happy birthday to me...

Gumbo at Liuzza's.
Dinner at Jacque-Imo's.
Rebirth at the Maple Leaf.

All good.

NOLA

I've spent a fair bit of time in New Orleans. I lived in the city for one glorious, liver-damaging summer. My post-college job was 100 miles north, and I made sure to spend as much time down in the city as I could. I spent most of my time in the French Quarter-to-Uptown crescent of the city, the oldest part of New Orleans and the closest to the Mississippi river. This is, of course, the part where all the tourist highlights are, but it also incorporates plenty of local neighborhoods and authentic New Orleans character.
I tried to get out and see the rest of the city, as well. Driving the streets, taking random turns, seeing the areas I never had reason to visit. There are few cities as easy to get lost in as New Orleans; the streets have no 90-degree angles or grid pattern. When I lived here, I had experiences of trying to simply go around a block and ending up in the city's suburbs before I could re-orient myself. This is maddening when you are trying to find something in particular, but a quite agreeable trait when you want to soak up the city.
Before Monday, however, I'm fairly certain I'd never wandered into the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The area gained national infamy during the Katrina coverage as one of the hardest-hit areas after the levee breaks.
Before heading to the Ninth Ward, I'd gotten a feel for just how raw the Katrina damage, how much the devastation must continue to affect daily life for so many people. On the train ride in, driving around town, I saw the rows of houses boarded up, gutted, abandoned. I saw residential blocks with rows of FEMA trailers in every front yard.

Ninth Ward, New Orleans
Originally uploaded by Harrison414

But nothing I saw compared to the sheer devastation present in the Lower Ninth above Claiborne. Nearly two years after the disaster, much of the debris has been picked up. Streets are not lined with houses, not even damaged houses. Streets are lined with weeds, through which you can grab glimpses of concrete foundations, steps which once led to now-missing houses. Blocks might have one, or two, or three house shells remaining, serving to accentuate the missing. This was once a residential community. A community with problems, with poverty, but a community with people and with homes. Now it's a ghost.

Much of my old New Orleans is up and running. The old and relatively high-lying areas around the river - the French Quarter, Downtown, the Garden District, Uptown, Magazine Street - look much as they did before the storm. The Superdome and Convention Center leave no clue of the horrible days the displaced endured there. There are signs of the storm - every other building on Canal Street remains boarded up, as do many elsewhere. A tourist in town for a few days, especially one in town for the first time, could leave with the impression New Orleans has put Katrina behind.

In a way, it's a shame so much of the damage occured so far from the New Orleans the rest of the country knows. The tragedy New Orleans endured and is enduring, has, I think, faded from the national consciousness. Outside, Katrina was a tragedy, was a horrible thing.
Inside New Orleans, you can tell, it still is.

Originally uploaded by mr_nightshade

One of the few things about the States I missed in my time overseas was a good cheeseburger. Thanks probably to the global fast-food chains, hamburgers are on the cheap-eats menu everywhere, at least in the English-speaking world, but perhaps also because of the global fast-food chains, something gets lost in the translation.
I ate plenty of burgers in New Zealand and Australia, and not one left me satisfied. There was a variety of reasons, usually starting with the meat - it seemed the ground beef was more often than not cut with with soy protein or some such thing to bulk it up. Even if the meat was right, there was always something off, such as the sweet-rather-than-salty ketchup Down Under. Apparently the just-right combination of a ground beef patty with cheese melted into its very essence topped with a lightly grilled or toasted bun and accesorized with some mix of toppings, just isn't one easily hit on outside the States.
(I did find one great burger during the 15 months we spent overseas. It was in north Thailand, of all places, at a little burger counter opened by an American Vietnam vet.)

I've had a chance to catch up on my burger shortage. In Atlanta I nearly had an overdose. The "Coronary Bypass" at the Vortex wasn't even close to the biggest or best burger I ate last week.

The Ghetto Burger at Ann's Snack Bar is not only the largest single object of ground beef I have ever eaten. It's more than a burger, it's an experience.
For one thing, you can't just waltz up and expect to grab a burger. Ann, who has been running the Snack Bar for about 35 years, serves the people sitting at the nine stools inside. If you get there when the stools are full, as I'm sure they always are, you wait until there's a space. We arrived at 3 p.m. There were about eight people ahead of us waiting to get inside. We finally made it to one of the coveted stools around 4:15.
(As the lady waiting next to us said when a couple bailed after waiting about 15 minutes: "You got to want it.")
Once we took our seats, it was another 45-minute wait for the burgers. This wasn't due to lack of service, it was because the burgers were made to with care. Patties at least two inches thick covered the entire grill. Onions were grilled, buns were toasted, bacon was deep-fried (I knew I would love the finished product as soon as I saw the raw bacon loaded into a fry basket).
When we finally were handed our Ghetto Burgers, we had in front of us a double-cheeseburger (each two-inch think patty must have weighed at least three-quarters of a pound) topped with bacon, onion, lettuce and, wonderfully, chili.

I finished the burger. My body complained for the rest of the day. It was totally worth it.

(And I'm not the only one who thinks so.)

the dirty south

My week in Atlanta was mostly a culinary tour of the city. I was more interested in hanging out with friends that I hadn't seen since well before I left the country, so I didn't feel a need to hit up all the tourist sites.
I did do a fair bit of driving around the city, though, and I was struck by the very different character of different spots in the city.
Here's how Atlanta appeared to me: islands of new, wealthy, trendy or commercial areas surrounded by seas either of wooded residential neighborhoods or the grit of the poorer, urban, mostly black Atlanta.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Atlanta. The stories about its rapid growth over the last decade or so rang true - it seemed much of the city was either under construction or had obviously been built recently. The interstates were strained by the traffic load even at 2 p.m. It is spread, or sprawled, out but this also seems to lead to several different neighborhood areas carving out their own identity.
Riding around Atlanta I found it difficult to keep my bearings; every trip from one area of the city to another seemed to require driving through winding, wooded streets before popping out at whichever business district we were looking for.
Downtown is a big more straight-forward, but once you get out of the high-rise corridor, you run across the gritty underbelly of the South's population hub.


I didn't completely miss out on Atlanta's sights - we spent time at the High Museum of Art, caught a baseball game at Turner Field and walked along the street where Martin Luther King, Jr. was born, now a National Historic Site. The houses on the block are generally well-kept and newly painted, although even here the processes which have led to the blight of the inner city and explosive growth of the suburbs are at work; the house next door to MLK's childhood home is abandoned.

I've been in Atlanta two and a half days, and my only impressions of the city so far is this: the food seems designed to kill rather than nourish.
Today I ordered a meal that was listed on the receipt thusly: "1 coronary bypass, med."

And today was actually a detox day. After meeting up with friends in D.C. Friday night and lots more friends here in Atlanta Saturday night, being behind on sleep and going out for a while again last night, a detox day was needed. Mostly, I think more sleep is needed.

Tomorrow, I'll venture into the city rather than just the bars and apartments of friends. At least that's the plan.

There are lots of things about New Zealand I took for granted while I was living there and had forgotten about. Living in the States again has highlighted some of the little differences again, such as the Kiwi practice of everyone always thanking the bus driver when they get off a city bus.
Riding around in D.C., I just can't imagine anyone doing such a thing. I'm also not sure what the response would be; probably suspicion on the more local bus lines. Today I did see bus drivers patiently helping out tourists, which I wasn't expecting. Some of the grateful tourists thanked the driver, but those don't count in terms of the point I'm trying to make here.
I guess the point is, I'm far more rude here to my bus drivers when I leave their bus, at least if total indifference on both our parts is judged as rude.

An uncle visiting New Zealand reminded me of the country's native Moa, one of the largest birds of all time but which is now extinct.

However, Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand, has recreated what they think the Moa's call sounded like, based on the size of its neck and vocal cords and other factors.

Hear the Moa here.

ferry fun

As the porthole exploded inward and I was drenched with a couple gallons of sea water, shipwreck movies were running through my head. When the ocean starts to crack the windows and flood the ship, it's time for the characters to panic. A few of my fellow passengers were eager enough to pick up the cue.
About all I could do was sit there, muscles tensed, clutching the armrests of my seat and watching as a skinny Thai crew member was nearly bucked off the bow of the ship as he lashed a sheet of metal over the hole where a window used to be.
On our way in to Koh Pha-Ngan the ferry ride was no sweat; it was a relief after an overnight bus ride from Bangkok. After a couple of nights partying and days doing exactly nothing on the island, it was time to head back to Bangkok and finish our time in Southeast Asia.
The morning weather on the island was fine. I didn't notice the rough seas until we got on the boat - a modern catamaran accommodating more than a hundred people. The route was in two hour-long steps: Koh Pha-Ngan to Koh Tao, another island off the Southeastern Thailand coast, then on to the mainland.
As soon as we left Koh Pha-Ngan, the boat was rocking in five-to-10-foot swells. Just big enough to throw me into my first bout with seasickness. I managed to avoid any personal food expulsion, but when we pulled into Koh Tao I was fighting nausea. During a layover on Koh Tao I popped a seasickness pill (a great decision) and my stomach decided it didn't need to scream at me anymore and settled into a sulking grumble.
By this time the sky had turned gray and a few short downpours had all the passengers huddled with their luggage in the snack bar or under the waiting area's roof. The scheduled layover dragged on, and word spread the boat from the mainland - which would take us to shore - was running late.

Eventually we loaded up. The rain forced the crew to move all luggage inside the passenger compartment, rather than the normal practice of piling it on the front deck. As the ferry pulled away from the dock, it became apparent the wait had only intensified the waves. The swells now were 10-15 feet, and every time the boat rose up on a wave, it violently slammed down into the water on the other side. It felt like we were constantly being picked up and dropped a few feet onto a parking lot. The boat shuddered on every landing, then made another rapid ascent up the next wave. In the brief instant of weightlessness at each peak, my stomach kept going up even as the rest of my body started to drop with the boat. Each parabola of rise and fall also propelled me up off my seat, and then back down, unless I physically held myself tight to the chair.
Eventually, the impacts took their toll - the plastic casing around some florescent lights at the front of the cabin came loose, crashing into a group of already-nervous passengers. One girl in particular ended up with more of her blood outside her leg than she would have preferred. Just as the crew had gotten her panic attack under control and moved her to the rear rows of the cabin, a far more alarming wave hit.
Instead of hitting this wave head-on, the boat was at a bit of an angle. The front right corner led as the boat tilted down into a trough, and the boat was stilled dipped when the wave crashed over the corner of the deck and up into the front of the boat with enough force to blow out a window. That's when I became soaked with saltwater and starting thinking about shipwreck movies, as well as the two-paragraph stories on ferry sinkings in developing countries; the deaths always well outnumber the survivors, by about 100 to 1.
The people across the aisle from me had pieces of glass coating them, along with sea water. Those passengers who weren't simply stunned by the event voiced some concern.

"We're going to die!"
Comforting to all, of course.
"We must go back!"
This one gained some traction among the group; we were only about 15 minutes into the trip and could still see the dock behind us. The Thai crew did their best to talk everyone down, although most people shouting were more interesting in voicing their opinion than listening to anyone else. A few individuals defused the crowd by pointing out the captain was likely better qualified than the screaming passengers to make such a decision. The captain, above in his cabin and unseen by the passengers, did make one concession to the situation by slowing down considerably. With a bit less momentum, the boat avoided any more waves breaking into the boat. The crew passed out doses of menthol oil which served two purposes: for one, it was calming and seemed to combat both seasickness and the low-level anxiousness which the roiling sea induced.
It also masked the scent of the passengers whose seasickness got the better of them; once one or two passengers' stomachs sent their contents outward, the urge was contagious. It also wasn't helped by the seasickness bags the crew passed out, which happened to be clear plastic.
The hour-long trip instead took more like two and a half. The surreal sense of the whole trip was only heightened by the TV monitors playing "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" in the corners of the cabin. Although I suppose it was better than "Titanic," or "Poseidon."




There is a postscript to this story. Our journey from the islands to Bangkok was supposed to take about 12 hours, putting us in Bangkok around 11 p.m. that night. Instead, the tropical depression off the coast delayed and slowed our ferry, which meant we missed our bus connection. We ended up arriving in Bangkok at about 4 a.m. We had no room reservation (a concept that doesn't exist in Asian backpacker budget accommodation). We walked along the backpacker area and found a room available for about 800 baht, or $20. Instead of taking it, we searched for another 45 minutes until we found a room for about 500 baht, or $12.50. A month in SE Asia will seriously screw with your cost-comparison calculations. We seriously felt the first room was simply too expensive to even consider, even though we were exhausted and it was 4 in the morning. Instead, we sacrificed an hour of sleep - when we knew we'd have to check out of either place in the morning - to save about eight bucks.
It didn't even strike us as unusual at the time. In a month traveling around Thailand, Laos and Cambodia we probably paid an average of $7-8 a night for accommodation, and that's double beds and private rooms, not the dorm beds we paid $20/night each in Australia. In SE Asia, most restaurants posted their menu (in English) outside. After a week or so, we'd look at the menus, and if any one item cost more than the equivalent of $2.50 or so, the place was too expensive and we'd find somewhere else.
Then, in Iceland, we stayed at the Salvation Army, in dorm beds, in separate rooms, and paid the equivalent of about $40/night each for the privilege. If we wanted blankets, it was an extra $7/night.

One year ago...

...I was complaining about the lack of central heating in New Zealand.

And we were preparing to leave Wellington for the final time. Doesn't seem like it's been anywhere near a year. We went driving around the city, exploring a few corners we hadn't seen in our months living in the city, and checking out a little-used viewing area of the city.

Downtown Wellington from Tinakori Hill









I still have a ton of stuff from our trip I've been meaning to get up here. I realize I need to do it quickly, or it's going to lose even more relevance. At this point, it's more to help out my own memory. So hopefully I'll put up a few travel dispatches from places I didn't get to blog about at the time.

I'm also going to be taking a shorter trip soon - this weekend I'm flying to Atlanta to see some friends there and in New Orleans/Southern Mississippi. Back in D.C. in June, then have to seriously start worrying about getting a job (and our upcoming wedding).

i love living in a city, but...

Last night we ended up out late. When we got home, it took me literally an hour to find a spot to park the car.
Even better, our temporary parking permit expired yesterday. While we wait for our new license plates and registration to arrive from Montana (so we can get a longer-term temporary permit) I'll be moving the car every two hours today to comply with our neighborhood's parking regulations.

(narrow) roads of the world

During the year in New Zealand many differences between there and here faded from my notice as "there" became "home," at least temporarily. But I never stopped marveling at the difference in the open roads. Even the major roads in New Zealand can turn into narrow, winding mountain roads. And the road is liable to turn into a single lane anytime there's a bridge of any kind, even if the bridge in question is just a few feet long and crossing a stream. At least the NZ road authority is nice enough to put up signs warning you of every one-lane bridge, and telling you exactly who has the right of way when you and another car arrive at opposite ends at the same time.



And there is, as you can see, at least one bridge in the country that with a single lane caters to two-way automobile traffic as well as the occasional train. (Trains always have the right of way).

Then we left New Zealand, and found the roads progressively get narrower. From New Zealand's one-lane bridges, we went to Scotland's one-and-half lane roads.

One-lane road with passing places
Originally uploaded by kopretinka.

The Scots do provide plenty of passing places, or spots just long enough for a car and just wide enough for two cars. In some lengths of road, there are so many passing places one side of the road appears to trace a sine wave.

Nevertheless, Ireland tops them all. The Irish just pave a lane one car wide, put stone walls on each side with no shoulder or margin of any kind, and then just throw them open to traffic in both directions. There were places I was afraid I was going to scrape both sides of my car on the rows of stacked stone, and that was before I met someone coming the other direction. I got lucky in Ireland; unlike some New Zealand trips, on the Emerald Isle I never had to back down a road after meeting another vehicle in order to reach an area wide enough for the both of us.



The entire time I was driving the Conor Pass part of my brain was filled with curiosity about what, exactly, would happen if we met another car. Another part was dreading an encounter. Most of my brain, however, was occupied with trying to keep the car on the narrow road as we wound up the hills in a dense fog.
Ireland's highest mountain pass might not stack up with the high-altitude drives of the Rockies. But the Irish certainly put a decent degree of difficulty on the whole thing.

a secure, undisclosed location

I now live about 1/2 mile from Dick Cheney. Not that you'd know it without doing some research. The house of the No. 2 executive is harder to get close to than his boss' house.
The grounds of the US Naval Observatory, where the Vice President residence is located, is completely fenced off and all entry points are guarded. That's not so surprising. The fact you can barely catch a glimpse of the house from the street isn't surprising. This being DC, the fact there is no sign or other acknowledgement it is theVP's residence is a bit surprising.

The real surprising thing is that you can't even see the place online. At least not with Google maps or Google Earth. Yahoo! maps still has the area in high resolution, at least last time I checked.

back in the day

Old Baylor Park-6
Originally uploaded by jmtimages.

In contrast to the previous post...

(The lowest I remember is filling up for 79.9 cents a gallon in St. Louis in college - sometime around 1998).

i'm glad I live on a bus line...

DC Gas prices
Originally uploaded by Focused.

In abstract theory terms, I don't necessarily think higher gas prices are a bad thing (although it'd be nice if there was some sort of infrastructure to allow more people to get by without using gas first).
However, it's a little bit of a shock to see prices jump 15 cents in a week. When I got here, I filled up in DC for $2.959/gallon, a price that was a few cents lower than most stations in the area. Today, I put in a few gallons at $3.099 per, a price I was happy to see - it was at least 10 cents below anything else I saw. (And I actually found that price in Maryland).

Rock Creek Park

Rock Creek Park
Originally uploaded by Mad African/Appler!.

It's also a little fun to walk out of your house onto a city park trail, and see that it's technically a National Park. Where all the neighbors are walking their dogs.

what i've learned today

When you're fat and out of shape, here's a tip if you'd like to run for more than five minutes at a time.

Start Slower.

the rest of the tour

So below you can see one shot of my street - here's a few more.
We're a few blocks off the businesses of Wisconsin Ave, and a few one-way and dead-end streets set the area off from the traffic. In the photo there's actually available parking, which isn't the case once the sun goes down. And I'm not looking forward to the headache coming up as we try to get a permanent parking pass.

The basement we're inhabiting isn't quite big enough for all our stuff - most of which has been packed up since we left the country in late '05. At the time, we thought we cut down all our possessions. Now I don't know where we'll put it all, especially since our closet is about a foot wide. I did get the important stuff worked out - the computer, TV and stereo are all hooked together after a run to Radio Shack for $25 worth of cables. So my clothes are all over the place, but I can download, watch and listen all through electronic entertainment bundle.

Our basement falls in the middle of a block of row houses, which I'm sure look nicer now than they will in November.

On the other side, where the entry/exit point to our humble basement actually leads, is the alley, and on the other side Whitehaven Park, part of Rock Creek park, which takes up most of North-central DC.

Today I made up my mind to go running for an hour in the park. I made it about 5 minutes. I was actually out moving in the park for an hour, but I only managed to run about a quarter of the time. Bad showing. Since I've got no real employment to worry about, I guess I'll have to work at that.

The neighborhood

The neighborhood
Originally uploaded by slack13.

Gotta say, this is a good time of year to get to DC. It was in the mid-80s yesterday, but no humidity yet, and stuff is flowering everywhere. Doesn't hurt we're a few blocks off a main strip but tucked away out of the traffic and our apartment back door opens onto a park.
I understand it's not always this nice - few people brag about DC's wonderful weather. But it makes for a nice introduction.