I know that should be “lowdown” but that doesn’t rhyme with Malmo. Then again neither does “downlow,” sigh.

(Our protagonist consults a list labeled CAREERS I MIGHT PURSUE. He draws a line through “Swedish Rapper.”)

Great thing about Europe (besides the work ethic, which I seriously love--more on this later) is that the whole continent’s wired up with trains. You can get from anywhere to everywhere, stopping at somewhere and nowhere, in swimwear and skiwear. This paragraph brought to you by Dr. Seuss.

There are at least two different types of Europe trips you can do: There’s the hang-out-stay-awhile-get-to-know-the-place kinda trip, and the sally-forth-and-wander, a/k/a The Whirlwind, enabled by the train system. On the first kind of trip you pick a spot or two and hang in it for weeks, to fully absorb the fumes. On The Whirlwind you get a Eurail pass and hop from one country to the next like a rabbit spreading his seed.

Most people will tell you The Whirlwind’s stupid and superficial, but I disagree on the former point if not the latter; I’d rather spend two days in a country than not see it at all. It’s true you don’t gain a deep understanding of the culture that way, but having just a taste of something will either whet your appetite for future meals or teach you to avoid the restaurant altogether.

So the girlfriend and I didn’t feel bad about abandoning Copenhagen mere hours after we’d landed. When you first set foot in a new place you get a vibe, and I know that sounds touchy-feely, but I’m seriously into trying to feel the vibe of a place, and sometimes it just ain’t there. Like I when I went to Santa Fe or San Francisco, no pulse. This is not to malign those cities, of course, because what’s more subjective than a vibe. Point is Copenhagen didn’t do it for us.

So we headed back to the train station around 11pm. Beautiful thing about Eurail passes is you bounce whenever, wherever. “Yo Slim, we wanna bounce up out this bitch,” I said to the Danish guy working the train counter. In retrospect it might have come out more like “Excuse me but when’s the next sleeper to Oslo?”

“I’m sorry but the sleeper to Oslo is fully booked,” he said. “You can try tomorrow.”

“Fuck that, dawg!” I said, which might have sounded like “I understand, thanks very much” with my accent.

The timetable showed there were trains leaving for someplace called Malmo every twenty minutes. I wasn’t familiar with Malmo, but the guidebook said it was a city and didn’t say it sucked so we decided to try that.

Although it’s in Sweden, not Denmark, Malmo is only forty minutes from Copenhagen. We got there a little after midnight, riding that train with the freakishly high ceilings. I’m not exaggerating, I mean you look up and expect to see Michelangelo paintings.

Back to Malmo: Strange scene on the platform--we get off the train and there are Swedish cops barricading off the end of it, nearest the station. Behind the barricade is a mob of people, tons and tons of people. Wait not just people, club kids. Shiny and predominantly blonde partygoers, teens or early twenties, cosmeticized and dressed to impress, lined up like they’re waiting to see Brad Pitt or Alfred Nobel or whomever passes for a celebrity around here.

A blonde chick cop directed us to walk around the barricade, so we actually had to step off the platform and walk along the tracks to get to the exit. Some guy was taking a piss on a wall and looking at us. My girlfriend started to comment on it but he zipped up and ended up walking right behind us.

So we get out of the station, and there are still mobs of club kids everywhere, crazy dense. Like the meatpacking district in Manhattan. There are outdoor dance floors set up in tents, DJs spinning, club lights, pumping bass, and grips of kids hanging out everywhere. A river ran past the train station and kids were partying on both banks.

Despite all this, it didn’t feel annoying the way it does in the ‘States. I don’t know what it is over here, but the mobs seemed somehow intelligent and orderly. Maybe I was projecting what I’d read about Scandinavians onto the crowd, but I didn’t see any drunken frat boys throwing each other into the river, which I feel like all Americans have seen at some point.

If I were a younger man I’d have eagerly jostled my way towards the nearest DJ playing house, but I’m not, and was ass-tired to boot. You gotta remember that me and the missus woke up in England that morning and were looking for bed space in a different time zone.

Before you go thinking Swedes party like this all the time, I oughta point out we unwittingly arrived right in the middle of Malmo Festival. I’d take some time to explain what that is here, but Google has taken the trouble to index the entire internet so I’ll let your fingers get some exercise.

The first two budget hotels we came across were booked solid, as was the third. Malmo Festival gets 1.4 million visitors over eight days so this was unsurprising. What was surprising was that the fourth place we hit up actually had space. It was ridiculously expensive (for us) but we’d been planning on spending one in seven nights at someplace nicer than a hostel, so it just came a little early.

Our room was tiny but tidy. Once inside we either had hot Swedish sex or went straight to bed, I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

Morning in Sweden. The breakfast at the hotel was free and unlimited, so the girlfriend and I ate like a pack of wild dogs. Cold cuts, cheese, eggs, fruit, yogurt, mueslix, and coffee. I wouldn’t discover how difficult it is in Europe to get filtered coffee until later.

We checked out and dragged our bags to the station, to leave them in lockers while we explored the city. Outside the streets were dead, almost completely bereft of people, zombie-movie-style. I was surprised to see not a single trace of garbage left behind by last-night’s college-aged partygoers; no crumpled beer cans, puddles of vomit or chalk outlines. I thought at the very least I’d see a guy named Sven sleeping on a bench with magic marker all over his face, but nothing.

When I was a freshman there was one guy in my dorm that always passed out early and we’d always break out the Sharpies and write on him. His nickname was Subway. Anyway.

We picked a random direction and started walking. I love Scandinavian design and was thrilled to see a couple furniture boutiques, but they were all closed; I’d forgotten Europeans actually take Sunday seriously, they don’t do a stitch. Meanwhile everyone I know in Manhattan has worked 80-hour workweeks at some point. I like the Euro system better.

After wandering down a half-dozen deserted streets, we eventually heard music and saw a crowd a few blocks away. Moving towards the source, we rounded a corner and found Malmo Festival was still in full swing. The city was dead two blocks over but this enormous plaza was packed. A huge outdoor stage had been erected and there were food stands everywhere, selling candy, hot dogs and lots of things I couldn’t pronounce if I had a gun to my head.

First thing we noticed was there were baby carriages everywhere. You’ve never seen this many babies, it’s like Swedes are trying to repopulate the Earth. If you threw twenty pieces of candy up in the air, nineteen of them would land in baby carriages.

I did some quick figuring and calculated that by the year 2007, four out of five people on the planet will be Swedish. Amazing but true.

Second thing we noticed was the blondes. Everyone had told me that Swedes (Scands in general) were super-hot, but it’s not like everyone walking around is a super-model; it’s more like their hot people stick out more than our hot people, they’re more striking-looking. When you think of the typical hot American girl you probably envision the blonde, busty, Midwestern farmer’s daughter. Well, Scandinavian immigration is totally where that aesthetic came from, you see it all around.

Third thing we noticed, and this surprised the hell out of me, was the prevalence of fat people! I’m used to America being the land of the obese, but the crowds we saw in Malmo were like, sitting on stone benches and breaking them. Maybe it’s all the dairy or all the money. America’s a fairly wealthy country, Sweden even more so, so I guess when you get a little dough in the bank, the first thing you do is invest in a spare tire.

We saw a few Asians and blacks walking around speaking Swedish, which kinda bugged me out. Although everyone speaks English the default language, of course, is Swedish, and a cashier at a stall began speaking to me in Swedish. I guess that although it’s primarily white here, there are enough immigrants that it’s feasible we or any of the racial minorities we saw walking around could be Asian-Swedish, which I thought was kinda cool. You know what I mean? Like the cashier didn’t assume we were foreigners. So different from America, where every time I leave the city I have to get used to dealing with hick expectations.

We ate lunch in a large courtyard nearby, sharing a picnic table with a Swedish family populated by two children, one of whom was a glum-looking twelve-year-old punk with the funky hair.

Musicians from all genres were set up on outdoor stages everywhere. A pop crooner, a blues-rock band, an opera singer. On the bank of the river, a jazz ensemble. The girlfriend and I wandered throughout, taking breaks to try different snacks.

Towards the end of the day we sat on a stoop in a deserted cobblestone alleyway, eating street food and listening to live opera. Not too shabby.

Swedish bicycle prisons are dangerously overpopulated.

Many Swedes tried to trick us into eating this “candy.” Call me
crazy but I won’t eat anything that looks like it came out of the
Play-Doh Fun Factory (unless they use that star-shaped attachment).

We ate this. I couldn’t pronounce it so I took a picture of the sign.
Later we ended up eating a whalemeat sandwich
because I thought it was reindeer.
I wanted to eat Rudolph, not Moby Dick.

Moments after I snapped this photo, the giant guy on
the left grabbed and ate the small group on the right.
The parents were upset but too polite to say anything.

I think this sign means “If you leave your Studebaker next
to the barn, don’t approach small girls chasing basketballs.”

There’s nothing like an old broken-down, hard-luck blues musician just
hanging out on the street and pouring his troubles out on the sax.
Especially when he’s like, blond and fourteen years old.

As it turns out, riding one of these will not make you thinner.

Check out homeboy on this sign. They drew a little rounded
ass on him! He’s got some junk in the trunk. Maybe you can’t
tell from this photo but it’s pretty noticeable in person.

England is expensive, but fools you into thinking it’s not. The prices are numerically the same as in the ‘States, but the exchange rates are all fucked-up--in a fight one British pound beats the shit out of one U.S. dollar, so the dollar has to go and get one of his buddies to make an even match-up. A ten pound sandwich sounds reasonable until you realize it’s twenty bucks.

Getting from England to the rest of Europe is also expensive, at least by surface. There’s a big-deal train called the Eurostar which runs from London to Paris through the channel tunnel, and even with the Eurail discount it runs into the hundreds of dollars. There are ferries going from Dover (England) to Calais (France); these seem inexpensive, until you figure in the cost of getting from London to Dover.

Surprisingly, the cheapest way we found to get off the island (not counting being deported) was to fly. We snagged a couple Easyjet tickets from London to Copenhagen, Denmark. Even after factoring in the cost of getting to the airport, it worked out to well below the Great Train Robbery that is the Eurostar.

We touch down in Copenhagen at night. The airport is beautiful, featuring the best of Danish industrial design: clean lines, tasteful use of wood and stainless steel, elegant and considered lighting. No one wants to live at LaGuardia Airport, but if you met the guy who designed Copenhagen International you’d beg him to design your house.

On a recent trip to Mexico, I wrote how crossing the border was like having the world around you drop in resolution, as if the U.S. was at 300 d.p.i. and Mexico was at 150. Well, stepping off the plane into Scandinavia, it’s like everything gets bumped up to 600 d.p.i. It’s the difference between analog and digital, CRT and plasma.

Not only do people in Denmark speak English--they seem to speak it better than most Americans. An icily efficient Aryan validates our Eurail passes at the train counter, then we put them into immediate use by hopping the subway to Copenhagen proper.

The interior of the subway cars are absurdly tall; you expect to see Vikings with six-foot battleaxes shuffling into the car. People seem pretty polite, they board and exit the train in an orderly fashion, and there are no thug-types sitting with their legs wide open like on the 6. Needless to say the trains are spotless.

The ride is short, and soon we’ve arrived at Copenhagen Central Station. Our first order of business after withdrawing some Danish crowns is food: Danish hot dogs from a nighttime food stand, then smorrebrod (Danish sandwiches on flat bread) from a late-night shop run by a Chinese woman speaking Danish. Good stuff.

I’m happy we’re in a foreign land, but a postprandial jaunt through the city shows me how much Europe really has changed since the ten years when I last visited. Every other block we pass has the same chain-stores you see in America, from Diesel to Armani Exchange, McDonalds to 7-11. Danes don’t look or dress significantly different from Americans except they are taller and you see more blondes. Other than that this could be Philadelphia or Boston.

Danes are descended from Vikings, once the most feared warriors on the continent, but you’d never know it by looking at them. Peaceful, non-jaywalking and exceedingly polite. In 1,000 years they’ve gone from raping and pillaging most of Europe to riding around on bicycles and stopping at yellow lights.

“They’re not very assertive with their advertising,” the girlfriend points out, looking skyward at one of the main intersections. I look up to see a large billboard that says “Carlsberg: Probably the best beer in town.” Wish I could have seen the advertising meeting for that one.

“The sun never sets on the British Empire,” goes the saying.

“...and it never rises on the British mainland” is what it should say on the other side of the placard. England greets me with grey, overcast skies spitting sporadic drizzle. I can’t take a decent photograph in such light and have to wait for those five-minute stretches where it clears up for a spell.

As in Tokyo, you’ve got to look the other way when you cross the road. This will take me a minute to get accli--

ZZZOOOOOMM

Whoa! Fuck.

By the way, I finally heard tell of why they drive on the left side of the road in England and Japan. Apparently it’s from the time when you had warriors riding around on horseback: they would always stay to the left, because it’s easier to swing a sword in your right hand at somebody coming the other way.

In America we drive on the other side because our young nation was founded after this horses-‘n-swords period in history, or, as I suspect, it was secretly founded hundreds of years earlier by a group of rangy left-handed equestrians.

They call coffee “black” or “white” here, like it’s people! At Victoria Station (think of a clean Grand Central without the bored-looking NYPD beat cops) I ordered a “coffee, milk no sugar” at a stand and the countergirl gave me an error--does not compute look. I tried again but she returned the human version of the blinking cursor and the blank page.

“Er...I’d like a cup of coffee,” I then tried, “with a little milk in it.”

“A white coffee, then?”

“Yes,” I said, with false confidence. White coffee sounds, to me, like coffee for neo-Nazis, but I was relieved to see my desires and her assumption lined up.

The missus and I take the train down through the ‘burbs, to an area called Sussex, southeast of London. My first impression is of rows of identical houses that all have chimneys. They press them up against each other here like townhouses, I’ve seen nary a free-standing structure.

We head over to her crashpad near Brighton, England, which is supposed to be a “seaside resort community”--but the beach here is made out of rocks! It’s either shitty geological luck or the work of some very industrious vandals. I’m picturing a warehouse full of sand and some snickering kids.

Still, there were families sitting here and there, facing the water. More than a few of them were picking up stones and tossing them absently towards the waves. So at the beaches down here, from what I can see are just a bunch of uncomfortable-looking folk hanging out and throwing rocks.

I’ve only been in England for a hot minute, so I haven’t had much time to form any meaningful observations or opinions (or even take any decent pictures). But one thing I can tell you is Britons are a hell of a lot more polite than say, the average New Yorker. The conductor who took my ticket on the train said “Thanks--thanks a lot!” and after taking my girlfriend’s said “Thanks, that’s great!”

By now most of you have seen OverheardInNYC.com; now I know why there’s no British version.


OverheardInLondon.com


Man: Sorry!

Woman: Pardon me!

Man: Excuse me!

Woman: Thanks!

Man: Thanks a lot!

Woman: Thanks very much!


--Overheard by Sir so-and-so

I’ve always thought Brits were extremely gracious. Case in point: in early summer, the British university where my girl is studying threw a “Fourth of July” party for the visiting Americans! I was so impressed--what other country would throw you a party to celebrate you defeating them in combat?

Then again, the redcoats did manage to come back and burn the White House in 1814, so maybe that took some of the sting out of it. Still, I can’t picture say, the French throwing a Dien Bien Phu party for the Vietnamese.

We won’t be in England for more than a day and a night; the bulk of our travel budget went towards Eurail passes, which are only valid on the continent. To get our money’s worth, we’re headed there straightaway.

"Let's go to the beach, kids! We can have rock fights
and take turns sitting on the concrete cube!"

The Parliament building, named in honor of
George Clinton and the band he had before Funkadelic.

Britain's most famous clock tower, often referred
to as "pigpen" by those with speech impediments.

Thanks for reading, thanks very much.

---

The streets of Manhattan are stretched and straight, enabling long-distance vision. Walking down Lafayette Street I can see the 3:30 shuttle bus to Newark Airport is right where it’s supposed to be, on the corner of Walker.

The thing that’s not where it’s supposed to be is me, three blocks north. My watch says it’s 3:29. This is not good.

I walk as fast as I can with forty pounds of deadweight on me, praying the bus doesn’t start moving. I make it through one green light but the next one is red. By the time I cross the final street and get within thirty feet of the bus, fucking thing starts moving.

I start running, but the weight of the pack precludes actual acceleration; I’m exerting more energy but moving at the same pace, making a spaz of myself in the process. So I rip free of the straps, ditch the pack hard on the sidewalk and sprint full-tilt for the bus. Slam my hands on the door frantically.

Bus stops. I run back twenty feet, snatch up my bag, lying sideways in the grit, and haul it into the open doorway. “Thanks,” I say to the driver, giving him my money and collapsing into a seat.

I could have taken a taxi, but that would run me $30 to $50, and this here shuttle bus is only thirteen bones. The $17 to $37 I save is gonna be chow cash in Scandinavia.

---

Confiscated at Newark Liberty Airport: My bottle of lighter fluid, packed last-minute to refill the zippo, which only holds about a week’s worth of fluid. The TSA person said it was illegal, even in check-in luggage. Looks like I’ll be a match-using motherfucker in Europe.

---

Never been to England before, so I didn’t know what to expect.

I knew what to expect on the flight, though: cranky flight attendants who, in my opinion, have tacitly capitalized on 9/11 by wielding what little power they have with an inflated sense of self-importance. So haughty. The subtext always seems to be “If I don’t like you, I can push a button and have you arrested at the gate.” Yeah, yeah--just gimme my fucking peanuts.

Airplanes are like movie theaters in that you’re forced to sit in orderly rows amongst strangers. Jet Blue or some budget airline should take out all the seats and just fill the plane with bean bags, so you could sit wherever you want. Better yet they could fill the entire plane with those colored rubber balls like at Chuck E. Cheese. That would be hot, especially if they had to pull one of those emergency landings with the slides. When the doors popped open it would look like you opened a Contac.

---

My girl is waiting for me when I get off the plane, and she’s a sight for sore eyes. The airport terminal dissolves into a grassy field and we run towards each other in slow-motion. I trip and fall but it happens when the camera’s on her, so no one really notices.

We head for baggage claim, with flowers blooming in our path, chirping birds circling behind us and all that. I had to check my bag because I packed a couple small knives. After retrieving it, I pull the camping knife out and clip it on the right side of my jeans, where it will remain for the rest of the trip. I can periodically check the sharpness of the blade by catching one of the chirping birds and shaving it.

---

I shoulder the pack. My girl shoulders the smaller one, then leads me towards the exit so I can get my first taste of fresh British oxygen.

---

---

---

Travel has taught me to pack light. So why the hell am I kitted out at 38 pounds?

I divided the things I'd be bringing into six groups and weighed each of them using a postal scale, to see where the fat was. Here are the results.

---

Backpack
Weight: 6.75 lbs

The main part of the bag has a little friend (right),
a normal-sized backpack which attaches to the back.

---

The main part of the bag resembles a shapeless suitcase...

---

...but unzipping the rear stowaway cover
reveals full-size shoulder and waist straps.

It’s an internal-frame EMS (Eastern Mountain Sports) 4000 Travel which I purchased in 1995, for the first time I “did Europe.” In the ten years since it has served me well, having been dragged across Europe, Japan, America, Vietnam, and one godforsaken camping site in upstate New York.

---

Group One: Clothing
Weight: 7.75 lbs

- 2 pairs of jeans
- 7 pairs boxers
- 8 pairs socks
- 6 T-shirts
- 1 jacket
- bathing suit
- travel towel
- flip flops

Two pairs of jeans (one pair in the bag and the other hanging from my skinny ass). I suppose you can do 30 hot summer days in a single pair of pants, but you could also shit in a bucket to save water. Plus I don't feel like sitting around in some German laundromat in my underwear.

Boxers and socks are another area where I was unwilling to pare down. Hotcrotch in recycled boxers is asking for trouble, and having clean feet is important to me because, well, I eat with them. Okay so I don't but the question is, if I did would you judge me.

Plus boxers and socks take up next to no space. The socks I'm bringing are the low kind, often called "ankle socks" because they were invented in the ancient Greek city of Anklos.

Speaking of socks, my girlfriend knocked mine off by packing far lighter than me in every category, bringing only three shirts. Faced with this sudden and uncomfortable gender role reversal, I halved my load of shirts, but the postal scale showed a weight savings of less than 0.5 pounds, so back in the bag they went.

The bulk of the weight, according to the scale, was the jacket, the jeans and the flip-flops, believe it or not. I brought flip-flops because, as anyone familiar with a hostel will tell you, the floors of their men's showers are among the nastiest surfaces on Earth, covered in the detritus of grungy travelers from around the world. It's a kind of UN of urine, grime and pubic hairs. So I'll wear the flip-flops in there as well as if we make it to a beach.

One item in this category that weighs next to nothing is the travel towel. For those of you don't know what it is, it's basically a chamois, the thing they use to dry your car off at the car wash. Doesn't feel particularly great on your skin, but when you’re backpacking it’s either this or drip-drying.

---

Group Two: Personal Items
Weight: 1.4 lbs

- eyeglasses
- notebook
- pens
- condoms
- gum

Condoms in case I find work as a drug mule, and I’m bringing American gum because foreign gum loses its flavor faster than reality shows.

The tiny silver pen is my travel pen, super-compact. The larger pen is one of the "impulse buys" they stock at the counter at Staples; it lights up and illuminates the page. Great for airplanes and trains although I think the constant flickering annoys the shit out of other passengers.

The white and black notepads are from Japan and Staples, respectively. I prefer foreign notebooks because they're smaller. The notepads from Staples are shite--if someone coughs, the cover will fall off--but I don't have any left from my Japanese stash.

---

Group Three: Electronics
Weight: 10 goddamn pounds

- laptop +adapter
- pen tablet +pen
- night camera +adapter
- day camera +adapter
- mini-tripod
- USB cable for camera
- foreign power adapters

If I could avoid bringing the laptop I would, but The Corporation said they have a huge project I have to work on starting the day after I leave. So I gotta haul this goddamn six-pounder around wimme, along with the pen tablet and pen which are critical for the nature of the work I do.

The Canon SD-10 I've got is ultracompact and great for daylight shots, but it shoots like shit at night. My ancient Sony DSC-P1 is super-slow, bulky and heavy, but it shoots well in low-light situations. Hence I bring both and their requisite adapters.

The mini-tripod might sound impressive or heavy but it's neither, roughly the size of a fork and weighing not much more. Good for bracing the camera on long-exposure shots.

---

Group Four: Travel Gear
Weight: 5.6 lbs

- travel guide (cut into sections)
- hidden moneypouch for the gf (black)
- hidden moneypouch for me (tan)
- backpack raincover
- day bag for the gf
- day bag for me
- shoulder strap for either my day bag or pack
- black zip-ties
- "surfer wallet" waterproof container for cigs, cash or as a second hidden inside-pants-leg pouch
- swiss army knife
- 2 combination locks (carabiner-style) for the backpack
- 4 carabiners
- 2 combination locks (mini) with lightweight cables
- bungy cord (not pictured)

The zip-ties weigh next to nothing and are good for shackling things. In thief-heavy areas (Italy, South of France, Spain) you can use it to quickly attach your bag to luggage racks and the like, to prevent snatch-n-grab-it thieves from absconding with your stuff.

Every zipper on every bag I own has a lock that goes through it. Two of my locks came with lightweight cables which I use to fasten the bags to stationary objects or fat people during overnight stays. They're also handy for connecting any stray cats you come across.

The carabiners are the cheap Chinese kind that will kill you if you try to climb with them, but they are great for stringing up improvisational clotheslines and the like.

---

Group Five: Toiletries
Weight: 3 lbs

- 5 bottles sample-sized body soap
- shaver
- witch hazel
- cotton balls
- sunscreen
- toothpaste and capped toothbrush
- 2 bottles sample-sized shampoo
- q-tips (not pictured)

On the road I shave using the battery-operated microshaver, using my zippo as a mirror.

For the past few weeks I have been washing only half of my face with facial cleanser, and I notice no difference on my skin. Therefore I have opted not to bring the facial cleanser and will go a month without washing my face. I’ll occasionally degrease my grill using cotton balls and witch hazel. If it sounds disgusting, get off my back; you’re reading my blog, not licking my face.

---

Group Six: Useful Non-Essentials
Weight: 3.25 lbs

- inflatable travel pillow
- Powerbars
- serrated camping knife
- kleenex for toilet paper
- wetnaps
- mini-flashlight
- tylenol
- earplugs
- band aids and first aid ointment
- zinc tablets
- liquid hand sanitizer
- 2 bottles sample-sized mouthwash
- motion sickness pills
- antacids
- dental floss (not pictured)

This is where experience comes in handy; these are items I'd pack based on being in situations where I wished I'd had these things with me. Although none are absolutely necessary, most are useful for train travel.

The Powerbars are meal-replacement failsafes, in case broken-down trains leave you stranded in areas without food. (Sometimes late at night, or in smaller towns, everything is closed and you're starving.)

The knife is great for resolving drunken conflicts.

Kleenex-slash-toilet paper can come in handy. I had a friend who traveled through a toilet-paper-scarce Greece; he wiped his ass using pages of a book he'd already read. Eventually he began outshitting his reading, so he'd have to quickly read five pages before he could drop the bomb.

A Swiss Army Knife is little more than a novelty in civilian, urban life back home, but on the road I have gotten good use out of the can opener, the corkscrew and even the tweezers. You never know when you will run into someone whose eyebrows require tweezing, and the corkscrew is useful for putting helical holes through a block of cheese to explain wormholes and the fifth dimension to fellow cabinmates.

Liquid hand sanitizer is great for picnics, or situations where you have to shake a foreigner's hand and want to display your prejudice by immediately disinfecting it afterwards, right in front of them.

Mouthwash for when you have no access to clean running water to brush your teeth.

Dental floss is good for tying things together, it's basically compact, ghetto twine.

Obviously they have medication overseas, but on the off-chance I'll actually need some I prefer buying it while I'm still in America. Ever try reading a product warning label in German? "I think it says to take 47 of these pills in a row, and mix it with something called Achtung."

---

Thirty-eight goddamn pounds.

Let’s get it on.

---

---

Travel Fun plus Arts ‘n Crafts!
Lesson One: Cut That Travel Guide Down to Size!

Follow along step-by-step with our thoughtful, innovative traveler as he shows you the ins and outs of intelligent backpacking! And gets hooked on using exclamation points!

Problem: The Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring guidebook is a must-have, but it’s bulky, heavy and contains some countries you have zero interest in.

What to do? Cut it up!

Advantages of cutting up your guidebook:

- easier to carry
- breaking up the desired chapters means you can throw even more sections away as you go along, lightening your load
- individual pages are now easy to remove. For daytrips, put the three pages you need in your back pocket instead of lugging the whole damn book around
- amaze and delight your family and friends

Using our handy-dandy postal scale, we see the book weighs in at
a whopping two pounds! If that doesn’t sound like a lot, remember
that when you’re backpacking, every pound counts! If that still
doesn’t sound like a lot, you can go to hell!

Tools:

For this project you will need:

- your Lonely Planet/Let’s Go guidebook (or, for practice, any Russian novel. Borrow a friend’s)
- a ruler
- binder clips in various sizes
- the type of girly, curvy letter-opener favored by the effete
- a pair of scissors
- a utility knife, a/k/a boxcutter or “debt recollection tool”
- a semiautomatic pistol
- some old manila file folders

In reality you will only need the utility knife, the clips and the
folders, but when I took the picture I wasn’t sure so I played it safe.
And not that it’s any of your business but the gun is a toy.

Step One: Discriminate!

Go through the Table of Contents and decide which countries you will never visit because of their inferior political systems, ridiculous beliefs and hopelessly backward social mores.

Bye-bye Belarus!

Step Two: Trim the Fat!

Starting at the front of the book, flip to the first page of the first section you’d like to keep. Holding the top of the book firmly in one hand, take the utility knife in the other and gently run it along the cleft of the pages, from top-to-bottom. Four or five passes should do the trick.

Note that your right hand should be tightly gripping the knife,
but it ain’t happening here ‘cause I had to hold the camera.

If you have good health insurance, cut towards your own stomach and use wild, slashing motions. For the rest of us, cut slowly, lightly and precisely. Whenever cutting through something thick, like the spine of a book or a night watchman’s jacket, best results are achieved by running a series of light strokes, rather than powering through with one or two cuts.

You might be tempted to try and cut it this way. DON’T.
Particularly if you already have low self-esteem.

Step Three: Remove the offending material.

For a good laugh, send the now-dilipidated pages to that country’s embassy with a post-it saying “Here’s what I think of your &@#%*@ country.”

Andorra?

Ignorra.

Step Four: Mince and repeat.

Duplicate the cutting procedure for each section you want to separate, going through the entire book. Minimize the amount of cutting you need to do by seeing if contiguous chapters are desirable/undesirable, and leave them together.

Step Five: Distribute and equalize.

Group your “good” chapters into sections of roughly equal size. Here we have four, plus that extra crap at the back of the book we’re ambivalent about. (“Foreign Phrases”--like you’re ever going to need to say “please” or “thank you.” Ha!)

“The Continent” now takes up less space than your lunch.

Step Six: Economy of scale.

We weigh the extraneous sections to see what we’ve really accomplished.

Europe, now 50% off!

Here we can see the weight of the slag is one whole pound. We’ve managed a 50% reduction in size and weight! So even though our parents are convinced we’re wasting our lives, we know otherwise!

Step Seven: To protect and to serve.

Tear the manila folders in half along their spines, then further trim the halves so they are the same height as the pages. Fold them around the sections, fastening them at the spine with a binder clip.

Again, there should be two hands in this photo.

If there is excess material, simply continue to wrap it around the book, providing extra protection for page edges. Damn if they don’t print these books on some cheap, shitty paper.

The wraparound cover prevents the pages from getting
trashed in your bag or rifled by pilfering gypsy scum.

Optional: Use brightly-colored folders rather than manila if you want to look like a dork while you walk around Berlin or wherever. (Tip: Use a black Sharpie to write I AM A DORK or SPRECHEN ZIE DORKEN on the cover. Extra points for bubble letters.)

Step Eight: Label your new mini-books tastefully.

Mark each book, but avoid writing the country names in big, black letters because you don’t want them to scream “tourist” while you’re crossing the street the wrong way and savaging their language.

I have devised a clever system of abbreviating
each country with select consonants, an idea I
came up with while watching Wheel of Fortune.

Step Nine: Usage.

When stowed in your bag, keep a binder clip on each side.
This is for the protection of you and your loved ones.

When you’re ready to use it, move both binders to the left. (Duh.)

It now operates like a normal book.
Suh-weet!

Step Ten: Armed with your new mini-guidebooks, go forth and explore! Or read some other webpages, then totally forget all about this.

Our new books are compact and stylish!

I serve an important function in society!

Disclaimer: If you have shaky hands, I urge you not to try this at home. Instead try it at your friend’s home, where if you cut yourself, you can like, sue them.

Today’s soundtrack: Cut Chemist (feat. DJ Nu-Mark), “A Peek in Time”
Today at 8:02pm: playing Mike’s X-Box, projected onto a 10-foot screen



I love Teutonic precision.

If you go to an American website for travel (Expedia et al.) and type in a departure town with more than one airport, the page comes back “We found more than one airport that matched _____. Please select....”

Well I found this killer Austrian website for plotting point-to-point train trips in Europe, and if you enter a town with multiples the page comes back “Your input is ambiguous. Please select....” I love it.

I want to talk like that all the time, particularly in situations of emotional intimacy.

So why am I looking at Austrian websites regarding European train travel? Will explain in next entry.

Today’s soundtrack: high on diesel and gasoline
Today at 6:02pm: choking down a bitter and foul brew, doctor’s orders



I don’t have health insurance, I have Dr. Ming. I go to see her every time I get messed up. Dr. Ming is a middle-aged Chinese woman with big, patient eyes and a thin line for a mouth that looks like a cartoonist drew it with a pencil. I like her ‘cause she knows her shit and she charges me in increments of ten dollars.

My Dr.-Ming-based health plan has obvious limitations: should I ever need an MRI, I’m pretty much screwed. But I usually go to her with nothing more than minor martial arts injuries, banged-up limbs and whatnot. Last time she fixed my foot using her strong fingers to dial some kind of medical PIN number into my pressure points, then smearing my sole with what looked like paté. This time I’m going to her ‘cause something’s up with my eye.

My right eyelid had started to swell. I thought it might be a bug bite but five days of persistent swelling spoke of something beyond a casual encounter with an insect. It became unsightly; got to the point where I was putting sunglasses on before I left the house. So on the sixth day I scraped up a couple twenties, made my way into Chinatown, found the unmarked doorway and descended into Dr. Ming’s basement lair.

The underground corridors are fluorescent-lit and look like the “Before” half of a time-lapse Mr. Clean commercial. Last place you’d expect to find a doctor. The building’s not all hers, there are a couple shops and businesses down here too, Chinese people behind desks and counters, but I have no idea what they do. Everybody looks like they’re waiting for something.

“Okay,” said Dr. Ming, after briefly examining my eye. Her son and husband were with her in the office, sitting in chairs on opposite sides of the room.

Her son, no older than eight, was holding onto a copy of The Wall Street Journal. Not reading it, but clutching it absently, the way a tyke holds a teddy bear. Part of me thinks he was reading it before I showed up, which would make him a very smart eight-year-old indeed. (Sorry, that last sentence came out like I was writing a British children’s book; I don’t know what happened there.)

“Lie down,” said the Doc, directing me to the examination table. “Close eyes.” I made myself comfortable on the paper sheet--I gotta get me some of these, for the house--and closed my eyes as instructed. “Good boy,” said Dr. Ming. She has a habit of saying this to me, and I always assume that her lack of mastery of the English language prevents her from recognizing how creepy it sounds. Well, what do I care; I’m not here for the ambiance.

“Don’t, open, eyes,” she stressed, dabbing my eyelid with something. After a few seconds of this I felt something making its way between the eyelids and lightly jabbing against my eyeball. I wasn’t sure if it was just my eyelashes being compressed from whatever the Doc had in her hand, or if she was poking me with something bristly. It wasn’t painful, just annoying, so I remained reactionless throughout. “Good boy,” she said again.

Next I felt her apply some kind of salve to my still-closed eye, and instantly thought of that scene in Ray where you see the boy weeping pus after the doctors treated his eyes with lye. It passed quickly and I told myself not to question the Doc’s credentials. I was referred by a good friend and she’s done right by me every time. Relax.

After five minutes and another two or three “Good boy”s I was allowed to open my eyes and sit back up. Coming out of the tiny examination closet and back into the office, I saw the father and son were sharing a private joke, both stifling laughter, and I had the sudden insane conviction they were laughing at me. That, too, passed, and Dr. Ming sat me next to her desk while she took my pulse. Have you ever seen Eastern Medicine Docs do this? They sit ramrod still and check your pulse on both wrists, one at a time.

While she was using her left hand to check my left, her right hand moved across the desk and picked up a pen. She moved it over a white pad of paper. She wrote my name (well, “Ray”) at the top left of the page, then wrote a small, crisp “0” on the top right. Zero? What does that mean? I’m a zero? My pulse isn’t registering? But as I watched, after a short pause she put a “5” to the right of the zero--“05”--then moved the pen to the left and wrote “Aug” followed by the day. That was the damn strangest way I’ve ever seen to write a date; who starts with the zero?

Next, as if possessed, her hand and the pen moved to the far left of the page and she began scribbling a series of Chinese characters, quickly and precisely. Her other hand was still taking my pulse. At the end of her scribbling she had three rows of a dozen characters, neatly aligned. “Okay,” she said, standing and taking the paper over to her husband, who had moved behind the counter by the back wall.

The back wall was lined by a large grid of wooden shelving, floor to ceiling, filled with wooden boxes marked by Chinese characters. The husband took a short stack of paper plates from under the counter and dealt out five of them, like cards. The plates were dirty, as if they’d been used to hold potted plants. I looked over at the kid. He was reading the goddamn Wall Street Journal.

The husband doled a series of herbs onto the plates, dipping into this box and that, constantly referring back to the list. At the end each plate was heaping with identical stacks of roots, twigs and husks. It looked like, if Tarzan was a salad chef. I glanced over at Dr. Ming and tried not to grimace, knowing she was going to insist I make The Tea and drink it.

She was already handing me the 8 1/2 x 11 printout of the recipe, which I remembered all too well. Six cups of water, bring to a boil, simmer for two hours.... The Tea, I should point out, doesn’t just taste like shit; it tastes like what I imagine diarrhea tastes like, the kind that comes out in all the wrong colors.

Her husband began bagging up the ingredients, dumping each plate into a paper bag. The plates went back under the counter.

“You drink every day, for five days,” said Dr. Ming. “Don’t touch eyes. Your hands, dirty. And, five days: No fried food. No duck. No grease,” she said, ticking off foods forbidden because they would retard healing.

And then she said one of the English language’s most unpleasant phrases:

“No coffee.”

How does this woman know what I love most? Last time she forbade me from eating pineapple, for chrissakes. I’ve been eating golden pineapples nearly every morning for roughly the past ten years. That I could cut out for five days if I had to, but coffee?

“No coffee?” I repeated, and if my eye wasn’t fucked-up I would have widened it.

“No coffee,” she asserted. I waited for her to say “Good boy” but all I got was a stern look.

Today’s soundtrack: doot doot doo doo, Mary Jane
Today at 8:42pm: closing the laptop



In Manhattan, silence is deafening. I’m so used to sound that the absence of sound--or what passes for it around here, anyway--fills your ears like you’ve got seashells up to them.

It’s 9pm and I’m on a work break, manning a stoop on Crosby Street. Finally sitting still and with nothing to do, I notice that what I thought was silence is in fact nothing like it. Though anyone who lived here would describe this as quiet, I can hear

- the high-amplitude whine of air conditioners
- the low-amplitude staccato of tires rolling across cobblestones
- the declining drone of a descending jumbo jet, inbound for Queens
- the periodic baby-elephant bleats from the klaxons of yellow cabs dueling on Broadway
- the occasional clacking of high heels on pavement
- a barely perceptible rumble that is the subway traveling beneath

The only thing I don’t hear is human voices, which is fine with me. My cell phone is cooling off in the holster, mercifully quiet.

Only time I ever heard true silence here was during the blackout a few years ago. Went walking around the empty streets and it was nothing short of eerie. Manhattan, like the Wall Street sharks in pinstripes who drive the economy, doesn’t do well without power; in those twenty-four hours there was no such thing as indoor plumbing, the internet or ice coffee.

You block out sirens, car alarms, jackhammers and the like; but the audio for live human screaming or shattering glass warrants your attention, particularly when they are combined. These were the sounds I heard earlier in the afternoon, right before I stepped into Italian Food Center to pick up my lunch. The combination meant I had to let the door go and take five steps backward to crane my head around the corner, looking up Mulberry and guiltily hoping for a commotion worth my time.

A guy was throwing tables over at a sidewalk café. Fully-set tables for four, and as he grabbed each securely by the sides and up-ended them, silverware and water glasses connected with the pavement, displaying the difference in their physical properties with the results.

What surprised me wasn’t the sudden display of anger; hot day like today, lotta people wanna cool off by whipping someone’s ass. What made me blink a few extra times was the guy’s age; he was pushing seventy. White hair and wrinkled skin.

Still, you could see muscle striations in his tensed forearms, and the pitch of his voice sounded an awful lot like the can opener for the proverbial can of ass-whupping.

Far as I could tell he was on his third or fourth table--and yelling in Italian, I now realized, though I couldn’t make out what he was saying--before a bouncer-looking guy rushed over and grabbed him. The old-timer broke free with surprising quickness and lunged towards another old-timer, who yelled back at him and put his fists up.

By now a crowd of tourists had gathered, and staff were coming out of the restaurant. A level-headed busboy came out with a broom and dustpan and stood a distance away, eyeing the broken glass and patiently waiting for the beef to subside.

Which didn’t look like it would be anytime soon; these two old guys wanted to rip each other’s throats out. It was all the bouncer guy in the middle could do to keep them apart. They moved a little slower, sure, but you could tell they were both pissed. Scrabbling hands and voluminous, foreign yelling.

Behind me two men had stopped to watch, and because most people in this area are tourists, I was surprised to hear they had vintage New York accents.

“Jack Gotti ain’t around no more,” said one, “else somebody’d be getting’ shot.”

“Tell me ‘bout it,” said the other.

I didn’t know people called John Gotti ‘Jack.’ You learn something new every day.

Since the fight didn’t look like it was going anywhere, I went back inside to get my sandwich. On the way out, a good five minutes later, I was surprised to see the “action” was still playing out, with both would-be sexagenarian pugilists now in the middle of the street, the bouncer still grabbing at the arms of one of them. The busboy, unnoticed, was sweeping up the broken glass.

Suddenly one of the men walked off, and the other turned and stormed into one of the restaurants. At that exact moment a female bicycle cop whizzed past me--an attractive, leggy brunette with curly hair, wearing the NYPD equivalent of Daisy Dukes and with a glock strapped to her hip. She pedaled towards where the commotion was and dismounted, but by then everyone involved had gotten it into their heads to disappear. So I did the same.

Today’s soundtrack: I feel the chaos around me
Today at 2:32pm: doing a double-take



Down on the corner by the diner, beating the heat with an iced tea break. I take a long sip. A sunglassed Asian girl in a green Jetta pulls up to the corner and yawns.

Three minutes later I’m still on the same corner, drinking iced tea. I take a long sip. A sunglassed Asian girl in a green Jetta pulls up to the corner and yawns.

I stare at her, worried I’ve somehow become trapped in Groundhog Day; but her pivoting head and bored expression tell me she’s just circling the block looking for parking. Look down to check that my cigarette is three minutes shorter.

Phew, that was close.