Holy Hullabaloos, The Blog

Asheville: Yay!

So, our summer vacation this year is in Asheville, North Carolina.  I've wanted to come here for a long time, I think first of all because I kept seeing it coming up in all those "best places to live in the United States" lists and compilations.  The combination of mountains and fresh air and rivers and cool, historic, offbeat, lefty town seemed like a great recipe for fun.  Hell, if it was good enough for the Fitzgeralds to drink themselves into oblivion, it's good enough for me. And indeed it's as good as everyone says.  We've had a great time here so far.  Went swimming a couple of times.  Went to the Bele Chere street festival one day.  Spent a day in the Pisgah National Forest hiking and looking at waterfalls.  This picture here is of my son looking out for bears on the trail.  We're here for another week and hope to get to the Biltmore and who knows where else.

My son has gotten three "presents" from random people in the town of Asheville, and maybe these three encounters nicely represent the coolness of the town.  The first day we were here, we ate at some downtown restaurant, and I took Walter to the men's room (interesting side note here is that at some point around turning 5, Walter started really preferring to use the men's room than going with his mother to the ladies room. "I'm going to be a man, so I think I should use the men's room").  While he was in the stall, I did that awkward thing that parents sometimes have to do where they have to hang out in the bathroom not doing anything but also trying not to look like a creepy pervert.  You do this by saying things like "is everything OK?" over and over so that people know you have some reason to be in there (you really have to hope that the kid responds to you, however, else you seem like a lunatic in addition to a creepy pervert, especially when you start banging on the door screaming are you OK in there over and over to complete silence).  Well, this time there happened to be this other guy in there, dressed kind of weird, listening to headphones and not leaving after he finished washing his hands and whatnot.  I had no idea what he was doing.  When Walter came out of the stall, however, the guy showed him a magic trick with a quarter (it didn't go well, and Walter, a budding amateur magician himself, was unimpressed) and then put the quarter in Walter's shirt pocket.  He left and Walter and I looked at each other like "whoa, that was weird."  My wife, Walter's mother, let him keep the quarter, but only after she scrubbed it for half an hour with antiseptic.

Yesterday at the Bele Chere festival, we were sitting around listening to some blues music and relaxing when a man with a giant blue parrot on his shoulder came over and gave Walter a string of Mardi Gras-type beads.  That was cool.  Here's Walter with his beads.

 

Finally, a couple of days ago, we were all walking on this weird staircase downtown that leads to Wall Street when Walter suddenly fell like the stock market after the textile industry releases a somewhat weak quarterly report.  Note to grandparents, etc.: he's totally fine.  But he did fall down a few steps and bumped his head and got all kinds of scrapes on his arm and his nose and both his legs.  Now, Walter hates getting scrapes.  He has a real thing about keeping his body entirely intact and does not like it when the integrity of his body is breached in any way.  So a scrape is sort of like the end of the world for him.  As an example, while he was screaming and crying after the fall, one thing he said over and over was: "I WILL NEVER GET BETTER.  THE SCRAPES WILL NEVER HEAL."  I carried him down to the street and we sat on a bench and while Karen was getting out a couple of small bandaids that we happened to have with us, a random man came up to us and handed us a complete on-the-go first aid kit, with antiseptic and a giant enough bandaid to cover Walter's humungousical scrape on his right calf.  And then the guy just disappeared.  Yay, Asheville Angel guy.  Here are the steps Walter fell down:  

On Thursday July 30 at 7 pm, I'll be reading from Holy Hullabaloos, my church-state road trip comicomemoirotravelogue at Malaprop's Bookstore in downtown Asheville.  I went into the store the other day, and it's completely great.  Independent bookstores are without a doubt the best, and this one seems like one of the best of the best, up there with places like Kepler's in Menlo Park and Brookline Booksmith in my hometown.  If you're in the area on Thursday, I hope you'll consider coming down to the reading.  I'll make some jokes and if there are enough people there, I'll read a little something that didn't make it into the final book and that you can't find or read or see anywhere else. 

A Collection of Thoughts on Recent Reading and the Budapest Metro

I've been reading some good books lately.  Now I will tell you what those books are.  First I read Cameron Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a first edition of which my wife gave to me for my 40th birthday.  For those who don't know, the famous movie was in fact based on a non-fiction book that Crowe researched by going undercover as a high school student in San Diego as a 22-year old.  The book is very different from the movie in all sorts of ways, and although the movie is far more memorable, the book was pretty enjoyable too, though perhaps not worth the $250 that it sells for (my plan is, over the course of my lifetime, to get Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Forrest Whittaker, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the four cast members of FTRH who subsequently went on to get nominations for best actor/actress (the three men won the award) to sign the book, thus increasing its value to something approaching a Warhol Marilyn painting or so, and thereby justifying the ridiculous expense of getting the book in the first place). 

I continued my reading with another volume set in a high school, though this one wasn't quite as wacky: the new book about Columbine by Dave Cullen entitled, well, umm, "Columbine."  The whole Columbine event is so incredibly fascinating, and the book is riveting.  I think it took me an hour to read it or something (not really).  It turns out that if you're like me, and the information you recall about Columbine was gathered just from your run of the mill news reports, then almost everything you think you know about it is wrong.  For example, while there was a trench coat mafia at the school, Harris and Klebold weren't part of it.  And while you might tend to think of the two killers as a piece, they were in fact incredibly different kids.  If I gave stars to books whereby the stars represented how much I liked the book, then this book would get lots and lots of stars.

So would "Into the Wild," my next book.  Though I read "Into Thin Air" when that was out and hot, I somehow never read this one--nor saw the movie--and it was another riveting book, which I had to read in tandem with my wife because she picked it up and started looking at it and also couldn't put it down and was ahead of me the whole time and would do that thing of looking over your shoulder and seeing where you were in the book and saying, "oooooh, this is a good part, want me to tell you what happens?  oooooh."  Although of course the wilderness guy who died by himself in Alaska at 22 or whatever was totally different from Klebold and Harris in a million different ways, there were some similarities--young kids who thought they were totally unique and superior than almost everyone else and wrote and wrote and wrote about their uniqueness in journals they left for people to read after they were dead--and so reading this book after reading the Columbine one was particularly interesting.

Now I'm reading the novel "Lowboy" by John Wray about a schizophrenic kid who spends all his time in the NY subway.  It's fine, though I'm not really that into it yet.  Mostly, though, what it reminds me of, because it's set largely underground, is the great Hungarian movie "Kontroll" about the Budapest Metro, which takes place entirely and completely underground.  I learned about this movie because of what happened to me in Budapest.  My wife and son and in-laws and I were on a weekend trip in Budapest from Krakow where we were living.  Budapest is a splendid city, but its subway has this rule--unlike any other subway in the world I've ever been on, and I've been on a lot--that you have to pay for a separate ticket if you change lines.  We all changed lines, and in fact when we were going to the second line a subway worker looked at the ticket we had validated to get on the first line and waved us on, but when we went to exit, some not-officially-dressed guy and his sidekick asked to see our tickets and informed us in broken English that we were in violation of the rules for not getting a second ticket validated when we changed lines.  He said we owed him something like seventeen million dollars.

Okay, not seventeen million dollars. But maybe forty dollars each, so like 200 dollars.

If I had been traveling with my family, we are all scaredy cats and would have just given him the money or maybe even offered to give him more money than he asked for and also perhaps our shoes just to get out of there, but the thing about my wife and her family is that they do not like to give money to people when they feel they are being screwed.  And so I knew that we were going to argue with these guys until either they let us go or brought us to the firing squad.  We argued with them for probably forty minutes about how the guy in the station had waved us on after looking at our ticket, etc. etc., and I even called the US embassy for help, which was useless because I got some 26 year old on the line who couldn't have gotten himself out of a paper bag much less us out of a conflict with the fake Hungarian metro security guards.  We kept insisting that the guys call the police, and they kept saying they were going to, but they never did, which made us pretty confident that they were just screwing with us.  We became sure of this when they offered to let us go for half the money they had originally asked for.  Come on, who are you kidding?  Finally, after forty minutes the guy crumpled up our tickets, threw them on the ground, said "Go!" and then also yelled "US people not right!" 

I have to give my then-four-year old son credit for his patience.  He likes playing and stuff, but he doesn't generally like arguing with Hungarian pseudo-police for forty minutes.

Anyway, when we got back to Krakow, we told some European friends about the incident, and they told us that the Budapest Metro is notorious for this kind of thing, and that there are these semi-official guys who wander the stations and look at peoples' tickets and try to give them huge fines.  The only people who pay them are the scaredy-cat tourists like me when I'm not accompanied by my wife.  The movie "Kontroll" is about one of these guys, and so we watched it as soon as we could.  Again: lots of stars.

So I Went to Russia and Barfed a Lot

This past April I went to Russia, but it wasn't the first time I tried to go there.  Last spring when my family and I were living in Krakow, we had plans to end our 6 months in Europe by going to St. Petersburg and then to Moscow, where friends of ours live.  When I say "plans," I mean that we had plane tickets and hotels booked and caviar spoons polished and everything.  The only thing we didn't have were visas, but we didn't figure that would be a problem because we had a letter of invitation from the US Embassy in Moscow where my friend works and so what could be the problem?

Well, the first problem, it turned out, was that getting into the Russian consulate in Krakow was about as easy as getting into the recent U2 show at the Somerville Theater.  For one thing, the consulate is open just three days a week from something like eight a.m. to noon.  We showed up there one morning, all three of us, and remember this includes my at the time 4 year old son (for those w/o kids, I'll just point out that small children don't really like waiting on line for hours), and there was already a line down the block.  No problem, though, we figured, we didn't have anything to do that morning and how long could it possibly take for the line to move?  Answer: Pretty damned long.  They let only one person at a time into the consulate.  A buzzer goes off at the locked front door of the building and one person (or family) gets to go inside.  When the person comes out from doing their business, maybe 20 minutes later, the buzzer goes off and one more person gets to go inside.  So, slow.  We waited there in this line for maybe 3 hours and then it became noon and nobody else got to go in and so we went home.

The next time we showed up a little earlier and made it all the way to the front door (actually I think only Karen and Walter were there until the very end, as I had to go off to teach) when the consulate guy came out to inform everyone that the consulate was closed.  OK, that's a total of 6 hours in the line.  Finally, the next time we made it in after maybe 2 hours (for those doing the math, then, that's 8 hours total of standing in line).  We went up to the counter and told the guy we needed three tourist visas and gave him our letter of introduction.  He said: "US citizens have to apply for the visa in the US.  Can't apply in Poland.  Sorry."  (or maybe he didn't really say "sorry," I don't know).  This was the point where maybe we were supposed to slip him some cash and wink suggestively or show some thigh or something, we had no idea, and we weren't going to take any chances offering a bribe to a Russian official while living in Poland, and my thigh is kind of hairy and isn't so hot anyway, so we just said something like, "uhhh, can we have a visa please?" and he said "no" and so we said, "pleasey weasey?" and he said "no" and then we had no choice but to leave and cancel our plans to go to Russia and eat the $900 or whatever it cost for the plane tickets.

Two sidenotes to this are (1) the US has the same requirement for Russians--they have to apply for their US visas in Russia--so there's some equity there; and (2) we ended up going to Paris for two weeks where we stayed for cheap in a great apartment owned by relatives of friends, and so things turned out more than fine for us in the end because Paris, for those who haven't been, is frickin' glorious.

Anyway, we still wanted to go to Russia, and so my friend at the embassy hooked me up with the cultural attache there who hooked me up with three speaking engagements in Moscow for the end of April and so Karen and I made a working vacation out of it, handing Walter off to his grandparents in St. Louis for a week while we polished up our caviar spoons and vodka shot glasses once more.  We got there after the 10 hour flight, checked into our decent and not so expensive (in Moscow this means like $250/night) hotel, and went out for dumplings and beer.  We negotiated the metro and the street signs written in the Russian alphabet and the surprisingly difficult-to-cross streets and had a fun night out.

Then at four in the morning I started barfing and couldn't leave the hotel for three days.

At one point of particularly violent barfing, Karen said, "I'm getting out of here" and booked herself a different room in the hotel so she wouldn't catch whatever nightmare thing I had.  She did lots of solo sightseeing while I writhed around in bed and watched hour after hour after hour of the travel channel and tried to sip Sprite.  After a few days I was able to wobbily venture out to see a few things like St. Basel's from afar, the Kremlin, and a cool art museum, but mostly I was just a total mess.  Until Friday, when Karen went back to the states and I was scheduled to give my three talks about religion and law in the U.S.  By then I was pretty well, and the talks went great and were definitely the highlight of the trip, not that it would have taken much to be the highlight of this trip, I mean prior to the talks, the highlight had been drinking an entire glass of water without yakking, but still, the talks were fun, even though one student kind of accused me of being a propogandist for religion, which is weird since I'm an atheist.

The trip home was no prize either.  After 10 1/2 hours in the air, it turned out we couldn't land at O'Hare because of weather, so we were diverted to Minneapolis.  We had to sit on the runway or whatever for three hours while they gathered some customs people to get to the airport to meet us for the unscheduled landing.  During the three hours, two people had to be taken off the plane by paramedics--one for food poisoning (he looked like I had felt six days earlier) and one for heart attack symptoms.  Nice!  We finally got off the plane and through customs and then I got to spend the night in a lovely Day's Inn in Bloomington Minnesota before getting back to the airport the next morning for my 6 am flight.  I ended up getting back to Boston 36 hours after taking off from Moscow.  And did I mention that on the entire flight from Russia to the U.S. (including the three hours on the runway) my chair wouldn't recline because the guy sitting behind me was probably 6'6" tall and weighed 400 pounds and moaned the entire trip?

I still haven't had any caviar.

Sorry About the Snow Globe, Walter

Maybe it's best described as an example of federal overreaching, or perhaps it's actually evidence that the TSA is trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys, or maybe it can only be chalked up as one more casualty in the war on terror, but believe me, nothing anyone teaches you about parenting can prepare you to explain to your four year old son why the giant guy from the Transportation Security Administration was confiscating the snow globe that his grandma had just given him for Christmas.

Now, if I were one of these right wing libertarians or something, I guess I would rant and rave and say "see how the idiotic government is getting out of control" and "boy wouldn't it be great if we could abolish the education department" and "why can't we just adopt the flat tax" and all that sort of crap, but since I'm a bleeding heart liberal, I'll just say that although the man from the TSA was incredibly apologetic and kind, and explained exactly why he had to take the tiny little Christmas decoration, this was cold comfort to my son as he bravely tried to keep the hot tears from falling down his soft little cheeks.

Ice Hotel Picture

As a follow up to yesterday's post on my trip to the ice hotel in Quebec back in 2003, here's a picture  of my wife and I that night having a drink out of ice glasses. 

Memoir Monday: The Ice Hotel, February 2003

Here's an idea for a new invention: a breathalyzer contraption that you hook up to your computer and that stops you from making a purchase over some amount if your blood alcohol level is too high.  If such a thing had been on my computer in the fall of 2002, it would have prevented me from drunkenly spending some ridiculous amount of money to book one night for two in the Hotel de Glace--i.e., the Ice Hotel--in Quebec for February the following year.  In my defense, I had seen a photo spread of the thing in Conde Nast or something, and it looked great, and I knew it would be a trip of a lifetime.  My wife--bless her--went along without beating the crap out of me first.

Here's what I learned about the Ice Hotel from our night staying in the Ice Hotel: The Ice Hotel is very cold.  The night we were there, some insane record was set--something like negative 47 degrees Farenheit.  We did all the things you're supposed to do if you spend a night in the Ice Hotel: we went dancing to some weird band playing French rock music and Bryan Adams in the hotel's "Club Nice"; drank straight vodka out of glasses made out of ice; took lots of pictures of ourselves in giant coats with expressions on our faces that basically said: "boy are we idiots for spending a night in the ice hotel"; slept on a bed of ice covered with deer pelts in special sleeping bags; dreamt that we were stranded on Pluto; and got up in the middle of the night to use the bathrooms, which meant getting out of the special sleeping bags practically naked (you're not supposed to wear anything in the sleeping bags--somehow this makes you warmer) and getting dressed and leaving the Suite de Boise and going to the thank god heated bathrooms.  You might think that sleeping in the special sleeping bag would keep you pretty warm, but in fact it doesn't.  The sleeping bag keeps you from dying, yes, but let's face it, if you sleep in a hotel made out of ice on a bed made out of ice, you are going to be really, really, really cold no matter what.

The promotional materials promised that we would be given coffee in bed the next morning, but in fact this did not happen.  Instead we were told to get dressed and go up to the non-ice hotel lobby to get it, but when we got there they were already out of coffee.  So, in other words, we got totally screwed on the coffee.  Did I mention we were cold?  While we were sitting around trying to warm up a little, we talked to a couple who had spent not one but two nights in the ice hotel, I guess because they couldn't find anywhere else to stay for the second night.  That sounded worse than death. 

But one night?  Do I recommend it?  I don't know.  How many beers have you had?

A Cautionary Tale Regarding Time

This past spring, my family and I lived in Krakow, where I was teaching a class in U.S. church/state law at Jagiellonian University to a bunch of really terrific Polish students.  In April, I was invited to attend a special conference at the University where professors from Hebrew University and Hebron University were meeting to discuss various issues, including possibilities for future collaboration.  It was a very unique conference, since these professors could really only meet in some neutral country like Poland.  I was delighted to get an invitation to watch the proceedings, particularly because the opening session was going to be held in the Library of the Collegium Maius, which is a beautiful old building that dates back to something like the 14th Century.

The keynote speaker, who was to begin speaking at 3:00 p.m., was some famous previous member of the Knesset.  I arrived at the appointed time, but the proceedings were already underway.  I didn't know if perhaps I had been given an outdated schedule or what.  The famous guy was speaking in this glorious room and all the important people were listening intently, and there I was, shuffling in to find a seat, interrupting the whole gathering and looking like a total doofus, especially because the first little translation device I tried using didn't work and so I had to doofusly ask for a second one.

The next day, I had intended to attend another session of the conference, but when I showed up, it was clear from the sounds coming from behind the closed door that the panel was well underway.  I had no intention of barging in a second time, so I slinked away and went back to my office.

The next day, which was a Wednesday, I was scheduled to meet a few of my students for pizza at Krakow's best pizza place, Trzy Papryczki (Three Peppers). I showed up at 6:30, the time we had agreed on, and imagine how surprised I was to find that they had already eaten!  I mean, I was maybe two minutes late, but that didn't seem like a good reason for them to have ordered and eaten without me in those mere couple of minutes!  I showed them my watch, trying to point out that I was basically on time, and that's when they informed me that all the clocks in Poland had been turned ahead an hour the previous Sunday.  That's right, folks.  I realized that I had been living on the wrong time for four whole days.  Talk about feeling like a doofus.

Anyway, I tell you all this to remind you: This Sunday is the day we in the United States turn back our clocks.  Don't screw it up!