Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Preparing, South America, Tourist, Traveling, United States

Money Matters: the new New Math

May 4, 2014 JG 3 Comments

For the last six months, with the exception of one week in March, I have moved every three to four days. I haven’t slept in the same bed for more than a week since last September. While I didn’t change countries every time I moved, I did manage to make it to 17 of them, only three of which use the same currency. So while everyone thinks I’ve been off on vacation, I’ve in fact been doing some rather intense money math.

Money math should be easy, but it takes quite a bit of preparation. The longer you do it, the quicker the preparation gets, but the harder the math becomes to perform on the fly, an essential skill for effective bargaining –itself an essential skill in almost every country in South America, Asia, Africa, and the Near East. Here’s how it works:

Crisp, clean US dollars

Carry some crisp, new, $100 US bills, and try never to use (or lose) them. (Even if you are from the Euro zone, you should carry US dollars. Your money may be worth more than ours, but people don’t actually want it more.)
Before arriving in a country, go online and determine how many ‘whatevers’ there are to the US dollar.
Remember this rate. If you are bored, practice multiplying and dividing by it so you are acclimated before you arrive at your next destination.
Avoid currency exchange windows, especially at the airport. Instead, make withdrawals from a cash machine in amounts sizeable enough that your improved exchange rate and lack of service fee offset whatever your bank may charge you for daring to make it interact with a foreign country. Careful not to withdraw so much money as to be left with unused bills upon your departure. The rate to sell these back will invariably screw you.
Because the ATM will undoubtedly give you bills of a denomination large enough to render them useless, go directly to the nearest bank or large, busy establishment (or sometimes your hotel desk) and break large bills for ones that won’t encourage the average taxi driver to pull the “I don’t have change” routine.
Rinse, repeat.

It seems simple. But do it three times in a month. I guarantee that at least once, you’ll forget to check the exchange rate before you land somewhere, and find yourself negotiating for a taxi without knowing whether you are arguing over 100 dollars or 100 cents. By time four or five, you will likely forget to take one of your prior currencies out of your wallet, and will find yourself attempting to pay for your pad thai with pho money. Somewhere in this timeframe, you will also realize it’s started to seem completely normal to carry three currencies simultaneously: dollars, currency of current country, and remnants of a country you’re still too close to to miss.

Colombian Pesos

Bolivian Bolivianos

Chilean Pesos – note the pretty window in some of the bills

Suppress the temptation to buy one of those lovely leather travel folios that fit your tickets and passport and itinerary, unless you are on the kind of trip where someone else is creating the lovely itinerary for you and handling most of your logistics. Opt instead for something plastic or vinyl, because at some point, you will find yourself in a country with the dirtiest, moldiest, wimpiest, most ripped bills you have ever seen, and you will likely have a lot of them. For me, this country was Myanmar. For you, this will also likely be the country in which you pull out your precious clean US dollars to exchange them on the black market for a rate up to 100 times that you would receive at a bank. If they aren’t pristine, they will be discounted to only 95 times the bank rate – or less.

The fake Burberry pouch I bought to be my moldy Myanmese kyat wallet

Due to the exchange rate, I bought this plastic pouch to carry the the hundreds of notes that make up $100 USD

Until I found this wallet in Cambodia, which I am still using. It has the added benefits of water resistance and multiple currency pockets.

If you have chosen to skip step (1), above, you will find yourself doing things like going to a bank machine in Bangkok to pull out baht and take them to the exchange window to buy dollars, just so that you can carry them (new, unbent, untorn) to Myanmar to buy flimsy, delicate kyat. In other words, even your lovely new dollar bills will be double-discounted by your own disregard for the international exchange scheme of tourism.

By the time you’ve been through this rigmarole four times, the preparation part becomes old hat. You are much less likely to forget to look up the exchange rate and land someplace unprepared. (Don’t bother with cash in any country where you’re laying over in the airport. Just use a credit card, or you’ll be left with 30 random Australian dollars and nothing to show for them.)

Australian dollars – for the 15 hours I spent in the Sydney airport

Note to self: when you find yourself taking money out of the ATM in the Colombo airport at 3 a.m., chances are you don't need it, and you should find an empty chair and go to sleep.

Note to self: chances are you don’t need those rupees you’re taking out of the ATM in the Colombo airport at 3 a.m. Resist the temptation, find the nearest prayer room, and go to sleep.

What becomes more difficult as time goes on is adjusting to the mental money math that accompanies these exchanges. In one week, you may transition from dividing all prices in kyat by 971 to figure out actual cost, to dividing by 3,954 riel to dividing by 21,097 dong. Give or take some zeros depending on how recently a country has revalued its own currency, or whether it has recalled its former currency from circulation and bothered to print up something new. In addition to a language barrier, you are now facing an economic translation grey zone in which you and your provider may be using two different bases on which to settle your accounts, and they differ by a factor of 100.

I shared a cab with a woman in Santiago. She took out bills completely unfamiliar to me, despite my having been in the country for almost two weeks. I asked her where they were from, and she looked at me oddly and said, “here.”

Now start bargaining. You aren’t used to that in your home country? That’s a shame, because it’s fun. It’s friendly, and vigorous, and slightly different everywhere you go. The whole process will start to seem like a game, in part because the money feels fake: it’s a different color, or size, or weight than you are used to. It has unfamiliar pictures and in some cases doesn’t even use European numerals, so you can’t be sure what numbers you are looking at when you at last agree on a price and pull out your Monopoly bills to pay for things. It will make you long for expensive Europe, where you will be astounded at what it costs to buy coffee but are willing to pay anything just to multiply by 1.4 instead of dividing by 758. Money Matters: the new New Math.

Dear Jordan: I love your country, and I can’t for my life tell how much money this is.

For the fun of it, more pictures of some foreign currency are below. They are mangled and messy in real life so the pictures aren’t the clearest, but you’ll get an idea of what it’s like to have carried about 15 currencies in six months:

the beloved Ataturk

Vietnam apparently wants you to know how productive they are.

Very few currencies have women on any denominations.

The elusive 5000 kyat note. Makes exchanging a $100 USD note much more efficient.

At 980 kyat to the USD, it’s hard to say why this 5 kyat note even exists.

Crisp, clean US dollars

Australian dollars – for the 15 hours I spent in the Sydney airport

Chilean Pesos – note the pretty window in some of the bills

Note to self: when you find yourself taking money out of the ATM in the Colombo airport at 3 a.m., chances are you don’t need it, and you should find an empty chair and go to sleep.

Dear Jordan: I love your country, and I can’t for my life tell how much money this is.

Colombian Pesos

Asia, Middle East and Africa

Wadi Wadi, We Like to Party

February 6, 2014 JG Leave a comment

Everybody’s got to make a living. It’s a simple fact that breeds an annoying amount of value-less interactions between total strangers in countries around the world. Tourists have needs, and anyone looking to make a buck will try to fill them. In the developing world, the volume of these interactions multiplies – but so does their value.

In Nepal, in India, in Bolivia, Colombia, Vietnam– you can’t get out of an airport without a taxi tout offering you a ride. He isn’t the driver – he’s the guy that gets the driver who only speaks the local language situated with a client. He gets the address of your destination, does the bargaining, puts you in a car, but then, he’s gone. You can repeat this with any mode of transport – the boat tours in Inle, the bike rentals in Hoi An, the motos in Phnom Penh – it’s the universal system of transport bargaining when a language barrier is involved.

In Myanmar, in Cambodia, in Thailand – walk near any monument, temple, or attraction and someone will be there to sell to you – postcards, sir? Sandals, buddhas, hand-made paper, bamboo wallets, souvenir t-shirts, sand paintings, Chinese waving happy cats? You need change money? Anything they can find that might interest you in the very least will be there. “Just for looking,” they invite. “No have to buy.” Don’t bother climbing a temple at sunrise to try to escape; a good salesperson knows exactly where the tourists are, and will be there with his paintings before the light clears the horizon.

Money changing booth at the temple in Mandalay (just in case you need to buy something)

Restaurant owners place their touts in the doorways. “Mingalaba,” they call in Bagan, as you try to bike by without crashing into them. “Massage? Pedicure,” they suggest outside spas on the streets of Saigon, handing a brochure across your path while you walk. The same tout from the same spa will come at you multiple times in a day. You are anonymous potential. In Hanoi, try not to touch anything you aren’t 100 percent sure you’d like to buy – they say ‘just looking’ but they mean just buying, and dirty looks (or worse words) may be thrown in your direction. But in Jordan….in Jordan, things are different.

In Jordan, all of it – the touts, the bargaining, the day to day crap of life that must be negotiated in a fashion fit to exhaust those of us who are accustomed to set prices and developed logistics – in Jordan, all of it is a joy. You will not offend by saying no. You will just elicit an escalating entertainment of pitches.

No, thank you, I don’t want to ride through Petra on your donkey. “Why not?” I like to walk. I’ll use my legs.

“Four legs, madam. Donkey have four legs. Better than two.”

“Walk? You not so fat you need to lose weight.”

“You worry about money? Happy hour price!”

“Taxi, madam?”

You keep walking down the Siq, past the Treasury, to see the tombs. “You drop something, madam,” a kid will call. In Central and South America, be very wary – this is the beginning of a ploy to distract you while someone else steals your camera, your money. In Jordan, in Petra in particular, it’s the beginning of a joke.

“Madam, you drop something!”

“Me?”

“You, madam,” the child will respond, pointing toward the ground behind you. At some point, despite your better traveler judgment, you will turn around and look. The child will giggle, his friends will join in, and someone will call, “your smile, madam! You dropped your smile!” It makes no sense. It isn’t even that funny, and yet they have so much fun doing it, you have to laugh with them. You also have to laugh because they will remember you.

Don’t think for one minute that you are an anonymous tourist in Petra. Don’t think that just because it gets over 600,000 each year, you can’t be identified. That kid who speaks to you, who asks you, “where you from, Madam,” on your way into the site in the morning, he could have asked you the same in Italian, Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese. But he sees you, sizes you up, nationality included, and when you leave later on, he will say goodbye in the language that is yours. He will recall a joke he told you, or an exchange you shared, earlier in the day.

Feel free to get a little cheeky – the kids enjoy it. If you respond to “where you from,” with the same question back, “and you, my friend, where YOU from,” the answer will not be ”Jordan,” or, “Wadi Musa,” or, “the Bedouin village.” The answer will be, smiling, “from my mother!”

Don’t misunderstand, you are economic potential. But in Petra – maybe in much of Jordan – the rapport is a prerequisite. Tea first – tea with so much sugar it’s almost a syrup – Bedouin whiskey, they joke – tea is first. A chat. And then – then whatever is coming will come. “We have tea, then maybe you look at my shop. If you like something, you buy it.” Or it will be time to haggle over the price of a camel ride, or a jeep trip through Wadi Rum, or the aba you see the ladies wearing and think you may want to take home with you. But first the tea, the talking, the laughter. Because in the wadis, life may be hard (living in a cave, or the desert – it isn’t easy, even if it is full of beauty), but it is also full of joy. And if you come to see the scenery, you must take in the joy as well. And that, for free, you may take home.

For more pictures of my time in Jordan, click here.

Asia

An Unquiet American

January 29, 2014 JG 3 Comments

I consider myself a patriot. I shun jingoism and frequently voice discontent with my mother country, and appreciate that I am allowed to do so specifically because I’m a citizen of the United States.

Patriotism isn’t blind. “Love it or leave it,” a refrain I have actually heard in conversation, is a simplistic approach to something as complex, diverse, young, and unsettled as the United States. I am not a patriot because I believe the US is better than every other place on earth; I am a patriot because it is my place. I accept its flaws like I try to accept my own, and just as I do with myself, try to improve what I can. In fact, part of what made me get up and see the world was the sensation that I had given up on us: I had disengaged from the act of improving my community, challenging my leadership to do better, or encouraging my country to rise above….well, everything. I was stuck in a rut of ‘oh well,’ and I needed to climb up out of it.

Being a patriot makes Vietnam a complex destination for an American. It isn’t a playground like Thailand, or a temple-stunned wander like Cambodia. It is a walk through an unresolved part of the American psyche, brought to life in the landscape in front of you. Every time I looked at a row of rubber trees or the magnificent islands rising out of Bai Tu Long Bay, I felt like John Cleese in the episode of Fawlty Towers in which the Germans are coming: I couldn’t not think about the war. I couldn’t not see American planes lighting up the horizon with napalm. I couldn’t not feel guilt.

But guilt is simple; Vietnam is complex. The Communists have infused Vietnam with their own brand of patriotism. You don’t even have to ask the question, and you will get the same party line. “We like Americans. We don’t blame them for the war. We blame the imperialist American government.” It’s the same rhetoric William Broyles got in 1983, when he went back to visit the Vietnam he had fought in, a trip he wrote about in Goodbye Vietnam. It is still being used today, by people wearing North Face jackets and New York Yankees hats.

It isn’t that Vietnamese don’t have opinions. It’s that there are few ramification-free opportunities to express them. As a result, you get a party line of behavior, not just speech. On my way to visit the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, I found my map indicated I could walk through what turned out to be a defense department complex, closed to lay people. While I was still ten feet from the guard I wanted to approach for directions, he pointed his finger at me, said, “YOU!,” clapped his hands twice and then crossed his forearms over his chest in an x, indicating I was not to pass down this road.

A firm believer in tourism diplomacy, I suppressed the temptation to laugh at such an out-sized gesture and kept walking toward him. He repeated his pantomime twice, and when I got close enough to speak to him and gesture – this way? That way? – he looked over my head, refusing to acknowledge my request – or my presence.

In America, publicly at least, we are raised to believe our opinions matter. It’s why tourists who get themselves in trouble are famous for saying, “you can’t do this to me, I’m an American!” The instinct shouldn’t be that we are Americans and therefore entitled to better treatment; the instinct should be that we are human, and entitled to equality. All of us share this innate desire to be respected and heard. Communism takes the notion of equality far beyond balance to a point where there is no ‘one’s’ opinion; there is only the party.

The Vietnam War is of course not called the Vietnam War in Vietnam. It is, “the American War of Aggression,” or, “the Struggle for Unification of Vietnam.” While everything from museum placards to memorial brochures is hyperbolized ad-nauseum in defense of the Mother Country, it is impossible to deny the basic validity in the point of view, and in looking at the experience from the other side.

At the same time, the propaganda is infuriating. And unsettling. As someone who wants facts in order to form my own opinion of a situation, how am I to determine what is real, and what is wording? If there is a continuum of truth with the NVA on one end and the US on the other, what lies appropriately in the middle ground?

Each site visited, each conversation, is an exhausting dissection of words and ideology, with no final verdict as to the accuracy of any hypothesis. You can visit the Hanoi Hilton, and most of what you’ll see will be about the French colonial oppression of the Vietnamese. At the end you will see two small rooms about captured American pilots playing ping pong, decorating a Christmas tree, and going to church. You won’t see the beating Edwin Shuman took when he fought to get the right to Sunday worship.

So what is an unquiet patriotic American to do with all of this?

Become still. Allow it in. Stand on a corner and watch the million mopeds zooming by. Watch the elderly exercising by the Lake of the Returned Sword, and the young people canoodling in its parks. Don’t be tempted by frustration; breathe through it. Absorb the difference, and let it inform you. Your own opinion will come. It will be uncertain, hesitant, and entirely yours.

For more pictures of my time in Vietnam, click HERE.

Asia

Just a Little Bit of History Repeating

January 19, 2014 JG 2 Comments

I like to believe I would stand up to injustice if I saw it perpetrated in front of me. In the abstract, as a notion of future behavior, I’m sure of it. But when that abstraction becomes a reality, what will happen? If standing up means risking my safety, potentially my life, what will I do? How great will the stakes have to be before I commit, and potentially make no difference?

History is nothing more than a series of human events, and it faces the same challenge: as a future abstraction, it seems so clear, but things change when present tense pulls them into focus. As they move into the past, and we are forced to interpret our behavior, we seem as confused about what our actions mean as we were when we made them. So much for hindsight being 20/20.

The world is full of atrocities. Some of them – like Nazi Germany, or the genocide of Native Americans – are our past, and others – Rwanda, Sudan, Syria – remain our present. Despite the argument that we learn from history, we have a bad case of déjà vu with genocide. As communities, as society, we take years to recover from the crushing blows of our own ugly humanity, and some would argue we never do.

In the 1970s, Cambodia suffered one of the most appalling genocides in recent history, and following it, things sprang back to life amazingly quickly. Depending on what propaganda you read, the Vietnamese either liberated or occupied Kampuchea from the Khmer regime, in January 1979. During the ten years between ‘liberation’ and the withdrawal in 1989, the UN and most of its developed member countries were still so uncomfortable with Vietnam politically (following the expulsion of the French and the Vietnam War) that they continued to recognize Pol Pot as the Cambodian leader for over a decade – this, despite the fact that in less than four years, he had masterminded the execution of three million people – almost 40 percent of the Cambodian population at the time.

Cambodians themselves wasted no time moving forward. Immediately following liberation, people flocked back to the cities from which they had been driven. They took back their streets and buildings from the vines and bushes that had quickly grown over normal life in its absence. Fewer than ten years after Pol Pot had been officially removed from power, Tuol Sleng (or S-21), the Phnom Penh school that had been converted to a detention and torture center, was being preserved as a memorial. Turning Choeung Ek – better known as the Killing Fields – into an educational memorial took only slightly longer. This despite the fact that when it rains, the ghosts of the dead still rise from beneath its earth in the form of teeth, bones, and fragments of cloth that must be collected and placed with their proper group of relics. It’s as if history takes advantage of the rain to remind you it can’t be buried.

What I found remarkable in Phnom Penh was the honesty with which the Cambodian people stare this ugly truth in the face. Pol Pot was arrested in 1997, and he died a year later. Long before then, survivors and killers alike had given testimony about creative methods to save bullets in the killing fields. The farm implements that professors, doctors, and artists had been forced to use in the fields were used to bludgeon them to death when night fell. The fronds of palm trees that occasionally provided shady respite were torn from their trunks and their spiked stems became the perfect blade for slitting a throat. DDT powder that helped cover the stench of the not-yet-decayed had the added benefit of killing anyone buried alive. Survivors testified about the loudspeakers hung from a tree in the yard that blared above the grind of a generator at night to hide the screams of the morning’s victims. Killers confessed to acts far worse than those to which the imprisoned were forced to give in the false testimony that led to their deaths.

We owe it to the dead to visit these places. We owe it to ourselves, and to those who come after us, to bear witness to this history we share, close up or far away. The pit that opens at the base of your spine when you see the hairbands and wristbands hung on the trunk of the tree against which infants were swung by their feet in order to bash in their skulls, so that their final cries would be the last sound mothers take to their own bloody graves – that pit that opens inside you and threatens to take you down into a place of darkness while you stand in bright sunlight, among strangers, and attempt to absorb a soon-forgotten truth – that pit is a small price to pay to be among the living. It is a small down payment against repeating history. And it is a great investment in understanding the people who later today will sell you a coffee, or a dress, or bring your dinner, or guide your tour.

Because life goes on. Cities are built, and modernized. Farms are cultivated and harvested. Fish are pulled from the lakes and rivers. As you walk around the pond at Choeung Ek – the one which is known to still hold bodies of the dead – you look out across a rice paddy. To the tourist, the view is serene. Children come to the fence and whine, “hello… mo-ney,” holding out a palm. The tone is so grating it is beyond practiced, and you are tempted to lean down and give them a bit of marketing advice: dial it back a bit. Raise my pity and maybe I will pay.

You can’t help but wonder what they’ve found while playing in their own fields. But they still play, because that is what children do. The tuk-tuk driver who brought you here still has a story to tell – his parents if not his own. It is happening all around us, this history, and while we’re watching this one unfold, it’s happening simultaneously somewhere else. While we watch, eyes wide open, and wonder if we should risk speaking up.

For more pictures of my time in Phnom Penh, click here.

Asia, South America, Tourist, Traveling

The Happy Room

January 2, 2014 JG 4 Comments

The restroom. The WC. Toilet. Powder room. Bathroom. It has a million uses and a million euphemisms, and nothing will make you feel farther from home than being so confused about how or where to handle your basic bodily functions that you are afraid to pee.

My favorite bathroom nickname accompanied with one of the nicest places I’ve stayed. On a junk boat in Bai Tu Long Bay, our guide repeatedly reminded us, before we headed out for a kayak or hike, to go to, “the happy room.” It elicited giggles, until one guy went to the happy room erected near the cave where we ate Christmas Eve dinner and hit his head so hard on the rock ceiling that he bled for two hours. Not so happy.

Twenty years ago, I learned the hard way what to expect from plumbing in the developing world. Nothing teaches you to appreciate the luxuries of home quite like having to crawl out of a sleeping bag in the middle of the night, put on two extra layers of clothing and your hiking boots, and race outside in 15-degree weather to have multiple bouts of diarrhea in a dirty outhouse. What I hadn’t expected, on this journey, was to find report-worthy bathrooms before I even left the relative haven of the United States.

On I-8, so far down the state of California that a random border patrol outpost pops up out of nowhere, I pulled over at a rest stop between the east-and west-bound segments of the highway. There is a special place in hell for this chemical toilet positioned near a neglected, overflowing dumpster surrounded by more red ants than I could find in the state of Texas, and quite a few large bees.

Conversely, in southeast Wyoming, just off I-25, oil dollars have developed a rest stop complete with dinosaur fossils, dioramas on the history of Wyoming, and the cleanest highway-side bathroom I’ve seen. In Wallace, Idaho, a town familiar to those who’ve read The Big Burn, a large green area with outdoor exhibitions on mining and logging, the history of the town, and a lovely playground is sabotaged by a metal toilet-tank combo, the likes of which I believed only exist in prisons. Clean, but depressing nonetheless.

Let’s be honest: the issue isn’t ambiance. It’s sewage. Like most of life’s unpleasant aspects, sewage is something best put out of sight and out of mind. In much of the developing world, where things are turned inside out, sewer systems are close to nonexistent. Necessity being the mother of invention, this leads to some creative ways to handle every day need.

The key to getting around plumbing problems in places with little infrastructure is to reduce waste. No toilet paper goes in the toilet. Instead, it goes in a waste bin next to the toilet. The only place I’ve intentionally flushed any toilet paper in the last three months is on an airplane – which makes business class seem even classier. The more common solution to this problem is just to not use toilet paper. Problem solved. One problem, anyway – and another presented. How does one…clean up? The answer is: water.

Water, you ask? What do you mean, water?

Here, we have two choices. The manual method is the bucket of water with a scoop/cup which you use to clean yourself. The ‘automated’ method – think mobile bidet – is a sprayer like that which may be on the side of your kitchen sink, used in theory to clean yourself.

In practice, by the unpracticed, this tool frequently leads to an entertaining mess. If you are lucky. If you are unlucky, it leads to an entertaining mess on your clothes. Neither of these methods leaves you dry – an obvious point I feel the need to mention.

Honestly, one should never assume that there will be anything useful in the bathroom. If you want toilet paper, carry your own. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how seldom I’ve had to pull mine out of my bag on this journey. As a result, I’m still carrying around part of a very high-grade roll of Charmin pilfered from a friend’s apartment in Dallas. You should also never count on having anything with which to wash or dry your hands. I’m ok with being that horrible tourist with the hand sanitizer. I’m not afraid of germs; I’m afraid of typhoid. As a consequence, I’m also still carrying the same container of hand-sanitizer I brought with me from the states.

While I’m being frank, one should also never assume there will be a toilet in the happy room. Don’t worry – you can still be happy. A squatty, in a lot of instances, is actually cleaner than a western toilet. Especially if you are in places where people aren’t going to sit on it anyway – or where, as is frequently the case in Asia, they have to be reminded not to stand on it.

None of this addresses what happens with what goes in the toilet. In many places I’ve seen, much of the plumbing is actually not hidden in the walls. The sink and the bathtub (a rarity) may drain out of a pipe and into the drain on the floor.

The same will be true of the shower, if it’s actually a separate section of the bathroom. More likely is that it will be a showerhead coming out of the bathroom wall, and should there be toilet paper provided for you, you’d best remember to remove it from the room before accidentally turning it to paper-mache material by turning the shower on in its presence.

But what of the actual sewage? I have mentioned that in some places, it is actually running right beneath the sidewalk, as an unfortunate misstep may reveal. In other locations, nothing’s left to the imagination: it’s simply running out from beneath the outhouse. For example:

Occasionally, you can get the same thing with a much nicer view:

Or this, where you simply squat over the ditch with water that runs through it…and I honestly don’t want to know where it goes.

More disturbing were the outhouses I saw at the floating villages on Inle Lake, which is also ‘famous’ for its floating gardens, which yield tomatoes, cucumbers, and watercress offered in every restaurant in the vicinity.

I ate the tomatoes. They aren’t Washington State heirlooms in August by any stretch, but they didn’t taste like their fertilizer. One of many small blessings I’m counting while I wait to see what entertaining plumbing Africa has in store for me.

Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling

Asia

Money Matters: the new New Math

Wadi Wadi, We Like to Party

An Unquiet American

Just a Little Bit of History Repeating

The Happy Room