Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Boxing Day
Monday was Boxing Day.
Boxing Day is not really part of American culture. According to my (expatriate-American) friend Mick, Boxing Day is primarily known and celebrated in "Commonwealth countries (those which used to be part of the British Empire.)"
Of course, I thought the USA used to be part of the British Empire. But if you begin to research Boxing Day for yourself, you will quickly find yourself buried under a mountain of puzzlements, conundrums, and dilemmas of just this sort.
If you are nagged by a sense that you would be happier if you knew even less than you know now about Boxing Day, just do a little reading on the topic. Here's a resource to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_day
It's like having electroconvulsive therapy. The more you read, the less you know.
Or ask a friend about it, and you'll experience a similar result. Just try it... you'll see.
A couple of days ago, I watched The Man Who Wasn't There. This was perhaps my third or fourth viewing of this fine Coen Brothers film set in a small, Northern California town in the 1950s.
One character in the story is a big-city lawyer from Sacramento who has the idea to use the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as a defense in a murder case. This is probably not the lawyer you'd want if you were in a jam. It's unlikely he would try this Heisenberg strategy if his own ass was on the line, but he'd take your money to try the experiment on your behalf-- if he doesn't know you too well, if he doesn't really care what happens to you, if he considers your case probably lost anyway, and if you're in some backwater town where fewer people will see the headlines when you get the chair...
Anyway, this lawyer's watered-down misunderstanding of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was this: The more you look at something, the less you know about it.
I don't think that's quite what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says, and in my experience, this isn't really true as a rule.
But it is true in some exceptional cases. One is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle itself. Another is Boxing Day.
Boxing Day is not really part of American culture. According to my (expatriate-American) friend Mick, Boxing Day is primarily known and celebrated in "Commonwealth countries (those which used to be part of the British Empire.)"
Of course, I thought the USA used to be part of the British Empire. But if you begin to research Boxing Day for yourself, you will quickly find yourself buried under a mountain of puzzlements, conundrums, and dilemmas of just this sort.
If you are nagged by a sense that you would be happier if you knew even less than you know now about Boxing Day, just do a little reading on the topic. Here's a resource to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_day
It's like having electroconvulsive therapy. The more you read, the less you know.
Or ask a friend about it, and you'll experience a similar result. Just try it... you'll see.
A couple of days ago, I watched The Man Who Wasn't There. This was perhaps my third or fourth viewing of this fine Coen Brothers film set in a small, Northern California town in the 1950s.
One character in the story is a big-city lawyer from Sacramento who has the idea to use the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as a defense in a murder case. This is probably not the lawyer you'd want if you were in a jam. It's unlikely he would try this Heisenberg strategy if his own ass was on the line, but he'd take your money to try the experiment on your behalf-- if he doesn't know you too well, if he doesn't really care what happens to you, if he considers your case probably lost anyway, and if you're in some backwater town where fewer people will see the headlines when you get the chair...
Anyway, this lawyer's watered-down misunderstanding of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was this: The more you look at something, the less you know about it.
I don't think that's quite what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says, and in my experience, this isn't really true as a rule.
But it is true in some exceptional cases. One is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle itself. Another is Boxing Day.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
The Air of December
I don't feel like I have anything terribly profound to say today, but I haven't updated this blog in almost ten days. In the interest of keeping it fresh, I'll go through the latest news.
I was away on my travels for almost a month. During that time, the Stockroom.com office staff moved from the temporary offices on the second floor of our new building into the permanent offices on the third floor. The permanent offices are beautiful. I'll try to remember to post a picture here at some point.
Our new building is about 30,000 square feet, and has several different zones. The ground floor is warehousing/shipping/receiving. The front of the second floor consists of three storefronts on Sunset Blvd, while the back half of that floor is used for leather production and storage. The rear portion of the third floor is home to our leather designer and additional production (primarily sewing), and also our latex department (design and production). The front part of the top floor houses our just-completed company offices (marketing, customer service, admin, accounting, IT, purchasing, publishing, art department).
We had been using two of the three storefronts on the second floor as temporary offices. Now that we have moved out of those, they will be available for other income-producing uses. We renovated and rented out the first one to a high-end furniture store a few months ago. The center storefront we tentatively plan to use for our own outlet store. The third storefront has not been rented yet, but we've had discussions with interested parties. The most intriguing prospect is a company that plans to open a high-end wine bar. The most attractive aspect of the property for them is our 20-car parking lot. Although we are already filling the lot to capacity during the day, it is mostly empty at night. That nighttime parking capacity is a scarce and valuable commodity in our neighborhood.
This real estate investment has consumed almost all of our cash and equity reserves, and as with everything in life there are risks (earthquakes, economic downturns, etc). But barring major calamities, it looks like we will be able to cover our mortgage payments and taxes using income from the storefronts, leaving the remaining 75-80% of the building free for our mail-order operations. So it's fair to say the project is coming together quite nicely at this stage. I am hopeful... optimistic even.
The current Stockroom.com team is the largest and strongest group we've ever had. They seem to be working well together. There is a sense of good morale and cohesion, a nice buzz in the new offices, and a lot getting done. Company operations seem to be well coordinated despite the growing size and complexity of the enterprise. Since my return to L.A. I have been in the office a lot, and there are always things for me to work on. But over time the company seems to be evolving more and more into an independent entity that does pretty well with less oversight from me. I am pleased.
Today I will be in the recording studio for the second time this week. I'm having a nice time working with John Leftwich and Larry John McNally in John's home studio. I think we have 7 songs in production now, and we will be starting work on an 8th one today. We are developing a nice rapport, and have discussed possibly doing some live performances together in the near future.
There are lots of holiday parties and things going on this time of year. Within the past week I attended a dinner for the L.A. chapter of EO (the Entrepreneurs' Organization), which I joined in early 2004. As always it was fun to socialize with my business-owner peers.
Yesterday there was a holiday lunch in our beautiful new company kitchen -- a traditional tamale and chicken mole feast prepared by Clara, who has been cleaning and cooking for us since 1994. The staff seemed to enjoy it.
Last night there was a dinner party for my EO (Entrepreneur's Organization) Forum group-- 7 current members and two recent alumni. I really value my membership in that forum, which allows us to support each other in both our business and personal affairs. The dinner was hosted at the beautiful and recently-remodeled home of one of our members, Melanie, who owns a successful insurance firm. The house overlooks the Pacific Ocean, and the sound of crashing surf mixed with the conversation and music coming from Melanie's iTunes collection.
Half of our forum's members are women, giving us the highest female-to-male ratio of all the forum groups in the local chapter. Each group has an average of 8-10 members. It's typical for a forum to have just one or two women, and many have none at all. I appreciate the more gender-balanced set of perspectives in our group. As it happens, 2 of our 8 active members are currently pregnant.
Pop and I missed the memorial service for my cousin Frank and his wife Gretchen in New Orleans. It was put together in a fairly short time frame while I was traveling back from India. Efforts had been made to contact us, but they were unsuccessful, and given the timing it probably wouldn't have made much difference. I got back to L.A. on the night of the 12th, and the next afternoon I called to inquire about memorial plans, only to find that the memorial was just about to start. I couldn't cover 2000 miles in 30 minutes, so I let it go. I'd done what I could through that difficult time mostly over the internet and on the phone.
I had hoped to go to the memorial, just to reconnect with the family and offer whatever support I could. But then I've always taken an independent attitude about rituals, holidays and the like. Weddings, funerals, graduations, birthdays, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Christmas, etc. I view all those phenomena as sort of optional affairs, and I take a similar view of the biological family itself. I'm certainly aware of family ties and cultural customs, and their varying degrees of importance to others. And I do participate at times, in my fashion. But I don't accept any of it as obligatory, for myself or for anyone else.
In the case of Frank and Gretchen, there was shock and sadness for both of their families losing both of them at the same time. In the aftermath came the added challenges of two families being involved in making memorial and estate arrangements for two people. Inevitably, different families will have different values, different feelings, and different styles of coping with such situations, and there was a potential for conflict there. From what I can tell, things did go fairly well between the two families in this case, but with added strain on both sides I'm sure.
...
I'm already looking forward to my next bit of traveling. There will be two adult-industry conventions in Las Vegas in early January, and I may make a brief appearance there. We intend to launch a new, strategically-important affiliate program at these shows, and it might be good for business if the company figurehead is there to do some rallying, presenting and championing. On the other hand, I'm a little burned out on the larger adult-industry "scene," and crowds of strangers can be tiring for me, particularly in that environment. Meanwhile each of our three booths at two different conventions will be well-staffed with fresher, more energetic and more enthusiastic personalities than my own. So the question of my attendance in Las Vegas will probably come down to what mood I'm in when the appointed hour arrives.
Later in January I may go with Larry John to New York City to do some music recording there. Then after that who knows. But in the meantime, I'm here in Los Angeles, and endeavoring to make the best of it.
I was away on my travels for almost a month. During that time, the Stockroom.com office staff moved from the temporary offices on the second floor of our new building into the permanent offices on the third floor. The permanent offices are beautiful. I'll try to remember to post a picture here at some point.
Our new building is about 30,000 square feet, and has several different zones. The ground floor is warehousing/shipping/receiving. The front of the second floor consists of three storefronts on Sunset Blvd, while the back half of that floor is used for leather production and storage. The rear portion of the third floor is home to our leather designer and additional production (primarily sewing), and also our latex department (design and production). The front part of the top floor houses our just-completed company offices (marketing, customer service, admin, accounting, IT, purchasing, publishing, art department).
We had been using two of the three storefronts on the second floor as temporary offices. Now that we have moved out of those, they will be available for other income-producing uses. We renovated and rented out the first one to a high-end furniture store a few months ago. The center storefront we tentatively plan to use for our own outlet store. The third storefront has not been rented yet, but we've had discussions with interested parties. The most intriguing prospect is a company that plans to open a high-end wine bar. The most attractive aspect of the property for them is our 20-car parking lot. Although we are already filling the lot to capacity during the day, it is mostly empty at night. That nighttime parking capacity is a scarce and valuable commodity in our neighborhood.
This real estate investment has consumed almost all of our cash and equity reserves, and as with everything in life there are risks (earthquakes, economic downturns, etc). But barring major calamities, it looks like we will be able to cover our mortgage payments and taxes using income from the storefronts, leaving the remaining 75-80% of the building free for our mail-order operations. So it's fair to say the project is coming together quite nicely at this stage. I am hopeful... optimistic even.
The current Stockroom.com team is the largest and strongest group we've ever had. They seem to be working well together. There is a sense of good morale and cohesion, a nice buzz in the new offices, and a lot getting done. Company operations seem to be well coordinated despite the growing size and complexity of the enterprise. Since my return to L.A. I have been in the office a lot, and there are always things for me to work on. But over time the company seems to be evolving more and more into an independent entity that does pretty well with less oversight from me. I am pleased.
Today I will be in the recording studio for the second time this week. I'm having a nice time working with John Leftwich and Larry John McNally in John's home studio. I think we have 7 songs in production now, and we will be starting work on an 8th one today. We are developing a nice rapport, and have discussed possibly doing some live performances together in the near future.
There are lots of holiday parties and things going on this time of year. Within the past week I attended a dinner for the L.A. chapter of EO (the Entrepreneurs' Organization), which I joined in early 2004. As always it was fun to socialize with my business-owner peers.
Yesterday there was a holiday lunch in our beautiful new company kitchen -- a traditional tamale and chicken mole feast prepared by Clara, who has been cleaning and cooking for us since 1994. The staff seemed to enjoy it.
Last night there was a dinner party for my EO (Entrepreneur's Organization) Forum group-- 7 current members and two recent alumni. I really value my membership in that forum, which allows us to support each other in both our business and personal affairs. The dinner was hosted at the beautiful and recently-remodeled home of one of our members, Melanie, who owns a successful insurance firm. The house overlooks the Pacific Ocean, and the sound of crashing surf mixed with the conversation and music coming from Melanie's iTunes collection.
Half of our forum's members are women, giving us the highest female-to-male ratio of all the forum groups in the local chapter. Each group has an average of 8-10 members. It's typical for a forum to have just one or two women, and many have none at all. I appreciate the more gender-balanced set of perspectives in our group. As it happens, 2 of our 8 active members are currently pregnant.
Pop and I missed the memorial service for my cousin Frank and his wife Gretchen in New Orleans. It was put together in a fairly short time frame while I was traveling back from India. Efforts had been made to contact us, but they were unsuccessful, and given the timing it probably wouldn't have made much difference. I got back to L.A. on the night of the 12th, and the next afternoon I called to inquire about memorial plans, only to find that the memorial was just about to start. I couldn't cover 2000 miles in 30 minutes, so I let it go. I'd done what I could through that difficult time mostly over the internet and on the phone.
I had hoped to go to the memorial, just to reconnect with the family and offer whatever support I could. But then I've always taken an independent attitude about rituals, holidays and the like. Weddings, funerals, graduations, birthdays, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Christmas, etc. I view all those phenomena as sort of optional affairs, and I take a similar view of the biological family itself. I'm certainly aware of family ties and cultural customs, and their varying degrees of importance to others. And I do participate at times, in my fashion. But I don't accept any of it as obligatory, for myself or for anyone else.
In the case of Frank and Gretchen, there was shock and sadness for both of their families losing both of them at the same time. In the aftermath came the added challenges of two families being involved in making memorial and estate arrangements for two people. Inevitably, different families will have different values, different feelings, and different styles of coping with such situations, and there was a potential for conflict there. From what I can tell, things did go fairly well between the two families in this case, but with added strain on both sides I'm sure.
...
I'm already looking forward to my next bit of traveling. There will be two adult-industry conventions in Las Vegas in early January, and I may make a brief appearance there. We intend to launch a new, strategically-important affiliate program at these shows, and it might be good for business if the company figurehead is there to do some rallying, presenting and championing. On the other hand, I'm a little burned out on the larger adult-industry "scene," and crowds of strangers can be tiring for me, particularly in that environment. Meanwhile each of our three booths at two different conventions will be well-staffed with fresher, more energetic and more enthusiastic personalities than my own. So the question of my attendance in Las Vegas will probably come down to what mood I'm in when the appointed hour arrives.
Later in January I may go with Larry John to New York City to do some music recording there. Then after that who knows. But in the meantime, I'm here in Los Angeles, and endeavoring to make the best of it.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Home
I am finally back in Los Angeles. I actually feel glad to be here, more so than in a long time.
It is nice to see my cats, Pop, my piano, my bed.
It's nice to have a break from worrying about someone sneaking curry and cayenne into every damn thing... Sandwiches... Chinese food... ice cream... toothpaste...
OK, no, I didn't encounter any spicy curried ice cream or toothpaste in India, but neither would've surprised me after a week there. In fact, if you want to make a million rupees -- which might be enough to buy yourself a shiny new Honda Civic (a basic model, not a fully-loaded hybrid or anything extravagant) -- you are welcome to steal those ideas and start yourself a new business.
It will be nice to tour the new company offices which I wrote all those checks for. The rest of the company moved into them while I was on my trip, but I haven't seen them yet!
It is nice to see my cats, Pop, my piano, my bed.
It's nice to have a break from worrying about someone sneaking curry and cayenne into every damn thing... Sandwiches... Chinese food... ice cream... toothpaste...
OK, no, I didn't encounter any spicy curried ice cream or toothpaste in India, but neither would've surprised me after a week there. In fact, if you want to make a million rupees -- which might be enough to buy yourself a shiny new Honda Civic (a basic model, not a fully-loaded hybrid or anything extravagant) -- you are welcome to steal those ideas and start yourself a new business.
It will be nice to tour the new company offices which I wrote all those checks for. The rest of the company moved into them while I was on my trip, but I haven't seen them yet!
Photo
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Confirmation
Slim hope has become none. I just got word via email that the bodies of my cousin and his wife were found in New Orleans.
Frank and Gretchen
My cousin, Frank Andrew, and his wife, Gretchen Life, are missing.
Frank spent the last year building a sailboat, and they took it out on its maiden voyage on Saturday morning, in Lake Ponchartrain, the enormous lake to the north of New Orleans.
Monday afternoon, the boat was found capsized. The coast guard, the police, and friends and family have been searching for them, but there has been no sign. It is now Thursday morning in New Orleans, and the weather has turned cold and windy. None of us has completely given up hope of a miracle happening, but the chances seem quite slim at this point.
Frank and I were about the same age. I don't have any brothers or sisters, and I guess my cousins are the closest thing to siblings that I have. I've been through a lot of different emotions as you might imagine.
I've moved to a new hotel room here in Mumbai with good internet access, and tried to do what I could from here. I helped to arrange a flight and a rental car for Frank's mother, my aunt Lois. I spread the word as best I could, including contacting my New Orleans friends, some of whom know Frank and Gretchen. That led to additional boats and a plane being added to the search effort. But still no sign of them.
I have bitched and moaned a bit in past entries in this blog about my friend and associate, Mike, the one who was running some of my company's webservers in New Orleans before hurricane Katrina. As of a few days ago, relations with Mike were somewhat strained on both ends. But Frank and Gretchen were friends with Mike, and as soon as he heard about their disappearance, all misgivings and grievances were immediately set aside. Mike was the one who arranged a plane and additional searchers in boats. So I am grateful to Mike for that, and touched by his concern and his efforts.
Frank had described his work on this boat in detail on his website. I just checked the site, and it has exceeded its bandwidth limit, obviously from so many people who are curious about it now that they are missing. So I won't put a link to it here. However, I will try to identify who the internet service provider was, and contact them to see about getting it back online for friends and family who want to see it. The site also includes a blog and other writings, wedding photos, and other content.
Both of them are 39. Gretchen was in her last year of medical residency, and I've been impressed by her as one of the best doctors I've known. Frank retired from a career in business two years ago, and along with other projects he has been working diligently on his first science fiction novel. They impressed everyone as good, kind, honest, helpful, thoughtful, responsible people.
A sad day.
Frank spent the last year building a sailboat, and they took it out on its maiden voyage on Saturday morning, in Lake Ponchartrain, the enormous lake to the north of New Orleans.
Monday afternoon, the boat was found capsized. The coast guard, the police, and friends and family have been searching for them, but there has been no sign. It is now Thursday morning in New Orleans, and the weather has turned cold and windy. None of us has completely given up hope of a miracle happening, but the chances seem quite slim at this point.
Frank and I were about the same age. I don't have any brothers or sisters, and I guess my cousins are the closest thing to siblings that I have. I've been through a lot of different emotions as you might imagine.
I've moved to a new hotel room here in Mumbai with good internet access, and tried to do what I could from here. I helped to arrange a flight and a rental car for Frank's mother, my aunt Lois. I spread the word as best I could, including contacting my New Orleans friends, some of whom know Frank and Gretchen. That led to additional boats and a plane being added to the search effort. But still no sign of them.
I have bitched and moaned a bit in past entries in this blog about my friend and associate, Mike, the one who was running some of my company's webservers in New Orleans before hurricane Katrina. As of a few days ago, relations with Mike were somewhat strained on both ends. But Frank and Gretchen were friends with Mike, and as soon as he heard about their disappearance, all misgivings and grievances were immediately set aside. Mike was the one who arranged a plane and additional searchers in boats. So I am grateful to Mike for that, and touched by his concern and his efforts.
Frank had described his work on this boat in detail on his website. I just checked the site, and it has exceeded its bandwidth limit, obviously from so many people who are curious about it now that they are missing. So I won't put a link to it here. However, I will try to identify who the internet service provider was, and contact them to see about getting it back online for friends and family who want to see it. The site also includes a blog and other writings, wedding photos, and other content.
Both of them are 39. Gretchen was in her last year of medical residency, and I've been impressed by her as one of the best doctors I've known. Frank retired from a career in business two years ago, and along with other projects he has been working diligently on his first science fiction novel. They impressed everyone as good, kind, honest, helpful, thoughtful, responsible people.
A sad day.
Monday, December 05, 2005
Mumbai
So... I am finally in Mumbai.
It is good to be here. The whole place strikes me as fairly insane, but that is true of most places for me.
For the most part, it's just like I pictured it, except that picturing it is never quite the same as being there... otherwise, why would we go? The air is smoky, it's super-congested, active, colorful, stratified...
I've just been here for part of one day, and I've spent a lot of time doing something I usually do in a new place-- walking around with purposeful aimlessness, just taking it all in, processing, storing.
There are a couple of frustrations. In communicating with people, it's true that English is widely spoken, and many people are fluent, more so than in Thailand. But I am finding that fluency can actually make people harder for me to understand, since they are chattering away freely in the local variant of English that is often so heavily accented that it is hard for me to follow. I just haven't developed an ear for it yet, which bugs me since I think I'm normally quite good with accents. There are only so many times I can ask people to repeat themselves before I fear insulting them and just let it go. At a certain point it begins to feel like an implicit accusation ("Your English is bad"), and while a Thai person might shrug and laugh that off, I detect a different sensibility (and sensitivity) here.
Also, finding internet access was harder than expected. My original hotel reservation here was for a couple of weeks ago, and I never got around to making a new one. So I went to one of those windows at the airport where they broker hotel reservations. They checked with the hotel where I had originally planned to stay, and it was sold out with convention business. So I let them recommend a place. I didn't ask whether it had internet access. I hoped it would, but I figured if it didn't there would surely be a stray wireless signal or a cyber cafe something nearby.
The hotel didn't have internet services. So I tried searching for wireless signals in the hotel. None at all. I was surprised.
I asked the hotel staff about a cyber cafe, and they assured me there was one "just over there." They said it was a 5-minute walk at most, and gave some directions that sounded like they might be pretty simple, until I went out the door and tried to execute them. That turned into my first purposefully-aimless stroll in India. Really good, but the primary objective remained unfulfilled.
I stopped in a couple of places as I explored the crowded streets to check again for wireless signals. I was again surprised to find no signals of any kind anywhere, not even secured ones. Of course, having been online since the 1980s, I do remember the days when getting online was a challenge even in Los Angeles, and it generally meant a very slow connection over a telephone line. But to see no wireless signals at all in a really dense urban area is something I haven't experienced in this century, and didn't really expect to ever see again... until after The Collapse of course.
Most people appear not to take much notice of me here (more about that in a moment). But when I stopped in the street, one man did approach to peer curiously at my laptop. Not too many people sitting around pecking on laptops in his neighborhood I guess. Perhaps there would be if there were wireless signals around, but of course there weren't. Back to the hotel.
I went back to the hotel and said I'd had no luck finding the cyber cafe. They seemed perplexed, and began to repeat the directions, which sounded very much the same. I told them I didn't know the area, and asked what a cab would cost. They said 10 rupees (about 23 cents). I asked them to summon a cab. They flagged down a moto-rickshaw for me, and I was ushered into it and on my way before I realized that no one had explained to the driver where the cyber cafe was, and he didn't speak English. I did succeed in conveying that I was looking for internet. He took me on a much-longer-than-expected ride (45 cents) to a coffee shop that offers wi-fi. Cool.
The courteous and fluent-yet-substantially-incomprehensible woman at the coffee-shop counter explained to the tin-eared American that, although they did have wi-fi gear, they were out of the little scratch-off cards with login and password information. Bummer. She then told me three times where to go and what to say to the next moto-rickshaw driver. Since I hadn't quite understood after three times, I thanked her and went back out into the street.
I just walked for a while. It turns out there aren't nearly as many internet shops here as in Thailand, although I had expected there would be. I asked at a couple of shops and nobody knew of anyplace nearby. I stopped and tried to make a call to a friend overseas, and that didn't work for some reason. Eventually I ended up in another moto-rickshaw. I was able to communicate easily well with my new driver, and he knew where to go and shortly I came to this cyber cafe where I now sit, writing to my blog fans (whoever you are), and enjoying being back online with my own laptop for 60cents/hour. (I suspect I'm paying a premium, but I'm quite content.)
Before leaving Los Angeles, I half-jokingly warned a couple of my friends not to presume they'd ever see me in L.A. again. Someone asked me if I was going to "go native" in some exotic destination.
I don't feel I ever "went native" in my country of origin... So does that make it more or less likely that I would do it somewhere else?
One of my Indian friends in Los Angeles, Arun, assured me as I was preparing to leave that I do look very much like a northern Indian. I seem to have a certain ethnic look that places me at or beyond the swarthy end of Caucasian, and within that range there is something highly adaptable about it. I am routinely adopted on sight by Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Indians, Arabs, sometimes Italians or Spaniards, and occasionally Hispanics as "one of their own." People chatter at me in the respective native tongues of all of the above with a remarkable presumption of comprehension. So that is happening here as well.
(In case anyone is curious about my actual genetic background, it's mostly European (English and German) and a bit of Native American (the one thing nobody ever guesses).
Blending (or at least not looking "American") has its charms, especially in an era where anti-American sentiments are on the rise. I don't worry too much about being presumed guilty of anything as long as my passport is tucked away in my pocket.
Time for lunch and more strolling. I am quite unsure about exactly how far I have traveled away from my hotel at this point, but I will soon resolve that question. I hope to find a map in one of these million little storefronts.
It is good to be here. The whole place strikes me as fairly insane, but that is true of most places for me.
For the most part, it's just like I pictured it, except that picturing it is never quite the same as being there... otherwise, why would we go? The air is smoky, it's super-congested, active, colorful, stratified...
I've just been here for part of one day, and I've spent a lot of time doing something I usually do in a new place-- walking around with purposeful aimlessness, just taking it all in, processing, storing.
There are a couple of frustrations. In communicating with people, it's true that English is widely spoken, and many people are fluent, more so than in Thailand. But I am finding that fluency can actually make people harder for me to understand, since they are chattering away freely in the local variant of English that is often so heavily accented that it is hard for me to follow. I just haven't developed an ear for it yet, which bugs me since I think I'm normally quite good with accents. There are only so many times I can ask people to repeat themselves before I fear insulting them and just let it go. At a certain point it begins to feel like an implicit accusation ("Your English is bad"), and while a Thai person might shrug and laugh that off, I detect a different sensibility (and sensitivity) here.
Also, finding internet access was harder than expected. My original hotel reservation here was for a couple of weeks ago, and I never got around to making a new one. So I went to one of those windows at the airport where they broker hotel reservations. They checked with the hotel where I had originally planned to stay, and it was sold out with convention business. So I let them recommend a place. I didn't ask whether it had internet access. I hoped it would, but I figured if it didn't there would surely be a stray wireless signal or a cyber cafe something nearby.
The hotel didn't have internet services. So I tried searching for wireless signals in the hotel. None at all. I was surprised.
I asked the hotel staff about a cyber cafe, and they assured me there was one "just over there." They said it was a 5-minute walk at most, and gave some directions that sounded like they might be pretty simple, until I went out the door and tried to execute them. That turned into my first purposefully-aimless stroll in India. Really good, but the primary objective remained unfulfilled.
I stopped in a couple of places as I explored the crowded streets to check again for wireless signals. I was again surprised to find no signals of any kind anywhere, not even secured ones. Of course, having been online since the 1980s, I do remember the days when getting online was a challenge even in Los Angeles, and it generally meant a very slow connection over a telephone line. But to see no wireless signals at all in a really dense urban area is something I haven't experienced in this century, and didn't really expect to ever see again... until after The Collapse of course.
Most people appear not to take much notice of me here (more about that in a moment). But when I stopped in the street, one man did approach to peer curiously at my laptop. Not too many people sitting around pecking on laptops in his neighborhood I guess. Perhaps there would be if there were wireless signals around, but of course there weren't. Back to the hotel.
I went back to the hotel and said I'd had no luck finding the cyber cafe. They seemed perplexed, and began to repeat the directions, which sounded very much the same. I told them I didn't know the area, and asked what a cab would cost. They said 10 rupees (about 23 cents). I asked them to summon a cab. They flagged down a moto-rickshaw for me, and I was ushered into it and on my way before I realized that no one had explained to the driver where the cyber cafe was, and he didn't speak English. I did succeed in conveying that I was looking for internet. He took me on a much-longer-than-expected ride (45 cents) to a coffee shop that offers wi-fi. Cool.
The courteous and fluent-yet-substantially-incomprehensible woman at the coffee-shop counter explained to the tin-eared American that, although they did have wi-fi gear, they were out of the little scratch-off cards with login and password information. Bummer. She then told me three times where to go and what to say to the next moto-rickshaw driver. Since I hadn't quite understood after three times, I thanked her and went back out into the street.
I just walked for a while. It turns out there aren't nearly as many internet shops here as in Thailand, although I had expected there would be. I asked at a couple of shops and nobody knew of anyplace nearby. I stopped and tried to make a call to a friend overseas, and that didn't work for some reason. Eventually I ended up in another moto-rickshaw. I was able to communicate easily well with my new driver, and he knew where to go and shortly I came to this cyber cafe where I now sit, writing to my blog fans (whoever you are), and enjoying being back online with my own laptop for 60cents/hour. (I suspect I'm paying a premium, but I'm quite content.)
Before leaving Los Angeles, I half-jokingly warned a couple of my friends not to presume they'd ever see me in L.A. again. Someone asked me if I was going to "go native" in some exotic destination.
I don't feel I ever "went native" in my country of origin... So does that make it more or less likely that I would do it somewhere else?
One of my Indian friends in Los Angeles, Arun, assured me as I was preparing to leave that I do look very much like a northern Indian. I seem to have a certain ethnic look that places me at or beyond the swarthy end of Caucasian, and within that range there is something highly adaptable about it. I am routinely adopted on sight by Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Indians, Arabs, sometimes Italians or Spaniards, and occasionally Hispanics as "one of their own." People chatter at me in the respective native tongues of all of the above with a remarkable presumption of comprehension. So that is happening here as well.
(In case anyone is curious about my actual genetic background, it's mostly European (English and German) and a bit of Native American (the one thing nobody ever guesses).
Blending (or at least not looking "American") has its charms, especially in an era where anti-American sentiments are on the rise. I don't worry too much about being presumed guilty of anything as long as my passport is tucked away in my pocket.
Time for lunch and more strolling. I am quite unsure about exactly how far I have traveled away from my hotel at this point, but I will soon resolve that question. I hope to find a map in one of these million little storefronts.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
A Not-So-Unwelcome Diversion
I find myself in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand.My original target was India, so how did I end up here?
I am a spoiled American in some ways. In recent years, I've been to Mexico, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, United Arab Emirates, and Thailand.
What else do all those places have in common? Among many other things, they all allow Americans to visit without obtaining a visa in advance. All you need is that handy US passport.
India, however, does require a visa for Americans.
I didn't personally make the arrangements for this trip, and I never stopped to think about the visa question. My assistant, Amy, didn't know it was an issue. I did know (or had known) that a passport alone is not sufficient in many cases, but as I said, it didn't cross my mind to check this time around.
The travel agent made no mention of it.
The airline made no mention of it.
The airline let me on the flight without it, which they're sorta not supposed to do.
But ultimately of course this was my responsibility, and my oversight. I suppose it's a mistake many people might make, and have made. But it won't happen to me again, that's for sure, and I can't imagine many people make such an error more than once.
I flew from LAX to Frankfurt, then to Delhi, then to Bombay.
I'm thinking maybe they were supposed to check for a visa at Delhi too... but they didn't.
So I got all the way to Bombay. After 24 hours of traveling, I was happy thinking I was done with flights and airports for a while. (I did console myself that in years not-so-long past, such a trip might have taken years, and would have been a once-in-a-lifetime journey... for those who survived it at all.)
Then, of course, I was then refused entry by Indian immigration. As an added bonus, I started coming down with a cold on the way to Frankfurt, and by the time I got to Bombay, I was not only totally worn out from 24+ hours of traveling, but also pretty ill... feverish, a bit weak. This was the beginning of the killer viral cough that had been going around the office back in L.A. I guess I was the last to get it, and managed to pick it up right before I left for my world travels.
The immigrations guy said "We have to send you back to your country." I thought I detected a subtle hint of satisfaction at having the opportunity to say no to an American. That was a bit of a drag, but I can understand people in other parts of the world resenting us for any of a number of reasons, and feeling that Americans in general can stand to be reminded of the limits of our prerogatives, power, sovereignty, etc.
I certainly was in no mood or condition to go all the way back to the USA, but I was pretty sure there would be other options.
Although India does not have any visa-on-arrival services, as many countries do, I was able to confirm pretty quickly that I had the option to go to another country and work on getting an Indian visa from there.
Naturally, I was not the first American ever to make this error. The Air India guys said it does happen with some regularity, and the most popular detours for persons in my situation are Dubai and Thailand. I could have guessed that myself, because I knew that both countries were close neighbors to India, and neither requires a visa of Americans. I visited both countries earlier this year, and flew over India when traveling from Dubai to Bangkok.
It was now late morning on Friday in India. If I'd flown to Dubai, the flight would be relatively short, and the time change would've given me an extra hour, so according to the Air India fellows, there was some chance I could've still gotten a visa that day. But if everything didn't go smoothly, there was still a good chance it wouldn't work out on Friday, and I would be stuck in Dubai for the weekend. I don't really know anyone there, there isn't much to do there that interests me if I'm traveling alone, and it can be expensive, like $300 and up per night for a decent hotel room on short notice.
I decided instead to go and visit my friend Dave, who lives in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, and to recover from my cold and my travel fatigue in a familiar environment.
The Air India staffers in Bombay were nicer and more sympathetic than the Immigration guys, which was nice. However, I did have to wait in the airport for several hours... and I didn't realize, when paying my $450 for a round trip to Bangkok, that it wasn't a direct flight. It went back through Delhi, making what could've been a 2 1/2 hour trip into something more like 7 hours. I was tired, sick, exhausted, unhappy, and not doing my best thinking, and I didn't think to ask whether the flight was a direct one. I just assumed that flights between the largest city in India and the largest city in neighboring Thailand would be direct. But I guess Delhi is the hub for Air India.
I was able to take a shower at the Bombay airport in a VIP lounge there. (You make yourself a VIP by paying $12.) I even slept for about 45 minutes, after the friendly staff there promised to wake me up in time for my next flight, which they did.
The flight from Delhi to Bangkok was delayed, which added to the already-long trip, and there was also a time change that made it even later in Bangkok. I arrived there around 2am, super tired, and sicker than ever... fever, headache, generally weak, and starting to cough. There were no more flights to Chiang Mai; The next flight I could get was 9:45am.
I could have left the airport and checked in somewhere, but I really didn't have the will to deal with carting my luggage around, haggling with a cab driver, locating a suitable hotel, not knowing my way around, getting ripped off, etc etc. I decided to just hang around in the airport until the morning.
I had been able to call Amy with an update from Bombay. But I hadn't talked to anyone else from home, and I imagined by now some of would be wondering why they hadn't heard from me. I tried to get internet access in Frankfurt with no success. Tried and failed in Delhi. Tried and failed in Bombay. The first access I could get was in the Bangkok airport. It was flaky, and relatively expensive, but I was grateful for it. After sending out some email updates, I used it mainly to chat with whatever friends I could find online for moral support and distraction from my sick & tired state.
Dave had assured me that I could now get super-inexpensive, high-speed internet access in our hotel, something that wasn't available on my last visit. I do have it now, after a bit of bureaucratic delay, and despite a bit of instability I consider it to be a true luxury. Using my Skype.com service, I can even make international phone calls almost for free. That plus email and instant messaging allows me to keep in pretty good touch with the office and developments back home.
I slept on Saturday afternoon, and then in the evening Dave took me to see "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" -- in English with Thai subtitles. Seeing a movie was the most activity I was prepared to commit to, but even that proved to be a bit much... I slept through parts of the film. It was hard for me to care very much whether Harry Potter won the broom races or got the Wizard Cup or whatever the fuss was all about.
All my life I've heard people say "Everything happens for a reason." I used to think that was superstitious BS, until I arrived at a better understanding of what the reason(s) might be: to give me the opportunity to handle the situation as gracefully as possible, to learn, to put things in perspective, to provide unexpected opportunities, to remind me of my own limitations, to keep things interesting, to put me in a place where I can help someone sometimes...
I have now been in Thailand for about two weeks. The process for getting an Indian visa from the consulate here was a bit bureaucratic and slow, but I got it earlier this week. I could have left here right away upon getting the visa, but after getting settled in here, I have felt no rush about leaving.
Chiang Mai is lovely... the people, the weather, the mountains, seeing my friend Dave, our relatively luxurious hotel (Hillside 4, $20/day), the view from my 8th floor balcony, and just enjoying the culture, the food and the energy of the place. I rented a scooter for transportation ($3.75/day); Driving on the left is an exercise in mindfulness. Our hotel has a nice pool, and I've been swimming laps every day since I got over my cold (which took a week, as it usually does). I have met several of Dave's circle of friends and acquaintances, and made a few friends of my own. We made a motorscooter excursion through the countryside to Chiang Dao, where we did some mountain hiking, explored some of the caves there, and visited a particularly beautiful and peaceful Buddhist monastery. I came back from that trip feeling serene and energized.
So the trip was hard, but it worked out fine. I am lingering here because I'm happy here. But there is still time in my itinarary to spend more than a week in India.
