The End my Friend the End

A number of people have commented to me that returning home after a long absence must feel weird. I see their point but in these last days of the trip I feel an almost magnetic pull drawing me back. One of the reasons I took this trip was to sort out my feelings of home. I cannot say that I have succeeded completely in that respect, but I definitely have new insights.

What defines "home"?
People? Place? Routine?

People- The world is filled with amazing, loving people. Good people are a dime a dozen and that is a wonderful thing. Any of you who orient towards the xenophobic should really get out there and travel. Love and cooperation is the common denominator everywhere and if we all realized that there would be a lot less conflict.  None the less I miss my family and friends. I confess I did not miss anyone much at first: the excitement of our adventure eclipsed a lot. But as, the adventure morphed into the ordinary, I started feeling pangs of absence. Long ties create deep channels. To lose connection with people you are close to is giving up a part of yourself. My loss was mitigated greatly because I was with Beth, my best friend and always companion.

Place- Everywhere I go I find reassurance from the familiar. I am now in Roanoke Virginia and I might as well be in Albany: the streets are snowed in and the 1920 bungalows are familiar. So are the rolling  hills surrounding the city and the vast expanse of woods and farms which stretch  on for miles. The same holds true for the most exotic locales we have visited. The beaches of Portugual evoke Cape Cod in Summer and the Sri  Lankan jungle feels familiar and much safer than I would have ever anticipated. That said I long for my 3 acres of lawn and woods which have imprinted on me for so many years. It's not because it's special, it's because I have absorbed it.

Routine-  This may be the way our trip has affected me most. Traveling as we did forces you to be adaptable and that in turn makes one philosophical. After a while you realize that, except in rare cases, all stress is illusionary. You can take almost any circumstance and decide it is a terrible plight or that it's not so bad and maybe even a good thing when placed in proper perspective. Waiting in lines, stuck in traffic, lost in a strange city are all times which afford you great opportunity to look around and feel the pulse of life. Often the situation that evokes a stress response is also the one that, if taken lightly, grants entrance into being fully present, fully engaged and truly living.  It is those accentuated moments in life that stand out in our memories and carry the most weight in our definition of self. The ironic thing is that you do not need to travel to experience the benefits of pushing your limits. It's just much harder to do at home because we all trend towards the comfortable. My lesson from this trip is to try to avoid complacency. To put that philosophy to practice we are going to Pennsylvania tommorow to buy two farm dogs ( puppies) from an Amish family.  It should make the five hour trip back interesting and help us from becoming bored when we are finally home. Thanks for reading. ~p

A Haiku for U

 We are back in the States now, well Vancouver anyways which feels like the the States to me (apologies to Canadian readers). I've been wanting to write about the last foreign leg of our trip, Japan, but my thoughts have not coalesced and I still feel very ambiguous about my experience. Therefore I have reached deep into my creative well to fish for meaning and what better way to try to crack this particular nut then with a few haiku. As some of you probably remember from 6th grade, a haiku is a 3 stance poem with a 5-7-5 syllable structure. It should have two images which are connected by a "cutting" verse. It also should have some, usually oblique, reference to one of the four seasons. Ok here goes....

 On the long hot train

 A crowd of people stare at phones

Alone in wanting

Light on wet pavement 

 Inside the itame waits 

 Sake warms the heart

Behind her face mask

The geishas young daughter sits

 Safe from all evil

Alone in the street

 He waits for the changing light

 Wind blown dry leaves dance

OK that was embarrassing! I hope I have not diminished my audience too much. Actually it felt good to write the poems and somehow I feel a bit closer to my thoughts now. Thanks for your patience.

Backwards...... Today we are leaving Vietnam and it's feeling like the end of the trip. We are still going to Japan then flying to Vancouver and road tripping home but that all seems a bit proforma, like a weekend getaway. You might be thinking Japan, proforma? I am anticipating that I will like much of Japan and also will be surprised by some of its aspects, but I also know it will be safe, polite, modern, and, dare I say, a bit pasteurized the way all first world countries have become.

Hopping from country to country, culture to culture, in a short time span has clarified some things that previously my mind had flitted around but never grasped. Early on, when I was learning to read, I had a primer that described a happy village. A care free boy on a perfect summer's day greeting the milk man and the garage mechanic as he bopped about town. This book instilled in me an image of the way life should be which I still hold dear. On this trip I have seen that my vision was not just childish romanticism. My happy village is out there in the jungle, on the edge of the desert and high in hidden mountain valleys.

The rubes, hicks and yokels of the world know something we don't. Their hands are leathered and their backs bent, but at the end of work they squat at the side of the road, immersed in wordless comradary and drink in the world around them in silent peace. They rarely take for granted the sounds of their children, the simple roof over their bed or the rice they nutured and grew. In the west we have so many idioms to disparage these people. Well I can tell you, these stone age basket weavers are far ahead of us and our cult-of-self in many ways.

There are a number of ways these people are different from us. They do not easily take affront to things and people. They laugh readily and tend to accent the positive. They want things but when things do not work out they easily shrug it off. Perhaps most importantly they spend about a tenth of the time thinking about themselves that most "modern" men do. Concepts of self actualization and existential angst are unknown to them. I think this is because, to them, the line between self and village is a blurry one. Whether due to their inter-dependence or their long cultural legacy, the "simple" people of the world have achieved a grace of living rarely seen in the globalized world.

Wait you say, these people suffer, they lack access to modern medicine and good schools for their children. They work long hard hours with little to show for it and then, the final indignity, they die young. All true to an extent but as they live their shorter lives there is a qualitative difference. They know the score from an early age. That is why their children work hard and happily for the family and rarely sucomb to sullen isolation. It is also why they are not haunted by death. When your father dies you miss him but it is natural. Death, like the monsoons, is just a part of everything. The casual acceptance of death frees the mind to the present. It opens you to feeling the rain in the breeze and the smell of the wood fire which beckons you home.

Channeling my Inner Prude in Bangkok

I've seen a lot in this trip and as it all percolates down connections form and impressions are made. Probably the biggest conclusion I've drawn thus far is that despite gigantic differences in culture and equally large differences in wealth, people everywhere are essentially similar and most people are good (see Beth's blog "Same Same Different Different" sixmonthtrip.blogspot.com).  The City of Bangkok however has challenged me.

For those who don't know much about Bangkok it is a sprawling city of over 8 million.  A major economic hub with a big tourism industry, it's a sleek, modern, city most famous for it's temples, street food and sex trade.  It's the sex part that has given me pause.

With a few exceptions (the Taj Mahal) comes to mind) we have not seen many westerners since we left Turkey. That is until we hit Bangkok where "we" are everywhere.  My peer cohort is well represented- older white couples seeing the world because they can.  This tourist segment is generally well heeled if a bit clumsy navigating the hoards of pedestrians on the sidewalks and a bit confused figuring out the local Metro system.  Then there is the dominant western tourist archetype. This is the white guy aged 20 to 60 who is escorted by a lovely Thai "girl friend". Often the older men are with a girl half their age. I saw one overweight and apparently mentally challenged young man with a petite shy girl who seemed somewhat mortified. He was wearing a tee shirt that proclaimed in big letters "FUCK HARD and MAKE A LOT OF NOISE".  Another white guy on the subway,who gave off a definite Ted Kaczynski vibe, kept his hand between his girl's legs way up high under her short skirt for the whole ride. They did not talk and she was walking the fine line between total disgust and appeasing her client.  Every day we see at least 20 of these couples in various permutations.

I have steadfastly tried not to jump to conclusion on this trip about people or customs. Researching the sex trade in Thailand I found out that most of the girls work solo without pimps. They often come from poor families in rural areas and many support their aging parents and relatives. Prostitution is a long established trade here preceding tourism by centuries. There is a kind of see no evil precept adhered to by both the police and the working girl's families. And money is hard to come by for the uneducated. It takes about $300 a month to support a small family.  The minimum wage is 300 baht a day ($10).

Then there are the johns, brazen and insensitive as they seem, they also give off an air of silent desperation, of being caught in the eddies of an isolating society all the while being pummeled with porn and endless sex oriented media.  Often the men are victims also. Emotionally famished they fall in love easily and, once their gold is depleted, are abandoned by the girl who, after all, is only in it for the money. Self delusion or, conversely, totally callousness are the hallmarks of the john.

Despite all my liberal tendencies my visceral reaction to the trade is disgust and cultural embarrassment. I cannot see how, despite the apparently symbiotic relationship between the parties, that there is any long term redeeming quality to these arrangements. It cheapens a beautiful culture and has to cause hate and resentment of the influence of the western dollar and, in turn, of westerners in general.

There is a difference between cultural assimilation and the reckless imposition of culture. I suppose this force is what the anarchists don't like about globalization. It can be seen on the subways and streets of all major cities where people have become cocooned and indifferent to the people around them. A far cry from the world's small villages where strangers are embraced and love is the glue that holds each day together.