Welcome to Norway

So, after that glowing post about the pleasures of European transit, I was deposited by the ferry not in Larvik, my supposed destination, but about 2 miles outside, with no signs at all as to where to go. Using my handy Google Maps on my BlackBerry, I managed to navigate to the train station, a pleasant walk along the water which I did the whole while with my rolling suitcase attached to my small eagle creek backpack, looking I suppose something like a tractor-trailer combination.



I arrived in Larvik to find it a small, pleasant town with a town square oddly deserted. The residents, sensibly enough, were enjoying the bright summer evening down by the waterfront, in a park and on the long pier that adjoined it. I manouvered my rig down to the end of the pier and joined the many blonde families sitting at the casual outdoor tables. I ordered a burger and a beer from the waiter who naturally spoke perfect English.



The burger, pictured here, is cleatly made not of beef, as one might expect, but of salmon. It was delicous. It also cost $35. Welcome to Norway.

The road north

 
 
 Getting to the ferry dock from the farmhouse was an exercise in transport complexity simplified by European sensibility. It took three trains to get me here, which I suppose might be daunting, but in fact was completely painless. I used my cell phone to check the schedules, bought a single ticket at the station in the small farm town of Skanderborg where I started, then seamlessly chained from a large regional train, to a small commuter train, and finally to some sort of light rail contraption which deposited me directly me in the maligned town of Hirtshals, on the northern tip of Denmark's largest “island”, the Jutland peninsula. (Danes like to refer to their country as being composed entirely of islands, like the one on which Copenhagen sits. Jutland is, however, very clearly a peninsula.)

 When I reached end of the train line at Hirtshals, I walked along a enclosed, wood-floored elevated walkway that led directly to the ferry terminal building, where I bought a ticket and then walked on board this ferry, where I now sit. The seamlessness with which the entire journey happened would only have been possible in a world where public, shared transportation is thought of as the primary means of getting around. It would be unthinkable and really a waste to orchestrate such a symphony of motion in the United States, where everyone would prefer to just get to where they're going in their car, anway. And why wouldn't they? Public transport in the US sucks. The American transportation will remain entangled in the deadlock of low demand for poor solutions probably for generations.

I love airplanes, trains, and yes, ferries, because they afford the dual luxuries of transportation and time – time to read, think, or enjoy the scenery. Personally, I hate driving mostly because it's a waste of time, and so mundane. It's true that the car does get you there a bit faster (in the early stages of metropolitan development, at least) and as such most Americans prefer it, but it lacks the civility of having someone else handle the navigation while you sit back and enjoy the ride.

I also have maintained not a little of the boyish wonder with large, complex systems. Rail networks, ferry systems, airports and the like have much of the majesty of human achievement about them. They can exist only because of civilization's ability to combine technologies and coordinate activities across large numbers of people and places. I suppose the car and it's technogies of scale are also impressive, but the magic seems to leave them when they roll off the dealer's lot and into the individual hands of it's owners. Not so the European rail network, which every day must have tens of thousands of people organized to operate smoothly; something which by and large happens all the time. Similarly, millions of pieces of technologies must coordinate in some largely unseen fashion, a thing of transcendant beauty, to my mind. It's a similar fascination which brought me into the telecoms industry as a consultant. (it's thus doubly cool that my cell phone works perfectly out here in the middle of the ocean, thanks to a pico-cell here on the ship. No data though :( )

The ferry I'm on itself, a ship really, puts the quaint Washington State Ferries which I used to love to ride as a kid to shame. This one is brand new, a brass plaque in the entry stating that it was released from it's Finnish shipyard just this year, and very pleasant. It resembles a mobile airport lounge more than anything else. It's got nine decks, each with various lounges, restaurants, and seating areas. The furniture is modern and colorful, decorated if anything a bit to artfully to match the vast grey and blue seas seen through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows which run the length of the ship.

I'm sitting by one of these now, about an hour into the journey already used to the gentle heaving of the ship amid this North Sea crossing. It's one of the roughest passages in the wold, as any Scandinavians will proudly tell you. I enjoyed a shrimp sandwich from the cafe, and found a bright green table where I can share a power socket with a ten year old boy playing games on his dad's computer.

This ferry takes me to Larvik, the largest town on Norway southern coast. I'll hang out there for a bit, then take a train to Oslo Airport in time to catch an early morning flight to Tromso, in the far north of Norway, well into the arctic circle. From there, immediately start heading south, to the Lofoten islands, and then to the town of Bodo, the northernmost rail station in Europe, where I can catch an overnight train (yay!) back to Oslo.

The heart of denmark

I'm aboard the MV SuperSpeed 2, a massive and brand new ferry servicing the route between the obscure Swedish and Norwegian towns of Hirtshals and Larvik. At 8am this morning, I left the quaint Danish farmhouse of my friend Suzanne's parents and took a series of three trains to get to this small port, where our ship has just pulled out to sea, delayed by weather, as these things sometimes are.

The farmhouse, where I slept last night was a small, 200-year old affair, bought by Suzanne's parents in the 1960's as part of the Danish government's efforts at farm reform. Denmark's largest island of Jutland (not technically an island, though called as such by the Danes) had been a collection of small farms, each with their own family owners and farm buildings. After the war, the government began a program of buying these up, repackaging them, and selling them as large parcels suitable for industrial-scale agriculture. The many quaint, often historic farmhouses remained, however, and were then sold one-off to young Danes willing to move to the countryside – people like Suzanne's mother and father. They took ownership of a beautiful two-story structure with adjoining barn, both built from the very stones found in the surrounding fields when they were first tilled centuries ago. The house is still in the very center of a large working wheat farm, the fields of which come right up to the edges of the half-acre lot. I passed a good hour in quiet contemplation, watching the already waist-high grasses blow back and forth in the June afternoon sun, the stalks already golden and top-heavy with seed. It seems odd to write this, but I've never actually watched the wind blow through a wheat field, something that seems like it should be a classic American pastime. It's calming and mesmerizing in the same primordial manner that watching a fire dance or waves crash. Now I know.

Last night, there was traditional Danish dinner held at the farmhouse, where the 30-odd guests spilled over two of the houses small rooms. This was the wedding's final event, and the only one under the sole control of Suzanne's parent's, who seized on the opportunity to do everything in traditional, Danish fashion. Danish flags were posted around the property, on small, purpose built stands, and also on a full-size wooden flagpole. At dusk, around 11pm, Suzanne's uncle lowered the flag from the latter and folded it up with unceremonious practice.

The family was proud of their country in a way that's hard for me to understand as an American, and I think cuts to the core of why Europeans have a hard time understanding the United States. Their relationship with Denmark is more than as a simple social contract with a government; the country represents the sum of their culture, traditions, and ancestral heritage. The flag-loving uncle also pointed out that religion was lumped in there as well. “The Danish flag is the oldest in Europe! Look, it's actually a cross,” he told me, turning the flag vertical for my viewing benefit.

Love my country as I do, I would never even think to have flags at my wedding. Being an American is an important part of my identity, but to me being American means something totally different. It is sharing a fundamental belief in how society should be organized (free expression, rule of law, limited business regulation). I'm not at all wrapped up in American “culture”, and to be honest find it's most common forms rather distasteful. I feel only very marginally more social obligation to my countrymen than I do towards an any other citizen of the world. In my life, the role of cultural ancestry is filled by Judaism, which has little or nothing to do with my homeland. Not so, clearly for the Danes, for whom Denmark is the land containing the ashes of their fathers, the temples of their gods. They share more than a cultural familiarity with each other, in many cases they share ancestors. They all kind of look the same, anyway.

Europeans love to deride American's as lacking a culture, and in a sense they're right. They also love to criticize us for our government's policy. Just this weekend I had to have no less than three conversations about the nature of American “freedom” and our struggle for/against it. They feel that because Bush is my countryman, he and I must share a context for decision making. While they were all reasonable people who I'm sure did not hold me or any other individual American responsible for US policy, they did seem to be curious to learn what “somebody like Bush” thinks of the world, to perhaps better understand those policies. It didn't bother me, I patiently explained, as I always do the vast diversity of the US and asked them to liken Bush to a continental leader like an EU president, not a national one like their own prime minister.

One especially bilingual interlocutor asked me why we used the term “Freedom Fighter” with reverence, when it actually suggests someone who fights freedom, as would a “Fire Fighter” fight fire. I wonder if I will get this again during the next two years I am due to live in Europe.

Globalizatin

I'm on a train in Denmark, and I just used my American cell phone to call the Russian embassy in Zambia.

And now I'm using my blackberry to post to my blog about it. The camera is broke, otherwise I would attach a picture.

The russian embassy, to whom Karina spoke in Russian, was not able to answer my question.
Ben Maritz - +1 917 340 6014 - Stanford GSB - "Endless Summer"

Welcome to the First World

I woke up in Copenhagen, had breakfast, got a much needed haircut, and got a phone call from my banker questioning my profligacy. The breakfast (a coffee and some bread) was $25, and my haircut, at a humble place across the street where I needed no appointment, was no less than $150. At least they were both delivered with flawless English.

The value of our humble dollar has fallen near to the point of absurdity, the clear result of our government's growth-first monetary policy. My favorite part of the whole thing is the Bush Administtration, starting way back when John Snow was Treasury Secretary at the dollar almost even with the Euro, has constantly paid lip service to their "strong dollar policy." To this day, they continue maintain the need for a high valuation, even when they pursued the very policies that encouraged low dollar returns and huge dollar outflows that resulted in very low demand for our currency and the resulting devaluation.

I suppose, as an American I benefited somewhat from this, since it did lead me to enjoy an economy fueled by cheap-as-hell credit for a long while. Now the price will come in the form of inflation and probably a reduced standard of living, though I will be safely in the slighlt-less-mismanaged economy of the UK. When I return to the US in some years, we will hopefully be in the throes of an export-led boom, fueled this time by a cheap-as-hell currency.

Ben Maritz - +1 917 340 6014 - Stanford GSB - "Endless Summer"

Morning in Warsaw

Yesterday I arrived in Warsaw from Krakow, to meet my friend Krzysztof from Stanford. My friends and I asked us to take us out for a night on the town, knowing that he was something of a big deal in his native land. He did not disappoint. The details, I must admit, are a bit blurry, but I believe that our evening consisted of visits to no less than give bars and two restaurants. And we went to two of the bars twice.

When I arrived two days ago in the splendid medieval city of Krakow, I already could see a distinct difference in style between there and neighboring Czech Republic. People seemed happier, a bit friendlier. My images of Poland were mostly of a drab, post-communist state, perhaps devoid of young people and plumbers, all of whom appear to have fled westward. Krakow, a city in which I did not spend nearly enough time, was the capital of the early nation-state of Poland for 500 years, and seems to have been splendidly preserved. This is the result, I suppose of having become irrelevant after the capital was moved to Warsaw in the 17th century. It's a city of pleasant squares, ancient castles, and cheery locals and tourists alike.

Krakow appeared to be doing well, but it still did not prepare me for Warsaw, which I think must be the most livable developing world-capital I have ever visited. It looks like what Paris might have been, if it hadn't hadn't already passed it's economic prime (Warsaw is booming), and it hadn't ever had a global empire (Warsaw is lily white – all Poles). Warsaw has the same boulevards, sidewalk cafes, quaint old quarters, and noble monuments of any respectable European capital. There are relics of communism around, but these have mostly become monuments themselves – the absurdly imposing “Palace of Culture” foremost among them – a copy of a similar building in Moscow, and a gift from the Soviet people.

It's a small city, at least the core that we saw, and it's seems very proud of itself. The city is dotted with shiny new plate-glass office buildings, which in contrast to many cities sit along the same wide boulevards as the older, more stately buildings. The city seems to have a fever of restoration – with what felt like every main street being repaved by shirtless men, loudly hauling traditional bricks and paving stones to and fro.

The Poles, like Krzysztof, are proud of their city, and of their country. Today's New York Times had an article about many of the young people who left over the last decade in search of work, returning now to take advantage of growing wages and rising employment levels. It's a big country – over 40 Millions – and has quite high growth of 6%. I often think of developing countries of turning a corner into sustainable growth when they start to develop domestic workforces that are globally competitive. A sign of this is high domestic consumption, which itself is the result of rising personal wealth and education levels. This can be seen in the statistics (Per capital GDP of about $24,000 US on a PPP basis), but also in the streets. In Warsaw, shops abound, cafes are everywhere, and the malls we visited (don't ask) were teeming. People were clearly spending money, and doing so at prices that were roughly the same as we would have in the US.

I was expecting to find a rather drab-post communist state, perhaps something similar to what I saw in the Central Asian 'Stans last summer – but this was nothing like that at all. Poland is clearly due to become only more influential in Europe, and possibly the world. Krzysztof is starting work for a major international oil company next month, but he has assured us that he has every intention of returning to his home in short order; and I can't fault him for it.

Amazing Warsaw Restaurant

I'm introducing a new "feature" to the blog, flagging some of the restaurants that I eat at which I find particularly noteworthy. It's no secret that I believe eating is one of the principal reasons for living, let alone traveling, and so restaurants are certainly an important part of my meanderings. I also tend to like to recommend some of the places I visit, and this can serve as a repository of them.



I came here with my Polish friend Kryzstof, a budding oil man and member of Warsaw's growing international business elite. As we walked in, he casually pointed out the deputy prime minister dining with head of parliament.



The gimmick here is openness -- the kitchen is wide open, and faces a set of bar-like tables on risers overlooking it. Even the computer used for reservations is open, it's casing removed. The decor of light wood and white paint, combined with the high exposed ceiling presents a casual elegance which sets of the simple food well. My favorite part -- there are no waiters. The cooks themselves run out of the kitchen with a cart which they wheel tableside. They do some final prep steps right before the diners, then serve directly on to waiting plates.



The food itself was great. It was mostly what I would describe as "New Polish", simply well executed versions of traditional fare. We started with a few starters, selected, naturally, to accompany the shots of Polish vodka we imbibed. It was, I think, a light polish pate, and some salted fish (both pictured below). We went on to a main course of braised veal shank (we all ordered the same, in solidarity in honor of Solidarity). It was accompanied by small gnocchi-like dumplings and some sweet braised carrots (the kind my grandmother used to make). The braising liquids made a delightful sauce, and though the meat was a bit gamey, my third beer made it all somehow sublime.



The restaurant is owned by a Polish-Jewish woman who is at the forefront of Poland's restaurant evoloution. This place is the 8th of her widely admired properties, each completely different than the others. I forgot her name, will try to find it and post here.



Our meal came to about $50 each, including drinks.





This was an amazing restaurant, owned by one of Warsaw's most prolific restaurant entrepenuer. The them was open-kitchen, with no waiters- the cooks come serve table size. Fantastic food, the best Eastern European I've had...



 

 

 

 

Zakąski Przekąski

Another restaurant review: An old soviet institution updated for 21st century Warsaw. The pictures are actually from 3 seperate visits, first at the beginning of the night, then at the end, then the next day as I was walking by... I love how everything is the same price-- drinks for 4 Zloty, snacks for 8 Zloty. It's also open 24 hours.



It's right across the street from the Bristol Hotel. No idea what the address is.





 

 

 

 

Auschwitz

I just came back from Auchwitz, and am now back at my hotel in Krakow, sitting in the comfortable but rather plain basement restaurant of our “3-star” hotel and listening to a Polish radio station playing poorly selected remixed version of recent American love songs.

The visit to Auchwitz was a little less dramatic or impactful than I had expected, and I think for that reason I'm having a hard time writing about it; I came down to write a blog post and have been spending about an hour web-surfing. My two friends and I wandered up to Krakow's main train station, looking for a bus to take us the 70km to the old camps, and somehow ended up on a guided bus tour with about two dozen fellow tourists. I was initially disappointed, but upon arrival realized that even if my sense of intimacy hadn't been ruined by being in a tour group myself, it would have been shattered by the the hundreds of other such groups roving the same grounds. Our group itself was fine and respectful, and our guide decent, his passion only slightly dimmed by having given the same somber tour hundreds of times.

For those who have not been, Auschwitz is actually a set of over 40 camps of various sizes located around an old Polish village of the same name. The first camp, called Auschwitz I, is actually an only Polish army barracks, and is comprised of about two dozen three story brick buildings. It's there that one can find that famously ironic “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign. This site, the first we visited, has been turned into a museum. The old barrack buildings, used to store thousands of prisoners during the war, have been turned into galleries, with exhibits with themes like “Extermination”, “Plunder”, and “Life in the Camps”. The second camp we visited, called Auchwitz II-Birkenau was about 3km away from the first, and was the largest in the complex. It's mostly wooden buildings are largely gone now, but they leave an epic footprint.


The way the exhibits are curated place an emphasis on the size of the operation, attempting to put the scale of the German experiment with institutionalized evil into scale. It succeeds most not when it shows the grizzly statistics (1.1 Million killed at Auschwitz), but when they physically display the detritus of those lost lives. In one of the barrack buildings, there is a display of various artifacts looted from the victims. There is a large pile of suitcases, an odd display of prayer shawls, a heap of human hair that fills the better part of a room. Most dramatic is the last display in the series, a sea of old shoes – each worn, shoddy, and stripped of it's laces. The shoes succeed because they remind the viewer of the individuals who must have worn them right up until their final moments. Each shoe had an owner, and that owner was murdered.

I think overall the exhibit fails because it didn't do enough to communicate the atrocity on a personal level, it didn't tell enough stories of the individuals involved. Jewish tradition places a tremendously high value on the value of an individual life. The Jewish Mishna, or body of authoritative commentary on the Torah, tells us that “whoever destroys a single life is as though he had destroyed an entire universe.” For that reason there is no higher injunction in our law than to not kill, and no higher obligation than to prevent the loss of life. The loss of six millions during the Holocaust is disturbing because of what it suggests about the human capacity for evil, but as a tragedy, it is no more striking than the loss of a single life.

For me, the visit to Auschwitz was most powerful where it recalled for me the personal suffering of my grandfather, who saw his entire family murdered in similar settings. I will never forget him telling me his story when I was a young boy. I have a vivid memory of having a conversation with him in the fron room of his Tel Aviv apartment, where I watched with awe as tears welled up in his eyes. He was mercilessly vague about the details, telling me only that the Germans sent away his parents, brothers, and sisters. I pressed him, asking where it was that the Germans sent them. He replied, telling me that they were sent to the ovens. I couldn't have been older than 8 or 9, but I understood the essence of what he was saying. Since then I've have carried with me a deeply disturbing image image of a young child being fed into an old-fashioned oven. Today at Auschwitz, in the only still standing death chamber, I saw a cremation chamber that so closely resembled the oven from that image that I had to catch my breath, and felt every hair on my body stand on end.

I've been asked a couple times if I bore any personal resentment against Germans, or the German people, for the atrocities of World War II. I don't. I feel that the German nation has since then acted in such a way that has shown genuine contrition. Sara, my dear Italian friend recently told me that as a schoolgirl she was required to take a field trip to Auschwitz, as are all Italian youths. I believe the same is true for Germans. This is perhaps the most important step; members of the civilized world need to understand that such things horrors can be visited by man upon man, and thus be conditioned to take steps to ensure they never again are.

To be honest, I feel for this reason a slight aversion to Poland as a nation. The Auschwitz exhibit goes to extraordinary lengths to drive home the point that Poles were among the victims, and the heroes of the Holocaust. There is a certain priest who as a prisoner volunteered to die in place of a Jew, and it seems that about a quarter of the exhibit is dedicated to him personally. I used to tell Polish people I met that my grandfather was Polish, but I stopped doing this a few years ago when I read Paul Johnson's excellent book on the history of the Jews and learned about the pre-Holocaust injustices against Jews in Poland, and the role of the Poles in facilitating the Holocaust. A higher proportion of Jews were killed in Poland than anywhere else, including Germany. In coming to Auschwitz, I had hoped to find some acknowledgement of the Polish role in anti-Semitism in general, if not in the Holocaust directly. I found nothing.

I suppose that brings me to my final complaint about the exhibit. That it did not place in perspective the events of how the extermination at those sites came to pass. The museum makes the Nazi's seem like aliens descended from another planet, more like tornadoes than demented criminals. I would have liked to have learned more about the 10,000 German guards who served at the camps, to understand their thoughts about what was going on, how the justified the killing and how they suppressed their objections. I think this would have driven home our individual responsibility to act against injustice, and have underscored the German's crimes in failing to do so.

Overall, I was pleased that the Auschwitz exhibits were so well attended by tourists of various descriptions. It seems that no one can pass through this part of Poland without seeing the camps, and there were a great number of schoolchildren who appeared to have made the journey for that reason alone.

Prague, new and old worlds

More contrasts of Prague, old and new. It's sometimes easy to forget that communism fell here only 20 years ago, and sometime hard to remember that it existed just two decades ago. Last night we spent the evening watching the quarter finals of the Euro Cup, the world's second most important soccer tournament. There was a massive TV screen erected in the middle of Prague's old town square, where probably 10,000 tourists and locals alike gathered to watch Russia beat the Netherlands in a 3-1 overtime match. Despite the somber setting amid the Gothic spires and fairy-tale architecture of the ancient square, there was much revelry, especially from among the large contingent of Russia supporters that seem to have found their way there.

Today, I stopped into an art gallery showing a collection of journalist's photos from the “Prague Spring” of 1968, when a reformist political movement in what was then Czechoslovakia gained enough momentum to draw a military invasion by the Soviet Union. The images were somber; of tanks crushing smoldering buses and young people marching under gaze of gun barrels. They called to mind Milan Kundera's The Unbareable Lightness of Being, and it's storied of absurdity in the face of the “normalization” that followed.

The crowds in the Old Town Square bore little resemblance to their parent's generation in 1968. For starters, many of them were visitors, and not a few of those Russians, with quite possibly a few descendants of former invading troops represented. The air was purely festive, with a large pint of excellent Czech lager in each hand and songs on many a lip. The world conjured from the photos would have have been inconceivable based on the scene last night; a different world.

A trip to the train station today brought a delightful reminder of the absurdity Kundera found so endearing. Tomorrow I head to Poland, and want to pick up tickets for the train today. I used the Soviet-era subway to get to the imposing, depressing old train station. It was only a short mile from the luxury shops and expensive cafes of the old town, but had not yet received the same uplift. Apparently rail travel is not part of the new Prague's vision of itself.

I stood in line at the International Tickets window for about 10 minutes and when I got the front I made what I assumed was a reasonable inquiry of the middle aged woman behind the counter. “Can you please tell me what times the trains to Krakow run tomorrow?”

“That is information!” She snapped back. “You must go to Information!” and pointed across the large, low-ceilinged hall. She apparently only sold tickets.

I smiled, bemused, and tried again. “I'd like to buy a ticket for tomorrow's train to Krakow.”

The woman, not at all bemused, said “What train?”

“Nine thirty,” I guessed.

“No train at nine thirty! Go to information!” I finally did as I was told, and came back only 20 minutes later armed with the knowledge that I wanted to buy tickets for the nine forty train. Which I did.

For a brief moment, I emphasized with the students in the photographs – I had suffered a very minor inconvenience at the hands of a capriciously officious railway clerk, surely nothing comparable to what they had to go through, but symbolic of an entirely different way of doing things. A different world.

Stag Town

I've just come back in from the first night of bachelor party revelry. I quit out early, the siren song of my computer too much, I had to tear myself away from what promised to be a visit to a Prague bar with 10 men, the same as the thousands of such visits that would be made by such groups tonight, and the millions before us. A quick look around at the dozens of men already present, an eyeing up of the five or six pretty young Czech tarts, obligingly done up for the occasion, and then a bee line for the bar for 10 more pints, please. Pilsener, please.

The bar would be on the ground floor of a stately nineteenth century building, a six-story testament to the monumental aesthetics of the late Hapsburgs who so tastefully turned this city from a rather gothic medieval citidel into a stately second capital of their empire. I'm not sure how they would have viewed their city's present state, as the party capital of Europe. The bar that I would have gone to with my friends would have been just one of many such beer joints, and it would have opened up onto a street with scores more. If it was in the center of town, as it likely would have been, it would have been many a time urinated on by a passing brit on his way from pint to pint.

When I first came here, in 2001, while studying at Oxford, the town was just in the process of being discovered as a destination for cheap drink and cheerful girls. Beer was 25 cents for a largish pint, and there were plenty of hostels available, mostly old communist apartment blocks thrown open in proto-capitalist glee. The old monuments of communism itself, such as the party headquarters, had been turned into institutions of democracy. The very epicenter of authoritarian rule, the secret police headquarters, had been taken over by Radio Free Europe. It was an American-backed enterprise, and I remember that when I saw it, and heard the story, I bristled with democratic pride. The Prague of 2006 was somehow more hopeful. The changes that were sweeping the city were very much visible against he backdrop of its more workaday communist past. I remember early one morning, (very early or very late), sipping some final pints at a bar among the workmen who had just gotten up to start their government-employed day. Me bleary-eyed, they in jumpsuits, licked our chops of the cheap and delicious Czech Pilsener, as we watched some suited businessmen keylessly-enter their shiny new Skodas.

Even the Skoda itself was symbol then – an old communist motor works somehow reborn as a competitor to Volkswagon and the other western brands. I think it was bought by GM or something,

Driving into the city center today from the airport I glided through suburbs that looked exactly like what I might find around Amsterdam or Paris. Rows of old houses, punctuated by new glass-and-steel office blocks with aggressively modern looking entries. Prague's suburbs have traded in their soviet monotony for a more western one, but its center has exchanged its centuries-old oblivion for a much more modern sort of homogenity – that of the beer pint swilled in discretionary spending.

The most interesting part of my visit to this former frontier of the Eastern Bloc was the multitudes of workers I've come across from even further east, in search of, I suppose, the European dream. Natalia, the agent who rented us this drab little apartment in its suburb location, is from Ukraine. She's been here for four years, having started as a dish washer at a nearby restaurant. She learned English, apparently from a succession of boyfriends, and worked her way up to the front lines of tourism. She seems to have done well for herself here; she has her own place, and over a coffee she told me of her recent trips to visit many parts of Western Europe. I asked her why she came to Prague. “It is gateway,” she told me. All of the native Czech youth have already fled to London or Paris or Berlin to work in bars or coffeeshops or the like, vacating their posts to their cousins from neighboring satellite states. The girl in the store downstairs is Romanian, and the waiter at dinner tonight is from Belarus.

The photo, by the way, is of Poyan, the Bachelor, firing a Magnum pistol at a firing range as part of the festivities

Back on the road

Two years ago today I had just left McKinsey, and was setting off on a trip from Beijing to Calcutta, overland via the Tibetan plateau and the Kathmandu valley. My ultimate destination would be Stanford, where I was about to start my MBA. Now, I do this process roughly in reverse, though the places have changed considerably. Now, I'm leaving Stanford, and working my back into the open arms of McKinsey, where I'll start work in the fall.

The places have changed. My odyssey this time will be horizontal, not vertical, a trek one-and-a-half times around the world. I left Stanford for Seattle yesterday, driving up the coast with my friend Sara. Tomorrow I set out for Europe. I will help send my roommate Poyan into the world of marital bliss by way of a “Stag Night” (bachelor party) in Prague, the new capital of such things. My itinerary from there runs roughly as follows
Leave Prague for Poland, stopping by Auchwitz on my way visit my friend Kzryztof in Warsaw
June 26: Attend Poyan's wedding in Copenhagen
June 29: Spend a few days in the north of Norway
July 4: Fly to Cape Town for a few days
July 8: Start a Great African Safari for the month of July, driving from Windhoek, Namibia to Lusaka, Zambia
Aug 1: Spend two weeks doing something between Lusaka and Delhi
Aug 17: Meet Ima and Mimi in Delhi
Aug 23: Fly to Bhutan
Aug 30: Go to Vietnam to meet Shupp
Sep 5: Return to Seattle for my 10-year high school reunion
Sep 8: Do a swing through the East Coast
Sep 16: Go to visit Elian in El Salvador
Sep 30: Fly to London to settle in
Oct 13: Start work

Stay tuned!

The photo here is Sara testing the structural integrity of a bridge in Fort Bragg, on the northern California coast. It's one of the prettiest stretches of road I've ever been on.

From the Buried Treasure department

I'm packing up my things, and getting ready to set off from business school. More on that later, but for now, here's an old Africa letter I found tucked on on an unused hard drive...

July 3, 2003

Lufupa Camp, Kafue Park, Zambia

Well, it’s coming up on 10 here, and after a slow morning, consisting of a few more stories over coffee by the fire and a big cholesterol-laden breakfast, we’ve decided to shove off and head for a fly-camp in the north part of the camp. A Dutch guy came through the campsite on his way back from visiting his uncle who is a missionary, and he told us the roads up north are passable, which we thought wasn’t so. But we wanted to go up there, it’s rather remote and in the heart of this vast national park, and now we’re off. The park is very nice, and the river that flows through and gives the name, the Kafue, is stunning, wide and serene. It looks like a terrific venue for donning a life vest and flowing downstream, doing the occasional backstroke and chatting to a guy in a boat floating along side you. Of course, if you did that, which is what we did in the Amazon, you would be eaten directly.

But sitting on the riverside is fairly satisfying, especially taking out a second to write to you, pecking away on my laptop, which is becoming less and less of a strange thing, as technology slides it’s silent way around the globe. All that’s sweetly missing is a satellite Internet connection and WiFi hotspot, so that I could be downloading the news as I sat. It would change everything completely, but that’s a change that’s coming, and somebody has got to come out here, sell, and build out the satellite connections. This could person could quite possibly be yours truly. Now that’s a JOB -- driving around the bush, setting up dishes, spending a few nights at a time in each luxury safari camp… Not so damn bad, really. All I need is, oh, half a million to get started and I’d be set. No problem. Ah, ideas, ideas…

We’re just backing up a kit for one night and leaving the rest behind with Grevaton and Benson; we’ll be back here by lunchtime tomorrow. My job was to pack up the kit and gear up the food, and I’m done, so I have a second to peck out a letter to you. Grevaton is packing up the bowls for us, and the others are idly chatting with some other guys from around the campsite discussing the state of the roads, with is a hot topic of conversation out these parts. Ricárd Kapucinski, one of my favorite authors, once wrote that in the tropics instead of saying “Hello, how are you?” you say “Hello, what would you like to drink?” This is true here, but in these parts of the African tropics a reasonable greeting is “Hello. How are the roads?”. Remember the road basically means absence of bush, and includes “tar roads”, “good roads”, “passable roads”, “bad roads”, “bloody awful roads”, and “nothing”.

The conversation on the roads goes on. They have a map out and are arguing as to what the “best road in Zambia is”. This road is probably about as good as the worst road in States. Seriously, it’s just a strip of tar with only a few potholes. No paint, no shoulder, nothing.

I don’t have much time to write now, and may not again for a while, so I think I’ll just continue extending this letter. Its odd not being connected, not getting email, not hearing the news. It’s actually great.

Ok, I’m being called.

5pm

Basango Plains, Zambia

Well I did my job. All the food for our trip was neatly sorted and packed into the cooler. The cooler never made it on to the truck, and now our entire food supply consists of the little odds and ends that I tucked away from Simon’s eyes, who was trying to get me bring as little as possible. Namely, we have: a packet of Frosted Flakes, coffee, tea, non-dairy creamer, a box of rusks, a box of biscuits, and a 500g bag of linguine. I had a Coke in my backpack that I am now drinking. We also have plenty of Gin, Tonic, and Whisky, and a cooler of ice (which is a luxury in these parts). All this for six people, and it will have to last us until dinner time tomorrow, when we should be able to get back to our camp.

If before we were deep in the middle of the National park, today we are deep in the middle of absolutely nowhere at all. It’s a “fly camp” belonging to the same people that owned the camp we stayed at last night. The camp last night belongs to a Safari operator who brings people into the camp and then on to here during the few months of the year when it is not and raining and the ground is not still too muddy to get into these parts. The guide book describes these flood plains, known as the Basango Plains, as being so remote that very few Zambians, let alone foreigners have ever heard of them. They must swamp over almost completely during the rains, although now they are fairly dry. The track out here was blocked at a few places and indiscernible at others, and the two-to-three hour drive to five and a half hours, which is completely in keeping with Zambian road travel. Everything takes twice as long as it should; no one was surprised at this. In the end, we had to double back a ways over the open plane to find it, on a road that looked like it was going back to where we came. I had no confidence in my dad, who suggested the route, but he turned out to be right, shockingly.

It’s quite beautiful out here, gently barren flat grassland punctuated by a solitary tree and rimmed by forest at about the horizon. It’s the kind of country that dries out completely half the year, then is totally impassible the rest. Right now, July, is about the boundary between the wet and dry periods. You can drive through it, but just, and if you see rain clouds gathering on the horizon, boy, you had better get in your car and make like all hell for a good road, or else you’ll be stuck in until someone comes winch you out.

We bounced around, passing herds of Wildebeest, a stunning solitary Roan antelope, and some Lechewe antelope far away, dots in the distance. We spotted the camp, a collection of thatched roofs suspended on wooden poles set in concrete (standard-issue safari dwellings, very similar to what we have at Ndevu), with a few traditional indigenous huts nearby. The latter are the dwellings of the caretaker and his family, who’s job is mostly to live here, in near-total isolation. He reminds me of a few people we once saw living out, way out, in the Bangwelu swamps in Eastern Zambia. Those people were fishermen who lived out in the middle of these vast swamps on anthills. To find them, we had to leave the road, driving, for six hours, walk for about three, then take a boat for three more. Then, out of this absurdly large flatness, a few huts would pop up on a large pre-historic anthill that must have dated from before what ever river that flooded that area was diverted. There were a few such families living out there, separated by a few miles or more, fishing and drying the catch, and then once every few months the woman walking out to “civilization” to trade the fish for some corn meal, then walking back. The kids spend their whole lives out there. Can you imagine growing up on a fucking anthill in the middle of a swamp that stretches beyond the horizon in all directions? “Excuse my friend, he grew up on an anthill.”

The Tonga language, one of the many spoken here in Zambia, has the same word for ‘to have’ and ‘to want’. It’s very Zen, but interesting in that it represents the mentality that is probably required for this kind of lifestyle.

The guy who lives here offered to sell us one of his two chickens, but that would involve killing one of them, a grizzly task none of us were hungry enough to face. Instead, we’ve got him to get his wife to cook us up some pumpkin-leaf relish, that we’ll put on the linguine. We’ll hopefully get back to Lufupu, where our cooler full of food is sitting quietly by our last night’s campsite, by late lunchtime, and we should last until then.

I have been reading my book, and dozed off, and everyone else had gone for a walk. They’ve come back, and Pasquali (who I’ve referred to as PV) announced that it was “half-past beer” and that “the bar was opened.” Everyone else is sitting around on the camp chairs my dad brought up from the States, trading stories. My dad is talking about a particular insult that when told by a Cape Colored (a bizarre community of mixed black-white people living in Southern Africa) is considerd just legal grounds for murder by the recipient. Pasquali and Simon are pouring over our two maps, discussing how the route to be taken by the guy we met in camp last night to get to the upper Zambezi is mad, and the feasibility of trying to get there by a different route later this week. More talk about roads, you see.

I’m going to go use the last few rays of light to read some more of my book, which is getting good. I haven’t read a novel in English in ages, and am a little antsy about it, I can’t really relax enough for it, for some reason. I think I shouldn’t leave Africa until I can.