Our India adventure

Sophia and I had made a special trip to my work to get the pages from the guide book I had photocopied and next thing you know we lost them.  They got left on a luggage trolly, we realized our mistake an hour before take off.  We had just woken up from a surprisingly good nights sleep in each other's arms on the floor of the Kuala Lumpur international departures hall.  I had to sleep sort of at an odd angle as the secret was in a money belt on my side, my special special secret cargo that only I knew about.
So then we got to the gate, they wanted to know where our boarding passes were, we had to shoot back to the counter to get them only to realize our India visas had been in the file folder that held the photo copied guide book pages.  Run run run upstairs to the fancy pantsie high faluting lounge where they were able to pull up and email and reprint.  Thank you thank you thank you.  Run run run to the gate just before they were closing the door.  You made it! smiled the Malaysian flight attendant and we were off for the friendly skies on Air Asia, the shittiest airline in Asia.

India was the place because we found a deal on skyscanner.  Sky scanner is cool, you can type in your country and then it will let you do 'anywhere' as the destination and it lists by price.  Go on, check it out, we will all wait for you.  So cool right?  So the cheap ones we found were for Trichy in southern India.
I had been to India once before, I think I wrote a blog about it.  Great place not so great people I was travelling with.  But the ease of travel in Kerala lead me to believe that all of Southern India was a bit easier and the 'full on' tough going India was in the North, we were going to Tamil Nadu by the way.  The night before we flew an older teacher I work with corrected this misconception.  'No mate' he shook his head 'You're going to real India.'  And he said it with a hint of doom in his voice.

And here I had been telling Sophia she had nothing to worry about in Southern India.  Her sister was against us going, her sister was sure we'd both be raped.  Her mother was under the impression we were going to Korea or Vietnam, I can't remember which.  Had she known the real destination she too would have come to the conclusion that we would both be raped.  I figured it would be like Kerala and now maybe they were all right about us being raped.

And maybe (in addition to or instead of getting raped) we would face all the other things I have heard about India; that it is crazy and exhausting, that everyone is trying to scam you, that beggars will attack at all times in mass, that flies carrying god knows which pandemic will collect all over your food and the noise and the chaos will drive you mad screaming for the comfort of your hotel room which will more than likely be too hot or possibly on fire for some reason.  And somehow simultaneously beautiful and spiritual and wonderful.  That is what I have heard about travel in India from various people over the years.  While I feel like having travelled around Asia the better part of a decade at this point (yep, I left Atlanta in late 06) I felt ready for the challenge.  But you know it was Sophia I was thinking of.  My wonderful Chinese Gal has done Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and even America (which is the strangest country I have ever known) but nothing like the India which existed in my head.  She is usually a good sport but I really didn't want to throw her in too deep.  Culture shock is a real thing and I just didn't want to.  I had too much riding on this junket, more on that later.

So we land, it is the first time Sophia has ever been in a plane with a back door, the first time she has been in a plane that had stairs down to the tarmac leading to a shuttle bus to the airport.  We walk into a small one room airport, that has an endless line wrapping several times around the room, luckily Sophia sees a sign that reads E booking upstairs which we go to and find a delightful couple of young people from Hong Kong.  The ladies at the desk look over our information and can't believe we don't have our travel itinerary printed out, I try to explain how we had it but lost it at the Kuala Lumpur Airport.  Could happen to anyone I say with a smile and a shrug.
That is not an answer, sir.  Said the tiny woman in uniform with her head wagging that wonderful Indian head wag.  They also wanted the address of the hotels we planned to stay at along with their phone numbers, which guess what, yep also gone.  Could happen to anyone, I smile again.  Look at me, I am a nice guy, lost the papers.
That is not an answer sir.  Again with the Indian head wag.
Finally I gave them a number, one of many that I had called a few days ago when booking hotels in India.  It could have been any of a number of places but the main thing was they had an Indian looking phone number to write in their form.

I found a taxi outside the airport and asked to go to the city center, near the bus station, I remembered our hotel was near the bus station.   We pulled up to the front of the hotel Guru, which I seemed to remember was in my guide book.  We did find our hotel, but the guy behind the desk wasn't nearly as nice as the dude at the hotel Guru so we stayed there.
Here is just for the google traffic

Hotel Guru in Trichy was a wonderful place with a great restaurant and really nice folks running it.  Highly recommend it.

Who knows, maybe that will help.  Back to our story already in progress.
The restaurant in the basement of the hotel wouldn't let us sit in the main area and insisted we sit in the special air con room in the back.  The dosas oh the dosas.  The curries and the chutney and the flavors and the dosas.  By the end of the trip I was officially on masala over-dosa but that first day sitting there eating all that stuff with Sophia I thought I was in heaven.

Trichy is cool for a day or two, there is a fort on top of a mountain in the center of the city.  As we were going in tourist hunters started with their routine, same questions in the same order from all of them.  What country are you from?  Oh My cousin is in America, I know it well.  New York or Los Angeles?  How many days have you traveled?  Where will you go next?  Followed by come with me so I can guide you to see some blah blah that they are hawking.  Not to sound cynical but every ten feet another guy with the same questions.  One guy asked me what country I was from and followed it with 'Oh America.  I know it well, my cousin is in America.  Melbourne or Sydney?'
Each time I made an effort to smile and answer politely before excusing myself until one of them yelled at the both of us 'RUBBISH, RUBBISH' because we weren't into hiring him.  After that I still smiled but didn't answer anybodies questions, at least not the ones that followed the tourist hunter script.

The temples in India you have to take off your shoes.  The rock fort was on top of a mountain with tunnels cut through the middle of the rock.  On top of that rock the India sun cooked down on that rock surface and the feet burned.  crowds of people hopped to get to shadows of trees and structures to escape the pain of walking on the hot hot rock.  There was a long incline of steps that lead up to fort on top.  The steps had small mats dispersed intermittently along the way but not enough so your feet didn't burn.  About half way up we decided it was a zen thing, like you had to divorce it from your mind and focus on the journey.  While I think this was the concept it didn't help, I was a child without sandals hopping around pool side on a hot summer day.

We got to the top and a Hindu priest rubbed white power in lines on our foreheads.  We could see the whole city and as we looked a pair of young boys hide around the corner and kept peeking at us.  One of them got up the nerve to approach us and nervously he asked our names and shook our hands.  We told him our name and he waited a beat then ran away to hide from embarrassment as his family howled with laughter.   It is possible he hadn't met foreigners before and while this was the first time a child reacted to us this way on our trip it would be far from the last.  The adults usually either reacted to us with indifference, disdain, or much more often curiosity and kindness.  But the kids were almost always really curious and often requested pictures.  They would wave and Sophia would holler a really big happy Sophia 'Hello' with a really big Sophia smiling grin.

I was worried about beggars in India, and sure enough they were all over the place, but they actually were never a problem for the simple reason that I came equipped with a Sophia.  I don't think there was a single person who asked for money that she turned away.  She didn't give anybody a lot, but everything is so cheap in India that it was something to the beggars.  Enough to get a smile out of them in most cases.  She also gave every tuk tuk driver a little bit more than the agreed upon price, out of ten days of drivers I think only one guy didn't get extra out of her and that guy was being an asshole.  So if you go to India, at least where we were in Tamil Nadu just bring the smallest amount extra and instead of worrying about being hounded by beggars make sure you have lots of small change and bills somewhere in your pocket and a little more space in your heart.  After ten years of travelling in Asia I still have so much to learn, Sophia took one look at India and was already awesome at it.  Just be really nice to people who have nothing when they ask you for something.

We got lost in the endless temples in Trichy.  They are so old and so unchanged and so covered with people all in bright colors beyond description.  Sophia got a garland of flowers from a priest, the ladies all wear these white flowers in their hair.  I tried to tie it into her hair somehow when a lady saw this and from her own hair took her own flowers and tossed them on the ground in order to use her hair pin.  She then grabbed Sophia and decked her head out with these beautiful white flowers, it was a completely selfless kind act from a stranger who was so happy to have a chance to do something nice for us.  It was not the first or the last time someone in India would show us such kindness.  What amazing people the Indians!

So we headed out for Pondicherry, planned on going it by train.   Travel in India by train is such a cool experience, a romantic way to traverse the wonderful landscape.  We tried to get tickets but the man at the counter couldn't understand our questions.  First there was no train until 2:30, then suddenly there was one at 12, which was two hours away.  We agreed and in the meantime wondered around until finding the train museum which was sort of neat.

When the train pulled up we were sent to the very end of the thing, turned out we were in last class which meant good luck getting a seat.  As we came in I noticed people were sleeping on the luggage racks, and as there was nowhere else I put Sophia up on one of them.  She seemed happy enough up there.  I hung by the door and watched India go by.  It was actually really pleasant for most of the way until we got to one stop where a bunch of guys ran on carrying heavy boxes and plastic chairs and bags of stuff.  They were screaming at people to get out of their way so they could put their stuff all over the place.  They were pushing people around like they weren't people.  They were ugly and I mean and they forced old people to move from their spots on the floor through intimidation and yelling.  At one point I got up to check on Sophia and they took my spot, I thought about getting it back from them but at that point we were almost where we needed to go, and you know what?  I don't need to get into a fight with five strange men over a spot on the floor on a moving train in India.  I am getting old now and I guess old enough to know when to lose my cool and when not to.

So that night in Pondicherry Sophia went shopping in a market and I waited at the hotel.  When she came back I took her out to a spot on the beach and said some cool shit and showed her the ring my grandfather gave my grandmother in 1939.  Boom.  She said yes and we both collapsed into the sand, I won't try to write about how that moment felt, I don't want to.  Some moments are not for blogs, even on the internet some things are still sacred.  She said yes and it is gonna happen.  It is big and scary and I have been a bundle of nerves before and since but it also feels right, so please be happy for us.  She is awesome, we are awesome, all is awesome.

So Pondicherry was uneventful with that one very notable exception.  We went to the museum and a police man told it was closed on Mondays.  There is a library, he told us.  Really?  Where?  Right over there.  He said.  Also closed on Mondays.  Oh we said.

We went to the Auraville, which is a transcendental commune turned city where all work for the common good of human understanding.  It was a really relaxing place, we went to their monolithic golden dome which was sort of like a golden hippie epcot center.  We found a nice tree and meditated, I should be ashamed to admit that but I ain't.  Deal with it you turkeys.  When we left we found a mall of very modern boutiques of stuff made and sold by locals.  Some of it looked very factory manufactured but if it is all going to helping the community whatever.  They had displays of alternative energy sources they were using, one of which involved marsh reeds.  They had a sign for solar cooled ice cream.  I bought some and was half way through trying to work out how solar power was used in making ice cream when it occurred to me that if they use solar power for the everything then they use it for the fridge too hence the solar cooling.  It also occurred to me that I got taken for a ride by some hippies, but it was ok.  A nice Mango sherbet on a blasting hot day in India was just fine.  A very nice spot, but I think that if one were to stay long term and get involved in the farming and volunteering that goes on there it win order to get the full picture of the place one should really stay for a while and get into the volunteer farming and learning that happens there.  But for one day it was a great spot with really cool vibes.  I bought a book on urban farming, I want to get some veggies going.

The punchline of the stay in Pondicherry was that the nice hotel I had chosen ( I splurged owing to what I planned to do I figured we needed a decent joint.  The night I proposed I told the waiter who brought me beer, he actually didn't seem to care.  In the morning we sat in their garden lobby and they brought us toast and coffee, when I left I found out that they charged us more for the toast per person than it costed to fill both of us up beyond belief to where we didn't want to move at every single other Indian restaurant we visited on our journey.  Toast.

But she said yes and it is happening.  That is the huge part.  Huge.

Tiruvanamalai was next, and we took a bus to get there.  I had to put the huge back pack (with the collected junk of two people) over my lap as the bus filled, so it was a long trip.  The horns on the buses are about as loud as they can be, often in several note jingles that really rattle the teeth.  The driver seems unable to operate his vehicle without the horn, removing one from a bus would be the same as removing the brakes.  People kept getting on, the guy next to us and Sophia entered into a who can give the other the most fruit and snacks contest.  They each quietly retreated at the rest breaks to the side of the road to buy bags of grapes and crackers to offer back and forth.  Meanwhile the bus ride went on and on as did the green fields and rolling horizon.  Farms and villages here, towns and small clusters of concrete there, always cows cows cows and the ever present previously but her once again mentioned blaring siren of the bus horn, alerting all from dirt to heavens of our approach like the horn in a cavalry charge.  In traffic the buses all blast their horns at one another while not moving and since they all have different little jangling songs it sounded a bit like really loud birds chirping, or possibly the song really big dinosaurs must have made when angry at each other.
The ride and the horn and the weight of the bag in my lap continued as did the country side as did the heat.  Holy cow the heat is so intense, there is no heat on earth like that India heat, and I say that as a Southern boy.  Air conditioning is rare if ever and the heat hangs on you and pulls you down, the sweat soaks the shirt until finally start feeling the drops getting in your eyes from the top of your head.  At no point did Sophia and I not each hold in our hand a litter water bottle, usually we had three or four on back up in bags.  So the heat was always a thing, and on the bus when moving it was ok because all the windows were down, but once we stopped there it was.

Along the way my mind wandered as my mind tends to do, I guess yours does also.  Remember before smart phones when you just had to sit and think?  The good old days?  Well that's what I was doing and it was really nice.  suddenly in the far off distance I saw a mountain, well a very tall hill let's say, and on top of that very tall rocky, craggy hill seemed to be ancient ruins of battlements or temples.  I shook Sophia from sleep to show her.  Bless her, she can sleep anywhere she wants to and at the drop of a hat.  Then an even taller one, this was officially a mountain and it had even more structures.  Then walls with archer torrents crumbling into hillsides and into nothing, then picked up again over the next ravine, first as rock piles which gradually grew and stretched into fortified structures which then fell again back into the rubble, back to where they came from.

What the hell is that??

I thought surely that must have meant we were in Tiruvanamanamanama (what was the name of that damn town again?) but no, we kept on for another solid hour or more before the bus finally pulled into town.  The rest of the day I couldn't get those structures out of my mind, the came and went so fast.  I was left questioning if I had actually seen it or if maybe I had allowed my mind to play with what I had seen until it grew into something, you know?  I do that.  All the time I do that to myself.

We visited the big temple in town, it was huge and marvellous like the others.  In Tamil Nadu they seem to be large towers with gates that you walk through into courtyards with smaller buildings inside.  We went into the inside of one of the temples and found ourselves in a small room where people were praying and singing around a small statue.  I honestly didn't mean to get myself that deep into the sanctum and it was the only time I really felt like a poser, a peeping tom almost.  We gave donations and had the powder rubbed on our foreheads.  The place was solid rock with amazing carvings that seemed to tell a history or religious text or both.  Families of the faithful smiled and waved at us, more people asked us to be in a picture, more cows, more heat.  Outside the temple we found a gauntlet of people asking for money, Sophia wound up buying food for several of them before I tugged her arm to get us away, I could see we had drawn attention and it was time to get going.  As we were walking in I was forced to buy a sarong because I was wearing shorts, which I was fine with, felt bad about coming off as disrespectful to be honest.

We spent the next day wandering aimlessly through back streets trying to find a meditation shrine, and when we did it was closed for lunch.  A woman from Switzerland in her fifties ran over to offer to take us to this amazing place she had found for lunch nearby, she would lead us and we were to follow in silence.  'No talking' she proffered as a sales point with a toothy grin which for me was the item that clinched the deal.  Fifteen minutes later we were up to speed with her entire 30 day stay at the mediation shrine and were becoming familiar with her relationship to the earth mother.  She explained that 8 years ago she had experienced an event of some sort that changed the way she saw the harmony of all things and expanded her perceptions of realitiy.  She sat with us at lunch which was in a beautiful garden where other foreigners sat sipping tea.  Without ordering anything we were all brought plates of food.  It was hipply cooked interesting takes on the traditional local curries and the price was almost nothing.  It was a really chill place to hang out, and throughout our lunch the woman from Switzerland stared at us without speaking or blinking as we all ate in silence.

The next day we got up early and made our way to the local bus station which is chaos.  We asked around five or six people how to get there, unsure of our pronunciation.  We finally found one, and as we sat down a man came with an urn of smoking incense and tapped each rider on the bus what looked like a long whisk broom.  We were grateful that he had done that for us so we gave him a few rupees.
The ride was about an hour or so and we were dropped off in a town at the foot of the mountain.  It was a very fast climb up the first of the two, and on top we found the ruins of what must have been a palace of some kind.  There were massive chambers that had stairs to the top where you could walk around on narrow ledges, two or three stories up and on top of a mountain.  The view from up there was amazing, we could see little specks far off in the distance which were farmers knee deep in water tending to a rice paddy.  We could see  lush fields to one side of us, the sleepy town to the other and at no point did we ever climb so high that we couldn't hear the din of bus horns screaming below but the higher we climbed the more it became part of the atmosphere, like a breeze or the song of birds.  Once on top we spent hours climbing around on the ancient structures, in the chambers which I imagined to be the halls of kings.  All around teenage couples were sitting together, each in a hidden corner tucked away.  They were the young lovers from the town below and here must have been the only place away from prying eyes of the older ones or the parents.  They weren't necking, at least from what we saw, rather sitting together and enjoying the wonderful breeze up there that was chasing away the Indian sun.  We did the same, Sophia and I.  We found a slab of ancient rock and laid next to each other and slept for a couple of hours.  I woke up early to see one of the teenage boys had jumped from the roof of one temple to the roof another below, maybe his girl was watching.  He made it but was now up a good fifteen feet with nothing to hang on to to climb down.  I watched as his friends (all howling with laughter) below.  A nearby foreigner lounging around and enjoying the show must have confounded everyone's amusement.  Eventually the poor kid managed to hang his entire body down the long end of a pillar and his buddies hung onto his ankles, knees, finally torso and he was down.  I feel back asleep for a time.  Sophia happily slept through the whole thing.

The next morning we went back across the street to the taller mountain.  This one was a longer climb and was covered with monkeys.  There are bad monkeys and good monkeys, the world seems to have become covered in the naughty ones.  Good monkeys live in the jungle and are sort of like squirrels.  They see people and run like hell, once a monkey tastes people food they become aggressive in your face gimmie gimmie monkeys and while often cute they are not very much fun.  Each time we stopped if we weren't careful we'd have a little monkey inspecting our bags.  One minute, this is a nice spot to sit with no monkeys.  Look over there, what a nice view.  HEY, STOP THOSE MONKEYS!

A school group of children was near the top.  From far away they called to us 'Helllooooo' and Sophia called back 'HELLOOOOO' back and forth until we were with them.  They were thirsty and the water was heavy so when they asked for some we both gave them one of our bottles, which they passed around among all the kids.  They all wanted to know our names and what country we were from, then they all wanted pictures with us.  This was right on the edge of a wooden Indian Jones bridge over a fall that you'd have time to think about as you fell it.  I am not good with heights so in all the pictures I am smiling, but also sitting down hanging onto the side of the rock stairway leading to the bridge for dear life.

We set up a hammock my father gave me between the pillars of one of the structures up top.  We ate pomegranates and the juice and little red popcornish bits spilled onto the rock below us.  I tossed the skin into the bushes down a cliff below and we settled in for a nice nap.  Pretty soon a little friend took notice of the discarded fruit smell we had a tiny monkey investigating.  I pulled the bag on top of us along with or shoes, reasoning that he didn't want anything in there bad enough.  Cautiously at first and then a bit braver we had this little monkey eating the fruit bits off the floor next to the hammock.  We watched up until the point where a gang of his friends showed up.  That was when we got up and packed the hammock and skedaddled.  On the other side of the cliff was another spot in another shelter and there we had us a nice long afternoon nap in that hammock which hung next to the edge of a cliff that fell off the side of the world into nothing.  

Some teenage kid came and asked for a sip of our water.  Like an idiot I gave it to him and watched as he proceeded to swallow my entire water bottle.  But good news, we started with six bottles and I had left one in the woods hidden as we climbed up, mainly because it was so heavy.  Still there on the way down, and as it was hidden under a rock in the shade it wasn't really cold but not really hot either when I found it on the way down.  As we left a whole army of teen boys of around 15 or 16 took notice of Sophia.  At first they wanted to take a picture with the both of us, then one boy nervously asked if he could have his picture just with Sophia.  They were looking to see if I was going get sore, I didn't, I thought it was hilarious, so they all took turns in pictures with my fiancée.  The longer this went on the wilder the boys became, they started hooting, laughing, and yelling, some of them jumping up and down with happiness.  When I finally gently suggested we get out of there quite some time had passed as well as several facebook pages worth of pictures taken.  We politely waved our goodbyes and the boys yelled fond thank yous and god knows what else at us in Tamil.  Later on the main road the entire lot of them went screaming by miraculously all balanced on one motorcycle and of course not a single helmet between them.  Those boys are still somewhere looking at those pictures.

After that was another bus ride back to Trichy.  I wanted to do it by train again but it wasn't really an easy thing to do from where we were and the bus saved us five or six hours.  Back in Trichy we went to the same hotel we had started in, they were all very happy to see us again.  In the basement restaurant they put us right in the AC room and treated us like stars.
We went back to the area that had the rock temple but neither of us felt like climbing it again.  We both agreed it wouldn't be the same the second time and it was a long hike on hot rock without shoes.  We wandered around shopping, I bought a text book for linear algebra that I will never be able to understand, but it was cheap.
That night next to the hotel she went shopping and I went to check out the bar, the next to last night of the trip and my first beer of the trip.  Sophia makes me do good, not out of anything but wanting to be a better man, which is pretty cool to find in someone.
So I was drinking a beer in the bar in Trichy.  I went in and they made me sit at the first table as you walk in, clearly the best table.  They had a sign on the wall that had the liqueur licence on the board below which read 'Drinking Alcohol kills families, country, and all the person' in gigantic font.  I was into my second pint when a group of  four tough looking guys came in, one of them looked damn mean and had the sort of fatness that made him look stronger.  He saw me and flew into a rage.  He stood in the center of the room and pointed his meaty fat finger at me yelling at everyone in there.  Why was this foreign scum at the nice table was what I got out of it.  I sat there sipping my beer looking back at him.  Two of his friends sat at the table across from me, the fat man came over and put his hand on my face patting, I pushed his hand away.
'my friend sit here, you sit there' he was smiling and it was a really scary smile, this was clearly a scary dude.  I got up and started to drop my money and split, I was done with that scene.  The barmen pulled me to another table across the room, brought me my beer and sat me down.  I finished my beer quickly and watched as everyone in the place ran into the kitchen and returned with beers and plates and plates of food for these guys who acted like they weren't even there.  So here is what the Southern Indian mob looks like.  When one of the waiters had a break I waved him over and gave him my money which he took quickly.  The fat guy didn't seem to like foreigners or me and I wasn't interested in how a belly full of beer influenced these feelings.  I paid and legged it, and as I was out the door I glanced around to see all eyes from that table focused right at me.

An hour later Sophia and I went down the street a bit to a movie theatre to dig on some Ballywood, and if you ever find youself in India for any reason and would some serious immersion that should be on your list.  We go in, again we are given very nice seats.  It is a gigantic theater but an old piece of rope has tied off the front half of the auditorium so everyone is crammed into the back.  Before the lights go down there is a preshow intensity that is palpable.  We saw a fight break out a few rows in front of us over a seat.  A brief scuffle that ended as soon as it began.  A third party interceded and both men sat down and seemed to be talking with their arms around each other's shoulders throughout the rest of the show.
So the lights go down and we watch a few commercials for a local tea, then the show started.  It was a comedy about a scamming street thief who goes around stealing wallets and in the first scene selling families drugged icecream so he could break into their house later finding them all passed out and drugged so he could rob them blind.  It was all in Tamil but the actions were so broad we had no trouble at all following the story.  The thief takes his loot back to his unbelievably nicely decked out flat, but first he meets a nice girl and one of his scams results in her getting fired he has fallen in love with her and somehow (the power of musical montage) seems to be her boyfriend in the next scene.  Along the way he picks up two fat and bumbling buddies who always seem to be yelling at each other and falling down.  Every ten minutes there is a musical sequence when the entire audience starts screaming at the top of their lungs.  There are whistles and noises coming from the people that are in time with the melody, so the crowd is actively participating in the music.
I also noticed that while the leading lady is indeed beautiful, she is at no point even in so much as short sleeve shirt.  She is often seen in flowing gowns and sari's that are traditional and brightly colored as any other respectable woman in India.  Regardless of this the men in the audience would wolf whistle and make high pitched 'a yiyiyiyiyiyiyiyiiii' noises when ever she came on screen as though they were all really drunk sailors in a strip club that were about to be kicked out by bouncers.
There was an intermission and it was getting late, I didn't want to be walking around with Sophia late at night in India even though we were just a couple of blocks from our hotel.  So we went for the exit and found that someone had left a large piece of plywood across blocking anyone from leaving.  Next to that was another door people were walking through and me and Sophia quickly realized it was the men's room.  We went back to the theater, and many helpful men pulled me aside to show me where the ladies room was, thinking I wanted her to use the wrong one.  About ten minutes into the second half we agreed that we really needed to get going, so we got up and left.  A man in the lobby was happy to move the large piece of wood and lead us down to a courtyard below where another man slept on a bench.  That man was shaken awake and he got up, rubbed his eyes and unlocked the chain padlock to open the large sliding metal wall gate so we could exit the facilities.

One more India story.

The last night there we found a guy that was cooking chickens.  We ordered what I thought were two orders of food but turned out to be two whole chickens with side dishes, enough for five easily.  We got most of it to go and thought We'd give it to a beggar.  As we were walking out we had the idea of buying a few loafs of bread to go along with it.  Pretty soon we had several loafs.  I walked around with the loaf hanging from my hand for all to see like a large fish I had just caught and was proud of.  The first was a group of three woman, all of whom had babies in arms.  They were each given a loaf of bread.  They all wanted money next, and I was about to tell them to fuck off when Sophia gave them each ten rupees, which isn't much to us but that seemed to make them really happy.  We gave a loaf to another lady, then two more women with babies showed up when we had given the last of it away so we went and got us more loafs.  We were on our way to the airport at this point so I had the big bag on.  Loaf here, loaf there.  It felt great.
We got in a Tuk Tuk for the airport and as we sped around the corner a group of people, all with loafs of bread saw us and they all waved at us, seriously.
So I've been travelling around Asia for around ten years, and I feel like I am so fancy.  I was nervous about the beggars because I hate always being in a position to say no to people.  Sophia has taught me the joy of just saying yes.
Sophia is from a very poor background, her family never had money especially and as a result she really seems more concerned with out money get's spent that I am.  I will go and blow a ton of money on a night out on the piss with friends.  But in India she could see that these people didn't have anything and she just started breaking her money down, money that she had earned by busting her ass six, not five but six days a week and passing it out happily to anyone that asked her.  So I would like to be more like her, we all should.  If you got something and you can spare it, you dig?  I could and should do more.  I never donate my time or money to anything really, but it sure felt cool to pass out that bread.

Here is something for the google traffic.

FUCK YOU AIR ASIA!!!!  YOU SUCK!!!!!  7 KG BAGGAGE ALLOWANCE FOR INTERNATIONAL????  MAKING ME PAY EXTRA TO CHECK WHEN I COULD HAVE MAYBE TRIED TO CRAM THAT THING INTO AN OVERHEAD.  I BET I COULD'VE CRAMMED IT IN THERE, AIR ASIA. I'VE CRAMMED IT BEFORE.  I'VE CRAMMED IT ALL KINDS OF PLACES.  WHAT, YOU DIDN'T THINK I'D DO ANY SHOPPING?  IN INDIA???  OF COURSE MY BAG WAS TWICE THE ALLOWED WEIGHT.   AND THEN WHEN I GOT IT IN HONG KONG MY PHONE CHARGER WAS MISSING, AND UNIVERSAL POWER ADAPTOR!!!!
MY UNIVERSAL POWER ADAPTOR IS ON YOUR HEADS, AIR ASIA.  YOU CAN DEAL WITH THAT GUILT FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES.  HAVE FUN WITH THAT, HOW DOES IT FEEL TO KNOW SOMEONE IN YOUR COMPANY OR QUITE POSSIBLY SOMEONE WHO DOESN'T WORK FOR YOU AT ALL THAT HANDLED MY BAGS STOLE SOMETHING?  I HOPE YOU ALL DIE!!!!  NEXT TIME I WILL FILL MY BAG WITH POISONOUS SNAKES, OR BETTER YET I WILL FILL IT WITH MY SPITE.  BUT INCIDENTALLY THE IN-FLIGHT MEAL WAS REALLY GOOD, WHICH IS UNUSUAL FOR AIR PLANE FOOD.  I WAS IMPRESSED WITH THE CHICKEN MEAL BUT THE CURRY WAS JUST SO SO.  YOU HEAR ME AIR ASIA?  WHILE THE CHICKEN WAS REALLY GOOD THE CURRY (ESPECIALLY AFTER BEING IN INDIA) WAS PASSABLE, BUT ULTIMATELY SO SO.

It was the best trip I have ever had in my life I think.  For me that is a big deal.  And hey, we're getting married.

Will's umbrella protest blog

Last week was when the umbrella protest was in full force.  Somewhere by the end of the week I was walking into work through the protest.  I am lucky in that the protest seems to have set up right smack dab on my walk into work.  So I was walking in and looking at art and enjoying the vibe, man it is so nice and peaceful and wonderful.  I passed a supply tent, one of the places where people are donating free water, snacks, even food donated daily from local restaurants.  I asked if they needed anything, I could pick up some food or water I suggested.  The man sitting at the table already covered with bottles and bottles of water said that they had it under control and didn’t need anything, the guy next to him quickly added an honest enough sounding ‘thank you for your support.’

This made sense, it seems as though they have to keep it in the family.  They have such a careful approach which involves very respectful resistance.  It is a message of politeness which permeates to each and every single person in the crowd, and they know they can rely on one another to toe the line.  Me they don’t know, so with me they are very kind and thankful for my support but they would prefer me to lend my love and solidarity.  I have found ways of helping, I have donated water on other days, I have talked with people and offered my love.  I wish I could do more, but understand completely why they keep me at an arms distance; this is their fight.  Still I love them for what they are doing and I am inspired by them.  I am inspired by teenagers.  I know, right?  Teenagers.

About five minutes after leaving the supply spot I found a way to help.  I was walking up a set of stairs to the public walkway which went between a set of malls and then off to the ferry.  As I passed the restrooms two young, maybe fourteen or fifteen year old girls called to me nervously.  They were dressed in all black with the yellow ribbons, the uniform of the protestors in Hong Kong.  They asked me if I could help them, I was delighted and said absolutely.

                One of the two girls was holding a toilet brush.  Turns out they were afraid to go into the men’s toilet and needed me to go fetch them another brush because, get this, these teens were voluntarily cleaning public toilets.  I went in and didn’t see anyone so I told them to come in too.  I found a collection of mops and dust bins but no toilet brushes.  They seemed disappointed, and I tried to tell them how amazing it was that they were doing this, but they were on a mission and disappeared into the ladies room. 

That is what this is, that is who they are, that is what they are about.  Young people have taken over major areas of one of the world’s largest cities and they’ve done so without resorting to violence, they’ve held the areas without destroying anything; no looting, no vandalism.  As a matter of fact they are actually doing a better job taking care of their little areas and the people in those areas than the city does.  I thought I would write some of what I have seen so far down.  Here it go

Last week

I work in Admiralty which is basically part of Central Hong Kong.  Several weeknights classes end at 9:45 and after ten or fifteen minutes of chatting with other teachers and putting  the teaching business from the day to bed I am off to catch the 10:30 ferry home, there is no 9 o’clock.  The walk home at night through central takes me through a series of shopping malls which connect by bridges and walkways.  At night all the shops are closed up and only the Mcdonalds and KFC are still pulling people in.  At night in Central it is quiet, the stores and sidewalks that in the day are so crowded and frantic become empty churches where footsteps echo and the rare people you see won’t look you in the eye.  At the end of the walk through the malls is a bridge over a large street into a park which takes me to the waterfront.  At the water I hang a left and stroll along the shore to the ferry piers.  It is a nice walk, and at night the lights from Kowloon across the water is dazzling.  Hong Kong has the most amazing skyline, no other city looks quite as great especially by the water at night.  At the ferry pier the boat takes me into the darkness of the ocean and to my wonderful little island twenty minutes away.  I look forward to my walk as I do my ride home.  It is peaceful and I let my mind wander to wherever it wants to take me. 

                Last week in the park before the water one night I noticed some students hanging around.  They were laying on the grass, a drum circle here, a kid strumming a guitar there and some people passing out literature in a language and don’t speak in an alphabet I can’t read.  They looked like they had been there all day.  I stopped for a minute and looked around, but really it was pretty small.  I didn’t know what it was about and it was the sort of thing you see in a big city from time to time.  Like any big city commuter I kept walking to my boat without giving it much thought.

                The next night I noticed these kids again, I think that would have been Wednesday, two weeks ago at the time of writing.  It seemed like a larger number, now they had a stage with people speaking into microphones, saying things in a language I don’t speak.  There were more people handing out fliers, and there were now tables where people were signing things.  Off I went for the boat again. 

                The next night was Friday (I finish early on Thursdays) and I had had a quick after work beer with Jason which wasn’t quick enough as I had missed the 10:30 ferry meaning I had to wait around for the 11:30.  I noticed the vibe in the park had changed.  Things seemed a bit more tense and I remember seeing TV cameras where there hadn’t been any before.  Instead of heading home I walked around the corner of a building to where I saw a large crowd brewing.  They were all yelling at police who were on the other side of a glass wall.  I could see that four young, geeky looking, skinny teenagers were getting cuffs behind their backs.  A man near me was yelling at the top of his lungs and waving a fist at a police officer on our side of the glass.  The crowd started chanting something I couldn’t understand but when they did one of the kids getting arrested looked up and smiled, which triggered an explosion of applause.  A group of girls started singing the song ‘do you hear the people sing’ from Le Miserables.  I know, I know it’s a show tune.  But there was something so powerful and important about the song as it came from these kids.  It was clear that something was happening.  I kept investigating. 

                Around another corner I could hear a massive crowd screaming from the bottom of large wall, I must have been a few stories above it.  People were climbing the wall to stand on top and shout.  I had no idea what was happening but was sure something was going down.  More police ran by across the park.  I noticed news reporters.  I walked around yet another corner to see a sea of people outside a building.  They were screaming and looked very upset.  I hung around but felt uneasy, I didn’t know then what I was looking at.  After a while I split for the boat.

                Later I put together that that was the very day and the very building where  hundreds of protesters had burst into and occupied.  That was the day when there were so many arrests, that was when it was really kicking off.  And I while I knew I was looking at something I didn’t know what it was yet, and neither did the protestors and as they would prove a few days later with their tear gas neither certainly did the police.

Saturday came and went, I didn’t see anything.  Sunday was my day off and I had four hours booked in the studio to practice for two hours each with two bands I play with for two hours each.  The first band was with Richard Davis, a new project that promises to be a very fun early 90s sort of college rock thing, Richard writes great songs and that day we worked with a bassist and it gelled.  In the middle of everything Richard looked at his phone and said that police were using tear gas and rubber bullets on protestors.  It had begun. 

                When the second band had wrapped it’s jam it was 9.  The teenage girl who works the reception at that studio was all over her phone and watching it on a laptop.  We asked them what was going on, her friend said some of his friends had been hit with pepper spray by cops.  This was in Mong Kok on Nathan on Argile street near Nathan, one of the busiest streets in Hong Kong which certainly means busiest world wide top ten.  The streets were lined with people selling illegal iphones right off the street corner, we saw one woman buying two.  China being China here we had one half of the city tearing itself to shreds and the other half making money hand over fist knowing the cops were too busy attacking protestors to notice.

                The other guys in the band were heading to a bar in Wan Chai to have a beer, maybe go check things out later.  I had to go then and there so alone I went to Central to find where the shit was going down. 

                In Central on the street people seemed frantic.   I saw a man leaving the area with a camera.  I asked him where to go and he pointed over his shoulder and told me ‘go about two blocks that way, you can’t miss it.’  He was right.  Two blocks and around a corner I saw a row of Hong Kong Police all in black with gas masks looking very much like soldiers from some 80s sci fi.  They had a massive black sign which in English and Chinese warned of tear gas and people were running the other way.  I felt my eyes start to sting.  Someone ran past me and in broken English warned me not to go that way.  A moment later I couldn’t breath and my eyes were on fire.  I was coughing and gasping and realized I had been exposed to tear gas.  For me I got it by getting a bit too close, I didn’t realize how far it spread and hung in the air in the area afterwards.  I was not at any point close enough to be directly hit, but even as a second hand victim it sucked for about fifteen minutes.

                 I made it to a nearby street and an old man wearing a doctors mask was doubled over and gaging, his eyes streaming with tears.  I asked if he was ok and without looking at me he muttered ‘the bastards, the bloody bastards.’  Here was a guy who had been very recently subjected to tear gas and much worse than I had.  I asked again if I could help him and he looked me in the face through blood shot eyes before stumbling away.  I went towards the chaos.

Around the corner I found thousands, thousands of people charging down the street.  I could see the tops of the police helmets on the other side of the crowd.  Plums of acrid white gas clouds hung and drifted just above street level a few meters ahead.  Each time they launched the tear gas (I’d say it was about once every ten minutes) people would flee the front area, ducking and screaming only to turn and march right back to the front moments later. 

I don’t remember seeing umbrellas that night, maybe they were there and I didn’t notice, as it was not yet known as the umbrella protest.  I think it was later in the night that people started pulling out umbrellas, but I did see lots of surgical masks.  I also saw most people had covered their eyes with cling wrap, some over glasses and some had just wrapped it around their heads several times.  I think the effect was that they were not only getting tear gassed but also couldn’t see clearly through the cling wrap.  The message was more telling the police that they couldn’t or wouldn’t be defeated. 

At this point I had to pee, really bad.  I had had a couple of beers with the guys at practice and it was getting serious.  Central Hong Kong is about the worst place to try to find a toilet when not in a late night violent civil upheaval, that night all shops and doors were locked and all building security were on guard.  So I left for a while, wandering in vein trying to find a place to piss.  I was mad at myself too, I realized I was witnessing history and would miss it due to my weak beer bladder.  Finally, finally I found a security guard in a building far off who unlocked a hallway leading to a men’s room. 

When I got back the police line had actually been pushed back a really long way.  It was pretty amazing, actually.  I heard later that protesters in the front were picking up the barricades and marching them forward at the cops who had no choice but to back up.  By this time (and I guess it was about two hours I had been there)  the police where boxed in on both sides by the students.

The closer I got to where the police where, the younger the crowd was becoming.  They looked fifteen on average, and they were all getting gassed.  I saw a line of police who were blocking a side street in a line behind a barricade.  It looked as though they had been flanked and separated from the other detachment.  Now they stood in one row from one end of the side street to the other taking abuse from hundreds that were screaming at them.  It made me feel sad for them for a second.  They grew up and were from Hong Kong too after all.  Then I reminded myself that they were using tear gas on children and I remembered that I didn’t feel sorry for them anymore. 

Closer I walked to the police line, now pushed far back.  I started to think it was a bit foolish, being there, being that close to the shit as it went down.  I don’t know if it was the sheer spectacle o f what I was witness in  or the high minded ideas which held me there.  I had the feeling I was seeing something important, something I would never see again.  I fully realize that those among us will criticize me for getting too close, although I do think I was far enough  back that I was not in real danger.  And while it certainly isn’t my fight as I am not a real Hong Konger, it is my home and you know what?  I believe in democracy as well as peoples right to protest for it.  But after a while it started to feel like it wasn’t my place to be there, plus I needed to catch the last ferry of the night home so I split. 

I woke the next morning with a head ache, I could still smell tear gas on my clothes.  I went out to the new territories to my friends Jason and Sandra’s house.  They were scheduled to head out for Macau for a nice gambling weekend and I had agreed to watch the dogs.  They have cable which means Cinemax and out here that means super crap 80s action films pretty much all day.  I was treated to Superman 4 and Cobra, later in the night I got the x box going with a grand theft auto game.  I had been really excited about the idea of house sitting with the big tv and all, but that day I couldn’t stop thinking I needed to go back to see what was happening, so in the evening I called my friend Jonathon and we met up in Mong Kok to look at things. 

Mong Kok had thousands, it was impossible to walk down any part of the road.  Nathan road (perhaps the busiest in Hong Kong) was clogged with people, their barricades had stopped all traffic.  Everyone was wearing all black ,everyone had yellow ribbons.  Jonathan took me to a bus, a double decker bus which had been surrounded by people and cut off and eventually abandoned in the middle of the street.  It was now covered with paper signs but noticeably no graffiti of any kind.  No spray paint, no bumper stickers.  It was sitting in the middle of an intersection of one of the busiest roads in one of the busiest cities on earth, surrounded by I guess close to a hundred thousand that day and nobody had done a single destructive thing to this bus.  Someone was passing out sticky notes for people to leave on the bus, on mine I wrote ‘fight the power’.  Best I could think of.  An old man next to me joked that I should put it in Chinese and I laughed and told him I didn’t know how so he smiled and laughed too. 

The streets were teenagers sitting indian style on the ground shoulder to shoulder.  One of the MTR train stop exits was covered with hundreds of people who had climbed to the top.  We walked and walked in one direction for what must have been thirty minutes along Nathan in the same direction and saw no end to it.  Some protestors were walking around with trash bags picking up after people.  Others were setting up the initial water supply points, collecting what food and water they could and passing it out for free.  There was a recycling area also, it seemed as though the protesters were doing a better job running their small city than the actual city had ever done. 

We made it to one major intersection and a sea of lights cell phones lit up like lighting bugs on a summer night and the crowd sang a song which was calming and serine.  This was one of the many times I felt profoundly moved by the pure beauty of the umbrella protest.

Jonathan and I ducked into a store and bought as much bottled water as we could carry.  We went around a corner to a supply area and gave it to one of the people giving away free supplies.  We kept walking.

I called to Jonathon over the crowd that this was how you are supposed to have a protest movement.  I said that this was these were the kids who got it right.  A man near me in the crowd heard me and said “You can never see a million person in the streets are peaceful.  Only Hong Kong.”  I was inclined to agree.

It seems the whole idea is to give them nothing to complain about, be as respectful of everyone as possible while shutting down a major metropolis.  Give no reason to incur wrath, prove that your side is bigger.  They use tear gas on teenagers so the teenagers turn around and clean up the city, and they offer free water and snacks (yeah snacks, like cookies and crackers everywhere you go god bless em) to any stranger that walks past.  Starring in the eye of the tyrants that would rob them of the democracy they were promised these kids would be so bold as to smile and offer to recycle.  They block roads with barricades decorated with signs apologizing for any inconvenience.  We teachers spend our lives regarding these teens as kids who lived in their facebook profiles and phones and for shopping.  We were wrong.  Man were we all wrong.  I have never come across a more impressive group of young people in all my life as the kids of Hong Kong.  Did you know one of the main organizers is 17 years old?  Yep Joshua Wong is 17 and along with others is orchestrating this thing. 

Over the following days people talked and speculated.  One of the most common sources of conversation seemed to be how everyone expected it would take for Beijing to get nasty.  People love to speculate.  Wednesday was the big Chinese national holiday and also the largest day for the protests so far.  It was unbelievable to see and it was strange to walk down what are normally busy streets which were of course now carless with kids sitting in file.  Each road was half occupied by the protesters and half open for people to walk.  Concrete dividers on the road had jury rigged steps for people to walk over as well as protestors on each side offering to hold your hand over.  Every so often you’d pass someone with a water mister spraying all who passed with their pleasant vapor.  Seriously, not just one but loads of people spraying a gentle mist on the hot crowds of people.    I wandered around for hours that day.  Eventually it became a bit dull, mainly I suppose for another reason the umbrella protests are great; it’s not in any way a show or an entertainment.  There is no stage, no bands, no games, no hot dog booth.  This is a protest, and I saw many signs reminding people of that.  Aside from people yelling through bull horns there was nothing to see beyond the thing itself.  This is a movement that has a very large concentration of teenagers, you’d think someone would want to get one direction or something.  But wow these are some wise young people, nothing of the sort.  They are not trying to keep numbers by offering some sort of entertainment, I think that may have been a mistake of occupy wallstreet.

Another point I’d like to make about this, they have a very short list of seemingly reasonable but more likely impossible demands.  The biggie is they don’t want their election in 2017 to consist of candidates who were vetted and preapproved by Beijing.  They were promised democracy in the hand over in 97 and this is the issue that has brought out the large numbers.  They also demand the resignation of the current governor  CY Leung.  They have other issues related to the cost of housing as well but those seem to be taking a back seat.  Having a clear set of demands makes it more difficult for the government to refuse them, as does their peaceful respectful nature.  China being China I think it is clear that to give in an inch would be unthinkable, so it’s hard to know where this will go at this point.

                Last Friday, I was teaching a class from 6:30 to 8.  At 8 I had a fifteen minute break in which I went upstairs and learned that a group of bullies (I later found out they were Triads) went into the demonstrations in Mong Kok and started punching people and trashing the barricades, the police stood by and watched.  Rumors haven’t been proven but it is a pretty safe bet that these men were paid to do it.  They claimed to be supporting the police, and remember these are peaceful teenagers now getting punched in the face by government hired members of the most notorious Asian Mafia this side of the Yakuza. 

                The news made me sick, I felt like all the air had left my body.  I walked back down stairs to teach and a young man came running into the room and politely asked me for the class materials as we was going to study on his own.  I gave him the hand out and as he was leaving I asked him if he was ok, he turned and said ‘no’.  As he was running down the hall of the school I called to him to be safe, he waved back to me over his shoulder.  I have no doubt he was running to get to Mong Kok.

                But the kids kept coming over the weekend.  The next morning I saw an old man posturing like he was going to fight protestors on my walk into work, that was at 8 in the morning.  Other teachers said they had seen fights in the subway. 

That day class numbers were way down.  I teach kindergarten age kids on Saturdays now and a lot of the parents were really upset about having to drag their little kids across what was becoming more and more of a tense situation.  The next day was Sunday and I went out to Mong Kok for band practice.  I waited by the exit, the always busy street was now open and occupied now by blue ribbon people.  These guys were in support of the cops, and I think a lot of them were Hong Kongers who were sick of seeing the streets taken over and some of them were the thugs that were beating people up.  A crowd of them formed with someone screaming about something in the middle.  Around the corner were thousands, thousands of protesters.  It didn’t look like these guys were about to do something, it looked more like they had cleared out a small quarter of a block and were in one corner griping as the protests continued.

All week things started to die a natural petering out.  Numbers were less and less as the scheduled talks with the government approached.  The HK government had agree to hear the protesters, but before the talks word went out on twitter and facebook that if they didn’t get what they wanted that protesters should be ready to return.  This was used as an excuse for the government to call off talks all together and the next day everyone was back.  Not in a huge numbers, I suppose the ones who were only sort of into the first week are home.  But the hard core dudes are out in tents living there.

I would now like to outline the steps the Hong Kong government has taken to deal with the protests in five steps.

1.       Tear gas protesters, many of whom are teenagers.

2.       Hire members of the mafia underworld to beat up peaceful protestors (again, teens)

3.       Order police to stand back and watch as members of triad mafia underworld beat up protesters.

4.       Agree to hold talks with the protest organizers.

5.       At the last minute tell the protest organizers to go fuck themselves and call off talks.

Crazy that it isn’t working for them, right?  I guess the scariest part is gonna be step 6.

Kerala

Will Sanders is a humongous doofus who clearly does not care about the feelings and interests of his true blog believers. (Sorry Will, I'm a little late with the public shaming. But that means you are REALLY late with the blog update).
Amy Bugg Burk on my facebook page 




I have been meaning to sit down and write this one for a while, but I haven't really been able to work out how.  I went to India with good friends and I am not sure that was the case when we got back to Hong Kong.  Travel with people means being around them all the time, and maybe this wasn't the right mix of people.  I will say this was one of the greatest trips of my life all the way up until the last day which was when the fit hit the shan.  I will also say that I see no point in using a blog to process conflict on the trip between me and my friends, even though things were said to me that I still take a good deal of umbrage to a few things  I thought I knew my friend and his wife fairly well and that they knew me.  They got the same me I always am, which caused the wife to become quickly annoyed and therefor impossible to deal with.  On the last day I was told that it was all my fault, I talk to much and when I do I talk about strange things that normal people don't talk about.  I thought she knew me before we went on the trip, she clearly did not.  So that sucked for the last few days of the trip, and also to a lesser degree it was a drag dealing with someone who is snappy and seems angry at you but you don't know why.  On the last day she told me laughingly that 'I have a breaking point, Will'.  So do I, so do I.  But that is as far as I go into that.  Done.  Fuck it.  Don't travel with people, and if you do travel with people that you really know and know how they travel and most especially people that like you.  That is important.  Regardless of all of what I have just said it was in easily in my top five trips of all time and here's why:

We went to Kerala, South India.

It was incredible, I would say think Southeast Asia but with better food, less tourists, and a bit more work and thought and blood and sweet and tears and stories going into getting from A to B.  Everyone always says what a difficult place India can be to travel in, they tell you about the vast cities like Delhi where the begging children eat from trash cans and the lepers and the poverty screaming at all your senses on all sides everywhere you go every minute of the day.  I didn't find that to be the case with Kerala, which is far less populated reletively, India still being India.  In the south where we went I just didn't see rich people aside from us tourists but also didn't see too many people unable to eek out a meal and food for them and theirs.  What I found were people who were happy to see me, they smiled as their heads wiggle the way Indian heads inside India tend to do.  The Indian head wiggle is simultaneously polite and intensely pensive and joyful and natural.  Indian people seem to stop wiggling their heads when they leave the country, but inside India conversation just goes along with a side to side head wag which I found myself unconsciously doing fairly quickly.
The food was unreal, the out of the way food stalls and hole in the wall shops we found contained the greatest curry, briani, papadum, and hell I have no idea the names for most of the stuff we ate but man it was good.  We went to a great place that was an old concrete tower that had a circular walkway lined with tables snaking it's way up and up and up this column for breakfast one morning.  We went to another place that was a bar where my friends wife was the only woman, it was a dark room of men drinking beers, but only men.  And I don't think it was a gay joint, just a new culture norm we didn't know going in.

On the first day we went to a zoo, it was supposedly the zoo that inspired the one in life of pi.  It had large enclosures of animals, but was also in an overgrown forest, the canopy of green hiding cages and deep enclosures of birds, lizards, and monkeys.  We sat for a time to escape the heat and a parade of families came by and I found myself so overcome by the beauty of the people.  The woman wore their bright color saris and the men were all very dignified in business shirts and slacks.  The little girls were all decked out in jewels and makeup and bright dresses and big hats and looked like little princesses, all adults seemed to walk holding the hands of a little kid. Watching the whole endless procession I had one of those moments you have when you travel.  They are indescribable, they are brief minutes where your whole life falls away and you are left with the power of a moment that will forever change your perception of everything in some small, often unnoticeable yet profound way.  After you have enough moments like this you are fucked forever, you'll never be able to see a picture of something happening in another country as a remote and unreal thing ever again. You'll see the world with new lenses that will alter you once and for all.  And that is how travel changes you, and India seems to fester with these moments.  And if you haven't before you die get out there and see something and go someplace, see if you don't see what I mean.
I was looking at some flamingos and heard a massive rustling in the trees above, I looked up to see hundreds of bats the size of black cats with webby vulture wings hanging in the trees above and all around, had they been awake or dangerous we'd have been goners, luckily they were neither..  The hippos looked like muddy logs which floated and there was some kind of ferret looking varmint  running amok here and there.  As we walked a little girl came up to the wife of my friend and asked "Excuse me miss, but what is your good name?"  Cutest thing in the history of cute things that little Indian kids have ever done.  Little Indian kids are so cool.

We went to an area called the backwaters.  We were looking for a guest house mentioned in the lonely planet which we couldn't find and luckily ran into another place which was became one of my all time favorite guest houses.  This was a three story place with an open roof for parties.  The guys who ran the place were completely sweet and wonderful hip young guys.  I found myself smoking hash with them and the other tourists, the first time I have been high in maybe five or six years.  I remembered quickly why I had stopped, it becomes impossible for me to interact with other human beings in that condition.  Yet at the same time I felt so unbelievably blissfully chilled out and happy.  The dude I was hanging out with was a trekking guide who had just come from a spell in Nepal. He had recently quit his job because he hated it.  He told me a story of a particularly unhappy group of German tourists who became so angry that their seats for a traditional ceremony weren't good enough so they actually threw a phone at the poor guy.  We listened to music and I had forgotten how cool that is when you are high.  It was a wonderful night, but the next evening when the joint came around I passed on it.  I think once every five years or so is good for me, I am so old and boring now, oh to think how we mellow with age.

The thing to do in the backwater is to get a house boat which floats you all day and all night around in lakes and rivers.  We didn't feel like blowing the money and when I actually saw the house boats I was glad, they frankly looked a bit boring and maybe even a little opulent.  We opted instead for a small canoe which came with a guy in the back paddling.  Now I love to canoe, I have been doing it since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I recon I can canoe pretty good.  I was worried a bit about the dude paddling, I sort of wanted to do it myself.  So for the first hour or so I helped in the front, I really wanted to go in the back and steer so I pestered him all day.  This was a tiny man who spoke no English but managed to push this boat all around in the canals and massive open lakes.
Along the way little kids ran along the shore in the villages and called to us for pens.  "Pens mister, pens mister".  This was because they always tell people going to the North that when you are faced with armies and droves of child beggers it's best to give them something they can use like school supplies, little pens and pencils and so forth.  This is something they can use in their schools and in many cases if they are given money it is for an adult who will take it from them anyway.  Well in the backwater we have completely sufficient villages where food is grown and things are shared.  Money has crept it's ugly way into things here or there, sure but for the most part they are well outside that whole financial trip.  But look out happy villiage children because here come these boat loads of fat tourists from other planets who want to throw pens to the children like beads at a martigras float because that was the only way to keep sane in the face of massive child hunger in other areas, even though like I said these kids are fine.  And as a result you have perfectly healthy and in all other respects happy children taught to beg for pens, why?  Because they have found that they have little else to collect and trade with their friends so now they are all plastic pen hobbiests.  Aw things could be worse there.  I didn't have any pens and shrugged and the kids laughed and ran along side our boat waving anyway.  Bless them.
So at the end of the day the old man who was driving the boat let me take the wheel.  I drove the canoe straight down the canal like an arrow, and when we got to the open lake that was was so large it actually had waves I managed to keep us where we needed to go.  We passed a bunch of men on the shore who were yelling something at our guide, and I realized it was something along the lines of "Hey, are you taking a nap to let the tourist do the work?"  And our man waved them off with some curt reply which didn't stop their laughter.  At any rate I made it go and I made it go straight and true.  Once we landed and had lunch the old man lead us through beautiful marsh areas past a village of houses that were all built in the middle of a lake.  Some had bridges, others had a boat on the shore just to get to and from the front door.  Our man showed us his house, which was half finished or possibly blown out concrete block which was short a few walls.  Damn.
But I got on well with him, despite our language barriers.  In the end we were walking and he came and put his arm around me and I did the same.  Someone got the picture, so here it is.


Me and our canoe guide after a long day of paddling together.


I found myself all alone at one point, on a beach that locals call the secret beach.  The three of us had rented beach chairs under a patio umbrella.  The other two had announced that they were going to find a drink and I should stay and watch the stuff.  Three hours they were gone, and the sun tan lotion had run out, and I couldn't leave that area because if I had all our stuff would have walked on.  So I pulled out a small drum pad I had been carrying and a pair of sticks and started banging away.  I was practicing double stroke rolls, paradiddles, and swiss tripplets mostly, which happen to be a few of my all time favorite drum rudiments.  After a while two young boys who wanted to play with my drum pad.  I showed them how to paradiddle and they picked it up ok.  Then an old man came and stooped down and started playing Indian rhythms.  Later the bartender at a restaurant would show the same patterns to me and a man from Cuba who spoke no English as we drank into the night.
Then they all left me there.  A while later a whole posse of teen age boys showed up.  They bombarded me with questions and wanted to take turns playing my drum pad.  The old man who we had rented the chairs from came and started yelling at them in another language to split.  They went about 100 meters away where they all started playing in the ocean.  The old man turned to me and said "They bad, they just want alcohol, very bad."  And it went like that, every so often they would come and talk to me and then the old man would run across the beach with his fist shaking.

I found myself all alone at one point.  The other two were off someplace else which was ok.  I was in a mountain town that had rolling tea plantation hills.  One day the taxi's, or auto rickshaw drivers called a strike in protest of the government cutting down the forest.  This meant that all the places where people go to hike around would be fairly inaccessible for a day.  I was staying in an amazing villa that overlooked the whole valley almost all the way up the side of a mountain.  I hiked up the hill that morning, I guess I was sort of thinking a nice little walk after breakfast and before lunch would be just the thing.  Well at the top of the hill I could see that I was now on the edge of a plateau and that . I was on a ridge that went along a mountain range.  I was already so high up, but there was a hill that looked like the top so I started climbing that way.  Finally I got to the top and couldn't believe how high I was but also that there was an even higher peak just ahead.  So I hiked along an narrow path to the next peak only to realize there was yet another peak.  They were like stairs, each one higher and higher and the pathways getting more and more narrow and next to huge cliffs.  After a couple of hours I was so high up that on the peak I felt more comfortable sitting or laying down, the view from the top went on for hundreds of miles and it looked like a really, really far way down.  I was looking at one more peak, this one was really tall.  This one had a really narrow path that went over nothing.  This one scared the hell out of me.  I didn't have any water, I didn't know where this went, and I told myself I was getting tired so I turned around and went back down.
The way down I started thinking that a fear of heights, my fear of heights is completely baseless.  Fear is like pain in that it serves to alert us when something is wrong.  Being all the way up a mountain triggers that as our brains know that if we were to jump off the edge it would be danger.  But the path was a path and it didn't really look like there was real danger.  I was pretty sure I would be fine yet in my guts I had the fear.  I thought on that the following night.  The next morning I packed water and asked for some toast in a bag.  So armed I set out to go straight back to where I had gone the day before.
The second day had much less visibility.  Finally when I got up there it was so overcast that the top of the peak from the day before was burred in marshmallows.  I started for the highest one but just as I started a cloud cover rolled in and I couldn't see the trail in front of me.  This was a no go, so I turned around for the second time, this time really disappointed.  I found a mossy hill nearby where I laid under a tree and read a few chapters of a book I had.  Then I closed my eyes for a time and listened to the gentle with and buzz of the odd fly here or there.  Finally I opened my eyes to see a blue sky.  Interesting.  Back up the hill was clearing up, it was still cloudy but I could now see the other mountain starring me down.  So I was there on the next to hill thinking, waiting.  Finally I started in that direction.  As I did an entire trekking company of Scottish tourist came from the other direction with a guide.  They seemed confused as to how I got so far out there on my own.  I told them I was out here defeating a fear of heights, one of them congratulated me as they past.  Here it is, the narrow path with endless nothing on either side.  Here it is, the top of the world that I backed down from twice.  I put the song I wanna be 500 miles by the proclamers in honer of the Scottish trekkers I had passed and after listening to that song about six times I was up there.
On top an Eagle circled lower than where I was.  There was a cross and a path that lead further along the ridge.
Finally the path ended in a rocky cliff and the clouds started coming in again.  I had a really bad five minutes where I thought I was supposed to find a way down this impossibly steep cliff but then backtracked.  I found another trail leading into the forest which I followed.
I started seeing tree houses in the forest.  I was some sort of live up in the mountain treking resort, which had a restaurant and as it turned out a decent but massively overpriced chicken mesala.  The rain poured as I sat having my lunch, I waited for it to clear and was again off.

Now I found myself in lush green hills of tea plants all in rows.  I followed the path and it turned into a dirt road.  I kept on, and it started pouring down heavy rain.  Nothing for it but to keep on.  I must have hiked in the pouring rain about two hours maybe more.  Finally it ended with a proper paved road with yellow lines with long houses on either side.  I waited under a concrete structure for a while, lost, soaking wet, in India.  I finally went and asked a woman if she could tell me where I was and how to get back to my town.  Her whole family sat me down and brought me hot tea.  The man was an auto rickshaw driver who was off due to the strike.  I secretly wished at that point that I could have hired him to drive me back to the guesthouse but I didn't.  I would never ask anyone to compromise their integrity.
It turned out that I was two clicks from my guest house anyway, and furthermore (get this) I had just walked 14 kilometers.  That's right.  I climbed the mountains, explored the forests, braved the weather and in the end a dude gave me tea.  Turned out that I had inadvertently discovered the high intensity trekking route that people usually hire companies to organize for them.  I got back at about 4 in the afternoon asked the people at the guest house for hot water and fell asleep waiting to have a shower.

One more cool story
It was blazing hot and we were at a bus station that was absolute chaos.  The signs were all written in a different alphabet and crowds of people standing in the open air heat.  The buses were non air con traps with people standing by just waiting to jump into one the way a cheetah jumps on a weak zebra.  I felt a hand on my shoulder and spun around ready to deal with someone who wanted to hassel me.  Instead I saw a man who was grinning from ear to ear and waving happily at me, just glad to see me was all.  I smiled and waved back, he was a very nice man.

Amazing trip

fantastic food

wonderful people

Go to India.

The ghost of birthdays past

First a fast message to my blog believers.  The China site is down but I have all the blogs saved and will make a new site for those soon.  Soonish.  If anyone wants them in the meantime I am around.  The blog tech has got so easy even a numpty like me can use it so the same site from back in 06 doesn't make sense any more.  I will make a new one soon.  I also gotta mail something to my dad, can you guys remind me to do that?  I keep forgetting.


Thanks for the happy birthday wishes on all the various media hoosie whatsus thing ama hey heys that we are  into.  It was nice to hear from everyone and I will try to get back to all of you over the next couple of days, even if only a fast sentence about how much you mean to me or to attempt a catch up.  But thanks, I feel loved and that is a pretty good thing. You lovie dovies

So it happens, well if we are all lucky (Inshallah) it happens.  We go and turn 37.  One minute you are reading comics in math class in high school, then you look around and you are in college, then the twenties goes by in a blur and whamo here comes 37.  And with any luck 38 will come right behind it (Inshallah).

Aging is part of things and we can embrace it or ignore it or fight it or hate or celebrate. I am neither old nor young.  I am somewhere in between.  I find hangovers are worse than they used to be.  I find little grey hairs in my beard that were once brown.  But I am far from old.
My grandmother had me by 60 years.  When I was 17 she told me that she had had her time to be 17 and it was wonderful.  but now it was her time to be 77 and that was just as nice.  So now it's my time to be 37 and I am pretty happy about it.  I am in Hong Kong, I make pretty good money for the first time in my life, I live on a small island that is wonderful, I teach which is something I dig, and the food here is holy cow amazing.  I think if the 17 year old me saw me now he'd be as happy as I am.  Life is good (Hamdula).

I got to thinking back on the past few birthdays I have had.  They were pretty good ens (Hamdula) so I thought maybe I'd tell you guys about them.  If you think that sounds boring than go screw, who needs you?  Jerk.  If you think that is cool (Inshallah) than Hamdullah.

I guess I was in my early 20s in the early part of this century.  We used to always hang out at a bar called Trackside in Decatur which was where I used to have all my friends show up to get me drunk on the occasion of my birthday.  I hadn't the foggiest idea of how to drink then and would just gun drinks until I was in need of medical intervention.  One year I got up to sing something at the karaoke that was hosted by this metal head guy, I can't remember much about.  He said I could have a shot on his tab when I finished singing.  Later in the evening he found me barely able to articulate language and demanded to know how many drinks I had put on his tab.  None, they were all from dear friends who all felt the best way to prove their loyalty and friendship would be to replace my blood with Pabst Blue Ribbon and whiskey shots in willy nilly order and maybe a little gin thrown in, maybe just a dash of god knows what else.
I was there with my room mate Ryan who had been talking nonstop about a girl he met, he had brought her to the party that night.  Everyone was having a good time and pretty soon I was dead asleep.

I don't remember what happened next.

After a solid week of not speaking to me Ryan finally told me the story.  I had fallen asleep holding a poster tube containing a poster for the film Blade Runner that someone had given me.  Ryan was in mid-asking this young lady out after finally gathering the courage.  Suddenly a very passed out guy on the other side of the table woke up and smacked the young lady in the head with a poster tube and explained that the skin head at the other end of the bar was someone he knew in Boy scouts when he was a kid and that the skin head was a total dick.  The skin head, I can only assume and luckily I would add didn't hear any of this.  Then this drunk asshole passes right back out and doesn't understand why his room mate is giving the cold shoulder for the rest of the week.

I am embarrassed to tell that story, it was a younger and drunker me, and I still have no memory of it happening except in my mind I can see a very shocked looking expression of both these people when it happened.
Good news.
My room mate went on to marry that girl.  I stood in their wedding, when I first came back from China they met me at the airport and helped me to surprise my parents.  And even though I ruined their first special moment with an act of incoherent nonsensical violence they have remained my friend and they love me and I love them.  Amy is among the most loyal of readers of the mess we like to call this blog.  Amy and Ryan have progeny now, and little Joseph is a hilarious little scallywag who seems to possess all the best of both these amazing people.  And maybe if I hadn't hit Amy with the poster tube the universe would have vibrated in a different circle and maybe all these wonderful things wouldn't have happened.  Maybe we would have instead all been eaten by werewolves or drafted into some sort of army for some reason.  Maybe.  Either way I still don't remember hitting Amy in the head with a poster tube on my birthday when I was young and drunk.
So that was one birthday.

here is another:

It wasn't my idea to have a karaoke birthday party when I turned 36.  It was something my friends Andrew and Zac (Zac's an ass) cooked up to coincide with Danni's going away do.  I wanted to go to a pub called, well now I can't remember.  I just asked Nigel who is here with me now, he can't remember the name of that dive either.  But it was the one that was just past Sutos in Surabaya.  I just wanted my friends to show up there and have a pint or three and that was the plan.  But I have no particular problem with Karaoke so I went along with it.  My only caveat was that there should be a bar too so people that didn't want to do the singing could hang out and do the drinking.  They wound up booking this massive room which soon became a massive smoke filled room and I was so happy that so many people came.  Buck and I sang Free Bird as I recall.  The place had a very limited selection of stuff and people got up and belted away.  There was a pool table too and all the girls who worked at the front reception desk at work were there, Devi, Wenny, Dessi, Holi and they gave me a little cake.  I can't remember much more about it now aside from I had a great time and Dennis and Gary and I probably wound up talking about rock n roll until those two guitar perverts started having their daily droolie mouthed guitar geek out.  That's what I remember.  Craig and Cecila were there too.  Craig was a wonderful guy who we lost not too long ago.  I always suspected he stole my chin beard but wore it much better than I did.  He was a nice guy, always smiling, always ready to hold his end of a conversation and even though I didn't know him that well I miss him and am sad for his passing.

All I remember from the year before was that we had it at my house and someone turned off the soul music I was playing and put on some godawful shit and I got sore.  I am a bit ashamed that a night with all my great friends on the occasion of celebrating my birth and that's all I remember.  I also think it was a silly reason to get sore.  But I am older now, I am older after all.  (Humdullah)

Last year I was on an internship in Morocco.  I was in a small city called Kenitra which was near Rabat and had a cafe almost every other shop front filled with men sipping mint tea and talking about the football.  The meals were tagines that came with fresh baked breads and the colors and the smiles and the smells and the sounds were like some kind of potent water that soaked into you and left you feeling alive.
It was me and Latoya from our school, our teaching English as a second language grad school.  Erica was with us, she had been in our program last year and also interned in Kenitra and had come back to stay.  Her boyfriend Hassan was a local former basketball legend and would be stopped in the street by absolutely everyone everywhere just to chat.  The conversation translated from Arabic would be
How is your family?
My family is good.
Hamdullah
Hamdullah
I hope you will be well in the future
inshallah
inshallah
then after a few more fast pleasantries they'd part ways and the next people would come everyone was once again smiling and greeting.

This was a very Muslim place.  Indonesia was a very Muslim place,( well where I was in Surabaya was anyway) and there there were enough expats that certain places existed where we could go and have a few beers, or in many cases too many and that was allowed and fine and ok.  We didn't drink near a mosque, well a few of us did but most of us didn't.  I was guilty of things like that before I learned better but I learned fast and became very aware and careful not to offend.
Kenitra was different.  The bars there were filled with prostitutes and considered very bad places to go into or be.  A good Muslim would never go near such a place, and I was fine with exploring other parts of the culture during my brief time in Morocco.
It was announced to me out of the blue that Hassan and his friends had spoken and agreed that for my birthday we could all sit outside, only on the outside of a bar and I could enjoy a beer.  This was no small deal, this was a major concession.  It was something that I would have never asked for, something I would have been fine with not happening.  I was in Morocco after all, I was a guest in the country and furthermore I didn't need to have a beer in order to be happy.  I was very happy.
When they offered to do this for me I saw that it was a genuine gesture from friends that were bending to do something they thought would make me happy.
When we got there the barman came out and told us we couldn't have a beer outside on the street, it wasn't something people did.  I said hey it's ok guys we go somewhere else, we do something else.  But no, they all agreed to go inside the bar.  I don't think they had ever been in one and for them to agree to do that, just to make me happy.  It was a gesture that I will always remember.  It was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me on my birthday.  I had one beer and we left, they were laughing gleefully the entire time.

I have just had a couple of weeks off for Chinese new year.  My old buddy Nigel is here and it has been the coolest (Hamdullah).  He came here because he was trying to teach in China and the whole visa dealings with China and Indonesia   He was going to teach in China and now things didn't work out so well so he is heading back to England, I would say given the situation for the best, he thinks so too.  But that's his story to tell not mine.  I just asked him if it's cool to talk about, he says he has no secrets.

It has been a great few weeks, we went hiking, we ate at every amazing dumpling house I know about, he explored, we laughed, we sang.  He's a great guy to have around and now that he is leaving in a couple of days I am a bit bummed he can't stay longer, he is a great couch surfer that way.

Yesterday was my birthday and I thought since Nigel is leaving soon we'd do some must do stuff in Hong Kong.  We took the MTR subway all the way out to Shatin, which is way the hell up and gone in the New Territories.  We had to change train lines four times, the humanity that packs into those things is incredible.  The MTR offers a seemingly endless march of hundreds of thousands shoulder to shoulder all eyes fixed on tiny glowing and beeping boxes in their hands.  It was about an hour or so, then we finally got to the Hong Kong heritage museum which housed the Bruce Lee exhibit.

I have been once before, and was just as awed and inspired this time around.  All of Bruce's philosophies are on display in hand written journal entries into now ancient scraps of paper.  Diagrams of martial arts defenses.  The entire fight scene against Kareem Abdul Jabar in stick figures including notes on moves and camera angles all written out by the dragon himself.  The yellow jumpsuit, the video stories, the photos, the memorabilia.  They have a report card from when he was in school, he got a zero in arithmetic.  He was failing chemistry and the only class he was doing well in was bible history.  Both times I have been there crowds of shocked elderly Hong Kongers huddle around this and tut tut.  They would all literally murder their children if they were to ever present anything close to these grades.  An old man leaned into me "He get zero in math."  His eyebrows raised in disapproving disbelief his jaw hanging open.  I don't even know the guy.
And did you know Bruce Lee was super into dancing the cha cha?  He was amazing at it.  Be water my friend.

Nigel and I went to an area called Mong Kok.  See, Nigel used to live in mainland like me and he therefor needs hotpot every few years for the rest of his life.  That is the deal, you need dumplings and you need that spicy hotpot or you just dry up and that is that.

Hotpot was the first thing I tasted on my first day in China, at the time I was terrified of it but it has come to be part of me.  Take a pot and put the burner on a table.  Get a good spicy Sichuan soup broth going and let it bubble.  Then they start bringing you plates of thin sliced beef, chicken, pork, fish.  They start bringing tofu by the massive bowl, dried fish, we fish, clams, breads.  Each thing they bring you put a piece in and watch it cook, as it does so it alters the flavor of the soup.  You know how a camp fire brings people together?  Hotpot is like that, all eyes focused on the bubbling dripping stew.  All are eating and cooking together at the same time.  It is the most communal food experience.
  So we braved the MTR again through the cattle march of people and we finally got to an outside market.  We kept seeing really cool places to eat but no hotpot.  We were also seeing loads of tiki tacki crap on offer to tourists.  We passed a German tourist yelling at a hawker because the hawker didn't want him taking pictures of his stall.  The German was causing a scene, Nigel and I rolled our eyes.  Cool expats hate those kinds of tourists, we see them all the damn time too.  Don't be that kind of tourist.
Finally I went into a Chinese medicine and herbalists shop.  I tried to ask for directions to a good hotpot place, he didn't understand so I asked him in a Cantonese Mandarin hodge podge but he got what I was saying.  He directed us to a place that turned out to be a chain.  We contacted more friends to tell them where we were, and while waiting Nigel found a really good out of the way hot pot place.  My friends from work all came, and because Namu is vegetarian, or the kind of vegetarian that eats fish we got two hotpots.  It was amazing, and we must have been eating and drinking beer for three hours straight.

Next, we all bee lined to Wan Chai where we had drinks in a revolving restaurant on top of a high rise over looking the entire Hong Kong sky line.  The lounge singer in the corner sang happy birthday for me and it was just perfect.  I was on the last ferry home smiling and nowhere near in need of medical intervention having a nice conversation with my mate Nigel.  I have grown.


May we all have a hundred more birthdays and may they all be a bit better each year.  May we all smile about and never regret our pasts.  May we never fear but look forward to our futures with the anticipation of a child waking up on Christmas day.  May we come to know ourselves and those around us, what we mean to them and what they mean to us.  May we live every single moment of our life like it is the most amazing moment so far.  If a bird is singing dig it, don't just keep walking.  If someone says something funny don't just laugh but laugh your fool head off, it's good for you.  May we all find ways to make the people we care about know we care like my friends in Morocco did.  May we all learn to dance the Cha cha like Bruce Lee.  May we all live as well and as happily as we can until we drop dead.  Inshallah.

One day I was 17, then I was 27 and now I am 37.  One day I will 47, 57, and 87 Inshallah.  I can't wait, can you?