Pi Chi always wanted to go to Bora Bora or Palau for our honeymoon. Bora Bora is a few lottery tickets out of our price range and Palau does nothing for me. Although I suspect if I ever go there I may change my mind. Sometime during the summer one of her papers was accepted to a conference in Mexico City. The conference was scheduled for right in the middle of what would be our honeymoon. I have not had real Mexican food in years and would gladly go to Yucatan or one of those places the Love Boat docked just to eat, but I do not want to honeymoon in Mexico City. I do not want to go to Mexico City for any reason. I convinced Pi Chi that Mexico City is not the greatest vacation spot in the world.
But then the head doctor type at her hospital got his own paper accepted. He wanted to go because he has relatives in Los Angeles and the easiest way to fly from here to there is to connect in LA. The hospital will pay for any trips to anywhere up to a point as long as a publishable paper is involved, and the head doctor offered to pay for the business class upgrades he required. The original plan was for Pi Chi to go with him and two other nurses to Los Angles for two days and then on to Mexico City for the conference. I was not in the equation for several reasons. I had already made my opinion of Mexico City clear and Dr Head was not going to pay for me to fly business class and stay at a nicer hotel. Dr Head also has a bit of a crush on Pi Chi, not on me.
The idea of Pi Chi flying to another continent with the boss of her boss did not bother me. She constantly reminds me of how old I am and this guy is even older. He is also a doctor, and working as a nurse for as long as Pi Chi has has convinced her that doctors are the last people you want to have any extracurricular relationships with. Plus if you draw a line between Brad Pitt and a baboon, he is much closer than I to the baboon. This does not imply that I am near Mr Pitt; only that I am farther away from the monkey.
We decided that we could honeymoon in Palau after the conference.
My primary concern with Pi Chi going to Mexico is that it is in Mexico. She comes from a culture where one can walk down the street while counting one’s cash one just removed from an automated teller machine. She and pretty much every other woman around here regularly leaves her purse open. Car doors are not always locked and parking a car anywhere is always an option. Your grandmother and young child can walk down any dark alley at any time of night. Guns are very illegal and kidnapping is unheard of. You could have your child wait outside while you go into a KTV for special service and she will still be there when you come out.
This is not Mexico City.
Most of your Chinese types are scared shitless when it comes to South Africa. They see it the way June Cleaver might see Florence and Normandie. It is generally assumed amongst the Chinese that any visit to South Africa will result in death and destruction. Or at least some kind of syringe attack wherein a large black savage forces AIDS-infected blood into some innocent Chinese arm. The Chinese are unapologetically racist and blacks are far higher on their terror alert chart than whites. And these are people who tell their children that whitey will eat them while they sleep if they are bad.
When we went to South Africa I had to convince Pi Chi that she would not only survive, but would likely not face any type of crime whatsoever. Not that my Magic 8 Ball is ever very accurate, but I know that most crime in South Africa is racially segregated. Black criminals mostly target black victims. White criminals mostly target white victims. There are simply not enough Chinese in South Africa for Pi Chi to worry.
When she decided to go to Mexico City I told her that all her paranoia about South Africa should apply. This has less to do with my own prejudice against cholos and is more about every statistic sheet in the world telling you that a foreigner is over one thousand times more likely to be kidnapped in Mexico than in South Africa.
But I liked the idea of having some time at home alone. I am fully prepared to spend the rest of my life with Pi Chi. It is worth mentioning that I assume I will not live very long. Regardless, there are times I just want her to get out of the house. If she went to Mexico for a week or more I could get some peace and quiet. Pi Chi is like a child in some ways. She told me this just yesterday and I agree. If we are both home at the same time I cannot do anything that does not involve her. She needs my constant attention when I have things to do, but is perfectly self-sufficient when I have no plans.
On the other hand I was never really comfortable with her going to Mexico without me.
Before I could worry about it Pi Chi got a paper accepted to a conference in Paris. This solved everything. Pi Chi loves Paris because it is where rich snobs shop and it is where I proposed. A honeymoon there seemed appropriate. But then she had to tell Dr Boss.
The Paris and Mexico conferences were at about the same time. She had already accepted Dr Head’s offer and turning it down would only make her lose face. This is a big issue to these people. But Paris is Paris and nobody around here talks about all the great shopping in Mexico. Dr Boss was disappointed, especially when the other nurses backed out and he had to go alone, but he paid the fees for her paper to be submitted to the Mexico conference anyway.
Pi Chi was one step away from getting a visa to Mexico and now she had to get a Schengen visa. This took longer than it should because she likes to do everything at the last minute and there is a new rule that forces some foreigners to get health insurance. Apparently the Europeans are tired of people from countries with universal health care going to their hospitals for every minor thing. People around here go to the hospital when they sneeze. Americans do not need insurance because we can have an appendage severed and talk about sleeping it off.
For weeks I told Pi Chi that if she did not get the visa in time I would go without her. She thought I was joking but once everything was paid for I was going to go no matter what. As much as I like spending time alone at home, I like traveling alone more. Pi Chi wants to see the history and culture long enough to say that she saw it, whereas I have been known to sit in front of Het korporaalschap van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq en luitenant Willem van Ruytenburch at the Rijksmuseum all afternoon. It takes a lot longer to really see the painting than to say its name. Conversely, Pi Chi can spend an entire day in a department store picking up every single item while I stand against a wall like a zombie humming Krofft Supershow theme songs to my imaginary hand puppet friend, Lester. In a place like Paris I want to go to the Louvre, Montmartre and that sandwich shop on Rue d’Anjou. They have very good sandwiches. The less time I spend at Louis Vuitton the better.
We arrived in Paris at the end of an unusual warm spell and the weather could not have been better. Unfortunately, the weather could not have been better so everyone who was in Paris at the time was out on the town. We walked down les Avenue des Champs-Élysées because that was where we first went on our first trip to Paris. It is our Memory Lane. That was where we ate our first ridiculously overpriced meal, where we saw Woody Allen’s “Match Point” and where Louis Vuitton drained the very essence of whatever was left of my soul. We have since learned that eating in Paris need not require a bank loan. There was a large line to enter Louis Vuitton so just having a quick look around was never an option. Apparently people are willing to wait in line all day simply to enter Louis Vuitton. There was no line on our first trip but that was in January. Everything has fewer lines when the beggars taking a leak on trees get stuck. And the theater was playing nothing but crap.
Walking down the Champs-Élysées was like walking in Tokyo Disneyland. Except that every single man, woman, child and dog in Paris smokes. If you have ever been to Tokyo Disneyland you know that it is just stupid crowded. Kind of like the Champs-Élysées on an unusually warm October afternoon.
I have mentioned once or twice to anyone who will listen that the Chinese are the most selfish people in the world. They drive the way they walk and they walk as though no one else is on the planet. The more crowded it is the more oblivious they are to the existence of others. But I found people acting Chinese in Paris.
When I was a child we were supposed to move out of the way of adults. This was something they called courtesy. As an adult I find myself moving out of the way of children. If I did not they would run into me. They are probably staring at me with their mouths wide open, but they cannot see me anyway. I could walk down the street maniacally wielding a flamethrower and lightsaber and everyone would still walk into me while staring directly at me. I also move aside for old people. This seems normal to me. But it is alien to not only the Chinese but also Parisiens. On the Champs-Élysées I saw old people moving aside for adults who moved aside for children. This seems backward to me. Perhaps because I am old. I should have been a child after children were put in charge.
Something that bothers me but probably should not is when people completely block the only available path even though they likely know that other people exist. Chinese people always stop in doorways and at the ends of escalators. Always. If there is only one way to walk through there is probably a Chinese person standing there. And they love to jump in front of me and come to a dead stop. But this is less annoying on foot than it is in a car. This trip to Paris showed me that Parisiens are just as inconsiderate as Chinese.
When I am photographing popular landmarks I usually lean against a lamp post or wall-type object. Not only because this helps stabilize the camera but also because it gets me out of everyone else’s way. When I wanted to photograph the Louvre from large steps where hundreds of people were walking I stood behind a couple who were sitting on the steps. Pi Chi asked me why I was standing there and not in the middle of the steps where inconsiderate tourists were taking their pictures. I pointed out that by standing behind the couple I was not blocking the flow of traffic in any way. This blew her mind since, as a Chinese person, she would have never considered it. The couple also offered me protection since most of the traffic was moving uphill and I was facing the same direction.
When we arrived in Paris we wanted to check in to our hotel. Because we are conventional like that. We, meaning I, dragged a large suitcase through the city’s metro system and on the sidewalks near our hotel. We had a large suitcase because Pi Chi likes to bring what she knows she needs, what she thinks she needs, what she thinks she might need, and what she thinks she might possibly want to look at or think about looking at at some time during the trip. She would have loved living in the age of steamer trunks. She could almost fit what she brings on a weekend trip into one of those.
The Paris metro system if very efficient and goes pretty much everywhere within Paris. But it sucks fat hobos if you have a large suitcase. Escalators are rare. Elevators even more so. There is probably a reason I have never seen someone in a wheelchair on the metro. Most of the stations and transfer areas rely on a labyrinth of stairs. I think the people in charge of the Paris metro are under the impression that regular humans do not carry large suitcases anymore. They may be right since I was the only person I saw carrying a large suitcase. It could be that the large suitcase types use taxis, but taxis in Paris are more expensive than lunch on the Champs-Élysées.
When we finally got out of the metro I had to drag that suitcase to our hotel. Unfortunately, we arrived in Paris at the end of an unusual warm spell and everyone who was in Paris at the time was out on the town. When I am walking down the street and I see someone with a large suitcase I move out of their way. Not because I am a great hero but because it is the decent thing to do. And I do not want to get hit with that large suitcase. But when I am walking down the street with a large suitcase I have to move out of everyone else’s way. And at least half of them blocked my path, forcing me to take the long way. And they were all smoking. I found myself thinking that maybe the Chinese are not alone in their selfish assbag ways.
My faithlessness in mankind was fortunately restored when we returned home and I had to drive to work. Nothing shows the selfishness of the Chinese like their driving.
The hotel on our first trip to Paris was on the Right Bank, in the 8th arrondissement. It was on a quiet residential street between a Monoprix with excellent cookies and a metro stop, not too terribly far from the Champs-Élysées. It was a very nice hotel and a good choice for a honeymoon. But it is beyond Pi Chi’s hospital’s price range. Our hotel on this trip was on the Left Bank, in the 5th arrondissement’s Quartier latin. Pi Chi was not impressed with the hotel, even though I convinced the front desk clerk to give us a room with a balcony for no extra charge by promising her our first born, until I took her past the selfish smoking assbags and around the corner where she saw the Seine and this:
She also liked the fact that the hotel was completely surrounded by food.
Pi Chi and I are fundamentally incompatible when it comes to food. She eats the standard five Chinese meals each day. Breakfast is whenever they wake up, usually early. Brunch is not like an American brunch but rather a quick meal after you get to work but before lunch; about 9 am. Lunch is at noon. It generally lasts 90 minutes and the entire country stops. Afternoon tea is another quick meal after lunch and before it is time to go home; usually around 3 pm. Dinner is at 5. There is also a standard snack time anywhere from 10 pm and midnight.
I eat two meals on a slow day. More likely one meal and a snack. I rarely wake up before 9 am. Experience has shown me that eating when I wake up is a bad idea so I tend to let a few hours go before I have breakfast. By then lunch is ending for the people around me and Pi Chi has already eaten three bowls of soup, a dozen dumplings, a bowl of noodles, a bowl of rice and various parts of various mammals. I usually have a bagel.
Pi Chi will have another two bowls of soup, more dumplings, more rice and/or noodles and even more chopped up carcass by the time I get home and have dinner. Sometimes I have rice. Sometimes I have noodles. I like to live on the edge.
We never eat at the same time. I could never possibly eat as many meals as she does and even if I did we would not eat together. She works banker’s hours. I work babysitter’s hours. We never eat the same food. Chinese people like Chinese food. When they travel abroad they seek out Chinese food. When I was in Kenya my driver told me that Chinese tour groups always bring crates of food with them. There is little Chinese food on the Serengeti. I have nothing against Chinese food but I like a little variety now and then. I make most of my own food while Pi Chi buys from “restaurants”. This is not nearly as expensive as it sounds since a restaurant could be little more than plastic stools around some guy’s blue truck. And the little stalls really do have better food than most real restaurants anyway.
On rare occasions Pi Chi will eat something I have made. She thinks I am a great cook and often begs me to make something for her. Keep in mind that she gets most of her food from shacks and trucks so her definition of great cooking might not be the same as yours or mine. But whenever I make something for her she takes a bite or two and never finishes. I would take this personally but it is less about taste and more about the fact that she probably snacked on tiny fishes and dessicated fruits the entire time I was making her food. Even some quick sautéed tomatoes with garlic, basil and olive oil on grilled garlic bread takes longer than the noodles and fish eyeballs she gets from the back of a truck. She simply does not have the patience for my roasted potatoes and mushrooms. And I never make Chinese food.
On our first trip to Paris Pi Chi mostly ate at a Chinese restaurant around the corner from our hotel. I ate food from all over the place. The only time I can get genuine non-Chinese food is when I travel. Most of the foreigners around here go to places like Thailand and Amsterdam for the drugs and whores. I go for the food. I usually eat like a Chinese on vacation. In quantity, not quality. I ate a lot of sandwiches on our first Paris trip. A sandwich is such a simple thing but so hard to do at home. You cannot make a great sandwich with mediocre bread. Predictably, Pi Chi’s favorite Paris sandwich was at the Louvre. Paris is engorged with sandwich stands but the one she liked the most was from an overpriced tourist shop.
Since the hotel on this trip was surrounded by restaurants, I never ate at the same one twice. We were within a very short walk to Italian, French, Mexican, Greek, Indian, Tunisian, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. The local Monoprix did not have cookies but there was an Arab pizza shop nearby with horrible looking pizza and some of the best cookies I have ever eaten. They also had very cold Pepsi, which is a find in a city that prefers tepid Coke. I took the Pepsi challenge a long time ago. Pepsi is like mother’s milk. As far as I know. Coke is like brucellosic dog urine. Nevermind how I know. Oddly enough I did not have a single sandwich on this trip.
Pi Chi loved being surrounded by a variety of restaurants.
She mostly ate Chinese food.
in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper
The purpose of our trip was to honeymoon but what made it possible was Pi Chi’s conference. So while her goal was to get her paper published my goal was to do the things I could not do the last time.
I hobbled around Paris on a cane during our first trip because I was having a bit of gout. This did nothing for my sandwich intake but severly limited my ability to climb towers. I was completely caneless on this trip and managed to climb Sacré-Cœur (255 steps), Arc de Triomphe (284) and Notre Dame (387). We also went up Tour Eiffel and Tour Montparnasse but they have elevators. I am not the most athletic person in the world. Two or three hundred steps are something to me, especially on very narrow spiral staircases. At the top of each of these buildings I was breathing like a stoner at the end of a 10k marathon and my heart was racing like a Chinese person trying to be the first in line to the free spoonful of peanut butter at Costco. At the top of the Arc de Triomphe, our first such climb, Pi Chi thought I was being facetious until she checked my pulse. Then she suggested I sit down sooner than later. While waiting for blood to go back to my brain I saw two children who had just climbed the same steps running and jumping around. “That is why I never give up my seat to children”, I said to no one in particular. Their father laughed knowingly. He was a big sweaty piece of cow meat so he felt my pain.
You would think there are ample places for Americans and other feeble people to sit at the end of all those stairs, but there rarely are. Arc de Triomphe has a single bench for a few thousand people. Sacré-Cœur has stone seats built into the tower but no one seems to know they go all the way around, so everyone stops at the end of the stairs. Notre Dame has nothing. Just too many people in a very small space after climbing too many steps.
The views from all these towers are quite good, especially Sacré-Cœur, and it truly was a once in a lifetime experience. Because there is no way in hell I am climbing all those steps again.
Sometimes I get a free day to myself on trips with Pi Chi. In Bali Pi Chi went to a day spa while I kicked it by the pool old school. In Durban I got to hang with meerkats and explore the questionable side streets while she was at her conference. We never spent any time apart during our first trip to Paris but I arrived a few days before she did so I got to look around on my own. During this trip she had her conference. This left me with plenty of time to just wander around, which I think is the best way to explore any city. She prefers to go directly to the places in her Chinese tourist books. If it is not in the book it is not worth seeing. And even when it is in the book it should only be seen for the sake of being seen. Pi Chi took a trip to Italy before I met her. She went to something like five cities in five days. She can say she has seen the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, Ponte Vecchio and Piazza San Marco but she knows nothing about them and she never really saw anything.
When I go to a place like Paris I will likely visit Tour Eiffel. It is the law, afterall. But I also just want to walk around without having any idea where I am or where I am going. This is usually the best part of any trip for me and where I find the most memorable experiences. I have walked past Pont Neuf I have no idea how many times, but I cannot remember anything specific without seeing photographs. But casually mention Pont Louis Philippe and I will immediately remember wandering beyond Notre Dame and around the 4th arrondissment until I accidentally stumbled on a protest march on Boulevard Henri IV to the Bastille. As I made my way through the crowd to cross the street a television news crew pointed their camera at me. So I raised my fist and chanted “Résistance” along with the protestors. I have no idea if I was on the local news, but I never made it onto CNN’s repetitive loop of five images per story. The protest was about raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the people were pretty pissed about it. All was peaceful that day and it was a righteous indignation/street carnival atmosphere at the Bastille, but after we left the country things started to get violent.
From the Bastille I wandered around more quiet streets and found myself at le Mémorial de la Shoah. I have been to a few of these places and they are always too depressing. Mauthausen was eerily quiet in the cold and snow. The Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima is like any big city park. Except that it has monuments and statues to innocent people who died for no reason and a museum that graphically tells the whole story. Das Mahnmal für die 65.000 ermordeten Österreichischen Juden und Jüdinnen der Shoah in Vienna is for Jews what the Vietnam Memorial in Washington is for baby boomers. The difference in Paris was that a survivor was there and talking to people.
I am not Jewish. I have never been Jewish. I never will be Jewish. My people left Holland centuries before Germany invaded. My family had no direct involvement on either side. I had an uncle who converted to Judaism to marry a Jewish woman but I doubt he was ever very frum about it. I have seen all of Woody Allen’s films to date but otherwise I have no particular interest in the culture or religion.
But there is something terribly impressive about a people who not only survive thousands of years of persecution and near extinction but also manage to thrive wherever they go and assimilate into the local society while keeping their own culture intact. Many cultures have been destroyed from far less.
I understand why some people do not like them. They are different from the people around them. That is always asking for trouble. And Israel is so bereft of political nous that even though Americans think all Muslims are terrorists, they also invariably side with Palestine over Israel. But when you talk to someone who actually lived through the Shoah none of that matters. This is not a movie you can pause to go into the kitchen for some Ding Dongs. This is a real person describing what really happened to her and everyone she ever knew. This is far more depressing than an empty death camp.
I defy any of these deniers to talk to any survivor and still claim that it never happened. And if they can then that is irrefutable proof that they are assholes.
And, yes, I chose to end this here. I have no idea how to segue from the murder of millions of people to the pizza I had for dinner that night and do not want to try.
1 comment:
Your life is too easy. Be a man and get a real job.
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