SE Asia Travelogue #3 – Laos

Hi Team,
It’s been a while, eh? Josh and I are sitting in a REALLY slow internet cafe right now trying to both chat with the cool Californians next to us and re-write a really good travelogue that we wrote you all two days ago. We had just about finished when the power flickered, just for a second, but long enough to lose it all. So, we’ll try to make it even better tonight and save early and often.
So, we were trying to write to you about Laos, which we left days ago.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic is definitely on the up and up. There’s tons of development going on all over– most of which seems to be funded by other countries. For example, the French are paying to pave every single road in downtown Luang Prabang (all 7 of them) all at once. Singapore has graciously ponied up to convert the two hundred year old market into a shopping mall. Russia contributed a couple ambulances, while Japan seems to have donated every single bus in Vientiane. China paid for an impressive fountain that synchronizes the water to pop music. The Australians spiffed up a nice cave full of buddhas. And the Americans proudly proclaim that they are contributing the most towards cleaning up UXO (Unexploded Ordnance– i.e. Mines, bombs, etc.)
Interestingly, the embassy’s sign neglects to mention who dropped all those bombs on Laos in the first place. It was a SECRET war, after all. But not to the Lao people. We saw lots of horrific pictures of the effects of those bombs in the country’s Revolutionary Museum. Pretty gruesome stuff. (It reminded me a lot of the pictures of Iraq that we’ve been able to see on Worldwide CNN– totally different coverage than the US version. People are actually dying.) Anyway, about that museum. They did a nice job depicting Laos’ colonial history. Tons of stuff documenting the successive invasions by the Thais, French, and Americans, as well as the Lao people’s triumphant liberation from all of the above. We also got to see Commie Leader President Kaysone’s briefcase as well as the metal spring he used to exercise with while plotting the revolution against the American Imperialists and their Puppets.
We loved all of that stuff, actually. But it seemed like the anti-American sentiment has been toned down a little. While the anti-French rooms were filled with little blurbs describing every step of the war, the American rooms barely had any captions besides “The American Imperialist leaving.” The Euros who signed the museum’s guestbook were pretty happy with the American bashing, though.
Overall, we loved Laos. It was very mellow and peaceful. We still can’t quite figure out how socialism and capitalism seem to be working hand in hand. But we did enjoy a sign saying, “Good people who love their country have the decency to not litter.” We also enjoyed buying street food wrapped in discarded bureaucratic reports. Seriously, I got one sandwich wrapped in the rate of reforestation between 1990 and 2000. (How it got from the government to the sandwich maker is an imponderable mystery.) Josh also sampled some other curious but delicious Laotian cuisine, like fried stuffed lemongrass. Picture this: a lemongrass, twig about the size of your pinky, stuffed with a half-fistfull of yummy meat. Don’t forget that lemongrass, while flavorful, is too tough to actually chew. Now, imagine the whole thing breaded and deep-fried. Then, try to figure out how to eat it– along with a crunchy side of fried, Mekong river moss. That one looked and tasted a little like Nori, so it was much more familiar to us.
As elsewhere in our travels, the motorcyle seems to be the main means of transportation. We were quite impressed to watch proper Lao ladies steering their bikes with one hand and daintily shading themselves with a parasol in the other. Not being comfortable on motorcycles, we travelled, as usual, by bicycles, boats, planes, and tuk-tuks (imagine a motorcycle front with a four-person cart in the back.) We particularly enjoyed cruising down the Mekong in a slow boat, watching children swimming, women bathing and doing laundry, while the men watered buffalos. In Vientiane, we biked on a great wooden bridge overlooking tons of rice paddies to a little villagey neighborhood. I don’t think many foreigners make it over there because people thought it was great and really funny to see us. Lots and lots of smiles and “Sabaidis” (“Hellos.”)
We were not so loved by the end of our sojourn in Luang Prabang. After returning from a boat trip where we felt a little ripped off, we ran into a bunch of tourists disembarking from the slow boat from Thailand. These guys had been sitting on a boat for two days, travelling about 15 kilometers an hour, and had no idea that Luang Prabang is all of two streets wide and five streets long. The new arrivals were being swarmed by tuk-tuk drivers trying to sell them transportation– that they didn’t really need– to guesthouses two blocks away. We thought we were doing them a great favor by letting them know that they could walk. But afterwards we felt terrible when we realized that we had just fucked with the local economy by depriving a whole mess of people of a good portion of their day’s income. We slunk off to the market and avoided the river area for the rest of our stay in Luang Prabang.
We had a minor moment of panic when the screw in Josh’s prescription sunglasses fell out. Fortunately, he caught the tiny screw, but we were afraid we would lose it if we couldn’t find someone to fix it quickly. We tried the silversmiths because they seemed to have a lot of tools around. No screwdrivers. Then, we went to the computer repair shop. They couldn’t help us, but they thought there was a glasses shop around the corner. When we couldn’t find it and asked the pharmacists for help, they had no idea what we were talking about and laughed embarassedly behind their hands. We were starting to despair when Josh realized who to talk to: the watch-repair man. It didn’t seem like he had ever worked on a pair of glasses before, but he gamely screwed in his loupe and rose to the challenge. The whole experience made way more sense when we couldn’t spot anyone in Laos wearing glasses.
The server here keeps going down, and it’s taken us a zillion tries to get into yahoo, let alone to actually get to the compose page. So, we should probably get going. One last vingnette: as our plane was making its intial descent into Hanoi, we looked out the window and saw the top of a mountain floating through the clouds. We couldn’t see anything else but fluffy, white clouds. It was wild!!
Tomorrow, we’re back to Hanoi, hopefully to see Ho Chi Minh’s well-preserved remains. Then, it’s off to Hoi An and the DMZ before a few days in Saigon.
We hope all of you are well and that it is much less hot where you are. We’ll write soon with our first missive from Vietnam. Please keep us posted on your lives.
xoxoxo Phil and Josh

SE Asia Travelogue #2 – More Thailand

Dearest Friends and Fans,
 
When we last left you, we were winding down our sojourn in Bangkok.  After writing the last installment, we came upon some street performance, while wandering through a city park. On one side of the park there was a small orchestra playing traditional Thai music.  A few hundred meters away, a crew of shirtless Thai B-Boys was doing some of the best breakdancing we’ve seen since Berkeley.  The perfect summation of Thailand: holding fast to their traditional culture, while embracing all the manifestations of Western modernity.
 
Random Thai Fact #1 – “George”
Surprisingly, every Asian we’ve talked politics with (Thais, Burmese, Kashmiri) seems to be really into George Bush. They think his pillaging of Iraq’s oil is a good thing (gas is expensive here), and/or they’re hoping he’ll do something similar to the brutal dictators running their home countries.  We’re not doing a great job of getting across the depths of our hatred for the man, nor have we been able to communicate our disinterest in the Miss Universe pageant (a current Thai preoccupation) – but that’s a whole other story.
 
So, on our way out of BKK we spent an afternoon in Ayuthaya, riding bikes in the sweltering heat around amazing ruins of temples and headless Buddhas.  Riding on the left side of the road took a bit of getting used to!  As we were getting sick of looking at Wats (temples), we came across a bunch of elephants and their costumed mahouts packing up for the end of the day – they loaded the giant animals onto the back of big trucks and drove off. We followed them, riding to the outskirts of town to the King’s elephant encampment.  We watched in awe as dozens of elephants ate, wrestled, and did tricks with their trunks.  After a little while, we were invited in to play with the baby elephants.  So cute!  They were very mischievious, untying Steve’s shoes and trying to hug Phil.
 
Random Thai Fact #2 – “Farangs”
We didn’t realize that being Farangs (foreigners) would be our ticket to instant popularity with the under-6 set.  Not only do parents get to point us out to their children and identify us as Farang, but our very presence is enough to evoke everything from gleeful screams of “Farang” to exhortations such as “Hello-1-2-3-4!” as we pass by.  Seems like everybody’s working on their english.
 
We took a cool overnight sleeper train from Ayuthaya to Chiang Mai.  Very fun – never before had we taken a mode of conveyance where you get to lie down.  There was a bit of confusion at first- everyone seemed to have berths except for Phil, who just had a chair.  But soon the porter came by and with a few deft maneouvers transformed her seat into a bed.
 
Random Thai Fact #3 – “Bags”
Plastic bags play an important role in thai market culture.  Not only are they good for your sticky rice, your curry, and your soup, but also your Coke!  Vendors will actually open a glass soda bottle and pour it into a bag for you to take with you, with a straw of course.  Interestingly, also, any time you buy something in a bag you can be sure the bag will come puffed up to maximum plumpness, no matter how small a quantity of actual products lie therein.
 
After a pretty quick stopover in Chiang Mai, we were off to Pai, a little hippie town in the “toes of the foothills of the Himalayas.”  We stayed in a very cool place on the banks of the river, across a little bamboo bridge.  Our room was a little hut on stilts, next to a garlic and soybean field, sorrounded by wooly green mountains in every direction. 
 
Pai has become quite a destination for euros and israelis on the year-long travel circuit.  If anyone has a fetish for hippies on motorcycles, this is the place for you.  Apparently this otherwise peaceful town has been having an epidemic of motorcyle accidents, however.  In our two days in town, we witnessed two people in arm bandages, our neighbor at the guesthouse drove into a Thai kid within his first hour in town, and we saw a drunken girl simply drop off her bike and struggle to pick it up, all the while insisting she was fine.  In light of this, we opted for travel by elephant, which seemed a safer way to get around.
 
We had a great time swimming with them in the river – they would dunk us over and dump us off their backs, and squirt us with their trunks.  And we were lucky to get to hear our elephant trumpeting – an incredible sound that vibrated the elephant’s whole body (although the sound also seemed to trigger all the other elephants spontaneously peeing).  Afterwards, our bow-legged thighs were ready for our first thai massages.  We were slightly surprised to discover that a thai massage includes your ass-crack!  Josh’s masseuse in particular was giggly and reeked of whisky.
 
Random Thai Fact #4 – “Dogs”
Thai dogs seem to be considerably more lethargic than their american counterparts.  There are lots of them, and we tend to encounter them sacked out, semi-conscious, strewn about the ground in various random places – like in the middle of a busy street.
 
For the past few days we’ve been bumming around Chiang Mai – a pleasant, if heavily touristed, city.  We bought our first custom-tailored clothes, attended a glitzy rock concert promoting dish detergent, spent time at the kitschy – but beautifully air-conditioned – Chiang Mai museum, and shopped at a few too many markets.
 
Random Thai Fact #5 – “Books”
Chiang Mai has many english-language used book stores.  (Some of them also double as excellent vegetarian restaurants.)  We were happily surprised when Steve found a copy of Dracula shelved in the Biography section.
 
Tomorrow is our last day in northern Thailand. Steve has left us for the sunny beaches of the south.  We’ve got a batik class and a dance concert to attend.  Then we’re off to Laos! 
 
More news, and hopefully photos, to follow.  Keep us posted on your happenings too.
 
Love,
 
Josh (in the composing chair) and Phil (suggesting apt turns of phrase and arguing for grammatical correctness)

SE Asia Travelogue #1 – Thailand

Hi Team,
 
I’m happily sitting in a nice air conditioned room while some dude chats away in French…kinda hard to write in English but we’ll see how it goes. 
 
Today has been a super long day.  We ventured forth on the public buses of Bangkok today to get ourselves to the crocodile farm a little ways out of town.  The air conditioning was wonderful and it was amazing to see how Bangkok goes on and on and on and on.  The crocodile farm was at once cute, disgusting, sad, and hilarious.  Best of all was the fact that it was a farm, zoo, and shooting range all in one!!!  Seriously, there were these teams of guys, racing through this little range, shooting at targets, while all these adorable families with tiny little kids were looking at the caged up and shadeless monkeys and tigers and hippos and, of course, crocodiles.  There were soooo many crocodiles.  Little ones, big ones, and a whole mess of mutant ones– ones without tails, with six legs, etc.  We got to watch a lot of them race over each other to get at some chicken carcasses.  Crocodiles are some blind mother fuckers– they couldn’t ever see the meat, just smell it, and they kept biting each other.  Oh yeah, we also saw a show where a couple of dudes stuck their hands and heads into trained crocodile mouths.  It was quite an experience.
 
Yesterday, things were a tad more normal.  We went to see the Teak Mansion (Rama the V’s palace), got lost in the bowels of the Chinatown (lots of Hello Kitty pens) and Indian neighborhood markets (lots of polyester), and ended up at this cute tourist trap mall where hipster Thai artists plied their wares and we forked up the dough to see an amazing puppet show.  A version of the Ramakini (sp) where the evil demon becomes evil and the great god becomes human.  It was fabulous.  Hard to explain in words but imagine three folks manipulating one puppet– one on the feet, one on the head and arm, and one on one arm– and then imagine that the three folks and the puppet are all moving in very stylized synchronized movements so when one person (or puppet) raises his/her leg, everyone raises his/her leg in exactly the same way.  Unbelievable.
 
Also unbelievable is the food, and it’s so much fun to procure.  We spend a lot of our days wandering by vendors selling stuff on the street, making weird pointing gestures, and (for me) asking ridiculously “jay?”  (vegetable)  to which I often get a “meat” or, more often, an actual sentence that I don’t understand.  Fortunately for me, I have Josh and Steve to taste the first bites of everything and check for meat.  It’s pretty fun and quite adventurous, although now we’ve got quite a repetoire of things we like– little sweet/sour things in green leaves, corn, fried scallion pancakes, and, of course, the ubiquitous and delicious sticky rice with mango!!!
 
What else can I tell you?  We went to see the green buddah and the grand palace.  It was quite grand and the king has a phenomenal collection of “guns and knives and killing things.”  Those of you who know about my secret penchant for People Magazine will understand just how into the royal family I am now.  I love looking at the pictures of them being given gifts by hill tribes, being presented with the new subway system, and playing the saxophone.  They’re so fascinating.  The queen has even invented six outfits that every Thai woman should wear.  I saw pictures of them in the Queen’s collection of ancient Thai silk– a pretty neat collection in and of itself.   
 
We rode the subway too.  It just opened.  Pretty cool system.  You get this little plastic token and touch it to a screen to get in.  It doesn’t quite measure up to the “T”, which as you may know, I love.  But it’s right up there. 
 
We also went to a sex show.  (Conservative cousins, don’t freak out at this one.  Skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid it:)))  Like the crocodile farm it was depressing but also a little human.  For some reason the Lonely Planet steered us to a place called Supergirls, which didn’t seem any different from the others being touted by the little dudes pushing menus in our faces while saying “ping pong show.”  But that’s where the Lonely Planet sent us and that’s where we went.  Inside, were several very real looking women, giggling on stage, looking bored, and then moving coke from bottle to bottle with their vaginas, giving birth to ping pong balls (of course), and (amazingly) blowing out birthday candles and popping balloons with darts they’d popped out of themselves.  Hmm.  I’m not really doing this adventure justice. Let’s just say we only lasted through three of the ten or so acts,  there was no sex on a flying motorcycle like the Lonely Planet promised, but we did enjoy when the birthday candle blower-outer couldn’t do her thing and had to get a replacement up on stage to do the deed– very professionally I might add.
 
Tomorrow we’re off to Ayuttaya and then onto Chiang Mai.  Probably we’ll write you again there.  Liza, Stephen, and Arielle, big ups for recommending Shanti Lodge.  We love the atmosphere, that it’s away from the crowds, and, of course, the pineapple lassis.  Thanks.
 
To all of you I have to write back to individually (especially you Dad), I promise I will ASAP.  Let me know if you want off this list.  I won’t be offended.  Promise.
 
xoxoxoxo -Phil (with Josh muttering over my shoulder and correcting my spelling/grammar)

josh speaks, do you dare listen?

Hello Friendies,

It’s been a while since I’ve spoken to most of you, so I thought I’d send a
quick (lengthy?) update on what’s been goin’ on since I hit the road over a month ago. I’ve been so many different places since then that it seems
like an incredibly long time ago now….

okay, so a month ago [when I started writing this] on August 1st I had
stayed up until 7:30 in the morning packing up my stuff, moving it out of
my room, and cleaning up in preparation for the woman who was subletting my room in Berkeley (who I’m told subsequently sub-sublet the room to someone else).

I had a day off to recuperate, then it was time to load all my crap (and I’ve amassed quite a bit) onto the truck. Me and Margot, my travel partner, spent the whole day and a good portion of the night cramming stuff into a too-small UHaul, driving back and forth over the bay bridge, and trying to stay cheerful in the face of what was becoming a bigger and bigger ordeal. We had opted for the cheapest possible method of moving
large quantities of stuff across country, which involves having to load it yourself onto a huge trailer. You pay by the amount of floor space you use in the truck, so there is considerable incentive to pile your shit as high as it will go. So there we were, out in the middle of nowhere in East Oakland, in the middle of the night with no one around, with matching his ‘n’ hers trailers side by side, stacking our possessions into 12-foot high mounds. I was immeasurably assisted in this Sisyphean task by my oldest pal Steve who had spontaneously decided to drive up from LA to chill with me one last time in the West… Steve lay on the futon entertaining me and boosted our morale by blasting the Pixies from his car. Anyway, I defied everyone’s expectations by actually fitting all my stuff into the cheapest 3-foot deep space! yippie! We celebrated with burritos from a roach coach at 2:30 AM.

Okay, then on the 4th it was time to hit the road. Margot and I loaded up Little Whitey (yup, we still had plenty more stuff to go in the car – miles davis poster, $1 guitar, disembodied puppet head, bag o’ eucalyptus leaves – it fills up quick!), Joe sent us off with a lucky grass twisty, and we were off like the proverbial herd of turtles. We stopped in Walnut Creek to pick up Jenn and Kevin, the other half of our convoy. Their van was stuffed to the kischkes too, and we were all super excited but still kind of in denial about our departure from the beloved Bay. Margot had bought us toy walkie-talkies at the thrift store which we could use to communicate between the “make-out-mobile” and the li’l whitey. We soon discovered that Jenn was a stickler for formal walkie-talkie protocol, over.

We drove for a couple hours, then stopped at a restaurant to eat some lunch. Almost everything on the menu had meat in it. Jenn got a salad with bacon and chicken in it. We drove through S. Lake Tahoe and went right near the road where John was staying at his family’s lake house – I thought about surprising him and dropping in, but we kept motoring. It was pretty striking when we crossed the Nevada border – we were right in the middle of the town, and all of a sudden there appeared huge hotels and super glitzy/cheesy casinos. We drove through some pretty weird towns in Nevada – there was this big billboard advertising a bar called The Bucket Of Blood. Just before stopping for the night, we stopped at a gas station in this tiny little cowboy town. The woman at the register was super surly. While I was paying, someone else pulled up at the pump and she yelled “goddamn it, another one!” We camped at a campground outside of town – we got there and a sign said the campground was closed for renovation. We decided to camp there anyway and we all lay out on a big tarp. It was really clear and we could see lots of shooting stars. In the morning we talked to one of the other groups camping there and it turned out they were from Berkeley. They swore they knew someone who was Kevin’s twin.

The next day we drove and drove and drove through the rest of Nevada. We were taking 50, “the loneliest road in America,” and indeed, there wasn’t too much around. Occasionally we’d drive through a tiny town but there didn’t seem to be anyone there. At one point we drove down a weird desolate stretch that had dead cows, all black, in various states of decay, evenly spaced out about one per mile. There were no living cows anywhere to be seen. At sunset we drove into Utah, which was incredible. Southern
Utah is beautiful – red cliffs, crazy rock formations, mesas and buttes. It’s like being on Mars. You can really imagine how the Mormon pioneers could have believed they had arrived in the promised land. We camped that night in a weird state park that was right in town. We drove around the campground looking for a spot – there was a sign warning us that all sites in the 2nd loop were watered heavily starting at 7 AM. We camped in the 1st loop. We had seen some distant lightning driving in, so we thought there might be rain and decided to set up the tents. I had Ben’s tent which I had never used before – it was, um, a provocative challenge trying to set up an unfamiliar tent, which had some broken parts, in the dark. But finally we got it set up, immediately insuring that it wouldn’t rain that night.

The next day we did some quick hiking around Arches national park, which is super cool. If you like stories about nudity, ask Jenn about the first time she was at Arches sometime. On the way out of Arches, we stopped at a little store for some popsicles. The bathroom was in the building next door, in an abandoned diner. We thought briefly about staging some performance art there, but decided to hit the road for Colorado instead.

As soon as we got into Colorado, there was another dramatic change of landscape. I mean, like actual trees and shit. We had our first rainstorm too, which was really cool except the van started to leak.

[wow, i can really prattle on! in the interest of getting anywhere near the present, i’m going to have to fast forward through some episodes. Cue tense shift]

Aspen Colorado – beautiful scenery, crazy rich people and their houses everywhere. Driving out of town up the mountain on a narrow road, we are nearly driven off the road by a huge RV. The van loses its side mirror. Little whitey, being considerably smaller, escapes with only a few terrifying seconds of near-collision. We go for an all-too-brief hike up the mountain… there is a light rain falling… for the first time since leaving California I have a few moments of calm and inner peace…. I had been feeling really in-limbo and de-centered. I understand what the “Rocky Mountain High” is all about.

Denver, Colorado – we stop at a Whole Foods to eat the salad bar before heading into what Jenn calls “the nutritional wasteland.” I pull out the $1 guitar and we have a sing-along in the parking lot.

Nebraska – we eat steak. It is good. At night it is raining so we stay in a hotel. Strangely, all the hotels in this little town in the middle of Nebraska are all No Vacancy. (Kevin speculates that it has something to do with this town being the “boyhood home of Glen Miller.” We drive on to the next town.

Iowa – we camp in a weird campground where they have huge streetlights on all over the place. We’re camping right next to a pond, and the frogs are incredibly, deafiningly, loud. They almost sound like mooing cows. Jenn yells at them to shut up, with mixed success. Early in the morning we are awakened by actual mooing cows. Driving through Iowa, we pass many corn fields. Most of them have weird number signs at the end of each row. Different strains of corn? Finally we drive past a huge complex – Monsanto. It all chillingly makes sense.

We cross the border into Wisconsin. Almost there! Suddenly there are hills in the landscape! We stop for gas and they have cheese curds at the counter. That night we pull into Phil’s parents’ house. Yippie! We all go out for custard (a wisconsin delicacy – it is like ice cream but with more eggs and cream or something). The next day we all go our separate ways – I stay in Waukesha, Margot continues on in little whitey to Ann Arbor, Jenn and Kevin to Ohio on their way to NY. Thus endeth chapter one, the great eastward expansion.

I have a couple days of resting and catching up with Phil, then it’s off to Chicago to look for a house. It is sort of exciting and sort of stressful to be there – it just adds to my sense of being in limbo. I look at one gross place with an annoying kid and somehow almost talk myself into thinking i could live there before I snap out of it. I look at one place that’s this amazing lofty space with 7 other artsy kids, but I think i’m probably not cool enough for them (indeed, they never called me back). I look at one place with this incredibly anal guy who talks non-stop and doesn’t ever ask me anything. He is essentially looking for someone who is a paying “guest” in his home, not a roommate. He provides a bed and linens for you, but you have to wash them every week. The whole time he is talking to me, he is obsessively arranging and rearranging this little pile of index cards. Very bad sign. I find one place that seems pretty good, with a guy who goes to the art institute too and plays music. He is excited cause there’s a southeast asian neighborhood nearby. Good sign. I hope he likes me. I realize that in one week, there is a pretty limited number of housing listings in my price range.

Then it’s back to Waukesha to deal with all my crap again. The truck has arrived, and Phil and I spend another sucky day transferring stuff from the truck into cars, into the Phillips’ garage. Then we have to pack our travel bags, cause the next day it’s off to Mass-o-two-shits.

We get up early and drive to the airport, the Phillipses and I. We’re going east to Phil’s cousin Margey’s wedding. It is weird to be in New England again. Actually, it is kind of interesting to have been so many different places in such a short time – I really have an acute sense of the different landscapes. We’re not actually going to a wedding – it’s just a party. Margey already got married in the Czech republic a few weeks back. It’s at a lake in the Berkshires. It is super nice there – the water is
beautiful and warm. It reminds me of many happy times in New Hampshire. Even though I have to deal with Phil’s extended family (she is the youngest cousin after Margey so there is rampant speculation about when the next wedding might be) it is nice and relaxing to be there. It feels for the first time like I’m having a brief summer vacation.

Next stop – Boston. I’m chillin’ with my dad and family there. It’s nice to be back in Boston, but i’m there for such a short time that I don’t have time to look up any of my local friends. My step-brother Jonah is home too. He has become a man since the last time I saw him. We have a deep heart-to-heart about life, love, and psychedelic drug experiences. I get to eat at all my favorite boston restaurants. Meanwhile, I get an email from the cool-sounding guy in Chicago – he wants to live with me. That’s one less thing to worry about.

Then it’s on the bus, and back to Amherst. My mom is happy to see me – but generally stressed and sad cause her father is declining quickly. He’s 92 – he sleeps for at least 20 hours a day and is really weak. He needs help to sit up or go to the bathroom, which is really hard for him because he has always been really independent. My mom and step father have been spending every day with him, but she has just hired a home health aide to help out. I pitch in while i’m there, helping him stand up, pushing the wheelchair, cutting watermelon into bite-sized pieces. He is so weak that it is hard for him to talk, but we talk a little bit. I think this is probably the last time I’ll see him alive. He sleeps so much my mother thinks he may just slip away.

Then i’m back on the plane, back to Wisconsin. The next day, Phil and I go for a bike ride. I ride past a mouse lying on its back, squirming. Thinking how strange that is, I circle back for another look. When I get there, the mouse is dead. It must have been in its final throes. This seems like an ill omen. A few minutes later, the whole pedal assembly falls off my bike.

The next day, it’s time to move to Chicago. I’ve made a reservation with Uhaul, but when I call they seem to have no record of me. They tell me they are super backed up, still trying to fill orders from yesterday. Finally I get a truck, but only if I return it back to Waukesha instead of going one-way to Chicago. That means load it up, drive 2 hours to chicago, unload it, and drive 2 hours back that night. Man. The truck they give me is ancient, diesel, incredibly loud, and seems extremely underpowered. Phil and I load all the crap into the truck, and hit the road. The fucking truck sucks to drive and I’m already dreading driving it down the narrow busy streets of Chicago and having to drive it back that night. Fortunately, there’s not too much traffic even though it is rush hour by the time we get to Chicago.

We get to chicago and are about a mile from my new house when the truck breaks down. It just suddenly stops and won’t go any further. Fortunately we have Jeri’s cell phone with us and we call the Uhaul hotline. They tell us it might be an hour and a half for the towtruck to arrive. Fuck. We wait for the truck and try to figure out what will happen next – will they tow us somewhere and then we will have to load all of my shit onto another truck? When the truck driver arrives he is really nice. He says no problem, we’ll tow you to your house, you can take your time unloading, and then call us again and we’ll take the truck away. Yippie! this means we don’t even have to drive it back to Waukesha! We bring in all my stuff – it is up a big flight of stairs and it is really hot. We are exhausted when we are done but relieved to be finished moving. Unfortunately, the guy whose room i’m moving into won’t be moved out for another week, so we just have to pile my stuff in the living room.

The next morning is my first day of school. It is way too hot for my planned first-day-of-art-school outfit, i have to wear shorts and a T-shirt. How unhip. I wear my El Jefe T shirt. All day people are asking me What is El Jeff? I get to orientation, which is in this big ball room. It is scary to walk in, there is an atmosphere of tension and no one is talking. I am hoping for some icebreakers or something, but no, it is just two hours of people talking about how lucky we are to be there and other boring stuff. On the way out I bump into a kid i met when i visited in the spring. He is nice and friendly. I go into super outgoing mode, introducing myself to like everyone I meet. That night there is a party for new grad students with barbecue and cheap beer. Phil told me that her strategy for dealing with meeting strangers at orientation was to look for the hippie-looking people and talk to them. There are no hippie-looking people here. I get pretty drunk and schmooze with a lot of random people. Most people are pretty nice, but it is a lot of work making all that chitchat. I meet a kid from Hayward. That is pretty exciting. He actually knows how to pronounce my shirt. After the party ends, i walk in the direction that I believe the train to be. I get totally lost. There is no one around. It takes me hours to get home.

The next day I wander around my new neighborhood, “Andersonville.” The restaurants and stores are a weird mix of swedish, middle eastern, and vietnamese. It actually seems really diverse – my block has Latin people, black folks, some Slavic type folks, and a few hip white kids. Two doors down from me is a huge group home or insane asylum or something, there are always disoriented looking people hanging around outside it. My El stop is called Argyle, like the socks. It is about a half-hour train ride to school – kind of far but more or less like my commute to work in SF. I go back to school and meet all the other incoming grads in my department (Art & Technology). Everyone seems really nice and actually more interesting than the people I met when I visited last year. I get a studio space which is kind of cool although I’m not sure how much i’ll actually use it since most of what I’m planning to do is on the computer. After that, I meet Phil and we go to the museum of surgical sciences. There are lots of life-sized statues of famous men of surgery and various antiquated surgical implements. Most interesting is their collection of gall and kidney stones, which are oddly jewel-like yet extremely painful to imagine passing.

The next day I have my first day of classes. They both seem pretty cool but are also both seminars where it seems like the students will end up doing most of the teaching which seems kinda lame for all the money i’m paying. I get a tour of the Art & Tech department facilities which includes an amazing collection of old junky broken electronic equipment which is up for grabs. How exciting! Then I jump in the car with Phil and head off to Ann Arbor for the long weekend. It is kind of a relief to leave Chicago and go somewhere else where I don’t have to worry about anything. We cook thai food, hang out with her friends, move into her new bizarre condo complex. I am joyously reunited with Little Whitey.

Fast forward to the present. I’ve been going to school for two weeks now. I’m still getting used to this whole “artist” thing. I haven’t actually made any work yet, but I’m thinking about it a lot and gathering tools and materials. I just ordered a new computer which is geekily exciting. My advisors have bombarded me with lists of people I need to go look up. I’m friendly with about a dozen people at my school. It has finally cooled down a bit after being stiflingly hot for most of the time I’ve been here. I can actually wear socks and pants. Today I had to put my hoodie on! (but that’s only cause the classroom was so air conditioned). The other day I went to the store. Granted, I seem to have picked a kind of crappy supermarket, but it was totally depressing. Y’all know how important food is to me! Let’s just say it was NOOOOO Berkeley Bowl. They didn’t even have tofu, let alone preservative-free tortillas. And the produce was anemic and expensive. sigh…

I still get intense flashes of homesickness for the beautiful Bay Area almost every day. To all my friends from there (and elsewhere), I miss you guys! I want to stay in better touch with everyone. I realized that I don’t have proper mailing addresses for most of my friends – write back with your info so I can send you funny postcards and mix CDs. I can now be reached at:

1462 W. Carmen, 2nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60640
(773)271-5631

May your days be merry and bright. Love, Josh