CHILLIN’ WITH FELLINI AND LUCINDA IN RIMINI, THEN HOME VIA ROME

The best thing about Rimini is Federico Fellini. He was born here and revisited periodically in his films, most notably ‘Amarcord’. A full twenty years before his death Fellini was already mining his memories for material, because for him Rimini was not so much a place as a ‘dimension of memory’. Ahhh… thank you, Federico, for foreshadowing me. How many times have I used that same phrase without knowing its precedent? There is a street here named for every film Fellini ever made, all in a row, even the ones where he served only as scriptwriter for Rosselini (e.g. Roma- Citta’ Aperta), and even some I’ve never heard of, curse me and my protracted periods of escape from civilization! Who better captured the zeitgeist of post-war Europe, especially Western Europe, especially Italy, the horror and sheer absurdity left to befall the world’s most advanced civilization after its mass fratricide and imaginary Maginot lines, henceforth only to be moved eastward to cordon off Slavic lands with a spur through Berlin? Antonioni maybe? Naahhh… Truffaut or Godard perhaps? No way. Bunuel maybe, but he pre-dates the war and includes Mexico in his oeuvre, so I respectfully avoid any comparison there.

And Fellini, as with Bunuel, accomplished his task without resort to pop music props or cheap shots across the bow of politics. He accomplished it through the heart, not intellect. Even my mother got it, may she r.i.p., though she never saw a Fellini film. When I compared our Sunday dinners to a Fellini movie, she got it. The concept that something was ‘Felliniesque’ was something that you just intuited; it couldn’t be explained. The fact that anybody could ‘get it’ is a tribute to our collective subconscious. The fact that something could be hilarious and horrible at the same time makes no rational sense, but it makes film sense, and it mirrors reality. Of course he had and still has many copycats. Get a group of Italian kids together and tell them to act like their parents and you’ve got a film right there. Of course it takes more than that to equal Fellini’s art.

But I’ve got more mundane decisions to make, i.e. do I stay or do I go? The weather’s good, so warm in fact that I have to open my hotel window to let the radiator heat escape. I certainly wasn’t having that problem across the water in Croatia… what was it… less than a month ago? It seems like a lifetime. It’s so warm I buy a gelato and walk down the street slurping it like I’d almost forgotten how. My hotel room’s okay, if small, but they charge by the hour for Internet. That grates heavily against my modern sensibilities. I don’t like to use Internet with the meter running. That ain’t surfing; that’s swimming laps. In countries like Italy, and many others with a technology gap, to get Internet with your room you’ve got to go to the most expensive hotels or the cheapest hostels. Go figure. So where do I go? Jammin’ Party Hostel, $36 total and all the Internet I can surf, right in the privacy of my room. That’s convenient. Price is almost the same, except Net instead of TV. There’s no heat, but that shouldn’t matter. Rimini doesn’t come alive until summer, you see, so heat’s not an issue except in the ‘aperto tutto l’anno’ places. Many shops and restaurants don’t open until summer. It must be zoo-illogical by then.

Of course the weather turns cooler the minute I make my move. Without sun this California beach playground quickly becomes an Oregon beach playground, sun burning off late in the day if at all. And hostels are pot luck by definition, so when the players for the Ultimate Frisbee Championship come to town everybody else has to move to a satellite location for the duration. It’s not like there’s any shortage of rooms. This town is nothing but rooms… and other tourist ephemera, e.g. beachwear, fast food, and playgrounds for kids. There are even British pubs here, one of the U.K.’s most famous exports, along with pot-bellied pub owners. They’ve also got automats here; remember them? You probably don’t if you never lived in New York City in the 1960’s. I never saw them any other place or time… until now. I can vividly remember that being one of the first things we went looking for during our trip to the 1960’s World’s Fair, like Mississippi hicks looking at fast food behind plexiglass and going, “Gawww… lee! Shazaam (two syllables)!”

What has all this got to do with Lucinda? Well, she was here; or at least her voice was, blasting out across the street from the most unlikely of white satin/chrome/glass eating & drinking establishments. I couldn’t believe it. I stood there and listened to “The way you move…” until it finished, and then got ready for “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” (and I don’t even like the smell of bacon; hate it in fact). It didn’t happen. It was just a one-off, but still that’s significant, to me at least. Surely these people can’t really understand what she’s talking about. I mean you can’t really understand what Lucinda Williams is talking about unless you’re from Lake Charles… or Nacogdoches… or Jackson… but still they get it. How do I know that? Because of all the diverse music to emanate from my CD/MP3 player in northern Thailand, guess which one always got a response? Guess. Lucinda won invariably, every time. Interestingly, like Fellini she also works from memory, relentlessly mining it for language and texture and nuance… but most of all feeling, just like Fellini.

So Rimini’s not SoHo, North Beach, Amsterdam, Berlin, Chelsea, the West Bank, the Left Bank, the Central Bank, Ginza, Gaza, Interzone, or any of the other cool hip groovy dangerous ungodly places in the history of the world, just a beach town with plenty of rooms… and oh yeah, they’ve got plenty of cheap Chinese instant noodles here, the sons of Zheng He having long since arrived with their fleets of Chinese junk(s). Between that and whole roast chicken for $5+change, I’m content… at least for a week. Unfortunately they don’t have blood (red) oranges, which I’d wanted the seeds from to take back. I’ve been saving it for last- bad idea. All they’ve got here are the navel variety. Why would I come to a beach town for navels? The tomatoes are good, no small feat for store-bought. They’ve got ‘that smell’ that you usually only get walking through the garden and brushing up against the leaves, maybe because they’ve still attached to each other by the vine. Maybe that’s WHY they’re still attached to each other.

Oh well, in a few days I’ll be home eating ribs (ha!) and making plans to do it all over again, some other place and some other time, in this case the Horn of Africa /Anatolia /Scandinavia. I’m on a roll. I got my ticket back to Roma today, so it’s just a matter of time until I catch my flight back to LA. Till then I’ll just watch the Frisbee championships and walk the beach and arrange and rearrange words as if I were God playing with DNA and… I just found out it’s Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter, the whole schmear! I’d have never known if someone hadn’t told me. You can’t tell it from any increased activity around churches or such. I guess that’s a sign of the times. All I see at the churches are obituaries hung up for notice. Happy Easter.

Finally on Easter Sunday I get a glimpse of Rimini the way it must look during summer, gridlocked with weekend revelers, general chaos and major mayhem. They claim to have a tradition of sunrise breakfast when all the previous night’s party fools chow down before going home. They also claim to have had a party bus shuttling people around the clubs all night, operational for the last twenty years, a fact they’re proud of. Wow! With ‘traditions’ like these, who needs degeneracy? It even starts to warm up a bit again finally. Maybe my clothes will dry after all. Temps are about exactly the same as LA on the western side of the globe where I triangulate myself, where love lies waiting if there’s a God. It’s supposed to be up around 30C-86F there by Sunday. YEOW! I know somebody who’ll like that. Then the day after the holiday’s over here, WHOOSH! It’s like a ghost town again, people gone back to work, and the gelato prices come back down ten percent, yummmm…

The Ultimate Frisbee championship is over and all the bozos have gone home to their own American and European countries, including Russia and Ukraine. Apparently the US won the big awards. There are miles of beach just waiting for the next holiday, then the Big One… August! I won’t be here, couldn’t take it if I were. Italians are like Thais; they like crowds. I don’t. Sometimes I think that the world is divided into two types- warm countries and cool countries. They talk on cell phones ALL the time; we don’t. We like ‘the other’; they like each other. Think beaches are ‘freer’ on the Adriatic Riviera, full of nude women strolling past you like Paz Vega in that movie whose name I can’t remember? Naah, not here, the only fur showing here is around the necks of fashion frou-frous strolling the shopping strip as the sun goes down and the cool night takes over. The beach itself by that time has drive-up campers jockeying for curb space as they ready the kids for bed and make sure the noodles are al dente. It might as well be Corpus Christi. I think the nudest beaches are in Spain, with an axe to grind against the Pope, or maybe a cross to bear. There was a funny commercial a few years ago where guys on the beach dreamed of America, where ugly women were forced to cover up. Tomorrow I catch the train to Roma; next day I catch the plane for LA. I’m outta’ here.

On the train I’m thinking I should re-think my previous attitudes toward Italy, and France too, after previous problems. France was not so much a problem, just an attitude toward foreigners or dissatisfaction at its own decreased status in the world that annoyed, but ITALY… now you’ve got to count your change carefully there. They overcharge and short-change to an extent that would make a North Vietnamese blush… then smile. Of course that’s in direct proportion to the number of tourists in the area you’re in, whether it’s high season for tourism or low, and whether you’ve been ‘made’ as a tourist. If the vendor gets a little shit-eating grin as he pulls out his calculator, look out! You’ve still got time to change your mind. I’ve had direct experience of this in Venice, in Rome, and even on trains, all in one week! But I’ve had no problem the past week or so in Rimini. People seem as sweet and nice as they could possibly be.

I knew if I waited one more day to finish this, then I’d have one more chapter. So when we pull into the station at Roma Termini, I decide to go ahead and buy my ticket to the airport for the next day. It’s €11. I put my money in the machine. It takes the €10 note, but eats the €1 coin, nothing showing in the count. I press the return button, but no luck. So finally I cancel and it spits me out a credit slip, instead of cash. *&^%$#@! Now I have to go stand in line, the very thing I wanted to avoid! There I lay down the credit slip and a €5 note, but the guy needs to see my documents for the re-imbursement, so I breathe deep, cross my fingers, and lay down my US passport. After the requisite signatures and flurry of button-pushing he hands me my ticket and a 1€ coin in change.

No way, dude. “Altro tre’ Euro,” I blurt. He feigns a look of surprise, like ‘Huh?’ “Ti ho dato cinque; resta altro tre’ Euro,” I assert rather boldly in Italian that may or may not be correct. He fumbles with his hands and change, and then thumps down another three coins. ‘Ha! You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on Hardie K,’ I think to myself as I walk to my hotel. Simple mistake or attempted rip-off, you decide. Then as I dump my change out on the desk back in my room I look at one of the coins closer. It’s a 100 CFA Franc coin, currency for several countries in Western Africa, but not much good anywhere else, almost identical in appearance to €1, just lighter in weight. Now I don’t remember the exchange rate, but I’m betting it’s worth less. Somebody woke up earlier than me today I guess. And this is Trenitalia, the national train company, for God’s sake! Things like this leave a bad taste. Welcome to Rome. Oh well, the rest of Italy is still nice, except Venice, same deal. I’ve still up-graded France on my list, and as fate would have I just might be going to those French-speaking CFA countries later this summer. This two-month trip came in at less than $3000, so I’m good financially, cost me more to live in LA.

The rest of the trip is uneventful. I go see the ruins of the Colosseum at sunset. I catch the plane the next day. Immigration and Customs are a breeze. Maybe they’ve got a new poster boy. There are rocking chairs in the Philadelphia airport. I rent a Mustang, see friends and run errands in San Fran. I catch my final flight to LA. I’ll hang here and TJ for a week then go to Seattle for the Seattle World Rhythm Festival. Then I’ll head for Ethiopia, go to the Selam Music Festival there, get my visa for Somaliland, Djibouti, etc., no big deal, just another day on the job. See you there.

TALE OF TWO BEACHES

Coming to France from Italy is like entering another dimension. The language becomes soft and swirly instead of clipped and crispy. So does the food. The pizze and panini (that’s plural, Homeboy; trust me) become crepes and quiche. It’s raining when I first arrive, but the sun comes out almost immediately in some sort of sympathetic magic. The Africans are selling sunglasses, not umbrellas. I think they’re all from the same hometown (the Africans not the umbrellas). The only common culinary denominator is the cheese and bread. Being an American, where bread is a minor component of any meal, except in sandwich form, I never realized the historical importance of it until I went to Thailand, where they constantly compare its importance to that of rice for them. And they’re right; I just never knew it. Of course I might have if we’d had better bread in my childhood. Pasteurized homogenized Bimbo white just doesn’t cut it. Fortunately we’ve largely returned to our Northern European roots in that respect, whole-grain brown and rich with flavor. Ditto for cheese, may Velveeta rest in peace. Finding brown rice in Bangkok is getting easier also btw, right there in the buffet line at Siam Square and almost any vegetarian ‘jay’ restaurant. You heard it here first. Cheese is still practically unknown there. Pigs are well-known of course, but not in ‘jay’ restaurants.

So in Cannes I immediately start looking for some Chinese stuff, food that is, since I obviously have a thing for it. We won’t talk about that other ‘thing’. It’s there, Thai too, but it ain’t cheap. Thais love places like this, sunny and superficial, so they’re here in force. Odd thing is, I kinda’ like it, too. It may be pricey in high summer, but not now, cheaper than LA and right close to the beach. I manage to find the most untypical place of course, down a long winding narrow off-center corridor which I finally find after immediately getting lost right out of the train station. That’s what happens when the tourist office is closed and I don’t have a map. It’s not deluxe but I’ve got wi-fi and a market close by. The market is incredible, too, vegetables and fruits and mushrooms that I didn’t even know existed. I’m in heaven, or as close as I can get without a Chinese takee-outee. And I’m warm for the first time in months. This is the French Riviera, deluxe apartments lining the beach and yachts lining the coast. There’s even a section for ‘historical’ boats, sailing rigs from times gone by, still ready to work, the teak only growing more beautiful with age. When I’m not in my room booking my June Scandinavian trip by Internet, I take long walks on a beach that extends to the horizon, punctuated by rocky outcrops and snack bars.

There’s supposed to be an African film festival in town, and I show up at the appointed places at the appointed times, but I’ll be damned if I can find anything festive going on, nor even any schedule, nothing. Festivals are supposed to be festive! That means balloons, flashing lights, etc. This is Cannes for God’s sake, home to the biggest film festival in the world! If I have to ask questions to find it, then something’s wrong. That’s the second time in as many weeks that a film festival has gone dud on me. Don’t they realize some people take this stuff seriously, even travel to attend? Fortunately all is not lost, though I don’t think this is the epiphany I’m looking for, i.e. the cheap chill spot to climax on. Rimini in Italy on down the line looks good, too, so I may have to go check that out while there’s still time before the trip home from Rome (homa from Roma?) mid-April. Since it’s the connection point for San Marino, another of those 192 countries on my list, I really have no choice. Frou-frou French dogs won’t give me the time of day here, either, the pure-bred snobs. Give me an old yellow dog any time, hybrid vigor and the works, please. Hold the mustard. Who needs these psychotic store-bought poodle pronto pups anyway? They couldn’t catch a rabbit if their pathetic lives depended on it.

Daylight savings time has gone too far. We’re barely past equinox and the sun is already setting at 8pm here. I guess I won’t have to go to the Arctic Circle to see the midnight sun. Just move the clock up like they do in China, and put Urumqi on Beijing time. That’s not the deal though, of course. The deal is to see the sun above the horizon all day long, just rimming the edge and rising up on a tilt to do it again without ever really setting. You need to get above the Arctic Circle around summer solstice for that, though, and given the price of accommodation in northern Norway, that may not happen any time soon. If I have a Russian visa for the Black Sea anyway, though, and it happens to be multiple entry… Murmansk is the largest city above the Arctic Circle anywhere in the world, and strangely enough Russia’s only ice-free port (with the help of ice-breakers) with unrestricted access to the Atlantic Ocean.

I get back on the train, still looking for my epiphany, next stop Rimini. To do that, I’ve got to go up to Milano, then back down through Bologna. Italy is so narrow, you’d think that crossing it would only be a question of where. But as they say, all roads lead to Rome. That’s because the Romans built all the roads of course, but small consolation for me. It’s like tacking a sailboat back and forth to get where you’re going. Fortunately railroads were built in a more modern era. Sometimes I think that the glory that was Rome was nothing more than one giant construction project. Almost every town in the Balkans had at least one Roman bridge, the ‘Rimski Most’. They’re still standing, many of them. Almost no roads were built between the Roman era and the advent of the bicycle, except for the Inca Trail in another world unbeknownst. That’s over a thousand years, a MILLENIUM for God’s sake. Of course that has more to do with the advent of the stirrup and alfalfa than the decline of Western Civilization. Sometimes we DO indeed get the cart before the horse, at least when it comes to riding bareback.

Did you ever imagine what Italy might be like without all the baggage of history, without all the tourists, or I should rather say ‘all the foreign tourists’? It just might be Rimini. Rimini harkens back to a day when beaches were for fun, just pure dumb kids’ fun, long before all the eco-tourism or the fashion promenades along the boardwalk. There’s little or nothing here for cultural tourism, just more hotels than you can shake a stick at, whatever that means. I’m not sure I’d want to see it in the height of summer. It must just be an anthill of sunburnt tourist butts strolling down the streets in search of pizze and gelati and giochi for the kids to play. But right now it’s okay, almost like a ghost town. I don’t like to hang around when the party’s over, but I don’t mind it when it’s just getting started, everybody painting and refreshing and remodeling, even though we’ve all got our fingers crossed, all of us, knowing that the people who get hurt in hard economic times like these are not the ones who caused it; it’s the rest of us with bills to pay and kids to feed. Pray to ‘em if you got ‘em, gods that is. And book your travel last minute this season if you’ve got the option; last-minute deals are opening up.

This isn’t exactly what I had in mind for my epiphany/climax/whatchamacallit for this trip, but then neither was Vina del Mar nor Montego Bay for the last two. Hmmm… there seems to be a pattern forming here. Do I like provincial tourist resorts that are maybe just slightly past their prime? I’ll save the existential musings for later. Right now I’ve got a country to catch, San Marino that is, should be about number 80 on my list, almost half way, give or take a medieval principality or two. San Marino lies at the top of a hill about an hour out of Rimini, and if Rimini’s got the hotels, then San Marino’s got the castles, eight or nine at last count. But who’s counting? There are some good views there, but not much more than that for me. Shopping is not my favorite sport. Sex is, but I prefer the home court advantage, so it’ll have to wait. I’ve still got another week or so in Italy to kill and I have to decide where to kill it. Decisions decisions, life’s hard. The problem with Italy is Internet, or lack thereof. Search for hotels in Rome on Expedia and you’ve got thirty pages to peruse. Specify ADSL and you’re down to seven or eight real fast. This is a country for which the great paradigm shift of the last decade is cell phones, not Internet. They’re not the only ones. At least I’ve finally got a day over 20C-68F on this trip here in Rimini, so for the moment I’m content. Decisions will have to wait… until tomorrow.

ESCAPE FROM THE COLD COLD ALPS

The train offers a unique and spectacular view of the Swiss landscape. The more pressure Africa puts on Europe the more these mountains just keep rising skyward, while renegade India covers the eastern flank doing the same thing in the Himalayas, sliding in and under like trying to steal a base. But for me Switzerland is defined by its lakes, not its mountains. They’re everywhere, pacifying the violent rugged landscape. It’s like a movie where the actors are natural landmarks and the acts are tectonic movements, all occurring in geologic time. It’s like a movie in 360 degree Sensurround happening right outside the train window, for Europe is defined by its train travel, too. Buses are typically only local here. It’s like a movie where all of Europe plays a partial supporting role, each major nation occupying a corner of the country and meeting somewhere in the middle. There’s a reason Switzerland is historically neutral. It has to be, with component German, French, Italian, and Romansch ‘other’ sections. This is Europe in microcosm, their pride and their prejudice, their heart and their handicap. While Switzerland learns four languages, America and the English-speaking countries create the popular culture that the world lives on, that serves as its operating system.

We’re moving into the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland now, a part I’ve only seen briefly before, crossing the border at Chiasso. Borders are only a formality now, and not even much of that, maybe a Customs or Immigration officer looking at a passport or poking a bag, MAYBE. Sometimes they don’t even wear uniforms, just flash a badge. It’s only a few minutes to Milano from here, where I catch the train to Torino. The industrial heart of Italy doesn’t offer too much more than that, if I remember correctly, though it was one of the great new cities of the Middle Ages, along with Paris and London. That’s young by Italian terms. I’m traveling light now for the first time this trip, all my road food gone and no reservation for the night. Whether I’d have made the reservation if I’d had the Net to do it, I’m not sure, but I won’t pay the price of a meal to use the Net for an hour unless it’s absolutely necessary. I still don’t know why the cost of living can be so high in some countries in Europe, typically cold low-population Germanic ones, and not others. I’ve almost decided it’s all ultimately based on real estate values, but I’m still not sure, and that in and of itself doesn’t really answer much. Why is the real estate expensive? Italians complain bitterly about prices going up with adoption of the €uro, and that seems correct, perhaps explained by an increase in real estate values, or just merchants taking advantage.

At least trains are cheaper in Italy, but nothing fancy like those in some other countries. The clickety-clack of rails and tracks is hypnotic and soon I catch myself nodding off. Then I catch everybody else nodding off. Exccept for one or two people, THE ENTIRE COACH IS ASLEEP! I feel better and cop another wink. People ask me what I do to pass the time on trains. I nod. Outside the sky is clouding up and soon it’s raining. At least it’s not cold like Zurich. The sun is still high in the sky and we’re running on schedule so I’m not too worried about finding a room. I only worry if it’s late and/or a weekend and/or high season. Worst I’ve ever done was a $129 room close to Stansted Airport outside London. Ouch! At least they picked me up, nice of them since I was half dead already, rigor mortis setting in and that smell emanating. I almost booked a $60 place in Torino several days ago from Ljubljana, but hesitated on the final click, deciding to keep my options open. I may regret that decision. If I’m lucky they’ll have a booking service at the train station. They do. I request a place with wi-fi but back off that quickly to keep the cost done and snag a place for $50+change. Italy still considers Internet a luxury, not a necessity, another reason to go with hostels. They’ve always got Internet if not wi-fi, usually free. Why not? They don’t pay by the hour any more than the hotels do for TV. Internet spots in Italy tend to get lumped and marketed with video games and other juvenile pursuits, like Thailand where Internet is considered play, not work.

By now of course it’s pouring down rain, but at least my place is close, or at least not TOO far. The nice lady there asks if I can speak Italian but before I can explain my twenty-five percent-and-rising level, she proceeds to proceed with her 30% Simplified English, filling in the gaps with extra thick linguistic molasses, sweet nothingness the consistency of axle grease, but so gooey you don’t want to bust her chops, since this is something she obviously loves to do. That’s okay, Psycholinguistics 102; I’ll be conversational in both French AND Italian by the end of this trip, Insh’allah. My main problem now is that I’m ssstttaaarrrvvviiinnnggg, since I had no time to eat in Milan. I’ve got to get a ticket for a train tomorrow to Cannes also, so I’ll grab something on the way. There the ticket seller can’t or doesn’t want to speak English, so we do that in Italian, my confidence growing. At least the street food is reasonably priced again and the pizza is made by real Italians, so I get into the Italian fast food swing, pizzerias and pasticcherias, talking funk and eatin’ junk. Other than that I try to see what I can of the city in the short time I have, a city made famous by a Winter Olympics a few years ago, and trying hard to live up to its fame. Tourism is way up in the Piemonte, they say. Italy has so many interesting places, it’d be hard to see them all in a lifetime. The few images I have here will have to suffice. My train leaves early tomorrow morning and I’m dead tired from an early departure from Zurich this morning, so when I click the light and hit the pillow… zzzzzz…

Somewhere there’s a beach, warm and sunny, with all the fresh fruit I can eat, sweet and sour, and a fat ol’ massage mama ready to pounce on my back and pound the kinks out of me, pound the kinks out of my tortured psyche, turn me into mush… aaahhh… I’m melting… Then the clouds begin to roll in and the sky grows black. But it doesn’t rain; it snows. Everybody packs up and goes back to from where they came, but I don’t know where to go, so I just get on a train going to some place I’ve only heard of, written in an alphabet I can’t read, everybody speaking a language I can’t speak. All I know is that I’m heading south. I know that by the location of the sun. But instead of getting out of the snow it just keeps falling harder. And instead of going downhill, we’re going up, past cactus and agave, juniper and sage, into tall straight pines and tall smoking chimneys. ‘Welcome to Flagstaff’. That’s what the sign said as we hit a bump in the track. That’s the last thing I remember as the screen goes black.

When I wake up we’re stopped on the tracks somewhere. It’s snowing. The sign on the train station says ‘Limone’. Well there’s a contradiction in terms, ‘Limones’ in the snowy mountains. It’s beautiful, though, I’ll have to admit, even though my main objective right now is just to get warm. I’ve been gone a month and a half on this trip, been to Tunis, Malta, and Athens, and have yet to see a day of 20C-68F. Now it’s snowing again as I head south. Oh boy! Then we go through a long tunnel and the other side is like another dimension, like we traversed a cosmic worm-hole. Snow is gone and a different language occupies the signs lining the tracks, lining the roads, lining the walls of my perception. Welcome to France. We straddle the border for a while, even changing trains again in Italy, but that line continues to define, even more so down the road. Soon the loudspeaker announces ‘next stop Monaco/Monte Carlo’, and then we enter another tunnel. When we stop I get a brief glimpse of the country of Monaco outside, one of 192 that are members of the UN and therefore on my list. Otherwise why would I be here? I’m just passing through on my way to Cannes and the south of France of such world renown. Though it hardly sounds like ‘me’, that’s a changing and ongoing concept, subject to constant revision. When you travel constantly, some comfort and superficial attractions are welcome. Welcome to Cannes.

NIGHT TRAIN TO ZURICH

I’ve woken up partially several times throughout the night, starting as we entered Austria and the ticket checker wanted to see tickets. That must have been Villach. That’s when the bozos got on and started reading something in German that must have been hilarious, since everybody was laughing so hard. I don’t know why getting on a train means it’s party time. I just wanted to sleep. That’s not easy when the seats don’t lean back and all the lights are on. Fortunately no one’s sitting next to me so I tie my scarf around my eyes and go for oblivion. That’s AFTER taking my secret sleeping pill. If I want to pass out fast and hard I just start studying Arabic; puts me out like a light, every time. I don’t know why. I wake up drooling and my Arabic language book’s on the floor somewhere. Don’t try this with your laptop. We’ve been stopped a while now. I wonder where we are. WE’RE IN FELDKIRCH! That’s where I had originally planned to get off to go visit Lichtenstein until I found out that the train goes right through Lichtenstein already. Sounds good to me. But that means that I’ve slept the whole way through Austria! Sure enough there’s a little glow on the horizon, meaning the sun’s starting to rise. It all starts to make sense.

The train lurches to a start and I get my last chance for a glimpse of Austria; sho’ is purty. Next thing I know we’re approaching another town but don’t slow down at the train station. The sign whizzes by- ‘Schaan-Vaduz’- that’s Lichtenstein! Then we cross a river and approach another town. This time the train slows down and we pull to a stop at the station. The sign says ‘Buchs, Switzerland’. So much for Austria and Lichtenstein. I’m glad I saw the little I got to see. I may have even passed through Austria before in the night, on the way from Prague to Budapest five years ago, but to this day am not sure. The sun’s rising higher now and a Matterhorn-like peak comes into sight, craggy pyramid like a golden eagle’s beak shining in the sunlight. I thought there might be a lot of snow on the ground since we got so much rain in Ljubljana the last couple days, but there’s none, plenty on the hills, though.

Now that I’m officially out of the Balkans it might be a good time to reflect on the highlights and low points. Yesterday certainly wasn’t a high point, being stuck inside all day because of the rain. It’s better than being stuck outside in it of course. Late night rides are always problematic, killing time waiting before, then trying to function normally the day after. The savings of a night’s rent isn’t always worth it. Then while I was waiting some local guy comes up and gives me a hard luck story about how he only needs €2.70 to get home, and nobody will help him. Since I was feeling good I wanted to believe him. In the US I’d never give money for a hard-luck story to some slob with a slur, but this guy seemed so neat and spoke such good English… I saw him again about two hours later. I guess he missed his train. This time he slides right past without so much as a glance. I know that vacant look, that studied gait, every step a calculated risk, every second a calculated eternity, an algebra with no variables. JUNKIE! He’d lie to his mother to get what he wants, then forget it just as fast. That’s why he’s hitting on strangers in the bus station. But you know all that. Remember Samuel L. Jackson in Jungle Fever? So I decide to follow the guy into the ticket office and see if by some chance he’s actually buying a ticket, but… he’s gone, disappeared, vanished!

Then there was the guy at the bus station in Pristina, Kosovo. I was waiting for the bus when a nice-looking woman comes and sits a few seats away. Well not three minutes have passed until Vitalis man comes putting the moves on, purring sweet nothings under the radar. She blows him off, but politely, much too politely. Does he know something I don’t? Maybe she IS working, but… the bus station? The friend she’s waiting for soon shows up and sits down, so that should quell the rumors, but Vitalis man just gets up and moves a few steps away, lurking watching waiting. I’ve never seen anything like it, like something straight out of the Discovery Channel. The closest thing I’ve ever seen in real life was when Nonay was in heat back in Thailand and Kanoon had to hang right with her till lockup, and even after to make sure no other suitor got in his two cents. Dogs are like that. But this is a HUMAN; at least I think. Thoroughly disgusted I go get on my bus, which is now waiting at the platform. Then not ten minutes have passed until Vitalis man gets on, too! Vitalis man sits right behind me chewing gum so loudly I can’t think. What was he going to do with woman in his spare ten minutes, take her to the bathroom?

Fortunately most of the scenery and the characters were a little more pleasing esthetically. Tops of the list of places would probably be Dubrovnik in Croatia, Mostar in Hercegovina, and Ljubljana in Slovenia, vivid combinations of history, culture, and architecture without so many distractions that all that gets obscured. Tourist high season in summertime might be different. There is more diversity than might be immediately apparent, divergences in time and space amongst people with a common history, up to a point. Slovenia and Croatia could fit right into Western Europe without missing a beat while Serbia struggles to throw off its past, Bosnia struggles to cling to its own, and Albania struggles to pull itself together after dodging bullets for most of the last two thousand years. Bulgaria has ‘sex shops’ to rival Amsterdam and ‘escort’ TV ads till early morning. Dubrovnik even has a nude beach, while not so many miles up the road their cousins in Mostar kneel in prayer on Turkish kilims and loudspeakers call the faithful to prayer five times a day.

It certainly puts the rise of Islam in context, a reaction to permissiveness in the West, an unjust Hindu caste system, and Buddhist passivity to it all. I can’t help but think that this is the image Ahmedinijad and others have of the West. Obviously he ain’t been to Jackson. At least the West’s being honest. If he thinks Iran has no gays he doesn’t know his own country very well. It was a haven for gays before Khomeini, and I doubt they’ve all left, though many have I’m sure. It’s punishable by death I believe. You can’t enforce sexuality, though Islam certainly tries. I just saw the BBC debates on ‘Arab Unity’. Not once did anyone question why this was even desirable, nationalism being essentially systematic racism. What’s wrong with Arab diversity? Palestinians are the sacrificial lamb for racist ‘Arab unity’. Their problems will never be solved as long as they’re an international issue, not a local one. Thai Muslims tell me that Jews are their enemy. I tell them that that’s absurd, too polite to tell them that they’re stooges for political manipulation. But I’ll tell you. ‘Islam’ might mean ‘surrender’ religiously, but hardly even the most minor compromise politically. Still I credit Islam for removing personality from religion; they’re way ahead on that count. Of course Arabs and Muslims are two different groups, but the fact that the former fits mostly into the latter only intensifies the issues.

When the train finally pulls in to Zurich, the immediate impression is one of shock. The prices are stratospheric! That’s in the upper stratosphere, right at the stratopause, next to the mesosphere, where temperatures are supposedly about the same as on the ground here. After all the urban legends about the price of coffee in Tokyo or New York, and their subsequent de-bunking by people who have actually left the airport, I assure that a cup of coffee of any kind or flavor will cost you at least three bucks in Zurich. You can quote me. Prices here are as high or higher than any I’ve ever seen, and that includes Reykjavik. I haven’t been to Lagos yet, but I’m in no rush. It’ll be next-to-last, right before Israel. Some Muslim countries won’t let you in with Israeli stamps in your passport. This is where a hostel can save you some real money, since no hotel has rooms for less than a hundred bucks, or have long been booked up. In Western Europe there are guests in hostels even older than me! This is reassuring.

So the big goal in Zurich is to try to spend as little money as possible. In fact, I’m so put off by the high prices that I decide right then and there that I just won’t spend any, or less than usual, anyway. That’ll show ‘em who’s boss. Already I’ve booked a dorm room in the hostel instead of a private room there or somewhere else. Half the time I even end up paying for two just to get the private room since many don’t have ‘singles’. The concept doesn’t exist in the US. We don’t have rooms that small. Except for M6 it’s the same price whether one person or two. A room is just a room and a bed a certain size; how many people you put in it is another issue. There are no ‘kings’ or ‘queens’ either, just twins or doubles, one big bed or two little ones. This is boring, right, but how often do you sleep in a dorm? It’ll make you think. The nice thing about hostels is that you sometimes meet interesting people. The bad thing is that sometimes they feel like the downtown mission, this one especially, both for the institutional floor plan and the people staying there. It seems they’ve got the rooms divided by age, for whatever that’s worth. At least it’s got a kitchen. That helps in a pricey place. They’ve got thick brown breads, too, so that looks like the ticket. I’ll buy a loaf of bread and eat up all the leftover food I’ve been accumulating for the last week. That’ll work for me.

Zurich itself is interesting enough, but hardly the place for someone trying to get warm. The clock towers are almost like a cliché come to life and testament to a mechanical age that’s long been superseded by an electronic and digital one. Should somebody put up a full-fledge digital clock tower? I don’t think they could compete with video screens. I’m glad I only booked one day here. It’s too cold. I suspect some of these other ‘backpacker’ tourists are really here looking for work. With prices this high, wages must be astronomic, highest in the world I believe. So I get a train ticket for Torino (Turin), Italy, where I’ll stay a night, then continue on to Cannes, France, determined to get warm or die trying. It was either that or book straight through and spend half the night in the Milano or Torino train stations. Even I’M not THAT hard core.

COST OF SINSEMILLA IN ZAGREB, COST OF SUCCESS IN LJUBLJANA

And God saw that man was hungry, so on the eighth day God created ham. And it was red. And ham was lonely, so God created cheese. And it was white, sometimes yellow. And the rest is history. Ham and cheese together proceeded to conquer the world, spreading far and wide, forever occupying the hearts and minds and bellies of their patrons. But is it halal? Is it kosher?

All I really want is a real meal, complete with rice and soy sauce and fresh-cut veggies kissing the wok with light hot licks. My stomach’s growling, but I’m so bored with bread and cheese that I don’t bother to eat. I eat a lot of apples, but that’s boring, too. Such are the whinings of the not-so-intrepid traveler. They used to say that the way to a man’s heart is through is his stomach, and while that may or may not be PC-OK to say in reference to women any more, it certainly applies to geography. I’ve been spoiled by years in Asia, with fresh hot cheap healthy (?) food readily available on the street, or close to it. European-style bakeries are nice for a change, but really can’t compete in the long run. Pizza makes a valiant try to be the universal standard fast food, but with mixed results. When they start coming out of bakeries, not pizzerias, complete with ketchup on top like I’ve seen here, I start looking elsewhere. I think I’ve even seen mayonnaise on them here, but I don’t want to know any more than that.

I almost got run over crossing the street in Zagreb because I thought I saw a Chinese restaurant on the other side, but it was a false alarm. Then I found a real one, but the prices were in geo-stationary orbit over Iceland. I’ll survive without it I guess. At least the veggie pizza here has broccoli, and there seems to be local cuisine with some of the same names as those in Bosnia, so I may venture into the restaurant fray if I find one with a ventilator. But the real food story of this trip is about blood oranges. I discovered them in Italy, found them again in Tunis, then Mladen had some from home in Dubrovnik, and now I find them in Zagreb. Is this something radiating outward from Italy? Why haven’t I ever seen them in Asia or South America, places with many sizes and types? Thailand even prides itself on refining oranges to the ultimate sweetness and the thinnest skin and the least fiber possible (any comparison to their women would be inappropriate since my wife is Thai. If we ever break up, then look out!).

Well this sounds like an opportunity for the enterprising adventurer, so I imagine myself taking carefully selected seeds back to Thailand and starting a new life as an orchard magnate. When I see them in the market today, in varying degrees of redness, I figure there’s no time like the present so invest in a kilogram (Th. ‘lo’) of them, some that are light red. There’s only one problem. THEY’VE GOT NO SEEDS. I JUST INVESTED IN A KILO OF SINSEMILLA (the word ‘sinsemilla’ means ‘seedless’ in Spanish btw, nothing more nothing less. Any connotations of sensual derangement are pure pig Latin). So where does the redness come from? Are these hermaphrodites or something like that? Do I get to manipulate my orange trees’ sexuality? It’s sounding more like Thailand all the time. Of course even sinsemilla has a seed or two of course, and in a half kilo so far I’ve found three. This orchard may be a slow starter. I also figure out that the redder the better, or at least, sweeter.

Darko Rundek has a song called ‘Sinsemiglia’ which gets all mystic and mysterious before ultimately playing out into Balkan over-dramatization, but still he’s quite fun to listen to. He’s one of the few local boys to find some currency in the current world music market. I planned to catch him in Sarajevo tonight but now I’m not there. He’ll be here in Zagreb tomorrow night, but I haven’t seen any posters for it, so make no plans, except to continue on to Ljubljana. I almost left today, but thought better of it. Compared to S’jevo, my current digs suck- no wifi or cable TV, just a lot of Croatian stuff and some sitcoms like The Nanny, Reba, and similar fare from UK and Spain, but at least the weather’s better. Ultimately any place worth stopping is worth staying, at least for a day. You can quote me on that. So I do. Zagreb’s pretty nice really, almost like Prague or something, but cheap lodging is scarce, not uncommon in capital cities- Santiago de Chile comes to mind. If the international groovers ever get tired of Budapest and come here instead, some competition may help. Me, I’ve got up such a head of steam after achieving the escape velocity to leave ‘S’jevo’ and booking Africa for next month that I’m having trouble slowing down.

Well, the big news in Zagreb is that sales of U2 tickets have lines of buyers backed up all over town, camping out and causing the web-site to crash. I’m not sure it’s worth all that. In Kenya someone who looks a lot like Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic’s general Mladic has been spotted after being on the lam for nearly fifteen years. And on the home front a new Chinese store has opened but they misspelled the word ‘Chinese’ in Croatian. Instead of ‘Kineski’ they spelled it ‘Kienski’, the ramifications of which I’m not sure of, like ‘Chiense’ instead of ‘Chinese’ in English, no big deal, but if it were like ‘Chiens’ in French, then that would be different. To blend into a new place seamlessly, you need to know enough of the language to GET the jokes, not be them.

Zagreb and Croatia feel like Europe again, a welcome change after a string of sometimes-not-so-beautiful cities in the Balkans. Ljubljana and Slovenia should be even more so, complete with higher prices. At least they’ll be in €uros. I’m tired of counting all this funny money, Monopoly money, shopping certificates only good on the day of the sale and at selected stores. Mostly I’m tired of being in the dark, an ironic curtain, in a region that really shouldn’t be so. I’m constantly reminded of the line in the Coen brothers’ film ‘Brother Where Art Thou’, “we ain’t got no radio here.” That kilo of orange sinsemilla cost about two bucks George W btw.

Ljubljana does not disappoint. Say that three times really fast and try to pull your tongue through the loop. We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto. This is pure Europe, Europe at its best, maybe something like a cross between Amsterdam and Venice without all the girls in the windows or water lapping at your toes. You can hang out in sidewalk cafes till the cows come home. You can go to the Saturday market and not only find veggies and dairy products, buckwheat bread and preserves, but stained glass and ceramics, way cool. Myself maybe I still prefer the Sarajevo Turkish quarter’s kilims and copper, but that’s an anomaly of time and space. This is a pleasing creative blend of past and present, Europe that is. A river flows through it, too, without trash lining the banks or plastic bottles caught forever in the infinite flows and eddies. Chaos and turbulence may be inspiring for off-beat rock bands and movies, but does little for tamer esthetic sensibilities. The weather’s nice, too, not so cold to begin with AND heaters in the room. Comfort- now there’s a concept.

It’s too nice; that’s the only problem. At only a quarter mill, the place fills up with tourists fast. I don’t think I’d want to see it in high season. Even now you almost hear more English than Slavic in the tourist area. My little bit of Serbo-Croatian doesn’t help much here with the Slovenian language either, which diverges greatly. My hostel room doesn’t help much either, just a bit too institutional for me. At first I feel weird staying in the private room while everybody else is bunking it, but then I realize half of them are hanging out in the cafes eating expensive meals, so it’s a trade-off. Me, I’m so excited at seeing some instant noodles in the grocery store that I even pay the w/bowl price. It’s an acquired taste. Finding a grocery store open on Sunday is something of a miracle in itself. Then I find a Chinese restaurant with reasonable prices, semi-takee-outee. Then I find a special train fare to Zurich for only €29. I’m on a roll. There’s a documentary film festival in town focusing on human rights. Maybe they’ll open the doors on the last day and make it free to all.

My reservations about Ljubljana have nothing to do with Indians, certainly not the ones from South America here in town posing as American Plains Indians while playing songs from their CD entitled something ‘Mohican’ that seem to have nothing to do with any tradition except that of the flute and New Age music in general. It’s not bad, but no more ‘Mohican’ than it is Bolivian to my knowledge, the war bonnets serving what purpose I know not. I’ve seen similar acts in Buenos Aires and Barcelona within the last year or so, the others from Ecuador. I guess work’s work, and I’ve even been accused of ‘sacrilege’ in my career as a folk art entrepreneur, but still… what’s the point? Carlos Nakai doesn’t need to wear war paint to get his music across; it speaks for itself. The word ‘nakai’ means ‘Mexican’ for God’s sake. Who cares? I don’t mean to be judgmental, but… somebody needs to be.

Then the rains came. As if things are not dead enough on Sunday already, the rain puts a damper on the little bit that’s left. And it rains for forty hours and forty minutes. That’s okay; I’ve got a train ticket and a belly full of sweet-and-sour chicken to my credit on the balance sheet of life. Finally it stops shortly before dawn. Maybe I’ll get to do some sightseeing today in Ljubjlana before my train leaves after all. If so I’ll show you some pictures. Deal? Next stop Zurich via Austria via Liechtenstein, two more countries to check off the list. I’m on a roll.