-T.W. again

Eye of Horus on Papyrus:


It sounds more posh than it is that I have plans to go to a dinner party in Rome Friday. This city is ultra-architectured, massively and detailedly, crowded with astounding cathedrals, temples, museums, statuary on every other building along each street...somehow Athens had a less heavy beauty.

A theater (I want to say, a "real" theater) in Athens near the Acropolis:


Temple of Athena Nike:


Temple of Athena next to the Parthenon:


Coptic church ceiling, with Jesus, Athens. (I had seen Egyptian orthodox Christians in a coptic church in Cairo doing the same things as people here; touching and kissing tapestries and images of Mary or Jesus or saints, putting their foreheads to them...):


This sweetheart, with wounded leg, showed me around the temple of Hephaestus, Athens:


In the Pantheon, Rome:


Pantheon courtyard fountain detail:


In a cathedral that was nearly endless in size and content:


This is a small portion of what this building (what is this building?) has:

/just monkey talk

impassive
as once were my eyes but
the italian version,
the emphasis
and my night's home
a turtle backed against
a smoke shield
that japanese details
won't suit

Athens, from the Metro window aboveground on the way to the city from the airport, looked exactly like northern California, flowering mustard and all. When I walked down to the platform switching lines, an outdoor platform, to my right an arch led to the clearest sky and was overhung with some blossoming tree, plus the scent of the spring air and it felt impossibly new.

The flight from Cairo was at 2:45am. Pretty much sleepwalking onto the plane, I did not notice my journal departing from the bag I had been carrying it in. Only after arrival I found out, and the airport locaters were unable to find it. Nearly two months of daily writing, the journal a gift from my mother. A little bit I cried at the airport. Then I decided to get a new journal and have made up my mind to make it far better.

I just got to Italy by ferry. I will post photos of gorgeous Athens soon. I have left the East behind with the written record of my time there but it is not gone. Do you ever notice what could be called little signs of a thing before it happens? People around me on the night I left Egypt were all having various troubles. I helped a person from Spain write an English email informing someone that things were going badly and he was stuck in Egypt. Other things. I don't believe that simply because those around me were having problems, that it indicated something unfortunate for me, but sometimes the way occurances are combined or the way I notice them seems to indicate a marker...but I know it was entirely my doing...

The next night I dreamt I was on the horse I rode in the Sahara, galloping once more, but she was misbehaving, knocking people's food from their hands and such things because the guide was not there. "And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad..."

After Rome and Florence I shall go to The Cinque Terre, very very old and almost no tourists.

When I imagine Egypt I think of pre-Islamic Egypt, well before the 7th century Arab invasion, before hookah-smoking and Turkish coffee and the diminutive yet exaggurated respect of covered-up women.

Stationed at points along the sidewalk are men in baggy white uniforms with black berets and black belts. Toting rifles, they smile and nod and say, "Hello," when I pass. At every turn some man will fall into step with me and will not leave. "Hey, hey woman," they say, "you are so beautiful." Or, "Hi, I like your eyes/hair/shoes. Welcome to Egypt," with that same smile, and then they don't go away. Where I go, they go, no matter what I say. Others try to lead me to their shop, or to their brother's shop, and they insist we are friends and that their daughters won't marry unless I accept a cup of coffee from them.

The man at the bank said, "I am finished here at 8 o'clock if you need any help with anything." So it was no less than a miracle that my guide to the pyramids (the government requires guides for tourists) was entirely unflirtatious, calm, normal. Most men here seem to think that an unaccompanied Western woman is some kind of prey, or some kind of pet. They make calling-to-animals noises. I always wear long sleeves, long skirts, pants. If I walk with a Western guy--not a word from anyone--it's like a strange charm where I cease to exist.

So today I am off to "Old Egypt" to see the "hanging church" and some ruins and other stuff of the ilk that I love.

While staying on the Thai island Koh Samui I got to sing onstage, only a cover, but a first for me. It was Creep, something the band knew and I was comfortable with. From the small audience there was actually not insincere applause. I am now in Egypt. Hoping these travel posts are not the usual dull rundown of, "and then I, and then we, and next..." because my eye always skitters right over those to the pictures. The one below of the sphynx is blurry--sorry--perhaps you might imagine a sandblown and witheringly long trek with no shade after which all appears fuzzy and unreal.

Is the planner surrealist or the weddings? 

Dusk on Koah San Road 

I love elephants. A real one showed up at the guest house in Bangkok 

Street dance performance 

This is Dilia 

Just outside my bungalow hut on Koh Samui (island). 

This is Matthew dressed as a lady to get a free drink 

Building on Koah San Road 

This is where they inform that death may result if caught with drugs in Egypt 

Not sure what this guy actually does 

I got to gallop on horseback across the sands of the Sahara 

each one took 30 years to make 

beautiful noseless face 

Automatically, when I think of certain places, some film or music-related word and image gets associated with it. All I could think of about my first destination in Vietnam was Hanoi Rocks. The capital city looks like one big village, and I like it there.

In a streetcorner temple at the altars with triple statues, the offerings have been arrayed elaborately--bananas (ripe and unripe, real and plastic), gold decanters, flowers, incense, Christmas lights, money, drinks, huge grapefruit. All trinkets of humans and nature bestowed upon the objects symbolizing the figures who represent God. Vietnamese peoples' prayerhands are always rocking with fervor. In every room here people are preparing offering trays or setting up tables or talking. Several old people are grouped here and there. One of the old men, who looks priestly or like a monk, came over and asked me, "Parlez-vous Francais?" Mais, non. Not enough, but we smile anyway.

Seeing French signs everywhere, and noting the French influence in the coffee and in the opening narration of a water puppet show I went to, I thought of a minor parallel, that when a person in a sense "conquers" another, her or his influence is retained somewhat later. By conquering I mean that, for example, some relationships are more like an occupation of your lands, a person somehow invaded, and for a time you--at the least--tolerated their interests. But even from those kinds of unwitting relationships, the residual essence, like the delicious 18th century style baguettes in Vietnam, or the amazing French-drip coffee, can be pleasant. Why do momentary thoughts take so many words to describe?

In coastal Danang I met back up with Nhan, whom I had first met on the crossing from China to Vietnam. He is Vietnamese but grew up in Germany. I stayed at his aunt's/grandmother's/uncles'/friend Dinh's house. Learned a different pool game involving three balls only. You have to make your ball hit the other two, one after the other. I got to drive a scooter over to Hoi An, Nhan was tired of driving, while he and Dinh shared another. The old section of Hoi An is a lanternlit hamlet with buildings from the 1700s, next to a river as New Orleans is, and with similar architecture, small balconies and tall paneless windows open to the sidewalk. Not as many cats though.

Saigon next. People only write Ho Chi Minh City. In Vietnam a lot of street kids, from like six years old to ten or twelve, have this messed up mafia dependence, and are forced to walk around selling stuff to make their room and board. Or, if they have homes, there might not be room for them to sleep there, so they sell cigarettes or lighters or postcards or whatever all night long. The bars and restaurants have wide open fronts to the warm night air, so the kids come in and stand in front of customers at their tables and keep repeating, "Buy this? Yeah?" and if you say no thanks they go, "Why?" in the most jaded voices I've heard from any kids. They do this selling until two, three, four in the morning. I heard one fellow traveler I'd met say to a kid who couldn't have been more than seven years old, "Hey, do you know what time it is? It's two-thirty," and the kid glanced at the guy's watch and said, "Two-twenty-five. You wanna buy this?" (In Cambodia the poverty situation is far more desperate. The kid vendors act exactly like adults, and many very young children are sold into the sex trade where most of the customers are Western men in their 50's and 60's.)

In Saigon I stayed with Allyson from Australia, who lives in a luxurious four-storey house with only one other person. The streets in Vietnam are all rivers of motorbikes, way more than would normally be imagined for any reason. You wade into them if you are walking across. There are no traffic rules.

I went to the War Remnants museum, during the week of the commemoration of kicking America out in 1975. One of the things that stands out to me is all the torture, the human strangeness of things like GI's taking photos next to the decapitated bodies of those they murdered, holding the heads and smiling about it. Or napalm, or bombs that destroy oxygen in a fifty-meter radius. And the automatic assumption that every village, its children included, was peopled with Viet Cong collaborators. This last point, and the murder of so many children, came up later in a discussion with someone I met in Bangkok. His older brother had been in the war, and once was approaced by a small girl carrying a basket of flowers that also contained a grenade that she threw, killing two of his friends.

While in Cambodia I read The Killing Fields. There is only one person in Cambodia right now who has graduated from journalism school. The Khmer Rouge killed pretty much all educated people between 1975-1979, plus people who wore glasses, or sang songs in French, etc. Just across the border into Cambodia from Vietnam, the temperature rose from 86 degrees to 100. The stilt huts lean over mudpuddles in the dry season. It's a tough place to be, but I like Cambodia.

I left there by bus on unpaved roads with a driver who blasted the very loud horn seriously every few minutes, for hours. An approach warning to the motorbikes, the flatbed trucks crammed with people, and the cows. When we stopped to wait our turn to board a ferry, women and children vendors rushed onto the bus, or up to it with their dirty naked babies in their hands, begging for money or trying to sell small, roasted birds and grilled frogs that they carried in huge piles on trays on their heads.

Some various pictures posted below.

Notes 

Hoi An 

We ate too much at the Vietnamese market 

Some building, hot day Cambodia 

In a Cambodian bakery 

Cambodia house 

luxury