My Diary

I kept a journal for the first 10 days of my Indian adventure but lost it on the overnight bus ride between Panji and Mumbai. The following is taken more or less verbatim from the replacement journal that Tori bought me.

So, beginning yesterday, we separated from the group and embarked on a 15 hour bus, jet, taxi ride to Delhi. The Bus was miserable because I was on the tail end of my sickness and coughed the demons out all night. I also had to pee and the bus had no bathroom nor did it stop much but kept a pace of about 25 miles an hour, the highest speed traffic ever gets up to in India. I did get to see a good Bollywood movie about some Douche and his nerdy friend. The douche, Farah Khan, seduced a secret agent and tried to get his friend laid. Then there was some dancing and a few songs and somehow things got resolved. The best part was when the douche's wife found out he was flirting with a secret agent. She threw a big fit and slapped him then he apologized and all was forgiven. The movie sucked, actually.
We stayed in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) for only a few hours, much to Tori's regret. Mumbai is the fashion capitol of India and she was dissapointed that she missed the glamour. What I saw of Mumbai leads me to believe it is the dirtiest and most polluted of Indian cities and I was glad to leave it (this all takes place a month before the terrorist attacks).
From the bus I got into a taxi and sputtered to the airport. I tried bargaining my bottle of Smirnoff for the ride, figuring they wouldn't allow it on the plane, but the airport security told me I could bring it so long as I didn't drink any on the plane. I paid the taxi and gave the security guy a firework.
The plane we flew on was owned by an airline called SpiceJet. What a stupid name, "SpiceJet." I sounds like a novelty, like a toy investment for some rich kid or a marketing group fresh out of American business school. The other major airline, Kingfisher, is owned by a beer company. I'm not sure if I would have preferred to fly with them or not.
The interior of the SpiceJet was new, but cheap. The seats looked and felt like padded lawn chairs screwed into the floor. Though they could recline, the passanger behind would have their legs squished, and the food trays extended all the way to my stomach. The exterior of the plane was covered in dirt, as if it recently landed on a gravel runway.
My introduction to Delhi was nice. Tori and I toured the city (the cleanest and best maintained in all of India) and found a room in the Janpath Guest House, an expensive mosquito breeding ground. After a nap we explored a Bazaar where I bought a couple hookahs. As we were leaving we set off the metal detectors but the guards didn't investigate us. They did bother the each and every Indian that entered the bazaar, even if they didn't set off the metal detectors.
My biggest learning adventure happened the next day, keep reading.

Angel Island/Could We Get a Boat that's a little less Sinky?

Break from India for a sec. Angel Island is like the Staton Island of San Francisco. My sister Jane and I took the S.S. Gash, a ferry with a five foot long stab wound in the side, on a day trip down to the island -a magical journey into the affluent California sea scape. As the first people on the boat, we got a killer spot next to a window. We avoided the outdoors because my microfiber hiking shirt, above-the-knee cargo shorts, and fanny pack were too flimsy to bear the harsh sea wind. A Note, I was not embarrased in my hiking outfit. On the contrary, I blended in nicely with all the yuppies in their Colombia pullovers, camelpacks, and Smartwool socks. Jane just wore jeans and a sweater; we looked down on her.
There was a sailboat race going on that day and we got the chance to see these magnificent eight-man racing yachts tacking through the wind while the crews raced from one side to the other for counter balance, boats nearly capsizing as our ferry and 3-man crew cruised past.
The Island was pretty typical for and island. We hiked, saw nature, got tired. There was a cool tree that looked like it was bleeding. I think it was magical. Or maybe it is all of nature that is magical. Just kidding, nature sucks. We tried to have a picknick at the summit but all these damn bees kept getting in out business. By the way, although the summit of Angel Island is one of the highest peaks in the area, at 1000 feet it is still about 2oo feet lower than my parents house in Des Moines.
On our descent we saw these goofy twig trees with giant pinecones, that and a hiking path that ran along a cliff. If we were severely intoxicated we could have stumbled to our dooms.
Speaking of which, on our way back to port the captain made a stop in a well-to-do Marin County sea town. There was a seaside bar that the captain presumably went to where these middle age ladies did milf dances (hands in the air, a-rythmic gyrating, awkward spins) in full view of our ferry. Since we were all bored on the boat, waiting for the captain to drink his fill, the lot of us sat and watched, critiqueing, imitating, enjoying.
When we finally got going again the captain drove us within throwing range of Alcatraz (and some smaller sea vessels) then crashed into the dock, more or less, which helped explain where the gash on the side of the ship came from.

Evil Northern Goa is a bad place

If ever you are planning a vacation to North Goa, don't. We were lured there by the promise of crazy Isreali party beaches that we later learned were made illegal because people kept getting raped.
We took the ten mile, hour and a half long journey at the height of my sickness, when my head was stuck in a vice that made my nose leak and my balance faulty. Add to that Goa is very hot, around 90 degrees plus humidity. There're more trees and fewer roads in South Goa so I didn't notice the heat as much, but in the north it's unbearable. Of course nothing has air conditioning.
The driver who was bringing us to the north said he'd cut us a deal if we visited a couple stores. I sat outside for the first store but the second I checked out because I saw a running air conditioning unit taped and nailed to the outside. Here is where I learned that Indians don't understand air currents. The A/C unit was on the bottom floor, next to the entrance, pointed at a wall. Maybe it's because of my spoiled American upbringing but I think if you're going to spend all that money powering and maintaining an A/C unit you should put it somewhere useful. Instead we were stuck in a sweltering top-floor showroom looking at fine silk carpets that sold for around $900 U.S. dollars. After hanging around for a respectful half hour and listening to the store owner's sales pitch we politely declined to buy anything.
Geckos really are man's best friends, not dogs. Geckos are small, eat bugs, live on the ceiling and walls, and stay out of my way; dogs do the opposite. I tried explaining this to Tori at the thatch-roofed hut we were staying at in the peasant town of Anjuna, but she couldn't get past the sound of scurrying above her as she tried to sleep.
The next day at 4 am we woke up and went for a walk to the beach. Some kids and I found volcanic looking rocks with nifty tidal pools by the sea. I tried to catch some creatures but they were too fast, then we walked to a beach where cows were lying around and dropping grenades in the sand. Back at the hut, Tori rented a moped, i think. I was feverish and a little delirious. She disappeared for the day and came back with cold medication while I sat in a hammock and hung on to consciousness by reading comic books. At some point in the day Luther, Tauti, and Evan stopped by and talked to me. Later that night we moved to an air conditioned beach side hotel.
My main problem with North Goa is that it's almost impossible to leave the house. As soon as I stepped out the door fifty people would surround me and try to snake my money. Constantly, everywhere I went, people just wouldn't leave me alone. At one point I was sitting on the beach, trying to enjoy the tide's ebbing, when a gang of gypsies pounced on me. I lost my temper and threatened the lot with torture and ruin, but they just didn't get the point.
Eventually I figured out that I had to store my stuff at a restaurant and buy something, then their staff would chase the gypsies, beggars, and crap toters away.
Swimming was an option too, but barely. There were nazi life guards posted every 20 yards on the beach an in the water. We weren't allowed to go deeper than our waists and we had to avoid "rip tide" zones. It was crowded too and creepy Indian men kept trying to touch Tori.
One of the saddest things I saw was the cruelty of higher caste people to lower castes. There was one kid making sand castles while two higher caste kids ran around him playing soccer with their dad. Every once in a while the high caste kids would intentially run through the castle or kick the ball at the kid. The dad not only didn't care that his kids were total shits, but he stepped through the castle once too. The sand castle kid's dad was nearby too, but he couldn't do anything because he was a lower caste. I wanted to get in the soccer dad's face, tell him to clean up his act, but Tori advised me not to. Guy probably didn't speak English anyway.
That isn't to say that Goa is all bad. As whiteys my crew and I were invited to exclusive clubs that played Euro trance with laser shows while transvestite looking ladies danced on the balcony. When not partying we could sit on the beach side, smoke hookah, and get drunk on weak martinis.
The oldest and biggest eastern churches are located in the town of Old Goa. Composed of one room big enough to fit a blue whale, intricately decorated and painted with at least 5 different colors per square foot, all hand painted, and sitting on the verge of collapse, the churches of Old Goa were really nifty. They also have a cool museum devoted to 500-year-old paintings of explorers and magistrates. Some of the paintings had disturbing depictions of Christians being dismembered by natives and it made me wonder how these burnable paintings survived so long.
We saw some army guys at a local restaurant. They had soviet looking assault rifles sporting patches of bare metal where the black paint flaked off and stood a foot taller than most other Indians. When they came in the whole staff stopped what they were doing to wait on them. I don't think they paid either. I was surprised by how old they were too. they all had gray hairs and lines on their faces.
After 5 days it was nice to leave Goa, the beach bum life was wearing on me. Little did I know the greatest trial was yet to come when we made for Delhi.

Southern Goa

Goa is the vacation destination for India, kinda like America's Malibu beach. It's a tiny state, about 30 miles long and just wide enough to fit the beach and some inland hotels. The Spanish founded Goa in the 1500s and didn't leave until after the Brits got kicked out. As a result Catholicism is the dominant religion and there are cool Spanish wells and forts all over the place. I read all this in the Lonely Planet guidebook.
We arrived at 4am in the town of Manilow, or something, and got attacked by every rickshaw driver in town. Their method is to surround each person in the group with every driver talking at once, making it harder to confer with the other people in the group so that it's harder to negotiate. There are government prepaid taxi stands that will give a fair price, but sometimes it's just easier to follow a guy to his cab and pay him what he wants. I had to pee, and noticing that the natives just whipped it out wherever they were standing, I took a "when in Rome" approach and let fly in the nearby grass. While we were loading our bags outside the train station I looked back at the entryway where dozens of people were sleeping, despite the urine, feces, and dogs prowling around. Some of the sleepers didn't have pillows so their heads rested on the steps. I didn't notice these people at first because they kinda blended into the surroundings. I felt bad about peeing where somebody was likely to sleep, though I'm not as bad as the natives who whiz right next to a sleeper or on the train platform where people have to walk and maybe set bags down. I wish India would invest in public toilets.
Our guidebook suggested an Inn called Ma Mickey's. The cabbie didn't know where it was so we drove around until we stumbled on it by luck. Our guidebook also said Ma Mickey's was near the beach, and since the sun hadn't come up we took its word. After setting down our bags and agreeing to pay $5 a person per night, we set out to watch the sun rise on the beach. The lesson we learned that day: never ask an Indian for directions. You say "Beach?" and make swimming motions to a group of people and each one points a different direction, then they look at each other and adjust until they're all pointing the same way. 99% of the time they're leading you to a store or to nothing at all. This happened at every intersection on our way to the sea, so a 1-mile walk took about 2 hours. We finally found the beach by standing on the road and waiting for white people to drive by, then we headed in their direction.
We chose our town, Colva, because it was supposed to be a quiet fishing village where you could watch fishermen bring in their catches every morning. What we found instead was a man gathering up all the tourists he could -whiteys, Buddhist monks, and some wealthy photo taking Indians from Bangalore- using them to push a boat into the Arabian Sea. The boat was huge, almost as long as a school bus, and there was no way nine or ten people could push it 15 feet across dry sand. After conferring with the monks -who spoke immaculate English and wore all orange- we all decided to ditch the guy. Now that I think about it the man was probably trying to steal the boat; what fisherman goes out at midday in low tide without a crew?
Funny thing about Indian women at the beach is that they dress the same as on the street: full saris, jewelry, bindis and all. This compared to the American and European tourists who sunbathe in string bikinis with thongs, sometimes topless (illegal in India btw). Guys have no shame though. One of the Buddhist monks wore orange briefs that matched with his robe. Some of the Indians wore semi see-through boxers and those string briefs that Michael Jordan wears. Gross.
The Arabian Sea is the warmest, saltiest water I've ever been in, clear too. And the waves are gentle as a breeze. Disappointing really. The only ocean waves I ever remember playing in were Hawaiian where the waves can crush you and the currents can take you out to sea as fast as a river. The Arabian Sea was more like a really big warm lake.
On our way back to the hotel Luther and I rented mopeds. The rest of my day was spent flirting with death on Indian roads with Tori on the back. We visited a fish market (stinky), a gated Bazaar (creepy), and an ice cream shop (melty). And you better believe I maxed out that shit at 75km/h. I hit an unmarked speed bump at that speed and almost bucked Tori.
Around this time I grew a sickness that lasted for the next ten days. The high points of this sickness were: explosive diarrhea, stuffiness, dry cough, insomnia, exhaustion, and a near constant cramp in my stomach. I think it was a cryptosporidium microbe dicking around in my intestines. It goes without saying that Indians are very open minded to cleanliness in food preparation. I mostly stuck to American and Chinese food because it seemed to rest better in my stomach, that and Hayward’s 5000 or Kingfisher, the national malt liquors of India.
Within a couple days we were lured away from south Goa to north Goa with the promise of crazy Israeli party beaches and more tourist sites. We were mislead, of course, but more on that later.

Freaks of the Overnight Express

The funny thing about trains is that they drive them like cars in rush hour traffic. Every five minutes the entire quarter mile of rolling steel would come to a stop, rest for fifteen minutes and then off to the next stop. One time I guess the conductor forgot something at a stop so we had to go back. More proof to the point that nothing in India is done quickly of efficiently.
We -Tori, Tauti, Luther, Evan, and me- met two nice older guys on our trip to Goa. There are only certain times and places where you can talk to Indians and know that they're genuine, not trying to get at your money --the train, oddly enough, is one of these places.
That's not to say there aren't hawkers and beggars at in the aisles and at every station, but they're different than regular riff raff. They don't get in your face, or try to be your friend. Food venders wander from car to car making duck-like noises: "deweydewey deweydewey." The tea salesman says, "Hot chaichai! Hot chaichai!" Their goal is to pique people’s curiosity; turn heads their way. If you ignore them they move on.
The serious characters, the people who make me love the train, are the beggars. In India an able-bodied man never begs. You don't have guys walking up to you saying, "spare change?" It just doesn't happen. What you do have are victims of India's public health system, and genetic variants. My introduction to this was by a man with horse legs, like a half centaur; they were miniature, frail, and stiff. They bent at the hip just like a horse though, making him walk on all fours. He had wooden shoes for his hands and when he stuck out his hands for money they were gray with calluses. Everybody gave him some money.
The next man had shriveled, child like limbs and a man's torso. He moved by scrunching along the ground like an inchworm. He had a clean shaved chin and a bushy moustache, which made me wonder.
Childlike body parts on adults are common, probably from malnourishment. When boarding the train I saw what appeared to be a little kid wandering around the platform. He was wearing a little backpack and had pants that were rolled up at the bottom for when he grew and his little shirt was tucked in. I was alarmed to see him wandering the platform alone, so when I caught up to him I was about to say something, but I looked down and saw a chiseled man-face, complete with moustache. He looked at me like "what?" and I skidded into the train.
There isn't much the Indian health ministry can or will do for the money less people. One of their programs a few years back tried sterilization as a solution, but that didn't last too long. There are simply too many people and not enough money, or rather; the money is being spent elsewhere. Defense: starting and maintaining a nuclear missile program with help from the US of A. Or in wasted ventures like damning 1,000 acres of farmland to make 600 acres downstream farmable. One gets the impression from looking at government spending figures that officials don't ride the train much.
When I said able-bodied men don't beg, I forgot about one class, though they aren't exactly men. Hirjas are transgender Indians; men -often castrated- who dress like women. Most are homosexual men who have no other way to express their sexuality in a culture that lets men hold hands and slap-fight in public, but sees homosexuality like Midwestern housewives see cockroaches. Other Hirjas were kidnapped and forced to have their genitals mutilated, then forced into prostitution. Either way they hang out uninvited at weddings and births and give their good blessings in exchange for money. Between gigs you can see them hustling on the train. Their method of begging is more like demanding. They walk up to a man and clap their hands in the guy's face and wait for money with one hand out and the other resting on her hip, foot tapping impatiently. If a guy doesn't give her money the Hirja will throw a fit and sometimes lift up her dress. She only bothered the Indian men in our car, not the women and not the whitey men, which was disappointing because I wanted the Hirja to lift her dress. I was curious.
As night came around all the characters left the train and the lights shut off. I lied in my top bunk and tried to sleep but bugs kept crawling into my nose, ears, and mouth. I also got bit about a million times by mosquitoes. When I'm sleeping I absorb water through the air and usually have to pee five times a night, this is true everywhere. The bathrooms on the train were nothing more than holes in the floor with a hose dangling from the wall. No soap or anything to wash your hands.
I wasn't the only pee fiend. Evan crawled out of bed a few times and wandered to the end of the train. Towards the end of the ride I switched bunks while he was in the bathroom then when he was walking back I made my hand into a claw and grabbed his head saying "whitey". He freaked out, gasped, then scrambled to his top bunk like faster than a squirrel. He later told me he didn't sleep after that. Trains are fun.

Intro to Train Travel

The Indian train is equivalent to the American Greyhound bus, except times 1 million. The train is the fastest way to get around India aside from plane and with more track than any other country it is also very convenient. I wish the states had trains like India.

Because trains are reliable, convenient, and fast, train tickets sell out quick. One is considered lucky to get a sleeper train, preferably A/Ced as they call it, because the other option is 12+ hours, shoulder to shoulder, in hard bench seats.

If you want to get a train it is best to order your tickets a week or more in advance. Going to the station to get a ticket the day of is not only risky because you might not get a seat, it's insane because the train station makes no sense. There are four different booths that all, at a glance, seem exist for the same reason: booking, times, tickets, and scheduling. Then there is a fifth unmanned booth where you get a piece of paper that you use to check off what kind of train you want and when, all in garbled English with no clear step-by-step interface. I never learned what booth to take the completed papers to. Add to this the fact that Indians don't know how lines work, everybody is yelling, it's 150 degrees and humid, the toilets have overflowed, and nobody, including the police, is capable of giving clear instructions and you have a scene from Dante's Inferno. While you're talking to a guy at a booth somebody will literally push you aside, interrupting an perfectly smooth conversations of, "What? I don't quite understand you", and they will begin their own conversation with the booth guy. The only way to keep this from happening, and this is completely kosher, is to stiff arm that person, pushing them out of line. You see this all the time and what's strange is that the person who is knocked to the outside of the pack never seems angry. They just go back into line at the closest available spot and work their way to the front again, no hard feelings. I guess in a country of 1 billion, where they have a history of non-violence, the Indians have figured it's best to just let things slide. If they were as volatile as Americans everybody in the station would get shot at least once a day. Speaking of which, Americans have a supreme advantage in lines, or huddles rather, because 1) there is a national history of reverence to light skinned folks, and 2) we are bigger, have thicker bones, better fed and developed muscles, and can push harder. Once Tori was at a counter when a man tried to butt-in. Tori swung her elbow at the guys head and knocked him three feet back to where I was standing. He looked at me, because we were obviously together, and I gave him a look that said, "Sorry, at least she didn't aim for your throat". Later that man actually apologized to Tori.

The train itself is unfathomably exciting. Just like everywhere else in India, there are no rules. If you want to climb onto the roof, go right ahead; hang out the door and give people high fives, do it. The train also feels like a roller coaster does straight out of the gate, at that flat part before the first big hill, where you have that looming feeling of anticipation. You expect sudden, drink spilling lurches to happen at any moment. Sudden stops are common. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a loop-d-loop somewhere on the miles of track. The trains look like moving prison cells: they're painted in drab greens and grays, have bars on the windows, and are dimly lit. People sit with their faces pressed against the bars and their arms hanging out the windows, just watching the outside world. On the inside are benches made of plastic leather stretched over wood. At night the benches fold apart to make triple stacks of beds. There are no real ladders to get to the top bunks, so it helps to have monkey-like dexterity and owl-like night vision. That is to say, the best creature for train travel is one of those monkey birds from the Wizard of Oz.
I traveled in the trains with my girlfriend Tori, her roommate Tauti, my former roommate Luther, and our friend Evan, all students from the Mysore - Iowa City exchange. We hired 2 autorickshaws to race from our hotel in central Bangalore to the station on the edge of Muslim town. Tori and my rickshaw won by two minutes, we tipped him generously for having endangerd so many lives, and so thrillingly, to get us to the station on time. So there we were, five whiteys in western style clothes, each with a huge hiking pack, towering over a sea of Indians; Luther especially, he is 6'4". People didn't just notice us, they formed in a circle about 3 feet away and walked with us all the way to our car, staring wide eyed, mouth agape. The circle was comprised of children, to be honest. Kids in India get a kick out of white folk and will talk to you, or just stare from a distance, all day long. I like kids and I like being the center of attention, so my introduction to the Indian Railway Company felt like I was Alec Baldwin walking into a crowded Kwik Trip, or something. Celebrity Delusions for Foreigners Railway Company, they should call it.
With our stuff stowed on one of the unfoldable top bunks and our circus of followers dispersed, we settled in for an 18 hour overnigh train ride to Goa, the Malibu beach of India.
Next entry, unless I get sidetracked, will be on the "Trainride of Freaks" where I tell about all the wierdos I met on the train. Keep reading.
Pictures were taken at the India National Train Museum in Delhi. The Indians don't still use steam locomotives.

Intro to India

I left for India on October 26. This date was chosen because my girlfriend has half of October and half of November off. In India that time period is known as Diwali, a big festival that celebrates string lights, fireworks, and train travel. This I figured out by the fact that all trains were booked, all storefronts were covered by lights on strings, and bright explosions would go off right by my face every time I went outside. And they're allowed to blow things up in people's faces because there are no rules in India. This is the first thing I noticed when traveling from the airport where my girlfriend Tori picked me up to the hotel in Bangalore where we were staying. On the road, cars did whatever they wanted, cutting people off was standard technique, speeding a necessity; I saw more than one motorcycle get up on the sidewalk to avoid a traffic jam. There are no streetlight, few street signs, and the biggest vehicle always has the right of way -which means that pedestrians yield to cars. They don't know how to use turn signals either. In a sane country, one signals for a lane change or a direction change at an intersection. In India, you use your turn signals when the road curves, as if warning the people behind that they can't go straight forever.
The next thing I noticed is the building and urban renewal practices of India. It goes to reason that when there is an obsolete building occupying valuable land in an overpopulated country that said building be either knocked down and replaced or renovated. Not so in India. They prefer to just move everything out of the building, and build a new one right next to it. So the visual effect in Bangalore where I first saw this trend is that you'll see a couple brand new, space age looking IT buildings, with air conditioning and big picture windows, right next to a concrete square, dyed brown from the pollution, windows knocked out and door bolted shut. The land management is baffling, and to think this country supports a billion people.
While we're on the topic of land, it is interesting to note that the soil in India is red; looks martian even. The reason for this is that there is an abundance of iron and aluminum oxides in the soil. Metal oxide contaminants are in many soil types, but they are especially noticeable when the soil has been leached of all nutrients, leaving the waste and unwanted oxides behind. It seems hard to believe that India can support as many people as it does with such poor soil. The two other major soil types are desert in the west and central region of Rajasthan, and mountain soil in the north. The main area of quality growing soil is, according to the soil map of India http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/india/soilsofindia.htm, in an area the size of Wisconsin and Minnesota in Maharashtra. Though I did once here a statistic that Iowa produces enough food to feed every person on earth. Indian's have done it after all, they have one billion people, and the food comes from somewhere.
I just wonder why. Why, when Indians see how overpopulated their country is, how difficult their living conditions are, how unsustainable their system is, do couples get together and say, "Well look at all these people. Lets have 50 kids."
Much of my Indian adventure was spent figuring out how India does it.

Posthumorous Chicago

It was over two months ago that I gave Chicago a go, but I just got some rejection letters from jobs I'd applied to there and forgotten about. Then I found some of these cool pictures that I wanted to post. They were taken on a day I sent alone on foot, applying for work. It's funny how big Chicago is when you travel by foot. It just goes on and on.

Day With Chelsea

The world is a cruel, jobless wench and no amount of denial or resume submitting will ever change the fact the your unemployable. It's not even a factor of resume building when not even an unpaid internship will pay you attention. Hello! I'll work for peanuts, live in a dog shed, run on a treadmill hooked to a generator so the coffee maker has power!
What drove this point home, my own rejection letters not being enough, was the fact that my friend Chelsea, who I had the pleasure of spending a sunny San Francisco day with, has been slaving away at her unpaid internship for 10 hours a week, looking for paid work, even at clothing stores, submitting thousands of resumes, and getting nowhere but in to debt. What's sad is that by most accounts she is much more qualified than me, and her resume and cover letters are practically Shakespeare.
Aside from commiserating, Chelsea and I had a lovely day wandering the city. We saw Fisherman's tourist trap, a famous place to waste time and money watching smelly seals defecate on the docks while eating a $6 hotdog you spent an hour in line waiting for. They also have a crab statue and guys who dress in silver and pretend to be robots for money.
On our way there we stumbled across a 400 year old Fransican church and a Hell's Anglel's funeral procession, in the same block. For 10 minutes windows shook from the cacaphony of thousands of motorcycles. Apparently their leader had just been murdered. The sight was really amazing though.
One of the less touristy things Chelsea and I did was lose her cell phone. The way it happened was we were sitting in a park, in a sea of characters, just people watching in the grass. The kinds of people you find in a San Francisco public park are the kinds of people you find at late night showings of The Crow. Baggy black shorts, muscle tees, boots or skate shoes, shitty fake dreadlocks, pubescent looking facial hair, camouflage, and white socks. They all passed around forties and blunts and talked to themselves, like everybody else does in San Francisco.
By touring from one side of the park to the other we got a sense of the hierarchy in park-bum community. When you enter the park you see the newbies: people with large military hiking packs who cuss about where they're going to camp out or get food. Past them you have the lowland scum who hang around the lake in the wooded area. These people are generally older burn-out types and wannabe burn-out groupies, smoking ditch weed and giving us dirty looks. After them we took a seat in the grass near what I call the Bums of the Plains. These people were in their twenties, able bodied, who just liked to sit around in the grass. They also seemed to act as go-betweens for the lowlanders and the aristocracy of park bums: the hill people. Even to outsiders like Chelsea and I it was obvious that the people who hung out on the hill overlooking the park were the cool kids, the ones everybody else looked up to and secretly despised, but openly sucked up to. There were more girls on the hill than anywhere else in the park, per capita, skinny ones too, wearing Doc Martens. The hill people wore makeup and trenchcoats, all black, and appeared to have real homes somewhere, possibly further back in the park, but none of them were carrying huge backpacks or tents like the newbies or lowlanders. The point where we lost Chelsea's phone was in the presense of The Dark King, a true leader of park bums. He came down from the hill and his people, everybody in the park in fact, stopped what they were doing to watch him descend. He had long blond hair, dyed green in some places. His clothes were tatters stitched underneathe leather armor. Chains dangled from his loins and conected his tight leather pants to his chestplate. His boots were steel-toed and strapped, not laced, onto his feet and calves. His cape, tattered and scraping the ground, cast a shadow that made him appear to literally spread darkness across an otherwise cheery and sunlit field. In one hand he carried a hammer, from his chain belt hung a curved Arabian looking knife. And his skin, pock-marked and white, possibly from makeup, and clinging to his hollow cheeks and high cheekbones, made him look undead. He passed right by us, and as Chelsea brought her knees towards her chest her cell phone slipped out of her pocket and into the grass. The Dark King stopped near one of the plains people who offered him his 40oz. They talked for a minute -The Dark King looking very intense, doing most of the talking- then parted, The Dark King returning to the hill and the minion walking off towards the lowlands. I imagined a war was brewing, perhaps the newbies had taxes to pay and The Dark King was issuing his final warning. We waited for a half hour, the minion eventually returned with a new 40oz but didn't talk to The Dark King. We decided to check out the botanical garden.
I will credit the bums of the park with one thing, they are honest, or at least indifferent to the possesions of others. After walking a half hour or so, all the way through the botanical center and a hysterical elderly man yelling at a park bench and throwing his clothes into the street, we realized Chelsea's phone was missing. I called it several times and we walked the mile or so back to where we were sitting and found it in the grass. Despite being in hearing range, the nearby bums left the phone where it was.
It is perfectly acceptable, in fact excpected, that citizens of San Francisco take a little time out of every day to go crazy. I saw a man in a suit (no tie of course) walk into a grassy area and just flop down laughing, like he was in a Prilosec commercial. Another guy stood in horse stance and pointed at things in front of him over and over, really fast. I saw a guy in a thong and a girl dressed like a clown doing normal things without seeming to notice her own getup. You see wierd stuff all the time in SF, and that was one of my favorite parts of my trip there.
Towards the end of the day Chelsea and I took and insane bus ride up the near vertical streets of uptown San Fran to Coitus Tower, a big building named after a famous socialite and giver. The bus was so big on the narrow streets that it had to perform 3 point turns to get around certain corners. But the deft driver did it effortlessly, missing cars by inches. It cost $5 to get to the top of the tower, and from there we could see all the way to Berkley. I made a commemoritive penny with a machine and dropped a quarter from the window. Then we called it a day. Chelsea took the train back to Berkley and I took it the other way, to my sister's house.
In the subsequent month Chelsea moved back to Iowa City and went to grad school. My search continues.

Old Farm Junk Yard

It is common for old farms to store wrecked and obsolete cars and farm equipment in a junk yard somewhere out of the way. These places are kind of like time machines, you can get a feeling of what old times were like by the kinds of junk in the back. I found my dad's old Saab on the family lot, some old threshers, and old trucks. All very cool. Good picture taking.

Ruins of Mukwanago

Outside my Dad's hometown of Mukwanago is a little spring that spews out ice cold, clean, oxygen depleted water where rainbow trout live. The area used to be a hotel, but now all that remains is a few wells, some damns, and a castle that covers the main spring. I like to think it's haunted. Probably has some ghost raccoons at least.