Lippstadt, Bielefeld, Cologne, Belgium, London

Kind of a lot to squeeze in, but let's catch up here.

After seeing Anja, I drove up north to visit my friend Anne in Lippstadt. The driving in Germany was not as interesting as Sicily, the roads are more like the US and the traffic much more civilized. Anne and I met hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge in northern Yunnan, China at the end of last year. We spend a day together in Lijiang and I thought it might be nice to stop by her hometown since I was in the neighborhood. We took a short walk around country roads in her town which is very farm-like, and then after saying hello to her family I bid her farewell to drive to the nearby town of Bielefeld to connect with my old college friend Lance, who I haven't seen for 6 years. He recently relocated from New Jersey to pursue a career in music, and to try out some new territory I think. He also got married, so upon arrival I met his wife and we spent about 24 hours on a high-speed trip down memory lane. We got drunk, listened to old Berklee recordings which are now 10 years old, and played some metal. I had decent Italian food. I saw basically nothing of Bielefeld other than the apartment where Lance now lives, though from what I gather it is an unremarkable town. Lance seemed to enjoy his new home and spoke highly of the music scene there and the openness with which his favored genre of exploding metal is embraced. I plan to return to spend more time hanging out and by then he'll hopefully have some gigs and I'll have some more time. It's good to catch up with old friends, especially in distant lands.

After Bielefeld I was due to return my rental car in Cologne. I spent two nights there and reunited with two Couchsurfer friends, Caro and Manu. They gave me a heroes welcome and it was really great to see them. I forgot how energetic and fun they both are, since it'd been probably a year since I saw them last during their visit to New York when they stayed with me for a while. I had time before seeing them to explore Cologne on foot to a fairly significant extent, to get good middle eastern food and scope out a number of vegetarian restaurants, and to stand in the shadow of the most giant cathedral for some time as well as to climb to the top of it. Then we had beer.

Things accelerated as the trip drew to a close. I took a train from Cologne to Brussels and got a hotel room near the train station. I killed a few hours walking around Brussels, then a quick train to Ghent to meet my friend Ilse for dinner, another CSer I met last year who stayed here in New York with me. The old town in Ghent is really beautiful. I had so little time to spend in Belgium, actually less than 24 hours I think, but it made me think that it might be worth a visit one day so in that sense it was interesting. That being said, Brussels was kind of run down and sketchy in many parts, although the tourist area was pretty of course.

Finally, the last night in London, at Ee Lynn's very tiny apartment in the very interesting neighborhood of Soho which has renewed my faith in London even though it is painfully expensive to do anything there. It's a tough place to visit and I never appreciated Couchsurfing so much until I saw how much dorm beds cost in London and in fact throughout Europe.

I'm glad for everything I saw in Europe, especially the friends with whom I connected and for the family experience in the Ukraine and Germany which was truly beyond anything I could've imagined until I was there. That being said, my next trip will be back to the third world and just about anywhere except Europe. I miss Asia, I'm interested in the middle east, South or Central America, and Africa. That'll come in another post soon after I retroactively sum up the remainder of my 8 month old trip in the Philippines.

from Freiburg

I am now in Freiburg, Germany at my friend Anja's house. She was my second-ever Couchsurfer about two years ago and we've stayed in touch. I'm staying with her for a few days. I have a few other visits planned to other friends between here and London before I fly home on the 15th.

The last week or so is hard to verbalize. Sarah and I flew to Budapest. We spent a few days in the city and met up with my parents, grandmother, aunt, and her family. Together we took a 7 hour busride into the Ukraine through Slovakia and stayed in a town called Munkachevo for three days. The first full day in Munkachevo we woke up and drove 30 kilometers away to visit first the cemetery where my grandmother's mother and my grandmother's grandmother are buried. Then we visited the village where she and her sisters were born which is called Zarice. After Munkachevo, we drove back to Budapest and flew to Hannover, Germany. Every day in Hannover, we woke up at 7 and had full day of activity which took us to the Bergen Belsen memorial where there is a museum on the site of the former concentration camp where my grandmother and her sisters were prisoners of the nazis for a year. We also visited the displaced-persons camp and the barracks in Celle, Germany where they lived after being liberated, and the synagogue which they more or less created themselves and where my grandmother and one of her sisters were married before immigrating to the US.

That is the basic idea of where I have been. There are a lot of details and I want to write them but I think I'm just not ready yet. This last week has been very intense and I want to write something that does this experience, and the wartime experience of my grandmother and great-aunts justice. It's very important so I'm going to wait a bit until I have a proper amount of time to create it, perhaps before I return, perhaps after, but it will be written soon. In the meantime, I will visit a few friends and explore Germany a bit before landing back in New York. I will be here for a few days, and I think afterwards head to Lichtenfels to visit Yasmine, a friend from New York who recently moved back there to her hometown. I should have more regular access to the internet now so I will try to write some of the amazing stories I have heard soon.

Looking back on Italy

I haven't had much internet time on this trip. I'm in Budapest now but haven't done anything yet, so let's see how much I can remember about Italy.

Also almost everywhere we went in Italy was very dirty. New York is admittedly not the cleanest of places, but there is evidence of people cleaning streets and the trash seems to be largely cigarette butts and the occasional other detritus. The problem in Italy seemed far more pervasive. It is a stark contrast to Budapest, where I have been for not even 24 hours, but in our short walk around the city last night in search of vegetarian food I was stunned by how clean it is. There is not so much a cigarette butt on a sidewalk. I suspect this has to do with the fact that as in other cities I have visited that are this clean, there are garbage cans and ashtrays on every corner. I know Bloomberg is against smoking, but it is ridiculous that we cannot manage to have an ashtray built onto the side of a trashcan in New York City. In Hong Kong they charge a sizable fee for throwing a cigarette on the ground, and they provide places for you to put them so people do. I'm convinced this would make a dramatic difference to the face of the city and I wonder how it could be made to happen. I can't imagine it would cost very much comparatively.

My sister and I drove through many places on this journey in Italy. Palermo was a bit scary. Not the sort of place you'd feel safe walking around alone at night. Everything seemed very worn, not just ancient, except of course for the designer clothing every other block between run down and abandoned industrial buildings. For some reason Italians seem to flock to extremely shiny and tight clothing. I'm not the best person to analyze psychology of fashion since I wear t-shirts and jeans all the time, but a dress with attached mirrored tiles all over it? Sequined shoes? Throughout Sicily, people kind of stared at us, and not in the Chinese way it seemed to me where they are just saying, wow, what the hell are you? I understand, I'm really white, I have freckles and red hair. But in Sicily it was very hard to generate a smile. I am told that this is cultural and that it involves a sort-of closed attitude to outsiders, but once you become part of the city it becomes easier to develop friendships and relationships. This is somewhat unusual for places I've visited where if you smile at someone, they smile back. In most of Italy, this wasn't really the case. There were exceptions of course, and we did meet some very nice people. Couchsurfing of course helped. In Siracusa we met one girl who is not Sicilian but lives in Sicily and had granita with her and her friend. Granita I was pleased to discover, is a Sicilian type of sorbet that is happily dairy-free and widely available. Good knowledge to have for the traveling vegan who is having trouble locating soy gelato, which is surprisingly available. Another culinary surprise was that asking for pizza without cheese was not as weird as I thought it would be. In fact, in one restaurant in Calabria, they had only slices, and several varieties premade without cheese. We don't even have that in New York. I was impressed, and starving, and pleased.

On driving in Italy, the people are pretty crazy. Sarah has become fond of saying that my driving has become very Italian. After all, when in Rome...and I actually am in Rome. So, I was told that there is only one rule for driving in Italy which is you are responsible to watch out for things in front of you. If you hit something in front of you, it is your fault. So, no need to worry about signaling, that's a given. You can also feel free to pull out into an intersection as far as you like, or just make the turn without stopping, that's also no problem. Right, left, across multiple lanes of traffic, no worries. Go as fast as you like, there's no cops anyway except on the highway and they go faster than anyone else anyway. These rules apply equally when driving in big cities like Palermo or Rome, or in medieval towns with stone streets the width of the car plus one inch on the side of each mirror. The cars are by the way substantially smaller on average. I saw no SUVs in Italy. Not one. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that gas was about 1.5 euros per liter. So, to translate to American, 1 gallon is 3.785 liters, and 3.785 liters would be 5.6 euros, which would be $8.80 per gallon of gasolio. I'm glad I don't drive on a regular basis. That horrific fact being revealed, our car was some kind of compactish Mercedes A series which got seemingly good mileage on diesel and we didn't have to fill up too much despite figuring out at the end that we drove about 2000 kilometros.

Anyway, we survived. We drove through days of beautiful scenery in Sicily. The middle tended to be agricultural. We would drive through rolling hills of farms and terraces and invariably every few hundred kilometers a town would appear way atop a mountain looking like a medieval fortress. We got the car onto a ferry between Sicily and the mainland. We drove up the east coast of Italy all the way to Amalfi which for the record is beautiful, but so is the entire coast and most of it without the people scrambling for views. We stopped in Caserta, a town north of Napoli, and visited family members of Sarah's most influential piano teacher. They were extremely welcoming. We sat in their kitchen watching them cook an insane meal for us. We then got a tour of the Royal Palace in Caserta, which is one of the most opulent places I've ever visited. We also wandered through Casertavecchia, the ancient medieval town of Caserta which was as atmospheric as any of those small towns we visited and among my favorite places I think.

We finished our Italian voyage in Roma. Having been there a few times already, my only real goal other than letting my sister relax and getting vegetarian food was to see the Colosseum, which for some reason I have missed out on up until now. More notably, we had dinner with two wonderful friends of Sarah's at a traditional restaurant and had a very nice conversation on our last evening, a perfect cap to our adventure in Italy before boarding our plane the following day to Budapest from where I currently write this.

I haven't wandered yet in this town, but our initial impression is positive. It's certainly a very clean city and very pretty to walk by night. Oh yes, and Hungarian may be impossible, but I'll reserve judgment for another 24 hours and until I have a chance to look at a phrasebook.

Europe, Sicily

I suppose the story of the rest of my Philippines trip will have to wait. I am in Siracusa, Sicily now. This trip is going well, though I have had hardly any computer time so I can't even really write the whole story now. The basic idea is a few days in London, fly to Palermo, a few days there, then rent a car and drive around Sicily and all the way up to Rome via scenic backroads which have in one case now led us into a field of crops. I don't mean they led us into a road surrounded by crops. I mean our car, in the middle of a pile of dirt around which things have been planted. That particular misadventure was an attempt to find the Vulcanetti di Macalube, a strange volcanic landscape in the vicinity of Agrigento. I am with my sister throughout and we've been having a pretty interesting time of it. We drove through maybe a dozen small towns and medieval villages. I navigated our rental car carefully through very small streets with ancient streets, nearly tearing the mirrors off but no actual damage so far. Between the towns the scenic roads wind up and down mountains and through farms. Grapes, oranges, almonds, and other unknown crops grow up and down the occasionally terraced fields around us. Crumbling and abandoned buildings are everywhere, some maybe 200 years old, some 2000. We have been to ruins of temples and theaters and churches built on top of mosques built on top of greek temples. I have eaten lots and lots of pasta but my Italian is now as good as it has ever been. One night we made friends with the owners of a hotel in Erice, a city on top of a mountain in northwestern Sicily. The owner and chef made us possibly the best Italian meal I've ever had, and then again the next day for lunch. In the evening, we sat in a courtyard with all of them drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, and laughing. It was a memorable evening.

So yes, Italy for a while. I will write more about these details when time permits. There is so much more. London was brief, mostly visiting with friends and enjoying London more than in the past thanks to staying with a friend in what I'd describe as a suburb called Leytonstone, which feels more like a town that has only recently been joined to London. Also a bit of a wander around Soho, a neighborhood I really should've known better, has given me a more favorable impression of the city. I'll be back there at the end of this journey for a few days before I fly home and will explore more. A lot of our first visit was resting and overcoming jetlag. So after Italy, I'll be going to Budapest to meet up with my parents and grandmother for a foray into the Ukraine to visit my grandmother's hometown, but I'll leave that story for when it happens, starting around the 30th of July. In the meantime, we're going to go drive circles around Mt Etna, an active volcano not far from here, and then head further up the east coast of Sicily and soon onto mainland Italy. At some point I'll have to learn enough Italian to figure out how we get our rental car onto a ferry. For the immediate future we'll explore Siracusa a bit and try to hook up with a Couchsurfer contact who lives on a farm just outside the city. I will remind myself when I next have a few moments to jot down impressions of Palermo and overall of the culture and people we've met and seen. It has been quite different than I expected in some ways, and exactly as expected in others.

I went to the Philippines

I didn't write about my trip during my trip. I was distracted. So I'm going to write about it now, about a month later, so at least to some extent the details will be preserved for posterity; at least those which are not permanently emblazoned in my mind.

The whole trip was 3 weeks. I flew from New York (Newark actually) to Hong Kong. It was just about 16 hours non-stop I think, which is I think my longest flight ever. My last few trips to or from Asia have hovered in the 12-15 hour range. Over a certain number of hours, I personally feel it doesn't matter anymore. It's just long and boring. My technique now has been to bring a book that is engaging so I can read the whole thing. That keeps me occupied for some good portion of the trip. In this case, it was the Crocodile and the Crane by Arthur Rosenfeld. It was good, look it up on Amazon.

I spent a few nights in Hong Kong to recover from jetlag before the trip began in earnest, though this was let's say marginally successful. It is a 13 hour time difference, it takes more than two days, but I think I adjusted admirably. After a few days of vegetarian food and visiting with my friend Lilian in Hong Kong, I took the ferry to Macau and checked in for one night at the Venetian Casino. It was gigantic and over-the-top and opulent and all of those things one might expect from a giant casino styled after Venice, Italy. It was at the hotel in Macau that I met up with Carrie, my close friend from Guangzhou whom I met about 1.5 years ago at the beginning of my first trip around China.

We spend a night in Macau largely exploring the casino due to crappy weather, then boarded a plane in the morning for Clark, Philippines. Lots of budget flights apparently dump you in Clark, the former site of a large American air force base and now a hotbed of sex tourism and seedy nightlife. Despite our fearing the worst, we stayed at a lovely hotel called the Oasis which was comfortable. Our arrival in the tropical climate was most welcome after the cloudy and chilly weather I'd found upon arrival in Hong Kong. The entire time we were in the Philippines, it was warm and sunny. I can't really recall anytime that the weather was not great. The evenings tended to be a bit cooler but never so much so that it was uncomfortable in a t-shirt really.

So we stayed in Clark the first night and immediately arranged to be picked up at 5am by a ridiculous 4x4 to drive us 2.5 hours or so to Mount Pinatubo, a giant volcano which last erupted in 1991 killing and hurting a lot of people, but has since become a place where people go to hike, ride motorbikes, and spend time at the beautiful clear lake now found in what I'm prety sure is called the caldera. The latter portion of our ride in the aforementioned 4x4 led us up and down this more or less dry river bed with an awful lot of rocks and bumpy terrain. It was like some of the avenues in New York though slightly moreso. We hiked through this same landscape for the next few hours, eventually inclining upwards towards the caldera. The landscape was not unlike what Frodo and Sam trekking through Mordor in the last Lord of the Rings film. We'd set out so early to avoid the heat, so for most of our hike that was not a problem. Having stepped in the river in my sneakers very early, my wet shoes helped me keep cool much as sticking your leg out of the bottom of the blanket helps regulate one's body temperature at night. So we hiked up, checked out the lake, hiked down, rode all the way back enjoying the scenic countryside and small villages. People are really poor in the Philippines most of the time, it's somewhat distressing, though like most of these third-world locations I've visited, they are amazingly friendly and seemingly pretty darned happy. We spent the rest of the day pretty much ensconced at the hotel, napping, enjoying the pool, and planning our next move. I believe that night we ventured out to Fields Ave, the main stretch of bars in Clark which is filled with absurdly young and aggressive prostitutes, women lined up soliciting men to come into the night clubs, various other bars, creepy old men, and a few restaurants. Much to my delight we found an Arabian restaurant where I managed to get a good meal. My review of Filipino cuisine will wait til later.

So that was pretty much Clark, an incredibly seedy stretch of bars which we managed to almost completely avoid in favor of a beautiful trek up the side of an active volcano and generally enjoying the warm climate and relaxing atmosphere. Next stop is our long busride up to the north to the former Spanish colonial city called Vigan, which I will write about later before I burn out.

the Philippines

I'm going to the Philippines. I'm leaving tomorrow and flying to Hong Kong first, spending a few nights there, a night in Macau, then Monday meeting a friend and off to Manila we go. I'll be spending 11 nights there and the idea is to spend a bit of time up in the north checking out cultural and historical sites such as the rice terraces of Banaue and the northern Spanish colonial city Vigan, then to venture south on a puddle-jumper and check out the beach island of Malapascua. The Philippines is made up of 7000 islands or so, and it's really famous for it's white sandy beaches and clear blue water. I will be updating my blog as much as I can with my whereabouts along with pictures and tales of vegetarian restaurants and disturbing water closets.

back in NYC, again

My six week adventure in Asia has concluded and I'm back in New York waking up early and waiting for my brain to adjust to being back on this side of the planet. The trip was great. I probably did more in that shortish time than I should have, but I'm glad I gave the faster pace a try and I did see quite a few things that I had been wanting to see for some time.

Now to settle back in and get cracking again on this website project of mine and the company that does or at least will ostensibly one day surround it. My mind will take some time to catch up, but I will try to post here with any salient reflections on my trip sometime in the next week or two. In the meantime and once again:

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