Tokyo Jim’s 生活

For years I’ve been promising my mother I would take her to Southeast
Asia, but there was always something standing in the way. Now we’ve
decided to do it and will be off to Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam in
a few days through the second week of January.

I am in Asia for the first time in two years. I will be in Shanghai through the 25th (for the first time in 21 years), then I will be in Tokyo until 10-14. There is a reunion of the people I used to work with 13 years ago and I figured it would be fun to attend. I’ll also be attending to some real business while I’m there. The day after I get back from Tokyo I leave to Boston for a technical conference. I should be back in San Diego on 10-25.

I am off to the East Coast for my near-annual pilgrimage. I’ll visit with my sister and mother in New York before heading up to MA, first with my mom and then on my own. While I’m there, I’ll attend MacWorld Expo and the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. I had also intended to go to the Usenix conference but this conflicted with my family visit, so maybe I’ll head to Atlanta in the fall to LISA instead.

I’d thought about going to the Kerrville Folk Festival for years, but I was scared by all the talk of rain, floods, and fire ants.

I decided to brave all that and finally got around to attending for the first time this year. It was different from all the other folk festivals I’ve attended. This one is more like summer camp for adults. It’s not just a weekend of headliner acts, but 18 days long, and the emphasis is more on what goes on in the campgrounds, while the main stage is secondary. Many people I talked to never or rarely went to the main stage. Days were spent sitting around reading, talking, cooling off in the nearby river, or driving into the town of Kerrville for a little dose of civilization (Texas-style: the Barnes & Noble wannabe store devotes a full third of its books section to Christian books). Nights were spent watching the official acts, followed by staying up until 0400 wandering the campground listening to music emanate from various song circles.

This was also my first time in Texas, and it did seem like a different country. I liked how everyone is very polite and found myself adjusting my speech accordingly so I didn’t sound too much like a brash Californian. The HEB supermarket (more like a French hypermarché) was a favorite hangout of mine when I wanted to cool off and/or eat local cuisine like a brisket sandwich.

At the end of my trip, I spent a few days in Austin, staying at the local hostel and doing my best to check out the local music scene.

I am spending the summer travelling around China and Japan. I have spent one month in Yunnan Province and one month in Sichuan Province and am now making my way back towards Hong Kong to catch my flight to Tokyo. It has been amazing so far, and the food has been wonderful. The worst restaurant in China is better than 98% of the Chinese restaurants in the U.S.

Update on 2002-09-02: I have finally arrived in Japan, only two months later than expected.

Update on 2002-10-29: Finally back in the USSA. But with all this talk of war, maybe I should leave again soon.

I’m back from 8 days in Mexico. My first time in Guadalajara, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, and Querétaro. I was also in Mexico City, which I still like, the crime and smog not withstanding.

I may take off soon for Italy, Greece, and beyond, but until then I’ll try to get a bunch of work done.

Music is my life and San Diego is severely lacking in this regard, so I had to go where the music is, and that meant living in Boston until it got too cold for me to stay. Well, I think I could put up with the cold, but I really wanted to hit the road and travel more and I was already paying for one apartment (in San Diego) that was sitting empty and I didn’t want to have a second empty flat in Boston. But I will be back. There are too many attractions in Boston for me to stay away for long. I also attended a web publishing “Boot Camp” there, took a bunch of bicycling adventures, and went camping in Acadia National Park.

The last time I stayed out all night in Roppongi was back when my Korean-Japanese friend Jung-Ja Ko invited me out to Java Jive (since closed), but even then, we all went home by taxi about 04:00. So that means the last time I saw the sun begin to rise there was for Victor’s party in the Sweden Center Building when I was a 留学生. Totally unexpectedly, it happened again last night, in celebration of All Hallows Eve.

(OK, so it wasn’t officially Halloween, but given that Halloween falls on a Sunday night, Tokyo chose to celebrate it a day early.)

For years I’ve been hearing about the annual tradition of gaijin taking over a train car on the Yamanote Line and turning it into a rolling party. Each year that I’ve been here on the appropriate day, though, something else comes up, and I’d never made it to the Yamanote Party.

This year I was determined not to miss it. I read in one of the local gaijin rags that we would all gather on the Northbound Yamanote platform at Shinjuku at 21:00 and roll from there. Apparently, JR personnel read the same announcements, as they were all ready for us. The platform was swarming with police, JR Security, ordinary JR employees and a bunch of guys in suits with an earphone in one ear talking into their lapels. The crowd started to get rather large and they kept announcing over the P.A. (mostly in Japanese, but once by a native English speaker with a British accent [definitely the first time I’ve ever heard live native English over a Japanese railway P.A. system]) that it is prohibited to do anything which interferes with other passengers. Then a bunch of JR guys come out holding signs saying the same thing, except that, of course, the ones in English made no sense.

This was all such a joke because the crowd of us Halloween merrymakers (which was about half gaijin and half Japanese) was still miniscule compared to the usual rush-hour congestion on the same platform. At about 21:15 a train pulled up and we all got on. Interestingly, the JR people were encouraging us to get on. I guess they really did want us off the platform. A whole bunch of the security guys got on the train too. They had also radioed ahead as to which train car we were all in, as there was a large contingent of JR uniformed personnel waiting for us at every station. The party consisted mostly of talking, beer drinking, and the passing around of those mini candy bars produced for just this occasion.

I heard from other people on the party train that the past two years saw some serious damage done to the train car, and that last year they actually diverted the train onto a sidetrack at Ueno and arrested seven people. This would account for the effort put into security this year. My original plan was to stay on the train for one or two rounds, then get off at Shin-Okubo and walk home. I was wearing an ALF mask that I brought over some years ago just in case I was invited to a Halloween party. I never was, so the mask just sat here. One girl on the train said “What, have you had that sitting around since seventh grade? I remember watching ALF back then.”

My plan to get off at Shin-Okubo was thwarted when, as we approached Ebisu, about 45 minutes after boarding, people started shouting “Everyone off for Roppongi.” Now, I must admit a bit of mixed feelings about Roppongi. I regularly look down on those gaijin who hang out there, pointing out that I prefer to hang in more Japanese nightspots like Shibuya. However, whenever I go to Roppongi I end up having a great time and wonder why I don’t go more often.

By the time I arrived at the station, the party train crowd had broken apart and I was on my own. I wandered a few of the disco-filled alleys, coming across Lexington Queen, where they wanted 3000 yen for entrance to their Halloween Party. I considered it for a few seconds, but the thought of plopping down thirty dollars to be locked up in a smoke-filled eardrum-bursting room just didn’t appeal to me. What if I didn’t like it? I’d be out the yen. I made my way back to the main street where I felt like a celebrity for the first time since being in Tun Xi, China, when I was followed around town by half the population, curious to get a look at a real, live White person. The ALF mask was a big hit, with tons of women stopping me asking if they could take a picture of themselves with me (well, with ALF really). Mostly I had the mask on backwards, both because it was too hot and because it obscured my vision, but I put it on the front of my face for the pictures. I can imagine that if you’re a famous person and this happens all the time it can get quite annoying, but for one night I had no problem putting up with all the women wanting to wrap their arms around me.

I made my way over to Gaspanic, which has a pretty good lock on the gaijin crowd these days, with their bar, cafe, and disco all having no cover charge. Just pay for your drinks, which were all 300 yen. I went into the disco part, and was awarded my free drink for being in costume and ordered my ginger ale. There’s a notice on the wall that you must be drinking to stay inside and they do strictly enforce that. They come around and ask if you want another drink. When you say “no”, you’re required to show them your current drink. Nothing stops you from taking all night to drink the one you’ve got, though. I had a good time in there, as the music wasn’t too too loud and lots of girls kept playing with ALF and wanting their pictures taken. Still, it was too loud to really be able to talk, and I can only take so much of the smoke, so I went outside for some fresh air.

I walked around a bit and it was now at that critical time where I either decide to catch the last train home or make that commitment to spend the night. I thought about what I would do if I went home (work and email), and decided that the worst night out in Roppongi would be better than that. It also helped that I had slept until 11:00 that morning, so there was no danger of becoming too tired. I figured adding a little food to my system would also give me the energy I needed, so I stopped at Sbarro for a slice of their potato and cod roe pizza (only complaint: not enough cod roe).

I thought about going back inside someplace but decided to hang out on a street corner for a while to do some people-watching. Always interesting in Roppongi, it was made even more so by the fact that so many people were in costume. I got lots of picture requests, and did a little photo-snapping of my own. I kept seeing some women I first met on the train and we kept exchanging info on what we’d been doing. After I’d been on the corner about 45 minutes, an Asian woman came up to me and asked in near perfect English why I was just standing there and was I waiting for someone. I explained that I just enjoyed watching the goings-on and we talked for a long time. I assumed she was from the U.S. but she ended up being from Brasil. She says she’s been here six years, mostly doing arubaito, but arubaito here pay better than professional jobs in São Paulo. We exchanged email addresses before she went back to Gaspanic to join some friends.

In case you’re wondering about how well-known ALF is in Japan, I’d say that most Japanese didn’t know who he was, though many did. I heard lots of gasps of “Ah! Arufu da!” The Brasilian woman said she used to watch it dubbed in Portuguese. My Eddie From Ohio t-shirt with a big cow face on the front was also dubbed “kawaii” by many.

Another group of partying Japanese girls stopped by, and one of them started speaking to me in English, telling me that today is her birthday. I wished her a happy birthday and she explained that she’s lonely. I asked how could she be lonely when she was out celebrating her birthday with a bunch of friends. She said “I’m just looking to the future.” I’m not completely sure what she meant by that. Maybe that she’s 25 and still not married? Well, they left soon thereafter, so I’ll never know.

It was now about 02:00 and I hit a local convenience store to get some more floppies for my camera. I went back to the corner to hang out a bit more and take some pictures before wandering around again. The weather was close to perfect all night along and I was still in short sleeves, but the thought of some warmth sounded nice. So around 03:00, I hit Starbucks for a Hot Cocoa, Tall, with soy milk (food review: it wasn’t sweet enough for my American tastes, and the whipped cream wasn’t sweetened, as it is in the U.S.). I sat down at one of the few empty seats and ended up talking to the two people to my left, who had only just met by sitting at that table together.

She’s a Japanese woman at Aoyama Gakuin Daigaku, and he’s a Chinese-American guy from Poway (in San Diego County) who took a year off from Columbia to spend a year at the Waseda University kokusaibu (the same place I did my study abroad). Soon his fellow kokusaibuer, a guy from Korea, joined us. They spotted yet another kokusaibu student at the table two spots away from us. The Chinese-American had trouble following our conversation when we spoke in Japanese, so I asked him which level he’s in. He said “J5”. I said, “J5? You should speak fairly well, then.” He explained it now goes up to “J13” (when I was at the kokusaibu the most advanced class was “J6”). Oh. I had a good time talking to all of them, and at 04:15 Starbucks kicked us out because they were closing. I promised to email them the photos I took, and Alan, the guy from Poway, took my address just in case I flake out.

The first train was still fifty minutes away, so I just wandered the streets until then, when I caught the 05:08, which landed me in bed just before 6. Sure, my sleep schedule is now all messed up. But it was worth it. I don’t think of myself as someone into the whole disco, bar, and nightlife scene, but in Japan it always seems different — perhaps more innocent — and I usually have a lot of fun. But I haven’t had this much fun being out on the town for the night in a long time.

Spring Break was spent with some fellow people from the UCSD Wilderness Club visiting and camping in National Parks in the Southwest. We hit Bryce, Zion, and the Grand Canyon, and then hung out in the Sedona area for a few nights, including one out under the stars up on a cliff somewhere.

I spent six weeks in Peru and Bolivia over the winter. This was my first time in South America, and all those years of Spanish study finally paid off.

When I was a student in Japan I provided tutoring in English to a high school student. She has now married a Peruvian and moved to Lima and they asked me to come down and spend Christmas with them. After this, I took off on my own and traveled around.

I took advantage of Summer (1998) and tried to get to as many folk festivals as I could reasonably attend. Towards the end of July, I went to upstate New York to attend my second Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, camping with other members of the Dar Williams internet discussion list.

Because the Newport Folk Festival also appeared to have a pretty good lineup this year, I decided to kill time on the East Coast for the two-week interval. The first week I hung out in Boston, with the stated intention of catching as many musical shows as I could. This involved spending most evenings at Club Passim in Harvard Square. I was there for Tuesday night’s Open Mic, Wednesday’s Christopher Williams and Pierce Pettis gig, and I was back again on Thursday to see both of Dan Bern’s shows.

The next week was spent on Long Island, staying with my sister at her place in Westhampton Beach. Talk about “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”! I couldn’t believe the display of wealth evident all around that area.

The easiest way to get from Eastern Long Island to Newport, Rhode Island, was via Block Island. I couldn’t complain. Block Island’s a great place and this was a wonderful excuse to visit again, if only for my five-hour layover between ferries. I rented a mountain bike and tooled around the island, with my first stop being at the Southeast Lighthouse. Last time I was on the island, in 1993, the lighthouse was in the process of being moved away from the cliffs on which it stood (and which were eroding more and more each year, threatening the very existence of the lighthouse). At the end of the day, I hopped the ferry to Newport and was met by one of the people I would be sharing a B&B room with. I spent the weekend attending the festival before heading home to San Diego on Monday.

Spring Vacation 1998 was spent with UCSD Wilderness Club in Yosemite. Due to weather, we didn’t get to do any of the activities we planned, but we still had a good time doing day-hikes and spending the cold evenings in front the fireplace at Curry Village before being kicked out each evening and being sent back to our (cold and wet) campsite.

I’m back in Japan for a few weeks for the first time in 26 months. I’ll be back in my San Diego office on 1998-03-30. Lots of things have broken in the last two years and my main job here is to fix it all.
This includes:

Well, that’s all that’s really broken (and the first problem has already been fixed before lunch time on the first day). Let’s take a look at what I said I would do last time I was here:

I’m here for a few weeks (95/12/03 to 95/12/23) installing some new software to handle credit-card transactions.

That is still the goal. We’re just doing the credit-card stuff in a slightly different way.

New Business Cards (don’t think I’ll get around to it)

I didn’t, and I don’t know if I will this time. Printing here is so expensive.

Renew driver’s license (no time!)

Same again. I can’t renew my license without an Alien Registration Card and that takes three weeks to get.

Stock up on cassette tapes (can’t get odd-lengths in US)

I still have lots of tapes from last time, and besides, I don’t do tapes anymore now that I have my CD recorder.

Stock up on label printer tapes (cheaper and more varieties here)

Yup. I need to pick up some of these, especially the 6 mm variety that I use for CD jewel case spines.

Buy black jeans for Mom (Edwin London Slim 06 Tight Slim)

She wants another pair, and I need some Edwin Soft Jeans (not available in the U.S.) myself.

Check out any new Universal Remote Controls

I don’t have much hope here. I may end up getting the Marantz one as that seems to have the most flexibility.

Check the latest cameras (I think I’ll wait for APS in Spring ’96)

I’ll still give it a look, but I just received a new APS camera from my mom the day I left.

Stock up on A4 paper (so hard to find in the US!)

Too heavy to carry and I found a source in the U.S.

Look for any new gadgets

Well, of course! This is what trips to Japan are all about. Most of the good stuff never quite makes it to the shores of the States.

See friends

Again, a given, if they still remember who I am.

Other things to do:

Tokyo Fax: +81 3 5389 0188

I have made it back alive from two months in New Zealand and Australia. I’ll do a writeup sometime soon.

UPDATE: My trip diary is now on line. Who knew it would take almost nine years!

I actually made it up to Napa for the Napa Valley Music Festival on September 20 and 21. Highlights included attending all four hours of Steve Seskin’s songwriting workshops (though I’ll probably never write a song in my life), Steve’s main stage performance, the Joel Raphael Band from my current home town of San Diego, and several of the songs heard at the after hours song circle I attended, but especially Mark Bradlyn‘s “Outside The Family Way“, about how he’s just not cut out for a life of raising a family. I identified quite strongly with that one.

Wow! Amazing! Incredible! That sums up my feelings upon returning from the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival in Lyons, Colorado. This has been the summer of folk music festivals for me. My first one was two years ago in Edmonton. I stayed in a hotel (the official hotel!) and hung out by myself for most of the time. See my Edmonton report for all the details of that trip.

This Summer’s experiences were a bit different. At the end of July, I flew to Albany, New York to attend the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival located in Hillsdale. I subscribe to the Dar Williams discussion list on the ‘net and a bunch of people decided to get together at Falcon Ridge, as Dar would be performing there. I had nothing better to do and I’m always looking for excuses to go traveling, so I jumped at the opportunity. All us Dar fans created Camp Dar, a place where we could all hang out and enjoy not just our common love of music, but each other’s company too. Jef Scoville was the elder statesman who showed us how it’s all done, while most of the other people were first-time festival goers in their teens or twenties. Dar even came by her namesake camp on Friday afternoon, friendly as always. Her manager, Charlie Hunter, stopped by several times and was always very gracious towards all of us.

At the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival, I camped with the Folk Music Digest contingent, around the BOT (Big Orange Tarp). This was an older group, made up mostly of musicians. No matter what time I wandered into the camp, someone was sure to be playing an instrument, whether a guitar or a harp. I could never forget I was at a music festival.

Dar’s performance at Falcon Ridge was wonderful, of course. Other performers I had come to see included Greg Brown, Cheryl Wheeler, Dan Bern, and Moxy Früvous. But the biggest surprise was Janis Ian. Sure, I remember her sweet songs from the ’70s and I figured she’s another washed-up artist living on her former glory, but that was definitely not the case. She just blew everyone away! Her guitar-playing was amazing and had everyone in awe. At the end of the evening, it was Janis that everyone was talking about.

I had never seen Dan Bern before, but I was suitably impressed. I’ve been told that people either love him or hate him. I have to place myself in the former category, though there were plenty in the latter among the Camp Dar contingent. He’s very “in your face” and some people don’t like that. But you just have to be wowed by a guy with “balls the size of grapefruits”. He also happened to be performing a show in Montréal when I was there a few days after Falcon Ridge so I went to see him again.

Vance Gilbert was very funny. He is quick to point out that he, as an African-American, is a distinct minority at these (mostly White) folk festivals (“there aren’t many chips in the cookie”). I think I also saw three or four Asians (besides myself) at Falcon Ridge. Vance Gilbert also did a Performance Workshop on the Workshop Stage, where he critiqued and gave advice to up and coming performers. This was also quite entertaining. One of the people he helped out in this way was Diana Jones, doing her song “The One That Got Away”. I also heard her perform later in a song circle. I really liked her performance and I bought her CD at the “Record Tent”. However, I was disappointed by it when I got it home and spun it. It was the CD I was most looking forward to hearing, but the song she performed is not on the disc, and I didn’t feel that anything on her CD lived up to the live performances I had seen. Another song circle song that stuck in my mind was Hollywood Comes To Hoboken, by Greg Cagno, an autobiographical song about the singer’s car being towed when Ron Howard and company arrived to do a shoot on his street:

I got towed by Opie
Ritchie Cuttingham towed me
I don’t care who you are I was here before you
You’re a big shot director
And I’m just a renter
But I’d appreciate my wheels back when you’re through

Speaking of song circles, this is where the real discoveries are made. And at the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival, it was especially true that while it was the big names on the main stage that got me on the airplane, it was the never-heard-before artists in the after-hours song circles that made the biggest lasting impressions.

I usually gravitate towards female singers, but the ones that really blew me away at Rocky Mountain were males. Andrew McKnight, from Middleburg, Virginia, sang some really poignant tunes, such as his Last Call Waltz, about a first date going absolutely nowhere, while Steve Seskin was my absolute favorite. For the four days before the festival begins, a Song School is held on the grounds, thus attracting an even stronger group of singer-songwriters than is usually present at these festivals. Steve Seskin was one of the teachers (along with Vance Gilbert, David Wilcox, Tom Paxton, Catie Curtis, and others). He has been writing and performing for 25 years, but he says that early in his career he made the decision not to tour, which is why we haven’t heard of him, though many of his songs have been recorded by, and been hits for, other artists.

I heard Steve sing Friday and Saturday nights, and was suitably impressed, but his crowning achievement, and the performance that won over tons of new fans, was his Sunday appearance on the Workshop Stage. He opened with a new song, New Orleans, a gender-swapped, younger, Bridges of Madison County, where a 28-year-old woman pulls off the interstate to gas up and ends up staying, getting married, having children, and working at the gas station where she stopped, leaving behind her former life in New Orleans. The power of this song, though, is more in what’s not said. We’re never really told much about New Orleans, other than “That’s another story … that’s another time, that’s another town, that’s another life.”

When she dropped the kids off
At mothers’ day out
All the ladies had their questions
But they knew not to ask about
New Orleans

I thought maybe it was my own memories about New Orleans that were making my eyes water, but after Steve’s second song, someone in the first row grabbed a box of Kleenex off the stage and started passing it around, so I knew that I was not alone. What I thought was so special about his songs is most were not explicitly tear-jerkers; the emotional impact was stealthily injected into the songs. Like with New Orleans, the greater impact was often made by what was implied rather than by what was said. Steve Seskin has perfected the art of the story song.

I hear that all of Steve Seskin’s CDs sold out immediately after his workshop stage performance. Luckily, I had bought one of his albums the day before the stampede. Everyone I spoke with agreed that Steve’s performance was awesome. I’ll have to track down any live performances of his next time I’m in the Bay Area, and order his other CDs.

Megan McLaughlin, a school teacher from Oakland, California, was another of my song circle favorites. She had also been at Falcon Ridge, as had several other people performing around the real and virtual campfires.

Back to the Main Stage, I was happy to see Cheryl Wheeler again, along with only my second viewing of The Nields. Their vocal harmonies are wonderful, and their workshop stage performance with The Burns Sisters was an added treat. I also finally got to see Eddie From Ohio, and I was so impressed that I bought three of their albums, after promising myself not to get carried away and buy too many CDs this time. I also experienced my second time seeing Nancy Griffith and Catie Curtis, and good first impressions of Tom Paxton and Peter Himmelman.

Overall, the three festivals I attended this summer were an absolutely wonderful experience. For those who have never attended, just imagine several days filled with nothing but great music all around you, almost twenty-four hours a day.

After Falcon Ridge, I spent a few weeks traveling around Québec. I didn’t have that much time to spend again after Rocky Mountain, but I did spend Monday doing a little sightseeing, checking out Rocky Mountain National Park and the town of Boulder, Colorado.

Québec surprised me. I never realized how French (in terms of language) it really is. Yeah, I know they want their own country and all (sort of) but I expected it to be more bilingual. In fact, I found the anti-English feelings to be quite strong. I would even go so far as to say their French-only stance is laughably pompous and arrogant. They try to be more French than the French and even the French I met thought it was ridiculous. For example, their stop signs don’t say STOP, but rather ARRÊTEZ. But what do stop signs say in France? They say STOP. Another example is that popular fried chicken restaurant from Kentucky. Around the world it is known as KFC. It’s KFC in Japan; KFC in China; KFC in France! But noooo, those crazy Québecois couldn’t stand to have a TLA based on English polluting their fast food drive-thru lanes. So in Québec, the Colonel smiles down from his PFK sign.

I was also surprised by how few English-speaking visitors come to Québec. 99% of the people I met in the hostels were either French, Belgian, or Québecois. I expected to see many more Americans (Montreal is only an hour from the border; four hours from Albany, New York) and Anglophone Canadians. But who can really blame them. English speakers are most definitely made to feel unwelcome. For example, the city of Montreal has gone through the trouble of erecting tourist information kiosks around the city. But they are entirely in French, with not a word of English on them. Hey, this is Canada guys!

Once you leave Montreal, you’re really on your own (good thing I’ve studied French for five years). In the countryside, absolutely everything is in French. I must add here that I’m not the xenophobic type, nor do I look for trouble. When I visited France a few years ago, I did not encounter any of the rudeness that many Americans report. I spoke French as much as I could (that being not very well) and tried to follow local customs, such as always greeting the shopkeeper upon arrival. I was more than happy to try and fit in with the local culture, and this is probably why I had all good experiences.

I felt differently in Québec, though. Probably because it all seemed so farcical. After all, this isn’t France. I saw it as a bunch of people pretending to be French; pretending so hard in fact that English has been completely banned from their land. But they’re only fooling themselves.

Europe was sure a lot of fun! OK, maybe I shouldn’t use the term
‘Europe’ since I only visited two countries this time. Still, I guess I
have to admit that I have underestimated Europe all these years. I have done most of my traveling in Asia and always avoided Europe mainly because "everyone goes there" and, well, I like to be different.

This isn’t to discount Asia as a travel destination. It also has much
to offer. Each has its advantages. Anyway, on to my most recent adventure…

Having been born and bred in Sunny Southern California, I have low tolerance for temperatures below 15 C. So I planned my flight schedule accordingly. I booked a flight in to London on 1996-10-10 and a return flight from Rome on 1996-11-26. I figured that as the weather got colder I would just head south. All details were left to the spur of the moment.

This plan worked out rather well. I arrived in London and spent almost two weeks there, exploring the city and surrounding neighborhoods. I attended several concerts, including one by Sophie Zelmani and Brian Kennedy. I had not heard of either of these people, but I read a favorable review in Time Out magazine and decided to give them a try. And I wasn’t disappointed! Both were excellent, though it seems much of the (female) audience had come more to see Brian (“Let down your hair!” they shouted until he did) than to hear him.

My original plan was to head over to Wales and on to Ireland by ferry. However, while staying at Curzon House (a hostel-type accommodation, like almost all the places I stayed) in London, several people commented to me on what a beautiful city Edinburgh is. So when it was time to leave London, I just hopped a train for Scotland and didn’t look back (well, it’s hard to look back because the train doesn’t have a rear window). I arrived at night, took a wrong turn out of the train station, and one of my first views of the city was the beautiful Edinburgh Castle and surroundings, all lit up. I was happy to have made the trip.

I hung out in Edinburgh for several days, and checked my e-mail for the first time, by using computers at the library of the University of Edinburgh. Although I do like cities, I also wanted to visit the highlands of northern Scotland, so I signed up on Haggis Tours‘ Jump-On-Jump-Off service, a great hostel-to-hostel shuttle service with entertaining drivers and some stops along the way. This was a great way to go, especially for someone traveling alone. I met lots of people on the (24-passenger) buses (mostly Aussies) and we would hang out together at night in the pubs (there’s not much else to do in small Scottish towns at night). I took ten days to complete the circuit, with stops in Pitlochry, Loch Ness, Kylackin (isle of Skye), Fort William, Oban, and Glasgow. Then I spent a final few relaxing days in Edinburgh before heading back to the London area with a 2-night stop in York (great Cathedral) along the way.

I detoured to the city of Reading, an hour or so outside London, to
hear a concert by one of my favorite musicians, Dar Williams, who just happened to be in the UK at the same time as I. I didn’t want to have to worry about getting back to London after the show so I booked a room in a B&B, my first non-hostel of the trip. It wasn’t bad, though I couldn’t help but keep thinking of Fawlty Towers. There was also the taxi driver who refused any money for the long ride to the B&B because all I had was Scottish money. It’s worth the same as English, but "I don’t like going to banks." Hmm…

A few days later I left the UK and flew to Venezia, Italy. I was real
worried about surviving in a country in which I didn’t know the language, but I needn’t have worried. I was able to pick up enough Italian to get by, helped by the fact that it is very similar to Spanish. I almost never had to resort to using English. It has raised my confidence level, though I expect it to be punctured when I go to Eastern Europe.

Venezia (Venice) was awesome. I’m sure that’s not news to most people, but I really hadn’t paid much attention to it in the past. I probably pictured it as similar to the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, where there are some canals and a lot more roads. I didn’t realize there are no roads at all! And me being a car-hating, public-transportation-loving kind of guy, I thought this was wonderful. Imagine a city with no car noise. Ahhh…

My first night in the city and the country I, along with an Australian farm girl I met on the bus from the airport, headed over to San Marco and started looking for a place to eat. We saw lots of touristy places that were charging £20,000 to reheat some old food in a microwave, but we vowed to keep going until we found a real place to eat. Actually, I walked in to one of those tourist places and spotted two Japanese women eating there, so I asked them in Japanese how the food was. And they ignored me. Pretended like I wasn’t even there. I don’t know what they thought, but I was a bit peeved that they would do this. After wandering for close to an hour, we happened upon a little restaurant buried away somewhere in the maze of walkways and decided to give it a try. We shared a pizza and two pasta dishes. It was wonderful and cost about the same as those microwave places. What a wonderful way to start off my adventures in Italia.

I loved just wandering among the many small alleys that make up
Venezia. On one such tiny street I peered into an open door to discover a small Internet Service Provider with a computer or two and about ten modems on the shelf. I also did a tour of Venezia’s (little remaining) Jewish community.

After a few days in Venezia, I left the carless paradise, hopping a
train for Verona, home of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, and spent two nights at the youth hostel there. In my room were two obnoxious Italian football players, but it was fun trying to communicate with them. In fact, at one point I was acting as interpreter between the Italian guys and an American who was also in my room. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself at the absurdity of the situation of me, someone who doesn’t speak Italian, providing interpretation between Italian and English, based only on my knowledge of a few other romance languages.

Next, it was on to Vicenza for a few hours to check out the Teatro
Olimpico and other great buildings by Palladio, and then to Padova. I
dumped my backpack at the hostel and spent the rest of the day and
evening checking out the town. Around 18:00, I decided it was time to check my e-mail and wandered over to the University of Padova and walked up and down hallways until I spotted a computer lab in the chemistry department. I was reading my e-mail for about twenty minutes when a woman asked me what the hell I was doing there. I told her, “I’m reading my e-mail.” We started talking and she was very nice and let me stay a while. When I was done there, I was lucky enough to run into a mensa (student dining hall) across the street with a really good full-course meal for only £6000 (it would have been double or triple that if they had known I wasn’t a student there). I also spoke with a PhD student seated at my table.

The next morning I saw a bit more of the town, accompanied by an
Australian woman I had first met in Verona. She said she wanted to get drunk with me on fine wine that evening, but I was on a tight schedule and needed to move on. My plane back to the U.S. was leaving from Roma in just over a week and I still had many places to go. So we parted and I headed to Bologna for one night (staying at a youth hostel way out in the boonies and eating dinner at a nearby bar/card club), and then took the train the next day to Firenze (Florence). One of my highlights there was an exhibit on Rennaisance Science. I stayed in Firenze for a few days (another wonderful city), and then took a bus to Siena.

The only hostel in Siena is out of town and I wanted to stay in the old city, so I stayed at a small pensione type place that is run by nuns. The view from my room was great; looking up at the Duomo on the hill. Siena is a nice town, and I even checked out an Irish pub there, complete with a live musician playing Beatles and other pop tunes.

Then it was on to Montepulciano, a mountaintop town. Why? Oh, I just liked the sound of it. And I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s All Men Are Mortal at the time and it takes place in an Italian mountaintop town. It was definitely out of season, being too late for the summer crowds and too early for the winter holidaymakers, and most of the lodgings were closed. I did get a cold, non-heated room (well, I only realized this fact later) at a place called Bellavista. OK, so the vista was bella, but I can’t really say that about anything else at this pensione. Still, I’m glad I stopped there for the night. For dinner, I did my usual of ordering a few small dishes and using the free bread to really fill up my stomach. On my way out, I ran into probably the only other tourists in town, two sisters from Kansas City and a couple, so we all headed to a caffe for a while, where I discovered that their idea of a “hot chocolate” is a melted chocolate bar. I certainly wasn’t going to pass the evening at the Bellavista.

I spent the next day in Asissi and was planning to spend the night
there, but I was getting a bit frustrated at all the time I was losing
by doing most of my traveling during the day. So I decided to hop the next express train to Roma (Rome). I arrived about 21:00 claiming the last bed at the Ostello Ottaviano, and had interesting conversations with the varied clientele. I spent the next several days exploring Roma, including a tour of some catacombs, and then with a French woman (married to an Italian) I met there and two nuns from India she was guiding around, to a local famous church.

If I could have, I would have extended the trip and headed into southern Italia, but I had agreed to meet my family in New York City
for Thanksgiving, and my attempts to weasel out of it had failed. But, I shall return.

Summer 1996 was pretty busy. Lots of events to keep me entertained.

Toronto was great! I really liked that city. Too bad it gets so cold in the winter or I would consider living there some time. I went for Greg Wong’s wedding, and a good time was had by all. I found it interesting that they felt it necessary to hire two armed guards for the banquet (this is super safe Canada) because there had been a spate of recent robberies of wedding banquets due to the large amounts of cash given as wedding gifts.

The Barenaked Ladies were wonderful, as usual. I dragged my business partner along to the concert and he liked them so much he flew off to Arizona to see them again the next night. Ahh, another rut he’s in…

I saw my sister twice, once in New York in July and then again in L.A. in August.

I missed out on the Edmonton Folk Music Festival this year. Tickets sold out very early. I snoozed; I losed. The plan was to hit both the Folk Festival and the Fringe Festival. Oh well. Maybe next time.

I spent a few days of my Spring Break in Seattle. I had never been there before and had heard it was a nice city so I decided to check it out, along with my friend Joyce. We stayed in Pioneer Square. And what luck! It didn’t rain while we were there. We also caught a Barenaked Ladies concert at the Moore Theater, wandered Bainbridge Island, and went to see the locks at Bremer.