Category Archives: Adventure

TGI Thursdays

This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

The hostess at TGI Thursdays looked at me like I was an alien, then slowly led me to a table in the center of the restaurant and left me with a menu, which was all in English.

She had an African accent and I didn’t hear enough of it to ID which country, but I’m pretty sure her real name wasn’t the one on her nametag—“Hi! My name is Emily.”

She was about six feet tall, string-bean thin, and wore stiletto heels and a barely-there mini skirt. I vaguely wondered if she changed into more modest clothes to get to and from work, but I didn’t really give it much thought.

I was hungry by now, so I was happy when the waiter appeared almost immediately. He too looked at me strangely. Whatever! What was wrong with these people? I ordered a club sandwich and a beer, then settled back and looked around.

Have you ever walked into a situation and thought nothing of it until it was too late to get out of it?

All the other women in the bar were either African or Asian, and none appeared to be older than 20. They were all dressed like “Emily”—in high heels, mini skirts, and low-cut blouses. They were literally hanging on the arms of fat, middle aged white men, many of whom were talking loudly, so I could hear their Australian, English, and American accents. North American, that is—I’m sure most of them were Canadian, ha, ha. These were oil workers, no doubt, and I was in a brothel.

The girls (I’ll call them girls because many appeared to be 17 or 18 years old) tittered and cooed at everything the men said, as if the men were the most fascinating, funny, and appealing male specimens ever.

“Ooh, Keef, you so funny!” a girl laughed near my table. Keith was 50-something, ruddy faced, rotund, and very drunk. He sat tilted as though he was about to keel over.

As all this sunk in, one of the few Arab patrons approached my table. He was like a human cliche of an Arab man: wearing a kaffiyeh, sporting a Saddam Hussein-style black mustache, and smoking a cigarette in a short gold holder. He leered at me as he circled my table several times.

I had the urge to bleat like a lamb. Then he aggressively pulled out the chair opposite me and asked, “May I join you?”

“No!” I exclaimed, perhaps a bit too loudly.

A giant Sudanese bouncer sidled up to me and the Arab guy slinked away.

“Do you know where you are?” the bouncer asked in a low voice.

“Yeh-yes…” I replied, feeling sheepish (in the embarrassed sense, not in the about-to-be groped-or-worse sense).

“I will stand next to you while you enjoy your meal,” the bouncer said.

What could I say but, “Thank you?”

My club sandwich and beer arrived. They were like any club sandwich and beer you would get anywhere else in the world. I ate, drank, and did what I commonly do when I am dining alone; I wrote in my journal. In this case, I took detailed notes, which is how I can write this narrative years later.

—

It’s not a very remarkable story. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed that something more dramatic didn’t happen. It was an eye opener for me. I had seen adolescent girls in Jamaica with the proverbial obese middle-aged German men stuffed into Speedos. I had read about human trafficking and sex workers in my master’s program.

But this was how the business actually worked. Supply and demand. I figured the maze I had walked through to get to the entrance was a means of shielding passersby from what was going on inside, and also of signaling to people like me who just wanted a sandwich and a beer, “This is something you should think twice about!” Obviously I was too dense to get it.

To be continued …

Ugly Americans

Leave a reply

This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

The days ticked away in Dubai. Toni and I went an excursion a day; the most memorable was a “desert safari.” I have been on a real safari, and it involved living things. This did not, and I can recommend that you skip it if you’re in Dubai unless you love roller coasters. It involved careening up and down and sideways—sometimes at a 45 degree angle—in sand dunes. I was sick to my stomach and stayed that way until our driver blew a tire and we got to wander around in the desert while he repaired it.

A couple rushed up to me and introduced themselves as being from Iran. They asked if I was American and then exclaimed, “We love America! America people!” This was heartwarming, and it happened to me again when I was hiking in the Jordanian desert last year. Yes, many of our government’s policies are terrible, and it’s good to know that people get the difference between the US government and the American people.

—

After breathing in dust for hours, Toni and I decided to go see a movie. She asked the cashier about something—was there a good restaurant nearby or something like that.

“No English,” he smiled at her.

She repeated her question, speaking slower and louder. He shook his head to indicate he really didn’t speak English, and she went for a third try, louder and slower. Standing next to her, I murmured under my breath, “This is embarrassing. He doesn’t speak English.”

“Okay!” She laughed and said to him slowly and loudly, “I’m sorry—I’m American!” Then she did an about face and walked quickly into the darkened theater.

I was shocked and furious. “Since when are you American?” I demanded.

“Canada is in North America,” she said patronizingly.

“So you’re American when you’re making a fool of yourself, but Canadian the rest of the time?”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” she said. “They don’t understand things unless you make it very simple. They’ve probably never heard of Canada. But they have certainly heard of America,” she said pointedly.

We were the only patrons in the theater and it was a double header of Bollywood hits. It was in Hindi with Arabic subtitles, but you didn’t need an English translation to follow what was going on.

If you’ve never seen a Bollywood movie, here’s a summary of how they go, from my limited perspective: There’s a five-minute scene where they set up the boy-girl story involving forbidden love, mistaken identities, controlling elders, and a mischief-making best friend or auntie. Then dozens of people dressed in matching costumes leap into the frame and perform a riotous song and dance number, preferably in a field of wild flowers, on a beach, or in the middle of moving traffic. This is repeated over and over with different costumes and settings until everyone lives happily ever after.

I sat through half an hour of it but I was so fuming mad that I decided to leave. Toni gave me a withering glance as if to say, “You’re insulting their culture.” I knew I had been harsh and would have to apologize later, even if she didn’t acknowledge her part in our verbal scuffle.

I hailed a taxi. “Take me some place I can get a beer,” I requested.

And that’s how I ended up in a brothel. Because surely, a woman traveling alone and drinks alcohol must be a whore, right?

—

The driver dropped me off in front of a place called TGI Thursday’s. Thursday, in the Middle East, is their Friday. It had what looked like a maze of tall screens leading to the entrance. I hesitated, but the driver had wasted no time in disappearing, so in I went. I zigged and zagged and then emerged into what did indeed look—at first glance—like a TGI Friday’s in the US, except for the gigantic portrait of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum hanging over the entryway.

To be continued ….

Finally, Dubai

1 Reply

This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

Toni was very serious. She was a teetotaler. She didn’t get my sense of humor. She was divorced and her kids were out on their own, so she was seeking. She had grown up somewhere in the boondocks of western Canada and was fascinated by eastern traditions like meditation. I was an on-again-off-again meditator but she was seriously devoted and would go on to live in an ashram in India and become a follower of some swami rami someone or other. Like most Canadians, she made a point of telling people she was Canadian so they wouldn’t mistake her for an American. Since I had fled the US, in part, to escape the George W. Bush era, I couldn’t really blame her.

—

When we arrived at our hotel I realized why the package had been so cheap. When most people think of Dubai, they probably picture phantasmagorical hotels like these:

Our hotel was in the old part of town and was a concrete bunker something like this except the windows were slits:

I suppose all that concrete kept out the heat, and in retrospect we were staying in a more authentic part of town, if anything about Dubai can be called authentic.

The first thing I did was go to the bar and order a beer. The two bartenders looked at each other sideways, clearly uncomfortable. One disappeared, maybe to consult with a manager. He came back and wordlessly opened a beer bottle, then wrapped it in a cloth napkin and slid it across the bar to me. Message received: I was a whore and an alcoholic, possibly both.

Toni disapproved too, and after pointing out the maple leaf on her back pack to the bartenders, left to go to the room. “I don’t drink alcohol,” she reminded me when I showed up with my beer wrapped in its shroud of shame. “But if I did, I wouldn’t drink it here out of respect for their culture.”

“They sell beer here,” I said. “So what you’re saying is that you respect their culture of treating women unequally.”

Toni harrumphed furiously and shot back, “I don’t know. I’m going to have some silent me time now.”

—

Our package included some free tours. I had bought a beautiful scarf in the airport to drape around my head. Not like a hijab, more like a glamorous, Audrey Hepburn-style nod to being in a Muslim country. I thought it advisable to leave my Star of David at home.

When I stepped outside, a wall of searing heat descended on me. I started sweating profusely and the glamor wilted.

Toni made up and were picked up at the curb by a guy in a giant gas guzzling vehicle—the only kind allowed in Dubai, apparently. He drove around and pointed out the sights. It was mind boggling, as you would expect if you’ve seen photos of Dubai. Then he took us to a “museum.” I was excited to learn about the history and culture of the Emiratis.

The museum was gleaming and glitzy, with crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and sleek escalators that might have been designed by Lamborghini. Strangely, the displays reminded me of shop windows in New York or London. Wait. They were shop windows. These weren’t historical artifacts or objects of art, they were items for sale. All of them were labeled as originating in Iran or Egypt or other places that actually had cultural traditions, and nothing was going for less than $1,000.

—

Back at the hotel, I went to check my email at the computer kiosks in the lobby but Yahoo wouldn’t load. What the hell? I Googled “weather in Dubai” and a local site came up that claimed it was 85F. That was weird. I had checked Dubai weather in Dublin and had expected 110F today.

It didn’t take me as long as it had in Cuba the previous year to realize that the Internet was controlled by the government. I was in for a six-day involuntary Internet sabbatical.

To be continued …

Having Some Good Craic Despite Being Cracked

Leave a reply

This is part of a series about living in Dublin and accidentally eating a club sandwich in a brothel in Dubai.

—

I had moved to Dublin from Oxford, and after a rough landing I was settling in. My flat felt safe. I reckoned that, since the addict had broken in shortly before I moved in, odds were that the flat wouldn’t burgled again until long after I had moved on. Magical thinking, I know.

Dublin did feel like a magical place, but not in a good way. The flat was close to some old castle that was a stop on the Haunted Dublin! tour. I don’t believe in ghosts or paranormal anything but there was something dark about Dublin.

And Dublin was ugly. I had moved from Oxford, city of dreaming spires:

To Dublin:

As usual I am exaggerating. Oxford is beautiful but it is swarming wall-to-wall with crowds, like some science fiction movie about overpopulation. Dublin has some lovely buildings, but unfortunately too many like the one above. It too was heaving with crowds, tourists but also EU newcomers from Slovenia and asylum seekers from Nigeria.

I thought about how the English had subjugated the Irish, taxing them, viewing them as sub human, and doing nothing while a million Irish died during a succession of famines. The architecture says everything about who was the conqueror and who was the conquered.

—

I didn’t have much in common with my new friend, Toni, except that we were in our 40s while everyone else in Dublin seemed younger, and we were both determined to take advantage of being “over the pond” to travel as much as possible.

The Sunday papers advertised great deals on travel packages. “See Sunny Spain! Only 400 € for 5 nights inclusive!” Inclusive meant airfare, hotel, some meals, and drinks in a resort populated by English speakers who would never be made uncomfortable by having to speak Spanish.

Sunday morning. I texted Toni. “Wanna go to Dubai?”

“Tell me more,” she responded immediately.

“Only 500 € for five nites inc airfare & hotel,” I read from the ad in the Irish Times.

“Wow thats cheap lets go!” She was in.

—

But first I went to St. James Hospital to have my collar bone x-rayed. I was no longer on the National Health System; in fact I was uninsured, so I would pay cash.

I walked down Vicar Street to Meath Street to Bellvue to Marrowbone Lane to Robert Street, on to Newport Street, to Pim Street, past the Guinness Storehouse, followed the curve of Grand Canal Place to Echlins Street and finally to James Street.

Total distance: 1.6 kilometers, or just under one mile. That’s Dublin. There may have been a direct route but now I knew I could stop at Guinness on the way back— and use my right arm to lift a pint.

The hospital reminded me of a Mexican bus station. The waiting room was furnished with a motley assortment of worn plastic chairs, the windows and linoleum floor were grimy.

I paid up front; I think it was 80 €. I was called in after the x-ray was developed, and the doctor said, “There’s been no progress. It’s still broken and you’ll have to keep it immobilized for another eight weeks, at least.”

I was shocked. “But it’s been six weeks!” I didn’t mention that I hadn’t exactly been resting and taking it easy, that I’d been climbing a ladder up to a top bunk at a hostel, then washing windows and scrubbing floors in my two-story flat.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“46?” I expected him to say, “Wow! You look so much younger—I never would have guessed you’re even 40!”

Instead he said, “Well at your age, things take longer to heal.”

My age?

“If it doesn’t heal after eight more weeks, you’ll need surgery to screw in a plate to hold the two ends together.”

Surgery? A plate? F— that!

There’s nothing like someone telling me I’m in a bad situation to make me come out swinging, to declare that things are great.

I was going to Dubai, and it was going to be a blast!

Incense and Sensibility

Leave a reply

This post is part of a series about living in Dublin and winding up in a brothel in Dubai.

Eddie’s house was so tiny I expected a hobbit to jump out of a closet. The floors were slanted, the stove looked like a toy, and the door hung crookedly off the bath so it wouldn’t be any trouble for him to keep an eye on me in there. I hadn’t been attracted to Eddie in a dark smoky pub, and seeing him in daylight didn’t change anything. He painted a picture of the house sharing arrangements. “I go out every night, and when I come home in the early morning I blast me music and drink a few more pints. It’s my house, so I’ll smoke in it. If you’d like to cook for us, that’d fine with me.”

I observed myself doing mental gymnastics to convince myself this would all be fine. I wanted out of the hostel. The serenity and confidence I had banked in England was gone. The fact that it was gone made me feel like a weakling. I had become a female Woody Allen, worrying, analyzing, fearful, neurotic. I was so afraid of being ripped off that I hid my watch—a Movado—in a zipped pants pocket, then promptly forgot about it and threw the pants in the wash. The watch had been given to me by a jerk boyfriend but was the one beautiful piece of jewelry I owned, and it came out in bits. Stress does funny things to the mind.

I listened to meditations on my MP3 player: “Sense a soft shower of shimmering light …” said the soothing voice, as the woman in the bunk below me hacked a tubercular-sounding cough. I attended meditations at the Sri Chinmoy Centre and went to Alanon. But I just couldn’t shake the anxiety.

Eddie kept saying things which indicated he knew sharing the house would be a disaster, such as “I’d probably end up hangin’ meself when yerself didn’t love me.” Like many men in the British Isles, asking a woman out on a date was not in his playbook, and he wasn’t yet drunk enough to just grab me and snog me. He must have sensed I would have reacted negatively to either approach. We sat at his wobbly kitchen table and he slowly drew me a map of Dublin and advised where else I could look for flats, stalling for time.

I admired his engineer’s pencil sharpener, which he gave me and which makes a great eyeliner sharpener.

—

After two weeks I landed a room in a spacious maisonette. It had a living area and kitchen on the first floor (in America, the second floor), and three bedrooms and a bath on the third. I shared it with a French guy who was building a website to help football fans find pubs in real time to watch specific games. He only emerged from his room when his girlfriend, a Canadian, came over. The other flat mate was an English guy who worked for Google. I only saw him once or twice, but several times a week I would come down to breakfast to find a young woman hanging about—someone he had slept with and was done with, but who wasn’t done with him. “So what time does Paul usually get up?” they would ask. Or, “How does Paul like his tea?” I would grumble, “I dunno,” until they took the hint and left.

It took a while with my arm in a sling, but the flat was very nice once I scrubbed it from top to bottom and painted my room, which overlooked some sort of friary.

There was a methadone clinic on the other side; the flat had been burgled recently by an addict who kicked in the door. There was a primary school on the other side of the flat, and Christchurch Cathedral was nearby, so I heard children playing and bells ringing throughout the day.

Things were looking up. I met a Canadian woman at a travel agency who was game to go anywhere. Because, once my anxiety ebbed away, it was time to travel.

To be continued …

Down and Out In Dublin

Leave a reply

In my last post I wrote about the river of “what ifs” going through my head about my upcoming trip. After writing it, I thought back on the worst things that have ever happened to me in my life. All of them have happened at home. The worst things that have happened to me while traveling? Well, they’ve didn’t turn out so bad in the end.

For instance, I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai.

But the story starts in “the other DUB city,” Dublin, where I was working for Oxfam Great Britain on contract for the summer.

Everyone thinks Ireland would be a great place to live, and that’s what I had expected. But I hated it.

This was at the height of the inflationary period they called the Celtic Tiger—right before the Great Recession hit—and everything was colossally expensive.

I stayed in a 12-bed dorm in the Four Courts Hostel until I could find a flat. The other 11 beds were occupied by immigrants from Poland and the Czech Republic who were almost out of money and facing the prospect of going back home as failures. One woman was so depressed she stayed in bed all day with the blanket pulled over her head; I never actually saw her. The only good thing about The Four Courts was the talking elevator that announced, “Turd Floor” in an Irish accent when it reached our floor.

I could go to the Oxfam Ireland office to work, but they didn’t really have space for me, so I worked out of the hostel dining hall while everyone else was out hustling during the day—except for the woman under the covers.

The streets were full of drunks, Irish and otherwise. Lots of Brits and Dutch and Germans came to Dublin for their stag parties. One morning I literally stepped over a drunken man vomiting in the gutter. I don’t know how they afforded it, because a pint of unremarkable beer in a pub cost $8. And maybe because Ireland’s economy was roaring, it seemed like the Irish were over being friendly to travelers. The only friendly overture I had from an Irish person in my first few weeks was a shopkeeper telling me to “Have yourself some crack, now!” That freaked me out until I realized he meant craic—which means “a good time” in Gaelic.

I had pictured myself working away in a cozy pub and making all sorts of new Irish friends, but I was bored and lonely.

—

In the UK and Ireland, it is much more common for people to share a flat or a house than it is in the US. Having roommates is not just for young or poor people. I would go to look at a flat and there would be a dozen desperate potential renters crowded around the front door. When the landlord deigned to let us in, we would find a dingy, dirty, little hole with a bedroom featuring a sagging twin bed and a window looking out on a brick wall. The rent for that bedroom and sharing everything else with two or three strangers was $500 a month each, easy.

Every night I climbed up to my top bunk and hunched over with my head against the moldy ceiling to read, hoping this would be my last night at the Four Courts. Oh, did I mention I had broken my collar bone in a bike accident in Oxford a week before, and my arm was in a sling?

Everyone used a website called Gumtree to look for flats and jobs and probably to sell their bodies to pay rent. I arranged to meet a potential landlord in a pub rather than go to his house alone. It was love at first sight, for him. Eddie was a good 10 years younger than me and at least a foot taller. His teeth were brown from smoking and crooked from not being an American. I wasn’t attracted to him and I knew it would be a bad idea to move in to the room he had for rent, but I agreed to come and see the place the next day.

To be continued …

Fears of Flying

1 Reply

Here is a photo that summarizes my trip-planning progress:

I depart in 15 days. I am in full-blown “What if?” mode.

What if I get pickpocketed in Rome (not a far-fetched scenario—my nephew’s wallet was stolen in Rome last year). What if I’m packing too much into this itinerary and I won’t be able to appreciate it all? What if I miss a flight/train/bus? What if people feel sorry for me, a woman traveling alone? What if I forget my phone charger? What if I show up at a hotel and they have no record of my reservation and no rooms? What if I rent a car in Spain, and I forget to ask them to give me an English-language GPS, and my Spanish isn’t good enough for me to follow the directions? What if my son doesn’t water my plants while I’m gone and they all die? What if I fail to blog along the way, which means I’ll have schlepped my laptop all over for no reason? What if I trip and fall into a cistern at Pompeii and it gets dark and no one knows I’m there and … are there wild jackals in Italy?

So you see, I have been busy. I really should have pursued a career in disaster planning. I would have been a natural at it.

I laugh kindly at myself as I observe the endless chain of what ifs come and go. I will prepare as well as I can. I will resist the urge to over prepare, because that would allow no space for spontaneity. I will deal with anything unexpected as it arises.

—

On Friday night my sister joined me and some friends for happy hour. Long-time readers of this blog will remember that while my son was in prison, there was plenty of additional excitement in my life. It’s never just one thing, is it? There was a plumbing problem in my apartment which caused me to have no kitchen for six weeks. I tripped and sprained a knee ligament and was on crutches for about the same six weeks. My mother was her third major car accident, which caused micro fractures in her spine and led to her giving up driving.

And then … my sister was battling Stage 4 colon cancer. She went through hell. She’s been cancer free for a year and a half but she’s still dealing with the lingering effects of it all—the surgeries, chemo, radiation, and all the other aspects of life that are affected by a life-threatening illness—finances, keeping up with a house and yard, two teenage kids, getting her strength back. The list goes on.

How is this connected to traveling? Because at happy hour we talked about the phrase “You’re so strong.” My sister hears it a lot. I used to hear it a lot when I was a single mom pulling myself up by the proverbial boot straps. Other friends had been through trials and had heard it too.

We all agreed that we hate the phrase.

“What choice did I have?” my sister asked. Right. I had thought the same thing many times when people had said “You’re so brave!” What choice did I have? I admit I had occasional fantasies about dropping my son off at my mom’s and running away to Florida. I know there are people who abandon their kids, and people who avoid getting treatment for serious illnesses because they’re in denial or afraid. But the vast majority of us just do what needs to be done because the alternative would be hurtful to ourselves or others.

“Being strong is when you are afraid of something,” said a member of our group, a psychotherapist who is also a cancer survivor. “And you do it anyway, even though you could choose not to and there wouldn’t be any consequences.”

And that’s how this relates to travel, especially for someone like me who travels solo a lot. I do have anxious thoughts about getting lost, being swindled, being disappointed. But I go anyway. The fear of regretting that I never saw the Amalfi Coast is stronger than the what ifs.

Red (and White) Flags

Leave a reply

In one month I’ll be in Malta, a tiny country most people have never heard of.

Here is a representative sampling of travel books available in the library for the three countries I’ll be visiting: Italy, Spain, and Malta. There was a whole shelf of books about Italy, a half shelf for Spain, and one slim volume about Malta. This should have told me something about what a hot (not) tourist destination Malta is. But once I get something fired up in my imagination, there’s usually no turning back.

Of course Vatican City is technically a country—the smallest in the world. I’ll be visiting the Basilica of St. Peter and the Vatican Museum and I’m sure there are entire books about them, but I don’t need books to tell me I’ll be seeing a lot of paintings of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus.

Someone at work laughed about me going to Malta and suggested that since I would also be visiting Vatican City, I could make this a grand tour of tiny countries. You know, the ones that send one athlete to the Olympics—an athlete who doesn’t stand a chance? I could have gone to San Marino, which is surrounded by Italy; and Monaco, which is on my bucket list. Liechtenstein would be a bit further north in Europe, but not as far as the other five that round out the Top 10 List of tiny countries, which are all tropical islands: Nauru, Tuvalu, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Maldives, and Grenada.

—

The lack of interest in Malta may have something to do with how difficult it is to get there. I will be leaving from Sorrento, where I will have spent three days seeing Pompeii, the Amalfi Coast, and Capri. You would think, from reading the one book about Malta, that you could just hop a train to Naples and fly right to Malta. Boom—easy! But alas, this was the same book that told me I must see the underground, 5,000-year-old catacombs on Malta, the ones that are closed for renovation until 2017. The book also said it would be “easy” to take a ferry from Italy to Malta. However I need to get to Madrid afterwards and it would take two days to get to the coast of Spain by ferry.

All the flights from Naples left at either 6:00 in the morning or 4:00 in the afternoon. They all connected somewhere else, which meant that reasonable-sounding 4:00 p.m. flight would get me into Malta at 11:30 at night. And the 6:00 a.m. flights were much faster; I seriously considered one that had a 6-hour layover in Paris. Finally, I decided to fly from Rome. This will require me to get up early—but not quite as early as the 6:00 a.m. flight—catch a train to Naples, then connect to Rome, then catch the express to the Rome airport, then fly at 11:00 a.m. to Catania—which is on Sicily, then finally arrive on Malta at 3:30 in the afternoon. That is, if nothing goes wrong on any of the five legs of the journey.

—

Another puzzle has to do with baggage. The flights to and from Malta are cheap—if I am willing to travel with only a carry-on bag weighing no more than 22 pounds. I spend some time researching ultra light bags; I could get a nice one for $70. Or I could just pay RyanAir $75 for the privilege of bringing a real suitcase with me.

I toy with the idea of traveling light. It would be easier to get on and off all the trains and buses and planes. I’d be less conspicuous, since my regular suitcase is purple. It could be kind of a cool challenge to wear only two outfits for a month, to say “no” to buying clothes in Italy, and eschewing souvenirs. Plus I would be doing my small part to save the planet!

Nah. I’ll bring my purple monster. I like to have options.

—

I contemplate these “problems” knowing that countless refugees are attempting the crossing to Italy in rubber rafts before the sea gets too rough in November.

Malted

Leave a reply

I go through three stages of planning a big trip.

First, a caveat: I am keenly aware of how fortunate I am to have any of the following “problems”—first-world problems, as they say.

First I pore over maps, getting more and more excited but less and less focused. “If I go all the way to Thailand, I might as well go to Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam, right? And Burma! That’s not touristy yet. Japan wouldn’t be that far away. It’s only a few thousand miles more. Then there’s Australia; I’ve always wanted to go there, and New Zealand is so close ….”

At this point I am looking at a $20,000, three-month vacation. But it’s fun to dream.

The second stage is getting real and picking something. In the current case, my friend Lynn suggested meeting in Spain and traveling around the sunny south. I said yes. Since I have been stockpiling my vacation time, I thought I’d go early—to Rome, then Malta, then on to Spain.

I spent a couple weeks reading guidebooks and researching plane fares and hotel rooms. I had to wait for some big expenses, like a new refrigerator, to work their way through my finances like a capybara in a boa constrictor. Finally, the day came when I had the spare dosh to buy my ticket. The fares had gone up by $300. I tried all the tricks, like waiting until Tuesday at 3pm Eastern time, and burning the effigy of a 747 under the full moon, but in the end the budget boa had to swallow another very large expense.

But on to stage three: Nailing down the small flights, hotel reservations, and tickets to popular sites.

I must say, RyanAir makes Delta look like a paragon of transparency. RyanAir came up as the cheapest flight from Rome to Malta, and really it was so cheap I wondered how they can stay in business. That becomes clear when you actually book the ticket. Would you like to bring a bag? That’ll be €18 for a carry-on sized bag and €35 for an actual suitcase. You know, those things tourists take on planes?

How about a seat upgrade for more leg room? Only €15. No thanks, but there’s an unavoidable €8 charge just to choose a seat—any seat. Being an obstinate person, and since the flight is only a couple hours, I chose not to choose a seat. I will probably regret it. I will probably get a middle seat between a snorer and a crying baby.

Thank goodness I don’t have an infant of my own, because the infant fee is €20. I’m not kidding. Then there are fees for musical instruments, golf clubs, bikes, and therapeutic oxygen (€50), which you need after running the gauntlet of the RyanAir website.

Finally, I went to check out. There was a €2 fee for paying. RyanAir really puts the ire in Ireland. This charge for using a credit or debit card makes me want to fly to Ireland, march into RyanAir’s HQ, and try to pay for my ticket in cash. They would probably charge me €3 for that.

Next, I went to book my carefully-researched hotels in Rome and Malta. Yes, they were both fully booked for the times I wanted. I will therefore be staying in a convent in Rome and at a hostel in Malta. That’s okay. It’s an adventure, right?

The convent beds have those super-cheap bed spreads that appear to be made out of plastic that you see in Latin America and third-rate motels in the US. Ick. This tells me that the sheets will also be threadbare—if they are even made of thread. Maybe I can fit a nice cotton sheet into my suitcase, and leave it behind when I fly to Malta so I don’t have to pay a fee for the extra 2 ounces of weight.

Well. The convent is dirt cheap.

Next, booking tickets to the Hal Soflieni Hypogeum, the 2,500 B.C. catacombs the 2016 Malta guidebook raves about and which is kind of my Holy Grail on this trip.

Noooooo! It is “Closed for Renovation until 2017.”

Justice, Sweet and Sour

Leave a reply

Summer is over, and so is my break from blogging. In my last post, I listed all the things I was going to do with my extra time: sit outside in the morning with my coffee and listen to the birds, plan a fall trip, and figure out how to publish the first year of the blog as an e-book. Oh—and write a novel.

I sat outside with my coffee once. I am planning a fall trip to Italy, Malta, and Spain. I didn’t write a novel, but Vince and I have started working with an editor on the e-book.

Mostly, I’ve tried to live in the moment. Summer is so brief. There were fun moments. At a family weekend at a cabin, someone brought a Donald Trump piñata (Made in Mexico, appropriately). I fostered a litter of seven kittens which drew visits from friends and family. Vince and I went to the State Fair where, at the FabBrow booth, he insisted he wanted a uni-brow. The makeup artists got back at him by making him look like a community theater actor.

I spent a lot of time outdoors. There were hikes and bike rides, and one day a friend and I spend hours making jewelry down at the river. Other times I packed a book and a beverage and biked to some quiet spot at a lake or the river.

—

The big local news this summer was of the killing of Philando Castille by a cop. Castille was black. The cop, Jeronimo Yanez, was Latino. Castille was pulled over for a broken taillight. He had a gun in his glove compartment, and believed that the proper procedure when interacting with a cop was to inform: “I’ve got a gun, and I’ve got a permit to carry it.”

I suppose Yanez didn’t hear anything after Castille said “I’ve got a gun.” Blam! Shot point blank five times and left to bleed to death. Castille’s girlfriend live streamed his last moments on Facebook. I have not watched that video, but hundreds of thousands of people have.

I live within walking distance of the Governor’s mansion in St. Paul, where the inevitable protests took place. Traffic was blocked off by the police for a month and I was kept awake a couple nights by helicopter noise. The protestors blocked off the nearby interstate and either police were patrolling with helicopters or it was news media copters, but they were loud. Not that I’m comparing my minor inconvenience to the Castille’s family’s loss.

—

This week marked one year since Vince was released from prison. He is doing so well. He just started a new job in catering, and he’s excited. In a month he will go off intensive supervised release, which means he’ll be able to stay out past 10:30 or go to Wisconsin to visit cousins. Best of all, he won’t have ISR agents showing up day and night asking him for urine samples.

—

Another event prompted me to write this post.

In 1989, an 11-year-old boy named Jacob Wetterling was abducted by a stranger at gun point in a small town in Minnesota. He was never found.

Vince was the same age as Jacob. Vince became a Bar Mitzvah, got his first job, moved out, turned 20, had a serious girlfriend, had serious drug and alcohol problems, went to jail, got clean, relapsed, turned 30, moved to Lanesboro, went to prison, got out, and has two years of sobriety. In a few months he’ll be 38.

This week, a man confessed to abducting, sexually assaulting, and executing Jacob Wetterling by shooting him in the head, then burying him—and returning a year later to move the remains. Lying handcuffed in the last moments of his life, Jacob asked the man, “What did I do wrong?”

Vince was sentenced to over four years in prison for drug possession. Because the statute of limitations has expired, Jacob’s killer will get 20 years on a child porn charge. He’ll be a cho-mo—the most loathed prisoner among prisoners. According to Vince, they are also considered a “protected class,” by officials, perhaps to prevent prison vigilantes from meting out real justice.

Breaking Free

Living Well, Despite what Life Throws at You

Category Archives: Adventure

TGI Thursdays

Ugly Americans

Having Some Good Craic Despite Being Cracked

Incense and Sensibility

Down and Out In Dublin

Fears of Flying

Red (and White) Flags

Malted