brain crabs

We got up at 6am to make it to our 11am plane in Tokyo. We hurried through the airport and made it to our flight with plenty of time. Our plane to Beijing was continuing to Xian and, being a connecting flight, there weren’t that many people on board.
As it turns out, Chinese pilots don’t really know how to fly. Maybe it was just bad luck but it seemed as though the pilot deliberately steered this aircraft into every turbulence pocket between Japan and China. The plane didn’t really ever stop shaking at any point. As if that wasn’t exhausing enough, it became powerfully clear towards the end of the flight that the pilot hadn’t ever completed the “landing lessons” of his training. By the time we landed, I felt like if it had taken any longer and had been any more utterly terrifying, I might have started to cry.
But, we survived and shakily made our way through customs and met Brendan by the airport entrance.
Our first mistake in Beijing was to get in a cab. No, we didn’t get ripped off, hassled, robbed, or taken where we didn’t want to go. We did, however, take a risk with our lives that probably surpasses that of sharing needles, playing with firearms, and even sticking silverware in the toaster. Despite the fact that there are white lines on the roadways, nobody seems to pay them any notice. The roads have been expanded, Brendan tells us, as a sort of display of progress. As a result, the lanes are really rather wide and that seems to inspire drivers to regard the white line as a lane unto itself. There was a lot of slamming on the breaks as trucks and busses tried to cut in front of us or squeeze us out of the way. There was an equal amount of sudden accellerating and swerving to get a better position in traffic. I got the impression that there were two kinds of drivers in Beijing: The reluctant paranoid ones and the ones who made the others reluctant and paranoid.
We made it to Brendan’s apartment complex which is one of many recent housing developments, all of which are clusters of towering monstrosities that are so apallingly tasteless that I can’t really imagine any architect being proud of them. The all sort of look like the towering hotel that accompanies a Vegas casino. Except even tackier and more college dorm complex looking.
We step into Brendan’s building and clap on (oh no, really) the lights in the lobby, get in the elevator that still has the manufacturer’s plastic wrapping on the door, clap on the lights in the hallway on his floor, and step into his unit. To his confessed delight, Brendan’s apartment looks like if a bank or an office building caught some “magic fingers” motel infection and grew little apartment growths. It’s somebodies warped idea of taste and quality. For instance, all of the floors are that white faux marble tile, the light fixtures and curtains look like they came from the South Philly furnishing sections of Home Depot. There’s a lot of official dark-wood-with-gold-details furniture, doors, and cabinetry. The bathrooms have those heat-up-drying-lamps that strange, dated motels offer. And, to top it off, the lighting system in the living room is almost indescribable. With the flip of a switch, you can transform the inhospitable “living” room into the lobby of the First Pimp Bank of Beijing as the blue and pink flourescant lights illuminate the ceiling and the decorative glass panel that seems to substitute for a fireplace. Brendan admits that he can never really stop laughing at this place. We totally understand.
(Bec)
I have to briefly interject that at this moment I am very proud of myself for making the washing machine in Brendan’s apartment work. The fact that nothing here is intuitive (and often confoundingly counterintuitive), coupled with my not knowing any Chinese leads to just pushing buttons until the apparatus of choice starts doing …. something. I am not even sure if it is really washing the clothes in it, but it’s making noise and water is sloshing around inside it, so that seems promising.
I couldn’t have imagined anything like this place. We went out to dinner with Brendan last night to one of his favorite Peking duck restaurants. Taking the subway was not so difficult. It may actually be cleaner than the public transit in Philly. We got off at the Tiennamen Square stop (so amazing, being in all of these places that I’ve only ever read about) and we walked past the Forbidden City and past all sorts of casino looking hotels and restaurants. We turned off the main road and suddenly we were winding through these back alleys clustered with small houses that seemed to be hundreds of years old. It was like we were in a whole differant city. Down narrow passages between houses, you could see courtyards with laundry hanging in them. Little fires were burning in corners next to tarps made into lean-to structures. Modernish heating units were plugged into walls that were crumbling, and men were offering rides their three wheeled bicycle carriages. The restaurant was tucked back in a dead end of one of these alleys. It was another series of houses built around a courtyard, but the whole thing had been roofed over and made into one restaurant. Each dining room had a seperate doorway and stoop, reminiscant of when they had been individual dwellings. The renovations that had been made over the years created this amazing jumble of exposed brick and drop ceilings and wooden doors with wavy glass panes. In a corner was a refridgerator sized cabinet full of ducks waiting to be cooked. Brendan explained the process of preparing the ducks which includes drying them, aging them and then inflating them with a rubber tube (?). China is so far out. Anyway, I heard good things about the duck, which was carved up only steps away from our table (yum), however I declined to try any. I ate some broccoli sauteed with garlic. It was tastey and good for a stomach that has been doing a lot of traveling.
After dinner Brendan took us to his new favorite bar/cafe in a differant Beijing neighborhood. Cleaner and cozier than the duck restaurant area, this street was just as ageless. The cafe itself was really amazing. The chalet-esque pointed ceiling was made of dark wooden beams with wooven wood, in a wickery/thatchey way. Many of the other wood surfaces were a similar worn dark wood. The rooms were furnished with comfortable antiques. I had whiskey in my coffee and the boys had Chivas and green tea (it’s cold in Beijing!) while we waited for Brendan’s girlfriend to join us. She arrived after about an hour and we all chatted for a bit. On our way out of the cafe we noticed a small basin with three goldfish frozen solid in the ice. We took another cab back to Brendan’s apartment and fell asleep almost immediately.

Today was a light day. Our jetlag really caught up with us and we lost some momentum as soon as we realized exactly how exhausted we were. In fact, we’ve done so much in the past couple days that I’ve got to read these posts to remember all of our adventures. At any rate, we just subway-ed it out to Ueno park and wandered around. Today, we passed up a museum and a kabuki show because we knew that we wouldn’t be able to absorb it. We’ve really packed a lot into the past couple days.
We had an amazing sushi meal for lunch, sitting at the counter ordering a-la carte. We stopped back at the apartment and took care of some pre-travel business. For dinner, Bec had some pasta with Scott and Marcia and I went out for a-la carte sushi (I felt as though I really had to take advantage of the availability and quality of sushi. It’s so good here that, in comparison, all of the sushi that I’ve previously had tastes like dirt in retrospect.) I stopped at a little grocery store and picked up a few things for the flight. We did some laundry this evening.
Now, we’re all packed and ready for Beijing.

Finally, this morning, we were able to sleep past 7am. Although we were more rested and feeling more human, that meant getting a late start. After breakfast, we took the subway to Asukasa, the end of the line, to visit the Senso-ji Temple. It was somewhat hidden from most main access roads so we had to meander through some winding backstreets, filled with assorted tiny shops that occupied structures that appeared to be left over from an older Tokyo. Suddenly, the backstreats dead-ended at a low wall with wooden gates breaking up the lines of stalls against it. We followed the wall to an open gate and a narrow boulevard of stalls leading up to the temple. The temple complex was.. Well, just wait and see the pictures. It’s such an unimaginably beautiful place that I felt like I walking into a movie. I just don’t have the words for it. At all.
I’m starting to realize that ultra-amazing and understatingly splendind are par here.
At any rate, we managed to drag ourselves away from the astounding scene of the temple and drifted back through the web of small streets in the surrounding neighborhood. We exited through a different way than we entered and found out pretty quickly that our map was more than a little incomplete since it didn’t even show most of the streets we were on. In no hurry, we made it back to a more major road and wound up running into a pair of Australian back packers who, with the help of their Lonely Planet guide (of course), got us pointed in the right direction. We strolled in the direction (eventually) of our next destination. At first, we walked about 15 minutes in the wrong direction. Once we got pointed in the right direction, we were informed by the waitress in the (casually ultra-slick-minmal-understated-traditional-pre-fab-cutting-edge-over-designed-looking-but-utterly-unimpressive-by-Tokyo-standards) restaurant at which we stopped for a lunch of noodles, that we hald walked off of our map. She indicated a couple important landmarks and gave us some universally comprehensible directions. Too bad they don’t accept tips here.
Anyway, just as we were becoming fearful that we had misinterpreted her directions, we saw the brilliant glow of our quarry from across the street: We had found the plastic food mecca.
Let me first say that any worth while restaurant in Tokyo, pretty much regardless of it’s quality or standing, has a handsome display of hyper-realistically rendered plastic examples of the dishes you can obtain at that establishment, presented just as the chefs present it. We found where it all comes from. The bright flourescent lights glint off of the trump l’oiel surfaces of the un-food in the claustrophobic store. Imagine a grocery store that has been put in a trash compactor and shrink-wrapped. Imagine the perfectly organized piles of vibrantly colored meals that will never rot. It’s a kelidescope of food that nobody will ever eat.
After marveling at that, we made our way back on the subway.
We stopped for coffee (it was great, of course) and then hung out with Scott at the apartment until dinner. We met Marcia at a nearby udon noodle place (it was great, of course).
After dinner, Bec and I checked out a book store in Ropongi. There were so many beautiful contemporary books that were made with interesting paper, bound in clever ways, with such enticing content that we couldn’t spend very long in there. We feared that we might buy everything. We might have to go back before we leave, though. I saw a couple things that I might not be able to pass up. I might have to take advantage of how great that book store is.
Another full day.

Jon and I struck out on a little adventure by ourselves today. It was the first time we had been left unattended in Tokyo. Armed with detailed directions from Scott, we set out to find Omote-Sando, a neighborhood full of upscale shopping (but aren’t they all??), droves of pedestrians and the hip kids. Almost immediately after stepping out of the subway station, we encountered the Fruits. (I am not sure what these kids call themselves, but pictures of them fill a monthly magazine of that name..). I’m not sure I should even begin to describe this without supporting photographic evidence. Whoa. These kids are goth-punk-cutesy-anime-babydoll crazy–like pink hair, thigh high vinyl boots, plaid bondage pants, and dayglow knee socks– all on one person. Stay tuned for the pictures, though….they’ll explain it all.
In sharp contrast to the preening school girl parade was the breathtaking Meiji Shrine. Built for the last emperor of Japan who was considered a god (the Americans forced the Japanese to drop the deity bit after the second World War), the structure is situated in a park, that is actually more of an enchanted forest. It appears out of nowhere in the middle of a frantic Tokyo neighborhood, but once you are in the park all of the bustle of the city is gone. You wind your way deeper into the park on crunchy gravel pathes. Few people speak above murmurs and huge wooden gates mark the way. Suddenly you are at the entrance to the the temple. Stepping inside sort of enlightens you about the finer points of Buddhism. Everything melts away in this space. Nothing seems very important, yet everything is sacred. Again, the pictures will help on this one, and the place definately looks exactly the way you imagine it should; the way all the books depict it.
Leaving the shrine for the real world was jarring. We decided that we needed food. We found a sushi bar with a conveyor belt. It was fabulous, like there was a man in the back cleaning each grain of rice individually. I am sure sushi back in Philadelphia is going to taste pretty awful after what we’ve had here. When we had eaten all we wanted from the sushi bar, a waiter came around and tallied up our bill based on how many plates we had and what colors they were.
(Jon)
Strolling around Omote-Sando after our meal we found the X-Box cafe, a promotional enterprise that’s been featured in a couple magazines. The X-Box is one of those home video game consoles and they’ve just released a new version. So, in Omote-Sando, they’ve taken over this moderately large retail space, put in some seating, a cafe counter, a bank of freestanding game booths, and some sofas in front of huge plasma screens for people who just want to spend the whole afternoon playing video games in that spectacular white plastic and glass space. I was tickled when the tiny Japanese lady in the corporate outfit explained the controls and the wonders of the new X-Box to me. They weren’t even concerned that we didn’t buy any food or that we took pictures. I guess the whole point of that place is to spread the word. They didn’t even charge you for the time spent playing their video games or ask you to take a hike if you’d been there for a while.
We exited the cafe in somewhat of a daze and wandered back the way we came. Having noticed a tattoo shop earlier in the day, we were interested in looking into the possibility of getting fantastic Japanese tattoos in Japan. The place turned out to be not quite so hot. Neither the artist’s portfolio nor the facilities were very impressive. We gave it a pass and hopped the subway back to the apartment.
A little later that evening, we went out with Marcia to a place called Tokyo Hands in the Shibuya neighborhood. We mentioned the Ginza area in previous posts and how impressive that was but Shibuya is like five or six Ginzas. I mean, I’m no bumpkin. I can go to New York, London, or San Francisco and not be phased by the intensity of the place. That is, I can deal with cities just fine. I’m a city person! But in Shibuya, for the first time in my life, I felt really small in a city. There, the night was as bright as the day. I’d walk down the street and, approaching an alleyway, I’d think, “When I turn my head and look down that alley, there can’t possibly be tens of thousands of people and hundreds of bright storefronts. It’s just a narrow alleyway.” But, to my cognitive dismay, I’d look down the alleyway and there’d be tens of thousands of people and hundreds of bright storefronts. I mean, walking through Shibuya, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t process what I was seeing as reality.
Arriving at Tokyo Hands and getting inside out of the madness wasn’t any relief at all. Tokyo Hands is seven floors of AC Moore, Radio Shack, Home Depot and Sharper Image all smooshed together into one gianormous complex. We were over stimulated after a floor and a half of this madness. I mean, who sells personal massage items and lumber in the same store??? It was all a bit much.
(Bec again)
For dinner we went to a near by food court in the basement of a department store, however food court is a deceptive term. It is called Food Show, and that’s a little more appropriate. The shops were serving amazing little sweets, Italian food, meats on sticks and these really tasty red bean filled cakes (I got one shaped like a koi fish and ate it while it was still warm… it was pure oral bliss). We got a variety of small dishes to take home, like kim-chee (which I hate myself for loving), the ubiquitous sushi and octopus balls (ask Jon… I find the idea too upsetting to talk about).
I was nearly falling asleep in my dinner, so I decided to crash around 10:00 pm. We’ve had this really odd jet lag since we’ve been in Japan. We wake up around 7:30 am and are exhausted like walking dead by 6:00 pm. I’m hoping it will diminish soon. It makes me hateful and there are sooooooo many people here to hate.
Tomorrow’s plans include another temple and the street where they make the plastic food. (Wait for it.. you’ll love it)

I’m starting to realize a particular variable that makes Tokyo, if not Japan in general, so exhausing and overwhelming. That is, the appearance and function of everything, down to the most irrelevent minutia, is so beyond over-considered that, as an outsider not used to that, you find yourself getting sucked into the unbelieveable details that most natives have come to take for granted. Nobody else is amazed at the perfection of the lavitories, the sterility and graceful design of the urinals, or the disposable, individually wrapped, single use toothbrushes and toothpastes in the public restrooms. None of the natives sit down at the restaurant and marvel at what a clever design solution their silverware is. Nobody else gives a shit about how stunningly elegent the bowl that their dinner comes in is. Every little tiny aspect of this experience, both the objects in it and the activities of the people in it, is so obsessively over-contemplated that it becomes this perfect static white-noise of overstimulation. When nothing is arbitrary, you start to notice everything. In Tokyo, I feel like I need bigger eyes. Or some serious blinders.

It’s been another huge day. It’s only 10pm here and I’m ready to crash.
This morning, a friend of Scott and Marcia’s, Mamiko, came by. She’s a curator for a university museum. I’d guess she’s about 27 or 28. She was very friendly, but conversation was tricky because of her little English and our nonexistant Japanese. The impression that I got was that she helps Scott explore and research the contemporary/outsider art scene here. At any rate, she knew of a few up-and-coming galleries in an area that had some factories that were in the transition to commercial spaces. Like Chelsea, in a way. So, we subway-ed it across Tokyo, and then walked through a couple neighborhoods. Out by some anonymous looking factory and a taxi repair lot was a handsomly rennovated building. The interior had very elegant sliding walls, glass doors and was a very finished gallery space. Of the 6 floors of the building, the top 3 held about two galleries each. There was a really tight little show of about 8 works on paper by some 20th century masters. They had a couple very early Warhol sketches, a small Cy Twombly drawing, a Gorky, and an OK Picasso. The rest of the shows were kind of a let down. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if they hadn’t lit all the rooms with florescent lights, a big mistake when it comes to lighting galleries.
But, anyway, it was a good experience and it got me thinking critically about art again (something I had been missing) and it was a nice trip to take. We walked back to the subway and took it to the Ginza again. On the weekends, they block the streets to traffic in order to accommodate all of the pedestrians. It was an intense sight to see. The Ginza became this huge steel and glass canyon filled, as far as you could see, with this river of people, strange and surreal since nobody really spoke above a whisper.
There, by the subway entrance, Mamiko helped Scott talk to the slightly crazy old guy who makes these intricate and compulsive dolls out of discarded clothing. This fellow doesn’t seem to make much money on these dolls considering that when you buy one from him, he gives you one or two more just for being interested. He never really made it clear who he was or where he was from, but he was seemed very happy that we stopped to hang out with him. I think Scott plans on going back to find out more, considering that he’s been collecting dozens of these dolls and plans on researching this fellow as an outsider artist.
Mamiko was very interested in Indian food so we found a good restaurant for lunch. It was really excellent.
Since this computer doesn’t have a CD burner, Bec and I were concerned about finding some alternative storage medium that’d transport our growing number of digital photos. We figured one of those USB thumb drives would do the trick. Obtaining one, however, reqired that we visit Big Camera, a major electronics multi-level department store.
Ok, I can’t even begin to describe how crowded, overwhelming, cluttered, manac, and intense 6 stories of fast paced, overstocked electronics bargain shopping in downtown Tokyo is. We managed to find an floor assistant and communicate to him what we were looking for with surprising ease considering the fact that all gestures for “thumb drive” could easily be misinterpreted as vulgar assaults in any culture. He directed us to a display case full of these drives. Each display model has a number next to it and on the outside of the case are a whole pile of laminated cards with the corresponding number. We took the tag to the cashier and they rang us up. We then took the elevator to the top floor where, in one corner of the room, by the deep friers, they had the extravagent mechanical massage chairs. The chairs were, aparantly, so divine that there were a team of employees dedicated to making sure that people didn’t fall asleep for too long in these chairs. Despite their best efforts, we saw quite a few people slack-jawed under a pile of shopping bags dozing off to the buzz of their chair.
Initially, I was unimpressed. Then, I saw the huge control panel. Then, I saw the section that fit around your feet and calfs. Then, i saw the price tag. I just *had* to try the $7,000 massage chair. I sat myself down a began pressing buttons at random. They were all in Japanese with no pictographs that’d give you an indication of what the settings where. As it turned out, all of the buttons seemed to be for the same setting: Absolutely Fucking Incredible. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me if, instead of a complicated machine, they just put three small people inside the chair, all of whom were expertly trained in massage. That is, until about half-way through the program cycle when the mechanism became so agressive and inhuman-feeling that I started to fear that it’d malfunction and wind up paralysing me when it’s servos overloaded and massaged its way through my torso.. I put that fear to rest as soon as I realized, “Wait a minute: I’m in Japan. Nothing breaks here!”
At any rate, we eventually extricated ourselves from our respective bliss-chairs and took a cab back to the apartment.
We hung out for a little while and then Marcia, Bec and I went out for dinner (Scott’s a little under the weather). We walked a few blocks into the Ropongi neighborhood to an astounding Udon noodle restaurant. They served us these 16 inch wide bowls filled with hot broth, freshly cut thick, wide Udon noodles, and the ingredients of your choice (mine was beef, Bec’s came with a big slab of fried tofu, and Marcia had tempura in hers), served with beautiful wooden lid on the bowl. It was easily in the top 5 noodle meals I’ve had. After dinner, we went to a sort of convenience store, which means 3 floors of a grocery store, CVS and Radio Shack all smashed together. They had tons of weird cookies and crackers and way, *way* too many preserved tentacle snacks.
We just got home moments ago, and I’m totally wiped out. In fact, I barely remember sitting down to write this post.
Please excuse the lack of photos so far. I’ve had such little time to even look at them, let alone try to upload them on this very slow computer. We might have to wait until we get to Beijing to put the pictures on line.
That’s all for now.

It’s been a very long day. I’m not even sure that I’ll be able to recount the events without an omission here or there.
I won’t even talk about the flights, suffice it to say that it took a very long time and there were a few pains in the ass along the way.
Anyway, Tokyo is absolutly unbelieveable. As far as its appearance and outward behavior, it’s often beyond perfect. Everything is fastidously clean, organized, and maintained. For instance, the subway, which carries millions of travelers every day, is immaculate and doesn’t appear any worse for wear for supporting the transit of thousands of commuters every hour. They even sweep the dirt out of the corners. But that’s such a small example! It’s difficult to describe the experience, exactly, but we’ve spent the day walking around and gradually realized that this whole place is like that. There aren’t any potholes in the road, there’s no trash, no grafitti, and there’s not that thin film of grime that makes you cringe away from most cities. When you stop to think about how many millions of people live in this city, it’s doubly amazing. Every retail area is clean enough that, if in a pinch, you could perform minor surgery on any available surface. And, as if it wasn’t strange enough to be in a city that’s totally sterile, it’s quiet, too. To carry on a conversation in public, one hardly has to speak above a whisper. But it’s not for a lack of cars or people, however. Everyone is considerate enough to keep from shouting at each other, yelling at their cellphones, or for driving a car that makes a horrible sound. For all of the thousands of cars we passed to day, the operator of each one seems to have maintained their vehicle so well that the engine noise wasn’t any louder than the day the car rolled off the lot. On top of that, nobody honks their horn. In the 24 hours that we’ve been here, I’ve heard two cars honk. Everybody is polite and courteous. However, there’s a distinct strangeness about quite a bit of this experience. I’ll expand on that in a later post as I get a better grip on how to describe it more exactly.
Like I said, it’s been a very long, and full day and I’m currently very jet-lagged. Right now, I’ll only breifly talk about what we’ve done so far. Tomorrow, I’ll have more energy to go into detail. Also, I’ll upload some pictures.
So, getting off the plane, we took a bus from Narita Airport to a hotel in Akasaka, a neighborhood in Tokyo. Scott and Marcia met us at the hotel and we walked to their apartment a few blocks away. We had a snack and then, while Bec crashed, I went with Scott and Marcia to the grocery store nearby and picked up a few essentials.
Today, we went with Scott on a trip to a district called the Ginza, which is the most staggering, impressive, expansive, and grand retail district that I’ve ever seen. We went into a little paper store, and checked out a small store that’s sort of like a gallery but more a retail outlet for the commercial works of the contemporary Japanese semi-pop artists like Nara, etc. We wandered around that area for a little longer, stopping to see an enormous, sweeping glass structured building that was designed by the fellow who designed the Kimmel Center. Then, we went to a department store called Mitsukoshi. Interesting fact: the Japanese love Christmas. Like, they *love* love it. We browsed our way through the store and expolored their food court. We bought our lunch there and took the subway back to Scott and Marcia’s apartment. We had a leisurely lunch and then Bec and I went back out with directions from Scott to visit the Mori building, one of many enormous sky scrapers in the vacinity. This one, however, has a 360 degree observation on the 52nd floor from which you can see all of Tokyo and Mt. Fuji in the distance. Imagine, if you will, that somebody took the downtown of every major metropolis on the planet and stitched them together. That’s Tokyo. An endless expanse of 6-15 story buildings with clusters of behemoth skyscrapers connected by highways cutting bright headlight paths through the city. Imagine the biggest city you can and double that. In Manhattan, you can see from one end to the other. In Tokyo, standing at the top of a skyscraper, you can’t see where it ends. It’s difficult to write about it, even, because when I try to remember looking at that view, my memory can’t even hold an image of that vastness.
When we got home, we immediately had to rush out to the ambassadors hosue. The American abassador to Japan was having his annual Christmas party at his palacial home and, since Marcia works for the embassy, we were all invited. Two neat facts: 1: The Ambassadors house is General McArthur’s post-war Tokyo mansion where the defeated Emperor visited him. 2: The American ambassador to Japan is the guy who was the president of the Texas rangers when Bush Jr. owned the team.
The party was strange and awkward. Much to our surprise, we wound up having our picture taken with the Abassador in front of his Giant American Christmas tree. We’ll be getting a print in the mail in a few days.
Afterwards, we went out to dinner at an interesting little restaurant. It had that low, in-floor seating, you pressed a button to call the waiter and ordered a-la-carte. Very tasty.
Now, I’ve got to crash. I’ll update more tomorrow.

So Preznit Bush, the Boy in the Bubble, goes on Good Morning America and says, gosh, there’s no way anyone could’ve predicted that the levees would break.

Really? Nobody? Really really? The Army Corps of Engineers had been talking about it for years — but then, Bush has never been one for listening to the Army; c.f. Iraq.
Geologists had been warning about erosion forever, but, you know, some of those guys believe that the earth is round and more than 6000 years old, so they haven’t got a whole lot of credibility.
Environmentalists had been predicting that the destruction of the wetland areas would leave New Orleans without a natural buffer for floods for donkey’s years, but they’re all tree-hugging faggots who won’t shut up about global warming, so it’s not like anyone was going to listen to them in the first place.

And I guess that Jesus didn’t tell Bush this was going to happen during any of their nightly chats. So how could he have known?

Allie’s new home in Mexico. It’s on the second floor.(exterior view)

The street where she’ll be living.

A door knocker.

You’re kidding, right?

Church interior 1

Church interior 2

Interior 3

Stained glass detail

The interesting little cactus-plant in our window planter.

The utterly useless map to the glassblowing factory.

August 12th
(Rebecca)
Today was the first day that we didn’t feel obliged to take care of any particular tasks during the day (i.e. grocery procuring, apartment searching, Instituto investigating, etc, etc..). In other words, we had a play day. It was a lot of fun. First we went to a small store where they sell the hand-blown glass that is ubiquitous in this town. I was full of questions. When I see glass work, I MUST know how it is made. Of course, my Spanish isn’t up to par enough to ask such questions, even if the people working there knew the answers to them. However, we found out that a tour of the glass shop where they are produced is available by appointment. We made arrangements to go there on Monday morning.
Then we went to our favorite cafe and ate lunch. I had my new favorite dish, Sopa de Azteca. It is so amazing… a light tomato and chile broth filled with avocado, tortilla chips and some grated cheese on top. Yum. I’m going to miss it so much when we come back to the states. Funny aside about Mexican food– it all seems to be the same ingredients, just rearranged into different dishes. For example, we could go out to eat and I could order enchiladas and Jon might get quesadillas and Allie might get burritos and we all end up eating a flour tortilla, refried beans, tomato salsa and guacamole. Oh and mucho queso. Mexicans LOVE their dairy products.
So, after lunch we went to La Parroquia (the big pink church). We have passed it every day since we have been here, but this is the first time we ever went inside. It’s pretty incredible. The interior consists of a lot of fancy masonry and huge murals and paintings illustrating the life of Jesus. The most striking thing about the place, though, is the number of icons inside. These little lifelike statues (polychrome) are in every alcove and corner in the building. There must be two dozen of them that we saw. Some wear actual cloth garments and candles and flowers are set in front of them as offerings. It is pretty surreal. The strangest thing, though, was a semi-minature Jesus, post crucifixion, in an ornate glass coffin. I was slack-jawed in front of this crazy thing for like 5 minutes. I really wanted to take a bunch of photos, but Jon suggested that it might be a bit disrespectful. I realized on the way out that if there is anything the Mexicans love more than sour cream, it’s Jesus Christ.

Aug 13
(Jon)
Burritos for lunch, shopping for the rest of the day… We went to a crafts fair at the Instituto which offered a wide range of goods, from sword-canes to folk painting. Needless to say, we made out like banditos. For dinner, we went to a little place on the square and had a strange little dinner. Suffering from something of a “NO MORE FLATBREAD AND BEANS, GOD, PLEASE” meltdown, Rebecca and Allie had some mediocre pasta and I had a mediocre burger. However, the burger did come with a little saucer of ketchup. Which was a strange touch, albeit it almost classy in a strange way. The three-piece mariachi band more than made up for the cheap, kind of crappy meal that we had. Our reward was to come home to more margaritas made from our new favorite tequila (and a great name for a pet) Don Julio Blanco. They were deeeelicious.

August 14.
(Jon)
A real nothing day. We took that day off, feeling an overall sense of accomplishment from having found an apartment for Allie and taken care of our souvenir shopping. We lounged around all day, reading and watching TV. We resolved to have much better dinner than we had the night before and went to a snappy place named Azafran. Their menus had steel covers, if that gives you hint of how neat it was. Allie’s dinner came with rice which was stacked in a cone in the middle of her plate. We made a couple “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” jokes. But dinner was excellent. I mean, really excellent.

August 15.
(Jon)
Today, we made what turned out to be an entirely fruitless attempt to find the local glassblowing facility. At the retail shop, they gave us a printed flier that had a map depicting the shop’s location and the approximate location of the factory. When I say approximate, I mean that the map kind of stops and, a few inches away, is the star marking the factory’s location, as if to say, “It’s over here somewhere, we think. We ran out of map so you’ll have to figure it out from there.”
“Oh? Well, fuck you,” we said after we walked for about a mile and a half and wandered through the only seedy neighborhood in San Miguel, past a little river filled with trash, streets that were running out of pavement, old and young men alike, drinking large beers before noon, kids with no shoes, a couple carwash/chop-shops, and more than a few disintegrating structures. Not wanting to give up the search, but compelled by our natural survival instincts, we did an about face, considering that we were making it pretty obvious that us gringos were quite lost. Anyone with half a brain would have noticed that we were walking in circles. So, yeah, it was definitely time to leave. After walking for a block or two, we hailed a cab and made our way out to the Gigante. It’s a sort of shopping mall/Target/Walmart/Superfresh. A place to buy, liquor, chicken, and underpants. So many underpants! They were unwrapped, too. I’m not sure that I’d want to own a pair of previously fondled undergarments. Ew. There was a small CD store in the facility with some very accommodating staff and wide selection of both native and imported music.
So, a little overwhelmed, and a little nonplussed by the Gigante, we got another taxi back to the center of town. On our way home, we stopped at a place that makes the Eyes Gallery on South Street look boring and agoraphobic and Rebecca and I bought ourselves a pair of fantastic masks. I hope they don’t break in our luggage.
We also passed the glass retail shop. Rebecca stopped in to give the lady a piece of her mind. The woman insisted that it was easy and obvious to find the factory. She pointed at the star on the map saying, “It’s right here!” as though the complete lack of any specific detail to its location on the map was easily overlooked. A customer in the store disagreed with the sales woman, confessing to Rebecca that, even though she’s lived here for three years, she still hasn’t actually found the place. Feeling vindicated, we went home, not before making one last, and ultimately crucial, stop at the convenience store. At that store, we had noticed such tempting treats like Bigotes and SuaviCremes (which are just like those vanilla wafer things). But this time, we hit the jackpot. And the jackpot was ¡Sponch! Dithering with the excitement of discovering what joy ¡Sponch! might have in store for us (noticing that the contents were squishy in the package) we rushed up the hill and readied ourselves for ¡Sponch!
We decided to photograph the ¡Sponchventure! (see below) Ripping open the package instantly filled the room with a thick, oppressive, saccharine, strawberry, musk. Although, in retrospect, our first clue to avoid this product should have been its name, the foul, stale, sweet odor should have also deterred us. But, much to the regret of our taste buds, we ¡Sponched! onward. We each removed a ¡Sponch! from the package and examined it. It seemed to be some sort of marshmallowy coconut-flecked substance topping some sort of insulation-esque biscuit that bore it’s namesake stamped on it’s underside. “¡Sponch!” the increasingly less appetizing snacks gloated to us. “Oh, Sweet Fancy Moses,” we replied and took the shameful, irrevocable leap into ¡Sponchland!
Not good. Really not good. It was possibly the most revolting substance I’ve ever ingested that had disguised itself has a tasty treat. I mean, I’ve had pork rinds and I’d chose them over ¡Sponch! any day. We’ve decided that sponch is spanish for “obviously not for human consumption.” Either that or “spongy chicas.” At any rate, I think the pictures tell the sad, tragic ¡Sponch! tale far better than I could describe it.
For dinner, we decided that we REALLY needed a reward after subjecting ourselves to the ¡horror! We went to a place called Casa de Sierra Nevada which turned out to be almost overwhelmingly fancy. Even being the only people in the restaurant, we kept our voices down. As a complimentary appetizer (or as a “lets see if these fucking gringos will eat this” prank by the staff) the waiter foisted on each of us, a small, fried taquito filled with the single substance that we’ve been desperately avoiding since we got here. HUITLACOCHE! Those of you who’ve visited the “Steve, Don’t Eat It!” website, all already aware of this mutant non-food. For those of you who aren’t, huitlacoche is, literally, diseased corn fungus. It really doesn’t bare any more description beyond that.
But, we felt compelled to eat it. The restaurant was so nice that we feared that refusing this complimentary dish would result in either the staff beating us to death (with either the sticks or the taquitos, themselves) or mocking us behind our backs. Neither of those were acceptable and I felt like I was already pushing my luck by not wearing at tie. So, emboldened with our previous ¡Sponch! encounter and operating under the logic that anything deep fried is probably at least palatable, we took the huitlacoche plunge. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t think any of us would or could ever eat it again in another context, simply knowing what it is. At any rate, dinner was only uphill from there. Dessert was an amaretto ice cream in a almond crust dish, which Rebecca and Allie shared, and a small glass of scotch for me. Upon arriving home, we put a ¡Sponch! in the microwave and giggled for about a half an hour.

August 16
(Rebecca)
Today, we made another stab at finding the glass factory. Instead of wandering around in a slum, we decided to take a taxi. It was definitely very far away, however the nice thing about Mexican taxis is that they charge you about $2.50 usd to go almost anywhere. The glass shop is actually a huge facility. There is also a forge where decorative metal pieces are made and a candle making shop on the premises. We only toured the glass shop, though. First we saw a man washing cullet (recycled glass) to be used in the furnace. Turns out the glass they use is old coke and beer bottles. Its tough stuff to work with, but it’s much less fragile than other kinds of glass. In other words, it is made for production work. After that we got to go into the shop It was comprised of a huge warehouse type room in which one half was a hot shop and the other half was devoted to cold working and quality control activities. The hot shop was unreal. There must have been fifty people running around with a very chaotic kind of precision. I was told that they are divided into teams of eight people and each team is supposed to make 400 units in an eight hour day. That’s really fast! The furnaces where they keep the glass were giant–i would guess about 35 feet long. One team member would gather and blow a bubble into the glass, then he would marver and blow at the same time on a teeny tiny little marverer. He would then hand the glass off to another team member to gather more glass or shape the bubble. No part of the process ever required more than one person, that way the minute someone is done with their job they can start it again on a new piece. No one ever looked idle. It was very assembly-line-like. All of this is very different from the kind of glassblowing that I learned, but it is incredibly interesting to see how other people do it. I could have stood there watching them all day.

(Jon)
Anyway, this will be our last post. We’re coming home tomorrow and, as much as we’ve enjoyed Mexico, we’ve all become a little homesick. I think our flight gets into Philly sometime around 9pm. Feel free to give us a ring. Rebecca and I will only have one full day at home, Thursday, before we go camping with her family on Friday. No rest for the weary, I suppose. Our cats are going to be really pissed at us, I’m sure. Our Thursday, I imagine, will be consumed entirely by doing our laundry and cleaning up the cat’s revenge-vomit (those bastards).
We’re all packed, aside from the things that we need for tomorrow. We managed, to my surprise, to cram all of our souvenirs into the luggage we brought. I just hope that it all survives the journey. If not, that’s what superglue is for, I suppose.
See you folks soon.