January 2009
1 post
November 2008
1 post
Closure
Hmm, just kind of trailed off there. Blogging for ten weeks is hard! I don’t know how people keep it up. Anyway, the last bit of the story, just so the 0.03 readers I have left aren’t left hanging: I spent a few days in northern Tunisia trying to feed myself despite Ramadan and visiting beaches. (I never thought I’d be so grateful for tourist ghettos, but the bartender at an...
September 2008
7 posts
Bashir
Bashir is a grizzled, lanky old guy who pointed out to me in the Tunis medina, the twisty old town, that there was a mosque behind me I could look in. And when I got to the doorway, there he was again. He explained to me how Abraham is everyone’s father—muslims, catholics like me, juifs—and how God gave four books to four prophets, and people see only the skin and the clothes but...
recapping
Okay. So I notice that the blog text has been a little thin on the ground for a couple of weeks. So here’s what I’ve been doing, if the photos aren’t sufficiently explanatory…. I went to Svalbard. There were puffins, polar foxes, skuas, kittiwakes, glacial ice, abandoned mining towns, non-abandoned mining towns, stubby-legged raindeer, ptarmigans, neverending dim sunlight,...
August 2008
25 posts
Liverpool
1) I can read all the advertising messages around me.
2) I can speak idiomatically to people in shops and express complex meanings.
3) I can actually understand what people in shops shooting the breeze are saying to each other.
3a) This is only true about half the time—walking around I often fall into the now-familiar feeling that I’m surrounded by a steady murmur of a foreign...
well, that was exciting
To tell the story in time sequence, as opposed to the way I figured it out this morning: last night around 4 am, the two French brothers who are staying in my hostel room met a couple of cool guys on a corner nearby, went to get some beers from the 24-hour minimart, the cool guys slipped something in their beer, and they all came back up to the hostel room where the cool guys proceeded to steal...
more from St. Petersburg
Very good city for touristing, St Petersburg. Day before yesterday I walked down Nevsky Prospekt, across some bridges, out to the fort where Peter the Great founded the city (I think the whole city is built on reclaimed land, like the Netherlands or Venice—old maps show just a fort in the middle of a river delta), and back again. There were assorted cathedrals along the way: one a 19th...
St Petersburg
Here are some things I like about St Petersburg, from my first four hours here. * smoked and cured fish in many forms. * lots of people doing lots of things on the street, kind of a New York feeling: in one metro station, each train doorway had its own little alcove cut into the red tile and each one had two or three people chatting, or trading shopping bags, or sketching in sketchpads, or...
photos
new photos on flickr up through Istanbul, if you haven’t looked recently….
onward from İstanbul
I had a good relaxing time in İstanbul. I saw beautiful mosques on a
spectrum from tourist-centric to tourists-can’t-find-the-door. I sat
in cafes along with backgammon-playing locals. Last night I saw a
sema, a whırling dervish performance, which may not have lifted me up
three successively higher levels of annihilation of the ego and then
back down to a sense of submission to...
halfway point
Today is the middle day of my trip. It’s hard to summarize what I think about that.
onward
Had a great day in Samarkand yesterday—wandered the hillside where the ancient city used to be (ancient meaning 700 BC - 1300 AD, as opposed to the monuments of the less ancient city (1360-1500, capital of the Timurid empire, grand mosques and medressas and tombs, much blue tile, much geometric cleverness)), saw particularly fine mosques, medressas, and tombs, three different shades of blue...
Samarkand
I’m in Samarkand. It’s a bigger city than Bukhara, and additionally the grand monuments are spread throughout the city instead of being concentrated in one heavily restored and sanitized Old Town, so it feels a bit like I’ve returned to the real world from a theme park. Although putting it that way isn’t fair to Bukhara’s old town—as I was eating dinner last...
stray news from Uzbekistan
* I can access my blog again, so the paragraph breaks are back!
* Yesterday I took a taxi across the Kyzylkum Desert from Nukus to Bukhara The car broke down on a rise overlooking the Amu Darya River, with Turkmenistan stretching out on the opposite bank. A pretty romantic place to break down, really. Daewoo Nexias apparently have a little thinger in a special hatch under the back seat that...
Uzbekistan
I’m at an unstable dialup connection in northern Uzbekistan (isn’t that just the king of catch-all excuses?) so no long reflections, but here I am. In Uzbekistan. I like it. Cheese exists here, which makes me very happy, and people have a huge variety of faces. People have been mingling here from so far away for so long that there is one hell of a gene pool. The history museum in...
Mogao caves
Wow. The Buddhist caves at Mogao, near Dunhuang (where I still am, contentedly eating melons) are—wow. They were all built between 300 and 1300 AD, way out in the desert. Unlike the ones I saw last week these caves aren’t niches in the cliff wall but _caves_, with entryways and floors and vaulted ceilings, every inch of them covered with murals surrounding the main images. The colors...
astronomical wonders
I just saw the Milky Way above the sand dunes behind my guesthouse here in Dunhuang. I like Dunhuang. But that is not the number 1 astronomical wonder of the last couple of days. You can read all about number 1 astronomical wonder by going to reuters.com, searching for “eclipse” and clicking the article by Lucy Hornby: I watched it with Lucy, her fellow reporters, and her astronomer...
eclipse in 3.5 hours
I’m in Jiayuguan. I have 1) fried fava beans to eat (which actually is something I eat in Seattle too—I get ‘em at Uwajimaya), 2) an internet cafe with machines that can talk to my camera, 3) a good lead on a location to watch the eclipse from, and I went to the freakin’ Great Wall of China today, so things are pretty peachy. I just uploaded some scenes from Lanzhou. And I...
July 2008
24 posts
Linxia
Linxia is a Muslim town, surrounded by dry hills and cornfields, where Tibetans shop wholesale. It is not a tourist destination. Everyone stared at me—oh, how they did stare at me—with squinting, quizzical expressions ranging from mild dismay to mild glee. Children liked to say “he-lo!” and liked it when I answered them. The old men have skullcaps, fantastic beards and...
back from not visiting Xiahe
I’m in Lanzhou again for a few hours (onward train this evening), back from three days of failing to visit Xiahe. Xiahe is the Tibetan monastery town I mentioned, home of thousands of monks, colorful, swirling pilgrimage destination for Tibetans far and wide, that I recently did not go to. I planned most of my itinerary in China around making it there, although, as I might have mentioned, I...
change of plans
Okay, I’m close to having all the tickets and whatnot I need for the rest of my time in China, which will be a relief. Have I mentioned that you can only buy train tickets here in the city they start from, and that nevertheless you have to buy tickets on popular routes like 5 days in advance? This is true except when it isn’t, which is sometimes, and no one quite knows why. In any...
Videos from Japan on flickr
I’ve posted some select videos that Neil took from his camera in Japan. They range from the survey of a temple grounds to the exhibits at the Emerging Science and Innovations Technology Museum. They’re on my flickr site, in a set called “Neil’s Videos”; you can reach the set via this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/naomioxford/sets/72157606409966082/ Enjoy! - naomi
noodles
My train friend Feili and his friend Rachel (a lot of college-age folks seem to have an “English name” they are ready to tell me, sometimes not even mentioning their name names) met up with me last night, and took me out for cats-ear noodles [note: noodles contain no cat ears], hand-rolled noodles, tentacles on a stick, and a stroll along and powerboat ride down the Yellow River. The...
hard sleeper to Lanzhou
Sounds like a book title, eh? Anyway, this is what happens when you take an overnight train in western China. 1) It’s three hours late. (Still better than Amtrak.) The Information lady at the train station can only tell me that it’s ###### (this is how I will represent things that people say to me in Chinese), so I sit down on the steps and hope for the best, but ten minutes later, a...
more about Chengdu
Okay, breakfast at guesthouse before train (oatmeal with watermelon and unidentifiable local fruit, salty duck egg (urk—it would be better not salty), fresh OJ)—so there’s time to fill in some on what Chengdu is like. Chengdu is, as you could have guessed, a huge city. It’s organic and dense with shops and alleys and human dramas and whatnot but on the large scale it feels...
new stuff on flickr
I’ve started a photoset on flickr with one photo per day in it, chosen sort of on the basis of color and sort of for no particular reason. I’ll keep it updated if my internet access stays pretty good, but who knows. The new additions to it should show up in the sidebar. By the way, I haven’t been able to actually see this blog since I’ve been in China—all of...
monk in a cowboy hat
Monk in a cowboy hat! Monk in a cowboy hat! What could be more Tibetan than that? Yesterday I wandered around the Tibetan quarter of Chengdu with two Israelis I met outside the Wenshu temple (a Ch’an (= Zen) temple with lots of incense, monks in saffron, and vegetarian food). The Tibetan quarter isn’t very big, but it was completely full of shops selling religious goods, giant...
Sim's Cozy Guesthouse
I arrived in Chengdu last night, and I’m staying in the nicest hostel I have ever stayed in. It’s right in the city but there are gardens and patios and a restaurant and a travel desk that fixed my pronunciation of place names, to the extent it will ever be fixed, and they leave bananas and a peach in your room when you check in and they pour big shots of Chinese date whiskey for 80...
