Travel Ghosts

I've always wondered why a more awesome alternate-me hasn't ever managed to beat out the less awesome version. Actually I've always wondered whether that isn't in fact what happens constantly... that the people that you see in front of you actually are the fittest of all possible realities...

https://xkcd.com/1580/

...and isn't that a terrifying thought?

Watch the toilet (Chengdu, China)

Current squatty potty sign from 2013

You don’t really know a place until you’ve met the toilets.*   Toilets are like people, there are good ones, and bad ones; the calm, reliable sort, and the kind that blow up when you feed them a bunch of BS; and some of them… well, some of them are a little different.

Unlike people however, when it comes to toilets there are times when you can’t afford to be a snob. You don’t care where that toilet’s from or who his mother is. Gold-tone handles and marble stalls would be nice, but you’re not going to look down on that giant pit in the ground either. No, seriously, don’t look down. If you fall in, I’m not getting you out.

Along with death and hemorrhoids it’s a great leveler.  Sooner or later (probably sooner), if you travel anyplace remotely interesting you are going to become uncomfortably familiar with the local plumbing, or lack thereof. In some ways, it’s easier when you’re camping (really camping, not being a pansy in an RV. Like Thoreau). What better way to commune with nature than to squat with a chill Appalachian breeze airing your southern regions, the gentle tickle of branches and  the rattlesnake rustling of the leaves in your ear? That is if you brought enough biodegradable toilet paper. Otherwise it could get a mite stressful.

Shit happens. It’s just sometimes you don’t expect it to happen.  Not having ten pence on you for a pay toilet which is ten kilometers away from an ATM can be a nasty surprise. Obviously not a tragedy, but getting arrested for panhandling or public exposure can be an unpleasant way to spend your vacation.

Of course most people have some sort of story about being stuck in a foreign country without their universal translator, trying to shout “Dónde está el baño!” over the sirens to the man running away from them with the stolen purse only to realize — once they clear their heads and their colons —  that they’re in Portugal.

Forget this for a minute though. Pretend you’ve never traveled. Furthermore your character grew up in the Midwest and the most exotic place she’s ever been to is Niagara Falls. For the last few years she’s lived in Ingleton, population one hundred and fifty.  She hasn’t even been camping. She’s also just had her second child. She and her husband arrive in 1995 China.

Just to be clear she does not arrive in tourist friendly, Hong Kong-style China. No. That would be too easy. That is not the point. Your non-fictional character arrives in Chengdu. Chengdu, the gateway to Tibet. Chengdu of the coal fires. Chendgu, where westerners are still as rare as a kosher renminbi note.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. She is not sent there by Glinda the good witch, or even her non-fictional approximation, Southwest Airlines. She takes a twenty hour China Air flight with a hundred plus other people. Three out of four toilets are clogged, and that’s only because her fearlessly altruistic husband fixed one of them. Everyone smokes. She has two children and one of them has a tendency to put other people’s shoes in his mouth. By the time they get to Beijing everyone is inexplicably ill.

After her brilliant experience with the airplane bathrooms, the barely toilet-trained toddler is eagerly looking forward to sampling more of what Chinese plumbing has to offer.  Beijing’s airport is happy to oblige; enter the ‘squatty potty.’  Now I know what you’re going to say: squatting is biologically sound, and really, much better for you than a hemorrhoid-inducing “throne.”  Be that as it may, coming into a huge metropolitan airport and having to unexpectedly rough it like you’re boyscouting in the Smokies compounds your culture-shock. The tiny, reptilian part of your brain keeps thinking “they’ve even screwed up the goram bathrooms.”  Most of your energies are focused on making sure your three year old jitterbug doesn’t fall in. There are a few squares of something almost but not entirely quite unlike toilet paper.

The next time of course there is no toilet paper. You are in Chengdu.  Your hosts (not mentioned here because it will require a long and tedious explanation about why you were in China in the first place) are chomping at the bit to give you a tour. However, everyone — translation: your husband  — has spent the last few weeks cleaning out the Mother Hubbard-sized apartment. It is not made to comfortably accommodate corn-fed midwesterners. Because of this and the terrifying thought of a bus ride with your vomiting children, for some reason you pass on a trip to see the Leshan Buddha.

They are not to be dissuaded and plan a day-trip to the DuJianYan River Irrigation Works, where they cheerfully point out the Chinese dam that has been in  continuous use for the last millennium, and contrast it with the fifty year old Russian dam that never worked. You see a few temples, wave at peasants and smile as if you are a gracious tourist.

Lunch features the usual delicious fare, plus some interesting walnut milk. Your stomach starts to rumble. In Ingleton this is fine, you probably just ate beans or something, but after only a few weeks in China you are now sufficiently paranoid to not trust liquid that you haven’t seen come to a rolling boil with your own two eyes. You try to make a preemptive visit to the restaurant’s bathroom (two-watt light bulb, walls ‘slick with ick’ and a bar of soap that looks like it’ll do more harm than good). Then your Weiban (foreign affairs officer) takes you down the mountain, on a set of stairs that looksdecorative.  Six inches wide, a foot deep.  Surely such steep, slender, slippery stairs could only have been constructed for aesthetic purposes. Surely.

There are no railings. Not that you could have held onto them while using both arms to clutch your wheezing infant to you. (In a sling of course, being an idiot doesn’t necessarily make one a bad mother.) The husband is helping the toddler, who has already managed to smash her face in an up close and personal encounter with Chinese architecture. Did I mention that there were no railings?

By the time they get to the bottom of the hill you’re certainly thankful to be alive, but there are more pressing issues. You are also somewhat concerned because your past interactions with Chinese bureaucrats have led you to believe that all requests have to be made via a discreet chat about the your problem with the official’s grandmother’s sister.

But, you tell the Weiban that you have to find a bathroom immediately. Fortunately your fears are wrong (if not entirely unfounded) and he points the way. You sprint to the bathroom, only to find your way blocked by a tiny woman with a fistful o’ Renminbi (actually, fēn, the pennies). Your character checks her pockets to find… Kleenex. This lady might as well be Leonidas and the three hundred. You run back to the Weiban  (and remember you missed most of your high school PE classes due to a recurring bout of mono) and he returns, waving you through with his open wallet.

The bathroom consists of a long trench separated by stalls, it’s well-lit and relatively clean. You skip toward the end and dutifully squat. Your form is darn near perfect for a westerner if you do say so yourself. Then you realize that there are no doors on the stall. You look up to see around two dozen women and children staring through the opening.

This is obviously not the ideal way in which to meet the locals, but you wave and say Hi! in your cheeriest voice, because hey, what else can you do? You continue to squat. They continue to watch.  You’re kind of tied down and they’re enjoying the show,  but hey at least you have Kleenex. You have a feeling that trying to communicate a need for toilet paper with your limited Sichuanhua vocabulary could irreparably damage Chinese-American relations.

..but eventually, every mortifying, horrible experience has to come to an end. You rejoin the group having learned that carrying a few fēn with you is far more essential than the phrase  “Zai nar tze swo?” since that usually only works if someone takes you by the hand and leads you there.  You fall in love with Immodium and live happily ever after.

Obviously, life goes on. You see the city since you’re there, you become acquainted with the indigenous bacteria (giardia being a local favorite) and click your chopsticks together helplessly until a kind waitress takes pity on you and brings you a fork. Eventually you’re comfortable enough that your family can visit the local park along with a couple of friends. The park consist of great , towering stands of deep green bamboo. Everyone passes on getting an ear cleaning with tools that look like they were made for removing plaque.

Lest we forget, in this area of China at this time, children do not wear diapers for the most part, but instead wear split pants. Their parents simply hold them over the nearest sewer and let them get it over with. For those of you that did not take introductory economics the low demand for disposable diapers means that people who do use disposable diapers pay a shitload of money ( When not on family outings you use cloth diapers.)

Like all infants your youngling seems to be perpetually in need of a diaper change. You spot some clean tables near the outdoor tea house. Clean tables. Try not to wet yourself. That’s kind of counterproductive. And more than a little ironic. So you put out your changing mat on this clean! table and go through the motions. Of course a large crowd gathers to watch you do this.

It’s moments like these that define you. At that instant you know you will never be able to look at a Koala Care changing station again without taking a solemn moment of silence. It’s natural of course; you and your family are all very white, you have two children, because as foreigners the one-child policy clearly does not apply to you, and you have curly hair. At least you’re not a red head. Then there’s no way to blend in. Plus, people on the bus are always be trying to take some.  (True story.) However, recognizing this doesn’t make it any less difficult and your blonde friend that happens to be with you, who is the very antithesis of shy, simply can’t stand it anymore

She sticks out her hand and traverses the crowd shouting “Yi Kwai! Yi Kwai!” (one buck!) No one is exactly sure how to respond to this. Since it no longer appears to be free entertainment most of them leave. But some of them follow you around as you take your son’s neatly wrapped gift in search of a trash can. When you finally find one it is naturally overflowing.  Their eyes follow you as you carefully place it on top of the mound of junk.

I know a lot of this doubtless sounds very chauvinistic and intolerant of cultural differences. ..and yes it is odd that sometimes four star hotels didn’t have toilet paper. It’s strange to someone who grew up in a different way. But you can have pretty weird stuff happen anywhere.

There was, and certainly is, a lot more to China than squatty potties and soot. There were wonderful students, phantom doughnut shops (there on the corner one day and never seen again),  epic searches for “efficacious disinfetant [sic]” (bleach), the sound of pedicabs, bicycles and more bicycles, giant red panda balloons, Mongolian hot pot, Chinese not-cinammon buns (red bean paste, apparently if it looked like the real thing that was good enough), the abundance of hua jao(hot), and la jao peppers  (with seeds so hot that it feels as if your esophagus is being lovingly flayed with a half-tempered katana) and always, ceaselessly, never-endingly boiling water. 

[Edit: I have been informed that "it's actually the la jao that burns like a katana... makes your tongue go numb and has a funky taste like sticking a battery on your tongue. The paragraph has been corrected accordingly.]

Chengdu was so much more than that though, and definitely a lot more than a series of toilets.

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* If you think is just a hook put there for the shock value of bathroom humor, well… it’s not.  If you’re not into scatology you’d probably better skip this post.

Lisbon Cubed

Lisboa is as nice a town in Iberia as you’d care to meet, but just like the only thing you remember about that brilliant topologist who donates kidneys in his spare time is how he clogged your toilet with spent Indian food, there’s only one thing I’m going remember about Lisboa:

You see, I was not traveling alone.  I was with my mother and grandmother, so the first thing we have to do is go for a tour of the local bathrooms. Because, you know, there are no lavatories in America and we’ve only recently invented fire. That’s ok though, honest, because I don’t feel thoroughly acquainted with a place until I have to use the toilets.1

So we waddle past Praça do Município (city hall), down the Rua da Prata (Portuguese for ‘giant tourist trap’) and turn off at the first likely looking café:

Cafe S. Nicolau, Lisbon, Portuga

Like polite people we buy some coffee. At least I think it was coffee. They called it coffee, that was the important thing. So we’ve got the coffee and are now customers in word and deed. We go downstairs to use the toilets near the stockroom. Now, truthfully lower level bathrooms aren’t really unusual in Europe; the fact that it feels like a set from  Young Frankenstein can’t be helped.

After assembling downstairs — chaining ourselves together with a rope, because none of us have money, phones or the slightest ability to return to the place we’re staying at if we get separated– we find the bathrooms. My mom and I let my pint-sized grandmother go first because her bladder to height ratio is the largest.  So I’m there in this little hall, chatting with my mom and we start hearing these strange noises. It sounds like a constipated motorcycle engine. There’s kind of a rhythm to it. Our first thought is that someone in one of the two bathrooms is.. how shall we put it… suffering from some sort of internal instability?

It gets louder. Much louder. I hear a crash from the stockroom. A dish breaks. We then realize the source of the noise is not one, but two people. A minute later the stockroom door opens, a rosy-cheeked, slightly out of breath portuguese gal walks out, trying to avoid eye contact with the four people now waiting for the toilets. For the record it is very difficult to grind against four individuals in a tiny hall without looking at them. A short while later another employee walks out. He looks to be in similarly fine health. By the time my grandmother comes out, my mom and I both look like we’re having seizures we’re laughing so hard. Unfortunately, my mother and I both lose our minds in the gutter so often we’ve taken to leaving them there, and my grandmother thought we were making it all up.

Pastel De Nata

So we get upstairs, back to the un-coffee, funny tartlet portuguese pastries and of course thevery annoyed proprietor. We talked to some customers upstairs and it turns out they heard too and it wasn’t just us. The owner’s calling the employees various names some in english for the sake of the patrons, others in portuguese, which, based on the tone he was using, I think I’m glad I didn’t understand.

As you can imagine, we do not stay to finish our coffee. This was my introduction to the fair city of Lisboa.

Big Clock

After our crash course on portuguese culture, we escaped various vendors, tourists and street musicians (pics here), stared at the big clock and generally enjoyed the city. Lisboa is kind of like an old supermodel; you know she’s maybe seen better days, but she’s still light years ahead of your average person shopping at Walmart. There’s still a lot of marble,which is as clean as five hundred year old marble can be reasonably expected to be, and the architecture is cool. ( Note: I’m an architecture nerd, my computer is full of pictures of spandrels and artistic manhole covers and shots of ‘exotic’ paving materials. I did not have time to geek out when I was there, which is fortunate for.. well.. pretty much everyone in the universe).

We actually did stop to see Praça do Município (aka City Hall) with its cute little Portuguese flag and a square or two and some other stuff, and  then caught a tram to see the Explorer’s Monument ( Padrão dos Descobrimentos pictures).  After London’s fantastic Tube, Lisboa’s public transit system requires some adjustment. It’s actually fine, once you actually y’know find the stop. For someone coming from a culture where everything is over-communicated and writ large, in technicolor, it just takes a bit of time to adjust to the teeny tiny signs, which are almost always in portuguese… and tourist information/post office, which is only open three days a week (yes I am being hyperbolic, and no I’m not sorry). Which is fine, I don’t feel entitled or anything, I come here, I don’t know the language and all I want to do is spend money on the “natives”. If they don’t want to help that’s fine with me.

Jerónimos Monastery

The best touristy thing we did was easily the Jerónimos Monastery. It really is beautiful, it’s a great example of Manueline architecture  and it’s important in Portuguese history or something like that.  It’s like one of these little restaurants that has some sort of   “Vasco de Gama ate here” placard hanging up near the entrance.

The history was probably fascinating, but I wouldn’t know: all the signs were in Portuguese.

Mosteiro dos Jerónimos

All kidding aside, it’s a lovely city, it’s got friendly people, they’re not into obnoxious siestas and it’s on one of the most gorgeous stretches of ocean I’ve ever seen. I just wish I could pronounce the names of the streets.

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1.You can tell a lot about a cultured from their toilets. If you want Cyndi to write a post about every funny bathroom story she has, beg her in the comments.

And: If the name of this post sounds familiar, it’s because I stole it from a great short story by William Tenn, from this book.

Louisiana IS foriegn country

As anyone from either coast will tell you, New York resembles San Francisco about as much as I resemble Barack Obama, which is to say: not at all. And if you think the West and East coasts are absolute opposites, then you haven’t been to Texas. Texas has created its own spacetime vortex in an effort to coexist with the rest of the United States (and they’re still working out some bugs.) One reason for all this is because the US is so freakishly huge. Another is that we’re just ornery and conflicted.

Garlic capital of the world, in case you didn’t see the sign

I have to admit though, we generally have more in common than we think. However, for all our similarities (e.g. we usually speak english, we accept the Federal government — in theory, and we think Laos is somewhere in South America), it’s quite possible to be a well-travelled citizen and yet have no idea what goes on in the next state. Yeah, you can drink municipal tap water in your home state, but it tastes like crawdads in Louisiana. The dialect of American English that Bostonians speak sounds a little bit like Gaelic. Use “hella” in Florida and everyone looks at you like you’re riding a yak through the city streets. Culture shock abounds, and you don’t even need a passport.

A flaming fish at McIhenny’s Tabasco Factory on Avery Island. Because.. like.. who doesn’t love a flaming fish?

On the other hand, it means if you want to meet the natives you don’t actually have to have a blind date with your friendly neighborhood TSA officer. True, maybe you don’t care about a palace made out of corn or the world’s biggest ball of twine, but we’ve got a lot of space here, and we might as well use it.

After a while you’ll get used to the natives, you’ll start to grok the peculiarities of Dixie, acquire a taste for the oddities of California. ..and maybe just maybe, you won’t look like a tourist (though that does require not wearing your crappiest sweaters and a fanny pack).

The City of Neon Lights, Las Vegas Overview

It should say something about me that I was actually more excited to see the Hoover Dam than Las Vegas. I don’t know what.. but it should say something.

The best way to get to Las Vegas is by plane. If you come by car — which, if you’re coming in from the east, requires driving through hundreds of miles of gritty, sunburnt desert — you’ll be ready to put up with anything as long as it’s in the shady air conditioning. And you will, believe me, you will. Not that I speak from personal experience of course.

I’ve been to Las Vegas twice now. The first time as a little kid, more than a decade ago when Las Vegas was trying to appear family friendly. There were dolphins to pet, lion cubs to ogle, klingons to scare the crap out of you and medieval jousts to keep the more bloodthirsty of us occupied. I’m sure of course, that I was unaware of a lot of things that were going on in the Las Vegas of 2000  that eight year olds should be unaware of. Occasionally I saw a few things I probably shouldn’t have, but I don’t think was scarred for life. At least I wasn’t, and then I went back. The center of the Las Vegas Strip still looks pretty much the same:

Around a decade after my first encounter with the rhinestone in Nevada’s crown, I drove through the Chihuahuan and Mojave deserts. Very different.  I was traveling with my family and since we were going through we decided to see Las Vegas, basically just because it was there.

In hindsight, Circus Circus was nowhere near as cool as it seemed when I was nine or eight. Figures. I’m not really sure what part of Las Vegas appeals to people in my demographic (i.e mousy little white girls) But.. for a prude who doesn’t gamble –and wasn’t even able to legally drink, don’t get me started on that — Las Vegas is  a garish, tastelessly flashy, desert hell. This is not to say that it wasn’t fascinating. It’s cool to see how companies can manage to efficiently extract money from people relatively painlessly. It’s also pretty interesting to try to figure out what allows Las Vegas, a city with no obvious natural resources and little else going for it, to continue existing.

Las Vegas begins to make sense when you realize that pretty much everything exists in its local form to make money. Of course this is a statement so obvious that it’s stupid, but it’s one that is strangely difficult to keep in mind.  No one who is trying to sell you something wants you to think about how much you’re actually spending. There are all sorts of little things that make Las Vegas seem different. The tiny, relatively uncomfortable rooms  are designed to encourage you to be out gambling or.. whatever. There’s the omnipresent cheap food. The food is weird at first, especially since you’re out in the desert and everything has to travel into the city, but  it makes perfect sense because the large profits from gambling essentially subsidize the  in-casino restaurants; meals are their loss leader. Maybe if you’re not concerned about how much it costs to eat out, you might spend more gambling, but I have no way to verify this.

In short: Las Vegas is pure tourist trap, it’s what every little charming New England village and quaintly dilapidated town in the Florida keys is afraid of becoming. Well plus some lights, and hookers, and traffic. People go there to pig out, ogle and generally make fools of themselves. This is actually pretty intelligent; the nice thing about traveling is that if you act like a complete and utter idiot it is no big deal, because you’re most likely never going to see anyone again. And if you do, you can pretend you forgot. Not that I know any of this from personal experience either.

So we went to all the really  famous places:

We unanimously decided to go to the Rio (pictures here.) Mostly because it was kinda out of the way. Also, to put it kindly, if not too eloquently, we expected it to be a bust. The Rio is probably designed with a younger, more active crowd in mind. If you liked Mardi Gras but just couldn’t get a handle on the weird french stuff, you might like the Rio.

If you put midwesterners in a dry, loud, technicolor environment for too long they start to wilt.  So rushing through and catching only the occasional blur of neon or a bared buttock proved to be a good strategy.

Once our touring strategy was decided, we all bebopped through a long string of casino/hotels without really stopping or spending any money (yes, Las Vegas hates tourists like us.) The Strip is basically laid out like this and we stayed mainly in the area between Flamingo Rd. and Spring Mountain Rd:

After the Rio we went to the Bellagio and took pictures of the pretty ceiling:

Edge of the Fiori di Como ceiling in the Bellagio Hotel

After that we headed to the Mirage, which is a lovely place.

In the Mirage it’s possible to hear yourself think and possibly catch someone else’s voice without the deafening noise of slot machines clanging through your nervous system. Actually, it was relatively peaceful in both the Bellagio and Wynn casinos as well. In fact I’d have to say they’re rather classy -though I don’t consider ‘classy’  itself  to be a terribly classy word. I suppose they try to make everyone feel like a highroller. And I’m sure the owners do this just because it gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. There are similarly considerate people running the Wynn:

These colorful decorations float up and down to provide interest. We travelled from the Wynn to the Encore via a long pretty (air-conditioned!) hall. The Wynn and the Encore match of course:

The Encore has a beach club, where you can roast in the Nevada sun. And nice decor as well:

The Venetian

The Venetian is the place with the gondolas and Raphaelish painted ceilings:

Harrah’s had changed a lot since I’d stayed there, though they still had the jester mascots etc.

I also saw Circus Circus, the Miracle Mile, the Palazzo, Paris, and caught a truly terrible outdoor show at Treasure Island. But I’m too lazy to post pictures of the first four, and too traumatized to say anything about the last one. It’s not that I’m especially offended by overtly sexualized display, but it just got to a point where it lacked taste. People have been writing salacious plays, lewd jokes, bawdy stories since the beginning of time etc. That’s fine. I get it. Maybe people feel like they have to blow off some steam. Well perhaps ‘blow’ wasn’t the best choice of words. Anyhow, Shakespeare I get. Donne wrote some absolutely lascivious poems. But is the body glitter and crappy rhyming really necessary? Give me a dirty picture by Titian any day.

Venus of Urbino

Titian couldn’t really draw, but he had the coloring inside the lines thing down.

The Rio and Caesar’s Palace (Las Vegas pictures)

Map of the Strip

I’d probably better let the pictures speak for themselves.

The Rio:

Inside the Rio Hotel

The tacky decor and Chippendales that I promised

The next day we went to Caesar’s Palace to ogle like true touristas: 

Entrance to Caesar’s Palace

Somewhat self-evidently, a statue of a horse

Caryatid Caesar’s Palace

Another Picture of the Caryatid Caesar’s Palace

Another Lobby Statue, Caesar’s Palace

Pictures of The Bellagio (Las Vegas)

Chihuly Ceiling at the Bellagio

Bellagio

This was pretty interesting but the lighting was poor.