Category: Personal

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My own “Eat, Pray, Love”, but not really

When I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” a couple months before leaving on this trip, it wasn’t hard for me to find some parallels between her adventures and what mine were hopefully going to become. Some of the more obvious ones include that we both would go to Indonesia and Italy, and I planned to meditate at a monastery. And I do not doubt that by the time I complete my journey, there will probably be other similarities I could draw.

Unfortunately and fortunately, our starting points were a little different. My trip would have probably been a bit different if I had been given a substantial publisher’s advance. I feel that this is almost like cheating because I feel that the budgeting that took place to make my trip a reality began well before I ever started planning and will continue after the trip is past. Budgeting was one of my bigger challenges because with enough money, the possibilities become almost endless. The part where I feel fortunate in our differences is that I am not divorced nor have ever been married, and I am not unhealthily off and on with someone as she describes her David.

Some similarities that I’m hoping for include having the opportunity to gorge on delicious food in Italy. I want to find that pizza that even though it falls apart when barely picked up, it doesn’t matter because it is so delicious when you finally get it to your mouth. I want to eat some meals overflowing with seafood and others that include so much pasta that I don’t even have room for dessert, which when the time comes I’m sure I can find a little left over space. After all, that’s why I’ve been told we have two stomachs—one big one for dinner and another even bigger one for dessert.

When I meditate, I wouldn’t mind experiencing some sort of similar meditative transcendence that Liz does, but I would happy with just being able to sit still for several hours without moving. This alone will be a great feat. And although I plan to go to a monastery where talking is against the rules, I hope to at some point in the trip meet my own Richard from Texas. I want to meet someone who makes me feel despite all that might be going on that everything is going to end up okay, someone who always has something positive to say even if it might feel a little backhanded, and someone who will listen to my stories and offer his two cents. I do need to make sure, though, not to end up with a nickname as bad as “Groceries”.

For the “Love” part of the book, the part that took place in Indonesia, where Liz finds her Brazilian lover, I feel I have to keep my mind open and see what happens. When I was talking to my grandma a couple months ago and we were discussing my plans for this trip, she had two tokens of advice that remain clearly in mind. First is to be safe and second is to find a nice Jewish girl. Both are very grandma-like things to say, and I’m not sure which of the two is more grandma-like. And I know that she will be happy with any girl that I’m happy with because of my many cousins (her grandchildren), several have married other Jews and several have not, and she loves all of her grandchildren-in-laws dearly.

So I guess in terms of this trip being my own version of “Eat, Pray, Love”, only time can tell. And in terms of me endorsing this book, I do admit to enjoying it, but only to the extent that I would visiting similar places and doing similar activities. I feel I may have liked it more knowing that I was about to embark on my own tale, and had the book not included so much about Liz’s inability to move on from her divorce and bouts with depression, I may have really enjoyed this book. I’m probably just jealous that I didn’t get a substantial advance on my own travel journal.

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Up Next: Meditation

I keep asking myself what I am doing. I’m as inflexible as can be and love to talk, both of which will present just a couple of many challenges I will face at my upcoming monastery stay. Several days ago, the fact that I’m going to try to do this monastery stay became much more real and my initial reaction was fear. Would I be able to do it? Would I fail at the yoga? Would I fail at the meditation? Would I be too hungry from not eating between noon and dawn each day? Would I be able to get up at These questions kept coming and kept making me second guess my decision to do this.

I then realized that my reasons for doing this were not to do something comfortable and relaxing. One reason is to better understand another way of life. And another is to do something completely out of my comfort zone and see how I am affected. The worst case is that I bail for my 10 days are up, but that is far from the plan. I don not know exactly what will happen and how I might change over this week and a half, but I’m ready and excited to find out.

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Monkeys and Elephants

Bali is not short on wildlife as I’ve now had a chance to witness it in water and on land. In a country so focused on growing its tourism industry and so rich in animal life, I sometimes worry how one affects the other. Two stops I made while staying in Ubud were the Monkey Forest in the middle of town and the Elephant Safari Park just 30 minutes away. Both were spectacular in the sense of how close I could get to the animals and how relatively unrestrained the animals were as far as cages and enclosures are concerned.

monkey

I took issue with how the tourists treated the monkeys occasionally trying to excite them in various ways. Then, people are surprised when the monkeys act aggressively in return. More than aggressive, the monkeys behavior can best be described in this scenario as protective. For example, we should not be handing monkeys a water bottle to see what they do with it. That all said, the monkeys were completely unrestrained and were roaming around every path and in every tree.

elephant ride

Elephant hug

In the Elephant Safari Park, the elephant caretakers and trainers all treated the elephants with complete respect; however, training a creature with the intelligence to dunk a basketball, paint, and raise a flag up a flag pole to do exactly those things feels like taking advantage of the animal. I loved watching an elephant use his trunk to slam home a basketball, especially as I am currently going through March Madness withdrawal, but I also recognized if the elephant can do those activities, what is the elephant thinking when asked for example to carry us on its back. I loved feeding the elephant, being hugged by the elephant, and shaking hands with its trunk, but all the while I felt a twinge of guilt. The Safari Park said that it rescued these elephants, and that knowledge taken at face value makes me feel better about the operation.

Experiencing these animals so intimately was a rare and fun opportunity, and I believe it raises awareness of their intelligence and grace.

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Balinese Road Etiquette

After a week in Bali, I’ve both ridden in a car and on the back of a motorbike. (The down payment on one of these motorbikes is about $30 USD.) Most roads have one lane going in each direction, and sometimes not even that. Everyone drives at whatever speed they feel most comfortable, and therefore, there is usually a lot of passing and being passed. And although we usually stayed between 40 and 80 km/hr, going around 60 km/hr on a small motorbike is an exhilarating experience. I was wearing a helmet, although I’m not sure how much that would actually help if there was a serious accident. More important was that my driver, Dive Master Ketut, was a husband and father of four and needed to provide for his family, so I knew that he would drive safely. That said, the weave of bikes , cars, trucks, and pedestrians had more elements of chaos than order, and I was happy that I was not driving. And finally, to add another variable, the potholes scattered throughout the roads are avoided by all travelers adding an extra bend to the already complicated weave.

driving in the rain

chicken crossing
I forgot to mention the occasional chicken crossings.
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Top100.cn – Creating a Soundtrack

Instead of focusing on the websites I couldn’t reach while in China, such as Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes even Gmail, I will write about the Chinese site Top100.cn, which is strongly affiliated with Google. Searching for music on Google China or through Top100.cn allows users to download almost any song. In a country that clearly has the capability to regulate the Internet, it is equally interesting to consider the sites and online industries without regulation. And even more so is how Google endorses them. That said, it does make sense for Google to do so in order to compete with its Chinese online search competitors like Baidu. Google, then, justifies its actions by explaining that the Chinese will download their music free of charge regardless if they can find links through Google Search; therefore, Google tries to place advertisements around those links so that the music industry can at least profit some from the high music downloading rates in China.

Throughout my life, I have always connected certain songs and specific artists to certain life events. This is partly because when I find a song I like, I have a tendency to listen to it over and over, but it might also go beyond that. I remember receiving my first CD player and listening to Matchbox 20 while writing my Bar Mitzvah thank you cards. I remember listening to Dave Matthews while driving to high school. Beginning of my high school senior year is marked by R. Kelly’s hit “Remix to Ignition.” My year living in Casa Italiana while at college makes me think of upbeat artist Mika. While riding my bicycle, my water-bottle shaped speaker would almost always blare 80’s tunes. And of course, anytime I’m on a family road trip, I look forward to Neil Diamond joining us. In other words, I feel that there is a rough soundtrack to my life, and I wanted to continue this as I traveled.

I filled an mp3 player full of songs before leaving, but after finding easy access to Chinese and Southeast Asia popular music through Top100.cn, I added many new hits to my playlist. Now, as I continue to travel, hopefully, I will start to connect these popular Asian tunes to my new adventures.

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Lost in Translation

Although I knew I was traveling to a foreign country where English was not an official language and not spoken everywhere, I expected more English-speakers than I found. As a result, over these two weeks in China, I began to perfect the gesticulation dance so integral to my survival. Traveling with an English map is the first step to any successful day in China. Street signs include English text, even if just the transliteration of the Chinese characters, taxi driver’s respond well to pointing to locations on a map and running my finger underneath the Chinese characters of where I want to go, and most tourist maps even included a city subway reference. With a map and an idea of where I wanted to end up, I could successfully arrive at most places. In other cases, however, when communicating with non-English speakers, as comes with trying to perfect any art form learned through trail and error, I had my fair share of errors. These are a couple, but by no means all, of my more memorable errors.

One of my first days in Beijing, I ventured out to find some dinner, and ideally, I wanted to find food to take back with me to my Beijing hostel family. I found a place that looked promising. It looked like a good restaurant with a menu full of photos so that I could have some expectation of how my food would look. I have been lucky that most Chinese menus abide by this photo philosophy, a useful tool whether or not the menu also included English. I walk into the restaurant and immediately try to convey that I want to take the food to go. Quickly realizing that my English isn’t going to get me anywhere, I start playing charades while repeating the words “box”, “bag”, “to go”, and “take away” out loud.

Two words. Big picture. I make a box with my hands. No reaction. I mime carrying a bag. They start getting more excited, and run over to me with a menu. They point at exotic dishes in the menu. I look at the door, perform the door-opening motion, and start walking in place. They start pointing to more things on the menu. I shake my hands indicating I want a clean slate and want to start over. I point at the door a couple times. I now realize that I’m the dinner entertainment for the rest of the restaurant’s customers. All eyes are on me. Realizing this game was not to be won and the sand in my charade’s hour glass had all fallen, I point at a chair to sit in.

I take a seat, they give me a menu, and after a minute or two of looking through the novel that was this restaurant’s menu, I find a chicken dish that looks safe and delicious. I order this, rice and a beer. My server immediately begins to laugh, a reaction that happened often at my expense not knowing what I was supposed to in most situations. He walks away and I hear chatter between the restaurant staff. They continue to say “chicken” between stretches of Chinese vocabulary. This is when it hits me that I had them on the completely wrong track and that they thought through all my gesticulating, I was trying to convey some sort of dish or animal that I wanted to eat. Even though “box” and “bag” sound nothing like “chicken”, I can see the humor in the situation in that they might have thought I was trying to mimic a chicken’s walk or something similar. I then understand why they were pointing to dishes in the menu as I was making a fool of myself. In the end, the dish was great, and I ate it as the majority of the restaurant continued to stare at me.

On another occasion, which was less comic and more common, I ran into communication difficulties trying to find my hostel in Hangzhou. After arriving via high speed train, which traveled at a speed of 350 km/hr, I buy a map and find a taxi, in which I point to the address of my hostel that I have saved on my phone. Not yet being well-acquainted with Hangzhou, I cannot place my hostel’s location on my newly purchased map. The taxi driver drops me off just far enough away from the hostel to make the last short walk a true challenge. I get my barrings on the map and even find my general location. Unfortunately, when searching for a very specific location, only understanding my general location wasn’t going to get me there. Based on the English instructions from the hostel, I knew that it was on a small side street off the main street where I was currently standing. This small street, however, was not visible due to the map’s high-level resolution. I walked up and down the street a couple times and then unsuccessfully tried to ask a couple people for help. I quickly realized I was no longer in a big city and even fewer people spoke English in Hangzhou, which is a much smaller city of only several million people.

Eventually, I stop and stare at my map while leaning up against a near by light post. After about 10 minutes, an attractive girl approaches me speaking disjointed, but very understandable English. I am not sure if I am more excited that she was helping me or that she is a cute girl who decided to talk to me, but either way, I stay focused on trying to navigate to my hostel. She says that she was already late for something and only had a quick minute to help me. She then asks a couple people around us for directions and we run around until she figures out where I need to go. I was confident that I am now at least pointed in the right direction down the street. We part ways, and I am left on my own to find an alley on the left side of the street at some undefined distance ahead. This task I had learned how to do. I keep asking people around me to direct me towards the alley, and eventually, once I pass it, someone will respond by telling me its behind me. After a fair amount of searching, I finally find my destination, where the staff speaks great English, there are other foreigners, and there are people to show me exactly where we are on the Hangzhou map.

That all said, now that I’m at the end of my Chinese portion of this adventure, I find myself feeling very comfortable in China.

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Journaling

It’s still near the beginning of my trip, and I have high hopes of being able to maintain this journal throughout the trip’s entirety. Mark Twain offered his two cents on this ambitious goal in his “The Innocents Abroad”:

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.

I am not sure how I will do at so tremendous an enterprise, but I figure even if there are gaps in this story, recording and sharing as much as I can seems worthwhile.