Moonbase

3:45 at Catharsis.

I’ll be scanning privacy code 23, and otherwise have my radio on 13/23, GMRS3/23 (17/23), GMRS5/23 (19/23).

Dutch and bicycles: they go together like patats* and pindasaus**. Futen*** and canals****.

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Last August, I got back from a couple months in Greece and Turkey and hit a hospital bed with acute septicemic typhoid. A spinal tap and a couple months of recuperation later, I left to go live in the Netherlands for six months, then spent a few more months travelling through Europe and the Balkans.

By the time we got back to the States, I’d spent something like twelve of sixteen months out of the country. Finally able to get Chinese food, I found this in a fortune cookie shortly after our return:

It’s eerie, isn’t it? How uncannily accurate those fortune tellers are.

In which the author learns to love the little fish.

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"Would you like to live in a monument? It is on a list of monuments. Antique." I had visions of tour buses outside our door and tourists filing through our living room. Perhaps if we charged them each a euro, we could pay our rent.

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Some photos of my recent trip to Greece and Turkey have been sorted and uploaded.

I know that every joke about the Turkish lira has been made already, but it deserves mention. The exchange rate is currently about 1,450,000 to the US dollar; a loaf of bread costs about 250,000 and a bottle of beer, 2,000,000. It brings a smile to my face to pay a million of anything for a half kilo of nectarines.

Inflation is, obviously, mad. Turks don’t take out loans to buy houses - or if they do, they get five year mortgages. I sagaciously take money out every few days instead of getting a wad of cash. I was very proud of myself until I mentioned this to a Turkish man I met and he pointed out that, actually, the dollar was slipping against the lira and I was better served by having my money in lira. “I had all my money in American banks. If I had kept it in Turkey, I would have made billions.”

Your image of a rug merchant is probably from 1001 Arabian Nights, where every third night Scherezade told of some scheming rug merchant cheating his brothers out of an inheritance, tricking a beggar, or trying to cheat the sultan who was dressed as a pauper and inspecting his realm. The caricature has been modernized as the greasy mobster whose rug store exists solely to give the Family something in which to wrap inconvenient bodies. I can state that these are entirely reasonable examples of the character of the rug merchant.

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The Cyclades (keek-la-dees) fill up the Aegean sea south and east of Greece. This is where all the famous islands are located: sun-worshipper's heaven Mykonos, nonstop-party Ios, the caldera of Santorini. It's where the images you have of Greece come from: white buildings, blue doors, magenta bougainvillea and always the blue blue Aegean.

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In Olympia I visited the ruins of the original Olympic games. I arrived by 8am to avoid the heat and tourists, but by the time I had walked through the remains of the temple where atheletes were ritually greeted by priests and into the pillared gymnasium where they grappled the sun was doing its Mediterranean duty. The incessant whine of thousands of cicadas in the olive trees fused into a single hypnotic note, the heat made audible. I sweated and slipped from one thin Doric shadow to the next.

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I’ve never seen a chain-link fence as amusing at the one that surrounds Homer’s “wall-girt Tiryns”. I don’t think the Myceneans would find it as funny—their 3500 year old temple to paranoia and xenophobia, a fortress on the eastern side of the Pelopennese, with its 10 meter thick walls thoughtfully protected by a delicate necklace of 1.5m chain-link.

The stones at Tiryns are so big (some at 14 tons) that Herodotus believed they must have been set in place by Cronos, the father of the giants deposed by the Greek gods. The chain link seems disingenuous.

The visitor today gets to walk up the uninspiring back side (entirely devoid of explanation or history) to the top of the fortress, where crumbling knee-high piles of stone that appear at least twenty years old sketch out crude homes. There’s a better view of the 25m tall walls from the bus that goes by between Nafplio and Argos. ‘Hypotenuse’, ‘erotic’, ‘isoceles’, ‘democracy’—all Greek words. So is ‘anticlimax’.

The 5km walk back to Nafplio took about forty minutes and three liters of water.

A few images from Greece — Athens and Nafplio. Visit the gallery for more.

"Excuse me, do you have the time?" This after a burst of Greek which was probably the same question. This should have been my first tip off - I have never before or since seen a Greek look at a watch, let alone ask a stranger for the time.

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A road trip through Mendocino and up the Avenue of the Giants.

"Here, add the vinegar, it is better."

I wasn't quite sure how adding vinegar to my breakfast of cow intestine, sour cream, and goat milk soup was going to improve it. Then again, I figured that if I was going to trust this man to lead me up Caraiman, a mountain in the Carpathians in central Romania, I may as well trust him; I was certainly outside my culinary hometown.

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The first few slides from my Israel trip.

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Despite my political leanings, I was tempted to consider pushing one or two Israelis into the sea myself, and this was before I was even over the Mediterranean.

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Joshua Tree is a desert in southern California where all the trees across the world that go mad are put to keep them from hurting anyone.

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I was in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago on a work trip and stopped in at the Glitter Gulch to quench my thirst.

Now, The Glitter Gulch isn't the best place to buy a drink. My glass of milk cost me $8.75. But most of the patrons aren't there for the drinks.

The business of a tittie bar is formulaic, trite, and to my limited experience . . .

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I didn’t shoot much in Israel. It was difficult; the tension was palpable and I was reluctant to draw even more attention by pulling out a very expensive camera. This has taught me a few key lessons about travel photography - but I digress.

This is my favorite of the shots. The little boy is one of a handful of Arab kids terrorizing the streets on their bicycles or scooters, bombing down the alleyways, narrowly missing pedestrians, hollering, and in general being children. I shot this photo of an Arab boy looking into a blocked-off Jewish street as he blurs by. I like the minimal color and the transitory feel to the image of the boy.

When I was flying back out of Tel Aviv, I again got interrogated and tapped for special inspection in the back room. While the El Al gnomes (much more friendly and, truth, attractive gnomes than the previous) were tearing apart my bag and the bag I was carrying back for Nicole, one of the senior agents was asking me about items in my luggage (they were much more interested in Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem than in the souvenir dagger with a 12” blade). At one point, he hefted a cubit-long cylindrical device trailing a power cord.

“And what is this?”

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I somehow managed to drink more than four liters of water. Some time around four, a single cool thought got through my sweaty skull to my molten brain (now approximately four times the size of my head and growing): "I must have some sort of fever or something."

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