While it’s not technically correct to say that a number divided by zero is infinity, in a certain sort of intuitive way it is true. How many miles will I bike before I burn through a gallon of gasoline? Well, I can bike forever and not one drop of gasoline will be consumed. Therefore, I get infinity miles to the gallon. Q.E.D.

The good mileage is not the main reason I’ve gotten so into biking lately, but it is certainly a bonus. Neither are the health benefits my main motivation, though they also are profound. No, the main reason I’ve been riding all over and around the capital of our fair nation is that it’s fun as hell.

These days, though, I’m catching myself getting just a bit smug on my daily commute. It takes me about 30 minutes to drive to work in traffic, though it’s only a six mile drive. Lights and traffic make it a chore, partly because DC has never heard of traffic sensors. Every single light is on a timer. Even if no car has approached 16th street from some minor side street in seventeen hours, that side street a green light every 45 seconds anyway. The 65 cars lined up on 16th street wait the 30 seconds, just in case a driver should happen to drive down that street someday, and then they continue on their way until they hit the next red light a couple of blocks down. Hurry up and wait. Hurry up and wait. I hate driving in this town.

I can bike to work in about 35 minutes. Part of that speed comes from being able to blow off red lights and stop signs when no cars are coming, as God intended for us all to do, and part comes from being able to hop up on the sidewalk and circumvent the long lines of cars waiting at stoplights. I’m usually the first vehicle at the intersection even if I pulled up last. Sometimes I have private moments of gloating when the same car passes me at several sequential stop lights. “See, buddy?” I find myself thinking, “You should ditch the car and ride with me. It’s just as fast and a hell of a lot less annoying.”

Now with gas prices as they are, I have another reason to gloat. As the poor souls who bought Lincoln Navigators and Ford Expeditions trudge down the road, watching the gas gauge dip visibly every block, I pedal along for free. I’ve filled up my car once since the beginning of June. It’s due for another sometime soon, but not until I next get in it, which could be late next week or even later. It only needs a fill-up now because I made two trips to and from Dulles airport a couple of weeks back. Instead of burning expensive gasoline, clogging up the air with my exhaust and clogging up the roads with a 1.5-ton,15-foot by six-foot steel contraption that transmits but a single piece of human cargo, I zip along on a 21-pound, two-foot by six-foot vehicle that runs on body fat. What’s not to love?

I’ve been riding for a long time, sort of intermittently. In high school it became my main mode of transport, since I didn’t have a car. Well, to clarify, I didn’t have a car until my senior year, when my mom burned out the flywheel in her 1981 Mustang (not as cool as you think—it was basically a Pinto, four cylinders with automatic transmission) and let me drive it “until it’s dead,” as they said. I made quick work of that. I got in trouble for driving through Hurley Gardens (that means over the curb and on the grass, weaving among the trees), but I never got in trouble for slaloming back and forth over the grass median divider on Hawthorne Boulevard. It would only shift into second gear, which you could push as high as 30 mph, so it got me around town, if loudly. It got me off the school bus my senior year, but that was not enough to rescue my coolness factor. I had way too many other factors working against me. Eventually, even second gear was lost. I couldn’t go more than 10 mph, and my dad made an executive decision one Saturday when I was out on my bike that the best EOL scenario was for a tow truck to come and remove the eyesore from the driveway. I was bitter, but it was probably the right decision.

I had the good fortune of growing up about a mile from the Illinois Prairie Path, a miles-long rail-to-trail path that runs among Chicago’s western suburbs and connects to several other area trails. It’s possible to ride several different configurations of 40 to 60 mile loops, crossing very few roads, and without ever retracing your route. It became a summer pastime for me to set off on many mornings into the interstitial green spaces of the suburban sprawl around me.

In the summer of 1994, having dropped out of school the second time, I was living in rural Illinois, working as an apprentice cabinet maker for my older brother and, probably due to feeling trapped and hopeless in many aspects of my real life, I fell in love more than ever before with the limitless freedom I could achieve riding along the slick straight flat black country highways for hours. At the end of the summer, just a couple of weeks before I’d planned to set out on a two-week ride from Polo, Illinois to New Orleans, I was hit from behind by a car while out riding near dusk. I broke a vertebra and ruptured a disk in my back. My bike was mangled and one of the pedals was completely sheared off. Given that the driver was doing 45, and that I wasn’t wearing a helmet and for most of the 50 feet I rolled my head was above pavement, it could have been much worse. Nonetheless, it completely derailed my travel plans and about a year of my life. But I told that story already, a couple of years ago, one evening after a long ride on the road between Brno and Vienna.

And then, four years ago, I moved to Washington, DC. For the first three of those years, I don’t think I got on my bike more than twice or thrice each summer. I’m not sure what I forgot. It’s equivalent to loving ice cream, or golfing, and just forgetting to eat ice cream or golf for three years. I have no idea what happened.

But this year, it has all come back. Part of it was meeting a retired Canadian couple on a ferry from Sardinia to Naples in May. We were traveling Italy by train and Ryanair; they were doing it by bicycle. They had just ridden down the western coast of Sardinia, and were on their way to ride another week or so on the Amalfi coast. C was really inspired by them, in a way I haven’t seen her inspired by very many things. I was too, but only to the extent that it reminded me how much I love doing exactly what they were doing.

Immediately after we returned to DC, C left for Arizona for the summer to study Navajo. I started riding my bike to work, but the 13 year-old Trek was simply not cutting it for me. It made things a chore. Plus they have these things called hills here, a feature conveniently removed from my native northern Illinois landscape by the movement of glaciers ten thousand years ago or so. And several large examples of these hills have been placed between my house and the building where I work. So one Saturday in early June, I headed over to City Bikes on Connecticut Avenue to see what’s on offer these days. I didn’t mean to buy anything; I just wanted to window shop and do some test driving.

Unfortunately, I fell in love with a Jamis cyclocross bike that was just too much fun to ride. Compared to my huge heavy old Trek hybrid with the rear pannier rack, this thing was slick, small, nimble, and quick. I spent four hours test driving other bikes that were more reasonably priced. It went on so long that I had to take a lunch break from my bike shopping. But every few bikes, I would take the Jamis back out and head a mile or so down the Capital Crescent Trail just to see if it still felt so right. And it did. So I took it home. We’ve traveled 300-odd miles so far and we have many more to go.

The hills, they are nothing to me now. Soon I will conquer mountains. And soon after that, the farthest reaches of outer space. There are no limits when you get infinity MPG.

Exactly one month to the day after our return from Italy, the photographic documentation is ready for viewing. We took over 300 pictures, and I have painstakingly winnowed that count down to a hundred or so that really capture the essence of the trip. I diligently cropped and edited them. I hope you appreciate all the work that has gone into the presentation.

1. I bought the newest version of Photoshop Elements, since my old version won't run in Leopard.
2. I cropped, edited, improved contrast and saturation, corrected camera distortion, rotated, fill-flashed, and otherwise improved the pictures for your viewing pleasure. But they still maintain that in-the-moment rawness that you crave.
3. I installed Gallery (open source photo gallery software) on the website to add new functionality (but an inferior aesthetic) to the photo page. However, this is a tradeoff for the greatly reduced amount of time I have to spend manually editing HTML and tweaking CSS code. And you can view the pictures in multiple resolutions.
4. I have painstakingly written terse and cursory captions for over half of the photos.

So I hope you enjoy the presentation. It is here: Paul, Corinne, and Thea's Italian Adventure 2008.

I would like to think that I’m a pretty smart guy. I feel smart. I know a lot of things, when I can remember what they are. I come up with clever solutions to complicated problems. I have read a lot of books.

But no amount of being smart seems to help me with my most profound shortcoming: I’m kind of dumb. You might say absent minded, or forgetful. There is a “special place,” whose whereabouts I know not, that beckons me with a siren’s call whenever my conscious attention is not needed here and now. I just disappear.

Often it happens in my down time, when my mind gets all wandery. Or when I’m driving, especially when I’m listening to music. I’m justing singing along, playing air drums, and suddenly notice I’ve missed my exit. Or that I’m driving my standard route to work even though it’s Saturday and I meant to go to Trader Joe’s, which is in the opposite direction.

Today, for instance, I was driving to the airport to catch a flight to Albuquerque. I’m going out to visit C., who is studying the Navajo language on the reservation in Arizona. I put on Blood on the Tracks, and was so busy trying to decipher the lyrics to “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” that I missed my exit. And it’s not just that I missed my exit. I forgot that Interstate 66 doesn’t actually go the airport. You have to take the Dulles toll road, the exit for which is several miles before you hit 66 when you’re on the outer loop of the beltway.

Heading west on 66, and having an inkling that I had made a mistake, I called C. to ask.

“Hi, hon. I miss you, can’t wait to see you tonight when I land. By the way, does 66 go to Dulles?”

“No, you have to take the Dulles toll road. That goes to Dulles. That’s why they call it the Dulles toll road.”

“Crap.”

I’ve only lived here for 4 years, and I’ve only driven to Dulles nine or ten times, so I can be excused for forgetting that, especially since I was so busy trying to figure out how Big Jim and the Hangin’ Judge figured into the plot of the song.

So I dug out the map and consulted it while sitting in motionless traffic on 66. I found an off-ramp which led to a side street which would in turn merge into some road which connected to something that met up with the Dulles toll road. Still an hour to go before my flight, no problem.

Well, I met up with the toll road, sped wildly to long term parking, found a spot, and ran to the airport shuttle stop, only to wait for 15 minutes for a shuttle. The driver was doing slow loops to help out a really huge, friendly woman with a southern accent who couldn’t find her car. Things went smoothly at the terminal, where I made a bee-line for security. The line was no longer than usual, and then I ran to find a departures screen to find my gate. 15 minutes to go.

Of course, it turned out that my flight left from the terminal that requires a shuttle to get to. I ran to the shuttle, and boarded the one that said it was leaving in “0:00 minutes.” But that was a bit optimistic, as it didn’t actually pull out for ten minutes. It dumped me off at the far end of the other terminal, whereupon I threw all my bags onto my back and ran to my gate, only to find that I had missed the plane by two minutes and, no, it would not come back to the gate. I looked down at my cell phone clock. 5:43. I looked at my boarding pass. Departure: 5:43. Crap.

Of course, last time I flew to Albuquerque alone, it was for a friend’s wedding. And that time, too, I missed my flight. That time, the particular cause was that I had my flight time imprinted in my mind from double- and triple-checking my itinerary so many times so I wouldn’t get it wrong. Only the itinerary I was memorizing was C.’s, not mine, and she flew out on a different day because, as a student, she’s not bound by this whole “vacation time” constraint that I have. I knew what day I was flying, and I knew my name, so my speed-skimming skills took my eyes directly to the important information in the email—the times and flight numbers—and skipped right over the unimportant information, such as the passenger’s name and the date.

Luckily, that time my flight was early in the day, so I headed to the airport and got a standby seat on a flight two hours after my original. No big deal.

Of course, each of those incidents had a completely different cause. The circumstances had almost nothing to do with each other. But, of course, to the people at the other end who were waiting for me—who on two separate occasions received phone calls from me to say that I had missed my flight and that they would have to change their plans to accommodate my mistake—it appeared a little different. There was one common cause for the two incidents: the basic incompetence of me.

So the question remains . . . Am I incapable of successfully getting myself to the airport in time to catch a flight? Am I that disorganized? Normally, C. and I travel together, and we keep each other on schedule and focused. And she reminds me how to get where I’m going and when to exit the highway. And to bring my ID. And socks.

So I suspect that, as a result of not having to worry about all the practical details concerning how to get from here to there by car, I have lost the ability to do it. Or at least that ability has atrophied. Which is funny, because really, I’m still a very intelligent and capable guy. I keep all sorts of complicated systems running smoothly as part of my job. I successfully schedule and attend meetings. I plan out projects according to deadlines, and I consistently meet those deadlines. It’s just that, in some ways, I’m a dunderhead. An insightful, clever, and efficient dunderhead.

This year’s international adventure will be in Italy. We leave next week. C’s sister has been there for a semester, and having finished her school obligation, is currently wwoofing in some little village somewhere. We’re flying over next week to join her for two weeks of traveling about.

We have a nice circuitous route planned which gives us ample time for visiting archeological sites, seeing art and architectural what-have-ya’s, not to mention a few days of quality beach time on the Mediterranean (my favorite place so far in the whole world). We’re taking our snorkels. We’re taking advantage of cheap RyanAir flights booked well in advance. We’re spending one night on a ferry from Sardinia to Naples. It’s got everything. The only thing it doesn’t have is a whole summer. Damn this whole “vacation time” thing.

Well, folks, it’s only been a couple of weeks since we returned from Oaxaca, and already the photos are ready for posting. As I mentioned, we took only disposable cameras, so these pictures were all developed from film to CD. You can see graininess and scratches in many of them, and for that I most profusely and humbly apologize. There is very little excuse for appearing analog in this bright new digital world.

So to compensate, I shined them up, cropped a couple of them where appropriate, straightened some of them out just a hair, and otherwise prettified things for the consumption of the larger audience. Then I penned some more or less relevant captions, loaded them up onto this here Internet, and now I’m sharing them with you. I hope you enjoy.

You can find the link over to the right in the Photoblog section, or you can just click this one: Oaxaca Photoblog. There are plenty more travel pic sets from our other adventures in the photoblog, and written stories about many of them in the Travel Stories section of StrPrpn.

We went to Oaxaca for two weeks. Did you miss us? I’ll post the photoblog soon, but writing all those captions can be time consuming and I haven’t had a chance yet. Here’s a teaser, from the tiny village of Chacahua, where we stayed at the tail end of our stint at the beach.

After getting robbed when we were in Guatamala two summers ago, we decided on this trip to pack nothing we cared anything about, including the digital camera. We hauled five disposable cameras around with us, which meant no zoom, no retakes, few clandenstine shots, and no previews to hint at whether the picture had come out at all. We had them developed to CD when we returned home, but you can still see the graininess, dust, and scratches in the digital versions, which irks me.

Oaxaca turns out to be a bustling city with a thriving middle class. Suave guys in name-brand jeans facebooked each other on Macbooks in cafés. Moms drove their daughters to private school in Toyotas. And here we were with nothing: I took a credit card, a debit card, and my passport in a money belt. Everything else was either clothes, books, basic toiletries, or a snorkel. Always learning lessons, we are. Next time, we’ll feel perfectly comfortable taking the digital camera to Oaxaca, and we won’t take anything to Guatemala. (That is, if we ever go back to Guatamala, which is doubtful. It has been decided that vacationing amid real and wrenching poverty is not fun. It makes you feel like a sick voyeur peering into someone else’s private misery. What else can you feel but shame to realize that your shoes probably cost more than some people make in a month. Literally. We’ve decided that, if we head toward poverty again, it will be to volunteer.)

Of course, Oaxaca is in Mexico, so there was plenty of poverty to be found: indigeno children who should have been in school instead begging for pesos on the street, old men in the villages hauling things to and fro on their burros, etc. But nothing we saw was as destitute as what we had seen in Guatemala.

More stories will follow, but for now I’ll just describe the adventurous day we had trying to leave. Dean had just crossed the Yucatan peninsula and was headed across the Gulf toward Veracruz. We arrived at the airport at 7:30 am to get Maris onto her flight to Mexico City, where she’d connect to a flight back to New Mexico. Once we’d seen her off, we took a walk in a park just outside the airport to pass the four hours until our departure. We returned about 10:30 am to find that our 11:55 flight to Houston (the sole daily flight to the U.S. from Oaxaca) had been cancelled due to Dean’s interference with its flight path. The flights for the following two days were full, but the ticket counter lady assured us that we could be on a flight as soon as Saturday (this being Wednesday). We objected to that idea, so she changed our ticket instead to depart from Mexico City the following morning at 6:00 am, but we were on our own to get there (it’s an eight-hour bus ride). On a whim, we stopped at the Mexicana airlines ticket counter, to be told it would cost us $200 per ticket to get on a waiting list, which we declined. Then we hopped over to the Click airlines counter (a JetBlue-like upstart) who had $180 tickets departing in five minutes. Were we ready to depart now? Could we be on that flight? Yes, please. Painfully expensive, and not technically in the budget, but we had little other choice.

So we ran through security (I didn’t even bother to put my belt or shoes back on until we were safely on the plane). They stopped us and made us gate-check our backpacks, which we hate to do because it always costs us precious time at baggage claim. We boarded the plane, they promptly closed the doors behind us, and the plane pulled away from the gate. The nice Oregonian rancher who had been behind us in line and in the same predicament failed to get to the plane in time. We relaxed on the one-hour flight to Mexico City and plotted how we would get to Houston the same day.

The Oregonian rancher, a thin guy with a big bushy beard, wearing a plaid shirt and boot-cut jeans secured by a belt with a big rancher belt buckle, was actually a transplant. He’d just started building a house in Oaxaca, he explained, and used his home here as a hub for his travels. Apparently he’d done well in the ranching business, or his ranch land had appreciated enough that selling it had set him up for life. He’d just returned from a five-month trip to southern Argentina, Chile, and Antarctica, where he said he’d taken 10,000 photos and had swum with penguins. Being a horseman, he said, he had a knack for animals, and he’d formed a bond with the penguins that most other people could not. I never got his name, but I really enjoyed meeting him, in part because his story was so intriguing, but also because hearing it encouraged me that setting foot on Antarctica sometime during my life is actually an achievable dream, and actually not really that difficult, if you can make it to the very southern tip of Argentina.

Once we landed in Mexico City, we retrieved our bags and headed straight to the Continental airlines ticket counter. We explained what had happened, and asked if there were any flights to DC leaving that day. The woman at first said she couldn’t change our tickets because the cancelled flight had been on an affiliate airline and their cancellation was not Continental’s problem. We insisted that it had been a Continental Express flight, but she wouldn’t believe us until I was able to dig up our printed Travelocity itinerary that I’d shoved into some flap of my backpack before leaving the US, an iterinary that clearly showed the Continental logo and flight number. She put us on a plane to DC departing in half an hour, with a layover in Houston. We thanked her kindly and ran to the gate.

We boarded without incident and settled in. It was then we noticed that we had only an hour to get through customs and security in Houston and make it to our next flight. This made us slightly tense.

We became more tense when we landed and saw the snaking line at the passport counters. We slowly resigned ourselves to shuffling through the maddeningly slow maze amid the frat boys and fat Texans returning from their vacations in Cancun and Acapulco. 30 minutes later we had the Homeland Security stamps in our passports and ran to security to find yet another serpentine line of aggravated souls. At this point, we had 15 minutes until departure. We began to sweat. Someone convinced the Houston TSA people that some of us were in a crunch and perhaps could be granted some special treatment to make our flights on time. They let us all into the Elite First-class Members-only Silver-spoon security line (which pissed off the Elite quite a bit), but we removed our shoes and our belts and our coins and got through quickly. Five minutes to go. We ran to the gate . . .

. . . only to find that the gate had been changed. Our flight to DC now departed from a different terminal on the opposite side of the airport in four minutes. Corinne asked if maybe they’d be kind enough to ask the plane to wait. The woman told us to take a cart. So we took a cart.

The first cart we saw was being held up because an indignant, fat Texan tourist was yelling at the driver about how he had wronged her. This was the same woman who I’d seen yelling at a fellow line-waiter back in security as they put their shoes back on. “If you don’t start treating me with a little more respect, mister, you’re going to regret it,” I’d heard her saying at the time. (In general, I believe that if one finds oneself encountering multiple completely unreasonable assholes within a very short span of time, perhaps it best to stop and consider if oneself might instead be the asshole.) So we took the second cart we saw, which was fortunate, because it was driven by a guy who had no regard for pedestrians, almost running several of them down to get us to the gate on time.

For the second time in a day, we were the last people on board the plane. At the gate, they gave us the emergency exit row seats, we climbed on board, they shut the doors, and then the plane sat at the gate for 30 minutes waiting for the go-ahead from air traffic control to take off.

We finally took off, and we watched Shrek 3 (unfunny and disappointing) to pass the time, landing in DC at 11:00 pm. We got to the Metro and caught the yellow line train, making it to Fort Totten just in time to catch the last red line train of the night. We got home, dumped our backpacks on the living room floor, and headed to bed. 17 hours from start to finish, but we made it. I was able to be at work the next morning bright eyed and bushy tailed to wade through the couple of hundred emails awaiting my reply.

We’ve been back from our Southwest Adventure ’07™ for nigh a week now, but I’m only just getting around to posting the travelogue. You can find the photos and witty commentary here: http://www.strangeproportion.com/personal/sw07/.

Pictures from the Thanksgiving trip to New Mexico, but I'm just getting around to posting them now. These are from a place called White Canyon, near Abiquiu (rhymes with barbeque). The third picture helps to explain why this canyon has been a popular spot to film scenes that are supposed to take place on the moon. The really low gravity around Abiquiu makes it look all the more realistic. The last picture is of an adobe mosque built by a community of hippies who converted to Islam in the ’60s and settled in Abiquiu. Georgia O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch is not far off.

Notice the blue of the sky. You just don't see that anywhere else.

Here it is, only 9:30 p.m. and I’ve finished everything on my to-do list for the evening. It feels like it’s been months since I’ve had this luxury, and perhaps it has. Planning a wedding, as I’m sure any veteran of the affair will say, is a bitch. To plan one long distance is doubly so. We spent most evenings for the first part of the year with a list of vendors to call and decisions to make. It was to be a simple affair—and largely it was, though it came in about 60% over our original and naively optimistic budget—but it was nonetheless sisyphusean in scope.

But there it is. Done. And everything happened exactly as we planned. More or less. Except for the DJ, who deviated from our painstakingly selected playlist. I use deviated in the most generous sense, because really, he barely touched our playlist. In fact, had we made a list of songs that definitely, definitely, under no circumstances would we want played at our wedding—well, those are the ones he put on the turntable. If you made a top 10 list of the worst, most clichéd songs to play at wedding receptions, you’ve probably got the second half of our reception covered. Bust a Move, for God’s sake. One More Night by Phil effing Collins. MC effing Hammer. My God. I feel like I should send out postcards to all the guests emphasizing that I did NOT tell the DJ to play Phil Collins, just to save whatever face I can.

But Jesus Bas, the flamenco guitar player, was exquisite. He strummed all Spanish sweetness during the ceremony and then hammered it home slightly electrified during the cocktail hour. He somehow worked it out with pedals to sing his own backing harmonies. It wasn’t the too-familiar-these-days guy with the sampling delay petal playing along with himself as a metronome. This guy was actually doing harmonies, and I (who used to co-own a recording studio, remember) have no idea how he pulled it off.

So here we are now, back from the honeymoon. We’re tanned, well-rested, and well-fed. In fact, I came back with an interesting and wholly inexplicable case of stripes, which at first I attributed to a possible tropical fungal infestation or insect by-product. My friend Chris postulated that they were caused by subdermal Carribean microleeches. It turns out (should I admit this?) that they were in fact due to a slight mishap with some lime juice and the sun, though I worry that those unfamiliar with my nocturnal habits might think they’re claw marks from my battles with were-beasts.

With all this time to kill nowadays (at least until my linear algebra class start on Monday), expect more updates than you know what to do with.

Confirmed it now is that the Star Wars mythology is apparently deeply embedded in my psyche, which only makes sense given the number of times I watched all of those movies when I was growing up and how much the adventures in my no-friends cerebral pretendland revolved around those characters. I never had the action figures, because they were too expensive, my mom said, but my rich cousin John had them all, including the ships and the Darth Vader action-figure carrying case, and I was infinitely jealous. But that's not the point. My off-the-cuff comparison of Tikal to Endor turned out to be half-right: It wasn’t Endor, but the fourth moon of Yavin, the scene of the celebration at the end of Episode IV.

Of course, when we booked our tickets to Guatemala, everything seemed hunky-dory down there (according to the State Department, anyway). Upon our return, for curiosity’s sake, we checked again and found this:

This Public Announcement is being issued to remind U.S. citizens of the continuing serious security situation in Guatemala. This Public Announcement expires on November 3, 2005.

U.S. citizens are urged to be especially aware of safety and security concerns when traveling in Guatemala. Although the majority of travelers visit Guatemala without mishap, violent criminal activity on the highways in Guatemala continues, and the number of armed robberies on city streets and in private homes is increasing. Crimes against foreigners have included murder, rape, and armed robbery. Criminals in Guatemala are extremely opportunistic; all travelers should remain vigilant and take appropriate measures to limit risk and losses. Assailants often respond violently if they perceive resistance from their victims.

Although fewer highway robberies have been reported recently, violent criminal activity on the highways in Guatemala continues and tourists, among others, have been targeted. Buses of all categories, tour vans and private vehicles have been stopped, with drivers and passengers robbed, sometimes violently. Armed robbers have intercepted vehicles on main roads in broad daylight. Highway bandits have committed rape in the commission of robberies.

The most common highway robberies involve pickup trucks pulling up next to the victims' moving vehicle with occupants brandishing weapons, or impromptu blockades on isolated roads forcing vehicles to stop. Travel on secondary roads increases the risk of encountering a criminal roadblock; robbers have used mountain roads advantageously to stop buses, vans and cars in a variety of ways. The roads around Lake Atitlán that connect the neighboring towns have little security and visitors have been stopped and robbed.

Gangs are a growing concern, both in Guatemala City and in rural Guatemala. Gang members are often well-armed and prone to unprovoked violence. Gangs are believed to be responsible for a substantial increase in violent robberies on inter- and intra-city buses; U.S. Mission personnel are not permitted to travel on these buses. Mission personnel continue to observe heightened security precautions in Guatemala City and on the roads outside the capital city.

There is little evidence of effective investigation of these crimes or arrest and prosecution of the perpetrators. The police suffer from corruption, inexperience and lack of funds, and the judicial system is weak, overworked, and inefficient. Criminals, at times armed with an impressive array of weapons, know there is little chance they will be caught and punished. In some cases, assailants have been wearing full or partial police uniforms and have used vehicles that resemble police vehicles, indicating some elements of the police might be involved.

“Why you no choose Antigua? All the gringos study Spanish in Xela. Is better in Antigua.”

So spoke the middle-aged man at the filthy Guatemala City street corner where we were trying to find the next bus to Antigua. The Spanish had already been studied, though not by me, and we three gringos were on the leisure portion of our vacation. This was, in fact, the only part of my vacation. M. and C. had gone down two weeks prior to study Spanish in the mountain town of Quetzaltenango (more easily referred to by its Mayan name, Xela [shay-la]). We met up for one week of traveling around Guatemala before returning home. We’d been doing a lot of traveling around the country, and Antigua was to be the last stop before we headed to the airport the next day.

“You are from Nuevo México, eh? I have been there. I know Taos.” He pronounced this last word with a laboriously rounded vowel sound, obviously practiced but never quite mastered. “I lived there. I did, you know, whatever I could. Anything.”

We chatted for a couple of minutes about Nuevo México, about Antigua, about gringos, as a large bus—referred to here as a ‘chicken bus’ because of the wide variety of typical passenger species—backed into position near us. Most chicken buses are actually American school buses from the ’70s and ’80s with stern warnings still intact about not throwing gum at your neighbor.

“This is the next bus to Antigua, my friends.”

We hand our big backpacks to the guy standing on the roof of the bus, as is typical, keeping our most valuable possessions in a small pack we carry on to the bus with us to keep close at hand. We confirm with the driver that this bus goes to Antigua, and the driver’s assistant guides us to our seats and places the pack on the rack above our heads. The bus is already growing crowded, and we’re tired. We stayed last night in a bare-bones hostel in the mountains near Semuc Champey, three hours by unpaved precipitous mountain road from a small town called Cobán. We’d been awoken at 4:55 a.m. for our 5:00 a.m. minibus by some Spanish-speaking voice with a flashlight in the dark. The journey was too bumpy for sleep, and when we arrived in Cobán at 8:30 with empty stomachs and sagging eyes, the bus to Guatemala City, another four hours further away, was already loading. We hopped on board and continued the journey. When we arrived in Guatemala City, it was just a four or five block walk to the place where the bus to Antigua loaded, and the last leg would be an hour and a half at most. Almost there.

It seems strange that the assistant is so forceful, putting M. into a seat in the row in front of us, when she’d been heading to the row behind. When I realize our broken umbrella is still in my lap, I put it on top of the backpack on the rack above my head, and notice as I lower my eyes the hands of the assistant repositioning it next to the pack. He is behind us, helping other people into their seats and packing three adults and their belongings into every two-adult-width seat. A large man squeezing past me drops some coins loudly on the floor. C. and I moved our feet and help him locate a coin that has rolled under our seat. He thanks us and brushes past. I close my eyes for a moment. The bus starts up and begins rolling forward around the corner as C. starts shouting.

“Where’s our bag!?” I look up at the empty rack. Shit. I stand up, spinning around to scan the blank brown faces in the seats behind us. The two men, the assistant and the coin dropper, have already disappeared out the back door. They were so well-practiced, so by-the-book, but at the same time so obvious—after the fact, that is. Of course they were thieves. Why else so much attention to the bag? Why else seat M. in front of us? The bus is moving faster now. C. runs out the front door, explaining what’s happened in Spanish to the driver as she passes him. I follow, but the driver only slows, and we have only seconds to scan the crowd at the corner. They’re already gone. I grab the ladder on the back of the bus that leads to the roof, climb up to make sure our big packs are still there, and am ushered in the back door of the bus by the real driver’s assistant.

By the time we reach Antigua an hour later and find a phone to call the credit card companies, they’ve rung up $500 in charges. Once we get back to the States and all the charges appear, it will turn out to be over $1000. Fortunately, we won’t be held liable for the charges, but C. is out a backpack, a hundred in cash, inexpensive but irreplaceable jewelry, a phone card, subway passes, her driver’s license, and so on. During the ensuing days, at random moments, she will remember something else that was in the bag. The emergency rain ponchos. We’re driving down city streets on the way to the store when her eyes drop. The earrings were in there too.

But now the photos are back from the lab and I am reminded of all the transcendental, ephemeral beauty I witnessed. It began the day after I arrived. As soon as I got out of Guatemala City’s filthy crime-ridden slums, my overcrowded bus took me up along narrow mountain roads weaving amid volcanoes draped in fog. Peasants led burros along the side of the highways. Crews of itinerant machete-wielding men walked from field to field. Short barefoot women with toddlers slung in blankets over their backs and enormous bowls of food or cloth balanced on their heads waited on the shoulder for someone to stop and take them where they were going.

M., C., and I met up in Panajachel the day after I arrived, spending a couple of days exploring that town and some of the villages that line the volcano-encircled lake there, Lago Atitlan. We then caught an overpriced ten-hour bus to a town called Florés, which put us within a couple of hours of Tikal, the ruins of an ancient Mayan city in the middle of thousands of square miles of protected rain forest that spans northern Guatemala, western Belize, and southern Mexico. We spent a day in Florés debating whether or not our digestive trouble was caused by amoebas, but still took some time to eat good food (relatively good, when compared to the desayuno típico of eggs, clumpy refried black beans, and a little sliver of salty cheese) and swim in the lake. From there we hit Cobán, toured a coffee plantation, staying in a hotel that claimed to have hot water (a real luxury), but in fact the hot water just turned out to be less cold than usual. Stopping in Cobán broke up the return to the South into bearable pieces, and put us near Semuc Champey, with flooded caves we explored by candlelight and its serene cascading pools of mountain spring water. A little thievery amid all that? So be it.

Then again, it wasn’t my stuff that got stolen.

Alright, folks. Photos from our trip to Guatemala are now up. It’s been just over a year since my last trip worthy of a photoblog page. This whole working for a living thing is highly overrated, as far as life as an intrepid traveler goes. And I get 50% more paid vacation than most American adults. Call me spoiled. I don’t know how people can be expected to subsist on two weeks of vacation a year. That’s barely enough to make the rounds to see family and friends, let alone explore this cool huge orbiting sphere we inhabit. At least the money’s good. What a novel change not to be broke all the time.

Oh yeah, the Guatemala pictures. I almost forgot. They’re here: Guatphot.

(Otherwise entitled, "Go east, young man!") I’ve arrived in Santa Fe just in time for monsoon season. Every morning I wake up to the unadulterated blue sky outside the window of whichever friend’s house I’ve chosen to crash at the night before, and when I stumble outside in my shorts into the clear dry air, squinting and scratching the sleep off my bare chest, I can see the tops of the clouds looming over the Sangre de Cristo (“Blood of Christ”) mountains to the east.

The clouds continue piling up behind the mountains, turning grayer and more ominous as the day progresses. Finally in the mid-afternoon they spill over the mountaintops and begin spreading out and dropping succinct downpours over various widely-dispersed parts of the valley. Since I’m reliant on my bicycle for transportation, these periodic storms disrupt my plans from time to time, but New Mexico needs rain as much as a deep-sea diver needs oxygen, so I put my personal preferences on hold and wish the rain-starved hills well while I park under the nearest awning or portale to wait it out.

After riding my bike around town for a few days, I decided to rent my moving truck a day early and use it as an oversized and inconvenient rental car. My jaw dropped when I phoned around town to ask about rates. The cheapest one-way truck I could find to the east coast was U-Haul’s $718 plus taxes and insurance. I was, however, able to garner one unforeseen advantage out of the deal, as a result of the U-Haul clerk’s Santa Fe public school education. The deal included 2043 free miles, just enough to get me to my destination, but not enough to allow any detours or errands. When I asked if she could bump it up just a bit, she said she could give me an extra 50 miles, and heck, she’d throw in the extra seven and round it up to 3000. Due to basic math incompetence, I now have a buffer of 900 free miles, just in case I get lost several times for days at a time along the way. If you know me, you know that when my mind gets a-wanderin’, such things are in fact more likely than not. I plan not to take advantage of these free miles—high gas prices and all, not to mention basic honesty—but it’s nice to know I have them just in case.

So during my days here I have visited the folks who need visiting, trying my best to mend the places in the net that have frayed from inattention during the past year. I have also eaten the burritos, enchiladas, carne adovada, green chiles, and sopapillas necessary to quench my appetite and widen my gut. I have sunned myself on patios and ridden my bike dry-mouthed down the gravel roads among the hummingbirds and goats, chamisa and piñon. Today after meeting my friend Roland for huevos and posole at Tecolote, I headed to the bike shop to buy my second inner tube in three days and ended up chatting for a while with a drunk Blackfoot Indian who hit me up for spare change. He liked me because I stopped to talk to him, he said, explaining that I wasn’t like most white people who always rush from place to place. He saw my Euclid 3:16 shirt and asked me if I’d ever read Kahlil Gibran (I failed to see the connection), then mentioned that he was an American just like I am, that he’d just gotten out of the army two years ago and figured that was his admission ticket. He had a hard time pronouncing all his words, most likely related to the 40 of Bud Light in the bag at his feet, but was mostly lucid. He gave me a name in his language, which I promptly forgot, but it might have been Lapi, and he taught me how to say "This day is a good day," which I repeated once pretty accurately and then promptly forgot as well. Overall, things have been good, and I’m just about ready to throw my many boxes of crap into the truck and spend three or four days geeked out on truckstop coffee and AM country radio, cruising on slick air-smooth highways to the next destination, my home for the next three to ten years, give or take. I’ll drop you a line when I get there.

Some places are not meant to be lingering places. They are designed to be passed through quickly, to disappear from memory as soon as you have gone from point A to point B. When it happens for some reason that you linger in one, it takes on a completely different character. For instance, near Gate A2 in Chicago’s Midway airport, a placid-sounding valium-soothed woman repeats her warning every six seconds to prevent daydreaming people in the long white echoing high-ceilinged corridor from falling like felled trees when they run into the stationary ground at the end of the horizontal escalator. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.” The people waiting at Gate A2 for their flight, which has been delayed for an hour and a half due to a thunderstorm in Denver, must nonetheless listen to this warning every six seconds until its interminably slow repetitive rhythm supplants their thoughts one by one. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.”

In this way, there’s something very purgatorial about the long white waxed corridors, the thick wet receding echoes of the woman’s voice, and the smooth infinitesimal creeping of time. When our return flight from Croatia landed in Prague, the man below was engaged in his own version of the purgatory dance. He was doing this for 45 minutes, but that much video takes up a lot of bandwidth.

I was warned by the completely unapologetic ticket agent when I checked my bags at Midway that, due to the delay, I would miss my connection to Albuquerque tonight. I finally landed in Denver after eleven o’clock, and rather than drag my 130 pounds of baggage by cab to an overpriced hotel near the airport to sleep for four hours at most before dragging it back to the airport, I’ve decided to pass the nether-hours of the night with you, Gentle Reader, waiting for the Frontier ticket counter to reopen at five a.m. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.” I’ve set up base camp with my laptop near the closed aluminum security gates of the food court, listening to the Beta Band on the headphones I stole from my Alitalia flight from Prague to Chicago. I couldn’t have known at the time that they would turn out to be so useful. The only source of food open at this hour is Burger King, so I had to give in and eat fast food for the first time in over a year. It tasted just like I remember it, that is, pretty fast and a bit like food. Thankfully, the Beta Band drowns out this particular corner’s repeating manta for travellers: “Please do not leave baggage unattended for any reason. Unattended items will be confiscated and may be destroyed.”

I promised Mike, our friend and colleague in Brno, that I’d share with him my first impressions upon returning to America after a year away, and these extra few hours I need to kill somehow seem like a wonderful opportunity to meander my way through those impressions. How does it seem different? What stands out now that I’ve been immersed in other cultural norms for long enough to become accustomed to them? In what ways do I feel like I’m returning to something absolutely familiar, and in what ways do I feel like I’m encountering something new? It’s tricky because a year isn’t really such a long time in the grand scheme. Mike has been living in the Czech Republic for 12 years, so he has probably been separated from his Americanness far more than C. or I have.

The change in scenery hasn’t surprised me. My brother picked me up at O’hare and had some errands to run in the city. I wasn’t surprised by the skyline or the traffic, both of which dwarf their respective analogues in the Czech Republic. Having been in a car five times at most during the past year, I was surprised that cruising on the Kennedy in my brother’s van into the city didn’t feel at all strange. Rather, it was completely familiar. I accompanied him on his rounds, chatting a bit with a couple of his customers. As we left the city, to satisfy my longing for a carne asada burrito and an [h]orchata, he stopped at one of the three restaurants called La Pasadita that lie on a one-block stretch of Ashland just south of Division. I’ve never understood why the same restaurant has three branches on the same block, but I have long understood that it is (they are?) my favorite burrito place(s) in Chicago. The burrito tasted just like I remembered it, that is, rich and spicy and delicious, with plenty of cilantro.

The observations worth mentioning number two so far. The first concerns the diner breakfast my sister and brother and I enjoyed yesterday morning at the Olde North Pancake House. The American diner ritual—a ritual with which I have a long and intimate acquaintance, dating back to the days in high school when I sometimes hit Denny’s with my friends twice a day, when I knew every diner within a fifteen-mile radius of my house and considered myself a connoisseur of the institution, able to recognize subtleties in the brownness of the decor, the bitterness of the coffee, or the “warm ya up, hon?” of the waitresses that escaped most casual observers—was strangely surreal because of my familiarity with it, combined with how different the Czech restaurant ritual is, both in itself and due to our limited command of the Czech language. C. and I managed to learn restaurant Czech pretty well, to the point where we could usually communicate our wishes to waiters and waitresses without confusion or miscommunication. Occasionally, we could even ask for certain basic substitutions (such as “without ham, please”). But almost all of our restaurant interactions consisted of repeating memorized phrases in various combinations; we were never able to carry on even the most basic conversation with the waitress. We sometimes take for granted being able to crack a joke or make friendly conversation with the people whose jobs bring them into contact with us on a daily basis. Being unable to stray at all from naming the desired item on the menu and replying to basic questions about our wishes caused us both some sadness.

So it was that I recalled the details of the American restaurant ritual as our meal progressed: The ease with which I could communicate with the waitress in English, her frequent visits to refill my weak diner coffee as often as, or perhaps even more often than I wished, the strangely familiar but exotic practice of leaving the tip on the table. It all came back to me like an old friend who I hadn’t seen since childhood but with whom I immediately felt at ease, the years since our last meeting melting away into the unaffected and uninhibited conversation that only lifelong friends can enjoy; like an old friend who, nonetheless, has met the intervening years in a surprising and just slightly unflattering way. He is so familiar, and I know before even opening my mouth what his response will be to certain questions, the way his mouth will turn down slightly and tense at the corners when he tries to keep a straight face at one of my jokes. But his skin is so pale—was it always this way?—and he has put on so much weight and carries himself with such an ingratiating hunch—has he always been so hunched? or is this new?

The second observation is the ease with which my fellow travellers chatted with each other while we waited at Gate A2 at Midway or, after landing in Denver, while we waited in line at the customer service desk to reschedule our outbound flights, or while we waited in line at Burger King for a late night meal to hold us over until breakfast. I’ve mentioned the notion of the fractured society that Mike talked about in relation to Czech society in the aftermath of communism. Such casual openness with strangers is almost completely absent.

I’ve never been one to make conversation with people in line at the grocery store or while waiting to cross the street, casually while passing in a park, or in any similar circumstance, but I am aware that many people do so and even enjoy it. As a result of my own reticence, I think it was particularly easy for me to adapt to the Czech methods of social interactions, which is simply not to interact with people you don’t know. Czechs waiting for trams and buses rarely, if ever, chat to pass the time. Czechs in elevators rarely say a word during the whole ride (though, in an odd sort of retroactive politeness they frequently bid each other na shledanou [good-bye] as they disembark at their respective floors after having not acknowledged each other’s presence for the whole of the trip). These Americans around me, on the other hand, were constantly engaging one another, whether to complain about the unapologetic ticket agent, to ask for clarification about their new connections, to ask why the wireless network in the airport seems not to exist despite numerous signs indicating its usefulness. How much simpler strange situations must be when you can simply ask the people around you for a bit of help. Yet how foreign it all is: Americans will just start talking to each other with little provocation! Imagine how strange they must seem.

In a bus heading up the Croatian coast on the narrow looping highway from Dubrovnik to Split, the Croatian equivalent to California’s Highway 1, C., M., and I are settling in for our five-hour ride. I’m on the left side of the bus, so I have a beautiful view of the steep hillsides stretching down to the coast, the mountainous islands jutting up out of the water, and the deep blue Adriatic stretching out to the horizon.

We took this trip in precisely the opposite order we should have. Upon arrival at the airport, we hopped onto a waiting bus to Split, caught a ferry immediately to Jelsa, a port town on the first island we wanted to see, and then a bus to a more remote, smaller, and less visited town. Thus, within a few hours of landing, we were at our most remote location, and we slowly worked our way to more populated, more touristy, and less authentic places as the days passed. Already in Dubrovnik I found myself pining for the idyllic Mediterranean meadows and unpopulated coastlines of the islands, as though I’d been booted from paradise into the harsh glare from the unflattering light of the temporal world. There would be no wine, olive, and cheese picnics on the rocky beaches of Dubrovnik.

Europeans seem to have known about Croatia for a long time. Even under communism, the former Yugoslavian coast thrived on tourism. After all, we only came here because so many Czechs recommended it as a holiday destination. We did, in fact, overhear many Czechs in all the nooks and crannies we visited. But most Americans seem not to have heard of this place. Perhaps, as I used to before I came here, they hear the name of the country and think, “Aren’t they having a war there?” But no. The war in Croatia ended eight years ago. Even Dubrovnik, which was 70% bombed out, has been almost completely repaired. Since Croatia’s economy depends heavily on tourism, the government started repairing anything even remotely interesting to tourists before the war was even over. (They cleaned up most of the minefields too.) Countless travel memoirs have been written about southern France, Italy, and all sorts of better known Mediterranean destinations, but not much has appeared about Croatia, which is their equal is almost every way save crowds.

Dubrovnik is distinctive because of the completely intact city wall that surrounds it. All the other walled cities of Europe seem to have demolished their walls at some point. Perhaps they’re too expensive to maintain. Perhaps, as Dubrovnik illustrates, walls have been obsolete as a protective measure since the invention of the airplane. Many towns will make a big deal about the small piece of the town wall still standing here or there near a river or built into the side of a building. Tour guides will drag groups of tourists with sun-reddened necks and sunglasses past the non-descript patchwork structures, pointing out the ten stones at the bottom that date from the thirteenth century. But in Dubrovnik, the entire wall—with all its gates, towers, and ramparts—is still standing. It lends a very medieval feel to the whole place.

The hostel industry has had trouble finding its niche here because of all the grandmothers and their sobes—private rooms—which they rent to tourists for a fair sum. They line up at the ferry landings and bus stations holding up signs that read, in five or six languages, “rooms for rent.” It’s actually a funny sight. While some are younger women and others are men, the majority are gray-haired grandmothers loudly hawking their spare rooms for $15 a night, forceful women who haggle loudly and refuse to listen when you say “no.”

Our sobe was on the side of the cliff that overlooks Dubrovnik; 371 steps up the side of the hill, to be specific. I know because I counted them. The cliff has a couple of roads that cut switchbacks up the cliff face, but most of the houses are only accessible by stairs—rough-hewn and uneven sets of stairs set at random angles. The stairs are given street names, and the houses that adjoin the stairs have addresses that ascend as the stairs ascend. The word for one of these staircase roads, put, is the same as is used for “journey,” and the daily march up the narrow stairs to our sobe was precisely that.

In Korčula, the church bells chime the quarter hours all through the night. This is not helpful when one is unable to sleep. But tonight, other things are conspiring to keep me awake as well. The heat is one. Although I am writing this by candlelight on a small balcony at the back of the building in the cool night air (relative to the daytime temperatures, tonight’s breezeless seventy-two degrees is blissfully cool), in the bedroom I was sweating even with the sheet thrown off. Another is the painful itching from the sunburn I acquired on our first day in Stari Grad. Right now, I’m shirtless and covered in more baby powder than an unclever kid trying to be a Halloween ghoul. It seems to help the itching. The sky is beginning to lighten at the horizon, so I think I’ll have to give up on getting more than the two hours of sleep that I’ve already had tonight.

We’re staying in a third-floor bedroom in a house across the street from the bay and about 150 meters from the old town. Korčula claims to be the birthplace of Marco Polo, though of course no one knows for sure. It’s the main town on an island that has alternatively been inhabited by Illyrians, Greeks, Romans, Venetians, and Croats throughout its long history. Everything is made of limestone—the streets, the buildings, everything—and is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Here, in Croatia, it seems most appropriate to clarify one lingering Czech question. When we were in Prague a few days ago, both my brother and Marcel had to endure C. and I bitching incessantly about the glut of stupid tourists being stupid and buying stupid things, posing stupidly in front of the stupidest, most uninteresting statues merely because they’re older than America, for example. I know we must have across as entirely more-expat-than-thou, but that wasn’t really the intent. It’s taken me a couple of days to put my finger on why I hate Prague, and I think I’m closer to being able to spell it out. Being a stupid tourist in Croatia has given me the necessary contrast.

Don’t get me wrong—architecturally, artistically, historically, Prague is an unparalleled place. It’s pretty much the only city in Europe that wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War. As a result, visiting the city center is a trip to another era, a living monument to a part of history that, if it exists elsewhere, has most likely been reconstructed from blueprints. But now, 15 years after the revolution in 1989, Prague is a whore, seductively displaying her wares to people who travel from all corners of the Earth to engage in this lurid fantasy. They tell Prague what they want her to be and she becomes it.

It’s not a real city anymore. The center is filled almost exclusively with shops that cater to tourists. A thousand storefronts offer you KGB tee-shirts, shot glasses, bumper stickers, shoddy mass-market folk art knockoffs, nondescript and non-specific stuff that looks vaguely Slavic. The restaurants offer you pizza or non-specific Italian or French food, and even when you are able to find something that purports to be authentic Czech food, it never includes dumplings. They don’t even appear on the menu, presumably because foreigners don’t like them. Having spent a full year in Brno, a town where few tourists have reason to go, I feel like I’ve had a decent introduction to the country and the people. I have a rough idea, albeit from my perspective as an outsider and a note-taker, of what it’s like to be Czech. Well, Moravian, more specifically, since they still differentiate; since Prague is in Bohemia, I have to make some allowances for my naivety.

One small example: For reasons I’ve been unable to determine, Czech waking hours are out of phase with the rest of the world. Many businesses there open at seven in the morning and, as a result, many people are finished with their day’s work by two or three o’clock in the afternoon. Because they are able to shop on the way home, most shops close by five or six in the evening at the latest. A special subspecies of convenience store exists for people who need to buy goods until eight in the evening. After eight, only the pubs are open, and even they close at ten or eleven o’clock, because people need to get home in time to wake up at five-thirty or six to start it all over again. The whole country are disciples of Ben Franklin’s early-to-bed-early-to-rise dictum, though I hear that it actually originated with the Austrian Emperor Rudolph II.

Prague, on the other hand, keeps party hours. Walking through the desolate and unpopulated old town at eight-thirty in the morning to meet my friend Marcel for the first time in eight years, I couldn’t figure out where all the people were. In Brno, the morning bustle would have been long over, the shops would have been open, and people would have been well into their day. In Prague, all the storefront security gates were drawn shut, exposing the work of night graffitists. Scattered early-morning dog walkers were the only other people on the streets beside me and the crews of orange-vested men and women sweeping up the debris and mopping up the puke of the foreign revelers who had been up late into the night, who had been, in fact, the only people out. The only Czechs to be found at the late-night dives amid the Black Sabbath, Joe Cocker, and Everclear blaring from the loud bars the previous night were the waitresses and bartenders.

The city has been stolen from the people who live there and has been turned into a generic, blandly international and culturally non-descript place. It is no longer Czech. I’m not even talking about the 40,000 Americans who live there, running the branch offices of international companies or wishing they could have been in Paris in the twenties. Many of the latter are unfortunate enough to have beenduped into thinking that one actually has to go to Bohemia to live that well-hyped bohemian lifestyle they’ve heard so much about. But the tourists don’t deserve all the blame. Every step of the way, Prague is right there, selling them what they want to buy, pretending to be something it’s not (or didn’t use to be). Hence the whore analogy. The tacit don’t-ask-don’t-tell deception barely conceals the real nature of the transaction. More than anything else, though, among all the wonderful experiences I had in the Czech Republic, I’m simply disappointed that the nasty summer tourist glut in Prague is one of my last memories of the place.

Well, the horseflies and mosquitoes are now taking advantage of the early morning light to annoy as many people as possible, including me, before the day’s heat oppresses them into a standstill. The swallows are flying circles overhead. It’s time to walk down and check the ferry times to Mljet island, today’s destination, half of which has been designated national forest, with a pair of lakes up in the mountains surrounded by meadows. The half moon is still visible. A seagull swoons and dives overhead. I kill a mosquito on my calf. I apply more baby powder.

We’re on the island of Hvar, in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia. Up the hill from the town of Stari Grad, where we’re staying in a small bungalow at a campground five minutes by foot from the waterfront, we hiked for an hour in the late-morning ninety-degree heat to a tiny village called Rudine. We passed olive groves and small vineyards bordered by piles of small limestone blocks that passed for walls. Fennel, rosemary, and laurel trees grew wild. The wind blowing across the dry scrubby hillsides smelled like God’s spice cupboard. Fig, orange, and pomegranate trees sprouted up everywhere. Enormous spiders lurked at the centers of webs whose support fibers stretched literally fifteen feet at times. We surprised praying mantises a couple of times. The sound of cicadas, near and far, filled the hot wind.

Thirsty from not having saved any of the water we’d packed when we set off, we followed hand-painted signs directing us to the Mini Market Žukova. We arrived to discover some umbrellas and a small white collapsable hut erected in a driveway. When we rang the bell, a woman came running from playing with some toddlers in the back yard. She offered us fresh produce, ice cream, and drinks from a cooler in the hut. When we asked for water without gas, she apologized, but offered to run into her house and fill a bottle with tap water for us, free of charge. We accepted.

Her English was barely passable. She knew enough at least to run her fruit and ice cream stand. When she heard us speaking in English to each other, she asked us where we were from. We answered. She asked, “Why here?” I answered, “Because it’s beautiful.” She made a gesture as if to dismiss the flattery. I tried to clarify. “We lived for a year in the Czech Republic, and everyone there told us that Croatia is paradise. We decided to come and see it for ourselves.” She blushed a bit before replying, “I am so pride.” We knew what she meant.

After the three of us downed the liter of water in a gulp, we found a trail heading back down the hillside to the sea, and after a few minutes we appeared at the mouth of a small cove lined with rocky outcroppings. Three or four sailboats rocked gently in the waves. Five or six families were all we could see in scattered encampments around the cove.

After a heavy application of Nubian brand sun block (SPF 6, our first mistake), we dove into the spectacularly clear blue water. A few minutes later, after one of my freshly-purchased water shoes had slipped off, I watched it floating in gentle circles downward. It was still clearly visible 40 or 50 feet down. I cannot describe the perfectly clean and clear phosphorescent turquoise water adequately. You’ll have to look at photos when I post them. Suffice it to say, this was the most beautiful start I could imagine to our twelve-day Croatian adventure.

We alternated for two or three hours between lazily wading in the cove and sunning ourselves on the rocks until we’d roasted ourselves to a light pink color. Not wanting to endanger our future beach plans, we decided it was high time to remove ourselves from the sun. We hiked back up the hillside, and our increasingly-insistent hunger suggested we look for someplace to buy lunch. We were unable to find anything resembling a downtown among the clusters of low and far-flung stone houses in the village. Eventually, we gave up and returned to the Mini Market Žukova. We asked the woman if the village had a restaurant. She shook her head. Then her face lit up and she rushed out from behind her cart, gesturing and excitedly bubbling in broken English.

“I’m asking. There is woman. I come with you.”

“Pardon?” we asked.

She tried to clarify. “There is woman in village. She is our superwoman. I’m asking. I come with you.”

“We don’t understand.”

“I’m asking. Woman. She cook sometimes.”

We began to understand that a woman in the village sometimes cooked for guests, for some sort of fee, we supposed, and that our guide was going to lead us to her house. Intrigued, we followed the fruit stand woman (whose name we never got) around the corner to a house where two young men were repairing the plaster under a large picture window. Two-foot-high figurines of the seven dwarves, hand-painted with house paint, were evenly spaced along the flat roof and half-height walls that surrounded a tiny courtyard in front of the house. A middle-aged blonde woman in a red and white sundress was overseeing the men. The woman who brought us fired off a couple of questions. The blonde woman shot back some answers. One of the young men looked up from his plasterwork to translate. “We have sausage, and some kind of fish. Grilled. Maybe some potato salad or something. Beer or juice. You want?”

Hungry, tired, and thirsty, our skin continuing to grow pinker, we accepted her offer to sit at a picnic table in the shade under a vine-covered trellis. She brought us beer, two kinds of sausage, round loaves of home-made bread, and two plates of grilled vegetables. We downed the beers at once and asked for seconds. She agreed, but then we saw her walk straight away from the table, down the driveway, and down in the street in the direction of the Mini Market Žukova. She returned a few minutes later with three cold bottles in hand. She kept bringing plates of bread and grilled food until we asked her, please, to stop. The Žukova woman returned a while later and asked if we needed a ride back to Stari Grad. She’d be taking her cousin to the ferry port in an hour, she said, and we were welcome to ride along. We accepted.

“Why would you come to this paltry little village on an island off the coast of nowhere special, you silly Americans?” is what she’d wanted to ask as she’d handed us the bottle of tap water, but all she’d been able to formulate in English was “Why here?” I couldn’t really tell her that the beauty of the hillsides and ocean, the Mediterranean climate and terrain so commonplace and uninteresting to her, was an endlessly exotic fairy tale to me, and that being offered a meal at her friend’s one-table ad hoc bed and breakfast was the perfect end to the perfect day. An hour later, we thanked our hostess and paid the reasonable price she wrote on a napkin. The Žukova woman pulled up with her Bosnian cousin in the front seat. The conversation proceeded between her and C. in German, since her German was far better than her English. We asked her how she enjoyed living in Croatia. The Bosnian woman spoke no English or German and remained silent, but the Žukova woman replied that everything was fine. The war had been over for eight years already, and was history. She asked us if we knew that there were many American soldiers (thousands in fact) still stationed there. We hadn’t known. She said that there was no more fighting anymore, that the Americans were only there to keep the peace, but that their job was done and they probably should have gone home two or three years ago. We could easily imagine that to be true.

When we finally got back to our bungalow and changed our clothes, we discovered that we’d long overstayed our window of safety in the sun. M. and I are redder than raw salmon, and we have crisp white outlines where our swimming suit tags had escaped to the exterior of our suits. C., due to more diligent sunscreen application, escaped mostly unscathed. We’ve all been applying lotion to each other for most of the evening, but I fear the worst: We may have to avoid the sun for the next few days. There are old renaissance chateaux to visit, from when the Venetians ruled the area in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and other sights to see from the Habsburg days. We could even track down some old Roman ruins or some fortresses that staved off invading Turks a time or two. But that’s not the point. I’m not particularly interested, at this point in my life, in ancient Croatian history and, honestly, I’m sort of castled-out after the castle bonanza at the end of our Czech adventure. I came for two weeks of beach, swimming, and sun, and my heart will drop if I have to hide in my bungalow in the ninety-degree heat all week. I suppose it serves me right for my solar overconfidence.

I’m posting this from the gleaming stone lobby of Andel’s Hotel in Prague, a hyper-modern ultra-hip launch pad for the international business jet set. How, you might ask, did I—a sweaty, unwashed backpacker with a stinky pair of sandals and a horrible watch-tan—manage to secure accomodations here among the elite? Well, my brother helped. He left this morning in a taxi for the airport, and C., her sister, and I are left in the hotel until noon trying to see how many free services we can take advantage of before we leave. I’ve already enjoyed the luscious breakfast spread, but have yet to visit the solarium, sauna, or steam room. My complimentary copy of FT (The Financial Times, if you have to ask) is waiting for me on top of the DVD player in my room, as are unlimited cappuccinos in the fifth floor lounge.

Yesterday, I was reunited with my old friend Marcel, who is working on his PhD in English. He’s in Prague teaching at a summer institute. We lived together in Champaign, Illinois in 1993 when we were both students at the University of Illinois. It’s been at least eight years since I’ve seen him, though e-mail contact has occasionally happened. It was a beautiful reunion, and we plan to wander the parks and winding streets this afternoon, though we might instead choose to sit in a cafe and down espressos. C. and I are touristed out. Too many sights, too many castle tours, too many “KGB: Still Watching You” and “Praha Drinking Team” tee shirts.

Posting has been intermittent, or perhaps sporadic, and will only become more so. We leave for the Croatian coast tomorrow morning, and I suspect that internet cafes will not be quite as common there. Nor will want to take time out of our heavy beach schedule. I’ve got to even out this farmer’s tan I’ve acquired this week. The back of my neck is ten shades darker than the band under my watch. I’m not even going to talk about my sandal tan.

In 1622, four years after the battle of White Mountain sparked the Thirty Years War, Austrian troops burned down the tiny farming village of Slavošovice while trying to suppress the rebellion in Bohemia. The Herda family, who had lived is Slavošovice for some unknown number of generations prior to 1622 but were displaced by the burning and the years of war, returned home when the village was rebuilt. Since the village was most likely rebuilt in a slightly different location using the stones from the original houses, it is difficult to determine the original location precisely. The Herdas moved into a small house, Slavošovice 14, and farmed the land there throughout the remaining years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, into the early 1800s, until some great-great-great-grand-descendent of the man and woman who first returned to the newly rebuilt village chose to migrate to a town called Lišov, about 6 kilometers away.

After spending a couple of days in Vienna with my brother, who is visiting from the US, the three of us took a train to southern Bohemia to visit our ancestral homeland. My brother is an avid amateur genealogist and has for the past two or three years been employing a professional Czech genealogical researcher named Jaroslav to visit the Czech archives in South Bohemia to find the birth, marriage, death, and land ownership records that have helped us to sweep a bit of our lineage free from the accumulated dust of history. Jaroslav met us when we arrived in Lišov in our rental car and gave us a guided tour of certain select parts of South Bohemia. He led us through the churchyard graves in Lišov and pointed out our ancestors' headstones. He took us past the house where they lived for some number of generations after leaving Slavošovice. He knocked on one door in town in order to introduce us to Mr. Kovařík, an 82-year-old man with one leg shaped like a waning crescent moon who shares with us the common ancestors who lived in the house at Slavošovice 14. Mr. Kovařík showed us some pictures of his house when it was still a farmhouse, and he shared the old yellow documents that dispersed the possessions of some unknown Herda or another who had died without a will. He then pulled from his cupboard a lovely State of Minnesota baseball hat, obviously unworn, the brim still fresh, flat and rigid, which had been given to him by a member of the Dale Pexa band when they visited Lišov from New Prague, Minnesota (pop. approx. 5100) two years ago. He donned the hat with a mighty and sparsely-toothed grin. "Just like an American," he proclaimed.

The next stop, we were told, would be the small castle that used to protect the villages near Slavošovice before the Thirty Years War. It turned out to be a small two-story stone building, about twenty feet on a side, that the family currently living in the adjoining house used as a storage shed. When we pulled up in our rental car, a young blonde girl, maybe nine years old, stood at the gate with a curious stare. Jaroslav jumped out of the car to introduce himself and us. "Hello, ladies," he called out to the middle-aged women who were enjoying their afternoon tea in the courtyard, one of whom had obviously stopped by while walking with her stroller and a couple of kids of walking age. "I have brought some American tourists to see the castle." We took some pictures, trying not to step on all the chickens in the yard, and stepped inside the castle for a moment to see the boxes and old garden tools kept inside. One of the women, who had stepped into the house, returned with an old laminated pencil sketch of the castle as it had looked a few hundred years ago, namely, exactly the same but without their house attached. A young boy, maybe ten, followed her out wearing only his underwear.

Jaroslav expressed our many thanks, and we returned to the car. Some of the children followed to watch us drive away. We sped on to the next stop, the ornate neogothic crypt that houses the remains of the members of the Schwarzenberg dynasty who ruled the area for hundreds of years and owned several South Bohemian castles and chateaux right up until the last descendant fled the country in 1947.

C. and I usually try to be the kind of travelers who observe silently from the sidelines as inconspicuously as our huge backpacks will allow, but Jaroslav had volunteered to be our tour guide In fact, he hadn't really given us much choice, and since we had so many remote places to visit in such a short span of time, the renting of the car made sense. Nonetheless, pulling up in our shining silver Peugot, interrupting tea-time with the chickens, snapping some digital photos and disappearing in a cloud of gravel dust—all at Jaroslav's arranging—had made us look like the worst kind of culture consumers, swooping down into these villagers' lives for all of ten minutes, to documents in our scrapbooks the quaintness that constitutes their everyday lives before we moved on to the next hurried item on our itinerary.

That next item was the house at Slavošovice 14, where for centuries my Czech ancestors lived life as peasants on lands owned alternately by various barons, monasteries, and princes, ancestors whose names are known now only because of the hours Jaroslav has spent deducing the salient details of their lives from the remnant bureaucratic paperwork of the lost centuries between us. We didn't knock on this door, because Jaroslav has tried before to gather information from the people who now live there. They are not interested in genealogy and do not like foreigners. While taking a couple of token digital pictures of the house, I tried to imagine generations of Herdas being born, growing up, choosing a husband or wife from the eight or ten other teens in the village, bearing children, hoping for a male child so the land would stay in the family, dying and being buried in the same church yard, for hundreds of years on end. The oldest son in each family, Jaroslav tells us, didn't have to worry about choosing a wife, as he was usually constrained to wed the daughter of the neighboring farmer, in order for the families to be able to merge their farming rights—not the ownership of the land, because that belonged to the prince, but merely the right to farm a piece of it. I tried to imagine all these scenes played out a dozen times or more over a dozen lifetimes or more in that house on that piece of land, and the similar scenes played out on every other farm for hundreds of miles around, but I just couldn't manage. It's just too far away.

While packing up the last of my things, after living for almost exactly twelve months in the Czech Republic with very little else in the way of material possessions to speak of (though of course the house in which we lived was furnished) I note for posterity the sum total of my possessions:

I should admit that there are several boxes of my possessions—including but not limited to hundreds of CDs, cassettes, and LPs; two sets of speakers; various digital and analog entertainment devices (though no TV); boxes of dishes, including Pfalzgraff service for eight which is rendered for all intents and purposes unuseable by C.’s violent reaction to the sound of silverware on it; a Juiceman Junior electric juicer; a Braun coffee pot that brews coffee directly into a thermos, which effortlessly keeps it hot for over eight hours; hundreds more books; back issues of various magazines; gardening implements; furniture; a Trek bicycle; a car stereo, amplifier, and speakers; more clothes; and various other things I can’t even remember anymore—awaiting me in an undisclosed location in New Mexico. It is clear to see that I am hardly an ascetic. Nonetheless, may I humbly recommend purging your life of possessions periodically, whether it be accidentally or deliberately, as a satisfying way to remind yourself of how disposable most things really are?

On that note, I hereby sign off for a while. C. and I will be traveling with my brother through Vienna, České Budejovice, Český Krumlov, Prague, Kutna Hora, and various of our ancestral Czech villages for the next 10 days, after which I will be meeting in Prague a very old and dear friend of mine who I haven’t seen in 10 years, and then C. and I will be flying to the Mediterranean coast in Croatia with her sister for 12 days. (I’m not the kind of guy who very often jets down to the coast for some R&R, so this part is actually fairly exotic and exciting for me.) Subsequently, I will fly to the Chicago area to visit my family for three days, then fly to Santa Fe for a week to visit some friends, grab the previously mentioned boxes of crap, throw them into a rental van, and drive them across the country to my new home to start my new job in an undisclosed location on the east coast. Hold all my calls. I will try to post some interesting travel stories in this forum, or I might just unplug and relax in a completely non-digital fashion. There’s no telling, really. I’m like the wind.

That’s it. Time’s up. During the next couple of days I will pack. I will run last-minute errands. I will sell things. I will pick out real Czech souvenirs for folks back home. We’ve already said goodbye to everyone but the closest of our friends. Lucie and I had a lovely bike ride to the lake just north of Brno this afternoon. I didn’t have a crown on me when we left, so she bought me a beer and a fried cheese sandwich at the lakeside beer garden. It was a beautiful and warm sunny day. The wind was calm. The fish were biting at bugs on the surface of the water. People were not wearing shoes.

I will miss fried cheese sandwiches. When C. first visited Prague in 2001, she later told stories of the “heart-attack special.” When I first visited Prague a month or so later, I discovered the deliciousness of which she spoke. It’s a specialty, and at some pubs it’s the only vegetarian option on the menu. It consists of a loaf of cheese which is deep-fried in oil (because cheese is not fatty enough by itself) and served on a roll with tartar sauce, which as far as I can tell is basically a big pile of mayonnaise with pickle relish mixed in. My fried cheese sandwich today also came with french fries, which I ate with a fork, because that’s what you do here, and I don’t like to be stared at while I eat.

When I say that fried cheese is sometimes the only vegetarian option, I actually mean that it’s the only real vegetarian option. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Often there are several items listed in the vegetarian section of the menu, but many of them include ham. From a certain point of view, you are correct when you object that ham is not vegetarian. But try not to think inside the box all the time. Ham can also be a condiment. If you were to beckon to the waitress and inform her that your vegetarian dish had ham in it, she would look at you with a slightly pitying expression. “Oh honey, it’s just a little ham.”

Non-vegetarian dishes, on the other hand, can consist of meat, stuffed with meat, with a side of meat. Maybe a little meat on top for a garnish. One of my favorites is chicken stuffed with ham and leeks with cheese and a slice of ham on top, but I also like dumplings stuffed with ham and creamy sauerkraut. Our friend Petr, the one who saved us from the landlady, likes to make giant trays of hors d’oeuvres when the four of us (Anne, Petr, C., and I) are hanging out. We’re talking about square feet of little sausages and cheeseballs neatly arrayed, accompanied by slices of bread smothered with cream cheese and blue cheese with slices of raw onion on top, and Olomoucký Sýr (which is a kind of stinkier-than-thou cheese whose legal status is in limbo given certain food safety concerns on the part of the EU). I don’t know if feet are involved in its manufacture, but it smells like they might be. Nonetheless, fry up a slab and slap it on some bread with some chunks of raw onion, and you’re on a rocketship straight to heaven. (I should be fair: Only pub food is so notoriously fatty and heavy, but most Czechs don’t eat out very often. At home, they also eat very good bread and a lot of vegetables with their meat and cheese.)

When you are walking down the street and you notice other guys—the kind who don’t already have beautiful girlfriends—watching the 6'2" blonde women with impeccably-toned everything from head to toe walk by, you expect that those guys are probably trying to figure out exactly what those women are doing to keep from showing the effects of the exclusively meat-and-cheese-based diet. It must be hard for those guys, because, well, it’s not just an occasional 6'2" blonde woman who walks by. It’s like every third woman is over six feet tall, and even if she’s not blonde, she has jet black hair and sky-blue eyes, or perhaps the ubiquitous Eurgundy dye and has applied eyeliner inspired by lioness eyes; but the woman’s particular coloring at some point becomes irrelevant for those guys, who in general look far less like a nation of supermodels than their better halves do. It must be somewhat of a curse, I think, to be a woman from this Slavic gene pool, because there are very few alternatives on the menu of prominent noses and foreheads and eyes ever-too-slightly close together. Need I mention the healthy, healthy selection of beer guts in every size and shape?

This is not a nation of anorexic women. It’s a nation of people who don’t own cars. In fact, many of the ones who do own cars now are starting to look a little, well, American. Like me. And I don’t even own a car. I sold my last car for $25, and I figure I got a pretty good deal for it, considering the shape it was in. You should have seen it. It was in worse shape than my van, which I let get towed away because it was cheaper than paying someone to tow it away. I miss my van, and the whole van lifestyle. It used to be that I knew it was time to throw some stuff out when I had more stuff than would fit in the van. One is not as portable as one would like when one owns more than fits in the vehicle that takes one to the next place. Throw all your stuff in your van, fill up your 44 oz. trucker mug with Amoco coffee, and the world is yours for the taking.

Have I mentioned what a fan I am of the Czech menu of disabilities? You’ve heard of dyslexia, I’m sure. I have met a couple of people who suffer from it, and it seems real enough. Though I don’t claim to understand it’s mechanisms, I can easily believe that such a disorder exists. I can even imagine how awful it must be to have the disorder called dysgraphia, which is a physiological or neurogical inability to write properly. I imagine it must be some sort of noise in the feedback loop between brain and hand. Fine so far. But then we have dysorthographia which, if you parse it, could only be a medical diagnosis for people with bad penmanship. And then there’s dyscalculia, for people who have difficulty in math. I actually do believe in dyscalculia: If dyslexics can somehow reverse the letters in a word, as strange as it sounds to someone who is unafflicted, why should it not be possible for others to reverse the digits in a number? Of course, discalculia need not only refer to such a specific condition; I can imagine the term as a blanket diagnosis that refers to people, some of whom I’ve met personally, who have inordinate difficulty with mathematical reasoning. If dyscalculia is simply a label applied to people who are medically sensitive to math, however, I remain skeptical.

What surprises me is the Google ratio for these terms:

In the country where the rigorous study of penmanship begins at age 6, it is not surprising that dysorthographia is almost as commonly mentioned as dyslexia. Of course, I do not claim to have presented an airtight case proving anything except my own surplus of free time, but it is an interesting discovery nonetheless. Thanks, by the way, to Larry and Sergey, who apparently are still keepin’ it real.

I have been orally examining my students all week long.

I’m pretty sure that phrase used to sound naughty to me, but in recent weeks it has come to sound perfectly natural. In fact, it is the most common way in our department to refer to the administration of oral exams. I haven’t yet figured out whether the phrase is proper in British English or if it is a Czechism but, either way, I’ve heard it so often that it no longer sounds strange and only occasionally makes me snicker.

My ability to use my own language has really suffered during the year I’ve lived abroad. My colleagues are for the most part phenomenally fluent, and several speak with impeccable British RP accents, to the point where I cannot tell they are not British by birth except when they switch into the z-zh-s-sh-v-k-rich consonant-fest they call their mother tongue. My students, however, are another matter. Except for C., almost everyone who speaks my native language to me during the course of an average day butchers it to some degree or another. Since language is merely convention, I sometimes find it necessary to butcher it in return to make myself understood. Even when such extreme steps are not necessary, though, I still find that strange phrases have crept into my vocabulary. Most of these are British phrases, which are much more common here than American ones. For instance, I rarely say “lorry‚” instead of “truck,” but it has happened. I’ve even talked about the high petrol prices these days. I have completely switched over to talking about my colleagues, never my co-workers, and I don’t even blink when someone mentions stopping at the store for some nappies (those are diapers in britsky, in case you didn’t know). I don’t even mind anymore when I hear someone say that X is different to Y (this is actually the preferred preposition in British grammar, believe it or not). And those are just the British ones. Czechisms are wrong in any language, yet it no longer sounds wrong to me when someone asks “Can I have a question?” I have grown perfectly happy with people’s discussions of the best way how to do something or another, and anymore I cannot honestly tell you whether it is more correct to say “I don’t usually wear plaid” or “I usually don’t wear plaid.” If you can’t tell the difference, you’re perfectly normal, but consider a similar case (“I probably won’t call her” vs. “I won’t probably call her”): Despite your ignorant bliss, there are rules for these things, which foreign learners of the language you can so glibly mumble even in your sleep have to memorize. The end result? My language has been contaminated, and I fear it will never be pure again.

As far as the orals are concerned, everyone has been doing pretty well for most of the week, although I was offered a direct contrast to what I’ve heard referred to in America as “grade inflation.” My experience in school tells me that an A is to be strived for, a B is acceptable but reveals that you never did the homework, and to receive a C is practically as embarrassing as failure. I won’t even mention the D or the F, because high school weeded out the people who get grades like that; they’re happily spreading tar on some highway these days. We are so intent on making everyone feel special that giving a poor grade hurts us as much as the student. We don’t want to label anyone a failure out of fear that it will hurt his self-esteem, so we give him a C at least for trying, even if he didn’t. I noticed this tendency in myself last week as my students waltzed in pairwise for the round of orals that C. and I administered. We gave As to the good students and Bs to most of the rest, which left Cs for only the really poor ones. We gave nothing lower.

In the Souborná Zkouška (“Qualifying Exam”) committee I’m sitting on this week with three Czechs, however, the scale is noticeably different. There are no unique and delicate snowflakes here. Only the three or four exemplary students received As, a few very good students received Bs, and the bulk of the bell curve received Cs. My Czech colleagues were not afraid to hand out Ds, and their system even has an E to better specify exactly how sub-par some students really are.

The thing that surprised me was how the students took the news. I felt just a little embarrassed for the first student when the head of the committee revealed that she would receive a C, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. She was content to be average. The D students took it in stride; some even seemed relieved. The eyes of the select few, though, those shining diamonds among the coal-dark masses, lit up to hear that they’d been awarded the much-coveted A; it was as if Don Pardo was announcing that they’d won a BRAAAAND NOOOOO CAAAAR! or that a donor kidney had finally been found for their dying mother.

At one point today, the opinion of the committee was overwhelming and I was forced to fail a student for the first time ever. This girl, who has some sort of disability—perhaps cerebral palsy, though I can’t tell for sure—started sobbing when we called her back into the room to announce her failure. I genuinely felt bad for her, because she had applied herself quite diligently throughout the year and was actually one of the harder-working students I’d had. Her English pronunciation simply sucks, and the committee agreed that she should spend the summer working on it. We failed another girl shortly thereafter. She took it much more stoically than the first, but she still ran out of the room without a word as soon as she could.

I began to enjoy the strange feeling of power I felt surging in my veins. I hadn’t felt such a feeling of power over someone’s life since my mom made a late-night call to the house of a girl I saw briefly during the summer after my freshman year at U of I. I had driven into Chicago to hang out with her one night, and we stayed out until early in the morning. At some point, my mom became worried and called the girl’s house to see if I’d left. The girl’s parents were pretty old school and viewed that phone call as such a public humiliation that they grounded the poor girl for the rest of the summer. That might explain why we had only two dates (though a contributing role may also have been played by my failure to live up to the expectations about my personality engendered in her by the Joy Division tee-shirt I always wore back then). Regardless, in much the same way that poor Eva will curse our names all summer long as she practices softening her final consonants and eliding her word transitions, Jodie must have cursed my name every night she spent watching TV with her iron-fisted parents. This isn’t the kind of power that most people dream of, but it’s more than some people ever get. I have hardened my heart against the suffering of others, and the tears of my students no longer arouse my compassion. I look forward to failing more students tomorrow, just because I can. I am now drunk with power. Nothing can stop me.

Looking for housing in a country where you don't speak a word of the language is not easy. Early last July, when we first arrived in Brno and needed to find an apartment, we had no choice but to enlist the help of Petra, the English department secretary. After making a trip to the bulletin board downtown where landlords post available housing, she made some phone calls and arranged a couple of visits for us. She had to accompany us in order to translate. (Czech is not an easy language to learn. After a year o