Creature comforts

This one is only for the real ones. 

1.

Travel does not make us interesting. That is, it does not make us interesting on its own—and I’ve certainly met plenty of fellow travelers on the trip who prove the point, folks who are clearly searching for something “out there” that they haven’t been able to find at home. Most of these people end up just as depressed on the road as they were at home—when what we are missing from our lives is deep connection, we rarely find happiness by putting ourselves explicitly in situations that make its cultivation more difficult. 

But I, too, have found myself uninterested at points on this trip—which, as we know, is exactly the same thing as being uninteresting. It comes in the form of a traveler’s seen-it-all-before weariness that seeps into my perception after a few days without vigilance against it, and it results in a distrust of my own capacity to tell a good story.

Kebab in a wonderful morning market in Margilan.

That was one reason why it was wonderful to travel for four days with a guy named Jocelyn last week, who besides being intelligent and thoughtful had a deep sense of excitement about his travel that I sometimes fear I lack. Though I can temporarily get along with just about anyone, I do often shy away from, or have difficulty with, connecting more deeply with fellow travelers; he was the first on the trip—perhaps the first fellow traveler ever, which is strange to admit—with whom I have connected in a more authentic way.

There’s plenty of rabid excitement to go around among travelers—perhaps one of the reasons I often avoid them—but Jocelyn’s was an intelligent enthusiasm, and his interest in cinema and football and Hinge dates all sprung from the same font, that of someone who had a feeling that he had catching up to do. When we were preparing to go over the mountains from Osh to Bishkek in a shared taxi that we heard might take up to fourteen hours, which I found myself facing with a bit of indifference, I saw that he had tweeted that it would be a story to tell the grandkids about.

If my posts have seemed pessimistic about travel, it’s because I know I am writing for an audience for whom travel’s power is self-evident and deeply-felt. But my time with Jocelyn was a great reminder to not let my skepticism of travel’s power become something more pernicious.

Those of us who choose life away from Pentecostal revival tents and acid-fueled Dead concerts are often trained in—or beaten down into—a skepticism of anything approaching pure feeling, an ethical orientation we call responsibility. But we have humanistic, aesthetic responsibilities too, and I’ve come to the belief that our greatest on that front is an openness to rapture. 

Often when faced with something wonderful I have wondered whether I am experiencing it correctly. But rapture is for many of us something that takes conscientious work. I think for instance of two moments with art last year—in front of the Garden of Earthly Delights in Madrid, which I stared at for as long as I could before the museum closed and they kicked me out, and with Jonathan in Philadelphia in front of a lovely Turner, whose phosphorescence caught our eye from two rooms over. In those moments, I had the niggling hope that something very real was shifting in my brain, even as I wondered whether I was looking at them right, whether I was paying enough attention; the real fear being that I have never, indeed, truly encountered a piece of art. 

But I think this is a choice we can make—to ignore that predominant voice and instead listen to the quieter one that opens a window into a different kind of life, even if only for a moment. The ability to be amazed is a skill that we must cultivate. And we need not require a Turner or a Bosch or even a trip from Osh to Bishkek. We can insist on our stories being good ones. Our lives are all about the telling.

Kokand’s railway station in the morning.

2.

As I’ve gotten older, I have begun to feel less guilty about seeking out things I enjoy while on the road—a flat white, for example, or a craft beer, or the occasional cheeseburger. I am no longer a purist about immersion in “local culture,” which I don’t believe really exists anyway. I used to feel bad when I broke my amorphous, self-imposed rules to only eat “local” food; I now try to go a little easier on myself. Part of the reason is simply the length of this trip—three and a half months now—and I have needed to find ways to keep both routine and some creature comforts in order to not go insane. But some of it too is my age—of knowing more what I want, and of seeking it out. I can sleep on trains and shit in squat toilets and much else, but I do like a hot shower and a decent coffee.

For a long time, I hated the word tourist, because it conjured images of cargo-shorted Americans stumbling off a tour bus to get scammed or eat horrid pasta at the “western food” cafes. But I have come to embrace it, not least because it’s a word that everyone in most any language understands, and also because there’s no pretension behind it. All us travelers are descendants of pilgrims—I mean this quite literally, as in that modern tourism has been traced convincingly in terms of practice and form to Medieval pilgrimage—a fact which should remind us that no matter how special we feel, our travels are part of broader patterns. (The problem for anthropologists in the literature has been sussing out the modern object of our secular form of pilgrimage—or perhaps there is none, and that’s why our travels feel so empty?) The first travelog is The Canterbury Tales, and it is the only such book that lets the collective speak; how curious would it be to write a modern travelog in that form? “The Polish Guy with Dreadlocks’s Tale”…“The Sex Tourist’s Tale”…“The Phone Addict’s Tale” …as they all huddle around the hostel common room with the out-of-tune guitar being plucked like an ingrown hair. 

If others are easy to parody, though, I am too: I laughed at my predictability a few weeks ago in Samarkand where I saw a sign for a craft beer bar and immediately turned in—like a moth to a flame, I thought. That third-wave coffee shops are in even the most remote cities in the world (I had a great flat white in Aqtau, of all places) is representative of an emerging global middle class but also a monopolization of tastes. An extreme version of this is what I’ll call “Conde Nast hedonism”—which fetishizes the best, the Michelin-starred, the clubs no locals can get into, the credit card points scheming, the de moda, and above all the acceptance of Apple Pay. 

Osh’s sacred Sulaiman-Too mountain.

It’s something Bourdain, for one, despised: a great wave of sameness engulfing the world, a reification of certain Euro-American dreams and desires, and an emerging youth culture that has come no closer to throwing off the yokes of consumerism-as-identity-formation than the last one did. But it’s also nice to have a flat white in Dushanbe after days of instant coffee, just like it’s nice to drink an NEIPA in Almaty and it’s nice to be able to speak to people in English all over the world.

The emergent alternative, anyway, seems to be travel as a sado-masochistic purity test, in which conception we travel primarily as a means to “seek discomfort” or put yourself (and others) at personal risk. (Sado- because any form of travel that is righteous about discomfort and “authenticity” in the extreme has the byproduct of inconveniencing those around you; I think, for instance, of haggling for the cheapest seat in the marshrutka, refusing to pay above local prices for anything; Salò: 120 Days of Sodom, as one of its many revelations, shows us that all sadism is class sadism. I’m also utterly fascinated by so-called “dangertubers,” who travel to neighborhoods or countries with reputations for violence, seemingly in an attempt to show that things aren’t as bad as they seem; one, named “Lord Miles,” was held by the Taliban for several months last year and when he was released declared that he was treated better in captivity than in “parts of Brooklyn”; no surprise that there’s a reactionary strain to these creators, but that’s a whole other essay.)

Many of us tourists flit somewhere in the middle of those extremes. I rewarded myself with a flat white after surviving that long cross-country shared taxi. And it’s true that it is, without a doubt, easier than ever to travel these days than it ever has been. Between the amount of information we can pull up on our phones, the acceptance of credit cards or at least the prevalence of ATMs, and, yes, the presence of all our homey creature comforts, there are very few situations where we’re put in any pressure at all.

We should be thankful, perhaps, for the few dollars here and there we’re scammed out of, the mild discomfort we feel stuffed into the back of the shared taxi, and the hostel room without heat. Is the world becoming a more boring place? It’s possible, but maybe that’s not the point.

In Margilan, Fergana.

½

I hope it’s possible to induce ourselves to rapture, and I think it remains a worthy goal. 

There’s one alternative theory that I find compelling, though, which is that we travel not for beauty but for strangeness. That, much like cultivating our eye for the beautiful, we must cultivate our eye for the odd. 

If beauty is the census of the world, then oddness is the census taker. Only with strangeness’s measure do we shock ourselves into recognizing beauty and seeing where it lies. Otherwise, we are far too good at ignoring it.

On the top of a cable car in Almaty, there is what is supposedly the only Beatles monument in the world, made by an eccentric local sculptor. George, Paul, John, and Ringo—who look like a family of gaunt quadruplet Animorphs beset by jaundice—sit, bathed by a tinny speaker playing “Back in the USSR.” Local Almatyians pose with them and then take the cable car back into the city, maybe stopping to gaze at the row of caged animals on the pathway nearby. The pheasants there are vermillion, striking, with broom-sized tail feathers, but I could not stay very long because caged animals make me horribly sad, and I believe in some superstitious calculus of the world that dictates that it is a spiritual crime to have the ability to examine closely something so elusive, which without our human interventions against nature we would witness as a flicker against the sky for a brief moment if we saw it at all.

The most beautiful Orthodox church in the world, Almaty.

3. 

In Dushanbe, there is a 42-foot-long Buddha, excavated from a temple complex in the south of the country. The face and much of the lower body is original. In Sary-Tag, an old scrawny dog followed me on a hike, really a scramble, up a hill behind my homestay to see those magisterial summits, some reaching 18,000 feet. In Fergana, I spent an hour walking around a fabric factory unaccompanied, watching women use the cacophonous machines to weave the region’s honeycomb patterns. In Osh, Jocelyn and I went out to the city’s only club and made friends with a group of locals who invited us into their karaoke room and the next day led us around the market to buy dates and pistachios. And here in Almaty, there is the tallest wooden church in the world, candy-colored and the interior bursting with gold icons. In isolated moments, things start to make sense. Someday I’ll make it mine, Dylan sings.

Beautiful Tajikistan.

Kidnapped by the oligarch

On the eighteenth floor of a new apartment building in downtown Dushanbe, the floating stairs are still drying to the wall and a hundred thousand dollars of furniture straight from Guangzhou is waiting to be unpacked. The fifteen-foot hot tub looked out onto a “New York City view,” according to my new friend/kidnapper Fara, though I didn’t remember any 540-foot flagpoles or snow-capped mountains visible from Hell’s Kitchen. 

Who is it all for? The price remained a secret—one of the few things Fara wasn’t willing to share. But there’s a market, an expanding one, in Dushanbe. In just the past five years, development has exploded in the city, and downtown is covered with high-rises next to garish bejeweled monuments dedicated to various national heroes. 

My new friend had struck up a conversation at lunch and insisted on showing me his under-construction high-rise. Before I knew what had happened, he had paid my bill and was shuffling me across the road into the unfinished lobby.

After the penthouse, our next stop was an apartment Fara was building for himself—on the tenth floor, behind a door with a lion’s head knocker. It was his “party apartment,” painted all in black with blue-accented recessed lighting that made the whole place look like a gaming PC. 

“So you’ll use this place when you’re in Dushanbe?” I asked. 

“No, just for parties,” he winked. “My kids—I’m around them for two minutes and—boom—headache!” he bemoaned. “And my wife doesn’t even know I drink wine, that I smoke, so I need a place like this.”

He and his wife and children had been, for two years now, sequestered in Dubai, where “everything’s fake,” to shelter his money from the corruption of Tajikistan. But Fara returned regularly, to check in on various projects he had around the city and see his mother, who hated the heat of the petrocapital. 

Fara, in that manner unique to the precariously wealthy and fraternity pledges, sought my approval at every turn, staring like a discarded pup until I voiced that his speaker system was, indeed, cool. Towards his lackey, whose name I never even learned, he was demanding; I got the sense that Fara’s wishes were turned into reality via the hands of this silent fixer. Next stop was promised to be the massive new mosque, but instead we kept driving—a change of plans—into the northern mountains. “I own two dachas here,” Fara confided, but that’s not where we were going. He was restless, chiding his sidekick/driver for the trip taking twice as long as the thirty minutes promised (despite death-wish driving on the yellow line, in the middle “lane”—what I call the “Mexican lane”—of a two-lane highway, ducking in and out from the shadows of eighteen-wheelers like a boxer without a strong left hook to defend him). 

We were headed to a new ski hill, a fact I didn’t realize until we arrived and saw the creamsicle-colored German gondolas climbing up into the cloudless sky and out of view. We rode up together, Fara standing up the whole time peering over the edge. At 3,000 meters, the landscape was rung with rocks and ice and snow, behind the ski hill not a track in sight. Just over those mountains, out of view, would be the Pamirs—the second-highest range on Earth. As my Russian tour guide in Termez might have endearingly said, it was “impossible to be indifferent” to the beauty. 

Only on the way back to Dushanbe did my kidnapper start on uncomfortable topics—as he told his grunt to keep driving (the dashboard reading 9, 6, 3 kilometers before empty) because he only trusted the quality of one specific gas station closer to the city, he began to repeat Russian propaganda about the Ukraine War, formulate a bizarre theory about the government of England pulling the strings behind world affairs (“much more powerful than the US”), and, at last and predictably, diving headfirst into anti-Semitic New World Order BS. But then it was time to leave—thankfully. 

In Samarkand.

As I consider a doctoral program in anthropology, I have been thinking about that tension inherent in all fieldwork of how much of one’s self to reveal. Of course, the same questions follow us in daily life as well—around a dinner table, in random conversations, with both taxi drivers and oligarchs around the world. But in ethnography, the tension is even more vital. 

The formulation is something like this: if we reveal what we actually think, we risk losing access to our interlocutors, for one, or alternatively imbuing too much of ourselves in work that should at least shoot for objectivity. If we don’t reveal what we think—if we demur or even lie—we are treating our interlocutors like people who cannot handle the truth or don’t already know that you disagree, which they may well guess anyway. 

Plus, if we don’t challenge our interlocutors, are we sacrificing justice by not speaking up in the name of the integrity of a silly little article? It’s hard to think that at least some of a choice not to challenge racist beliefs, for example, is our own discomfort in doing so. If there is a possibility for building genuine solidarity through ethnographic work, which I believe there is, perhaps we must aim for total personal authenticity, even if it results in closed doors or personal discomfort. 

I have traveled a thousand miles since my last blog post—certainly the longest interlude by distance. Most of that was desert, frigid winter desert, dromedaries visible out train windows. I spent four or five days in Aqtau, the Kazakh port city where we docked, recuperating from my watery ordeal. I stayed at the Silk Way Hotel, a run-down place with an unfortunate breakfast buffet, but the kind of place where I could have blinked and woken up two weeks later—it was a city that swallowed time, a hotel that never seemed to change, Russian-Kazakh women staffing the front desk who asked no questions. I think I used someone’s personal hotspot for Wifi, and I got comfortable in that room which looked out on a hangar-like school, finishing my Nabokov. I walked all around that city, the coldest place on the trip by far, and went one evening to a Che Guevara and Harry Potter-themed bar (Harry Potter perhaps the only international “brand” as recognizable as Che’s poor handsome face—well, plus Boss Baby and the Minions, two more recent additions that decorate nursery school entrances from Mexico City to Aqtau completely dislocated from the movies that spawned them like chest-busting aliens into the world; it reminds me of the response from a high-ranking Iranian general after Trump assassinated Sulemani, who said (I’m paraphrasing) “What should we do in return? America has no heroes. We can’t assassinate Spongebob.”).

Leaving Aqtau I took the second-longest and least-comfortable train trip of the journey, a bipedal affair from Aqtau to Beyneu and then from Beyneu to Nukus. We arrived in the desert rest station of Beyneu around 10pm, and my seatmate on that first train was kind enough to get off with me and help me bribe the conductor of the second train so I could sleep some before departure and not have to get a hotel. I’ll get my complaints out of the way first: both trains were unbearably hot, so much so that I spent time in the area outside the bathroom because it was slightly cooler; the trip was punishing, and I had very little rest for those twenty-four hours, and the border crossing on the train was stressful as my passport refused to scan. But despite that, the other passengers were kind, sharing their food, curious about me, and bearing the conversations mediated by Google Translate. My social battery, though, was quite low by arrival in Nukus. 

Nukus—notable for a great museum and nothing else. An isolated place where a Ukrainian artist sheltered some avant-garde Russian art from the authorities. Quite lovely. 

Pieta for the Aral Sea, Nukus museum.

Then to Bukhara on an eight-hour train in the afternoon and evening. Bukhara’s monuments are wonderful, but outside the preserved center the city is ugly, ramshackle. 

And then on a superfast train to Samarkand, where I stayed for five nights. A more dynamic city than Bukhara, with plenty of things to see, wonderful onion dome monuments and intricate mosaics, though it really is an aesthetic rather than intellectual experience as there are no museums of quality and the city outside those monuments is uninteresting. There was a craft beer bar, though.

I took an overnight train then to Termez, a city on the Afghan border, and the aforementioned tour guide Sergei picked me up from the train station. Maybe half of the other passengers were soldiers, reporting for duty at watchtowers and training camps, but Sergei and driver Amir took me the other direction, to a Buddhist stupa first and then to the cave monasteries of Karatepe, and finally to the city of Alexandria Oxiana, supposedly founded by the famed Macedonian himself. The Afghan border in the background, beyond the Amu Darya, previously known as the Oxus, with plumes of black smoke from clearing fires. In the seventies, Mazar-e-Sharif was a major stop on the hippie trail, like Varanasi; I often wonder which places I have visited will be off-limits to future travelers, and which will open. 

The ruins of Alexandria Oxiana, near Termez.

Sergei had the boundless energy of an amphetamine addict and a curiosity that had him create his own little intellectual life in the backwater of Termez; he collected museum catalogues, practiced his Italian in the evening, and was obsessed with the history of the place he was born. “If people knew about this place, it would be like the Acropolis in Athens, the Eiffel Tower, it would be filled with tourists,” he told me as we looked at a small muddy bump in the ground that he said was the remnants of the city’s river port. 

I didn’t think that, but it was remarkable in its own way—requiring a lot of imagination, but incredible in the extent of its history, of the cultures that had been through here, of the various worlds to which this piece of land had been a part of. Buddhism had come through this monastery on its long route from its natal bed in India to China, Japan, and Korea. Alexander, four centuries before that, had seen this very river and conquered both banks, leaving the legacy of Hellenistic civilization which means that statues of Apollo are excavated in Afghanistan. 

I managed to cross the border on Thursday into Tajikistan, overpaying for a couple taxis to arrive in Dushanbe. It’s a much more dynamic city than I expected, more free-wheeling than Uzbekistan, though also completely odd, with a cult of personality around the authoritarian president that reaches to including his image on large-scale stone carvings tracking the history of the Tajik people. There are golden phalluses topped by jewel-encrusted crowns. There are a few decent cafes and very cheap beer. 

I may go up to the mountains in the coming days if I can find a route. Not the Pamirs, which are far too cold, but the Hisars, between here and the northern city of Khujand, in the Tajik part of the Fergana Valley, which will be my next stop. Then possibly to Kyrgyzstan, back into Uzbekistan, and finally to Almaty, Kazakhstan, from where I will either go to Pakistan or somehow get to Ithaca for recruitment weekend. 

There is of course more to say, because there always is. But my writing has been slow recently. I have been struggling with figuring out what motivates me to travel these days, and how to square that with my political commitments. It’s different than when was eighteen, of course—when everywhere was exciting, when being on my own was exciting. I am less interested now in cities, as I am more convinced that they are largely similar in important ways; I am less food-motivated, I think (I say as if I were an ill Golden Retriever). These are similar questions with which I was preoccupied at the beginning of my trip—what value does it hold?

I have moments of lucidity, of belief; I have enjoyed the trip immensely; but I am left unsatisfied by a lack of political purpose. If politics must come from community, it is impossible to formulate a real politics of travel, whose thrust is that of constant change and within which personal connection is as ephemeral as dust in a draughty room. 

Hasta pronto. 

Anchor notes

Waiting is not a game—it’s a sport. After four nights on the boat, in a top bunk composed primarily of springs, one tires of the endless cups of tea. Of the laps of the deck, of life revolving around mealtimes like a boarding school, of those so many pieces of hearsay—we’ll be stuck for three more days! no, we’ll leave within a few hours!—that drip to my ears through the Russian- and Turkish-speaking contingents like calcified water through the stone roof of a cave. 

But all athletes have their moments of elation, too—the sunrises, the rainbow of the washed-out colors of morning, the next day nothing washed-out at all but instead vibrant, changing from lilac purple to maraschino orange to smoker’s lung yellow in a few ticks of the watch. And the truckers who invited me to drink with them two nights—saving me from the bardo of sobriety. 

A twenty-four hour trip spread across five days, the first spent in a waiting room—though I prefer “holding cell”—in the port of Alat, an hour south of Baku, which ended with being allowed to board and a “dinner” of two boiled eggs and two boiled sausages; the next the loading of the trucks and an eventual departure, making my first friends, two Uzbeks, and incessantly checking our progress, going to bed as we were still languishing in Azeri waters near Baku, kissing the beak of the Absheron Peninsula; the following waking in view of the Turkmenistan coast, followed by a journey to the first Kazakh anchoring point (strangely, we were not at any time I was awake out of view of land the whole trip); the next day, the choppiest, a morning spent swirling along the axis of the waves and a moment of hope as we raised anchor and creeped to within view of the port; and the final one, when we arrived in the evening, with it all happening at once, the match finished, the winners crowned, time to pile your sheets, say goodbye, pet the Kazakh drug-sniffing dog. 

A trip of several stories, not just one—there were the interrogations from the Azeri border guards about my time in Armenia, the photos taken of my passport, the longer we spent at the port the more suspicious they became, so that on the day before we at last departed I spent moving from room to room to avoid them; the Ukrainian sex addict and the stolen money; there was the inaugural punch to the face that flattened an Uzbek in the corridor and cemented friendly boxer Borya as king of our little society; there was my crush on the receptionist/cabin girl(?) Sabina, who had secretly fled back to Azerbaijan from Germany because her divorce hadn’t gone through; there was the evening spent with the Turkish trucker with an award-winning mustache and white ethereal hair that reminded me of Pop’s who took to calling me düşman, enemy, because his wife was Iranian, and who back on his farm in Ankara slept in the same bed as his favorite lamb, whom he called his son, while he made his wife take the couch; there was the ever-present anxiety that I had made a big mistake and may miss an important interview on Monday that would be inexcusable to miss; and finally there was the utter relief of leaving, squeezing through the crammed-together semi trucks on deck like an errant glob of toothpaste, failing to have time to say goodbye to most of the truckers who immediately sprang into their cabs and on their way to Astana or wherever else—the thorough baggage search at the Kazakh border post, the smiling sergeant who thought the footballer Jorginho was American, the drive to Aqtau and the lovely, run-down Silk Way Hotel where I write this.

How did I manage to spend those days? Well, there was always the tea; I read, passively, forgetting what happened just a page back in Nabokov’s sludgy The Gift, often on the deck just to have some semblance of privacy despite the chill; I watched the three movies I had downloaded on my iPad (The Talented Mr. Ripley—very good!); I talked with people, asked questions through Google Translate; I did not try to learn some Russian, which I should have; I learned a Soviet card game called durak and despite my ignorance could not stop winning hands; the two afternoons I had cellular data and called some people; but mostly, above all, I waited.

Our little society. We rarely saw the Azeri crew—they were upstairs, kept apart from the rest of us—except for once or twice where the captain descended to check on things with his owl-like face and the outfit of a maître d at a cut-rate steakhouse. Instead, we took care of ourselves—with great help of the chef, the two female receptionists, the one young guy who served food. People could speak, generally, either Russian or Turkish—Azerbaijani is mutually intelligible with the latter, and as a former Soviet state many Azeris also speak the former, while many of the Turkic passengers (Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz) can also understand bits of the latter, too. There were no Russians on board—just Georgians, Azeris, Turks, Kurds, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Ukrainians. A typical meal: greasy vegetable soup, roast chicken, plain pasta. Breakfast: bread, cheese, two boiled eggs, honey. I have nothing but respect for a chef who can create something edible with no fresh ingredients, just freezers full of the same five or six things, so I will not complain at all here about the food. But I was getting worried about scurvy, I’ll say that. I like to keep my teeth in my head. 

Drinking accoutrements. If you’re ever in Ukraine, avoid drinking Black James.

The highlight of any morning, even more so than on land, was the shower. It was the one thing that worked well on the boat, and especially in the bathroom, where the soap canister had a lot of rust but very little soap and the bidet gun (there was no toilet paper) gushed onto the floor just as much as where it was aimed. The shower was invariably hot and strong, with enough force that it pelted the mildewy vinyl curtain with the image of anthropomorphized, frolicking dolphins as if it were a harpoon misfired from Queequeg’s tattooed hand. Within seconds, everything else in the cubicle of a bathroom was soaked with water, so I had to fold my change of clothes in ever-evolving Gordian knots off the high hooks. 

Most of peoples’ days, though, were spent in the salon—far too small a space for the forty-ish passengers, with two faux-leather couches, a few chairs, two portholes, and a large central propaganda display of the Azeri president walking in fatigues with the caption, “Karabakh is Azerbaijan” (a phrase whose Azeri translation I had tried to memorize on the day I was being interrogated by suspicious border guards about my Armenian allegiances). Off to the leeward side, the “passenger lounge” (closed and locked on captain’s orders after I spent much of the first day there fleeing the police) and, just to its right, the all-important smoking room, harshly lit and duly framed like a Beckettonian experimental theater space (Enter ARSLAN holding yet another packet of cigarettes; HADIN snubs a fiftieth butt in the cornucopic ashtray). 

The Ukrainians, at least, were somewhat glad for all our delays. Drinking those two evenings together (the second night some horrible “whiskey-flavored liquor” made in Ukraine), they were hanging out with each other for the first time in months. Three of them had gone to primary school together—Timothy and Igor had gotten the other Timothy into the business—and were glad to not have to drive. Borya, the boxer, was there, as was Jasur, an Uzbek who was more devout and didn’t partake. Another Igor, too, and then the second night the aforementioned Ruslan, who drove the conversation towards the only thing he cared about: the rank objectification of women of various races, creeds, and nationalities. 

Without the war, these Ukrainians would be driving through Russia—which would cut the trip approximately in half between Kiev and Astana. Still a serious trip, but without the dozen border crossings that it would take to go there and back through Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and across the Caspian to Kazakhstan. Timothy showed me a video of his young son, only one year old, playing in a park while the air-raid siren whirred in the background like an extraterrestrial insect. Morale was low—they just wanted an end to war, an end to the corruption of the government. Whatever hope and unity the beginning of the war had offered was a long way off. I was gifted a Ukrainian flag.

And what was Timothy carrying in his truck on that odyssey of a trip, from a war zone to the middle of the steppe? Paper napkins. 

It must have been that night that Igor’s money was stolen, but he didn’t realize until we were packing the next evening, and by that time our little society was already cracking into new spaces, and the outside world nosing its way back in. We had docked, the Kazakh border guards in their high fur hats and snow-print camo had already boarded the boat. The money—$1500 in American hundreds, effectively the total of what Igor would take home for the 1.5 month trip back and forth—was gone. It could have been stuck in the back of one of the three dozen trucks, could have been in someone’s pocket, could have been dropped from the jacket over deck in the Caspian. Who knows. Sabina asked me to help organize the sheets; I was briefly called over to the border sergeant as the selfie with the other drinkers was displayed as evidence of who had been present; and we were gone. 

The last day it had seemed impossible we would ever actually get off. If I had known it would take five days, maybe it would have been better from the beginning—as it was, I felt trapped. I had gotten to know the boat—when our anchor raised on Sunday, I knew immediately—my bunk trembled like a scared dog, and then, silently, we would be moving again. I still feel, after four days in Aqtau, off-balance. But I feel like I won. 

Aqtau’s only attraction is an eternal flame marking the Great Patriotic War (WWII). I figured out the bus system yesterday; I bought a scarf at the mall; I have visited the same cafe twice already. The buildings have monumental portraits of important Kazakhs; I have seen Che’s face, oddly, on cafes and Telecom ads. I leave tomorrow for Nukus, which will take around twenty-four hours in total. But it’s a train—one can leave a train.

Until next time. 

Christmas in Kurdistan

The call to prayer sifts through the streets of Kars, the snow muffling its vibrations—it’s the last muezzin I’ll hear until Baku, most likely, and the sound lulls me into reminiscing over the last week and a half, since I left Istanbul, took the ghostly metro in Ankara where there was no ticket-seller, and later emerged from the 22-hour train to Diyarbakir last Tuesday morning. Trains, as I wrote last time, are the only form of transport that seem to go faster than you expect. So as hoped, the near-full day in my own cabin (with a fold-down couchette for a bed) felt like far less than that. I held my breath in Kayseri, hoping that no one would board my compartment, and hours later, in Sivas, someone opened the sliding door and I awoke with a start only for them to thankfully close it again and leave me alone. All through the subcontinent we stopped, all through the night, at random crossroads with names like kilometer 125/60, names like blood pressures, until blearily I woke with the sun, after a terrifying dream that I had somehow missed my stop and the train had continued far far far into nothing. 

I was not the only passenger to alight in the Kurdish “capital”—the three generations returning from medical treatment in Ankara of course did too, as well as an older couple who seemed to have had a grand old time on the journey. But the city immediately felt, upon exiting the station, subdued, silent, and I walked through a park towards my Airbnb with barely a bird chirping, but I was in good spirits—finally east.

Lamb liver kebab.

My host, a teacher named Nûda, had told me that she wouldn’t be able to open the apartment until after returning from school later in the afternoon, so she recommended I stop in at a restaurant serving Diyarbakir’s specialty dish—lamb liver kebabs—and ask if I could store it there. When she suggested it, I assumed she knew the restaurant owners personally; I walked in through the sliding glass doors as if they had already been warned of my arrival, and, armed with Google Translate, I told them that Nûda had suggested I could store my bag with them for the day. 

“Nothing dangerous in there, right?” the host asked when I motioned to the backpack. 

“No, but you can check if you want,” I replied—I didn’t take for granted the kindness of leaving a bag all day. But he didn’t insist, and he led me to a back storeroom where I was allowed to prop the Cotopaxi in a cardboard box of hand wipes. 

Only later did I realize that Nûda did not, in fact, know the restaurant owners personally—the host, and the rest of the waitstaff, were just kind enough to help me. Later, when I returned there for lunch and I was waiting a few minutes longer for the Airbnb, one of the waiters named Barish offered to put me up at his home himself. 

So this was a beginning in Kurdish Turkey—“North Kurdistan,” to use a name that one should never utter within Turkey itself—that suggested the extent of the kindness to come. Over my week and a half there, I was humbled by gestures large and small—the offer to put me up, roadside cups of tea, shared pieces of food. Kurds are unwelcome in the country they are forced to call home—for most of the history of the Turkish Republic, the government even refused to acknowledge that Kurds were real, instead calling them “mountain Turks” who had forgotten their own ethnic heritage. The census refuses to count them still; only recently are Kurds able to study and speak their own language without fear of direct reprisal; nearly every Kurd I talked to had a story of others being jailed, or at least made to feel less-than. Eastern Turkey, then, is a “sensitive area,” to use the euphemistic parlance of domineering governments the world over, which meant that every bus ride I took included one or five checkpoints guarded by the jandarma, where everyone on board was forced to show their identity card. At one, between Van and Kars, the soldier forced me to come off the bus and bring my bag to a shack beside the road, where he proceeded to go through my things. “What are these pills?” is never a great question to be asked, and I feared that my explanation that they were for malaria would seem unlikely amid the snowy steppe, but the masked and armed soldier took my explanation and allowed me on my way. 

Original 3rd-century marble in an Assyrian church, Diyarbakir.

Backing up, then, in Diyarbakir—a wonderful place, warrens of circling alleys, spice and fruit shops spilling onto the sidewalk, an expansive and charmless “new city,” and a three-mile ring of 6th century walls. I walked from end to end in the old city and stumbled, both days I was there, into conversations with Kurds who wanted to talk about the US, the city, all that. The normal questions: “how much does it cost to fly to the US?” “What is your religion?”

With the first group of men, I went into the central mosque and one of them, a religious teacher, led the prayer. They were pleased when I told them I believed it was horrible was what happening in Gaza. The religion question, though, is always a difficult one, as I’ve found that in other parts of the world it’s more of an ethnic identifier than one connoting individual belief. In India, I gave up on telling people I was not religious and eventually just said I was Christian, because the first answer is legitimately confusing to people; it’s more about where your family comes from, what culture you come from, rather than what you personally believe. This trip, I’ve gone back and forth, but saying I’m Christian is often easier, because it’s true that (like so many Americans) my cosmos is a Christian one more than anything else, beside and beyond my lack of personal faith. 

I went to Mardin on the 21st, an ancient Aramaic city just ten miles from the modern border with Syria, but I only got one good afternoon because the next day the streets were deluges, and I could barely leave the Airbnb without getting soaked; that evening, the rain had stopped, but the city was cast in a coat of impenetrable fog, so that figures emerged out of nothing close enough to touch. I was eager to get back to the lowlands, and I went next to Van, on a long bus through the city of Batman. Van was more my kind of place—much less touristed, and two separate people asked me why I was there, which I always take as a good sign! I went to the magnificent citadel, built by a civilization called Urartu that I had never even heard of, later occupied by Persians and Ottomans alike. The lake is massive, and my climb to the top of the castle was a highlight of the trip so far. 

The snaking fortress of Van with the modern city in the background.

From Van I went to Kars, because it’s the setting of Orhan Pamuk’s great novel Snow, and also because of the ruins of Ani. Ani was once a capital of Armenia, occupied also by the Ottomans, and today it sits within sight of the Armenian frontier, across a sharp gorge, with both Armenian and Russian flags flying. It was dwarfing, monumental, and I was in awe the whole time, feeling the weight of two thousand years or more of habitation under my shoes. 

Christmas Day I passed on the bus between Van and Kars, and I ate sheep kebab that night, and I also realized that day that I would have to find my way over the Georgian border because the promised direct bus no longer exists. That is to say: it was an unmarked day, much like the rest, which is fine by me—I am now in Georgia and plan to be here on Orthodox Christmas, on January 7th, which will more than make up for whatever pomp I missed by being in a conservative Muslim city on the 25th. 

In Tbilisi, the language and people and mountains feel all so different from Turkey, from Kurdistan, and in some ways the feeling of those ten days has already faded and been replaced, as is bound to happen with travel. But what I ought not forget is the generosity there. 

I try not to necessarily be surprised at incredible hospitality—by which I mean I don’t think we should see them only as incredible acts of kindness by individual people, although they often are that as well. Instead, it points to how hospitality as a concept is simply different in many other parts of the world. We live in a marrow-deep greediness as a culture, and in other places it’s people’s first thought, instead, to share. 

In the elevator in the hotel in Kars, an older man was returning from grocery shopping; he carried five bags of groceries, including a whole head of cabbage, up to his hotel room (not sure how he planned to cook, but no matter). I said “çok!” as a friendly comment—“lots!”—and he grunted and without saying anything handed me the plates and cutlery he was carrying, fished into the plastic bags, and retrieved two apples that he managed to hand to me before the door was closed on the first floor. Without a word. I don’t think he interpreted my comment as some sort of reproach—“you have lots, give some to me!”—or at least I hope he didn’t. But that sort of small kindness is so common that it becomes, in places like this, unremarkable. 

An Armenian church at the ruins of Ani.

In The Odyssey, the part that always strikes me is how guests, even before being asked their name and business, are invited into others’ houses and served food. Odysseus himself takes advantage of this as a plot point—it’s just assumed you’ll gain access to another’s home and won’t have to make any excuses (before dinnertime, at least). 

Even as a non-believer, too—as it’s Christmas—I can recognize that the pieces of the story of Jesus that most astound me are related, too, to ideals of generosity. It should at least encourage us to think about what it would mean to give everything. 

Those moments of kindness that are surprising to us—to me—offer lessons on how to live, how it’s possible to live. Is there more to give? The answer is almost always yes. 

Escape to Asia Minor

Daniel Saldaña Paris, Mexican writer and friend of a friend, has written of how Mexico City swallows creativity—it’s the kind of place where writing is extra difficult because, first, everyone needs to hustle to get by, and two, the aural nature of the city means that there’s never any time to think. He lived for several years, like me, below the path of the planes in Narvarte—a sonic feature that never bothered me much except for a handful of times, when for some reason a strange part of my brain began to hang onto the whooshing noises and they dug into me like a form of water torture, because they really are constant, all day long.

Istanbul too is a city where writing seems a superhuman feat because of the amount of stimulus mainlined daily, between the aggressive taksi drivers blowing through crosswalks to the crowds of gulls guffawing at you—but mostly this is a roundabout way to excuse the fact that I haven’t published anything since Sofia. It was a shock to stop moving after three weeks of changing locale every couple days, and I think that (as well as the sucky weather the first week and my increasing stress over application deadlines) made me lethargic. Another reason for not doing so is that the topic kept changing the longer I spent in Istanbul, and I tried several times to get started, and wrote indeed several thousand words, but nothing felt right. It is such a privilege to write and feel it flowing; when that spark disappears, as it always inevitably does, it feels impossible, unfair, though it is much closer to the true nature of things.

The second week things looked up, as the sun came out and I was in a generally more cheery mood, and I spent most of the week working during the mornings in the apartment alone before going and doing something in the city—I went to an ambient music concert, several museums, the Princes Islands.

One of the museums was the flashy new Istanbul Modern, which features a very good exhibition tracing the history of contemporary Turkish art, but which was difficult to love because as an institution it was extremely and primarily attuned to Instagramification—by which I mean that the works in the temporary exhibits seemed chosen above all for their ability to fit in a square frame, as visual complements to the real stars, which are a distant dreamy teenage gaze and pure white designer clothes. There were, indeed, several pieces I couldn’t get close enough to because there were too many visitors lined up for a photo. I’m not averse—in all cases—to art as backdrop, but it seems to me the unique prerogative of the museum as institution to push viewers beyond that paradigm as much as possible rather than limply obliging it.

There was a temporary exhibition of large-scale portrait photography by Türkiye’s preeminent director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose masterful Winter Sleep and Distant I count among my favorite films, the latter with one of the single greatest gags in the history of film, that being a scene in which the fish-out-of-water transplant to Istanbul who is staying with his cousin is watching German porn on the shared TV, when suddenly the man whose house he’s staying in stirs and begins to walk downstairs, so the young man hurriedly arises from the couch to adjust the channel, and the first thing it lands on happens to be a late-night broadcast of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, right during the iconic four-minute silent scene when the group are first entering the Zone on the pushcart, really one of the eeriest four minutes in cinema history, and so the gag is complete, because the cousin descends to check in on his new charge and he finds him in the middle of presumably watching that long Soviet masterpiece—a choice he’s of course baffled by, as anyone would be, though the recent arrival can’t disavow it!

But anyway, I walked into the photography exhibition, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced something that made me reduce my estimation of a given artist as quickly. Because these pictures were not only bad, reductive, strange, but also many of them clearly photoshopped—one supposedly of a group of Georgian schoolgirls before a waterfall so egregious in its ham-fisted alterations that I laughed in front of it—the faces slapped together, the knees made of play-doh—and I looked everywhere in the exhibition’s horribly-written captions to find some explanation or excuse, because again it was so egregious, and yet here I was in a modern art museum and this was being presented without comment as a photography portrait exhibition—really, incredibly baffling that Ceylan though he could get away with it, though I suppose he did, because there it was, blown up on huge prints, for everyone to see!

John Berger, the grand vizier of art critics and model of being a politically-conscious writer, who donated half of his Booker winnings for G. to the Black Panthers, was a deep skeptic of what we might call today the “power imbalances” of portraiture well before we were in the habit of analyzing that stuff. His major contribution was drawing our eye to the reproducibility of artworks (and, I should say, visual information as a whole) as a fundamental difference of our postindustrial existence (and of course he wrote this in a time when the reproduction was TV and print advertisement, not the internet).

I can only imagine he would have had a field day with Ceylan, as his photographs grant their subjects no autonomy—they have no names, often saying nothing more than “girl in India,” and the captions make the (unbelievable) argument that this actually lends the subjects more humanity, proving you really can say just about anything in a museum caption. (Presumably) real people, somehow presented more empathetically despite their faces being ripped up by touch-ups and glossy photoshopping, their backgrounds and lives decontextualized? I read it differently, obviously, as voyeuristic and—beyond anything—lazy, which is especially insulting coming from an artist who demands so much patience from his viewers, as all his plot-light movies top three hours long. (I saw his new film while I was in Istanbul, too, and it’s also quite bad, all of which makes me wonder if he was kicked in the head sometime around 2015, after finishing Winter Sleep.)

Anyway, I did enjoy Istanbul, though it was not as I remember it—I can’t tell how much of that was just the season, the dreariness inherent in any city in the winter, versus a real change, because indeed the city seemed robbed of some of its great charm. Part of it surely is that I’ve changed in the decade-plus since last visiting, though I do think the changes in the city itself are real, as almost everyone I talked to professed a malaise about the state of things. Inflation is a fact of life, with the lira losing something like 60% of its value year-over-year, and young people who also saw an opening for political change after this year’s devastating earthquake were sorely disappointed when Erdoğan nonetheless won against a fractured opposition, extending his twenty-plus-year hold on power. What’s somewhat odd for a country in depression is that people are out and about, constantly partying and drinking and seeing friends, but it comes from more of an “end of the world” vibe than anything deeply positive—we might as well spend our money now, as who knows what it will be worth next year. The young people with a more middle or upper class background all have found ways, too, to complement their income with some dollars or euros—doing as my host did and renting out a bedroom, teaching in another country certain months of the year, or freelancing online.

Some of the good stuff at Istanbul Modern.

The Islamic government, cheered on by certain segments of society to be sure but rued in the country’s largest metropolis, has walked back so many of the things that make this country unique—they made Hagia Sofia into a mosque again after Atatürk’s transformation of it into a museum, they annually increase taxes on alcohol, etc. Istanbul is a bubble and now I’m on my way to Diyarbakir, in the Kurdish region, then Kars, a notoriously Islamist city, at least according to Pamuk’s Snow, so I will see another side of the country, to be sure. Before I left, I did say to myself that the trip would really “begin” when leaving Istanbul, which even if it sounds ridiculous as I’ve been on the road for over five weeks, still feels true. Or a different kind of trip, at least.

I’m now on the train across the Anatolian peninsula, and though I am barely out of Ankara on the map, the landscape has already opened up tremendously—that gold-green steppe, blue skies, spidery factories and power stations. A “big sky” region that will only get grander the further east we go, though there are twenty-two more hours at least left on this train, so we will see how we feel about the grandeur then. Sometime in the night, I will pass the furthest east I have been in Türkiye, which means also the furthest east I have ever been before India. Everything from here to Delhi is terra incognita for me.

I initially was seated with a Kurdish family returning to Diyarbakir from the hospital in Ankara—a young daughter, the grandfather, and the father with a colostomy bag. They were friendly, we talked through Google Translate, but we figured out a way to switch me into an empty room, as the rest of the wagon is nearly empty, and they obviously wanted their privacy, and I mine.

So I’m buckling in now. But trains are the only form of transport that actually go by faster than one expects them to.

How many cats can you spot?

Monks, beggars, and a tech millionaire

I’ve been thinking about anthropology recently, for an obvious reason (my CUNY app, which I’m delaying working on by doing this blog). It’s a strange discipline—much stranger than I think people may assume—and one of the ones that’s changing fastest in response to the academy’s long-overdue reckoning with colonial history. As I see it, anthropology is at its core the study of two things: identity and kinship. (It’s more specific than “studying humans,” then.) If we think back to the modern field’s origins, with Margaret Mead on a Pacific island yelling “wow, what a big pig!” at the natives, researchers funneled their questions about the host society through looking at trade and exchange. If we can figure out how different communities trade with each other, then we can figure out how people come to identify with one community over another—and probe the borders of society, identity, culture. All other questions—about religion, gender, etc.—necessarily flow through these first ones. 

The beginning of this week I spent in the mountains of western North Macedonia (damn the Greeks for forcing that strange amalgam of primary directions) in a beautiful monastery built into the side of the slope. Founded in the mid-18th century, Bigorski monastery is very much alive, with around thirty monks calling it home, one of the most remarkable wooden iconostasis in the world, and (most important for me) comfortable, clean rooms for fifteen euros a night. Across the way, an Orthodox church and a mosque occupy competing promontories in two small villages, and just over the 8,000 foot mountain above them is Albania. Truly a regenerative, peaceful, gorgeous place. 

On Monday, I attended the Orthodox liturgy with the monks. I was in the church as they all filed in; I was immediately uncomfortable (a feeling which lasted!) because I really wasn’t sure what the fuck I should do—where to sit, when to stand, how to beat the overwhelming urge to kiss the icons. What you have to understand is that this is a tiny church, with pillars and columns and candelabras dropping from random points in the ceiling at intervals during the service; the second thing is that even the chairs are different from Catholic Churches, as they’re made for standing, and they line the border of the church rather being placed like pews and even normal parishioners come to look like a council of judgement. 

Luckily, there were some normal chairs available, so I went to one of those towards the back, where I really couldn’t see much, which was sort of fine by me. But about halfway through, a nice but assertive monk came to me and dragged me by the arm to the main part of the chapel, right between the dueling call and response groups of monks on both sides of me, with the chief monk (?) in the middle swinging the smoky thingamabob towards me. Well, the monk was good to me, because even though the move didn’t help my anxiety about not fucking up somehow it did get me a courtside seat to the ceremony, which was quite beautiful, exactly what a church service should be: esoteric, sensorial, and in a language you don’t understand so you don’t have to think too hard about any of the thorny bits. The monks sang pretty well, too, sometimes harmonizing, with the only exception being the musty looking guy in a different hat whose job seemed to be to grab the correct book off the shelf and turn to the next hymn in coordination with the guy with the same job on the other side. I guess he didn’t take to the singing lessons. I was reminded of it last night when I saw Napoleon (not good), which features several glamor shots of various battle drummers getting blown to bits at the edge of a phalanx. How bad do you have to be at soldiering to get strapped with the drum gig instead of holding, I don’t know, any weapon as you’re marching into Waterloo? 

I digress. After the lovely service, I was once again grabbed by the arm and told to accompany the monks to dinner. My thoughts of a great anthropological conversation was put on hold, though, as it became clear the clergy and laity were sitting separately, so I sat with a bunch who were clearly there for the free meal more than the ritual of it all (hey, no judgement, me too). We ate in silence as a monk read something in Macedonian and rang various bells. Ok, but get this: the food was really, really good. Vegetarian, some egg scramble with a big hunk of fresh mountain cheese, kefir, and a tres leches style cake for dessert. What the fuck! Where’d those monks learn to cook and sing? Most eligible bachelors if…you know. 

Across from me at the table was a guy with puffy white hair and a fancy jacket. At first, I thought he might be an anthropologist but he turned out to be instead on a self-designed meditation retreat motivated by some abstract guilt for feeling “partially responsible” for creating the shitstorm of a media and tech landscape we’re in because of long-ago work with Nokia gluing users to their phones; his current retirement project was writing poems with ChatGPT and building a walking path somewhere in Greece that he said he had been trying to build for a decade (only two kilometers long, though…how many more years could it possibly take?).

Back in the Skopje bus station the next day, a real descent from heaven to hell, with all the requisite infernal circles in attendance (avarice, check…lust, check…dirty bathrooms, check…). I ate a bad döner (not the last!), changed money, waited patiently for the bus to Sofia. Several sellers of perfume (not sure if they’re targeting their audience well) and beggars, including one who seemed to speak seven or eight languages. The guys waiting next to me on the bench were Bangladeshi, and they had just been denied entry into Kosovo. One said that they had been working in Bulgaria and now would have to return—two of the six managed to get back to Sofia with me on the bus, but the others stayed behind for lack of seats, stuck without a real plan for next moves. A precarious situation.

We can track the development of anthropology through the monastery and the bus station. The monastery is an example of the old style of fieldwork—it’s quite literally cloistered, a small environment where you could easily determine a lot about identity and religion and community and all that. It wouldn’t be hard to live among the monks for a few months and end up with a thesis about Orthodox religion in contemporary Macedonia. It’s a perfect field site that would be legitimate since the discipline’s inception, an easy jump from Mead’s Pacific island. 

The bus station—not so much. The very old school anthropologists would say that it’s not closed enough—that there are too many variables , and anyway you’re not really studying a society or community because everything is in flux on a minute-by-minute basis. Urban environments in general were for many years off-limits; in the sixties and seventies this started changing, though, as more and more anthropologists started studying large-scale society in various ways. At the bus station, one could study migration, certainly, as well as poverty, social services, drugs, economy, everything. Place the bus station in the United States and it might be an even more controversial field site, but even that became much more possible in the eighties and nineties. These days not too many people would say that studying the bus station is illegitimate. 

But as the discipline has progressed, and especially because of the necessary reckoning I mentioned earlier with colonialism and racism inherent the field, there’s been a movement the last thirty years to say that studying the bus station isn’t good enough on its own to decenter the field’s expectations (true); that studying anything, actually, is fraught (true); and that all researchers must deeply take into account their own positionality when doing research. This movement towards “autoethnography” is a helpful one, to a large extent, as it forces researchers to confront their own backgrounds and consider more deeply how and why they study certain peoples, places, rituals. Almost every new ethnography has a healthy dose of it now. 

What I find troubling, though, is a further move that attempts to take this insight and then seeks to take the self as field site—an abdication of the idea that anthropologists can study basically anyone else in the first place. This means leaving the bus station behind entirely, and the monastery and Pacific island too of course, and doing things like writing an autoethnography of pregnancy, addiction, depression, or—most popular of all!—fieldwork. What an ouroboros. 

I’m skeptical of this for a few reasons, the primary one not being that I find studying the self illegitimate, but rather that I trust so deeply the possibility of art to do it better. Anthropology has techniques that are made for studying others—if we want to study ourselves, why not use the tools that have been given us by memoirists, novelists, painters, and musicians? Much of the work I most admire could (with the addition of a literature review) be easily branded autoethnography—the work of Teju Cole, for one, whose excellent new book Tremor I just read—but what makes it powerful is that it’s in dialogue with the long tradition of that kind of writing. Meanwhile, anthropologists are creating a new subfield based on the need to position the researchers themselves as characters (again, a good and helpful move in moderation) but are taking it too far—they shouldn’t write autoethnography and should write memoir instead. 

So I suppose this is all to say that the self is interesting, and we should study it, both in and out of anthropology, but we shouldn’t sacrifice the possibility of field sites, the bus station and the monastery alike. 

It’s been a while since I last wrote a post. Since Belgrade, I’ve been in several places: in Bar, Montenegro, a bad place, a feeling of course filtered through the flu I had there. Tirana was great, with a pyramid monument designed for the erstwhile dictator (now the inevitable EU-sponsored public art space and cafe, God help us), as well as with an inevitable EU-sponsored museum of the communist secret service (which, inevitably!, captures none of the emotional power of what it must have been like to live under such terror and instead spends a lot of time showing the various semi-clever but entirely predictable places the baddies used to install bugs (hint: everywhere) and limps toward an apolitical conclusion (basically turning itself into a shrine to the quaintness of rotary phones and film cameras)).

Anyway…Tirana to Pristina, a boring place with statues of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and no easy way to get to the bus station, then the monastery via Skopje, and now here, Sofia, perhaps my favorite city so far (besides Vienna, which doesn’t count). I had a rollicking good time at a bar last night with some lovely Bulgarians talking politics and “the Macedonian question” (not that interesting in retrospect…though at the time I thought wow, this is a whole blog post…that was just the rakija thinking). Lovely, welcoming people who embraced me with their friend group; also my favorite bartender ever (vaguely disappointed at first when I spoke English, but then made me that hot mulled rakija, vaguely smiling when I told him I go around the world looking for bars as good as his).

Today, tomorrow here—Saturday evening to Istanbul — on the train I’ve been really anticipating. And thank God for Asian Istanbul, and goodbye blessed Europe! Forever do us part. 

This isn’t Europe, this is Serbia

“There’s no future for Serbia,” Luka started off. “We’re small and everybody hates us.”

So we’re in the Balkans. “An example of American intervention that actually worked!” Jonathan said on the phone the other day. Not wrong, I think—Kosovans probably feel that way, Bosnians too, but here in Serbia the vibe is decidedly different. I made an early mistake with a French guy at the hostel who turned out to be ethnically Serb with a flip comment that Serbia is isolated because of what they did in the war. No, what history says Serbia did, he replied.

With Luka, a bartender in town, I was more careful. He was an interesting guy, having spent time all over the world, including at the University of Miami, where he played basketball on a scholarship. He claims he doesn’t have resentment against America, but he quickly recalled his angry reaction when an American referred to his country as “the place we invaded in the ‘90s.” 

But “there’s a Serbian saying that to succeed in life you have to forgive your parents. That’s what we have to do for the United States,” he said. Plus, the chances of regaining ground were thin due to geopolitics as he interpreted them. “If we took our land back, killed the Albanians and Kosovans, then what would happen?” he asked me. “The whole world would come down on us. Our only allies are China, Russia, and North Korea. And if the US attacked us again, what would Kim Jong Un do? We don’t want to start another world war. We already started one in 1914.”

Perhaps it’s fair to say that if the only thing standing in the way of another ethnic genocide is the distaste for provoking North Korea to launch a nuclear attack on the US, that’s not very much. And this is a guy whose job entails interactions with American tourists all day; what do people say behind closed doors?

So yes, Luka, perhaps the Balkans aren’t Europe, as you say. I certainly feel further than the three hundred miles between here and Vienna, that dream of multicultural and functional pan-Europeanism, where the most people have to worry about is whether they’ve remembered to pay their 400€ subsidized rent (no penalty if not). Here, Kosovo is still on the maps of a unified Serbia, no one talks about the wars, and there are a bunch of Russians throughout the city as it’s one of the few countries in Europe they can still visit visa-free (not that that’s actually a bad thing, as it makes this place one of the few that draft-dodgers can flee and keep their conscience intact). 

I got here the slow way, with a train from Vienna to Budapest on Tuesday, which we had to get off about halfway through and go on a bus instead as they were repairing tracks. The same thing happened between Budapest and Timişoara, a cute little city in western Romania, one of three European capitals of culture this year. I’ll sum them up quickly because I passed through both for only half a day each. Budapest: why, in a city know for regenerative hot spring baths, does everyone look so miserable? Romania: was the only benefit of ending communist rule the ability to play saccharine mid-2000s adult alternative radio pop at a high volume on public buses?

The next step was teed up to be the most difficult, a transfer that didn’t exist between Timişoara and Belgrade. It was a train connection that existed not that long ago but was stopped for some reason, and so I woke up early on Thursday to take the most rickety train I’ve ever ridden (one single wooden car filled with Romanian peasants coming back from a night in the regional capital carrying their weekly shopping) for a little over an hour to the border town of Moravița. The hope—I couldn’t tell how distant at the time—was that there would be a taxi waiting at the station to take me over the border and to the Serbian town on the other side called Vršac/Вршац (now in the land of Cyrillic), in total about a twenty kilometer distance on the highway. The fear was that there would be no one—a totally realistic possibility based on the size of these towns—and I was mentally preparing for the worst, a hike on the side of the road with my full backpack, after whose multiple hours and subsequent train connection I would arrive in Belgrade battered and bruised, if I made it at all. 

Luck was with me though, something I know I’ll pay for to the travel gods at some other point on this trip, and there was a single old Romanian man with a cane waiting in the cramped train hall. Not only that, a French couple (more off-putting than the average French couple—hmm) was trying to do the same thing, so we could split the fare. The driver brought us to his car, asked me to stow his cane at my feet, and jerked into the highway. We stopped at the duty free store and he came back with a chocolate bar. We spoke in a mixture of Romanian and—well, I don’t know what languages exactly, but on my end I was throwing in words in Spanish, French, and Italian with the hope that at least one of those would be close to the Romanian equivalent, and he spoke in a pidgin of Serbian, Romanian, and English, none of which I understood very well, but well enough to get that the Serbian border guards had a bad reputation and that he liked to keep in their good graces—hence the chocolate gift, which I ended up tossing unceremoniously onto a metal table outside of the kiosk. Having a table for throwing duty-free bribes is something that every border post should have. 

The Romanian guard checked us out of the country—and the EU—languidly, and the Serbian guard took a few minutes studying seemingly every stamp in my passport, probably looking for one from Kosovo, and asked me what I had done in India and what my Vietnam visa was for. I think it was legitimate curiosity rather than border guard malice, but you never know with them, especially the blond and stoic pretty women officers, often the meanest of all. But this one had nothing to prove and let us through, and we arrived at the station in good time, and our driver friend got out of the car even though he hobbled on his cane and helped us buy tickets and even walked out to the platform. So much of travel is reliance on the kindness of strangers, both paid and unpaid, and he proved it, and I hate to think of what a mess it would have been if he hadn’t been there. 

To that end, I’ve been thinking about my philosophy of travel a bit—what advice I’d give to others. I’ve come up with a few things so far. First, there are four bits of essential knowledge when one enters a new country that one must remember, learn by heart, ingest as quickly as possible and ideally by the time you meet a border guard: how to say hello, how to say thank you, what the currency exchange is (rounded to a number you can easily calculate in your head on a moments notice), and how to dial emergency services. Those are the only four things you must must remember—everything else you can look up in the moment.

Two—I find that it’s not phone, wallet, or keys that are most important to remember when packing up and moving from one place to another. The things that you’re actually at risk of leaving behind are TCS: toiletries, chargers, shoes. Everything else ends up in your bag naturally (as long as you don’t get in the habit of using hostel or hotel safes, another thing I’m dead-set against). 

Third, short term memory is key; long term memory less so. In addition to the four things I mentioned above, you should ask everyone their names and remember them all. That might seem extreme, but it’s incredible how people open up when you remember their name. But it’s not easy, and you need to be consciously trying to remember it any time you introduce yourself to someone. You can repeat it, write it down, create a pneumonic. But why short term? Because as much as it’s important to be able to regurgitate this stuff one hour, one day, or (sometimes) one week after learning it, if you’re traveling to a lot of different places then you don’t need to remember the name of someone in the hostel in Budapest when you’re in Montenegro. Saying “mulțumesc” won’t make people feel appreciated in Turkey. Making yourself forget and making space in your brain is just as valuable as remembering. 

Finally—my last rule is to go with the flow 96% of the time. Travel is an exercise in patience. Most of the time, complaining does nothing but make people frustrated with you—just accept whatever is happening and move on. That said, knowing when someone is trying to fuck you over that 4% of the time is the most valuable travel skill there is. Distinguishing the two means that you don’t waste your energy on the former but can stick up for yourself (or more likely get the fuck out of whatever situation you’re in as quickly as possible) in the second. Part of this is realizing that the most vulnerable time as a traveler is when you’re moving from the train (or bus, etc) to your accommodation with all your stuff on your back. Avoid unnecessary detours and conversations. I’m happy to get distracted by everything when I don’t have anything valuable on my back that would ruin my trip if I lost it. 

Belgrade is a city of cafes and bars, with not much to do—my kind of place. It’s orthodox, and I went to a church today whose interior was so beautiful, colorful beyond anything I’ve seen in a church, with incredibly detailed stories from the Bible illustrating every corner of the ceiling in bright primary colors. It’s also on the Eastern European club circuit, and I went out last night and really hated the music. What else is new. 

I’ve been writing, reading, socializing. But I’m ready for some time alone, which I’ll have in Bar when I arrive tomorrow morning. Getting somewhere on a train, watching the sunrise from the window, getting a border check in the middle of the night—those deeply good things. Bar is supposed to be only ok, but I need a recovery period and a chance to work. So I’ll stay for three nights, take a breather, get some work done, cook, spend less money. 

I finished two books recently: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli and The Enigma of Return by Dany Laferrière.

Until next time.

What Orient?

Theroux was right when he said airports and airplanes are nothing more than waiting rooms. I’m guilty of believing in the romance of flight, that imaginative distance between takeoff and touchdown, but the actual experience is more often humiliating than anything and makes me even more misanthropic than usual. In Heathrow yesterday, no one could figure out how to walk in a straight line, and there was one bathroom for the whole terminal. Even the worst trains inspire camaraderie in a way that’s completely foreign to the nicest airplane. So as much as part of the reason for my plans over the next few months to avoid planes is emissions-related, it’s also because flying is cheating, an unnatural intervention that dries us out corporeally and creatively. There’s a reason there’s no great plane novels, but plenty of great train, road, and boat ones. 

“If Vienna is the gateway to the Orient, to what Orient does it lead?” a character asks in Mathias Énard’s masterful Compass, a book primarily concerned with how miserable it is to be a professor. To Énard, the city is one of intellectuals stuck in thought, on loop, barely getting out the door before getting overwhelmed by memory—and possible titles for journal articles that will go forever unread. The protagonist, in a single dreary Viennese evening, recalls and dreams through the vagaries of a love affair while tormenting his neighbor’s dog with anthropological recordings of Javanese gamelan played extra loud. He is by trade an ethnomusicologist, a scholar, and an Orientalist, and the book pointedly uses that latter term muddied by Edward Said as a refusal to disavow engaging with its problematics. Just because the Ottomans were at the city gates twice doesn’t make it any more of an Oriental city, Énard’s protagonist replies unconvincingly, but the label sticks, in the book and beyond it, as the city forms itself into a starting line of sorts for any and all adventures further east, journeys both real and imagined.

And so begins my adventure also, here in this imperial capital which I have wanted to revisit since last coming in 2015. I have had the idea for this trip as a whole for possibly even longer, since I was in high school. In fact, cleaning out a computer the other day I stumbled upon notes for a trip, which included the detail of the ferry between Baku and Aktau I plan on taking, much of the same route, and the additional conceit of sticking as close as possible to Boston’s latitude as possible (which I have obviously not taken up). I hadn’t quite realized that this specific idea has been kicking around in my head since before I had even done any solo travel, when most of what I knew about these places was based on the shower curtain world map I loved to stare at in middle school. 

That said, it is somewhat strange that this comes at a point in my life when I feel more skepticism about the act of travel than ever before. I look at the world—with its incredible violence, especially the terror being rained down on Gaza, at the climate collapse travel does nothing but accelerate, and at the scores of people (from Gaza but also from Afghanistan, Haiti, and countless other places) leaving their homes and “traveling” unwillingly. In that context it’s hard not to see a trip like this as a terribly self-indulgent act. The old rationales—that traveling opens our minds or makes us into more tolerant people—seem weak to me now, not only because I’ve been lucky to already have a lot of mind-expanding travel (there must be diminishing returns!) but also because those seem small benefits, even at their most transformative, compared to the drawbacks. 

That’s all to say that despite the excitement I have for this trip, the feeling of fulfilling a long-sought wish, I am also traveling in search of something: to see if I can stumble upon some ethical, aesthetic, or political justification that I don’t see now. I look forward to the rhythm of the road taking over, placing those doubts to the side if temporarily. 

How to create a home on the road? I have never been a convincing athlete, but I’ve done a few guided runs that shifted my perception on the possibility of something similar. They’re fartleks, the ones where you’re supposed to run in intervals but not stop, just modulate your speed and find your recovery at the slower pace. I didn’t used to think I could recover while still running, but those runs showed me it was possible. So I hope I can find something similar now—finding some recovery or peace in movement.

Yesterday I went to see Bosch’s The Last Judgement, not nearly as mind-altering as Garden of Earthly Delights but still enchanting in the horrific way Bosch paintings are. Worth seeing, though, especially as there was no one there when I went, an empty bench in an empty room with the occasional wanderings of a lethargic guard and the sound of a video installation on Super 8 which sprung to life every minute or so. Just as obsessed with life’s sufferings as Bosch was Thomas Bernhardt, whose vision of Vienna informs my view much more than those of Beethoven, Mozart, or Freud. I went this morning to a park that plays a central role in The Cheap-Eaters, where an obsessive character credits the decision to walk towards an elm tree rather than his usual oak, a slight diversion to his daily route, as the single crucial moment of his life. That character, like Compass’s protagonist, is engaged in a scholarly “study” which he will never complete, which takes place mostly in his own mind. There I read, enjoyed the sun, and eventually wound my way down to the Danube, where minarets mark the national Islamic center. Vienna is the promise of Europe, where the trains run on time, there is religious and cultural tolerance, everything is clean. My waiter at the cafe I ended up at spoke Italian, Serbo-Croatian, English, Romani, and, of course, German—on the streets, I’ve heard Arabic, Turkish, French, Spanish. 

What I can’t tolerate, though, are the Christmas markets, sprung up around the city like weeds pleading to be plucked, bits of Northern Europe kitsch that most people I think would find charming. But, as we all know, I’m a grinch to the bone. 

Until next time.