suitcase on world tour

Yesterday evening was in Barcelona. This morning was in Madrid. Now in DC. Luggage not in DC. US Airways a bit hazy on where precisely it might be. Mucho jetlag. Just realized I can't remember password for work e-mail. (a sign of a successful vacation?) Back to the airport in the morning to head for Nashville. Maybe even with luggage. If we're lucky. Need sleep. More intelligent thought later. Urk.

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Hola

Writing from Zaragoza, after a whirlwind two-day stay in Segovia followed by two great days in the land that the Internet forgot on the north coast of Spain, and a day on the road in a Parador where the coin-operated "Internet Machine" used dialup and some funky browser. Tomorrow we're heading down to the center of the city for a festival celebrating the alleged appearance of a virgin on a pillar hundreds of years ago. I've obviously fallen hopelessly behind in blogging the trip. I'm hoping to write some snippets to go with snapshots after I get back. But for the moment suffice it to say that it's going great. The cold is finally starting to ease up (after a lot of nose blowing and some pretty funny sessions with pharmacists in which I attempted to pantomime my various medicinal needs -- oddly enough we didn't cover the phrase "coughing up phlegm" in my Spanish class.) We're learning as we go along (for example, my new itenerary rule is never to plan stays shorter than a single night in a given place.) But by and large the trip has been a success. Watch this space for details later.

Sniffle, sniffle

Still feeling pretty iffy, but managed to drag myself out of bed yesterday and headed for the Prado. We pretty much agreed to split up and meet for dinner, which gave me a bit more flexibility. The museum was pretty amazing -- too much art to absorb. Also got a chance to walk through the Parque del Buen Retiro on my way back to the hotel.

Today we're probably going to hit one more art gallery (the one with Picasso's Guernica) and then head out of town toward Segovia.

Ugh

In Madrid now, after a whirlwind tour of Grenada and Toledo over the last three days. (The cathedrals and royal trappings are starting to blend together.) That's the good news. The bad news is that as of this afternoon, I seem to be coming down with a sore-throw-runny-nose-general-lethargy fall cold. Not at all good. Questions is, if I still feel like crap tomorrow should I give up one of our few days in Madrid and stay in bed, or try to go out sightseeing anyway. If I don't go out, I will probably miss out on seeing the Prado. If I do go out, I run the risk of making the cold drag on longer than it otherwise would. Ugh. Maybe it will all fix itself overnight.

Getting into Madrid was interesting. For the third city in a row we basically found our hotel by driving in circles for an hour or two. We've got to start researching driving directions better in advance!

Snapshots!

Click to view photos like the one below!

Lost on the Rock

Now in a big, somewhat touristy hotel in Grenada. Good news is that they have free Wi-Fi in the lobby! So (assuming I get motivated) you should hear a bit more from me soon.

I'll whet your appetite with a brief overview of today. After yesterday's combination of Roman ruins, old-town Tarifa, and hiking on a beach, we got up early this morning to hit the road. I first headed back down the street through Tarifa's massive town wall and into the old quarter, where I rounded up breakfast of pastries, apples, bread, Serrano ham, and orange juice from shops scattered througout the narrow cobblestoned streets and the tiny town market.

We ate breakfast in the tiled courtyard of our hotel, and then headed out of town past the massive electricity-generating windmills toward Gibraltar.

After parking our car in a dusty lot in La Linea (the line -- named for the line of fortifications built by the Spanish eager to take back the Rock from the Brits), we then flashed our passports and walked across the international border into the tiny British colony of Gibraltar. We hopped on a bus and were transported across the city's airport. The runway is built on a jetty in the sea and cuts across the only road into town. After arriving in the town center, we hiked past the town hall and down Main Street, past merchants hawking ape souvenirs and fish & chips. At one point the red-coated ceremonial guard marched by on its way off duty, looking like it had just stepped out of a revolutionary war pageant.

We arrived at the base of the cable car station, which transports visitors something like 400 meters up the rock. My parents bought into the spiel of a driver hawking minibus tours, while my brother and I decided to take the cable car up and then explore on our own. We agreed to meet up later in the town square.

The cable car ride up was fun -- but nothing prepared us for what we found when we arrived at the top. To begin with, the famed Barbary Apes of Gibralter were waiting in force at the top. One was perched ready to jump onto the cable car when we arrived, and others quickly stationed themselves nearby as we arrived. Despite the threats of massive fines, people still feed the apes food, and as a result they have lost all fear of humans and instead view visitors as a source of tasty meals. As I walked along the balcony, one actually jumped from above onto my shoulder and began unzipping my backpack! That was nothing compared to what happened to the woman who walked onto the balcony carrying two closed bags of potato chips. An ape came flying at her at lightning speed, launched himself at waist height, and grabbed the bags out of her hands. He then proceeded to open them one by one and eat the chips, while other apes jostled for position nearby to eat the crumbs. The apes have come to associate any plastic bag with food, so another ape managed to score a bag from someone's pack. He threw it away disgustedly when he opened it and found it contained nothing but Kleenex.

When they're not stealing from visitors, the monkeys generally ignore them, climbing around the rock, eating fleas off each other, and generally behaving like monkeys. My parents said that their tour bus driver actually knew them by name, and called one through the window into the bus for a short ride!

All this focus on the apes shouldn't obscure the other incredible thing about the Rock -- the view in all directions. It's easy to see why this has been considered a strategic stronghold for thousands of years. Standing on top of the rock, one could easily rain down artillery on any ship traversing the narrow passage between Europe and Africa. Even with a persistent haze we were able to see for miles.

Our troubles began when we decided to see the other sites on top of the Rock, including the seige tunnels built by the British defenders over the last three centuries. Foolishly believing the maps and guidebooks, we simply walked out of the cable car complex at the top of the Rock and started walking. However, we quickly found a complete lack of signage and a bewildering array of closed roads and stairways scattered among the ruins of abandoned fortifications. We weren't the only ones having problems -- halfway down the massive mountain we ran into a group of Russians who were equally confused, and several other groups confirmed our confusion. My parents said that one of the couples on their bus said they had gotten hopelessly lost on Rock yesterday and decided to try it again today with a guide.

During our explorations, we did discover a bunch of really cool stuff, including a dark tunnel that we explored for 30 feet or so with the aid of a camera flash, a variety of abandoned concrete buildings and fortifications, and even an abandoned 1902 gun battery with the gun intact. The lack of touristic guidance leaves a lot of room for exploration by the adventurous.

My brother and I eventually decided that there was no point in trying to walk back to the top of the mountain to take the cable car down, so we instead slowly wound our way downward in the blistering sun using a combination of roads, trails, and stairways (high in the air with missing railings!). Hours later we emerged (sweaty but victorious) in the town, and met up with our parents, who had already returned from their tour, eaten lunch, and then waited for hours.

After we ate fish and chips at a pub for lunch, we headed back across the line into Spain and hit the road for Grenada. Despite lacking directions to our hotel, we eventually found it and checked in around 9:30. Tomorrow we're touring the Alhambra.

My Spanish

My Spanish is rapidly improving -- while I still often stare blankly when someone lays down a line of machine-gun Espanol, I am usually able to get my point across in basic travel/commercial situation, read signs and menus, and understand the gist of what folks are saying when they slow down and use small words. The two factors that are really helping are:

• Motivation to learn: I am now motivated to constantly study and improve my Spanish. I was spending maybe 4-5 hours per week on Spanish in Nashville, but now I'm now constantaly pulling out my dictionary to look up words, perusing my verb conjugation crib sheet, etc. You are very motivated to do this when the alternative is looking like an uneducated ugly American. Now I at least look like an uneducated ugly American who is making an effort.
• Constant reinforcement: It helps tons to have the constant reinforcement of people talking to you in real world situations and being surrounded by a world labeled in Spanish. For example, this morning, I saw a sign for a Peliqueria. Having forgotten this word I simply walked down the street, peered in the door. I saw hairdressers hard at work, and was quickly reminded (in a memorable way) that a Peliqueria is a place to get your hair cut.

All of this means that I think my Spanish should be markedly better by the end of the trip. And it increases my desire to figure out a way to go live/work in a Spanish-speaking country for a few months at some point, since I think that's probably the best way to move toward fluency.

no time to blog!

Now in Tarifa, on the Strait of Gibraltar. Can see Africa! Off to the Rock in a bit. Spent previous days sleeping on a pig farm and exploring hill towns and ruins. Much fun. Hopefully I´ll find somewhere soon with unmetered WiFi so that I can post details and photos.

In Spain!

Writing this from an internet cafe in Seville. Got here last night after a marathon trip from Nashville via DC and Philly, using planes, trains and automobiles. We were still in a jet lag fog last night, but are starting to snap out of it now. Ate seafood at an outdoor cafe next to the river last night. My Spanish is usually good enough to make myself understood, but not good enough to understand the locals unless they slow down and purposely use preschool level words. I expect that after three weeks of trial by fire, things will improve, though. Dinner was especially interesting, because we didn´t cover the 20 varieties of fish in Spanish class back in Nashville. Everyone is looking to me for translations, so I was sitting there frantically thumbing through the dictionary...

Biggest problem right now is that I can´t figure out the phone number for my newly-activated GSM card. Anyone know anything about this?

gotta run now...

Not just the big easy

I just got around to reading a colleague's account of her travels through Mississippi last week. It's a sobering reminder that New Orleans is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hurricane damage.

In d’Iberville, the stench is horrible. I’ve had my air conditioning off to save gas and to vent the fumes from my gasoline cans, but I have to turn it on even as I leave the windows cracked. The smell just hangs in the air, almost palpable. It’s horrible, all things rotten and spoiled and decaying and decomposing. It feels contaminated, and it brings home health officials’ concerns about disease and infection. I wonder, will this ever be the same beautiful bay again?

Across the bridge into the city, I see massive steel commercial fishing boats tossed ashore like toys. Remnants of clothes and paper and who-knows-what hang high in trees and in fences, looking eerily like prayer flags strung in the mountains of Nepal, and a little like high-school kids had TP’d the entire area.

A line of debris lies pushed up onto the shoulders of the road. Wood, kitchen items, toys, paint cans, you name it. Unbelievable, but the storm surge reached here, more than a mile inland. Beyond, houses on block after block are open all the way through, showing the path of the surf and the wind. And again, smashed buildings, one after another. The Boomtown casinos is torn apart, with green-felt gaming tables lying in the muck outside.

Outrage

The more I learn about what happened in New Orleans, the more ashamed I become of my own government. One of the things I wondered when the whole thing was first going down a week or two ago was why people didn't just walk out of the city. Obviously this wouldn't have helped the elderly or sick, but the masses of people in the convention center, Superdome, etc. with no food, water, or sanitation could have at least gotten out of the horrible conditions.

Well, it turns out the police officers and other first responders were occupying the bridges out of the city and were threatening to shoot people who tried to cross them, according to several eyewitnesses interviewed on this week's edition of This American Life. The show focused primarily on the experiences of two people -- a NOLA native who was stuck at the Convention Center, and a San Francisco conventioneer who wandered around with a group from a hotel eventually ended up camping out in a small community for several days on a highway median.

The witnesses told of police occupying two different bridges out of the city -- firing into the air and threatening to shoot into the crowd whenever a group of people moved toward them. One of the bridges was occupied by the sheriff's department from the richer suburban community across the bridge, and was quoted as saying that they didn't want the suburb to "become another SuperDome" -- a reference that could well be taken as meaning that they didn't want lots of poor black folks coming into their neighborhoods.

The contrast to 9/11 is striking. On 9/11, we remember the enduring images of dazed survivors walking miles to get out of the city, covered with dust. At the same time, the first responders were considered heroes, rushing the other way to fight fires and rescue trapped survivors. But in New Orleans it seems that the police -- the very people who were supposed to be protecting the city -- were actively preventing its citizens from escaping the unfolding crisis.

Forget this sham "bipartisan congressional committee" being pushed by the Republicans. This thing needs a full scale independent commission with subpoena powers, just like the 9/11 commission. 9/11 was, in some ways, a bolt from the blue. This was a much-anticipated emergency, and one in which government officials at all levels utterly failed to uphold their commitment to the people they serve. Someone needs to investigate this, ensure that those responsible are held accountable, and prevent it from ever happening again.

It also ticks me off that some conservative demagogues are already twisting all this around to support their own political predilections. Bill O'Reilly says that this is what happens to poor people who don't take personal responsibility for their lives. He has also stated that anyone who relies on the government to help them in a crisis situation will invariably be disappointed.

Did the government botch this? Absolutely. But to act as if failure was foreordained because government can't handle crises, or because poor people are destined to suffer, is to adopt a criminally negligent viewpoint. Governments, quite simply, are the only institutions with the resources to mobilize and effectively respond to a crisis of this magnitude -- and they have a moral obligation to protect their own citizens. Whether or not they are successful in this obligation is a question of planning, resources, and leadership -- not one of political philosophy. If governments are prepared, they will be able to respond effectively. In this case, they were not.

(The call for "personal responsibility" because of the failures of government is especially crass coming from people who have supported gutting key federal programs, replaced career disaster managers at FEMA with unqualified political appointees, and diverted massive amounts of money and resources toward fighting an unnecessary foreign war.)

I am shocked and outraged at the continuing revelations of just how badly this thing was botched -- and like it or not, one can't escape the twin factors of race and class. It's hard to imagine armed police officers threatening to shoot rich, predominantly white midtown Manhattan residents as they fled Ground Zero. But somehow this behavior was deemed acceptable when the victims had smaller salaries and darker skin. What does this say about our country?

A night at the shelter

Last night was my first shift volunteering at one of the Red Cross hurricane shelters here in Nashville. I worked the graveyard shift, from 1 AM until 8 AM. I am still processing what I saw.

I met an older diabetic man who toddles around with a walker. He likes his Cheerios with lots of milk and a single packet of Sweet 'n Low. He also likes bananas, but can't stomach anything to drink other than water. Definitely not lemonade, even if it's the good lemonade like they were giving out yesterday. He was rescued from his home by two men in a boat, but then he still had to wade through water up to his chest to get to a temporary shelter. He was eventually airlifted to Atlanta and then to Nashville. He thinks his niece is in Houston and is coming to get him sometime, maybe this week. In the meantime, he has fallen into the shelter routine, being escorted upstairs to the medical team three times a day for his pills and injections, and spending the rest of the time chatting with anyone who will listen.

I heard stories of evacuees who are claiming relief payments for non-existent family members. But I also saw first-hand the selflessness of many evacuees, who have taken it on themselves to turn the shelter into some sort of home. One man spent almost the entire night wiping down tables, emptying trash, and doing other chores. "Didn't he need some sleep?" inquired a staffer. But he was used to working hard at night -- his job in New Orleans was delivering the Times-Picayune in the wee hours of the morning. Another man took at upon himself to begin vacuuming the common area, and another lanky, well-spoken man in coveralls had clearly become something of a spokesman for the residents, advocating for their needs with shelter staff.

One woman, perhaps mentally ill, was worried about her children, who had evidently been hitchhiking away from New Orleans for the last week. Her son finally called her during the night, and she came running into the room desperate for someone to tell him how to get to the shelter. I talked to him for quite a while. Evidently he had caught a ride with someone in Alabama who was headed to Tennessee -- somewhere. His benefactors were asleep at a truck stop, and he wasn't sure what road they were on. In the end the best I could do was tell him which interstates came to Nashville and recommend that he call back when we could talk to the driver.

Another extended family staying at the shelter had to leave for the hospital in the early hours of the morning after the medical staff determined that a young child was running a fever of 103. The nurse called an ambulance, but the family then decided to take their own car, and the ambulance went away empty.

I quickly realize that the well oiled humanitarian machine that I learned about in my two days of training bears only a passing relationship the situation on the ground. In a smaller, more local disaster, the Red Cross' thoroughly-planned management strategies might work perfectly. But it is clear that the system was simply never designed to handle a disaster of this magnitude and complexity. Shelter staff have been dutifully filling out shelter registration cards for every client. But it's unclear whether these have actually been entered into a database to help reunite families. Furthermore, clients have left the shelter without signing out or providing a forwarding address, so even if some names could be matched up there's no guarantee that the person sought would still be there.

Americans everywhere are desperate to help -- a staffer who had worked the evening shift talked about the incessant calls she had been taking from people hundreds of miles away who were desperate to offer housing. The Red Cross is put in an awkward position by these requests. It is the official policy that all Red Cross services must be provided on an equal basis. (IE, someone can't come in and buy a steak dinner for one person in a shelter unless they buy a steak dinner for everyone in the shelter.) Furthermore, there are clearly unknowns and risks related to sending vulnerable evacuees off to live with unknown people in unknown conditions. So shelter staff are instructed to simply take these housing offers and post them on a message board, not to recommend them to specific clients. Many clients are already dazed and overwhelmed by their surroundings. The scraps of paper piling up on the message board are just one more input to their already overloaded brains. They are not yet able to consider life-altering decisions about where they will be living next month or next year.

The lack of response to offers like this has resulted in criticism that the Red Cross is somehow walling off evacuees from help. This is clearly untrue. While members of the general public are not permitted to come inside the shelter (for good reason -- there is enough organized chaos already), they are welcome to be in the parking lot. Residents can come or go as they please. Technically, they are supposed to sign in and out to help with communication and record-keeping, but this is pretty loosely enforced -- especially for the smokers who periodically retreat to the patio to light up. Evacuees inside the shelter have access to daily newspapers and television, as well as the bulletin boards full of housing and job offers. Daily shuttles are provided to places like the downtown Red Cross headquarters, Wal-Mart, Target, etc. Phones are available to make phone calls. Despite what you may read in the City Paper, this is not a concentration camp. It is simply a shelter whose management is trying to provide at least a small level of privacy to its residents.

It is impossible to generalize about evacuees -- the floodwaters clearly affected anyone with the misfortune to live below sea level. But it is evident that the hardest hit are those who are least able to reconstruct their own lives. Those with money, connections to other parts of the country, or simple resourcefulness are gradually moving out of shelters and picking up with life in their new surroundings. Increasing numbers of those left behind are elderly or ill (either physically or mentally). Some have never before left Louisiana, and they are baffled by the situation in which they find themselves. A staffer told of one woman who kept asking why she was at the shelter -- after all, she was sure she had paid her rent on time. Working with these people would be challenging in any environment. Add in the combined stress of seeing homes destroyed, neighbors killed, and then being forcibly evacuated hundreds of miles from anything familiar, and the challenge becomes almost unimaginable.

And the Potentate of Tonga also called...

The assistant to one of the enior bigwigs at our company just sent out the following broadcast e-mail. I am muchly amused, though I can't quite put my finger on why...

From:[bigwig's assistant]
To:[Just about everyone]

Call me immediately at x1234 if you have a meeting at 10:45 a.m. w/the Governor of Nigeria. He is downstairs in the lobby.

On neologisms

Does anyone else find it odd that the spell checker built into Blogger doesn't recognize the word "blog"?

Whole lotta nothing...

So, yeah, I've pretty much dropped off the face of the earth when it comes to keeping this blog updated. This is pretty much an annual occurrence -- I somehow just don't have the energy to blog during the dog days of summer. However, suffice it to say that nothing new and earth shattering has occurred. Here's a quick rundown of the mundane garbage I might have posted had I been in a posting mood:

• I've continued my weekly sojourns to the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute, where I've been taking Spanish classes since January. I think I'm approaching the fluency level of a semi-literate two-year-old, but it's been enough to help with...

• ... continuing to plan the trip to Spain. I've never really trusted travel agents, having found that I can almost always find cheaper or more palatable deals on my own. However, after numerous attempts to locate a car somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula that was big enough to hold four people and their luggage and had automatic transmission, I gave up and got the travel agent involved. I ended up having her do the train reservations too -- got tired of trying to understand cryptic price quotes from RailEurope's website.

  I have booked the rest of the trip directly, however, thanks to the wonders of e-mail and intercontinental faxes. I'll try to post an itinerary sometime soon for those who are curious.

• Meanwhile, at work, I've been buried in the usual pile of sludge created by high school sports. Actually worse than usual this year because we were rolling out code we wrote to other branches of the company. Things are more or less stabilized, but it's been an exhausting month.

• Nothing new to report on the getting out of Nashville plan, except that I feel like I'm starting to come down with a mild case of senioritis. It's not that I'm working any less than usual, but now that I've made the decision to split it feels like I'm just prolonging the agony. Oh, well... the paychecks are nice. (Truthfully, I'm toying with the idea of trying to sell myself as a part-time telecommuting consultant after I leave. The downside of this would be that I'd get to take some of my existing stress with me to Boston. The upside would be that I'd have a well-paying consulting gig right off the bat with none of that pesky inteviewing and kissing up to potential employers. Hmmm. We'll see what happens.)

• In family news, brother number 2 is still living in Richmond, and wants out of his job. Brother number 3, after a summer as a camp counselor, is now talking about moving to Richmond and living with brother number 1. Unclear exactly what he'll do when he gets there, but hey, it's a start.

• Fitness plan continues, although I've definitely found that weight loss slows down when I don't log calories. I purchased a program for my Palm phone that makes this fairly easy, but you still have to be pretty disciplined about entering everything you eat. Even with the occasional lapses, I'm still working out 3-4 times per week, and am now about 60 pounds lighter than when I started back in April. So I guess I'm doing something right. Only real problem is that my pants are all in danger of falling down.

• After watching the total cluster that was the New Orleans disaster response, I've been trying to figure out how I can become part of the solution. Today I attended two classes at the local Red Cross chapter, and am now qualified to engage in basic disaster response work. They recommend taking a bunch more classes to truly learn the ropes, so I'll probably try to sign up for some more book learnin' soon. The Nashville-area Red Cross is trying to fast-track volunteers through the process because Middle Tennessee will probably be hosting several thousand evacuees from the New Orleans area (There are already two shelters open, and they will be adding more.) It's unclear exactly what my role might be in all this, since they have a "don't call us, we'll call you" approach to new volunteers. But given the amount of stuff they have on their plate, I expect I'll pull duty sometime in the next few weeks. (They are doling out shelter work in 12-hour shifts, which will be a bit rough with my regular job, but is probably do-able.) Based on what I've learned so far, I think I'm interested enough in the disaster response program to continue training beyond the immediate Katrina-induced crisis.

Red Cross Training

Listening to 'Mile 8'

Mmmmm... Jack's BBQ

Mucho cerveza

Blogging while intoxicated at Nashville Brewer's Festival. Ain't technology grand?

Dell Hell

Turns out I'm not the only person to have frustrating experiences with Dell customer service. Some guy over here compiled a dossier:

# of Dell people I've talked to ... 14
# of times I've heard 'now this will fix the problem' ... 15+
# of new, larger problems created ... 6
# of times any problem was fixed ... 2
# of copies of an email Dell sent me in one day ... 62
# of minutes spent on the phone with Dell ... 320+
# of hard drives my computer now thinks it has ... 3
# of times I've restarted the PC during this process ... 65+
# of Google results for "Dell customer service problem" ... 2.6M
# of hours of paid consulting work I've missed @ $100/hr ... 5
# of times Dell support finally agreed to replace it after it was dead -- then changed their mind and want me rebuild it with them ... 1
# of times Dell sales called to sell me DSL for my dead PC ... 1
# of dollars I spent on Dell's optional high-end warranty ... $280

And that's just the beginning.