World Tour 3 - Thailand and Cambodia

P.S. (Meaning "prescript" now) I am actually in Hong Kong airport posting this blog, not in India - there was a long holdup between posting it up and finishing putting my pictures in the entry :-P.

P.P.S. ("Post-pre-script," obviously) Apologies for stupid font things and formatting things here - the blogging program is being stubborn and I don't know how to fix it.

Hi everyone. My deepest apologies for the severe delay in updates to this blog. As some of you know, I'm currently working on my applications for the Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, and those essays have taken up every bit of my free work time. But recently I've taken a break from the essays and am trying to catch up on my blog. Here is the Thailand and Cambodia entry, and I'm close to done with the Japan entry as well. After that, all I need is my Bali entry (which will basically consist of "THE ST. REGIS IS THE BEST HOTEL EVAR"), and I'll be all caught up (we're in India now, going to see the Taj Mahal tomorrow). But thank you, dear reader, for your patience, and I hope you enjoy this next entry.

On the flight from Beijing to Bangkok, after Stephen and I listened to Sibelius’ 2^nd Symphony, I had a revelatory journal entry. I reached the conclusion that I should pursue a career in philosophy rather than psychology. This is a big shift for me, but I’ve done a lot of thinking about it and think I’m right. I’ve been obsessing and talking about it so much during this tour that it’s become a joke and irritation among my fellow Whiffs, who have been very indulgent of my recent predilection to talk about my internal conflict incessantly. I feel like I’ve resolved a lot of the conflicts now, so hopefully I’ll be able to think and talk about other things over the course of tour. If you’re interested to hear more about my reasoning, shoot me an email.

Upon arriving in Bangkok’s beautiful shiny new airport, we were picked up by a huge bus and immediately set out on a 1-2 hour drive to Pattaya, a Thai beach town. We were hosted in Pattaya for two nights by the Siam Bayshore Resort, a very nice hotel surrounded by sketchy clubs and run-down hotels. They took very good care of us – the staff were incredibly kind and courteous and always smiling at us, telling us they were honored to have us, etc. Josh observed about the Thai that they are very friendly and gracious and greet everyone with a smile, and it was completely true. We only spent a day in Thailand, but it’s high on my list of places to return.

In our rooms that night was a platter of local fruits – big grapes with seeds, lychee, a Jack apple, bananas that are sweeter than you can get in the US, and some tasty thing with a hard pit, the name of which I can’t remember or figure out. Our individual beds were double-sized. This was the first of many very nice hotels on this tour. One weird thing: there was an indoor window between the shower and the main room, such that if you didn’t close the blinds, you could simply watch someone shower. We dedicated some good time to discussing possible reasons for including such a feature in a hotel room.

After crashing late that night, we woke up the next morning and had a fabulous hotel breakfast (once again, one of many I will have this tour). After walking around the trashy streets and laughing at the strange presence of a Russian restaurant in this Thai town, we departed in an open-air taxi (basically benches on the back of a pickup truck) for the Floating Markets. The Floating Markets are a colorful complex of food, clothing, and souvenir shops all on the water, on thatched-roof wooden docks connected by bridges. Many people kept shop on small wooden boats floating by the bridges, selling hard-boiled quail eggs, assorted fruits, fried dough, etc. Stephen, Evan and I bought coconuts from one of these boats and sipped the coconut milk through straws as we walked around. One image that stuck in my head was of a man swimming near a boat, washing a huge pot in the grayish water.

One of the most pleasant things about this market is that people weren’t desperately trying to sell you their wares – they were happy to have you look at them and consider buying them without pushing you to go further. So we had a splendid time walking around and looking at all of the colorful merchandise. At one point, we noticed a person stumbling around inside of a plastic ball on the water. We went over to investigate. For about $5, you could enter this 7 foot diameter clear plastic ball and have it inflated with you inside, and be pushed out into the water (on a leash, so you could return eventually). Of course I was the person to do this. Stephen caught the action on his FlipVid, and we will post it onto YouTube as soon as I remember to tell him to. :-P All who have seen this video have agreed that it is the peak of my career in physical comedy. It was fun for me too. Once you see the video, if you observe carefully, you can see why it’s so difficult to stand up – as soon as I put weight anywhere on the ball, it moves under my weight and topples me over. Apparently the strategy is to run in one direction and reach an equilibrium that way, which is what I attempted. As the video will show, I was not successful in this endeavor.

After we returned from the floating markets, we quickly showered (as a slightly futile fight against the sweaty humidity) and departed to go ride elephants. At some point earlier in the tour Scott had made a joke to Josh about how he wouldn’t be happy with Josh’s tour managing unless he rode an elephant; apparently Josh wouldn’t have it and so found an elephant riding park about half an hour away from our hotel. Tourist season doesn’t really seem to have started yet, so we were the only customers there at that point. As we walked in, we were greeted by a sign advertising a “monkey training cobra show.” We were also greeted by a little elephant (shorter than me), walking around freely and feeling at us with its trunk to see if we had any bananas to give it. Keiji and I rode an elephant together. We rode on a metal bench perched on top of the elephant, while our driver simply straddled the elephant’s neck and mostly steered it with his feet behind the ears.

This was a surreal experience – feeling the elephant lumber beneath you, how long and wide its gaunt is, was truly astounding. Also, the elephant’s skin was rough, hairy, and warm to the touch, unlike anything I’d felt. I spent the latter half of the ride with my flip flops off and my bare feet on the elephant’s back, just feeling the skin shift beneath me as the elephant walked. At one point, the driver took my camera and got off the elephant, telling me to climb on the elephant’s neck myself. So I straddled an elephant neck, and the driver took many pictures of me like that.

The complex we drove through sometimes looked like the most isolated jungle possible, sometimes like the backyard of a theme park, and sometimes it was full of people’s shanty houses with laundry hanging on lines. It was a strange place, to say the least, but beautiful.

After the elephant ride that day we sang a concert at the hotel. The hotel put together a beautiful setup in its central courtyard and we sang a good concert. Before they served us a very nice meal of Thai food – but nothing spicy, which was very disappointing. Luckily, I would get my spicy fix when we returned to Bangkok a few days later.

The next day we spent driving into Cambodia, to Battambang, where we would stay the night before heading on to Siem Reap. Driving in Cambodia was much like driving in Thailand and Vietnam – the landscape through the windows is mostly rural, poorly constructed houses, and when you pass through a city there are many restaurants and businesses being run out of garage door setups. Honestly I sometimes found myself struck by the sheer amount of businesses running, and the amount of inventory they all had in stock. For a poor country, there sure was a lot for sale. But it didn’t seem like too many people were buying, which was strange given that the display of inventory for some stores seemed almost like a show of wealth. I don’t pretend to know what I’m talking about when I make observations about the economy in southeast Asia, though :-P.

One distinctive thing in the landscape was the fact that almost every house had a large, ornate, colorful, beautiful shrine in its yard. These shrines seemed far and away to be the best maintained and most valuable object in any property, and I found myself wondering how much of their personal wealth people invest into these shrines. Apparently Buddhism is the major religion of Cambodia, and all of this has made me understand just how deeply ignorant I am of what Buddhism is. I’d always thought of Buddhism as kind of more a philosophy than a religion, but it turns out that in common practice it has a whole pantheon of deities, just as many absurd prophecies about the future as any religion, and a lot of iconography that I don’t understand. Traveling around the world and realizing how little of what I see I understand makes me want to go back to Yale and major in world history. Alas, it was not to be.

We crossed the border from Thailand to Cambodia on foot, which was quite an experience. There was a strange structure to it, especially the number of people trying to sell us things in the no-man’s land between where we went through Thailand emigration and where we went through Cambodian immigration. A snazzily dressed man who called himself Mr. Lonely escorted us to our bus, managing to share with us on the walk his woes with women and his rendition of an Akon song I don’t know. After a lunch break, we continued to drive to Battambang.

When we arrived in Battambang it immediately began raining, which was good for breaking the heat but bad because all the roads were dirt and so you couldn’t walk around without getting your shoes incredibly muddy. My shoes have taken quite a bit of damage over this tour, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to burn them along with all my other possessions at the end of this tour.

Battambang is a small town full of the garage door businesses I was talking about earlier, which makes it fun to walk around. We met a Buddhist monk that night named Mr. Lucky, who guided us to a restaurant named the Asean Beer Restaurant. Mr. Lucky wore an orange robe which is simply an enormous square tube of orange material; he showed us how he folds it around himself in order to wear it as a robe. Mr. Lucky was very smiley and friendly and had good English. He has been a Buddhist monk for seven years, but is young – he is just now finishing high school. He hopes to go to medical school in Scotland and be a doctor. But in the meantime he runs a tourist business in southeast Asia, and told me several times that if I am ever in Cambodia or Vietnam, I should call him up and “you and your friends will be happy.” Mr. Lucky knows the secrets to a fun time in southeast Asia. So, friendly as he was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he really wanted to be our paid tour guide.

But Mr. Lucky didn’t ask for money, and did lead us to an incredible Cambodian restaurant. The Whiffs bought 13 of us (one was home sleeping) an extravagant meal in which we all ate and drank as much as we could (and some more), and in total it cost 100 dollars with tip. It’s expensive to get to southeast Asia, but once you’re there it’s cheap to live. Our waiting staff did not speak any English, so there was quite a bit of charades trying to order what we wanted. Nearly at the end of our dinner, after we’d stuffed ourselves full (I had the green curry, which was universally agreed to be the best dish there), a couple guys made the (great/terrible) choice of ordering the “fire mountain” out of curiosity. This turned out to be a bump-shaped grill that they lit on the table and provided you with massive amounts of raw meats to cook on the grill or in the boiling broth on its side. I remember there being squid, shrimp, and steak – I’m sure there were some other meats as well. We all tried to eat as much of it as we could, but unfortunately a good amount of food ended up being wasted. But damn, it was quite an experience!

The next day I slept in and then we departed around 11 for Siem Reap. At Siem Reap we stayed at the Victoria Angkor Resort Hotel, a beautiful very high-end hotel with a magnificent pool. The aesthetic of this hotel was focused on wood and empty spaces, something I liked quite a lot. The elevator was an open-air lift made of welded iron – I thought this was particularly striking.

Upon arriving we almost immediately all got into our bathing suits and putzed around in the pool (as per usual, much more luxury than a bunch of college kids should be allowed to have). Later we got changed and were served another extraordinary dinner. After the dinner we sang a concert outside for party guests at the hotel.

One of the most incredible things about this hotel was actually outside it: in the park in front of the hotel were enormous trees full of black splotches. Those black splotches, upon further examination, were bats, big ones – there were hundreds upon hundreds of these bats in this complex of trees. During the day you could hear them squealing outside your front window. But in the evening (in fact, while we were eating dinner) the bats perform a mass exodus from the trees, all going in the same direction (why? I don’t know). A few of us left dinner to watch this for a while, and it was a truly unique sight. There was a continuous stream of bats flapping their wings for as long as the eye could see. Sam Bolen accurately observed that this was a pretty convincing sign of the apocalypse. (The picture may be dim, but all those black specks are bats, and that barely captures the half of it).

The next morning had the real action, though: our tour of Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. Apparently there are hundreds upon hundreds of these ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples around Siem Reap, and we only saw three of the most famous. First we went to Angkor Thom, which was the capital of Cambodia when it was built around 1200 AD. It was actually a thriving city of over a million people at the time. Now all that remains is the stone – the wooden city is all dust, but the stone temple stands strong in all its detail.

The Angkor Thom temple was the religious center of this thriving city, and it was built after the king decided to switch the national religion from Hinduism to Buddhism (apparently Hinduism wasn’t giving them much success in wars, so they figured they’d appeal to some different Gods who might give them better luck). So the temple is full of and partially composed of twenty-foot tall stone sculptures of the face of Buddha, some with eyes closed, some looking out, all with the same serene half-smile.

The walls of Angkor Thom are littered with detailed murals depicting dancers and gods and stories. The amount of detail remaining in the stonework is truly astounding (check out the picture). You can see the curves of the dancers’ individual fingers and the subtle emotions are clear on each face. These small details combined with the majestic sweep of the thousands of tons of stone piled up into a massive temple complex make for a humbling effect. Angkor Thom may well have been my favorite of the temples we saw, because for some reason I was able to conjure the most vivid image of what it must have been like in its prime. Imagine the 20-foot-tall Buddha faces gilded with gold, painted colors all over the temple, priests and common worshippers flocking the asymmetrical passageways going about their worship, while the commercial bustle of the wooden city surrounds them on all sides. I think especially the asymmetricality and unpredictability of Angkor Thom contributed to how easily I could imagine it as still being an active worship space.

After Angkor Thom we went to Ta Phrom, a temple complex famous for the particular way in which it has been destroyed – it has been strangled by the jungle. While the stone temple walls still stand, some have been crumbled by enormous trees, or merely integrated with the trees, so a tree will grow its roots over a wall or around its base. This is what you imagine when you think of an Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider scene. Thus it’s appropriate that a scene from Tomb Raider was actually filmed at exactly this temple. I spent some time exploring this one on my own, running around, getting lost, ducking between trees, through doorways, over rubble – it was a lot of fun and I wish I could’ve spent longer there.

Finally, after a break in the afternoon, we went to Angkor Wat, which is the crowning jewel of all these temples (though there are hundreds upon hundreds of these temples, which you could spend months seeing). Angkor Wat looks very different. It’s much more formal and symmetrical – its three crowning towers are nearly identical (except the middle is larger), and they clearly bisect the complex. There’s a grand moat surrounding Angkor Wat, a grand wall, and then once you enter, there are three wedding-cake levels you have to climb in order to reach the top. The first perimeter is covered with mural work all around, of the same detail but on an epic scale – hundreds upon hundreds of feet all laid with ten-foot tall murals depicting stories about war, about the home, and about the gods. The second perimeter is a grand hallway with stone seats laid all around. I learned that these seats were occupied by worshippers all chanting prayers in unison. I’m sure that resounding prayer shaking this beautiful temple had a pretty strong effect. And then, on the top, there’s a shrine, and you can walk around and see the towers up close and personal.

One feature that I found distinctive was the staircases. The stairs are so narrow and steep that you must climb them with your feet sideways and your head down (to make sure you don’t fall). Apparently this is an intentional feature of the design. The reason is that this forces you to climb the stairs to the shrine with respect and deference towards the gods. Turning your feet sideways is a sign of respect, because pointing your feet directly at someone is considered rude, and bowing your head is a sign of respect, perhaps for obvious reasons. I thought it was really cool that the physical experience of walking up the temple stairs automatically puts you in a respectful and deferential state of mind.

Walking out of Angkor Wat, along the long, grassy “front yard,” I saw a strikingly white horse grazing on the grass. There seemed to be no one nearby who was responsible for the horse. This image stuck in my head. Before boarding the bus back to the hotel, we also saw some monkeys, just hanging out in the trees by the side of the road. There was a pretty cute baby monkey clinging to its Mama.

That night we got to see a traditional Cambodian dance show. The dances were very formal and stylized, but all of them portrayed stories – either epic battles between good and evil gods or a simple courtship between a mischievous young boy and a demure young girl. The music was the best part – there was a young girl singer, simply sitting very relaxed on the side of the stage, who sang beautiful ornamented music of a type I cannot really imitate or describe. She had a throaty but clear tone, and danced up and down scales I barely understand with an incredible agility and versatility. One of the most impressive things, though, was how the dancers managed to keep their headgear on while dancing – some of the crowns they wore were a foot tall, topped with many ornaments and delicate spires. I probably couldn’t have kept one of those balanced even while standing still, but these dancers did it while dancing.

In the meantime, the Victoria was really spoiling us rotten. The General Manager either really liked our performance or was just feeling generous, because he comped us all the food and drinks we could ask for as well as two visits to the spa. I got two different massages – the shiatsu massage was by far the better one. I got my muscles pounded and stretched six ways to Sunday, and felt really awesome afterwards.

Thus it was with great reluctance that we departed the Victoria that Wednesday to fly to Bangkok. We had an overnight layover in Bangkok before our early morning departure for Tokyo the next day, so we got rooms at an airport hotel called the “Convenient Resort” (many jokes ensued about what was and was not convenient about it) and went out in search of dinner. We ended up at a Thai restaurant across the street which was fairly obviously not frequented by a bunch of American college students. Since in all of our time in southeast Asia we’d been asking for spicy food and not getting it, several of us ordered curries or other dishes and asked the waitress to make them very spicy. We got exactly what we asked for. My chicken curry was the spiciest dish I’ve ever had. Each bite felt like taking a shot of tequila. My mouth was burning, I was sweating terribly, tears streaming down my face, but above all I felt an adrenaline rush like no other. I was very proud of myself for maintaining this intensity of spiciness for at least 20 minutes and most of my dish (though I may have ordered two or three extra helpings of white rice). Stephen, Josh, and Sam Bolen were right there with me, especially after they all ate the raw spicy red pepper together. Bolen was fine (I’m convinced he doesn’t have taste buds), but Josh and Steve were right there with me in Pain Town. But it was a lot of fun, and on the way out a table of locals all gave us the thumbs up for braving the spices.

The next morning, after very little sleep but with a surprisingly settled stomach, I boarded our flight to Tokyo.

World Tour 2 - Beijing, China

First, the pictures I promised from the ranch in Spray, Oregon:

Beautiful, right?

Now, on with our story. When I woke up at 4 AM to head to the airport last Monday morning, I had that dry, snotty pain in my throat and nasal passage that told me I was in for a good long cold. During our whole time in Beijing I was sustained on a regimen of Excedrin and Sudafed during the day and Benadryl and melatonin to go to sleep, which kept me functional enough to enjoy the days but not enough to go out with everyone at night. But it definitely made Beijing less fun than it could have been. Oh well – shitty health is an inevitable hazard of Whiff Tour (especially for me – my immune system is not the greatest).

The flight was long and uncomfortable and I spent most of it banging my head against my Rhodes and Marshall application personal statement, trying unsuccessfully to write a good draft. I probably should have spent it sleeping, but I was determined, and I always want to take advantage of the peaceful time for work and contemplation that long plane rides give me.

If you’ve never flown to Asia and are wondering how it feels, please refer to this picture I took of myself upon arrival.

We arrived in Beijing at around 4 PM and were picked up by Jen, the daughter of Jean Jones, our host. Jean is the principal of the International Montessori School of Beijing, an elementary school where we performed on our first day. She’s been hosting the Whiffs for several years now – in fact, her oldest daughter Kat is currently dating a Whiff from a few years back. Very graciously, Jean hosted all of us in her house, and though some of us had to sleep on couches, it was very comfortable and we all had a good time getting to know their family.

The first night was composed of eating dinner in the Jones household and trying to stay up as late as we could muster – I think I lasted until about 8:30 PM. But that was okay, because the next morning we were up early to go sing concerts. First we sang at the Montessori school, which was made up of adorable bilingual students who adored us (one kid was wearing a Whiff t-shirt he got during ‘08’s tour), and second we sang at Shi Gia, a public Chinese elementary school. This was a very cool experience – the kids and teachers all knew a little bit of English but not too much, but they were ecstatic to have us and very obviously wanted to impress. (For instance, upon arrival we received a long and boring tour of the pictures on the wall, depicting all the cool activities the students can participate in at the school). Our performance was broken up by two kids coming on stage with microphones and reading from scripts long speeches about how grateful they were to have us (first in Chinese, then in English). At the end, we sang Do Re Mi with the student choir and they gave us colorful little charms that bestow happiness, luck, money, etc. (reminiscent of Christmas ornaments, but not).

In between these two concerts we visited a chic shopping center with a less-than-chic mall within, which was our destination. This mall was stuffed with stores selling knockoffs of every brand ever. Our destination within this mall was Jessica’s Tailor Shop, recommended to us by Jean, where we could get ourselves hand-made tailored suits for about $150 and hand-made dress shirts for about $15. My suit, which I bought at Sym’s for over $250 my freshman year, is pretty janky and has never fit me well, so I decided to make an investment. I chose a fabric that wasn’t quite black, wasn’t quite navy, and wasn’t quite gray – a slateish color that was between all of these. I like it and am very excited to wear my new suit next year. I also got two dress shirts.

I felt like I had spent a good amount, but two Whiffs were a cut above the rest. Mike got two suits and five shirts, and Sam Hafer got one suit and twelve shirts. They spent about the same amount of money, over twice what I spent. Mr. Lavigne has now sworn to go on the Poor Tour Diet, because he’s spent all of his money at the tailor’s; Mr. Hafer was not available for comment.

After the tailor’s we had the first of several greasy tasty Chinese food meals. Chinese food isn’t much different in China than in the US, except there’s no conventional orange chicken or teriyaki chicken. We had a LOT of dumplings and quite a few noodle dishes, as well as a delicacy named Thousand-Year-Old Egg, which I think was an egg aged in vinegar or something like that. Later that same night we had a dinner at a very nice restaurant where we were served six ducks between the fourteen of us. The method was to take some duck skin and some meat and put them into a thin pancake with apple and cucumber slices and a thick, sweet sauce. I’ve had this dish at P.F. Chang’s before, but it was much better at this restaurant. During our dinner we saw a performance that included a magician who dropped her bird at one point, a man who balanced on improbable arrangements of cylinders, a small contortionist girl who blew our brains out of our skulls, a man whose mask changed instantly when he threw his cape in front of his face, and a beautiful violinist who played silly simple chords in rhythm in a tacky outfit.

Before dinner, though, we went on a Hutong Tour, which was a rickshaw tour of the old town in Beijing. This was fairly unimpressive – our tour guide obviously knew less than Wikipedia and had pretty terrible English, and the buildings were mostly run-down residences. However, we had some time walking through a cool market district by a lake, and climbed a tower with a seven-meter-tall bell on top. And of course, there was the perk that everything we saw was about 800 years old. The best part, though, was meeting up with Kevin Olusola, a good friend of Stephen, Jerry, and me from Yale who took this last year off to study Chinese in Beijing and so will graduate with all of us displaced ‘10ers in 2011. Kevin was enlisted by Jean to be our guide and helper (since none of us can speak much Chinese at all). It was a joy to see Kevin, especially because he’s obviously thriving in Beijing and was glowing with positive energy the whole time we saw him.

Unchronological as my narrative was, that was pretty much all of the first day (Wednesday) – two concerts, tailor, Hutong Tour, and dinner. I went home after dinner because I was sick, but some other Whiffs went out and had (I’m told) a rollicking good time. While I sleep my Benadryl sleep, let me spend some time telling you my impressions of Beijing.

Beijing would suck to live in. It has the two worst qualities of LA to the max: sprawl and smog. The smog is its worst quality: I did not see the sky during our entire stay in Beijing. Even an hour outside of the city on the Great Wall, the blue was still hazed over with white. In downtown Beijing, it looks like you’re in the Truman Show where the sky is a computer dome, and they turned the sky off. It’s just all white, and if something is over a couple hundred feet from you, it’s already partially obscured by smog. (Look at the last picture - that is an accurate representation of the Beijing sky at all times). As for sprawl, the streets are so wide that there’s no pedestrian life, which takes away one of the primary pleasures of being in a city: walking around. In the suburbs (the fifth ring, since the city is organized into ring-shaped districts), where the Jones house is, there are large swathes of demolished wasteland and long stretches of disorganized strip malls. Honestly, I left Beijing convinced that my friends who are obsessed with China after spending a summer in Beijing must be obsessed with the language and with being in a foreign land, not with Beijing itself.

However, I still had a great time in Beijing and saw incredible things. My favorite (perhaps predictably) was the Great Wall, which we drove to promptly on Thursday morning. I got all trussed up in tourist gear: shorts, sneakers, a t-shirt, blue Jansport backpack with water bottles, so much sunscreen my skin was shiny, $8 sunglasses I got in a Florida convenience store and a Mercy Corp hat I got in Portland. Though we had the option of taking a cable car up to the Wall (which was on a big hill), most of us opted for the whole experience of climbing the stairs. This was a big physical challenge, especially in the smoggy air. Someone observed that the Chinese are not yet as concerned about injury liability, and so aren’t scared of putting continuous long, steep staircases going up forever. By the time we got to the Wall we were deeply sweaty but that didn’t matter – we were on the Great Wall! And the experience of getting exhausted climbing up to the Wall and being tired climbing up and down its curves definitely enhanced the Wall’s majesty.

The crazy thing about the Great Wall is how windy it is, gripping to the ridge of the hills like a huge stone snake. You’ll climb laboriously to the top of some bump, pass through the shade of the guardhouse, and when you emerge triumphant from the other end you’ll see that you haven’t even begun to climb the Wall – it goes up, bump by bump, to enormous heights, and of course does this for about 600 miles. I’ve been thinking about experiences I’ve had that are impossible to replicate anywhere else, and walking on the Great Wall is one of them. No matter how many amazing pictures of the Great Wall you see, that can only give you the visual experience. The physical experience of stepping on the uneven stone and the stone steps that don’t quite fit your feet, of straining up a hill and awkwardly bumbling down, all on this solid man-made curvy Wall, is unlike any other walking experience you can have anywhere else in the world. And, despite all the amazing pictures we got, that was my favorite part about being on the Great Wall – the feeling on my feet.

Plus, I rode a toboggan down the hill, which was freaking sweet.

After the Wall we showered, donned tuxes, and set out for our concert that evening for a Yale Club event. During the bus ride, Stephen and I continued a long tradition of listening to classical music together on tours by starting with Shostakovich’s 10^th String Quartet. On the way to the gig we stopped at the Olympic complex and saw the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. Very cool buildings, but I think people might have enjoyed the popsicles we got the most. The Yale Club event that evening was an outdoor shindig at a restaurant as a fundraiser for a charity that sends Chinese students to American universities. They gave us free food and an open bar, but I was starting to feel sick so I wasn’t able to take full advantage of either. The performance was awkward because of a terrible sound system, but the night was enjoyable nonetheless. Once again, while many of the Whiffs went out, I went home to bed.

Friday morning we set off for a tour of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, both of which were overwhelmingly large and impressive, especially the Forbidden City. I found myself wishing I had the historical knowledge and context to really know what I was seeing, but I did have a headphone audio tour guide to tell me cool details. A few things I learned: one loooooooooong staircase had a solid stone mural laid out along its whole length. Since the whole mural was from one enormous piece of stone that was quarried very far away, one might wonder how they managed to get it there. Turns out that, during the winter, they created a road of ice miles upon miles long, and slid the stone to the Forbidden City by that method. Crazy, huh? One thing that impressed me was the sheer amount of ceremony involved in the Emperor’s life – sure, he had a sweet place to live, but every room was dedicated to particular ceremonies that he had to engage in on a daily basis! But more than anything the joy of visiting the Forbidden City was just admiring the tiny artistic detail on every building as well as the enormous majestic nature of the whole spectacle. And to think – no one was allowed to see this!

The touristy nature of the whole thing took away from the sacredness of the space, though – there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, and at every room people were crowded around the railing, leaning in to take pictures. It reminded me of how at the Louvre, there was a crowd of cameras around the Mona Lisa but no one seemed to be looking at it with their eyes. I took tons of pictures, but I found it funny that hundreds of people a day take the same pictures of the same thing, so millions upon millions of amateur pictures of each of these big tourist sites must exist. Makes me think that pictures are ideally for the things that no one takes pictures of, like some strange image that struck you on the side of the road. For the great monuments, I think that ideally everyone should put their cameras away and download professional photographers’ pictures off the internet afterwards. But I’m a sheep and am definitely not going to resist the urge to compress all of the incredible monuments I’ll see into a snapshot (Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal and the pyramids are all coming up). The whole tourist scene at the Forbidden City made me just think of how much more beautiful it must have been when it was sacred, when only a select few were allowed to see it at all. I guess this is the price of democratization and capitalism (both of which are very present in China, even if not officially or politically).

After the Forbidden City, we had one last greasy dumpling lunch, went to the tailors to grab our suits (which Jean is graciously going to take with her to the US next month and mail to Greene, since that’s our first domestic stop after tour), and headed to the airport to fly to Bangkok, Thailand. Though we only spent one day in Thailand (we were in Pattaya, not Bangkok) I've got enough for a long blog post that I'm part of the way through writing and hope to finish tomorrow. So stay posted for more updates!

P.S. For those who think my blog is behind the times - yes, it is. But you can't rush genius :-).

World Tour 1 - Portland, Oregon

Hi guys. :-)

Yes, it's embarrassing that I established this blog three months ago with big plans for writing in it and then wrote nothing. But now I have something to write about: I'm on Whiffenpoof World Tour and will be for the next three months, traveling to about seventeen countries and taking more redeye flights than the human body should be asked to handle. And our first stop was Portland, Oregon.

We left at 3:30 Tuesday morning from New Haven, meeting in the dark outside ABP. None of us had slept more than an hour, some of us had not slept at all. We'd all spent the day before packing frantically as well as either watching our friends graduate or graduating ourselves (congrats Dee Dee!). My mood was immediately boosted by some validation of my stellar packing job - Whiffs looked at my little bag and said "how the hell did you fit everything in THAT?" I must say, for three months, I think I did a pretty impressive job: one duffel/tux bag and one small Jansport backpack fit all of my necessaries (as pictured on the left).

At that ungodly dark hour we were met by two enthusiastic alums who sent us off with Whiffenpoof ties and best wishes. I remember not even really feeling tired this morning - my brain was shining with this giddy energy ("holy fucking shit I'm about to travel the world for three months straight!"). As we drove to the airport, we talked about things we were excited for, and the world slowly became light blue and misty in a way that felt really poetic to me. So I tried to journal, and managed to scratch out a page in my new Moleskine I bought specifically for tour. I was so cramped in the backseat and the car was so bumpy, however, it was entirely too physically difficult for me to scratch the poetic itch properly. Honestly, this is how I've felt all tour - I've journaled every day (as I resolved to do from the beginning), but it has all too often been a moment caught uncomfortably in a car where I have neither the mental space to properly process events nor the physical space to properly write down my thoughts.

We arrived at Hartford airport and departed at 6 AM for Chicago, which was our layover on the way to Portland. During our two-hour layover, almost all of the Whiffs commandeered a large space in the gate and fell asleep on top of our bags. There was a flight boarding before ours, and the boarding line had to wrap around us. I was one of these Whiffs and caught some good shuteye on the hard floor.

When we arrived in Portland, I made a conscious decision to wake up. One thing I’ve determined to do over this tour is to make the distinction between sleep and waking as clear-cut as can be, spending little or no time in that between-state where you nod off and on and the world is covered with drowsiness.

We went straight to Josh’s mom’s house from the airport and ate Subway sandwiches. The reason we’re in Portland at all is because Josh Levin, one of the Whiffenpoofs, lives here and is the tour manager for the first section of tour. So he’s hooked us up with a pretty incredible few days in Portland.

Pretty quickly we headed from Josh’s house to the coast of Portland. Driving in Portland, the thing that struck me was how lush it is – how green and wet the landscape is. Of course, this is because it rains 8 or 9 months out of the year. But, experiencing the rain here myself, it seems to be a natural part of the landscape, so it’s not as aggravating. Rain elsewhere seems like an interruption, rudely barging in on your day – here, it feels like the natural state, and any dry patches are just pleasant exceptions to the rule. Either way, all the water makes for some healthy plants. As we drove to the coast, we cut through huge hills of pine forest, and I felt like I could have spent forever just looking out the window.

We stopped at a restaurant called Camp 18 which was established by Josh’s stepdad’s parents. Camp 18 was a huge log cabin building, with enormous sculptures carved straight out of tree trunks. At Camp 18 we were treated to the restaurant special: cinnamon buns about 10-12 inches in diameter and four or five inches thick. Jerry and Justin finished theirs – I ate over half of mine, but made the wise decision not to go for the kill.

After Camp 18 we went to Cannon Beach, a beautiful beach that was featured in National Geographic once. Cannon Beach is flat and wide, the sand is all wetly packed like the last layer of a normal beach, and a stream runs through it to the ocean. We walked around for a while talking about how crazy it was that we were actually on tour now. I was giddy with the crisp cool air and visual spectacle of the beach, and I kept on saying, “guys, we get to do this for THREE MONTHS!” Here’s a picture of Haystack Rock, the enormous formation we spent a long time looking at.

That night we sang a concert and I could sense the fresh energy we had as a group – that same holy-shit-we’re-on-tour feeling. The next morning we had two concerts and a masterclass early, but they didn’t seem like chores in the same way they did during the year. Hopefully this energy sustains throughout tour! (Though I’m sure there will be moments where I just want to go home and don’t have the energy for the day ahead of me).

Wednesday really kicked into gear late in the afternoon, when we drove up to Oregon wine country. The hotel we sang at that night (The Allison) treated us to a wine tasting before our concert at Natalie’s Estate Vineyards. Boyd, the owner of the vineyard, poured us our glasses of wine and explained each to us in turn: a Chardonnay which was fermented in stainless steel barrels and thus was clear and refreshing, a Merlot, Cabernet, and a Cabernet-Merlot mix which was the 2007 reserve. There was a chef who paired the white wine with a shrimp bruschetta dish and the reds with pulled pork on sweet potato slices (not to mention the huge plate of cheeses, fruits, nuts, crackers, and chocolate covered strawberries). There were gold plates with a hole cut in them to fit our wine glasses, so we could hold both the plate and the glass in one hand. We sat around talking about artisanship in all of its different forms – how well-made coffee, tea, wine, cigars, liquor, beer, music, or really anything all kind of tasted the same – a deep, layered taste that goes through stages on your tongue.

That night we sang at the Allison Hotel and immediately afterward sat down for an orgasmic three-course meal: an excellent salad (sadly rare in the world), steak with mushroom sauce, a chocolate ganache with caramel corn garnish, wine during and coffee afterwards. Josh broke out a box of cigars (a gift from his uncle Chris) from the Dominican Republic and passed one to each of us. The cigars were short and smooth, neither mild nor biting. We walked off the hotel grounds and onto a field which we only discovered later caked each of our shoes with over an inch of mud. Almost all of us smoked, though many had never tried a cigar anymore. There was much coughing and desperate wars to keep matches and cedar sticks lit in the breeze – eventually we all gave up the pursuit of sophistication and passed a cigarette lighter around. The sun was setting behind ornate clouds on one side of the field; on the other side the moon was rising between pine trees. This was the first “moment” of tour. Afterwards we talked about the importance of not forcing “moments” and not overanalyzing them either while they are happening or in retrospect. The combination of the cigars, the fresh excitement of our upcoming tour, and the idyllic setting simply lifted us all into heaven. We waxed philosophical, talking about cigars as a metaphor for mortality, whether it would be more beautiful if the world came to be without a Creator or with one, and also spent some time talking about vocal technique and connecting with the lyrics of a song. Driving home, high from the cigar, I felt like I loved everything and everyone in the world, and got very huggy-feely.

Unfortunately some people got sick from the cigars, and one car had to stop for someone to puke. This began the sicknesses we’ve already had on this tour: Sam Bolen has been up a couple different nights puking from a stomach virus, and Scott actually had to go to the emergency room because of an inexplicable excruciating feeling that his head was going to explode. When we went to Josh’s Mom’s ranch this weekend, Scott stayed home at Josh’s Dad’s – but I think he’s okay now.

Thursday morning we got up and had brunch at the house of a Spizzwink family (parents of one of the underclassmen in the Spizzwinks). After, five of us went to the Oregon Zoo, where Jerry worked as a summer intern last summer in the Birds of Prey section. Jerry’s former coworkers gave us a backstage tour, which was incredibly cool. We met two owls (a small, stressed-looking owl and a gorgeous eagle owl with deep gold eyes), three eagles (two bald eagles, one smaller and one larger, and a golden eagle – two of these eagles were missing one eye), a kinkajou (a really cute lemur-like rodent who we got to feed), a big blue and gold parrot (who painted abstract paintings and prefers to use colors matching its own feathers), a turkey vulture, a porcupine (who we also got to feed), and a funny-looking friendly bird I don’t know the name of that reminded me of Kevin from Up. Most of these animals were rescue animals who wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild (hence the eagles with one eye). Needless to say, this was an incredible experience.

That night, after a stop by Powell’s Books, a bookstore that takes up a whole block, we attended a small happy hour thrown by the Yale Club and then sang a sold-out public concert in a Unitarian church in downtown Portland. We made about $5000 in ticket sales and $1200 from CD sales at this concert – none of which Josh and Mike had budgeted for – so it was a successful night to say the least. After the concert, we went to a couple microbreweries where the beers were sophisticomplex but overall too hoppy for my taste (yeah, I just coined a word. What up.).

Friday morning we sang a concert for a high school and had a satisfying workshop with an enthusiastic and talented high school choir. Afterwards we came back to our hotel for a sleepy rehearsal, where we learned some rather silly Japanese music. Then we had a happy hour hosted by Mercy Corps, the charity that Josh worked for during his two years off between leaving Tufts and coming to Yale. The happy hour was in Mercy Corps’ World Headquarters, a very chic building with walls of exposed concrete, light wood and glass. Mercy Corps laid out some food and booze for us and we sang some for them and spent a slightly awkward two or three hours hanging around. As at most events like this, there was a cluster of Whiffenpoofs talking to each other at most times as well as individual social-feeling Whiffenpoofs having conversations with strangers. I had a good conversation with a woman whose name I don’t remember who is in charge of private fundraising at Mercy Corps. I told her about my idea that psychological research could be used to understand much more deeply why people aren’t highly motivated to give to charity, and that this understanding could be implemented in much more effective fundraising campaigns. She certainly seemed interested and I saw some light in her eyes, but in the end she admitted that there was no job perfect for someone who wanted to take such an academic, theoretical approach to such a practical problem.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of vacillating lately between thinking that I should dedicate myself to using psychology for the public good and thinking that I should do philosophy because it’s the subject I’m most intrinsically passionate about and most naturally talented at. The answer to “what do I want to do with my life?” is different depending on what sub-question I use to answer it. If I ask, “well, what do I want to accomplish with my life?” then the answer is: save the world by using psychology to influence people to give to charity. If I ask, “well, what is the career I would most enjoy on a daily basis?” then the answer is: do philosophy, because I find its questions intrinsically compelling and get more satisfaction out of writing philosophy papers than out of doing perhaps anything else. Both of these arguments seem compelling to me, but I have to dedicate the first part of my career to one or the other (even if in the long run I can pursue both). So ask me what I think I should do with my life on any particular recent day, and the answer will be something like my mood – it systematically varies depending on the time of day and my particular context. All of this is as a big preamble to saying that this Mercy Corps happy hour made me feel for an evening like saving the world is the way to go.

We spent that evening at Josh’s Dad’s house. He cooked us Copper River salmon, which is apparently a rarity that can only be obtained three weeks out of the year. The steak was about a foot by two feet – that must have been a huge fish! We had another fabulous meal and spent the night simply relaxing in the house, utilizing the internet, belting out barbershop quartets that Jerry printed out for four of us to learn, etc.

Saturday morning we woke up and began the drive to Two Saddles Ranch, a 3 ½ sq. mile piece of the earth that Josh’s Mom owns. We stopped by Multnomah Falls, the second-highest waterfall in the United States, and took pictures in the light misty spray. Then I drove the car the whole 3-4 hours to the ranch, and it was an incredibly beautiful drive. We drove by Hood River, a big blue body of water surrounded by mesas and cliffs, and turned off 84 into the great wilderness. Unlike western Oregon’s well-treed landscape, eastern Oregon, beyond the Cascades, is like a well-watered desert grassland – lots of shrubs and some small trees on grassy hills and rock formations. The most beautiful part of the drive, however, was our forty-minute drive between two small towns through multitudes of windmills. Each of the windmills was its own white giant but they all turned together in a very pleasing way. And the hills rolled so softly and were so green that I realized the default Windows background picture must have been taken on this drive.

Our car arrived an hour ahead of the others (everyone else stopped for lunch when we didn’t, because we’d had a big breakfast before at Denny’s), and Noel (Josh’s Mom) took us for a tour of the property on the back of her pickup truck. The ranch is a breathtaking piece of land. It’s a similar landscape to what I’ve described before – huge rocky hills, green, with sage brushes and juniper trees abounding. What was truly astounding to me, though, was the idea of owning so much land that you don’t know it all, that it would take two full days to horseback ride through all of it. It’s honestly incomprehensible to me. But it’s all functional land – about 60 black angus cows graze it, which they sell to meat ranches as breeder cows. They have 20 horses on the property as well, and horses are really Noel’s passion – she was once an award-winning show rider. After riding around on the property in the pickup truck, we went back to the ranch house and had dinner with a whole big group of people, all family and friends of Noel and her husband. The family and friends were not only visiting for Memorial Day, but also for the Spray Rodeo, which turns the little town of Spray from a population of 150 to a population of two or three thousand. Today (Sunday) we sang the National Anthem at the Spray Rodeo and spent the afternoon watching cowboys compete for who could best ride a bucking bronco or most quickly rope down a calf and tie three of its legs together.

The highlight of our little time at the ranch was the trail ride I got to take this morning. I rode a horse named Denali, a tall white-and-brown painted mare who liked to eat the plants against my will and scratch her belly by walking over the sage brush (which I happily allowed her to do). All five of the Whiffs who were riding were being carried around by our horses rather than really guiding them, so a lot of the ride was composed of us saying “woah!” and trying to get our horses to stop trotting. But we got to see the beautiful landscape by literally going off the beaten path and climbing to the highest point of the hills. Every once in a while I had the urge to draw a sword and yell “chaaaarrrggeeee!!!!” and gallop across the fields, but I restrained myself, mostly because I didn’t have a sword.

Now, after spending the day at the rodeo, we’re driving back to Josh’s Dad’s house in Portland. We’re going to arrive at around 10 PM, crash immediately, and wake up at 4 AM to head to the airport. We have an early flight to Vancouver, a 4-5 hour layover there, and then an 11 hour flight to Beijing tomorrow. From Beijing, it’s going to be Thailand and then Japan. I’m very excited about all of these things. Portland has been a wonderful first stop, very comfortable and beautiful, and my belly is full of free food, but I feel like tour has still yet to begin – we’re going to leave the US and not come back for almost three months. What a crazy notion! But I feel ready.

World, here I come!

P.S. Pictures from the ranch will be included in the next post, once I load them from my camera.