All in cultural musings
by Jenny McBain
Perhaps my nine-year-old son has the makings of a therapist. A Scottish friend was hosting us in his deluxe apartment in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile the ancient street which wends its way from Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood Palace. In addition to owning a number of desirable properties, my friend is in possession of a title and sports a "Sir" in front of his name; but wealth did not buy him happiness feeling distinctly discontent when he sought my son’s council.
by Jules Older
Inspired by the new California Academy of Sciences exhibit, EARTHQUAKE, we decided to check our earthquake kit.
Yes, we have one. We’re prudent Bay Area citizens, and like most Bay Area citizens, prudent and otherwise, we live on a fault line.
The Big One is coming and coming soon—more on that, below—so get your earthquake kit in order. We did.
But it had been how long since we put that kit together? Five years? No, more like eight. Maybe we ought to check it.
Maybe you should check yours. Ours came as something of a surprise.
Eight years ago, we’d bought a large plastic bin that just fit the living room closet. In it, along with a few other items, we neatly packed canned beans and pesto, a can opener and plastic forks, crank-operated flashlight and radio, wipes and toilet paper, canned fruit and toothbrushes, candles and matches, disinfectant and Band-Aids, and, for reasons that now escape us, exactly forty-seven dollars.
Sealed it up and stuck it in a cool, dry place next to the ski jackets. Should last forever. We’re earthquake-ready—rock on.
Funny how fast eight years roll by. Until the Academy exhibit, we forgot all about our kit in a closet. Never opened it once.
Then, we did. Eight years later, it had shrunk… and grown.
by Dorty Nowak
I collect cookbooks the way others collect travel books. More than souvenirs of places I have been, they help me recreate memories and whet my appetite for further trips. Over the years, I’ve accumulated an impressive library, with Europe, Asia and the Americas grouped together on my bookshelf. When I open Provence, the Beautiful Cookbook, and look at a picture of glossy tomatoes clustered with deep green zucchinis, papery garlic, and branches of rosemary I can taste the wonderful ratatouille I had in Nice, and I’m there once again.
I developed a taste for culinary travel early. My mother, who hated to cook, had a limited repertoire, which reflected her German-Irish roots. Meat, potatoes and vegetables cooked to a uniform grey were standard fare and I could usually predict what we would have for dinner by the day of the week. The Joy of Cooking was the mainstay of her library. It was, and is, a no-nonsense compendium of recipes, with no pictures to grace its pages. When I was fortunate to travel to Europe in college, the pleasure of sampling new foods and the beautifully illustrated cookbooks I collected were almost as exciting as touring the sights.
Thirty years ago, I was dazzled by my action-packed month visiting a friend and his family in Japan. They live in Fukui Prefecture near the Sea of Japan, but I gazed in wonder at the Gion Festival and temples in Kyoto, kabuki theater in Tokyo, the deer park in Nara and Himeji castle from Shogun days. The most delicate and intimate thing I recall was a tea ceremony performed by a friend of my friend at her home.
by B.J. Stolbov
Ferdinand Marcos died in 1989, except in Batac. Here, in this small town, in his home province of Ilocos Norte in the Philippines, the memory (and more) of former President Ferdinand Marcos is preserved. His house is preserved, just as he left it. Next door to it, now, is the Ferdinand Marcos Museum, where his portraits, photographs, press clippings, clothes, shoes, furniture, and other memorabilia are preserved. And down a hallway, behind a locked door, opened only by a uniformed guard, in a starkly painted black room, coldly refrigerated, with a single spotlight shining down on a glass coffin, most creepily, is preserved ― Ferdinand Marcos.
Ferdinand Marcos, the son of a local politician, was born on September 11, 1917. From early on, he was a brilliant student, public speaker, handsome, charismatic, controversial, and larger than life. He scored a near perfect grade in his Law Board Examinations while in prison on charges of assassinating one of his father’s political rivals. He argued his own case before the Supreme Court and had himself acquitted, on a technicality. He was, by his own accounts, the leader of a guerilla group that fought the Japanese in World War II, maybe. (More on that later.)
Always a man in a hurry, he met, courted, and married, in eleven days, Imelda Romualdez, a tall beauty, 13 years younger than he, from a powerful political family. A successful lawyer, rich from his law practice and other unknown sources, Marcos was the youngest elected Representative in 1949, the youngest elected Senator in 1959, and the youngest elected President in 1965, and, in 1969, became the first President to be re-elected.
Spain is Earth’s version of The Biggest Loser.
It’s hard to believe that Spain, a country that today is smaller than the state of Texas, once ruled an empire covering all of Central America, much of the US and South America, parts of the Caribbean, bits of Europe and even some outposts in Asia.
That’s a lot of empire to lose.
Remnants of the former empire are everywhere evident in Latin America, however, where Spanish remains the dominant language, where the culture and food retain heavy Spanish influence and where Roman Catholicism, the religion imposed on native civilizations at the often bloody point of a sword, remains the overwhelmingly dominant religion.
Even Cusco, a small city today but once the capital of the mighty Incan Empire, boasts 17 cathedrals for its 350,000 residents.
A couple of them are particularly fascinating, and a little funny.
by Elyn Aviva
We were on Malta, a tiny island at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, within sight on a clear day of Sicily and Mount Etna, and we were confused.
Since our first day on the island, Gary (my husband) and I had been experiencing generalized confusion. For example, we had been told that everyone spoke English—after all, Malta had been an English colony for over 150 years—but street signs were unpronounceable, and our taxi driver didn’t seem to understand a word we said. He replied to our frantic queries in something that sounded like a mixture of Arabic and Italian. And it turns out it was. Sort of. Maltese is a Semitic language, brought by Phoenician settlers 3000+ years ago, so it sounds vaguely Arabic. And because Italy has had such a pervasive influence on Malta—in part because of proximity, and in part because for decades the only television channels available were Italian—Italian words and cuisine are prevalent.
But our linguistic confusion was superficial. Much more confusing were the temples, the fat ladies, and the cart ruts. We had come to Malta to see the massive Neolithic stone temples, recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. Some of them date back 5,500 years—or maybe 10,000 or 12,000 years, depending on whom you believe. Ggantija, on Malta’s tiny neighbor island Gozo, is thought to be the second oldest temple in the world, after Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It predates the pyramids by millennia. Some writers believe the Maltese temples are oriented to astrological alignments that existed 12,000 years ago, not 5,500—and might even have been built by extraterrestrials.
by Connie Hand
The sun was bright under a clear azure sky. The birds were merrily singing on that beautiful Summer morning. As I stood by the country road and stared at the house in front of me, my heart was pounding. I was in Nariz, Portugal standing in front of a house that was typical of the area. But this house was special to me because it was the one in which my father was born. Immediately I thought of the stories he used to tell about his childhood in Portugal and his journey to America.
I always loved to hear about far away places and thought that one day I would travel to Portugal to visit those little towns and big cities that Dad talked about in such a vivid way.
The story of my father, Augusto Silva began on June 8, 1911 in Nariz in the district of Aveiro. He was the second of five children born to Maria and Luis Silva, and it was not an easy life. The family farmed their lands and tried to make ends meet. In 1927, Dad decided to emigrate to the United States, and it was a life-altering decision. He researched what was necessary for his journey. It must have been very hard on both of them when his widowed mother gave him her approval to leave. He told me he vowed to go back to visit this sweet woman, and he did keep that vow. He described that visit with tears in his eyes.
He traveled to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, and worked there for several months until he discovered that Portugal’s emigration quotas were filled for the next several years. He was advised to travel to France to take up residency in Paris. He told me that he worked in Paris doing odd jobs. I remember Dad telling me that Paris was a huge, beautiful city. He said he saw as many sights as he could, but he really couldn’t wait to get to America.
story and photos by Paul Ross
It was my first foray from Santa Fe, New Mexico, up South Dakota way and one my few experiences in the Midwest, “America’s heartland,” which is derisively included by bicoastal media under the broad heading of “flyover country.” Almost immediately, I sensed something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it but there was an element missing. I didn’t need my urban-honed 360o hyper-awareness ...’cause, generally, I wasn’t in any big city in South Dakota; I was just surrounded by miles and miles of flat agriculture: corn, soybeans, hogs –NYSE commodities literally on the hoof. I didn’t have a problem with it, because it was what I’d expected. It was with the people. They smiled and audibly said “Hi” on the street –to a stranger -for no discernible reason!
At an annual charity affair –the McCrossen Boys’ Ranch Extreme Event Challenge Rodeo-- the best place from which to shoot photos was secured behind doubled fences. So I tried a big city ploy and walked in like I belonged. It worked, until Cindy Menning, THE woman in charge, approached. I mentally prepared a barrage of important credentials with which to snow, or at least impress, her. But, instead of a challenge, she offered access to an even better vantage point –right atop the chutes where professional bull riders dropped down onto their ¾ ton mounts.
No questions were asked, just friendly help extended.
by Kristin Mock
This is not the betelnut princess I imagined. This woman is sitting outside her one-room apartment tying waxy betel leaves around smooth, ivory-colored nuts while her daughter does math problems out of a textbook and sips a cup of mango juice. She has been tying betel leaves for hours, flinging them onto a waxy mountain of wrapped-up nuts piled high in a cloudy glass case, snatching one every once in a while and placing it between her lips. It is this, the stained lips, the tell-tale pink with a hint of scarlet, the color I’d come to learn as the betelnut smile, that holds my curiosity most as she hands me a paper bag.
We are on the tiny tropical island of Xiao Liuqiu, a wet and humid place off the southwest coast of Taiwan. After driving home on the two-person motor scooter we’d rented that morning, Matt, a Canadian adventure writer who lived in Taiwan for seven years, and I sit on a wooden swing outside of my purple bungalow overlooking the sparkling lights on the shores of the South China Sea, and I learn the legend of the betelnut.
I’ve been fortunate enough to travel all around the world but also witnessed an unbelievable array of street scams and hustles. From Cairo to Caracas, Amsterdam to Amman, someone was always trying to sell me wolf tickets: the fake drunk, the razor blade slash, the Rio shoe scam, money exchange bait-and-switches, shifting walls, high-speed car chases through barrios, muggers with machetes, riots shrouded in tear gas, clans of pickpocketing gypsies, exotic temptresses who slip something in your drink, being a guest in a Third World jail, and running for my life from the Triads, the Chinese mafia. I even survived an elaborate and well-orchestrated grift in Bolivia involving fake policemen with a fake police car and a kilo of fake cocaine that had me sweating like a hostage. But please don’t let all of this discourage you from grabbing your passport and exploring the beautiful world we live in; you’ll find most places to be as safe as your front porch if you exercise some basic rules of caution:
1. Stay ready and you won’t have to get ready.
Before you embark make copies of your passport, medical card, credit cards, and travel itinerary. Give a copy to a friend back home and keep one set with you, separate from the real thing. Email any pertinent information to yourself through a web based email account so you can get it from any hotel or internet café if needed. Check in with the U.S. embassy when you arrive. I even keep $20 folded under the sole of my shoe for emergencies.
2. Don’t be the ugly American.
Don’t draw negative attention to yourself. If you’re going to party overseas (which I highly encourage) don’t get too drunk and always take a taxi at night. Don’t accept an open drink from someone or leave yours unattended. Most importantly, never mess with drugs while you’re in a foreign country - I have a friend serving five years in a Costa Rican prison who can back me up on this.
by Silvia Pe
We were all children once. Childhood is the time of dreams and fantasies, when our imagination craves great adventures. I wonder if there’s a child who has never dreamt of becoming the king of an enchanted, beautiful castle? It was my dream when I was six.
I grew up in Sardinia, listening to the legends of the proud guardians of the Sardinian coastline. My favourite locations were the coastal towers: They’re scattered along the edges of the whole island, from Cagliari to Alghero, from Oristano to Siniscola, placed to form a big protective circle. My Sardinian history teacher was my grandfather, an old fashioned sailor.
He was a charming middle-aged man. His broad shoulders and rather serious demeanor gave him an authoritarian look, but he had kind eyes. He loved to enchant me by gesturing with his knotty hands, telling me about the Sardinian silent watchers… Built to resist the pirate’s incursions, the towers were managed, equipped and defended by the Royal Tower Administration, a proto-agency based in Cagliari. A stone in Uras dating back to 1546 stands as a witness of one of the incursions by the infamous Red Beard, or Barbarossa as we call him (his real name being Khayr al-Din).
The towers were placed in a way that allowed the watchers to communicate using visuals and sounds, without leaving their stations… a little bit like when I was in front of my grandpa and my thoughts started running as if into a dream world.
by Jules Older
Sure, I wanted to go to San Francisco. Cable cars, Chinatown, Golden Gate… and something more. Daughter Willow had moved to the Haight district, which in my day was the hippie epicenter of the world. What a chance to introduce Willow to her dad’s own, personal history! So I signed us both up for something called the Haight-Ashbury Hippie History Bus Tour.
Along with four 20-year-olds — I think they were history students — Willow and I climbed aboard the bus — the psychedelic VW bus — owned and operated by tour leader, Hippie Bob.
H.B. was in his fifties. He wore a long, graying ponytail and those little, round John Lennon glasses. He had on enough love beads to serve as a flotation device, and he smelled of a familiar herb; maybe it was patchouli. Maybe not.
Just the guy to teach my daughter modern American history.
“Hippies like me came out to the Haight for the Summer of Love,” Hippie Bob began. “We lived in communes in big old houses like the ones on this street.”
“When was the Summer of Love, Bob?” Willow asked.
“In the sixties, man. Definitely in the sixties. And call me Hippie Bob. That’s my handle, you dig?”
Willow looked puzzled. “I, uh, dig, but when in the sixties, Bo — Hippie Bob?”
“I dunno. We weren't all hung up with numbers and dates and stuff back then. If it feels good, do it.”
I piped up, trying to help the history lesson progress. “Wasn’t that 1967, Hippie Bob? And weren't there many famous rock stars and other cultural icons living right here in the Haight?”
Thailand is renowned for having some of the world’s best prostitutes.
It also has some of the scariest.
My first order of business upon arriving in Bangkok was an early morning trek to the Damnernsaduak Floating Market, a 90 minute drive south of town in light traffic, and one of the most fascinating places I’ve ever been.
The Damnernsaduak Floating Market is a series of canals lined by rickety wooden stalls selling all manner of goods, from tacky tourist items to local art and sculptures. You can purchase exotic spices and oils, native clothing, a vast array of fresh fruits, and even play with snakes.
When you arrive at Damnernsaduak you hire one of the long-tailed wooden boats to guide you through the markets. A 2-hour tour is around 300 Bhat (about $9), and the boatman will just float along past shops til one peaks your interest and you ask him to pull up alongside. There are also numerous merchants in other boats selling fresh fruits, meats, or cool drinks. They’ll pull up beside your boat to pour you hot tea, show off their fruits, or describe (always in a language I don’t understand) what their meat on the stick is and why you must buy it.
In the middle of the market is a non-descript shack that at first glance appears to be selling nothing. There are a couple of guys lounging in chairs enjoying a smoke. Upon closer inspection you discover that the men are draped in huge snakes, and are all too eager to show them off to interested tourists.
I can’t resist bad decisions like this, so of course I stopped.
It started out with a scant breakfast (have you ever tried a one egg omelet?) and miles of walking around the city streets of Quito in Ecuador wearing wedged sandals instead of sneakers. Wedged sandals are not the shoes of choice when traveling. My feet, already aching, were really in a state of extreme protest, a not too subtle indication of the agony to come. We were on our way to visit the art exhibit we’d been anticipating all day, but hadn’t quite left any time out for either lunch or water.
The Guayasamin Museum was our destination and surpassed all our expectations. The paintings and sculpture were impressive and the house in which they were displayed, splendidly representative of the Ecuadorian painter’s era (1919-1999). The original house had an extensive collection of pre-Columbian art he had acquired over decades. The only downside was that there was no place to eat! Our dilemma was if we were to start searching for a restaurant, there wouldn’t be time to get to Guayasamin’s Capilla del Hombre (The Chapel of Man), which was a “must.” By now it was a toss-up as to which was worse, my overwhelming hunger or my throbbing feet.
We decided to skip the restaurant search and walk to the Capilla which, we were assured, was just a short distance away. We simply couldn’t take a chance on missing the experience of visiting this most amazing structure, Oswaldo Guayasamin’s final dream, completed three years after his death as a tribute to the 500-year struggle of indigenous people of the continent.
words + photos by Jolandi Steven
In the pursuit of progress, the past is often overlooked, neglected, discarded or forgotten.
But to me, it holds an allure that is enticing, charming, mesmerizing and utterly seductive. Not so for everyone: When I first mentioned the abandoned village of Al Jazirah Al Hamra on the outskirts of Ras-al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates to my husband, he evinced his non-committal with a shrug of his shoulders.
Thanks to Google, I learned that Al Jazirah Al Hamra means “Red Island,” and before the discovery of oil and subsequent land reclamation that linked the old town permanently to the mainland, it was on a peninsula that, with high tide, became an island. The questions puzzling me were: “Why did the people abandon their homes?” “Where did they go?”
by Fyllis Hockman
As a travel journalist, I’m fortunate enough to travel the world, reveling in a multitude of life-enhancing experiences that I would never otherwise be exposed to. I then get to come home, kicking and screaming, and write about them, usually dispensing with facts and focusing instead on my observations. After a recent trip to Shandong Province in China, I had even more observations than usual and was motivated to record them before even thinking about the article I would ultimately write. So here I’ve blended the personal with the professional—and they are indeed more personal than professional—in the hopes of sharing with you my private reactions to that recent trip.
Once a country of thousands upon thousands of bikes, gray-green clothes and propaganda signs everywhere promoting Mao Tse-Tung, the glories of socialism and China’s one-child policy, China now boast 6-lane highways full of traffic, bright Western high-fashion dress and advertising promoting Sony to Gucci to Prada to Ferrari to KFC and Starbucks, of course, and even 7/11s. What not long ago were farming villages are now bustling urban metropolises with legions of skyscrapers and high-priced condominiums . China has not only come into the 21st century but is forging ahead of most other countries into the next.
After 10 days and nights with our 30-year-old young guide and mother of a three-year-old, we became such close friends that we were walking down the streets with our arms around each other. A strange and wonderful relationship forged so quickly.
Many Chinese prefer drinking just plain hot water to anything else – and everything is served warm, from water to soda to beer – especially beer.
Despite all of China’s progress, Western toilets have not really caught on except in the better hotels. Everywhere else, at attractions and restaurants, treadle toilets are the norm—more often than not, without toilet paper. You think you get used to them—but you don’t really.
Since childhood, everything about Japan has enthralled me: food, traditional clothing, bonsai trees, ikebana floral arrangements and, of course, the people themselves. The poster in the window showed verdant, bucolic rice paddies being tended by women in traditional bonnets and straw hats. For dramatic relief, a snowcapped mountain hung in the background and the caption promised that I would “See the real Japan. Become immersed in the mysterious Orient by cycling the back roads of rural Shikoku – an island that outsiders rarely visit.”
It took about a nanosecond for me to walk into the travel agency and pay a deposit.
I had been struggling with my prayer life, figuring out where and how I could have some peace and quiet in the Big Apple. I tried to petition and call on God, but the words wouldn't come. I wondered, “If a city never sleeps, how does it ever dream? How do its people ever come to a solemn state of rest?” My father, a Christian of no particular denomination, suggested I visit a mosque and learn from the Muslims.
“Watch them pray,” he said, “Their discipline and devotion is admirable. Watching them pray at the exact same time every day was one of my favorite things about living in the Middle East.”
I say I am a well-traveled Filipina, but that only means I have made countless layovers on flights to and from New York. The most traveling that I have ever done is through reading books, therefore I have great expectations of places I have yet to see. I hear “India” and I think saris in vibrant colors, citrus rinds covering a plate of curry, or yogis in lotus position. I hear “Rio de Janeiro” and I think futbol, futbol, futbol!
When I hear the word “mosque,” a flipbook of ideas, images, sounds, and even smells pop into my head. I let my mind cruise through this Rolodex as I sit in the Pelham-bound 6 train. Here I am, a young Protestant raised in a Catholic country, managing all the thoughts sweeping through my head as I near the New York Mosque. I straighten my spine and fix my hair as I get off the train, forcing myself to be, or seem to be, more reverent than I usually am.
by Gwen Davis
Mimi was a Bichon Frise, a little puffy white dog of inspiring intelligence and charm. The placing of her ashes in a young coconut, and sending her to sea off Bali, where I have come to live since her shocking departure,-- it is the one place we had not traveled together since dogs were not allowed,-- had to be postponed until the day of the full moon, which is now, because when you do ceremony in Bali it has to be at an auspicious time, or the souls do not rejoice as they should. At least, I think that’s the reason. There’s so much mystery and superstition around Bali that one cannot be quite sure. You just have to leave your heart open and see what happens. At any rate, I do.
So Mimi, whose last great earthly journey was to Bali in my suitcase, in a little flower-printed metal box from Hartsdale pet cemetery where she was cremated, got taken to the beach at Canggu, because that is where you are allowed to do your ceremonies. Yoni, my darling driver, came today bearing five little baskets woven from palm, with tiny flowers and petals in them, and we went there, pausing for her to light the incense, and scatter a few of the petals.
