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.

Thailand

    We arrived in Thailand to discover that the country is still in mourning over the death last year of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, or Rama IX to you and me, whose image, usually as a young man, is everywhere displayed on billboards, buildings, fences, traffic circles, pagodas and pretty much anywhere there's any available public space, always accompanied by black and white bunting - sometimes miles of it.  Oh, to be in the bunting business.  This guy has more exposure than Santa Claus on Christmas.  Even the casual visitor is told, several times a day, of the tragic loss of the sovereign, and of the certainty that his memory will linger in his subject's hearts forever.  For example, it's become part of the pre-flight safety talk, as important as what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing.  It would all be very touching if it were sincere, and it well may be, but there's no way to know since even a whiff of criticism of the king, or anyone close to him, is strictly verboten, punishable by years in prison.  This fatwa applies anywhere and everywhere, even perhaps to blogs that are unlikely to be read by more than 5 people, which is why you won't get to read this one until its author is safely out of the country. The deceased king, who reigned for 70 years, was closely associated with a series of military regimes, and is presumed to have played a major role in the government massacre of dozens of student demonstrators in the 70s, which is enough for me to hold off on unending adoration.   Which is not to say he was not truly beloved by "the people".  If the Russian people can overwhelmingly endorse Putin, another known murderer of his political adversaries, and if the American people can elect you-know-who, then we shouldn't be surprised if the Thai people really loved this guy, who, I must admit, does look kinda lovable in the millions of images one can't escape seeing every day.  He looks more like a sincere graduate student of, say, classical poetry, than like the pompous potentate you might expect, or even Yul Brenner.  But it felt rather creepy, at least for this westerner, to be required to stand while his praises were sung at the start of a movie, and to notice the reverence that the ritual seemed to elicit in the rest of the audience.  Fun fact: the king was an American, or at least could have been.  He was born in Massachusetts.

Bangkok, long high on my bucket list, is a huge, modern city with dozens of third world shantytowns occupying the interstices between the skyscrapers. Sort of a mashup of Hanoi and Dallas.  You walk along teeming alleys where excellent street food is being grilled on every block and aggressively hawked for a pittance, and then step into a high rise shopping mall that wouldn't be out of place in New Jersey, except it really would be because it's bigger and better than anything in New Jersey.  We went to a rooftop bar one night (800 ft above the city) where a couple of ordinary drinks cost us close to $50, and then had a superb dinner at street level for a tenth of that.  City of contrasts.

As first time tourists to Bangkok we hit all the iconic Buddhist temples and monuments, which are world class versions of the Buddhist temples and monuments a tourist sees all over Asia. These are active houses of worship, but they seem to be trying to outdo each other on the flamboyance scale. Take, for example, Wat Pho, next to the grand palace in the old part of town.  It houses a 46 meter long, guilded, reclining Buddha, in addition to hundreds of other Buddhas aligned in stately rows. There are over a dozen enormous bejeweled towers, called chedis, and countless bits of lesser statuary, some of it quite playful.  The whole effect is a feast for the eyes.  I have the impression that Buddhist temples, in general, aim to be fun to look at, and Bangkok has some of the top examples of this anywhere.  Of course, churches also strive to be beautiful, and one feels almost compelled to compare the two.  In fact, the largest temples beg comparison to cathedrals.   In both cases, the builders aim for grandeur, beauty, and of course artistry, but the results are very different.  The best cathedrals, while often gaudy, are filled with beauty, to the point of leaving the visitor awestruck, and also somewhat humbled.  The mood is sombre, perhaps following the lead of the central Christian image of a dead man still attached to the device that killed him.  (It's only a slight shift in the culture of brutality over the ages that saves Christians from praying to a hanged man every Sunday.) Buddhism isn't burdened with such images, which may explain why its "cathedrals," seem like happier places. They too are filled with beauty, and they're no less gaudy, but the visitor doesn't feel awed so much as wowed.  I think Beth got it exactly right when she noted that Wat Pho has pazzaz; Chartres doesn't.

Against all advice we decided to go to the island of Phuket. Apparently, it is the accepted wisdom that Phuket is too touristy, too built up, too commercial and too 1970s.  We found none of that to be the case, but, in fairness to the critics, I concede that the taxis are too expensive.  Other than that, it's basically a tropical paradise. So as not to stoke envy, I'll spare you the details.  We had planned to spend about a week on Phuket and then make our way to Krabi, on the other side of Phang Nga bay, which is alleged to be even more beautiful than Phuket, but our plans ran afoul of the core purpose of this entire expedition: dental tourism. In order to fulfill my lifelong dream of saving thousands of dollars on medically unnecessary crowns, I would have to return to Bangkok too soon to make it to Krabi, so we ended up spending a little over a week on Phuket and then heading directly back to Bangkok.  This was hardly unbearable, and it provides an excuse for returning to the region next year, as if one were needed.

A word on medical/dental tourism: it's the best idea since sliced bread (I hate that expression: sliced bread is a terrible idea, but you know what I mean.). Among America's many afflictions, the outrageously expensive and inefficient medical system is hardly a secret, but fleeing from it whenever possible is a surprisingly underused strategy.  The medical monopoly in America has gotten so out of hand that it's almost always worth it to take your elective medical business elsewhere, even considering the associated travel expenses.  Of course the key word here is elective; most American heath insurance schemes effectively force you to stay in the country and use the local overpriced services, but retirement has freed me from dental insurance, so here I am in Bangkok having my unflattering incisors replaced with elegant new ones at a quarter of the cost in New York.  It almost pays for the trip.

I can't write about Thailand without talking about the food. For decades I have been deeply enamored of Thai cuisine, to the point that friends consider it a very annoying quirk.  So just being here makes me feel like a kid in a toy store.  Thai food 3 meals a day!   I can now report, after 3 weeks, that the food here is delicious, and I am quite happy having chicken curry and pad Thai for breakfast.  I won't leave the country, though, spoiled for eating Thai food in New York or San Francisco, as I was with French food after living in France.  I can point to instances where the food here surpasses its American counterpart, but for the most part it doesn't, and I will continue to annoy my friends by suggesting Thai as the default cuisine whenever restaurants are being considered.  Of course America lacks the street food culture that is ubiquitous here.  There are uncountable thousands of little food carts offering grilled meets and fish, wonderful soups and curries, spicy salads and fruit drinks, all for pocket change. And the high end restaurants turn out one richly flavored dish after another, often at a level of spiciness you rarely find anymore back home. Sadly, those high end restaurants, the ones with the impeccable, if often obsequious, service, seem to have an almost exclusively foreign clientele.  We ate in several restaurants that certainly rated Michelin stars, if they gave them out here, which they don't, where none of the diners were Thai.  One's discomfort at that is somewhat tempered by the knowledge that the locals are eating very well elsewhere, since this is clearly a country that appreciates good food at all levels of society.

If there's anything I like more than Thai food it's sex, and that seems to be offered up here much in the manner of the street food.  Unlike the street food, I passed on the street sex, so you'll have to look elsewhere for an honest report (i.e., I can't make that first sentence truly parallel, and add another "Thai"), but I can pass on a few impressions.  In some areas there are hundreds of hookers (I presume) sitting on stools in front of bars, massage parlors (a big thing here, not per force sexual) and sometimes just plain doors, eager to make eye contact with any passing male, especially western males, who for some reason seem to make up a large percentage of the pedestrians in these areas.  The girls are somewhat like the tuktuk drivers in that they seem to mostly sit around waiting for work.  (Those tuktuks, also, are everywhere, each with a driver who must say, a thousand times a day, "where are you going?" to everyone who walks by).  What's striking to a traveler used to the prudish confines of the United States is both the extent and the openess of it all. There are red light districts everywhere, but not like these.  And this in a country where a strict dress code (no exposed knees or shoulders, no matter what the temperature) is enforced in many temples and museums. I'm aware that there's a strain of political correctness that condescendingly regards this business as exploitive, especially the sexual tourism aspect of it that seems to predominate here, but I disagree (save for the minors who may well be swept up in it).  It's no more exploitive than the tuktuk business, or, no doubt, dozens of other businesses that rely on the huge pool of underemployed people in this country, and pretty much everywhere else, for that matter.  But while not exceptionally exploitive, there is an aspect of it that invoked a sadness beyond the normal sympathy one feels for all these people doing dead end jobs; I'm referring, of course, to the costumers.  If you watch for a while, you notice couples on bar stools or just strolling in the lanes - middle aged, or older western guys with Thai women half or a third their age, and often half or a third their size.  They talk intimately (in what language?) and smooch in a way that you don't see with hookers and their clients on the seedier streets of New York.  These guys are here for the girlfriend experience, or maybe even the wife experience.  Not all of them, for sure, but a lot of them.  I can only guess at the kinds of personal failures and disappointments that would drive a person to fly to the other side of the world to try to buy a girlfriend.  There but for fortune, eh,?

       

Rooftop bar

          

Bangkok mall with Golden Gate bridge

Tourists

Near Phuket

Phuket

Wat Pho

Chedi

Cambodia

When you spend only 4 days in a country you can't expect to get a whole lot of insight into it -  just another country checked off on your life list.  So Cambodia for us is reduced to just two things: Angkor and genocide.  The temples of Angkor are just as cool as you'd imagine - they don't disappoint.  The murder of over a million people for obscure (to me, and you too, probably) ideological reasons is no more comprehensible than it was before I arrived in Siem Reap, but it's a grim and timely reminder that when a deluded, hateful, anti-intellectual party gets its hands on the reins of government the consequences can be more horrific than our imaginations are capable of taking in.  

Angkor Wat seems more like what Versailles would be if it fell into ruins than it does like a ruined temple, as that word is understood back home.  It, and the dozens of other similar colossal structures in the area, are expressions of what must have been enormous government power at the time (about 1000 years ago).  I grew up influenced by a family prejudice against this sort of thing - throwing so much of society's effort into building glorious monuments. But I'm so ignorant of the circumstances associated with this particular society that it's easy to let go of that and just enjoy what they accomplished here, and it's pretty impressive.  It would probably be even more impressive if they had managed to invent, or import, the arch.  As a result of this oversight, there are no large rooms, but there are endless arcaded corridors with beautifully executed bas reliefs, ziggurat-like towers, reflecting pools and moats you could sink a destroyer in. Speaking of the bas reliefs: along with all the other Hindu imagery (yes, Hindu, not Buddhist: there have evidently been some changes around here in the last millennium) are thousands of apsaras.  What are apsaras, you may well ask. Apsaras are mythical dancing girls who wouldn't look out of place in a soft core porn flick from the 70s.  To use a modern term, these are the hottest thousand year old women you're ever going to see.  To be honest, the best single aspara I've seen is in the Met in NY, but what's so striking here is the sheer number of them.  Over 3000 in Angkor Wat alone, sporting 35 different hairstyles.  Makes you wonder what these people were thinking.  You won't find anything Iike it in the Vatican, or in Hagia Sophia, or even Versailles itself, for that matter.

We had a guide for our first day of temple touring, and he was the only Cambodian we managed to engage in a conversation about the Khmer rouge. We called him Sam, focusing on the only syllable of his name we could pronounce. My failing memory about this nightmare from the 70s manages to put a lot of the blame on America - for the secret war that destabilized the country; for the reckless diplomacy of Kissenger/Nixon; even back to the odious Dulles brothers who manoeuvred America into a reactionary posture on Indochina that was criminally insane, IMHO.  But still it was surprising to hear that Sam seemed to blame the Americans also, which put me into something of a defensive crouch.  Yes, we were culpable, but the actual atrocities were all carried out by Cambodians - no Americans in sight, and none pulling the strings, as far as I know.  Sort of like blaming Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh for Auschwitz.  Of course Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh are guilty for Auschwitz, and Kissenger and Nixon are guilty for the eviceration of Phnom Penh, but only because when you murder millions of people there's a lot of guilt to go around.  I'm in no position to lecture anyone about what happened in Cambodia, but I suspect that Sam, and by very weak inference, a substantial part of the population, has yet to come to terms with it.

Laos pics

                                  

Laos

Laos.
January 24, 2017

in 2015 six scientists searching for new species identified a previously unknown snake just a few km from where we are now, Luang Prabang, Laos.  The new species, parafimbrios lao, is just one of over a hundred new species recently identified as part of an ongoing international project to better define the ecology of the Mekong River.  Today, following a six hour expidition by boat on the Mekong, I would like to offer my contribution to this effort, the previously undescribed Laotian Sand Cow (see grainy photo).  While the sand cow is here proposed as a new species it was not a previously unknown animal, as was the snake, but its status as a separate species has heretofore remained unnoticed, as were the 4 different species of giraffe, historically assumed to be a single species; a paradigm overturned only a few months ago.  The sand cow emerges from the jungle in the morning to browse on the sandy riverbanks, where we spotted several on our journey.  It appears to subsist on sand and an occasional gulp of rivermud.  This impoverished diet no doubt explains its lethargy.  In several hours of, admittedly intermittent, observation, no movement beyond an accasional tail swish was observed.  DNA sequencing will be required to establish the suspected evolutionary link to the now endangered dugong, or sea cow.

Luang Prabang turns out to be the very model of a modern major tourist town.  The streets swarm with Westerners, divided roughly equally between English and French speakers. Most of the native population appears to be employed in service to the tourists.   Markets proffering knick knacks made in the surrounding villages fill the streets night and day, manned (more accurately womaned) by eager natives hoping to sell something for a dollar or two to the passing parade of blasé millionaires (a million Laotian kip will set you back a little over a hundred dollars).  I am struck by the high ratio of sellers to the value of the merchandise.  If Walmart worked like this there'd be a separate salesperson standing next to each little rack of t shirts or bin of apples.  Oxfam says the world's eight richest people have as much wealth as the world's poorest 3.6 billion people, a fact that's hard to fathom.  But the stark poverty of these market workers makes it a little easier.

Still we didn't come for the knick knacks, and neither did anyone else.  We came looking for a remote (which it really was before they built the airport), beautiful, old Lao city full of history, elegant temples, great food (don't miss the fresh grilled Mekong fish with lemon grass and tamarind sauce) and, of course, third world prices. And if you can look beyond the throngs of tourists (including ourselves) you can still find most of that.  Did I mention the stunning mountain setting, and the perfect weather?  Apparently one of the unexpected benefits of a calcified one-party state is that the government can mandate the preservation of the architectural character of the town if it so chooses, and it has.  The result of that, along with a coveted UNESCO blessing, is that Luang Prabang is almost perfectly preserved, and remains free of the usual contemporary atrocities that despoil so many otherwise lovely spots around the world (it's amazing, all the things you can do with bamboo).  But it's not nirvana; the coffee's weak, and they don't seem to have gotten the news that chocolate is one of the five major food groups.

It was pretty easy in December to feel a bit smug telling all your friends you're leaving them in the cold to take off for southeast Asia for the winter, until you get here and start meeting the real travelers.  It makes our long anticipated adventure seem a little pathetic by comparison.  Take, for example, the Dutch couple we met in Vietnam who are in the midst of an 18 month jaunt that will next take them to Perth, where they plan to buy a 4wd vehicle and sell it three months later in Sidney.  Or the American pair, youngsters really, who've given up on Manhattan after a few years of trying and are returning to their native Atlanta, but not before taking advantage of the dislocation to travel around Asia for six months.  There seems to be a bottomless well of stories like these among the milling crowds, mixed in with the college kids on a break year and the do-gooders teaching English or computer coding to unschooled children in remote villages.  It all makes a person feel like he ought to have constructed a lot more interesting life for himself.

First impressions Vietnam

Jan 19, 2017

We've been in Vietnam a little over a week. Yesterday the sun filtered through the clouds for a solid ten minutes; the first time we've had any evidence of its existence in Asia.  This is the dry season here, according to the elitist weather services. Evidently the dry season is a Chinese hoax.  

The traffic in Hanoi is Vietnam's answer to China's one child policy.  Which will prove more effective in combating overpopulation has yet to be determined.  Here there appear to be neither traffic cops nor traffic laws.  Pedestrians, cars and motorbikes, especially motorbikes, compete freely for the same space on the roads and sidewalks.  The paths of vehicles and pedestrians interdigitate in random directions. At intersections streams of traffic cross at right angles, never stopping, swerving around and past themselves, using every square meter of pavement, yielding only to the thousands of motorbikes parked on the sidewalks and driveways.  In the vast expanse of central Hanoi the sheer density of traffic is overwhelming, even for this new yorker, comfortably enured to walking the length and breadth of Manhattan.  But the most startling feature of this 24/7 scrum is that it seems to work.  Traffic flows.  Get into a taxi and enter the fray and somehow you glide through the teaming hoards and emerge at your destination without suffering the nerve wracking gridlock that typifies any midtown Manhattan cab ride.  Step off the curb and steel yourself to cross the the street, effectively offering yourself up to the phalanxes of bikes and cars you know have no intention of stopping for the likes of you.  Swerve slightly, maybe; stop, never.  But somehow you make it to the other side, the sea of traffic having parted just enough to allow you to slip through, and then having closed up behind you.  But let me make one thing perfectly clear: this system could never work in America.   In America we would kill each other before we got halfway to wherever we were going.  Not by collision, but by road rage.  In the course of one 15 minute car ride I witnessed a dozen incidents that would have led to criminal assault in America, but here didn't cause a raised eyelid.  Cars cut each other off; pedestrians step out in front of trucks; motorbikes pull out in front of cars, which in turn squeeze them to the side of the road, and so on and so on.  And no one gets mad. No one yells.  No one curses. No one hits.  No one stabs.  No one shoots.  You know you're not in Kansas anymore.   I can't claim to know what the people here are thinking.  I can't even speak two words of the language.  But I can say with some confidence that they have a calmer temperament than we do, and the comparison does not reflect well on us.

Vietnamese has six tones; Chinese only four.  I, myself, have none, which is reason enough for me to not even try to learn any of it.  Beth, on the other hand, put in some time listening to Vietnamese language tapes and can now sort of say hello and thank you in Vietnamese.  These words come in handy when walking into and out of rooms containing other people. Hello, Chào ban (I can write it; I can't say it), proved particularly useful whenever we'd encounter little kids on the sidewalks, who all say "hello" to us, in English.  Apparently everyone is learning English.  They're certainly not learning French.  I'd hoped that my French would be useful here, seeing how this was a French colony for over a century, and the North was never occupied by Americans, as was the South.  But it most certainly is not.  The only vietnamese person I've encountered so far who spoke any French looked a bit like Ho Chi Minh, and he only knew a few words.  I get the impression they really hate the French, more so than the Americans.  I guess a decade of unprovoked invasion, warfare,  mass killings, biological warfare and arrogant , antidemocratic subversion doesn't trump a century of colonialism.  Says something about colonialism.

It seems appropriate that we spend the last few days of democracy in America in Vietnam, a country we (i.e., America) so wanted to keep from determining its own fate that we killed thousands and thousands of people, some of them our own citizens, wrecking our own economy in the process.  And all that effort, all that evil, wasted, all for nothing.  Vietnam emerged beholden to no one, and seems to have won it's core battle of the twentieth century: overthrowing the cruel totalitarianism of feudalism, while America has voted, essentially, against democracy and for a new feudalism, the cruelty of which is only tempered somewhat by the enthusiastic support of its most gullible victims.  So, here in Vietnam, where a brighter future is eminently feasible, we can enjoy a modest respite from the slow motion trainwreck that's just getting started at home, and that looks to go on longer than the years left to us.

But enough of this pompous moroseness.  Let's move on to what's really important: sightseeing.  The karst landscapes we're seeing here are beyond breathtaking.  They are, in fact, ridiculous.  Unreal.  Even the dreary weather doesn't hide it.  I can't even imagine what natural process could have created this stuff.  Thousands of brute block mountains set on Florida flat plains, or emerging as islands from a gentle sea. The local creation legend has something to do with dragons, and, frankly, it makes as much sense as the limestone erosion story that seems to be the received geological wisdom.  In any case, walking, or rowing, through it, is to be immersed in a Disneyland fantasy world.  The effect is only magnified by the myriad temples and pagodas scattered throughout the area, many of which seem to have been situated primarily to enhance the visual, or dare I say spiritual, experience of being here.  You find them tastefully nestled into rocky crannies halfway up nearly shear cliffs, or gracing the edges of bucolic lakes and rice paddies.  There's obviously an esthetic sense at work here.  These locations weren't chosen to attract crowds of dutiful tithers.  They were more likely chosen to attract tree huggers, like me.