Ben Meets World

Whitewashing

2009-08-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

Boat #1, Up the river to Nuts Huts in Bohol
Boat #2, Across the strait from Bohol to Panglao Island
Boat #3, Across the Cebu Channel to Argao
Boat #4, Private "speedboat" to the Shangri-La on Boracay

I’ve always been fascinated by the way our minds work to cope with the vastness of the world, the uncountable places and landforms we move through as travelers over the course of our lives. A place, it seems, can exist in our consciousness in one of three forms. First, as a mere name, a place on a map, a dimensionless data point. Leaf through a guidebook, or browse the web, and thousands of these pop up. If the name is in a foreign language, it can prove stubbornly hard to remember at this stage. And why should the mind remember it? What good does it do?

Then, as itineraries start to take shape, places start to fall into place in relation to one another. Relation of distance (“Loboc is only 30km from Tagliabara”) and in term of desirability (“Bohol has decent weather this time of year”). The sea of names starts to fall into a hierarchy, sketched in pencil on the inside of a Lonely Planet cover, or perhaps posted to a Google Doc spreadsheet. One starts to be able to recall the names of such places. More information gets attached to the hierarchy (“the ferry to Cebu leaves at 2pm”, “the woman on the phone sounded alright, the rate was reasonable”) as a plan unfolds.

Finally, of course, there is the actualization of actually knowing a place. Set foot, glance around, have a meal, or even just drive through and you pass a threshold of experience which cannot ever be undone. I think back to my earliest, least documented trips, and there are places painted with indelible memories. My only recollection of Florence is a café where Moz and I found a meal all-you-can-drink wine for some 10,000 lira. But it means that I have been to Florence, and will always place it in a category aloof from Parma, or Segovia, or other places of which I know equally little.

Today I woke up by the side of a river, in a VIPA, a native hut set up as part of the backpacker’s resort known as “Nuts Huts”. It’s one of these fine establishments set up by European travelers (two couples in this case) who tire of the road but can’t bear reality just yet. Filled with passion for travel and understanding of the travelers needs, these places are priceless while they last. Understandably, the founders don’t tend to last more than a few years. They have a kid or otherwise come to their senses and sell the property to new owners, sometimes likeminded sometimes not, and move on, the magic lost in transition. Nuts Huts appears to have lost one of the founding couples, fled back to Belgium, but at least half the other is still around, with a two year old mixed-race boy a testament to some sort of interesting story and staying power.

The entire last week I was working in Manila, the city was under attack by sheets of rain, like a Hollywood portrayal of a monsoon. I glanced at the extended forecast for the places I wanted to go during week of vacation, and the icons turned up ominous for the entire length of my stay: the sun obscured by a dark cloud, with rain emerging from the bottom and a lightning bolt for good measure. Not great beach weather, and so we decided to head for somewhere a bit more “cultural”, less sun dependant.

Bohol, an island squarely in the gizzard of the alien-beast shaped map of the Philippines, is known for its jungles and bizarre topography more than anything – it’s got the Tarsier, the world’s smallest primate (not a monkey, a “pro-simian”), as well as some oddly shaped hills. Nuts Huts is in the thick of it all, accessible only really by river. It fits the bill for a wet-season retreat, except that the weather, this entire time, has been stunning – not a cloud in the sky, and just enough humidity to remind me I’m on vacation.

So we set a course for the beach. Bohol’s got a few well known beaches, mostly frequented by the Scuba diving tourists endemic to the islands. One such beach, Panglao, is actually an island unto itself, off Bohol’s coast, halfway to Cebu, our next destination. Panglao, according to the Lonely Plant has three resorts: one german, one dutch, and Filipino. Having had the reflection noted above on the expatriate-owned vacation lodge phenomenon, I decided to try La Estrella, the Filipino option. I called ahead and asked if there was a room, to which the lady replied “yes” in much the same way she might had I asked if she had two eyes and a nose. At 45 Euros per person, the place was fully ten times the price as Nuts Huts, and as such really couldn’t be that bad – ah, the signaling power of pricing. If it had been cheaper, I might not have come.

A boat from the pier on the mainland brought us straight here for 600 pesos, and we found upon landing that La Estrella is just fine. The rooms are clean, if possessed of a few more ants than Vivian would like, and the staff have none of their innate Filipino friendliness and hospitality tempered by the watchful eye of a North European boss. But then, there’s none of that familiar order, no real urgent need to attend to things that don’t really need attending-to. Finish that half-built outdoor bar? Whitewash the cinderblock wall around the property? Sure, those would be great ideas. But right now?
But I can’t complain at all. The kitchen let me come in and film them preparing our delicious dinner, as if having a tourist in there asking annoying questions was the most natural thing in the world. The ramshackle dive shop here has staff charming and low-pressure enough to have convinced Vivian to try her hand at scuba yet again. And from the vantage point of a hammock slung low between beachfront palms, it was starting to be hard to see what the big deal was about all that whitewashing anyway.

People Power

2009-08-17T06:42:00.001-07:00

The four or five yellow-shirted waitresses stood in a neat line under the TV, volume turned up but oddly silent. The restaurant was part of a “Dampa”, a Filipino favorite combination of a wet market and pantry-less restaurants clustured about some fishing docs. There are a few in the capital, we chose the Roxas Blvd location, it took us no time to get there, as today was a public holiday, spontaneously declared two days ago. Cities can be all pleasure without traffic.

Corazon Aquino, the former president who died exactly a week earlier, was being finally being put to rest in a shrine of sorts, somewhere in Manila. We walked the length of the well-lit market, only slightly overwhelmed by touts flogging their masters’ restaurants. We bought a few pounds of prawns and crabs, and picked a food stall that looked reasonably clean, and seemed to be endorsed by the presence of a few large Chinese families. The Chinese boss of the restaurant weighed what we brought in (cooking service is provided by the kg), and then handed us over to the buzzing but subdued team of Filipina waitstaff.

The public mourning process had been ongoing for most of the time I had been in Manila, including a massive procession that marched down Ayala Avenue right beside my office. The entire office had stood against the window in a 5-foot-nothing mass, lamenting that the windows wouldn’t open wide enough to properly toss out yellow confetti as the crowds passed below. Chants of “Cori! Cori!” were clearly audible 29 floors up. That was three days ago now.

All week, every TV I passed had either live coverage of some or other memorial service, or some retrospective on the great lady’s life. A humble housewife, by all accounts. Not a politician, naturally, merely a Filipina, forced on the national stage by the brutal assassination of her husband, ordered by none other than the grand villainess of islands, Imelda Marcos herself.

In 1983, Dictator Marcos’s days clearly numbered, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was invited back from political exile to assist in a transition to democracy. As he stepped off the plane, the military escort sent to protect bared their teeth and gunned him down before he could touch the soil of his homeland. It was the beginning of the end, and a wave yellow-shirted protesters, of what become known in the country as “People Power”, was unleashed. Not even the United States could save Marcos now (although some say it did try). The Cardinal heading the Catholic Church in the Philippines pushed forward Corazon “Cory” Aquino into a snap election against Marcos. Marcos declared himself the winner of the election, but the People Power protests became too much. He boarded a US government plane to live out the remaining three years of his life counting his Billions in Hawaii. It all ended in 1986, and they say it was the world’s first bloodless revolution, the first in a series that runs to this day.

Cory served as president for two terms, then was the only president ever to not attempt a third. The current president, Gloria “GMA” Macapagal-Arroyo, has ridden outlived one scandal after another, and for months we’ve heard rumours of her trying to change the constitution to allow herself the forbidden “Third Term.”* I had lunch with a group of business leaders the other day, among the country’s most powerful, and the sense was that the tens of thousands of yellow shirts on the streets were a signal more than just misery at the loss of the a passed leader. GMA would have to be very careful from now on.

The meal in the Dampa was pretty damn good, and I have to admire the restaurant for stubbornly refusing to stock a single ingredient. They had rice, but we practically had to beg for a vegetable to be served alongside our shellfish. In the end they offered some stir-fried Kang Kung (water spinach), although not a few minutes after we ordered we saw a lad run out the door and jog back a few minutes later with a bag full of the stuff. Although we perhaps missed out on authentic “Filipino” cookery, we did wisely in choosing a Chinese establishment – the kitchen, overseen by a formidable Hokkien woman, was possessed of a good portion of the 3000 years of experience built up the Overseas Chinese peoples of the south china sea and thereabouts. The prawns, fine specimens, came out in a Shanghai-style sweet chili sauce. The crabs, hairy and blue, were fried with salt and pepper -- the grown up version of a dish I had prepared myself not a week prior back in Seattle.

A pair of cold San Miguel Pilseners gave me enough to savor as I sat back to watch Cory being jauntly lowered into her tomb as scores of suited and uniformed serious people looked on. A trio of buglers played a fine rendition of “Amazing Grace”, and then “Taps”, and then just nothing at all as the camera panned the silent, massive crowd. One of the older waitresses, who may well have clad the same yellow shirt she now wore in the streets back in 1986, started to cry, just a bit, then made a joke about something, laughed, then ran back into the comforting din of the kitchen.

* In fairness, it should be noted that a disproportionate share of her scandals are tied to the “First Husband,” Mike Arroyo. GMA is ever vigilant in trying to keep him away from the illegal gambling rings and massive kickbacks he seems to have such a weakness for. She banished him from the country for a month in 2005, although it seems to have little effect

Mangos

2009-08-14T14:32:00.001-07:00

Philippine mango, as eaten by me on Panglao Island, off the coast of Bohol.

"The Mangos in the Philippines are the best in the world. End of discussion." -- Lonely Planet Philippines, 2009

The first time I came to the Philippines, back in June, I arrived in my hotel room to the sight of two Mangoes, laid out on a platter next to a knife, spoon, and white linen napkin. I ate them, and they were very good. I promptly called down to order two more. A deep love of Mangos runs in my family.

I showed up at work the next day, still abuzz with the pleasure of finally being in a country where one can get decent mangos. "Ha!," Sameer, my Indian colleague, scoffed at me. Philippine mangoes are no match for what you can get in India. Eager at the opportunity to get into a conversation about mangos, I proceeded to talk of my days working in Hyderabad in May, during the peak season of the Alfonso, India's best known mango. "Ha!" Sameer scoffed again. By endorsing the Alfonso, I had revealed how little I really knew of the world and it's mangos.

When I arrive back to Manila from the States a few weeks ago, Sameer was also just arriving back from his home. We went about our work for the day, and then, as we were packing up to head back to the hotel, he paused. "Oh! I nearly forgot!" He reached into his laptop case and produced a brown paper envelope, stapled shut, ripely fragrant.

"These are what we had lying around the house." The saint had brought two of India's finest, from his own collection, grown in Sameer's native Punjab, and in season this time of year. They burst forth with flavor, and later that night filled my entire hotel room with the most delightful, fresh aroma. The texture was a bit stringy, I had to floss afterward, but it was well worth it.

Any connoisseur of world class, ripe mangos must make a trade off between texture and flavor, and the Indians, bless them will take flavor any time. Filipinos, with their tastes running milder all 'round, have opted to cultivate for texture. The flesh of the better specimens, of which we had many, was every bit as silky as a flan, and shone a delightful orange-yellow. They could run a bit sour if under ripe, but I didn't mind; it merely added bite.

But, my verdict? The Indian mangos. What can I say. Chambra videshi hai, dil bhartia hai.*

*My skin is that of a foreigner, but my heart is pure Indian

Philly food

2009-06-21T00:42:00.000-07:00

Adobo, a soy-based stew
Crispy Pata, braised then friend pork knuckle

Filipino food gets a bad rap back home, and I must say that I don't believe I've ever actually tried it, having heard that it was all guts and offal. Turns out it is a bit earthy, not quite the stuff of Thai refinement of Chinese indulgence, but it does stand on its own merits for flavor and character. It was explained to me that the Philippines never had a real royalty, having been fairy primitive right up until the Spanish conquest -- no royal court means no professional gourmet chefs.

Local food of course exists aplenty, but I never really got a chance to explore the city on my own, and so all of the local meals I ate were in the company of my Filipino colleagues. They of course insisted on taking me to eat in various modern shopping complexes, to have (albeit authentic) replicas of the cuisine of their people -- eaten in the comfort of air conditioning and the company of other Filipinos and their foreign guests. At one restaurant, we actually ran into Imelda Marcos and her retinue, which kind of made the whole thing worth it.

The national dish is, of course, Adobo, a pork and chicken stew actually reminds me quite fondly of some of the dishes I used to make when I started cooking. The thin broth is mildly flavored with garlic and soy sauce, but mostly retains the character of whatever was braised in it. The best rendition I had came served with handfuls of garlic cooked in the skin. The picture I took does not do it justice.

The only bit of offal I actually ate in the end was something called Sisig, an appetizer designed to be eaten with cold beer on a hot day, made of small bits of pork jowl and liver, grilled and then fried and marinated and served complete with bits of bone left in for texture. The fat and carbonation disguises the humble ingredients nicely. It's a dish much better suited to be eaten on plastic stools squatted by the side of the road rather then in frigid air con next door to a Balenciaga store, but I was able to let my imagination do its work.

As in all of Filipino culture the Spanish influence is basically completely gone, except in the names, where it lives on fiercely. "Crispy Pata", was a brilliant rendition of a braised pork knuckle, breaded then fried before serving to give it texture. (Pata means leg in Spanish). I was thrilled to see it served with a pickled cabbage -- basically a sauerkraut, which makes it very similar to what loyal readers will recall was my favorite Luxembourgish dish -- Judd mat Gardebounen. I'm guessing this is a coincedence.

I apologize for the dismal pictures, taken with my phone. I'll be back to the islands on another trip next month, and will redeem myself.

A few days in Phily

2009-06-20T19:53:00.000-07:00

The trip to Jamaica, the subject of my last post, back in February market the end of a halcyon month of sitting on Vivian's couch and doing a spot of work, between cooking myself breakfast, lunch, and dinner in her Harvard Business School dorm room. The months between now and then have been sparse with content due to their being full of labor, and being spent in settings such as Scottsdale, Arizona, with very little to distract me in the way of pleasure or alimentation.

It's a sign of my aging that I was not perhaps as pleased as I one would have at the opportunity to take a trip overseas, to Asia, no less -- but I thought to myself that AT LEAST I would have the opportunity to eat something other than the strip-mall and hotel fare that I'd been surviving on.

I spent only five full days in Manila, but "days" can't really be used to describe my trip, since I as I had to match the schedule of my call-center clients, I was working mostly nights. Call centers are something of a success story in the country, standing for fully half the new urban jobs created in the past ten years or so. Legions of young people troop into modern office buildings starting around nine pm, and stay in shifts until about noon the next day. I worked late most days, which meant until about 3pm -- at which point the offices were starkly deserted.

The guys I was working with were high end, doing a bit of support, but mostly sales and technical work. The call center "agents" are almost entirely college educated, and slouch in their chairs, cheap headsets jauntily perched atop their heads, as they dispatch with Americans with probably half their intelligence. They are modern men and women, raised on computers no doubt in internet cafes whose endless line of small computer-filled cubicals probably matches their work environments quite well. Their fingers fly across keyboards, windows flicker open and closed across their screens, and they patiently walk their customers through whatever steps are required to un-fuck their computers, or phones, or whatever.

The sales calls were the best ("Press 1 if you would like to open a new account…"). I listened in as one agent handled a woman from St. Louis call in about a software product.

"What sort of company do you work for ma'am?"

Cabinet manufacturing.

"So that's a manufacturing business? Did you know that we have a special version of our software just for the manufacturing industry? Let's talk about that later and first get some more information about you."

I had the image of a volleyball player setting an easy serve up in the air, then waiting poised for the ball to crest its arch.

Three Jerks

2009-04-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

Jerk Pork on the beach at the Ritz

Jerk Chicken getting the sauce at Scotchie's
Viv enjoying a Jerk Fish down by the beach

Ackee and saltfish is the national dish of Jamaica, but the Jamaicans I spoke to admitted, when pressed, that actually, when it really came down to it, they preferred Jerk.

A simple barbeque dish, Jerk refers both to a set of spices used to marinade chicken, pork, and fish alike, as well as to a sweet-and-spicy sauce that the resulting meat is drenched in. It's served in "jerk centers", mostly shacks with a few tables and a steel-drum barbeque and a few drunks.

Chickens are the most classic food to Jerk. The birds, whole, are splayed opened ("butterflied"), rubbed deep with spice mix, left to marinade in a cooler for a day or two, then cooked slow over a wood fire. The meat gets cooked to a juicy perfection, but the skin barely caramelizes and hardly gets a chance to render, leaving it fatty and delicious.

Upon an order, a chicken is pulled from the grilled, and hacked into bite sized pieces by a strong armed man with a cleaver. The meat is piled into a stryrofoam box or piece of tinfoil, in a manner not a little reminiscent of Chinatown.

The classic sides are "rice and peas" (what we would call "ice and beans"), although this being Passover I focused instead on the popular alternatives of (humongous) roast sweet potatoes and yams, breadfruit, and something called "festival", which as far as I could tell was a cornmeal dumpling. I hope it was cornmeal, because they were good and I ate a lot of them.

In the four days I was in Jamaica, I think I had 6 jerk meals. The best, by far, was a Scotchie's, a roadside joint whose charming ramshackle local character is somewhat diminished by the expensive looking flat screen TV under thatched bar, and, gasp, a white woman who looked like a proprietor darting around in the back. The food was good, and the many local patrons didn't seem to mind the lack of complete ramshackle authenticity. Those I spoke to agreed it was the best, and apparently it recently won some sort of award from a magazine.

I'm almost ashamed to mention it, but the "Jerk center" at the Ritz, right down the beach, actually did a pretty damn good jerk pork, which may have been better than Scotchie's. It also cost $17, about five times as much. BUT, when served directly to our immaculately turned out lounge chairs facing the beach, and eaten with the sea breeze at our backs in pina coladas in our spare hands, we were not counting pennies.

Ackee, rice, salftish is nice

2009-04-13T19:52:00.000-07:00

Ackee and saltfish. The yellowish bits that look like fish, are actually the ackee.
Ackee on the vine
Mackerel Rundown, another Jamaican breakfast specialty

One of the themes of this blog is salt cod (bacalao). I'd heard of course about Jamaica's national dish, ackee and saltfish, but I just assumed it was dried local bream or river fish. So imagine my pleasure when we pulled into Dolly's Café in Montego Bay, and I was served a plate of unmistakable bacalao.

The fish, like all salt cod, comes from the North Sea, Scotland and Norway and thereabouts, and is dried by wealthy Europeans before being processed in EU-standard factories and shipped to the New World for consumption by the simple folk here. So understandably, the amount of saltfish in the dish was pretty low, maybe just an ounce or two.

That's where the Ackee comes in -- a handsome purplish fruit, when boiled it yields a firm yey flaky texture which closely resembles that of the saltfish. It's rather flavourless, and so easily adopts and the tastes of salt and the see when its sauteed with the cod. I actually thought it was fish until the second or third bite. A practical filler.

Dolly, a septuagenarian restaurateur, seems to operate mostly for the benefit of expatriate Jamaicans returning home from the US for a vacation. She was a bit surprised to see the two of us white folks, remarking, "you're escaped!" (form our hotel).

Good Hope, Jamaica

2009-04-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

"How many people work here with the tourists?" I asked Isaac and Alfred, our two guides for a horse ride we were taking around the Good Hope Plantation yesterday. It was a bright day, and there must have been 5000 acres of property dazzling below me.

"Two," they replied, and looked a bit puzzled. I steered my horse, Cokehead, off the trail and up into one of the many citrus groves we were riding through, and plucked another Ugly Fruit of the tree. Like an orange, only uglier and more delicious. Juicy like you wouldn't believe, with the flavour of a mandarin and the size of a small grapefruit. The peel came off easily, and I gleefully let the juice run down my face and shirt as the horse walked itself back onto the trail.

It had taken a good hour to drive the 20km inland to get to the Plantation, which dominated most of the valley of the Martha Brae as it ran out of the Cockpit mountains out to the coast and the resorts below. Some signs posted about the plantation described that it had been around for some two hundred years, and owned by a succession of oddballs, starting with a succession of slave-owning sugar cane farmers, and eventually passing into the hands of a partnership which tried to create a high-end tourism destination in the 60's or 70's. They restored the old great house up at that top of the hill to its most charming, and for a brief while they managed to lure in some society types, even a prince, it so appears.

There was a civil war of sorts in the 70's in Jamaica, and the visitors ground to a halt. A brochure with the history of the plantation noted that when Jamaica emerged in the 80's, tourism there "had gone from exclusive to (all)-inclusive." The owners tried a few other pursuits, notably the citrus farm, as well as a race horse training operation. Both worked, sort of, to the degree that we were able to hire two retired race horses to ride through the magnificent orchards of trees dripping with ripe fruit.

We high-brow Americans, the kind who are pre-disposed to "responsible tourism" and look down our noses at package tours and would never willingly don a bracelet or surrender to having to eat at a buffet while on holiday have an ingrained aversion to Jamaica, land as it is of bargain all-inclusive. It's a shame, really, since the island is full of gems such as the Good Hope Plantation.

If any of the Internet people out there find this post and are considering a trip to Montego Bay, don't miss a horse ride up at Good Hope. I hear that you if you call ahead and ask for it, they can prepare you lunch at the great house. I just found the web site, which I'm glad they have, but don't worry, it is MUCH more slick than the plantation itself...

Jamaica me crazy

2009-04-13T19:37:00.000-07:00

South coast of Jamaica, near Belmont

The flight to Montego Bay was packed. Usual set of white people vacation goers, families, fat people, the like. My stomach turned as I saw the queue to board the plane; I had visions of screaming children and fat people closing in me both for the entirety of the flight across the Caribbean, but also during my stay there. Ellen, who had never been to Jamaica described it as middle-class over-grown spring-break hell, with the bad taste of economic colonialism thrown in to boot. I didn't really do that much research in advance of this trip; I had a few free hotel nights to burn, so I looked for the combination of cheapest flights and most expensive eligible rooms, and clicked buy as fast as I could, before I could get a call from the office taking my long weekend away.

The plane ride was predictably awful. The vacation actually pretty damn nice.

The fat people from the plane disappeared promptly upon arrival. I didn't even really see them in the airport, at least once we cleared the surprisingly rigorous immigration screening. I picked up a rental car, turned on to the highway and whizzed up the coast, skirting by yards the perfect Caribbean beach vistas, complete with beach shacks, kids splashing in the waves and fishing boats bobbing gently off to the side. We passed a dozen or so all-inclusive resorts. I was pleased to reflect on how pleased I was to not be in there with the fat people.

Our hotel, The Ritz-Carlton Rose Hall, which I chose on the basis of it being A) not an all-inclusive resort, and B) being very expensive but still under the $400 limit for me to use my Hotels.com points, was actually great. A bit on the big side, with 400 rooms, but what it lost in character it more than made up for with comfortable rooms and terrific staff, who appeared only too happy to spread the towels over our lounge chairs and bring us plates of jerk chicken and pina coladas as we dozed and read on the beach. Every request was received with a friendly "ja man!"

We had two full days, and on both ventured out in the rental car up and across the mountains in the interior. The first day we ventured clear through to the south side of the island, the Kingston side, which provided all of the standard developing country trappings I required to make me feel content in having ventured out of the tourism bubble (goats in the road, shack-stores, police checkpoints, ubiquitous mobile phone ads, etc). We had a fine meal at a public beach packed with Jamaican weekenders, then drove back north the long way, wrapping along the western coast, stopping for sundowner in the resort town of Negril

Negril and Montego Bay together are the main resort towns of Jamaica. I was prepared for Cancun, but was quite pleased to find that the all-inclusive fortresses which dot the coast have actually done a decent job of leaving the towns themselves in relative peace. They appear to have only recently entered the " no more stray dogs" phase of development (beach towns start out with a few dogs, which then become a lot of dogs, which then go to no dogs as they are discovered and develop). It's all small hotels spread out along the beach. A few lousy foreigner restaurants, a few good foreigner restaurants, a few really good local shacks. Happy faces all around.

We returned back to our own island, tossed the keys to the valet, and retreated to our balcony to crack a Red Stripe and watch a movie on the laptop.

The German Re-conquest

2009-03-02T05:08:00.000-08:00

Sunrise around Turchheim, where I started my hike

Chateau overlooking Ammerschwihr

Lunch in Riquewihr. Those white things are spaetzle. Mmmm...

As is the French custom, I muttered a quick "Bon Jour" to the people I passed on my walk today, all 20 miles of it through the wine-growing Vosges foothills of Southern Alsace. As is the case when I go anywhere in France, I said Bon Jour, the people passing said Bon Jour back, and I would hope that they would leave it at that, not forcing me to sheepishly tell them that "pardon, je ne parle pas francaise" and then get a dirty look in return. But today, there was a twist. I was walking through these poorly market trails with such a sense of purpose that I suppose it appeared that I knew where I was going -- and so more than a few people stopped me to ask for directions.

"Bon Jour" "Bon Jour" "Vous parle Alleman?" "No!" and it was MY turn to give a dirty look. The gall of these Germans, to come to France, and speak not a lick of French! #

I was amused at first, but then slowly realized that essentially ALL of the people on these trails were German. One couple I spoke to (in English) told me that they were retirees, and owners of a vacation home in one of the villages along the way. I asked if there were many Germans here. They laughed, and said "Oh yes."

This morning I took the early train down from Strasbourg 25 minutes to the regional hub of Colmar, and then from there caught a local service a few stops west to a small town called Truckheim, arriving around 8:30. From there made my way up through the country to the town of Ribeauville, the only town with a rail station on the other side of the hills -- and that with exactly one train per week, which would come that afternoon at 5:21pm. I had no ATM card, and no money for a taxi, and so the urgency of making that connection did add a little spice to my day.

It's pretty country, especially once you get up into the hills which line the vast Rhine valley. The villages are nestled in the foothills and expand into monotony and highways below, but above it's all deciduous forests and vineyards producing some of the best white whine around -- world class Rieslings and Gewürztraminers. I imagine its even prettier if you come in the right season when everything's in bloom, which I of course did not (a hallmark of Ben-travel is going to places in the wrong season).

The villages are cute, but in a very self-aware way, with fresh paint on every Alsatian crossbeam, and with every second house either a wine tasting gallery or a restaurant. The famous village of Riquewihr and Kayersberg are particularly bad, and to make matters worse they're all ringed with small villas being under construction, for more Germany retirees no doubt. Fortunately, I passed through on a wintry Sunday, when everything was closed and I could pretend it was all just gloss on some sort of underlying authenticity which spanned the centuries. I imagine in high season, when the vineyards are at their peak, it might be a bit different.

Trails, paths, farm roads form a fine network to get lost in, and with a village every few kilometres, you can't really get that lost. I had my Blackberry-GPS in hand, and so there were a few stages where I found the paths frustratingly veering off at indirect angles from where I needed to go. Fretting about the time, at a few stages I decided to just set off direct to my destination (another hallmark of Ben-travel-- just ask Vivian). It was a bit tough going at times, but I did manage to trudge through enough wild mushrooms groves that when I arrived in arrived at the town and saw a menu posted offering wild mushrooms, I gave up all thoughts of traditional Alsatian food and dived right in. A few glasses of Riesling, some prok chops, and plenty of mushrooms, all washed down with spaetzle, and I was ready to get back on the trail.

I made it to Ribeauville with twenty minutes to spare.

Here, more or less is my route:

View Larger Map

Chez Yvonne, Strassbourg

2009-03-02T04:23:00.001-08:00

Foie Gras with Mango
Interior of Chez Yvonne
Jambonneau (Pork Knuckle)
Sauerkraut, in the original French

I only had an afternoon and evening in Strasbourg, but it was enough to see that this was clearly my kind of town. A jog along the canals advertised straight away that this was a place that takes its eating, and its drinking, seriously. Surprisingly stately buildings such as the European Parliament overlooked canal-side cafes where urbanites sipped their regional wines in slung-back folding lounge chairs and watched the odd boat go by. Jogging was slow, because I had to stop by the window of more than a few chacurterie storefronts.

Alsace has the most Michelin stars of any French region, yet I spared my father the shame of eating anything resembling "luxury food", and so for dinner we followed a recommendation of the unerringly spot-on New York Times travel section. It led us to a restaurant in the very tastefully preserved central old town -- Chez Yvonne, an old-school (since 1873) winestub (meaning Wine Stub), which gave no nods to modernity in its decor, but has kept its food just current enough. I started with a Foie Gras, apparently was invented in Alsace, which was served with a mango relish and vinaigrette that really brought out the sweetness and allowed me to enjoy the richness but to forget that I was eating Goose Offal.

My dad had as his main a traditional sauerkraut dish, which, I'm told, was also invented in Alsace, where its known as choucroute. It came heaped on a plate, surrounded by some unappetizing but authentic looking boiled meats. My main course was a jambonneau, a braised pork knuckle simply braised and served in its own sauce along a simple side of tasty fried potatoes.

I don't tend to cook too much European food because to make it taste good it has be fussy -- most dishes are all about timing and skilfulness, which have never been my strengths in the kitchen. When I do European food, its usually braises in which the central meat stands up for itself against a simple backdrop of the sauce made by the cooking liquid, and usually a simple side. I usually use lamb, since it so flavourful and delicious, I think the jambonneau pork knuckle has similar character. Luxembourg's judd mat Gaardebounen, a pork's neck dish, has similar character. Just a bit of food for thought for food.

Ancestral Homeland

2009-03-02T04:15:00.003-08:00

The male line in my family can be traced back with some certainty to the 18th century, when a few Maritz men appeared in the employ of the Dutch East India company somewhere in what is today South Africa. For years, the best version of the events that got them there was that which was told by my great uncle, that the first Maritz men to set foot in Africa were a pair of brothers, German mercenaries who joined up to guard the Cape Colony. This is a story; the only thing about my genealogy that is certain is the existence of a gene which never lets things such as facts get in the way of a good story.

BUT, from that distinguished line comes my father, who now flogs computer equipment to owners of large data centers. It so happens that one of the worlds' largest is owned by the Mormon church in Salt Lake City, which they use to track the genealogy of all of their members, so all the ancestors can be baptized in absentia. On a recent sales visit, my father was allowed to peer into this treasure trove, and found that his, and my, people can indeed be traced back as far as Europe -- as far back as a Quinten Kehren Marisse, born in 1568 in the village of Zutzendorf, in what is today the French province of Alsace. At the time, this territory would have indeed been German speaking and controlled by German princes. The Maritz storytelling gene does the effect of coming unerringly near the truth.

Quinten's birthplace is only about a hundred miles south of where I'm now working in Luxembourg, and so this weekend my father and I took a road trip down from Germany to check out this, our ancestral homeland. We met in Heidelberg, where he had some meetings, and drove for a few hours down the Rhine into France.

Like most of Europe, the country looks and feels just like Pennsylvania. Rolling hills, broad plains, and the occasional grove of forest. The German side of the Rhine is now more or less a complete belt of industrial farms and prosperous towns. The Rhineland is a major industrial center for Germany, and the towns are all quite modern and prosperous. Speyer, where we stopped to have a look at the cathedral, has a science museum with not just one but several large aircraft propped up by pillars high in the air, accessible by stairways to children young and grown. I convinced my father not to stop.

On the French side of the border, the landscape is the same but the civilization is quite different -- it's all still small scale farmland, dotted with ancient small villages every few miles, clearly built up over the centuries as dwellings for the workers toiling the rich fields. The very fact that the land could support so many villages speaks to its richness. The Germans were able to somehow transform that fecundity in to major cities and airplanes frozen in flight; the French just let it be.

After about an hour of winding over country roads and through villages large and small, we crested a final rise and saw spread before us Zutzendorf, a village exactly as all the others. A few hundred houses stood tall around a few streets of modest proportions, and as we strolled about, the odd tractor would trundle past. Red roofs covered that dark wood and white-washed stone siding material that most people associate with quaint German mountain villages. A few weeks ago I drove with Ellen through some German mountain villages. They all appeared to have long since moved on to a more bland building style. It was Sunday, but there didn't appear to be anything that would have been open had it not been. A mayor's office, a tractor warehouse, and that's about it.

We looked about for signs of Marisse's, but found none. The story was that Quinten's son or grandson immigrated to Africa, and upon doing so adopted the more Dutch sounding name of Maritz. However, in Zutzendorf, despite being no Marisse's, there were plenty of Moritz's listed on house name plates and in the local cemetery. Is it possible the name changed before the family left?

Anything would have been possible in those heady days of 17th Century Europe and the 30 Years War, a sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics which set the stage for the following four centuries of warfare. As my father pointed out, Zutzendorf, which would have converted to Protestantism along with the rest of Alsace in the 1520's, came to be governed by a Catholic France in 1648. It's possible that a French sounding name like Marisse may have been inconvenient in a society ruled by a French foreign occupier. Its even more likely that the war had something to do with Marisse/Moritz/Martiz family's decision to leave Alsace and head on to Protestant Germany proper, and from there onto fiercely protestant Africa.

The Low Countries

2009-02-09T04:38:00.001-08:00

Viv enjoying her two-star lunch at Mosconi
Wiener Schnitzel in Aachen, Germany
Pancake in the Dutch countryside
Our hotel in Amsterdam

I started a new project three weeks ago now, which has taken me to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a small country wedged between France, Germany, and Belgium which has used its low profile to somehow turn itself into a major European center for banking, mining, and media. The clients are easy going but we are not and so the work has been tough and have kept me from thinking, let alone writing, for weeks.

But this weekend, following a particularly brutal and mindless shift at the office, Vivian came to visit and joined me as we escaped the city-state for a road trip through the low countries. For the journey, I had procured an audio book of The Guns of August, that great classic of history which describes the few weeks 90 years ago at the dawn of the First World War, when the future of Europe and the world was juggled above a playing field made out of the same very lands I have been covering.

Our destination was Amsterdam, from where Vivian needed to catch her flight back to Boston, but we started out heading East, getting lost by the rail yard and then passing out of Luxembourg and driving twenty minutes to Trier, in Germany. We found out a few hours later that this was the very route which the Germans crossed (in reverse) when they invaded Luxembourg, the very first military action of the war, seizing that same rail junction, violating Luxembourg's precious neutrality.

On the return today, I drove a more direct route down the length of Holland and across Belgium by way of Liege, the great fortress that King Albert of the Belgians refused to abandon to the German war machine, making himself the only real hero of the war, and making his country its first martyr.

Of the landscape of the region is more varied that label "low countries" lead me to expect. There are a good deal of plains, and plenty of canals lined pretty towns alternating with industrial edifices in varying states of decay. There are fields, and occasional windmills, and as you get further south and east, there are the Ardennes, the fine set of rolling hills covered with farms and forest groves. The whole thing gives the impression of being some better presented version of Pennsylvania, and I imagine its roughly the same size.

Upon returning to Luxembourg , I was greeted, as I always am, in French by the bus driver on the way to my hotel. I tried to reply in kind, but stammered, and so she naturally switched to German. She would have spoken both of those languages quite fluently, as well as her own patois, Luxembourgish. The casual, pragmatic multilingualism is completely foreign to me as an American, and reminds me more than anything of the many African villagers who I have met who think nothing of the fact they speak not only their own mother tongue, but that of each of the surrounding villages. They may speak a little English too.

It all drives home the point that these great European wars were civil wars, and even the great massacres like the holocaust were simply internecine feuds no more or less banal than what we hear about to this day from Africa, that other ancient continent. I've often wondered how Germany could so quickly go back to being a functioning part of Europe after having started two horrible wars and committed unspeakable atrocities. It's neighbours collectively shrugged and moved on; they had to, they were neighbours.

Hasta la revolucion siempre

2008-12-24T11:13:00.000-08:00

From the jungles...
…to the electoral headquarters
From bottom to top: the three biggest brands in El Salvador: FMLN (the former rebels), Arena (the right-wingers), and Tigo (the cell phone company)

It's been a solid 28 years for the rebels in El Salvador, and they're still going strong. Of course, they've gone through some serious changes over that period, not least of which is a complete and stunning transformation from a group of mountain guerrillas to a modern and perfectly civil political party. The right wing fascists they fought against have become equally subdued -- together, they tell the story of one of the more remarkable peace-making processes in the world.

The civil war in El Salvador, understandable bleeds into the mess of the 1980's conflagrations which paralyzed central America. In Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond, the US and the Soviet Union fought a proxy war seething proxy war against each other and against the poor hapless peasants misfortunate enough to live in those countries. El Salvador followed the usual pattern: a right wing, corrupt government and often dictatorial government was about to be overthrown by a reformist popular movement, which initially took action through a democratic process. The outgoing leaders managed to convince the US that the reformers are actually communists, and so they receive license to suspend democracy and aid to combat the inevitably resulting guerrilla movement. The guerrillas, at first, receive support from the peasantry of the country, and later from Cuba and/or the Soviets.

The civil war in El Salvador never quite reached the same epic levels of genocide as happened in neighboring Guatemala, but things were nasty enough. An early masacre in 1981 of 1,000 men, women and children by US-trained government forces at a town called El Mozote was the subject of an excellent book by Mark Danner, which I read on my way to the country. From the story he tells of killings and counter-killings, one would have easily thought that the war could only have ended in a complete victory by one side over the other.

But not so -- the war grinded on for ten more years until the end of the cold war, when the US finally pulled the plug on the right-wing government and forced a set of peace talks which led to mass exonerations and elections in 1992. It's bizarre but, reconciliation seems complete. Elian tells me that its largely the result of the complete lack of any ethnic dimension to the civil war, although I imagine that the fact these poor Salvadoreans were essentially fighting a war that was not theirs for 10 years has something to do with it as well.

A friend of Elian's who I met near her site fought in the national army, against his own brother who was seduced into the rebel camp by a pretty guerrillera. Today they get on just fine -- indeed, he is getting ready to send his kids to join his brother the former communist fighter, who now lives in Virginia.

The rebels, known as the FMLN, simply became a political party, as did the right wing party of the former nationalist government. Their flags, essentially unchanged since the war, hang everywhere as political advertisements.

La Pupusa: World Cuisine

2008-12-23T10:43:00.001-08:00

A pupusa, served as usual with a kimchee garnishEl Salvadorean Tortillas
Mother and daughter pupusa team at work

The pupusa, El Salvador's contribution to the culinary world is simple, but hard to describe. It's simply a stuffed tortilla, usually filled with beans and cheese. The tortillas in El Salvador are small (4" diameter) and thick (1/3") to begin with, and are usually cooked on a hot griddle, having been hand-moulded from a batch of freshly ground corn meal. The thickness of the tortillas and their method of cooking makes the result taste more like a grilled cheese sandwich than anything -- though with the delicious taste of fresh corn. Or sometimes rice, since they also often make tortillas from rice flour here, strangely enough.

Pupusas are always served with a pickled cabbage salad, dressed in a tomato sauce. Pickled cabbage with tomato is more commonly known as kimchee, though not in El Salvador.

An important part of the role of a Peace Corps volunteer is living as the locals do. I was thinking that I suppose I could learn to live without the Air Conditioning, and am secretly a little jealous of the absence of the Internet -- but I can see the food might be a major issue. El Salvadoreans, like most people in this world, eat nothing but food -- and what they define as food is quite straightforward: soup, rice, beans, meat, and pupusa. Anything else would not really identify as edible. It's odd to think that a generation ago in the United States, most Americans would have taken a similar view -- our generation is the first to actually see the possible varieties of cuisine as a form of expression and enjoyment more than simply sustenance.

The pupusas are good -- gooey without being greasy and piping hot with just the right mix of filling to dough. They come high on the list of "foods made from meat or cheese wrapped in bread of some sort", which Vivian and I are compiling. The pupusa variety with the rice flour wrapper is an interesting and successful variation on this theme.

Over the past 4 days I've probably eaten 20 pupusas. And while I look forward to searching out an El Salvadorean restaurant back in the US one day, I'm glad that in the intervening months I will have something else to eat.

Peace Corpse

2008-12-23T10:31:00.000-08:00

Elian the budding politician

Right now, directly under this fan, it's almost bearable. Several times today I've looked about myself, startled by a blast of heat and looking for the open stove or blast furnace from whence it must have come. But, inevitably, there was none; it's just the El Salvadorean lowlands in December: hot as hell.

It's common knowledge that the Peace Corps, which places Americans in two-year posts around the world is designed to benefit the volunteers as it is the nominal recipients of their aid. I suppose each volunteers journey is unique, but spending time with Elian here it's struck by how powerful the experience of just being here is -- getting to know the ordinary folk of the third world in a way otherwise impossible.

Elian's "site" is Ciudad Dolores, a small town smack in the center of this small country. Her assignment is to engage in "Municipal Development", which as far as I can tell means she sits in the mayors office and finds ways to make herself useful. She talks of being involved in many initiatives in the town and its surrounding farming regions, but the Maritz in me can't help but note that her most visible occupation appears to be pounding the pavement. Together we've traversed the town several times, slowly exchanging warm salutations with the parents sat in the streets and receiving excited smiles and embraces from the packs of children in perpetual orbit. She goes by "Ellie" here, and the name is constantly on the lips of young and old alike. We've been a meal at every house we've stopped into, two when we've stayed long enough.

Being her mother's daughter she gets on well with the folk here, has no end friends, and has already become an integrated enough part of the social fabric here to have been the victim of the rumour mill -- it's been said that she has a second boyfriend in a nearby town, a young man recently returned from the US with a fine pickup. She commiserates with the women in the town about the men who go abroad and don't send back enough money, and she complains with the men about the crooked politicians and the lack of decent jobs. It's just life, and she's part of it.

I've spent some time in my life trying to sell to these people, though the people in question were in Malaysia and I was doing so from the 30th floor of a gleaming tower in Kuala Lumpor, crunching numbers to find the optimal offer and message to try to get them to spend more money on their mobile phones. Yesterday, as we pulled into a gas station, Elian saw a sign announcing "Doble Saldo", an offer to double any deposit ("saldo") she made into her mobile phone account -- exactly the kind of thing I was tasked with coming up with. She hurriedly asked to borrow five bucks, even though she had just borrowed five bucks to put on her phone the day before. Having only her salary of $300 a month to work with, every cent of "saldo" counts.

Elian is supposed to be living the monastic life of a Peace Corps volunteer. As far as I'm concerned, despite her access to cell phone, Internet, and DVDs, she still can claim to have survived the wild due to her surviving here without air conditioning for the better part of a year already. I'm reading a book on Latin America right now which presents an erudite set of explanations as to why the region has steadfastly refused to develop itself despite having every advantage. Sat here sweltering, unable to move, the answer seems painfully obvious.

Tel Aviv Restaurants

2008-12-10T06:47:00.000-08:00

This is it -- the end of three months of living the Zionist dream here in Tel Aviv. I haven't quite been farming the fruits of the Jewish earth, but I have been doing my share of consuming them. It took me a while to understand the swing of the culinary scene, but once I did food and eating have managed to reassert themselves as my primary hobbies.

Tel Aviv is very much a city for eating-out. The city is packed with restaurants and cafes, and a good number of those are packed with beautiful people enjoying themselves and their company. The Mediterranean climate and a strong agrarian tradition ensure quality ingredients, and these are often served in largely unadulterated fashion. A wide range of cusiines is available, reflecting Israeli's multiculturalism and wide-ranging travel tastes. Yet, I've found that the food here degrades rapidly with distance from its origin -- Middle Eastern food is absolutely first-rate. Italian is good, French decent. Anything even remotely Mexican or Asian is usually awful (with one or two exceptions).

Service is efficient if not friendly, although there is a bizarre pattern of waiters absolutely disappearing when it comes time to ask for the check. The décor also follows Israeli culture in being, um, rather bold, but there are many cozy spots nonetheless.

Every meal I've eaten over the last three months has been in one sort of restaurant or another, and as such I've managed to develop a few favourites into solid recommendations.

MIDDLE EASTERN

Shemesh. For the best shawarma you can get anywhere, head to Shemesh in Ramat Gan. I wrote a whole blog post on this, so won't expand here.

Abu Hassan. Similarly, you would be remiss to leave Israel without having a good Hummus meal. Personally, I think that the best hummus is at a local spot near my office in Ra'anana, but most people can't be expected to schlep out there. Settle instead for Abu Hassan, an institution of a restaurant whose deserved popularity has caused it to spill out of two storefronts already. Go early because they run out of hummus by lunchtime. 1 Dolphin St, Jaffo (03) 682-0387

MEDITERRANEAN

This is where Tel Aviv does best in terms of variety, class and content. As it turns out, all of the restaurants I heartily recommend here are in the Neve Tzedek/Avenue Rothschild area, which happens to be my favorite part of town. This is because all of these restaurants were recommended to me by a man I happened to have met one night in Champa, a bar in the heart of this neighborhood. We talked about how awesome the bar we were in was, establishing his good taste, and so I went on to ask for the other places he liked and frequented. He said that he didn't venture far, but it didn't matter since all the best places were nearby anyway. I trusted, and I verified.

Champa. An "authentic" Spanish Tapas bar with imposing looking legs of ham and coils of sausage hanging from the walls. I don't think anyone from Spain would recognize this as anything remotely spanish, but they do serve Cava, and most of the ham is important from Catalonia, and both are very good. It's a bar, but you can certainly piece together a light meal from what they offer.

Cava is actually the only drink on offer, and the staff does a fine job of upselling to bottles, "the same price as three glasses!" This leads to a rather convivial atmosphere, which as the evening presses on often spills out into the street. The location, and the corner of Nachlat Binyamin and Avenue Rothschild could not be better. Rehov Nahalat Binyamin 52; 077-200-8636

Radio Rosco. Just down the street from Champa, my favourite restaurant in Tel Aviv is a casual italian joint, serving what must be the best pizzas this side of Naples. I think it's supposed to be inspired by Italian-American cuisine, but they must have screwed up since there are very, very few Italian restaurants back home that are this good. I've been back four times. Don't worry, I have verified that they only use kosher pork.

The atmosphere is warm and inviting, overcoming the rather bizarre location in the small inner courtyard of a low-rise apartment buildinng. Tables fill the empy space inside the building and occupy a proper indoor space adjacent. You enter through the opening of a Spanish-language Bookshop, so its easy to miss.97 Allenbi St (03) 5600334

NG. A fine modern addition to the Jewish tradition of "meat" restaurants (dating from the days when laws of Kashrut forced jews to choose between meat and dairy if they wanted to open a restaurant). The rest of the world would think of this as a steakhouse. It's in a comfortable old house in the heart of the old neighborhood of Neve Tzedek. Service here is actually quite friendly, for a change.

There's not much to the menu, just a few appetizers and a few cuts of steak (porterhouse, fillet, etc). The steaks are good, and seriously prepared. You can't choose your level of "done-ness", but they come out a solid medium (as they should be). If anyone reading this goes to NG, you HAVE to order the eggplant appetizer. In a country which eats a lot of eggplant, this dish is divine. 6 Ehad Ha'am St. (just above Tazza D'oro) (03) 5167888

ETHIOPIAN

Ethiopian. Yes, the name of the restaurant is the same as the name of the genre. Something like 100,000 Ethiopians have immigrated here in the last 20 years, taking advantage of their birthrights as Jews. They haven't assimilated that well, which is bad for their standard of living certainly, but a good thing for the cuisine. This place is an unassuming restaurant on the sea-ward end of Allenby street. Décor is basic, service is in Hebrew or Amharic only, but the food is top-notch.

INDIAN

Tandoori. This small chain of Indian restaurants is run by an Iraqi-Jewish-Indian family and produces very passable South Asian food. I lived on their Dal Bhat (Lentils and rice) for a week when my stomach would accept little else. The kebabs are great too. There are also about 100,000 Indians jews living here in Israel, but their relative economic success has sadly limited their proclivity to run restaurnats. The only other game in town is Indira, which is owned by Romanians now and is awful. Herzliya, 32 St.Maskit 099546702

ASIAN

Sometimes you crave Asian food it happens to most people, and it happens to me quite a lot. Sadly, there's not much in Tel Aviv to hit this spot. I wasn't able to find even a truly decent Thai place, which was surprising given the number of Thais living in Israel and Israelis, living it up in Thailand.

Thus, the only two Asian places I can truly recommend in Tel Aviv are as follows:

Onami. On the popular Rehov Ha'arb'a, seated among the many trendy restaurants, is this highly polished Japanese spot. A large dining bar surrounds a sushi kitchen where friendly Thai chefs joke among themselves as they skilfully slice and dice fish and vegetables alike. Hipster music is piped in (Kinds of Convenience in a japanese restaurant? Ok…), and the crowd is young and affluent, if not sophisticated. Waitstaff are the usual surly Israeli women, though they appear to speak English well. Food was at about the level of a decent New York sushi joint, which is pretty good. This is by far the best of the Sushi bars in Tel Aviv.18 Ha'Arbaa St. Tel: (03) 562-0981

11th floor, Crowne Plaza City Center. This is the restaurant in my hotel. They have a full menu of various "Mediterranean Fusion" offerings, but I have only ever had the Sushi, which is actually pretty good, and reasonably priced. The restaurant endeared myself to me for its complete unpopularity, as it is tucked away on the 11th floor of the hotel and had just opened when I arrived. But over the three months I lived in the Crowne Plaza it was somehow discovered, and by now it is quite packed nightly. Crwone Plaze, Azrieli Center

Orthodox or Catholic?

2008-12-06T13:03:00.000-08:00

The road to Mar Saba
The monastery
The nuns praying outside the walls
The Kidron Valley, below Mar Saba
The door-monk coming out to chat with the nuns
Full size pics

"Orthodox or Catholic?"

I blanked, never having been faced with the question in exactly that form. The black robed, black bearded monk stared at me for a moment, then went back to handing out paper icons to the nuns gathered outside the door of the monastery.

"You are Orthodox or Catholic?" He looked at me again, "or Protestant?" There was no clear right answer for me among those choices, so I picked the one most easy to defend if I was to be pressed.

"Protestant," I said and smiled pleasantly.

He looked away. "Closed. Today, monastery closed." He went back to handing out icons, and I simply stood by, in the middle of this crowd of chanting nuns, waiting for an opportune moment to explain that I had come a long way, and very much wanted to visit Mar Saba, this very important Orthodox monastery, home to many of orthodoxy's most famous saints. As I stood waiting, the monk shuffled off.

I was with two co-workers, a man and a woman, and we all just sort of stood by, listening to the not unpleasant chanting of the women, clustered about the small doorway. The monk came back, he probably thought it would be easier just to let us in.

"Ok, you come," he pointed at my male colleague and I. "You, stay," he said to the woman. I already knew that there were no woman allowed in Mar Saba, and none had been since the time of it's founding in the 6th century. Indeed, not that much else had changed in that particular corner of the arid Judean desert over the centuries; I guess that's kind of the point of Orthodoxy.

The Orthodox Church, the main form of Christianity practiced in Greece, Russia, and the Middle East, is the direct descendant of the Byzantine Church founded by the Roman emperor Constantinople in the fourth century when adopting Christianity as the official religion. It survived through the centuries, battling all the while against the myriad heretical groups that tried to fork off on the basis of some or other dogmatic dispute. The most notable of these splits was of course the Roman Catholic church.

From it's earliest years, the Orthodoxy has had in its ranks eremitical (hermit) adherents, rejecting the physical world for isolation, hoping to gain stature in the spiritual one. In ancient times, there were monks who walled themselves up in caves, eating only once a week. There were stylites, a type of hermit that climbed up on to the top of pillars, and never came down. And there were plain old monks who just lived out in monastaries in godforsaken places like the Judean desert.

There could hardly be a better setting for the giving up the world, than the Judean desert, since it hardly resembles the earth at all. Mar Saba is built into a canyon in the middle of the vast, dry wastelands that lie south of Jerusalem alongside the dead sea. I had driven there in a taxi from Bethlehem, and after the sprawl of Arab houses petered out, we passed through mile after mile of moonscape, over a road that crossed back and forth on an attempt to navigate hills and cliffs clearly not meant for hospitality. At one point the car got stuck; we got out to see obstacle, but there was none. We had just gotten stuck on the road itself.

We entered the monastery. We followed the monk down the stairs into a courtyard where another identical black robed, black bearded man was standing. We shook hands and met Father Lazarus, an American hippy who after losing himself in the 1960's San Francisco, re-found himself in Orthodoxy, "with the Russians, " as he put it. He has spent the last twenty years in Mar Saba, thus far upholding a vow never to set foot outside. He showed us St. Sabas's tomb, and then in an adjoining church his body, held in a glass display case. He took care to point out both the un-decomposed state of the body, as well as its sweet smell. I did not go close enough to verify either.

I came to Mar Saba in the footsteps of William Dalrymple, a favourite author of mine I've mentioned here before. Dalrymple spent a few months among the many sects of Christians still extant in the Middle East, and gave special attention to these monks, direct descendants as they are from a historically very important line. He passed through Mar Saba and stayed for a few days, enough to earn the place a chapter in his book.

I asked Fr. Lazarus if he knew Dalrymple. He did, but was dismissive. "I was not that impressed by him. He was trying to write a book, he was not interested in learning about the mysteries of Orthodoxy." Sensing that I was about to earn a lengthy lecture about these mysteries, and knowing that my co-worker was still waiting with the nuns outside, I beat a retreat, though not before accepting a glass of water from the spring which St. Saba had caused to appear 15 centuries earlier. It was quite nice.

In Dalrymple's book, there is a sense of fatalism surrounding these ancient communities. In Turkey, he recounts how the Armenian Christrians, having been more or less forced out of the country, they are now being systematically removed from history as well, as their churches and graveyards being torn down and buried. In Lebanon, he describes the once powerful Maronite Christian community as a group of short-sighted thugs, hellbent on taking the country down with them on their path to self-destruction. In Israel and Palestine, it's a simpler, perhaps sadder story of the Palestinian Christians taking advantage of their relative wealth to simple up and leave.

There are 15 monks in Mar Saba today, down from the thousands of antiquity, down from the 80 of Mark Twain's visit in the 1860's, and down from the 20 that Dalrymple saw ten years ago. Their decline is less stated than that of the majority of Palestine's Christians, the vast majority of which have moved away to less insane parts of the world. One often thinks of the Jews and Muslims at each other's necks in the Holy Land, but in this internecine battle it’s the Christians who have been hear the longest, and have suffered the worst: the population of Jerusalem was over 50% Christian at the time of Israel's independence, today it is less than 2%.

Highways and high explosives

2008-12-05T13:28:00.000-08:00

Me and Adam
Me and Orit, eating fruit from the garden
The Ayalon Freeway, the tall buildings at the right are my hotel
The TOW anit-tank missile

This evening, I took an hour's drive north up to my aunt's house for a Shabbat dinner. I cruised in my undersized company car up Highway 6, the main road to the North, easily gliding among the eight empty lanes. It gets dark early here, but the road is flood lit most of the way. The roads were almost empty, and the experience was more like driving across miles and miles of freeze-framed airport runways than anything else. The many overpasses I glided under, each trimmed with Tron-like blue florescent lighting only reinforced the effect. After turning off the main highway and completing the last 30km on an equally luxurious side road, I remained with impression of a road network vastly overbuilt for a country this small.

I suppose Israelis being the least patient race on earth must drive a strong need to build away any threat of traffic jams, but I have a lingering feeling that the construction is more than that. It must be a holdover from the early days of the country, when the Jewish State was only what could be built by the Jews. There was a time, when Israel , though present, was still not quite a reality in the minds of many people, including most of its residents -- the newness and fragility of the country needed a counterbalance in the form of steel and concrete, poured high in the towers of Tel Aviv and wide in the roads that linked the ancient hills and valleys into a modern country.

I arrived at my Aunts house and had dinner in time to have leisurely postprandial hookah smoke with my cousin, back home for a few days from the army, where he's halfway through the three year military service that all Israelis enter upon their 18th birthdays (women, of course do only two years). He's a paratrooper, in an anti-tank unit, trained to blow up the same Syrian tanks that his father, my uncle, fought against 25 years ago in the Lebanon war.

There not being many tanks around these days, he spends most of his time on the border with Gaza, fighting a low-grade war only slightly tempered by the cease fire between Israel and the Hamas government. Missles fly in both directions, the deaths mount up slowly, one here, two there.

A month ago his unit was sent to demolish a house which concealed the endpoint of a smuggler's tunnel from Gaza. The house was mined, and when the armoured bulldozer crosser into the yard it exploded into a massive fireball which knocked down the nearby houses. A friend of his somehow had gotten hold of footage from an unmanned surveillance drone, and I watched the clip twice with him.

He's since managed to get himself enrolled in a course to be an off-road driving instructor. I saw pictures of his training; it looks pretty awesome -- driving Humvees over every possible terrain in light and dark for days one end. His mother, my aunt, confided over dinner that she was pleased that he was going to be now stationed in some school in the interior of the country rather than on the front lines. He gave that "oh, please mom!" look that every young man has to give in the face of a mother's worrying.

I've given that look many times, except the things that I do are only theoretically dangerous. I've never actually come into contact with anything truly dangerous; I've never really been scared. Adam was very nearly blown to bits. It wasn't a big deal, no one was seriously hurt, it's just a rite of passage, I guess.

But the fact remains. Within easy distance of one of these beautiful space-age flood-lit highways, a foreign force detonated a mine as a defence against a military operation. Most Israelis will take the position that the army is not merely a right of passage, it's actually an active fighting force. It's not quaint that Adam has been trained to fight aging Syrian tanks, it's practical. But I have to wonder -- given that the army is such an integrated part of the fabric of society, might it not be perpetuating its own role by engaging in such house-for-bomb exchanges with the Gazans? And might mainstream Israelis be tolerating it because of the secondary benefit of the conflict's institutions turning boys into men?

So if the sweeping highways and new towns still being built serve to the ease the Israeli psyche, let them continue to build. Perhaps soon they will be attractive enough to receed into completely.

Rose red city!

2008-12-01T06:17:00.000-08:00

Rose-red city!

Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah, AKA Johann Ludwig Burckhardt

Following a recent trip to Petra, the ancient city carved from rock in southern Jordan, I was struck by the entirely inadequate treatment given to the city's discovery in my guidebook. The history of its founders, the Nabateans, was discussed at length, but they were primitive and were only independent for a short while before being absorbed into the regional political systems, starting with the Romans. The Nabateans carved a lot of mountainsides, but they are nowhere near as interesting as the western travellers who braved all kinds of privations and bloodthirsty natives to "discover" the city two thousand years later. I had read briefly about the first one in an unrelated book on Egypt, and wanted to know more.

So on a slow day at work, I decided to consult some of the original sources. I started with the diaries of the first explorer,Johann Ludwig Bruckhardt, a Swiss traveller who had set out from Cairo to find the source of the Niger and ended up way of course, disguised as a wandering holyman. His disguise was so convincing, that he was adopted by the locals as a sort of saint, and his today enshrined in Cairo in a Muslim graveyard. I read his first-hand account of shedding all of his belongings before entering Petra, knowing that what he had would be stolen, only to have his remaining rags of clothing lifted from him in his sleep. My edition of his journals was published in 1829 following Bruckhardt's untimely death by the British "Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa".

I turned to the fantastical journals written by the New York lawyer John Lloyd Stephens, who for the journey transformed himself into Abdel Hasis, "a respectable Cairo merchant, dressed in flowing robes and armed with a brace of pistols." He describes his entrance through the canyons as "the most extraordinary that Nature, in her wildest freaks, ever framed… it is perhaps the most wonderful object in the world, except the ruins in the city to which it forms the entrance." Stephens, unlike Bruckhardt and other early explorers did not encounter significant resistance from the local Arabs, a point he laments at length.
I even stumbled across a 2nd edition of "Petra", the epic and not very good poem by John Wiliam Burgon where I re-read the famous description of the ruins being "A rose-red city, half as old as time!" The exclamation is Burgon's, one of many he seems to like to use!

So how did I manage to have these classics of exploration literature in my consultant's team room? Why by Google Book Search, of course. I have known about this resource for some time, but I see now that the scope of the books made available online is reached stunning proportions; just about every classic of exploration I can think of: Burton, Shackelton, and even my ultimate hero, Col. F.M. Bailey (who loyal readers will remember from my Uzbekistan posts) are all there in the original editions. The text is all indexed and searchable, and as all these books are long since in the public domain, they can be read at leisure.

The user interface is good, but not great, although it contains a lot of nifty features such as a list of all the references and cross-references made in other books. I was browsing the Google Reader blog, where I learned that they have made a mobile client for the Android platform, which actually may be a compelling reason to buy an Android phone (need to check if there is a good podcast client, like what I have on my Nokia/Symbian phone).

Many of the classics of historical/travel writing genre which I have come to love, such as the books written by William Dalrymple, Alan Moorehead, and of course Peter Hopkirk, were based mostly on the primary sources created by the original wave of explorers themselves, backed up with extensive travel of their own. The digitization of the primary sources makes them accessible to lay travellers such as myself, who can create their own scaled-down works of travel literature, such as... this blog.

Zionist German Architecture

2008-11-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

Israel was perhaps one of the greatest social experiments of modern history, and in a certainly limited sense is one of its greatest successes. The creation of a modern nation state out of nothing more than an ethnic and religious group was certainly a stunningly bold, humanist undertaking. It’s fitting, then that after a location was chosen and a language refined, when the time came to build a city, its architects looked to that most modern of styles for their inspiration: the Bauhaus.

A brief-lived movement that grew out of the troubled and ultimately misplaced optimism of Weimar Germany, the Bauhaus was a state-sponsored architecture and design collective. I’m no expert, but the Bauhaus output of the 1920’s and beyond stands in start contrast to the modernism of fin-de-siecle Europe, which manifested itself in the warm Art Nouveau styles of eras before the wars. The Bauhaus rejected ornamentation in favour of simplicity, and details in favour of efficiency. Perhaps most of all, they rejected the elitism and expense of all forms of high design at the time in favour of something which could be reliably and effectively reproduced – they were, perhaps, the inventors of Pop Art.

Ideologically, this was all very much in line with what the inter-war Zionists had in mind for Israel; a egalitarian utopia which turned its back on a more complicated European past and had both feet firmly in an elegant, simple future. The fact that architectural style also promised to be cheap to manufacture certainly didn’t hurt. So when a great number of the Jewish members of the Bauhaus school were chased out of Germany in the early 1930’s, the new city of Tel Aviv, rapidly rising out of the sand dunes to the north of the old port of Jaffa welcomed them with both arms… and quickly put them to work, drawing their own plans and training the new crop of Zionist builders.

I have made a good number of trips to Tel Aviv over the years, and I never really recalled the city has having particularly notable architecture. I mostly thought of the dusty streets of low-rise concrete buildings as being more or less undistinguishable from the countless other cities built after the Second World War around the globe. But as you move closer in to the heart of Tel Aviv, if you gaze up through the leafy trees that line the streets, and can peer behind the sheets of peeling plaster, it becomes not hard to make out a gentle curve of a buildings corner, or the stark cropped edge of a long balcony: the trademarks of the Bauhaus.

As you move down such a street, it becomes almost breathtaking – building after building repeats the same motifs, artfully simplified construction of apartment blocks stripped down to their essence. One can imagine sea-air ventilated rooms full of happy young Zionist architects, men and women side by side in khaki shirt-sleeves, slumped over drafting tables sketching away under a portrait of Walter Gropius with a banner that reads “form follows function!” After work they might have gathered in the still-fresh city square of the “White City” they were about to create until one or another of them produced a clarinet and then they would dance the hora until the small hours.

I suppose in the uncertain, war torn years that followed independence, as the idealism gave way to modernism of a different sort and middle class moved out of Tel Aviv and into the many suburbs filled with driveways, washing machines and the like which now fill the coastal plain. Tel Aviv remained a commercial center, a home for the banks, the ministries, and whoever else could not easily move. The apartment blocks, built in a fit of communal optimism, passed into the tied hands of landlords bound by rent-control laws who had little choice but to let the buildings pass into disrepair. Plaster peeled, gardens were paved over, and the airy iconic balconies were closed in with all manners of slatted blinds and iron railings and worse to protect against the Mediterranean sun, the salt air, and the sceptre of crime that haunts every city of the sort Tel Aviv was becoming. It’s that Tel Aviv that I remember as a boy; a place with pleasant weather but awful construction. A part of Israel fun for an outing, but giving no reason to linger more.

Today, it appears things have changed. In the early part of this decade, the center of the city was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Simultaneously, Tel Aviv began to succumb to the wave of urban renewals which was, and still is, sweeping the world. Our generation is rushing back into the cities our parents and grandparents abandoned, seeking the very sort of human contact and unpredictability they sought to avoid. So among the old septuagenarians taking the air, one can see in Tel Aviv many a yuppie walking their (miniature) dog or raising a pair of designer sunglasses to asses a particularly attractive view. The restaurant and café scene in the very core of the heritage architecture districts (Avenue Rothschild, and Dizengoff) is truly world class, and shows signs of getting better (see my forthcoming blog post on the dining scene). I think it’s exactly what our smiling, singing architects had in mind.

The Best Hotel in Eilat is in Jordan

2008-11-22T12:55:00.000-08:00

Israel, though commonly thought of as a Mediterranean country, has a small outlet in its far south onto the Red Sea as well, connecting it to the trade and fair weather of the oceans of the southern hemisphere. Despite being constricted for space, wedged as it is into the tip of Israel’s southern triangle, it does dual duty as a major port and as a major tourist destination. It’s actually most interesting for its proximity to Aqaba, a sister city which serves the same role for Jordan, in plain view across the water.

A co-worker and I made the four-hour drive down from Tel Aviv, through the formidable Negev desert which makes up the most of southern Israel. It’s a stunning landscape of red rocks and jagged hills, a more hostile version of New Mexico. It’s unwelcoming character is somewhat underlined by the skull-and-crossbones signs that line the roadway, reminding drivers that beyond BOTH sides of the road lie live-fire military training zones. When the well-maintained two-lane highway meets the Red Sea, the surrounding scenery doesn’t subside, rather the small hills grow into brown mountains that loom over a narrow passage to the water, where lie the ports and hotels.

The tourist industry doesn’t mind the lack of space, rather it seems to thrive on it. It’s impossible to explain the experience of an Israeli tourist hotel to someone who has not been. It’s a thoroughly democratic affair, with packs of extended families making the trip with a full retinue of offspring in tow, content to do nothing more than sit about all day and night, chatting loudly and eating, moving only to go from restaurant to lobby to pool and back to restaurant, with children in constant orbit. These being Israelis, brought up on the virtues of communalism, there is no need nor desire for space. It can be delightfully informal, if you don’t have to stay long.

We stayed in the “best” hotel in Eilat, the Rimonim Neptune, whose recent make-over was already wearing thin under the stomping feet of the masses. The desk staff, mostly Indian and Russian immigrants, seemed only barely able to cope with the chaos. My heart went out to the restaurant staff, mostly Russians, as they fought a running battle against entropy among the many buffet and dining tables. No matter how many the chairs they uprighted or spilled dishes they mopped up, there were always more crashes and squeals. I saw a child gleefully open the spigot of the Coco Puff breakfast cereal dispenser and watch the contents empty onto the counter and out into the floor. An attendant walked by and pretended not to notice.

Outside, on the nearby beach, the hotel beach bars compete for the title of disco with the loudest music… and the longest hours. I believe the current title went to our hotel, which was able to both keep me from falling asleep long past midnight, and wake me up again the next morning altogether too early. In short, I would not recommend a holiday in Eilat.

However, from my hotel window I could plainly see the fast-growing part of Aqaba, on the opposite side of the bay. The Jordanian monarchy, in partnership with the Hariri families Saudi Oger construction company, is transforming Aqaba into a major tourist destination. A planned city is fast rising from the waterfronts old fish docks, in fine Gulf style and scope.

Signs around the town announce an ominous “Promise of Growth”, hinting at the bargain forced upon the citizens of Petra, many of whom have been moved away from the waterfront up into new apartment blocks in the surrounding hills. We passed through on our way to Petra (see next point), and I was struck by the opulence of the first hotel to open, a sparkling Intercontinental, with a promise of attentive, smiling staff you would never dream of finding in Israel. I’m not sure how this will all work out for them, but from a tourist’s perspective, it can’t be much less appealing than Eilat.

Cairo, city of the present

2008-11-17T09:24:00.000-08:00

Cairo, like many prominent world cities, has had several lives. What sets Cairo apart, is just how far back these flow, clear into the era long before the dawn of human history. Orthodox Christian tradition has it that Jesus took a swing through here as a young lad with his family. As he came by Cairo, he must have seen the pyramids, hard to miss as they are. It's odd to think that that time, year 0 for western civilization, is much closer to us now than it was to the construction of those pyramids, 2500 years prior.

It's this age that sets Cairo apart from other cities with rich pasts. In Rome, threads of the past can be found which run through, almost unbroken to the present day (The Pope being one, himself a descendant of the Pontifex Maximus, chief bridge builder of the ancient village). In Delhi, believers are worshiping right now in the very same mosque where the builder of the Taj Mahal did the same. In Egypt, the pyramids are tourist attractions, nothing more. I just finished Anthony Sattin’s book The Pharoh’s Shadow, in which he searches for signs of continuities from the ancient past. He writes well, but as he hardly finds any, it’s hard to describe the book as a success.

Signs of Cairo’s thousand-year incarnation as a Greek (or at least Hellenistic) city are also faint. Granted, it was never a very important Roman or Byzantine city. My favourite author, William Dalrymple, merely hops through the city on his tour of important sites of the Byzantine/Eastern Church, as described in his excellent From The Holy Mountain. He makes a few church visits in Cairo, but only to interview the Coptic priests about their current political plight, the severity of which is seen in their evasiveness.

There are still a few million Copts in Egypt, and I visited some of their holiest sites, in what’s known as “Old Cairo”. It’s a shrine-packed area of a few acres around the places where the Holy Family stayed while they were in town. Churches and monasteries stand cheek-by-jowl vying for the attentions of the thousands of mostly Catholic, mostly Spanish tourists. In one of the all-too-common accidents of history of this nature, it’s also the exact site where the Pharoh’s daughter found baby Moses, and so among the churches stands one of Egypts last functioning Synagogues, built to mark the site.

The few remaining Copts and the Jews have been subjected to increasing violence as their numbers have dwindled over the decades since Egypt’s independence. Old Cairo, a World Heritage Site, is thus protected by an over-abundance of Cairo’s already-ubiquitous white-uniformed police. They form a cordon around the outside, and visitors must be searched. Inside, UNESCO and US AID have provided funds for what is a very nice restoration, but the resulting marked difference from the rest of Cairo makes it feel more like an amusement park than a part of history. What little life is left in those stone walls is propagated by the several Christian schools, who pumped out their students on the afternoon of my visit to do battle in noisiness with the legions of tourists alongside me. I donated $20 the Synagogue and hurried out.

Pharonic and Coptic signs are there if you are looking, but it’s Cairo’s third incarnation, as a Muslim capital, which leaps out at you. There are mosques everywhere, more than I imagined would be in a supposedly secular state. Many of these were built as part of elaborate tombs during Egypts 150 year period of rule by the Mamluks, slave-kings who could not leave their wealth to their children, and as such blew it all on monuments to themselves. Islamic Cairo, now renamed “Fatimid Cairo” no avoid any confusion with anything “Islamist”, is a collection of narrow alleyways and mosques of all descriptions. Without the danger of attack its not sealed off from anything, and is very much still alive with market stalls, apartments, kids, barber shops and all the other signs of lower-middle-class metropolis life.

Muslim rule ended, more or less, with the rise of Nasser’s Arab Republic. It’s a strange twist of fate that as official Islam waned, its incarnation among the masses rose, and turned upon the minorities in its midst. Egypt’s cities, both Cairo and Alexandria, entered the 20th century with their heritage rich within them. Pre-war Alexandria was from all I have read the best city in the Mediterranean, with foreign oddballs of all descriptions mixing in effortlessly with the native Jews and Copts, not to mention the Muslims. Today little is left.

It all happened as part of the great sorting out of civilizations which occurred amid the dropping tide of globalization which followed the First World War. The rise of the nation-state and the corresponding military means to improve the purity of the corresponding “nations” was all it took to send each ethnic, religious, or linguistic group in search of itself. There are very few places left where distinct communities live side by side – the only places that comes to mind immediately are Kuala Lumpor or Singapore, with their splendid vibrancy of Malay, Chinese, and Indian cultures.

The re-globalization of the past decade is a weak by comparison – what are trade links and satellite communications compared to the immediacy of next door – but it is something. It has spawned some actual diversification, especially in the business community as represented by people like myself, taking ourselves to new lands in the name of commerce. I’m proud to be part of the rebound of diversity, re-conquering Cairo in the name of my ancestral cousins.

Leaving Cairo, Never Easy

2008-11-16T12:18:00.000-08:00

I am writing from the Cairo Airport, in a Starbucks, right next to a McDonalds. At the table next to me is a happy, young Saudi family, husband, maybe 25, in a creased dazzling white dish-dash, with his nation’s trademark red-checked headscarf casually wrapped up on top of itself above his head. He and his two young wives (sisters? one wife one sister?) are enjoying matching Big Mac Meals with giant-sized sodas.

The airport here is the first time I’ve seen anything but grace from the Egyptians – they get along well enough with Israel but they certainly don’t like it. The guards all graciously ask my destination, then gruffly ask for my passport and point me about once they hear I am Tel Aviv bound. There’s not much love lost – the team of young Israeli security screeners who interview all passengers at check in bark back and forth with their Egyptian counterparts about matters of queue management in poor and poorer English. I’m willing to cut them some slack – they fly here specifically for the job, then fly back, in shifts, each inbound El Al plane carries the staff that must wait in Cairo for 3 days until the day of the next scheduled flight so they can do their jobs. They ask the usual probing Israeli security questions, staring you in the eyes, asking simple questions rapid fire, waiting for you to trip up. Once the last passenger has past scrutiny, they scamper aboard behind him, undoubtedly relieve to go back to Israel and do whatever it is they do when they are not being confined to their compound in Cairo, unable to wander out for reasons of “security”.

The Egyptian government deserve praise for doing what it can to keep the Palestinians in check and the Middle East peace process on roughly the right track. Like most authoritarian regimes, they are at hard pragmatists, and while they may not love the idea of a bunch of strutting jews discoing and sunbathing and making fortunes just up the coast, they know that continued conflict means continued prestige for the Islamist freedom fighters of Hamas and Hizbollah, who dislike the secular Egyptian dictatorship only marginally less than the Israelis. So they host peace talks, half-heartedly keep weapons smugglers from crossing into Gaza, and do what they can to maintain contacts.

The Egyptian people are by nature welcoming, with a warm, formal hospitality and patience that makes them the approximate opposite of their Israeli neighbors. But they appear to be willing to draw the line at Zionists. I read an article in the paper this morning describing a widely supported protest lodged against the Israeli Ambassador to Egypt by a Egyptian high court judge. The two share a high-end apartment building in a wealthy suburb of Cairo, and it appears that whenever the honourable judge chooses to use the gym, the Israeli is invariably already there, which means the all entrants must be searched by the 5-strong Israeli security detail. If it’s anything like the dressing down that I received at the airport just now, I might be inclined to understand, if not second, His Honor’s side in suggesting that the Envoy find somewhere else to live… like in Israel.

The Egyptian Museum

2008-11-14T15:03:00.000-08:00

"Come. Sit." Said the guard, patting the bench next to him. I complied, parking myself on the small bench against one of the thick, cool walls of the Egyptian Musuem in Cairo, my first stop on today's sightseeing. "You take photo?" the guard asked, gesturing at my camera.

"Oh no," I replied, knowing that it was not allowed. I had taken photos, but only when no one was looking.

"You want?" he asked. He was a small man, in his 40's. I'm sure he had a wife and kids, maybe two wives and kids, and probably didn't make that much in the museum. I saw what was coming and shook my head no. "You take photo Ramses," he insisted, gesturing at what was clearly labelled in English as a statue of King Amenhotep IV. The guard got up, walked 50 feet away to stand in among some haphazardly placed lesser statues, tried to look busy for a moment, then turned to shoot me a furtive nod and wink. I dutifully stood up, took my photo, then slipped him 5 Egyptian Pounds ($1) in one of those pleasing sly bribe-passing handshakes.

There may be museums more poorly curated then the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but none would has a more significant collection. The pieces, when considered for there craftmanship, age, and symbolism are simply stunning. Some are up to 5000 years old, and are all the more moving for having remained very aesthetically pleasing right up until today. The jewellery would not at all look out of place on one my friends or sisters. But they are just sort of cast about the cavernous building, like so much furniture on discount in a warehouse sale. My sister, who has been here before, told me to get a guide or I would be lost. So naturally I declined to get a guide.

In a way, the lack of order is almost fitting. To me, the magic of the these artefacts is much more in the stories of their discovery than in the ancient, alien lives of the people who found them – and when they were found, they were locked up in some cramped tomb, piled one on top of the other, certainly in no order and with no captions.

This only dawned on me when I saw some of the photos of the explorers who uncovered them, and the condition in which they found the tombs. King Tutankhamun, a king so minor in the annals of the Pharaohs that his grave was promptly forgotten by his contemporaries and left until Howard Carter stumbled upon it in 1922, beneath some wreckage passed over by generations of prior tomb raiders. They excavated a staircase going down into the earth, into what could have been anything at all. They it was in all likelihood a storage cellar of some sort, but imagine their delight to have found it was one of the richest archaeological finds ever made. I’ve had some lucky breaks in my time, but never anything quite so.

The King Tut exhibit in the museum is, to this layman’s eyes, the only thing really worth going to see. But the sheer amount of gold and glitz, together with those great black and white photos, to make it worth the trip.