back of the train if she found out I was a Jew; she'd tell me to get out of her country, to get out of everyone's country, to get out of existence.  The Jews don't have a place - any place.  It's not the same thing.

And just why are all the women, even little girls, veiled here?  Even if I can put aside for a moment the racist symbolism it expresses to the likes of me; even if the Moslems had an epiphany and realized they wished the Jews no harm after all, I'd still be appalled by the veil.  What an awful way to live.  I'm no scholar of Islam, but the explanation I always hear is that they do it because it suppresses male lust.  Nonsense, but let's go with it.  Instead of burdening half the population with the odious task of mollifying the other half, why don't Moslem men take responsibility for their own libidoes?  A modest proposal:  let the women wear bikinis wherever they venture in these hot climates, and mandate that the men wear blindfolds in public (and be accompanied by an older female relative, of course, to lead them across the street), under penalty of flogging, or worse.  I anticipate the usual objections to my scheme - mostly involving the divinely ordained role of women as servants and toys - but let's just try it out for a century or two.  After all, we can always go back to the old, tried-and-true ways.  Just ask the supreme court.  

Our plan for Malaysia was to make 3 long stops - Kuala Lumpur, the Cameron Highlands and Penang Island.  We soon dropped the Highlands, for reasons of logistics and safety, and had to replan everything else.  KL was on the agenda because I wanted to see the Patronis towers (the Moslem world's twin towers, still standing) and because any big city is always worth at least a few days.  Penang because of my love for panang curry.  As it happens we didn't go up the Patronis towers, and the island may not be the namesake of the curry, but we had a great time nonetheless.

Jeez, people are friendly here.  A guy, seeing us a little puzzled about which exit to take from the subway, ended up walking us a half mile  through teeming streets to our hotel in Chinatown. Chinatown KL was much like other such places I've seen - crisscrossing alleys lined with people selling delicious food.  But in this case it was overshadowed by the second tallest building in the world, the Merdeka tower, looking a bit like a black monolith from another solar system.  We couldn't enter it because it hasn't opened yet.  The locals are a bit mocking about how long it's taking to get it up and running, proving they're not from  New York, where a 3-station subway extension takes 50 years to build.  So, yes, the architecture is pretty amazing, but the best thing we found in KL was the beef rendang at a halal buffet over a parking garage near the botanical gardens.  Vaux le voyage, as the Michelin guide would put it.  

Penang is actually an island a mile off the Malay coast in the Andaman sea, but the main feature isn't so much the tropical rain forests and beaches as it is the (ex-colonial) city of George Town.  We ended up spending a week there, in a pretty shabby hotel, but we must have liked it since we originally booked for 3 days and then kept adding to it. It's a mix of cultures - less Moslem-dominated than KL, with beautiful Buddhist and Hindu temples and Chinese clan houses.  Our most notable experience was hiking up 800 m Penang hill, on a 90/90 day (oF / %humidity).   It's about the same height as Mt Tam, which I think of as a stroll, but it was hellishly hard.  I think my days of strolling up mountains are over.  I'm self diagnosing cardiac insufficiency, or maybe just youthfulness insufficiency.  Beth took it in stride, but she's 17 days younger.  There's a reward at the top - a cafe with a wide selection of kacang fruit bowls.  This is a dessert we discovered on our last trip to Southeast Asia; shaved iced smothered with fresh fruit and various delicious syrups and a smattering of add-ons.  Almost worth the climb.  We got down via the venerable funicular - the way everyone else comes up - which is a pretty thrilling ride if you're in the first car. 

Part 4.  Thailand

We left Panang the way we came - by ferry, with the notable asymmetry that the taxi to the hotel, from the touristy ferry dock, cost 30 Malaysian Ringget, about $US 7, but the taxi back, called for us by the hotel, cost 6 Ringget.  More evidence that you're probably not far off to always assume that if they know you're a tourist, you're a mark.  Our next destination was an island in Thailand and was going to require several iffy transportation steps, so we allocated 3 days for the journey, just in case.  We got off to a rousing start by missing the train to the Thai border.  Well, not simply missing it, but getting to platform 2 a half hour early while it left from platform 4.  That put us on the next train, 2h behind schedule, with a 5 minute window to make it through Malaysian border control before they closed for the day.  somehow we made it, and were able to buy tickets on the Thai side for the last train out that day.  Pleasant surprise: we had to buy couchettes on a sleeper car.  I haven't done that in 50 years, and it turns out to be a great way to travel.  Gotta do it more often.  First, vendors run up and down the isles selling delicious food at third world prices.  After sufficient time to eat it, the porter comes down the isle and makes everyone's bed.  Unfortunately we were only going about 5 hours (I think the train went overnight to Bangkok) so we had to get off at the small city of Surat Thani at midnight.  Knowing this I booked the closest hotel to the train station I could find, about 2 miles away.  Midnight at the Sura Thani train station is not a happening place, and there were no taxis to be had.  A couple of guys on motorcycles offered to take us to the hotel, but as they had no solution for our luggage, we passed.  Just when we were giving up all hope, one of the motorcycle guys came back with a pickup truck, thus saving us from a long, rural walk in the dark.  Our hero, but it gets better.  The hotel was closed and dark, and unresponsive to doorbell rings, knocks, and phone calls.  On the brink of resigning ourselves to a night in a grungy train station, our hero went around to the back of the hotel and somehow found, and roused, the manager, who reluctantly let us in and showed us to our (very nice) room.  In this case, the service provided by the taxi was well worth the tourist supplement.

The next day we had another glitch, when we couldn't find the van that was supposed to take us to the next ferry, to the island of Ko Samui in the gulf of Thailand.  No one speaks English here, off the tourist track, but another very helpful guy, a bus driver at the train station, told us, tirelessly using Google translate, that we should take the local bus to the ferry company office in town (the Sura Thani train station is 10 miles from Sura Thani.  Go figure.) and take the van from there.  that worked, and we eventually found ourselves on a lumbering car ferry slowly crossing the straight to the island.  Since we hadn't used up all the time allowed for this travel section, we had 2 extra days before our next hotel reservation, so we hastily found a place not far from where the ferry took us, and settled in to wait it out.  The Rajapruek Hotel turned out to be a tropical paridise, with 2 swimming pools and a beautiful beach, so the two day wait wasn't a chore.  

There's gotta be hundreds of beach resorts catering to westerners all over Ko Samui.  I picked one, called Bandara, on the north shore, lined up with a dozen others along the beach, to be our 5 day indulgence.  If Rajapruek is a tropical paradise, Bandara is a luxury tropical paridise.  Our bed is 10.5 feet wide. You just have to close your eyes to the business model - hundreds of smiling locals, some of whom I'm told are from Burma, scurrying around fluffing the pillows, cleaning the pools (there are 4), serving drinks on the beach, offering massages etc etc.  Do they hate us, behind the smiles?  I find it easiest just tell myself I've earned it, scurrying around someone else's laboratory for years, while "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us", as the Soviets used to say.  Maybe they really were paying us, if I can afford places like this.  This is our third Thai beach vacation in 6 years - Phuket, Krabi, and now this.  Habit-forming, apparently.  And I'm not really much of a beach person.  

That wasn't such a handicap at our next beach hotel, In Chaweng, since there was no beach there.  It had apparently eroded away since my sister visited a few years ago and dined nightly at tables on the sand.  I had wanted to check out the main tourist beach on the island, Chaweng Beach, sort of a Vegas by the sea.  But the promotional literature neglected to mention the lack of any actual beach.  Rising seas?  Drifting sands?  Never did find out, but the honky-tonk Vegas is still there. So we whiled away our final couple of days on Ko Samui checking out the churning street scene and sampling the food and music. Next stop, Bangkok, our true destination.

Six weeks and 10,000 miles for a dentist appointment, and well worth it.  Dr Kitema restored my runt eyetooth to its youthful glory for less than the cost of a cleaning in Manhattan.  And she throws in, for free, the satisfying knowledge that you've evaded the American medical gouge-the-suckers monopoly.  We had planned a couple of extra days in Bangkok, in case there were any dental contingencies (there weren't) so we had to find something to do in a city where we had already exhausted all the A-list tourist attractions.  Bangkok is a super cool place just to walk around, and the food alone is worth the trip, but the best thing we found was the Ancient City, a private park in the suburbs.  Some rich guy decided that the problem with the Thai people was their lack of national pride pursuant to an underappreciation of their history and achievements.  Thus, the Ancient City - a 400 acre park in the shape of the country with dozens of life sized reproductions of major Thai monuments, temples and other wonders.  The Vatican meets Disneyland, Thai style.  It's too big to see in a day on foot, so they give you a bicycle on the way in.  It would have been even better if we hadn't previously been to most of the places represented.   

Finally, I would be remiss not to report on the most crushing disappointment we suffered in Bangkok.  The Bing Su is gone!  It came as a total shock, since the kacang in Malaysia was extant and terrific.  Both of these terms describe a ubiquitous Korean dessert we discovered a few years ago in Thailand - a hemisphere of shaved ice infused with sweet milk and smothered with fresh fruit and and/or countless other goodies.  Five years ago they were everywhere, and now they're gone.  Evidently, it was just a craze, like the hula hoop, or CB radio.  We found one little shop that had a version of it, but you could tell their heart wasn't in it.  I guess now we'll have to go to Korea.

Part 5.  Tokyo, Japan

I've always been afraid to go to Japan - way too expensive.  20 years ago we had free plane tickets that would have gotten us there but we deferred, in favor of Argentina, when I saw what a night in a hotel room the size of a coffin costs in Ginza.  But times change, and it's pretty convenient to change planes in Tokyo on a flight From Bangkok to New York.  So I found us a decent hotel in Nihombashi and arranged for a 4 day layover.  Good decision.  Turns out Tokyo is  another better-than-newyork city but without the overhanging spector of fascism you feel in Singapore.  And it's not prohibitively expensive for us anymore, so I guess we'll have to go back, since 4 days barely scratches the surface.  We lucked out with the weather (with afternoon highs approaching 60 oF), given that our tropical travel kit was not configured for winter, and hit a few of the obvious tourist highlights.  Continuing our tour of the world's greatest metro systems, we crisscrossed the city of 13,000,000 people without a hitch.

The highlight for us was probably our dinner with Junji, who was a visiting professor at U Mass a couple of years ago.  Junji and wife Ahmi and son Jun took us to an okonomiyaki restaurant, where you make your own Japanese pancakes at your 12" high table with a built-in griddle.  Delicious, if a little cramped for western legs.  9 year old Jun (who speaks excellent English, as do his parents) showed us his live beetle collection and took us trainspotting at a nearby railroad crossing, where we watched a dozen train lines doing the work of an advanced civilization.  Metro lines, commuter lines, shinkasen bullet trains.  And this was out on the edge of the city, not near the central stations.  It'll be sad taking the LIRR into Manhattan from the airport.

Everyone we encountered in our short time in Tokyo was exceptionally pleasant. Random people expressed interest in us and tried to be helpful.  We were even interviewed by a tv station when we arrived at Nirata airport.  So I mean no offense by what I'm about to say, but something about the friendly Japanese reminded me of the friendly Malaysians - groupthink.  In Tokyo everyone wears masks - indoors and outdoors - on the streets, in the parks, in the trains.  In Malaysia no one does.  In Malaysia everyone hates the Jews, in Japan everyone evidently hates the covid virus.  I hate the covid virus too, so I'm with the Japanese on this one, but masking outdoors?  Driving masked in cars alone?  It's just virtue signaling.  Thousands of masked pedestrians swarm around me on the sidewalk, forcing me to admit that people anywhere can come to believe anything, independent of reality, apparently.  I'll go out on a limb here and say that it's no more rational for the Malaysians to hate the Jews than it is for the Japanese to wear masks outdoors.  So this, then, is the human condition, and, clearly, it's hopeless.  The majority of people everywhere, everytime, everyculture, are unimpressed by reality.  Lincoln said you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.  Maybe so, but that doesn't help much.  QAnon, prayer, Auschwitz, Donald Trump, etc etc happen time and time again - all driven by mass delusion - and there's no end in sight.  Sorry to end on such a grim note, but the masked minions, sympathetic as they may be, focus the mind on how far we are from enlightenment.

Well, mission accomplished - winter evaded.  Time to fly home, back to where people drive on the right, as god intended.  Only a 13 hour flight - piece of cake.  And, according to JAL, we'll land one hour before we take off.  

A Walk in the Hamptons

 August 2020

It’s almost a cliché to note that inequality has risen to an obscene level in this country, but that remains a somewhat abstract concept to the many of us who rarely mix outside of our own caste. Of course, we all know about the gap between the rich and the poor, but if you’re somewhere in the middle, like me, you may not have a visceral feeling of just how obscene. I could give you statistics about the millions of people who fly first class from one vacation home to the next, or the millions more who can’t come up with the money to keep the heat on, but it wouldn’t have the impact that a few afternoons of strolling along the mansion-lined streets of eastern Long Island (which I recently did) or any number of the other haunts of the pampered class, can have in clarifying what American inequality really means.

I’m a middle class guy – richer than some, poorer that others – and in the Hamptons I’m still a middle class guy, but it feels different. In the city I’m part of a continuum, but out there there is no continuum. There are the barons and the peasants, and a middle class observer feels like a 5’8” outsider in the Swiftian world of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians.

On the back roads of East Hampton, enormous, and enormously elegant, leisure homes, hide behind high hedges, affording just enough of a peek to passers-by to allow for the desired sighs of admiration and envy. Hundreds of them – thousands of them. They are the playthings of people who are so far above me in wealth (and maybe of you too) that I can’t even fantasize about ever joining them. But there’s another caste of people in the Hamptons – people who are absolutely essential in making it what it is. I’m talking about the legions of laborers and gardeners, who work tirelessly to plant and maintain the flower beds and lawns and pristine landscaping that create an atmosphere of understated prosperity, and who are the people you mostly see on the roads and lawns, especially in this time of covid-induced timidity. Most of these guys toiling in the hot sun look like impoverished immigrants to me, and seem as far below my station as their employers are above it. The whole scene paints a stark picture of the feudal economy that our country is fast approaching. But what comes first to my mind is not so much England in the 13^th century, as the land of the Eloi and Morlocks in H.G. Well’s Time Machine, absent the unfortunate cannibalism. In that allegory, countless scurrying workers create a world of leisure and luxury for a population of sweet but ignorant layabouts. Of course, in that story the Morlocks are the bad guys, and the Eloi don’t understand the situation. In our world, it’s the opposite.

Which brings me to my theme - resentment. My father taught me not to count other people’s money, but it’s hard not to feel just a little jealous of all this wealth; and that jealousy slides over into resentment if I allow myself to contemplate the merit, or lack of it, in the American economic hierarchy. What did that 25 year old kid driving the Mercedes convertible do to deserve his status that the 4’11’ Guatemalan standing on a ladder to trim the 4 meter hedges neglected to do? Choose the right parents, most likely. But my resentment, however justified, is mild compared to the resentment felt by working class white people who, we are told, voted for Donald Trump and the Republicans en mass, and don’t feel the least bit sheepish about it, even now, as we enter a new depression. The received explanation is resentment – not of the upper crust; but of the blacks and immigrants who they see as their competition for their rightful place in the hierarchy, however low. Of course, in supporting the Republicans, they are supporting the worst of the baronial elitists – the very people who are unabashedly hastening our descent into feudalism. But we are naive if we think they have simply been bamboozled into thinking the Republicans are going to help them. They seem more than willing to accept their peasant fate in exchange for indulging their resentment of those they see as encroaching on their rightful status, and they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, but I maintain that their resentment is misplaced, and seriously so. If they insist on nurturing their resentments above all other concerns, then they should at least get it right. Resent the rich, who have effectively stolen the country, and who add to their booty daily by dominating the political system, rather than people who are marginally worse off, and whom you fear will become marginally better off.

I speculate that their failure to do so is attributable, at least in part, to their unfamiliarity with the gaping inequality that separates them from the true owners of the country - an unfamiliarity that applied equally to me, and probably to most of us, who haven’t had the chance to experience it on a personal level. I suspect that those undernourished hedge trimmers have a better feel for the wealth gap than I ever did. Those of us who want a more equitable economy have to recognize that these working class conservatives are our political enemies, and that their misplaced resentments stand in the way of our political goals. Maybe those resentments have been influenced by those who benefit from them; maybe not. But in any case, we shouldn’t be shy about trying to influence them ourselves, in the service of good, as we see it. So, in the spirit of the aforementioned Mr Swift, I have a modest proposal. Let’s encourage white, working class Trump voters to visit the Hamptons, or their nearest playground of the rich. Let them take in the whole width and breadth of these Shangri-Las. I’m guessing that walking among the miles and miles of beautiful estates will be more effective in stoking their resentment of the rich than simply knowing that people like the Koch brothers have 80 billion dollars, while they had to scrounge for the bus fare out to Riverhead. And I’m hoping that they will be affected the same way I was, and come away with a little more understanding of who their economic enemies are, and where they should be focusing their anger.

 

Sri Lanka 2018

Sri Lanka       Jan/Feb 2018    (Photos below text}

Arrival.

Sri Lanka is very far from New York - about as far away as you can get without leaving the hemisphere.  35 hours of travel time, including a long stopover in Shanghai.  That's not the shortest route, but it was the cheapest, and offered a chance, once again, to verify that the earth really is round, since we met up in Colombo, the next day, with our friends who did the same trip, but went eastbound, through Amsterdam.   I never learned why the capital is named Colombo (Christopher never visited), or why the second biggest city is named Kandy (hardly any sweets to be found), but I'm glad that they are, since those are almost the only towns in Sri Lanka with pronounceable names, as you'll see as this journal progresses.  Not only are we maximally displaced from home in space, but the 10 and a half (that's right - half) hour time difference makes us feel maximally displaced in time also.  

Our arrival was not auspicious.  It was pouring, and our taxi crawled the 20 miles into town from the airport in rush hour traffic, eventually taking us to the Colombo Fort district, where we learned that the hotel we had booked months before had no rooms. (Later we discovered that the hotel had no rooms because it didn't exist.)  We were shunted off to a tiny hotel miles away, which became our first taste of the guesthouse system in Sri Lanka that actually makes it very easy to travel here with little advance planning.  In response to a postwar tourist boom, thousands of small guesthouses have sprung up all over the country. They typically have a few rooms for guests with hotel-like amenities and are run by a resident family.  Most people speak at least a little English, and many are fluent.  The hosts fall over themselves to be helpful and welcoming, no doubt because they are competing with countless other helpful and welcoming guesthouse hosts. The whole system is enabled by booking.com, which lets travelers like us go online and scroll through dozens of offerings scattered throughout whatever the next town on our itinerary is.  We learned not to care too much exactly where a guesthouse is in any given town since the ubiquitous, and ridiculously cheap, tuk-tuks make it trivial to get around.  

The recent history of Sri Lanka is brutal and tragic, but to me it's just a tropical paridise, shimmering in the Indian ocean 7 degrees north of the equator.  The 2004 tsunami killed over 30,000 people, including 1700 trapped on the same coastal train that we took several times, uneasily watching the ocean the whole way.  Worse, the country was devastated by a civil war that lasted 26 years and killed 100,000 people, ending only in 2009.  Tourism is only feasible now that the Tamil rebels have been utterly defeated and the country is at peace.  I'm embarrassed to admit I don't know enough about these events to have an opinion.  Now that I'm here, I can't even tell the Sinhalese and the Tamils apart, and while it's hard to believe there isn't any lingering tension between them, as a tourist I'm completely oblivious of it.  The Tamils are Hindu and the Sinhalese are Buddhist, but the conflict was more ethnic than religious, and the two religions seem to get along fine.  At the large temple complex in Kataragama we saw thousands of followers of both faiths gather for a series of rituals, most of which seem to involve incense and fire. An outsider is hard pressed to tell who's who, but I think the people lined up to smash a coconut on a sacred rock were Hindu (makes as much sense as the wine and wafer thing, no?).  

Galle.

After meeting up with Fran and Jerry we left the crowded city of Colombo and took the aforementioned train down the  coast to the colonial town of Galle (don't even try to pronounce it), where once again our prebooked room (at the Friendship Villa) was unavailable (this time due to vandalism perpetrated by it's previous occupants), and once again we were shunted off to another guest house.  Still, we spent enough time at the Friendship Villa with F & J, where we had several excellent meals, to be befriended by the friendly hosts and to learn that, in Sri Lanka, there's such a thing as too much friendship. Apparently, the locals have learned to mine the throngs of western tourists by being nice to them, and this of course is one reason it's so pleasant to travel here, but it can get a bit overweening.  I think Beth kissed enough babies to run for office.  Galle Fort, the old town, is a well preserved Portuguese/Dutch/English settlement dating to the the 16th century and now filled with shops and restaurants catering to western tourists.  It is surrounded by ramparts that protected (just barely) the population from the 2004 tsunami, and that also afford beautiful views of the sea.  

In Galle we went to the first of many buffet style dinners we would enjoy in Sri Lanka, but this one had the distinction of being served in the smallest restaurant I can recall ever patronizing.  Fewer than a dozen or so diners are squeezed into a space about the size of my kitchen.  We sat on wooden blocks instead of chairs and served ourselves from clay pots lined up against the wall.  We were not issued plates, but ate off small wicker trays covered in Saran wrap.  This arrangement, presumably designed for space efficiency, proved less than satisfactory, but had the redeeming feature of teaching us the value of ceramic tableware.  10,000 years of the continuous use of this technology is evidently for a reason.  The meal was delicious.

Marissa.

A few years ago they discovered that non-migratory blue and sperm whales inhabit the waters off Sri Lanka's southern coast, so we headed down to the beach town of Marissa to try to see them.  We signed up for a whale-watching cruise and headed out to sea with 30 or 40 other tourists.  We saw 4 or 5 blue whales and a bunch of dolphins, but no sperm whales.  The enormous whales were an awesome sight (at least for nature nerds like us) but the best part of the voyage was probably the Leviathan dose of schadenfruede we got from watching almost everyone else retching over the side while we munched on somosas and enjoyed the 6 foot swells.  Wheeee.  Next time, all you vegans, ditch the herbal remedies and take your scopalamine.  

Kataragama, Yala, Undawalawe.

Next day we hired a car and driver and made our way to Kataragama, picking up Fran and Jerry along the way (they had passed on the whales and retreated to a tranquil beach resort a few towns down the coast.).  There we settled into our enormous rooms at the two-room Heine nature hotel and met our guide, animal-spotter extraordinaire Banje.  We got a 5 AM start on our Jeep safari into Yala National Park, arriving before dawn in order to beat the heat (which never materialized) and take advantage of the local wildlife's alleged propensity for taking a morning stroll, or slither.  As it was we saw dozens of exotic animals and beautiful birds throughout the day, but not the elusive leopards.  Exciting high point of the tour: being charged by an angry elephant.  

Kataragama is also home to a major religious site that attracts pilgrams from all over the country.  We joined the throng at dusk, since a daytime visit was disadvised owing to the scalding sand / barefoot tourist dilemma.  Like all temples here, you have to leave your shoes outside, but this was a large complex of several Hindu, Buddhist and Moslem temples, connected by long, sandy avenues, unforgiving under a hot sun to our tender feet. You know you're not in Kansas anymore when you're the only westerners among a teeming crowd of Sri Lankans in white robes, dozens of red- faced monkeys, and the occasional elephant.  The walls of the complex are adorned with seemingly infinite files of porcelain statues of peacocks and elephants.  Fascinating as all this was, my eyes were drawn to another temple on top of a nearby mountain, Warasiti Kanda.  I learned that it was accessible only  by a staircase of 2000 steps, and somehow managed to cajole Beth and Jerry into going there with me the following day.  The locals seem to have a penchant for building stairs up steep inclines rather than switchbacks, and I thought this would be good training for our planned assault on Adam's Peak in a week, with its 5500 steps.  Unsurprisingly it was a pretty hard climb, and the view from the top was spectacular.  Our plans to stop for a triumphal refreshment on the way down were thwarted by mendicant Hanuman langurs, and we had to wait until dinner time to eat anything.  It was, actually, worth waiting for the great food at our strange hotel, where  we were the only guests. 

It was time to abandon the lowlands and head up into the Central high country, but not before another Jeep Safari, this time to Undawalawe national Park, justly renowned for its elephants.  Here the herds of elephants are seconded by the herds of Jeeps bearing tourists.  Apparently the elephants are so inured to the Jeeps that they barely notice us in ours, inches away.  It feels like Disneyland, but it's such a thrill being among them that we didn't mind.  A 2-month old baby elephant was the star of the show, kept sequestered among the protective, enormous legs of his family.  

Ella.

The mountain town of Ella could serve as a counterexample for third world towns hoping to improve themselves through tourism.  Rampant overdevelopment has overwhelmed what little infrastructure there is, to the point that the best way to walk the mile from the train station to our hotel was along the railroad tracks, the roads being in such poor condition. The parallel road to the hotel is a one-lane, two way, dirt track girdling a steep hillside on which dozens of new guesthouses cling precariously.  Fortunately, none of them slid into the abyss during our stay.  The white-knuckle tuk-tuk ride to get there was worth it, though: It was a lovely guesthouse with fabulous views, run by an Australian family.  Breakfasts were served on a veranda looking across a deep, green valley with a waterfall cascading down the far side.  Hiking in the surrounding mountains and tea plantations was appropriately rewarding, as was the curry buffet at the restaurant next door.  

By this time we had noticed a pattern in table service here: the dishes and pottery are of a very high quality, no matter how modest the establishment, but the cutlery is barely better than disposables, usually made from thin metal that reminds one of heavy duty aluminum foil.  Also, napkins are in very short supply.  Our working hypothesis is that this is because the locals eat with their hands and don't need no stinking forks or napkins.  One day, under the tutelage of one of our guides, we tried to emulate them, but it's not as easy as you'd think.  There's no problem getting the food from the plate into your mouth. The problem is that when we get food on our hands we have an irresistible urge to wipe it off and we quickly go through whatever minimal napkins are provided, unconsciously cleaning our hands between bites. The locals, on the other hand, don't worry about such things and just wash their hands at the end of the meal.  It was a bridge too far.

A note on Sri Lankan cuisine, independent of how you eat it.  There are three main dishes: Curry, curry and curry.  Oh, and rice.  You might think this would get boring, but it hasn't, yet.  It's so tasty we all took a cooking class to learn how to make it.  The secret appears to be to use lots of fresh spices and to grind them up with a mortar and pestle the size of a washing machine.  There's chicken curry, fish curry, and 5 or 6 kinds of vegetable curry.  If you want anything else there's Pizza hut.  Well, That's not quite true: there are a few luxury hotels catering strictly to western tourists, and some of these have superb food that goes beyond the local fare, but maybe that doesn't count as Sri Lankan cuisine.  We went to two such places worth noting.  We had the lunch buffet at a strikingly beautiful hotel designed by local hero architect Geoffrey Bawa.  The food matched the views.  And we had a dinner buffet at a sprawling resort on the beach where I felt obligated to photograph some of the dishes in anticipation of the future need of a memory aid to help juice up the experience of eating lesser south Asian food in America.  

Hapatule.

We planned to take the train to our next destination, Hapatule, but a strike shut down the line so we hired a car and driver.  The trains are essentially free, but it's easy and cheap to hire a car or a tuk tuk.  Driving here is like nowhere else I know.  First, you have the dogs - thousands of them.  They're all about the same size - maybe 25 pounds or so, and they all seem to like to sleep on the roads that, thus, are littered with sleeping dogs.  On back roads, where vehicles come by every minute or two, a dog will reluctantly stand up and move to the side of the road just in time to let the vehicle pass, then lazily return to his spot in the middle of the road.  They must each do this hundreds of times a day. Why they don't just settle in a few feet off the road remains one of those mysteries of the Far East.  The system seems to work pretty well, but not perfectly.  One sees, occasionally, the odd three-legged dog.  The dogs add a layer of interest to any road trip, but the real thrill of motoring here is due to the Sri Lankan passing lane.  Sri Lankan drivers excel at passing.  The mix of vehicles - bicycles, motorcycles, cars, vans, tuk-tuks (millions of tuk-tuks) all insist on each going at his own chosen speed and all have zero patience for driving behind a slower vehicle.  Thus you spend most of your time passing or being passed.  We seemed to always get the most maniacal tuk-tuk drivers on the road.  They don't wait for a clear lane on the opposite side to pass: they just create their own center lane and rely on the other cars to make a space for them.  This is all the more nerve wracking for American tourists, not used to driving on the left.  Roads that seem barely wide enough to support two-way traffic all seem to have a virtual third lane that pops in and out of existence as needed, like virtual particles in the quantum vacuum state.  Somehow we survived.

Sri Lanka used to be Ceylon, and to me Ceylon means tea.  Under British rule Ceylon (the size of South Carolina) was the world's leading producer of tea, exporting more, even, than China (the size of America).  The industry has shrunk, but the central highlands are still adorned with miles of tea plantations, and they are delightful to hike through.  The town of Hapatule is right in the thick of it. One route took us up to "Lipton's seat," the perch from which the great man used to survey his extensive domain.  Check out the pic of Beth snuggling up to his effigy.  While in the area, we took the near-obligatory tour of a tea factory, learned more than we wanted to know about how tea is harvested (by hand) and prepared, and attended a tea tasting.   None of which changed my view that tea is a rather boring libation, hardly worth all that hoopla in the nineteenth century.  

Dalhousie.

All of our hiking up to now was just in preparation for the big one - the pilgrimage route up Adam's Peak.  The trains were back in service so we caught the scenic route from Hapatule to Hatton (ok, that one's pronounceable too) and made our way to Nallathanniya and then Dalhousie, where the thousand-meter high stairway begins.  Every article you read about this trek tells you to start at 2 AM, so as to reach the summit temple before dawn, in time to see the sunrise.  A lifetime of hiking has taught me that sunrises are highly overrated, so, resisting the unrelenting social pressure, I resolved to wait until 4:00.   Why not 9:00 or 10:00, or some other human hour, you may well ask.  It certainly wasn't the by-now discredited admonitions to avoid hiking in the heat of the day (there is no heat of the day in the highlands).  No, it was the chance to climb a mountain at night on a well-lit path, supplied with tea shops all along the route, accompanied by Buddhist and Hindu pilgrims.  You can't do that in Yosemite.  Avoiding the 2 AM departure also avoided all the western tourists, the only people who are dumb enough to slavishly follow the guidebooks, and allowed us an uncrowded hike in the company of Sri Lankans.  People of all ages do this hike, and some of them are an inspiration - the very young and the very old all determined to make it to the top. The most impressive were the many slight, young men, carrying heavy loads up to supply the shops.  We saw guys with cases of coke cans that must have been half their weight.  Still, that didn't make it any easier for us, carrying almost nothing.  5500 steps is a lot of steps. It took us about three and a half grueling hours, the first two in darkness, the rest in brilliant sunshine.  But it was well worth it.  I'd rate it one of the great hikes in the world, and that's without any of the religious motivation that enhances the experience for many of the people who do it.  

The Buddhists here seem more pious to me than in other Buddhist counties I've visited.  Our first clue of this was when our driver, early in a long drive, parked in front of a Buddhist temple, got out of the car and prayed for 5 minutes while we remained, somewhat bewildered, in the back seat.  He then put some money into a donation box, got back in the car and continued the drive without explanation.  Our second clue was when we heard several references to Lord Buddha, rather than the Buddha.  All theology is nonsense, but all theology is not the same nonsense.  I never like hearing a god referred to as a Lord.  It smacks of medieval feudalism; someone to be obeyed, rather than admired.  And when all the people around you start obeying a god, it's time to renew your passport.  In the museum of Buddhism in Kandy, they tell a story about the birth of Siddhartha (the future Buddha) that was new to me, and, frankly depressing.  Seems he was born from his mother's side, rather than her vagina (i.e., asexually), and his birth was prophesied by a wise man.  Sound familiar?  This seemed to fly in the face of the basic Buddha legends I've heard dozens of times in my travels, the gist of which is that this rich guy, sequestered from the brutish world by his his helicopter parents, has the rose colored glasses ripped from his face when he chances to leave home and sees the ubiquitous misery in the world, and so renounces his cushy, superficial life and resolves to discover the true, universal path to happiness.  After several false starts he succeeds.  Of course there's a lot of supernatural mumbo jumbo along the way, but the kernel of the tale is that he's just a man, and through intelligence, perseverance and self sacrifice, he finds enlightenment. Now, I know it's a fool's errand to parse through the various fairy tales that underlie religions, but as fairy tales go, I rather liked this one.  The Kandy museum sort of ruined it for me.  Who cares about his lifetime achievements if he was just another supernatural being destined from birth to ascend to godhood?  I sure hope this is just the revisionism of a local sect and doesn't represent the foul underbelly of all of Buddhism.

Polonnaruwa.

Sri Lanka has a written history going back thousands of years.  Long before it was colonized by European powers, it was conquered by a series of south Asian invaders and usurpers, one side effect of which is that the capital city bounced around a lot over the centuries.  Unfortunately Sri Lankan Kings had a nasty habit of destroying their predecessors's palaces and setting up shop elsewhere, so there isn't as much archeological evidence of this history as you'd like, but there's still plenty.  Thus a given archeological site tends to represent a fairly short time period, unlike, say, Rome, where thousands of years of occupancy can be seen represented by extant structures in a small area. For example, Anadappurawa in the north was founded by king Panduksbhaya in the 4th century BCE and reached its architectural height in the second century BCE, and it is from that era that most of the ruins to be seen there date.  But I couldn't tell you much about them since we didn't go there (our friends Fran and Jerry did - you could ask them).  We went instead to Polonnaruwa, which reached it's zenith in the 12th century CE, during the reign of King Parakramabahu.  The ruins to be seen from this period are spread out over a few square km and we rented bicycles so as to be able to see most of them in a single day.  It's not Angkor Wat, but it's pretty impressive.  There are several beautifully preserved colossal stone Buddhas that looked like they were carved last week, instead of a thousand years ago.  Many of the major buildings have largely crumbled, but several enormous stupas are still intact.  There is a well-preserved circular building called the Vatadage that looks like something out of ancient Rome, and a cathedral-like structure that houses another enormous Buddha, this one in high relief.  I noticed one wall that emulated Inca stonemasonry, with perfectly fitted large stones of various shapes, so precisely carved as to need no mortar. Spending a day among the ruins may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I get off on wandering around them and trying to imagine what it was like to be there when it was up and running.

Srl Lanka is a third world country with third world prices, except for the designated tourist sites, like Polonnaruwa, which are administered by the government and charge first world prices.  The urge to gouge foreign tourists is apparently too strong to resist, and on some level you can't blame them, but it begins to get you down after a while. They are shameless about posting different prices for citizens and foreigners.  This is a game everyone can play, and it makes the world a meaner, poorer place.  Just today the Metropolitan Museum of Art started charging non-New Yorkers a $25 admission fee.  It's still free for locals, but it was heretofore free for everyone.   It is all of a piece with Trumpism; the privitization of what ought to be public.  

Sigiriya.

Paying $30 to spend a day seeing Polonnaruwa was no obstacle, but the same fee for the the much smaller Sigiriya gave us pause. However, that fee was only a minor consideration compared to the real deterrent there: wasps.  Apparently thousands of them inhabit the site, and the same government that collects millions from visitors can't find the wherewithal to remove the nests, although they (the government, not the wasps) have built a shelter half way up, into which you can flee if a swarm should attack.  Waspophobe that I am, I decided that Sigiriya was an attraction I could skip, even if it is one of the highlights of the country.  But over the course of several weeks we met travelers who had been there recently and none of them saw any wasps, so we decided to chance it.  Glad we did.  Sigiriya is a 200m monolith of volcanic origin that served as a palace and fortress about 1500 years ago. A certain king Kasyapa needed a secure site for his capital after overthrowing his father in Anadappurawa and fighting off his brother, the rightful heir.  The ruins on the summit are reminiscent of Machu Picchu, and the place must have been impregnable.  As is par for the course in this country, you access the top by climbing countless steps.  In a niche partway up there are frescoes of voluptuous women, a refreshing break from a hard climb. They think these are just a small remnant of what were once many more; a heartbreaking loss.  An enormous stone lion, now mostly lost, guarded the entrance to the ascent, up a sheer cliff.  Only the truck-sized front paws remain, flanking the grand staircase to the top.  It's quite a site.

Sigiriya peak has a twin, Pidurangala, a couple of km away.  We climbed that one too.  It lacks a fortress, but has a reclining Buddha and a great view of its confrere.  The top is a bare, granite dome that you can only reach by scrambling through a steep and narrow array of boulders.  The path is not crowded, but there are plenty of locals around to lend a hand navigating through it.  In fact, the Sri Lankans we've met have been almost uniformly pleasant to us and seemingly happy to offer help if asked.  Many seem eager to show the place off, especially to Americans, who are rarely seen here.  Lots of Aussies and Brits, but hardly any Americans: we met none in a month.  The ignorance is mutual. I stopped answering the inevitable question of where I'm from with "New York".  Too many times they'd never heard of it. 

Kandy.

Kandy, in the center of the island, is the city that held out the longest against the Europeans, but finally succumbed to the British in the 19th century.  It figures prominently in the mythology of the country, being the repository of one of the Buddha's teeth (I kid you not).  The tooth had a long and storied journey from northern India to its final repository in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. No doubt it was on the same flight that brought Mary Magdalene to France, Mohammed to Jerusalem and Jesus to New York to meet with Joseph Smith. Curiously, you can't see the tooth in its eponymous temple, as it is hidden away in a Stupa.  What you can see are thousands of barefoot supplicants roaming the grounds, lighting candles and listening to speeches (sermons?).   I have no idea what the speakers were saying, but such gatherings seem symptomatic of the sort of Buddhism practiced here, in contrast to the more private worship I've seen elsewhere.  Much as I love ancient dentistry, my favorite find in Kandy was the botanical garden in nearby Peradeniya.  Hidden among the giant coconuts and Royal Palm allées there live 24,000 fruit bats.  During the day they hang by their feet from the branches, looking, from a distance, like cassava melons.  Are they called fruit bats because they eat fruit or because they look like fruit?  Every so often one of them lazily spreads its 5-foot wings, declaring its animal nature. 

Bentota.

After all that exploration, hiking and culture, we decided we deserved a vacation on the beach, so we caught a train to Aluthgama, on the western coast, and then got a tuk tuk to our hotel in Bentota - a splurge for Sri Lanka at $50/night.  Our original plan had been the Maldives, a beautiful archipelago a short flight away, but that's a Moslem country, with separate beaches for locals and normal people (called bikini beaches), a practice that was just sufficiently off-putting to keep us away.  As it was we got a tiny taste of Moslem beach culture in Bentota, where we saw a family (presumably) of 4 women encased head to toe in black burkas with a man (their husband?) frolicking in the hot sun, on the very beach where I took a flight in an ultra-light. The stark contrast between the 21st century high-tech airplane, representing unbridled freedom of the open sky and sea, and the constrained, cloistered figures from the 7th century did not go unnoticed.  This was my first time in an ultra-light.  The flight, skimming only a few hundred feet above the beach was more beautiful than I was prepared for, and it was lent an extra frisson by the requirement to wear a life jacket.  Before that last-minute adjustment it hadn't occurred to me that we might crash into the ocean.   I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the harness trying to figure out how to disengage myself and swim free of the plane before it sank.  Of course they never crash - they wing is a built-in parachute.  

This stretch of coast is the main beach resort area of Sri Lanka, and it goes on for miles of tropical splendor, but is surprisingly uncrowded, with just enough tourist activity here and there to supply you with a bite to eat or a shaded lounge chair if you need it.  The Indian ocean is bathtub warm; there are colorful fish in the shallows, not to mention the occasional sea turtle; our comfortable room had a balcony overlooking the swimming pool and good AC.  I could have stayed another week, but it was time to return to winter, and a real time zone.

New Construction in Colombo

Stupa, multifaith temple at Kataragama

Kataragama temple

Hanuman Langur at Wadasiti Kanda

Undawalawe national Park

Market near Ella

On the trail to Ella rock

Beth and Mr Lipton

Jerry, Fran and Beth on the best footpath to Ella

Adam's peak summit

Adam's peak, stairs

Adam's peak

Tea plantations

Rice fields

Sigiriya from Pidurangala

Top of Pidurangala

Polonnaruwa Buddha

Polonnaruwa

Polonnaruwa Stupa

Sigiriya lion's paws

Sigiriya maidens

At Sigiriya

Botanical garden Kandy

Fruit bats

Bentota beach

Israel, May 2017

Tel Aviv

The view looking south from the balcony

Synagogue floor from Roman era

Temple Mount with enforcers

Beth in dead sea

Jerusalem - Western Wall

Dinner starters

Tel Aviv

Israel. The promised land.  The holy land.  The land where we landed, finally, after 20 hours of traveling, after 2000 years of exile, is hot as hell - 104 degrees, and this is only May.  Right away you're starting to feel a little grateful for the exile.

Israel is not an ordinary country; the Jews are not an ordinary people, and their history is not an ordinary history.  I could write a long essay trying to justify those propositions, but it wouldn't be as edifying as the observation that

"Europe has now changed completely.....When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in europe said "Jews go home to Palestine". Fifty years later, when he went back to europe on a visit, the  walls all screamed, "Jews get out of Palestine".
.....Amos Oz

So this can't be an ordinary travelogue about the first two weeks of our spring vacation.  Here you can't escape history, or politics.  At least I can't. Everywhere there are reminders of the long train of events that led to my existence in America, and to how close I, and maybe you, came to being a lampshade.  And still could become one, with just a little tweak to the political winds that whisked the Trump regime into power.  And so I was genuinely moved when the cabdriver taking us into Tel Aviv, upon hearing I was Jewish, said "welcome home."  We should take Oz's point; in Europe, and everywhere else, nothing really changes completely.

Our flat in Tel Aviv is on the 22st floor of a sparkling modern high rise with spectacular views from a curved balcony.  The Mediterranean on the right, the old city of Jaffa in the middle distance, and the road to Jerusalem going off to the left.  Beyond Jaffa the cityscape stretches to the horizon, which struck me as odd, since we are located on the southern edge of the city and I didn't expect the urban sprawl go beyond Tel Aviv; that is, I didn't realize how big the metropolitan area is, given that the city proper has less than half a million residents.  It reminds me, physically, of Bangkok, but with a sea instead of a river. There are dozens of skyscrapers, and dozens more being built. At a distance it looks like Miami Beach, but up close you see that there are teeming third world neighborhoods between the towers, at least in some areas.  In others, like ours, Neve Tzedek, there's a sort of West Village yuppy vibe, with leafy lanes and chichi shops.  But the prices certainly don't remind me of Bangkok.  Nothing is cheaper than you find in New York, and many things are a lot more.  Fortunately we're not paying for this flat, so we can afford to eat.

But it's not the layout of the place that's so interesting; it's that it's a Jewish country.  How weird is that?  And they speak Hebrew, a language that turns out to be about as easy for us travelers as Thai.  Yeah, I had a bar mitzvah, but I seem to have retained nothing of the language (never knew any, really) or even the alphabet (knew reasonably well, I think).  I blame that on the poor instruction at my (so-called) Hebrew school, and not on my complete indifference to the subject. So just getting around isn't that easy.  English isn't as ubiquitous here as you'd think.  Everyone doesn't speak it (we were misinformed), and a lot of the signage is in Hebrew only.  Even worse, the signs that are in English are usually inadequate.  I suspect the signs in Hebrew are also, since the country serms to have an attitude problem when it comes to information.  At Yad Vashem, for example, the nice man at the information desk peeled a single sheet diagram of the place off a thick stack of them and pointed out on it the entrance and exit and a few other features, but when I said thank you and went to take it he said "12 sheckels".  They're just not as forthcoming with information as we're used to. The diagram itself turned out to be so poorly conceived that you were better off just exploring on your own rather than trying to follow it.  Despite all this I learned only two Hebrew words in two weeks: ezerakh vatiq: Senior citizen.

Curiously, the language we heard most often in our elevator was neither Hebrew nor English, but French.  I never learned why our building had so many francophones, but a museum director told us that Shimon Peres was a great Francophile, and tried to steer the country into adapting French, rather than Arabic, as it's second language.  As a result, he said, very few Jews speak Arabic whereas most of the Arabs speak Hebrew.  I'm not convinced that that's the explanation for this asymmetry; maybe it's more related to the ice cold shoulder gived to the Israelis by even the least hostile of their neighbors, but it is true that few Jews here speak Arabic.

We spent the first few days walking around Tel Aviv dodging the kids on electric bicycles who seem to regard the sidewalks as bike lanes, and going to museums.  The best was the diaspora museum, which was great but should have been better.  It was about various Jewish communities around the world over the last few thousand years, but it failed to do what I wanted it to do: parse the movements of the Jewish population in space and time.  How many Jews were where and when? Where did they go?  What happened to them?  With Jews, you know that many were murdered, many were ethnically cleansed, and many were de-jewed, one way or another, over the centuries.  But I don't have a sense of where most of the Jews were at any given time, and I can't begin to trace their travels back and forth across Europe and the Mediterranean, fleeing from one racist tyranny after another. So, the take-home message I got from this museum is that we need another museum, for just that.

As is par for our course, a disproportionate percentage of our touristing effort went into planning what to eat and where to eat it.  We had recently seen a documentary film about Israeli cuisine, and we eagarly sought out several of its recommendations.  A Persian lunch counter in a strip mall was particularly worth the detour.  A lot of the best stuff is purveyed by Israeli Arabs, like a hummus place in Jaffa that serves their signature product in huge bowls, and the pastry shops in Haifa where you take an empty box and fill it from dozens of piles of various phyllo/nut/honey concoctions that run circles around the sort of baklava you usually get in America.  But the most memorable tip we got from the movie sent us down a series of dark, one-way streets in Jaffa to a place where no one spoke a word of English, and the feisty waitress had to use hand gestures to explain the menu, the most colorful of which revealed a hitherto unsuspected homolgy between felafel and felatio.  (Of course!  Even the words are almost the same.). My favorite restaurant, though, was the one a cab driver told us about - a busy, touristy place sprawling onto the quai in Jaffa.  Instead of offering a choice of appetizers, they bring you pretty much the whole menu - dozens of delicious dips and salads.  When a waiter scooped up a bowl of a particularly superlative one that I hadn't quite finished I started to protest, until I realized he had just gone to refill it. The perfectly grilled whole fish that constitutes the main course would make a fine meal on its own, but after the orgy of appetizers it seemed almost superfluous.  We went to that place twice.

Jerusalem

There is frequent and fast bus service between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, so we used it to get there on our 5th day in Israel, which required getting aquatinted with the Central bus station.  This is, perversely, on the edge of Tel Aviv, in a sketchy neighborhood.  The Central bus station is an attraction in itself, in a quirky way.  It is enormous - the largest in the world when it was built.  Its world, though, is clearly the third world.  It doesn't look like it was ever new.
Escalators and stairways crisscross cavernous spaces almost devoid of people. Grubby shops selling cheap food and chachkas hide in various alcoves.  Information in English is hard to come by (don't expect any at the information booth, even if you are lucky enough to find that) but there is in fact, a fast bus every 15 minutes to Jerusalem, and that's the best way to get there.

It was perhaps a bad omen that my first step in Jerusalem was nearly fatal.  Among our fellow bus passengers were several Israeli soldiers, a few of whom carried very serious-looking guns, rather nonchalantly, it seemed to me.  If anything, it made me feel safer, actually.  (A bus on this route was blown up by Arabs in the 90s.). As I stepped off the bus in a scrum of soldiers and civilians, the straps of the small backpack I was carrying got entangled in the menacingly complex parts of a machine gun slung over the shoulder of a teenage soldier, and we both instictively pulled away from each other, but the straps stayed entangled.  Luckily, he just smiled, rather than interpret that tug as someone trying to grab his gun.  I bet he was still in training, and hadn't gotten to the part where they teach you that if someone tries to grab your gun, just kill him instantly.  As it happened, I got to take a second step, and made my way toward the old city.

Despite the fact that Jerusalem is probably the most scrutinized city in the world, and that I am at least as focused on the politics of the middle East as I am on anything else on the planet,  I had no real feel for the layout of the place.  Turns out the Jerusalem bus station is about a half hour walk from the old city, the kernal of contention that signifies Jerusalem for almost everyone.  But you don't have to walk - there's a modern streetcar ( that would put any similar conveyance in America to shame) that will glide you past rows of inviting cafes and markets right up to the gates of the old city.  To get oriented we took a two hour walking tour led by the terrific, but unfortunately named, guide, Yoni.  The first thing Yoni told us was to ignore all the armed soldiers milling about since they were tourists, just like us.  OK....  Then we plunged into the walled square kilometer that everyone in the western world concedes is the navel of religeosity, the place where the real world once contacted the imagined world of the gods (a function formerly filled by Mt Olympus).  The old city turns out to be a warren of densly packed narrow streets, teeming with tourists.  In the Muslim quarter (more like the Muslim two fifths) the narrow streets are covered by awnings and lined with hundreds of little shops, giving the feel of an indoor bazaar.  This is the place to be if you need to buy a set of Turkish coffee cups or a fez. They also have good smoothies.  The other quarters seem less commercial, but still have quaint squares and cafes, along with various churches and other storied monuments.  The most renowned of these is the church of the holy sepulchre, where the scrum of tourists is such that it is hard to see the floor tiles.  It is here that I saw people lining up to prostrate themselves on a stone slab - the stone of anointing - where Jesus' body was not lain out for a short time.  I say not, because, besides the usual fallacious nonsense associated with religeous relics, this one forgoes even any pretention of authenticity: it was placed in the church in the 19th century as part of a reconstruction.  And yet countless worshippers get down on all fours and awkwardly slide themselves onto the stone, polished smooth by the thousands who have preceded them. I found it a very discouraging comment on the human condition.

This ancient, walled-in compound may be the most contested bit of land in the world, but the residential and commercial areas are a love fest compared to the temple mount, a plateau constituting a few acres of seething hatred that exposes the true meaning of religion for anyone who cares to see it.  The moslems control the actual plateau, but in a grudging concession they are required to allow access to infidels a few hours a week, and, for reasons I can't articulate, I wanted to go up there.  The Jews control the gate, and you have to pass through their security before being allowed in, which was stricter than any other security check we experienced in Israel, including the flights in and out.  Everyone is interviewed separately, and you have to convince them that you are not going to commit any religeous act while you're up there, such as praying for rain.  Apparently the moslems take great offense if their monopoly on piety is challenged in even the slightest way, and the Jews are happy to concede that to them.  On the plateau, you can see, but not enter, the two mosques that were built in the 7th century over the ruins of the Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans 600 years previously.  The more spectacular one, with the gilded dome, has become symbolic of Jerusalem, as the Eiffel tower is of Paris, but up close it looks like it could use a bit of a touch up.   Still kind of cool, though. The most interesting thing on the temple Mount for me, however, was to experience a tiny whiff of what it would be like to live under the jurisdiction of the moslem religious police.  They patrol the open plazas on the plateau in plain clothes, hoping to catch anyone who deviates from the onerous rules that no doubt suck the joy out of life for anyone oppressed by them.  And in the few minutes I was up there I managed to run afoul of one such rule; one that I had not been aware of, and one that no person in his right mind would even imgine.  A young couple asked me to take their picture standing in front of the dome, which I did.  As I handed the camera back, one of these guardians of the true faith ran up, and all three of us thought he was going to say that photography was forbidden, but, no, the offense was that the couple were touching each other when I took the picture.  That is, their shoulders were touching.  Fortunately, this is still Israel, and he wasn't carrying a whip and a gun, so he let them off with a warning.  I suppose this incident is not surprising - it's the sort of thing you hear about every day in the news - but, as they say about skiing the back bowls at Vail, you gotta be there to really appreciate it.

As is well known, in 1948 the Arabs, in the form of the Jordanians, captured the old city (from the British, formally).  They expelled the Jews from the Jewish quarter, physically destroyed it and barred Jews from entering the city ever again.  19 years later the Jews, in the form of the Israelis, captured the old city (from Jordan, formally), expelled the muslims, destroyed the Muslim quarter and barred Muslims from ever entering the city again.  Oh...no...wait...that's not what they did.  What they actually did was to leave the Muslim quarter alone, open the city to everyone and hand over the administration of the temple mount to the moslems.  To my mind it is just this sort of thing that sits at the core of the Arab/Jew conflict. The Jews, formerly the people who don't fight back, have now become the people who bring a knife to a gunfight; an improvement, no doubt, but not enough of an improvement to avoid the festering sore of the neverending Arab/Israeli war.  The Jews, apparently, still have a lot to learn about how to get along in the world. Lesson number one is that no good deed goes unpunished.  If they can learn that, then it may be possible to arrive at a final settlement of the conflict, rather than another final solution.

The orthodox have an inordinate presence in Israel, especially in Jerusalem.  Per their instuctions, the western wall is devided into male and female sections. Their influence on the national government is intrusive, and perverse.  There is no civil marriage here, and all public transportation is grounded on Saturday.  Worse, they seem to claim for themselves the mantle of true judiasm, and the rest of the country puts up very little resistance.  All of this stuff is offensive for its intrusion on the lives of others, and they shouldn't be allowed to do it, but most of it is politics as usual, and the orthodox Jews are far less vile in their tyranny than orthodox Christians and Moslems.   But their implicit claim to be the only true Jews...that, I take personally.  It pisses me off that these guys think they're more Jewish than I am, given that we'd all be thrown into the same oven if the furhurs or the muftis or the grand dragons have their way.  But why, given that they have the theology and I don't?  I concede to them the religion, but not the jewishness.  So I guess I agree with Hitler on this.  We're a tribe you can't quit. The religion is almost irrelevant to identity, like Catholicism is almost irrelevant to being Italian.  Part of the problem is semantic; we need another word for the religion - let's keep Jew for the tribe.  Mosaish?  So that makes two points of agreement I have with the fuhrer; we are also both of the opinion that it's best to put on your pants one leg at a time.  If I think of any more I'll pass them on.

Masada and the Dead Sea

Time to rent a car.  Car rental companies seem to be running a scam almost everywhere I've ever been, but in Israel it's been taken to new depths.   I thought it was bad in America, where two or three companies monopolize the industry, local governments levee blatantly unconstitutional taxes and the desk agents terrorize renters into buying insurance they don't need at laughably high rates.  Here, they rent cars the way Canon sells printers (the printer is almost free; it's the ink they're really selling, at prices Chateau Lafitte wishes it could get).  You can rent a good car for $6 a day, but before you drive it off the lot they've tacked on 6 times that amount in mandatory fees and insurance.  Goniffs.

Back on the tourist trail, we headed out one day to Masada, a two hour drive from Tel Aviv that brings you into a different world.  In an unpopulated desert bordering the dead sea there is an isolated hilltop archeological site that is one of the most unusual Roman artifacts anywhere.  There's no denying the existence of a virtual ancient city built out here in the middle of nowhere 2000 years ago, but it wasn't built by the Jews who made it famous by dying there in the first century CE, it was largely built, and later abandoned, by Herod, the Roman governor of Palestine in the previous century, if you believe Josephus, the Roman/Jewish historian who is pretty much the only source for everything we think we know about Masada.   Exactly why Herod would do such a thing remains unclear, at least to me, but there certainly was a fortified palace there available for capture by a faction (a rather disreputable faction according to Josephus) of rebellious Jews during the anti-Roman revolt in Palestine that at that point had already seen the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.  The ruins left to be seen, and clambored over, by tourists today are from the Roman period, and the story of the Jew's last stand in 73 CE is mostly just a story.  There is very little physical evidence of it at the site, with the exception of a huge ramp built by the besieging romans, a ramp that now serves as a convenient access route for visitors who, like us, prefer to avoid the cable car running up from the dead sea side.  So, if you like Roman ruins (check) it's worth visiting for that reason alone.  But the site's fame rests on the story of the  (Jonestown sized) mass suicide that marked the end of the siege and that the moderm Israelis seem to have fetishised.  They bring freshly minted inductees into the IDF up here for for their initiation ceremony.  Why?  Do they see this death-rather-than-surrender thing as the ideal behavior of a Jewish soldier?  Does any other country try to indoctrinate their soldiers like this?  It's hard to take any of this death and glory stuff seriously, but isn't the standard ideal to die fighting, rather than to die surrendering?  Can you draw a line from this distorted version of heroism to the modern Jews who say that Hitler failed, because we're still here?  Or to the Israeli government, that swaps busloads of imprisoned Arab murderers for handfuls of innocent hostages?

Not a happy place, Masada, and after a few hours we were ready for what was sure to be the goofy fun of swimming in the dead sea.  Turns out it's not so easy to get there from the western side of Masada despite the fact that, from the top, it looks like a short walk; there are no direct roads, as we discovered. So we drove around the long way, past several Arab villages offering camel rides and finding no takers, and, an hour and a half later, arrived at the shoreline that sported a string of Miami-ish hotels, none of which seemed to have more than a couple of customers.  By then it was late in the afternoon, but the outdoor thermometer at the beach we picked was still stuck at 41oC.  It wasn't quite that hot, but it was way too hot to lie about in the sun, so we plunged right into the saturated salt solution that looks deceptively like water. It isn't. Walking in it only knee deep is enough to convince you it's denser than water, and of course you float like a cork.  We splashed around, took the requisite photos, rinsed off with fresh water, and left.  An hour, tops.  Lots of fun, and a welcome antidote to the grim drama left behind on the plateau.  Apparently, there's also some sort of take-the-waters mudbath scam going on here, but we didn't encounter it. Maybe it has something to do with the existence of the highrise hotels, since a dip in the dead sea seems like a day trip to me. But then why are all the hotels so empty?  Is there an off season for quack therapies?  Not caring enough to investigate, we headed back to Tel Aviv.

Haifa and the Galilee

We went to Haifa to see the Baha'i gardens.  Very pretty. Definitely worth seeing, and a relief from the Moslem/Jew tension that suffuses everything else.  Baha'i is a fairly new faith that, according to our very animated guide, accepts all the precepts and prophets of all the other faiths, ancient and modern,  ignoring all the obvious contradictions, and, of course, the utter nonsense of the whole enterprise.   Still, they seem like they want to make nice  - why can't we all just get along? - and they have built a very beautiful garden overlooking the sea.  I asked the guide how they felt about Joseph Smith - was he in the pantheon with Jesus and Muhammad and Thor?  He didn't seem to know, so I refrained from pressing on about the tooth fairy and Harry Potter (my personal favorite supernatural being).  Curiously, adherents are not allowed to live in Israel, even though the religion is headquartered there. The nescessary personnel are rotated in and out so as not to establish residence.  No one seems to know why, but I suspect anti-Semitism, don't you?  Ok, maybe it's not, but I wanted an excuse to use that word, so that I can seague into a rant about why that term is itself anti-Semitic, and about the use of language and the Jews.  Here goes:

Only the Jews seem to have a special word to describe the bigotry against them: anti-Semitism.  Sounds almost academic, doesn't it?  Like antinomianism, or anticommunism. An intellectual philosophy, rather than a murderous creed.  Senator Eastland was not an anti-melanist.  He was a racist.  Likewise all those haters of the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Indians (both kinds), the moslems  etc. etc. - racists, all.  Of course the Jews are often of the same race as their haters, but they are also often of the same linguistic group ("Semite" refers to the language group that includes Hebrew and Arabic.). Languages evolve.  "Racist" has replaced "bigot" as the epithet of choice.  "Bigot" might be technically more correct, but that ship has sailed.  Jews, and everyone else, should stop using the euphemistic word anti-Semite and call Goebels and Henry Ford and Amadenajed and Yasir Arafat and the Israel boycotters and their legions of confreres what they are: racists.  Let them own it - loud and proud.   Language matters.

The Jews are as guilty as anyone else for this dereliction of language, and that's not their only sin.  Consider for example, the word Palestinian.  Even the Jews seem to go along with the morphing of this word, for centuries the term for the people who live in Palestine, the sliver of land between the Jordan River and the sea.  Now it seems to refer only to the Arabs who live there, or, at least certainly not to the Jews who do.  By any rational lexigraphic interpretation there are Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews, but to the racist language police the Palestinian Jews are now the Israeli Jews, as if Israel weren't part of Palestine.  This is not a subtle shift in meaning and it is shameful for the Jews to go along with it.  As Orwell observed, language affects thought. You're led to think differently if a dispute in Ireland is framed, say, as between Catholic and Protestant Irishmen, rather than between Irishmen and Protestants.  Ireland for the Irish!

OK, now that I got that off my chest we can move on to Zipori national park (more great Roman ruins, including a synagogue with a mosaic floor), Narareth (skipped it) and the sea of Galilee.  The latter is actually a freshwater lake, and if JC or anyone else ever walked on water it probably wasn't here, but on the dead sea, which feels like you could almost do it yourself if you wear styrofoam shoes and have good balance.  On the other hand, we saw a guy walking on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea at Caesarea (another great Roman site, a few miles down the coast from Haifa), but I chose to believe he was walking on submerged stones.  We hung out for a while in Tiberius on the S. of G., but there's not much happening there.  Reminded us of Asbury Park in its most rundown state, a couple of decades ago. It's a pretty big town but the waterfront was almost deserted.  A far cry from the beaches of Tel Aviv, teeming with beautiful people sipping cocktails in beach chairs in front of fancy hotels.  We didn't stay long.

I wanted to drive further north, to see more of Galilee and the Golan heights, but, even though Israel is only as big as New Jersey, it seemed too far for the time we had.  At that point Israel didn't seem so small, but neither does NJ if you have to drive the length of it.  We drove back to the city and had dinner in an italian restaurant, which is as good a sign as any that it was time to move on to Europe.  We left plenty of sights unseen, and restaurants unsampled, so we're not averse to returning some day.  And that day may involve more than tourism, since it is not unimaginable that we might have to flee the US at some point (certainly no more unimaginable than it was for German Jews in 1933) and what other country would have us?  Well, I told you it wasn't going to be a ordinairy travelogue.