I bought a new pair of shoes yesterday.
That shouldn't be news, but it is for me. I've always had a problem getting over to the shoe store and making a purchase. Like most real men, I only own a few pairs of shoes. A black pair for the suit, a running pair for the street, and a pair of sandals for everything else. I have never owned a brown pair of shoes in my life, not because I don't like the color brown, but because I don't have a brown belt to go with them. As for Oxblood, the name alone turns me off, and besides, red shoes are for Judy Garland.
My shoe-buying process goes something like this:
1) a girl tells me that women will only go out with men that have good shoes. This is their friendly way of saying that my shoes are either out of style, or look ragged enough to have participated in the Bataan Death March.
2) A few weeks go by, and I don't go to the shoe store. Eventually, one of the soles comes apart. (This happened with my most recent pair. I sat down on my haunches to pick something up, and SNAP, one of the soles broke in half).
3) I flop around on the broken sole for a couple of days, always meaning to go to the shoe store, but never getting around to it.
4) I go to the mall to pick something up. I walk by a couple of shoe stores, and the thought crosses my mind to go in. Then I don't.
5) I go to the mall again, and really want to buy a pair, but can't because I'm wearing sandals and, of course, I have no socks.
6) Finally, on a whim while picking up the new issue of Maxim, I stroll into the shoe store and buy one of the first pairs I see.
But not this time.
After the sole snapped, a lot of my friends complained that I needed a new pair of wheels. Let it be said here that I have big feet. Size twelve or thirteen, depending on the brand. Most of the people I know call my feet 'boats,' and whenever I retort with "You know what they say about a guy with big feet?", I usually get a response of, "Big mouth."
Anyway, I was at the mall in Rio and I thought, "Hell with it, I am going to buy a new pair of shoes." I had just come from the beach and I was wearing sandals, but I didn't care. I was going to walk in there and buy the best damn shoes they had. My last pair were Hush Puppies, and all the chicks said they made me look like a clown (because my feet are big, not because the Puppies were red). So I was going to wow them with my sense of style.
I don't speak Portuguese, but it didn't matter. I walked into the shoe store and sure enough, there was a guy there who understood what I meant when I pointed at a pair of shoes, then held up twelve fingers. He looked at my bathing suit, then my bare feet, and shrugged, motioning me to sit down.
Ten minutes later, he came out with four boxes. A real salesman. I guess he thought he was going to take the dumb Yankee for a ride. He handed me a pair of socks and told me to try the shoes on (this sock thing is pretty cool; I mentioned it to a friend later and asked her how long they had been lending people socks in case you wanted to try on shoes while wearing a bathing suit; she looked at me like I was a complete idiot).
I tried the shoes out. Pointy ones, square-toes ones, slip-on ones, and tie-up ones. It didn't matter much, because they were all too big. The guy had screwed up the conversion. He muttered that I was a size 43. (This was a tremendous ego boost. "You know what they say about a guy with REALLY big feet?") Then he disappeared and came back with four more boxes.
I tried them all on. They looked pretty good to me. I have absolutely no idea what good shoes are supposed to look like, so as long as they are black and don't seem too 'clownish,' they're all right with me. I stood in front of the mirror and checked them out, then glanced through the window and into the mall hallway. Every hot Brazilian chick that walked by was looking at me as if I were indeed a clown. It wasn't the shoes that made them smirk. It was me examining myself in a mirror in a pair of beige socks, black shoes, white hairy legs, and a bathing suit. No one can commit social suicide quite as well as I can.
I liked one pair. They weren't as pointy as the Italian elf shoes that are ready-made for nose picking, but neither were they bulbous enough to get me a job with the Ringling Brothers.
I bought them. They weren't too pricey, but they were pricey enough. I even bought a new belt to go with them. Don Juan on the way.
Later that night I went to a party and listened to Samba music and danced like a fool. I got a lot of good comments about my shoes. One girlfriend said she was 'proud of me.' Man, those Hush Puppies really must have been crap.
It was a great night. My shoes were a hit and made me feel ten feet tall. They fit perfectly and felt as if I wasn't even wearing them. They made me feel so good that when a friend and I left the bar and walked down to Copacabana Beach, I hardly noticed when the Atlantic Ocean gave them a free bath.
Shit.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Work
All right, so it's been a while since the Coyote sat his ass down and howled for a while. Usually I have a lot to say, as any of my friends (and various enemies) can attest. So why has it taken so long to write another blog and hopefully entertain people with rants on any subject under the sun?
Work.
I love my job. The only reason I don't talk about it much is because I don't want strangers reading about what I do for a living. Don't get excited. I'm not a pimp or a gunrunner, nor am I a spy for the CIA. Fact is, you've got to be very careful with blogs. Telling the world all about your family and your workplace might seem like a good idea at the time, until some idiot decides to screw you over for whatever it is you've said. Bitching about your boss or calling your mom a nag is not a good idea on the biggest party line in the universe.
Anyway, work's been taking up a lot of my time. I don't really look at it as work, because I like what I do and I get a lot perks out of it. For example, today I met a pretty cool guy who sings Latin love songs to make ends meet. After that, I went and chilled out with two young ladies who were soaking up the Brazilian sun with as much gusto as their oiled bodies could muster. Which is to say, not much.
I've never been a big fan of tanning. I find it a bore. Women covet it, but I can't understand why they use the word 'tanning' as a verb. "We're going tanning." That implies that they are going to do something. They aren't. They are going to lie down as if they've been shot by a Colt .45, and they are going to do it to the sweet sounds of Shakira coming out of their iPods.
Today's tanning episode got me thinking about work. You see, these two chicks are showgirls. That's their job. They're great friends and I love them to death. So as they were lying there, they asked me if I'd mind moving their chairs (whilst they were still lying on them) so that they could get a better angle from the sun. As women do, they had unstrapped their bikini tops and were lying on their stomachs. It was much easier for them to ask me to move the chairs, rather than tie the tops, get up, move the chairs, lie back down, and untie the tops again. So the thought crossed my mind to do it.
Then I saw something. Over their oiled, tanned, gorgeous kick-line butts, I saw a man painting a light fixture. He was sweating his balls off in the afternoon sun, paint chips all around him, the stink of varsol and epoxy in his nostrils.
I told the girls to stick it.
Point is, work is a pain in the ass for most people. I'm not one of them, and I'm lucky. The two showgirls, same thing. But most people don't enjoy what they do. I listen to people bitch about work all the time. If they aren't bitching about what goes on at work, then they bitch about the drive to work, the weather on the drive to work, the damn kids who need to be picked up after work, the good-for-nothing coffee machine that is broken in the break room, so forth. I know waiters that put in 12 hours a day for lousy tips, and I know financial advisors that want to murder the chairman of the Fed. In fact, now that I think of it, I hear a lot more bad things about work than I do good things. I bet you do, too.
It's hard to nail down what jobs are good and what jobs are bad. I hate bugs, but I once met a guy who was absolutely ecstatic about being a public health inspector. I mean, he loved it. He told me all kinds of things about cockroaches. He admired them. He told me that they are very smart and quite crafty. "Take the soda gun," he said. "People always forget to check there. I can go into a restaurant and not find one thing to gripe about. Then I take the top off the soda gun and look down the hose. Bingo. Eggs galore. Yeah, they like their sugar."
He smiled when he said that. I wanted to barf. He told me I wouldn't get hurt by roach eggs, but if it really bothered me I could just order soda in a can. Thanks.
Travelling through South America has given me a ton of choice Coyote Law #1 examples. Watching these guys build houses is as frightening as any horror movie. Nails and glass everywhere, lumber falling from the heavens, and these guys are all in bare feet. For head gear, they wear a sweat-soaked bandana or a dirty Yankees cap. (Random aside: the marketing guy for the Yankees is doing a hell of a good job; Yankees caps have dominated the entire planet, take it from me). Yet the builders look happy. Hot and tired and moving at an incredibly slow pace, but happy. And why not? In poor places, what are you going to bitch about? When you don't have something, it's hard to complain about it when it's broken.
That's the paradox of our culture. There was a dumb bumper sticker making the rounds a few years back that said, "He who dies with the most toys wins." Okay, but you have to work to get those toys. You've got to drink lousy coffee during meetings, and you have to take static from a fat blowhard that stinks of onion every time he passes by your desk. When you open up the box on the new DVD player, washer/dryer, microwave, or high-def television, you might feel like a kingpin, but you're merely forgetting the fact that you had to scrape ice off your windshield 72 times in order to buy the thing.
Work is a bitch because it's supposed to be a bitch. I complain as much as the next guy and immediately forget my own platitudes when someone pisses me off about some project or other. But then the check comes, and suddenly the angels sing from the heavens. I buy a round of drinks for the ladies, and I purchase a brand new something-or-other. Then it's back to work.
When I was a kid, I remember hearing all about how we wouldn't have to work when I was older. We'd have a ton of free time, because robots would be doing things for us, and we'd be able to fly our helicopters to the Hamptons whenever we wanted.
They lied to me, the bastards. Technology hasn't set us free from anything, because new laptops and kick-ass TVs cost money, and in order to get money, you have to do something for somebody. That's what work is, in case you've forgotten: doing something for somebody else. Unfortunately, people work harder when you pay them for it, which is why a deck built by a pro is level, and the one built by your cousin Todd is a piece of crap. I wish my job came with a billion dollar paycheck like the movie stars get, but it just ain't gonna happen. What most people do for a living doesn't have as big a price tag as what the movie star does. For some reason, millions of people want to watch Julia Roberts cry, but they don't want to see a guy shovel dirt. Strange.
So yes, work has taken up a lot of my time lately. But as said, I can't bitch. At least, not right now. But give me five minutes, and I'm sure I can think of something...
Work.
I love my job. The only reason I don't talk about it much is because I don't want strangers reading about what I do for a living. Don't get excited. I'm not a pimp or a gunrunner, nor am I a spy for the CIA. Fact is, you've got to be very careful with blogs. Telling the world all about your family and your workplace might seem like a good idea at the time, until some idiot decides to screw you over for whatever it is you've said. Bitching about your boss or calling your mom a nag is not a good idea on the biggest party line in the universe.
Anyway, work's been taking up a lot of my time. I don't really look at it as work, because I like what I do and I get a lot perks out of it. For example, today I met a pretty cool guy who sings Latin love songs to make ends meet. After that, I went and chilled out with two young ladies who were soaking up the Brazilian sun with as much gusto as their oiled bodies could muster. Which is to say, not much.
I've never been a big fan of tanning. I find it a bore. Women covet it, but I can't understand why they use the word 'tanning' as a verb. "We're going tanning." That implies that they are going to do something. They aren't. They are going to lie down as if they've been shot by a Colt .45, and they are going to do it to the sweet sounds of Shakira coming out of their iPods.
Today's tanning episode got me thinking about work. You see, these two chicks are showgirls. That's their job. They're great friends and I love them to death. So as they were lying there, they asked me if I'd mind moving their chairs (whilst they were still lying on them) so that they could get a better angle from the sun. As women do, they had unstrapped their bikini tops and were lying on their stomachs. It was much easier for them to ask me to move the chairs, rather than tie the tops, get up, move the chairs, lie back down, and untie the tops again. So the thought crossed my mind to do it.
Then I saw something. Over their oiled, tanned, gorgeous kick-line butts, I saw a man painting a light fixture. He was sweating his balls off in the afternoon sun, paint chips all around him, the stink of varsol and epoxy in his nostrils.
I told the girls to stick it.
Point is, work is a pain in the ass for most people. I'm not one of them, and I'm lucky. The two showgirls, same thing. But most people don't enjoy what they do. I listen to people bitch about work all the time. If they aren't bitching about what goes on at work, then they bitch about the drive to work, the weather on the drive to work, the damn kids who need to be picked up after work, the good-for-nothing coffee machine that is broken in the break room, so forth. I know waiters that put in 12 hours a day for lousy tips, and I know financial advisors that want to murder the chairman of the Fed. In fact, now that I think of it, I hear a lot more bad things about work than I do good things. I bet you do, too.
It's hard to nail down what jobs are good and what jobs are bad. I hate bugs, but I once met a guy who was absolutely ecstatic about being a public health inspector. I mean, he loved it. He told me all kinds of things about cockroaches. He admired them. He told me that they are very smart and quite crafty. "Take the soda gun," he said. "People always forget to check there. I can go into a restaurant and not find one thing to gripe about. Then I take the top off the soda gun and look down the hose. Bingo. Eggs galore. Yeah, they like their sugar."
He smiled when he said that. I wanted to barf. He told me I wouldn't get hurt by roach eggs, but if it really bothered me I could just order soda in a can. Thanks.
Travelling through South America has given me a ton of choice Coyote Law #1 examples. Watching these guys build houses is as frightening as any horror movie. Nails and glass everywhere, lumber falling from the heavens, and these guys are all in bare feet. For head gear, they wear a sweat-soaked bandana or a dirty Yankees cap. (Random aside: the marketing guy for the Yankees is doing a hell of a good job; Yankees caps have dominated the entire planet, take it from me). Yet the builders look happy. Hot and tired and moving at an incredibly slow pace, but happy. And why not? In poor places, what are you going to bitch about? When you don't have something, it's hard to complain about it when it's broken.
That's the paradox of our culture. There was a dumb bumper sticker making the rounds a few years back that said, "He who dies with the most toys wins." Okay, but you have to work to get those toys. You've got to drink lousy coffee during meetings, and you have to take static from a fat blowhard that stinks of onion every time he passes by your desk. When you open up the box on the new DVD player, washer/dryer, microwave, or high-def television, you might feel like a kingpin, but you're merely forgetting the fact that you had to scrape ice off your windshield 72 times in order to buy the thing.
Work is a bitch because it's supposed to be a bitch. I complain as much as the next guy and immediately forget my own platitudes when someone pisses me off about some project or other. But then the check comes, and suddenly the angels sing from the heavens. I buy a round of drinks for the ladies, and I purchase a brand new something-or-other. Then it's back to work.
When I was a kid, I remember hearing all about how we wouldn't have to work when I was older. We'd have a ton of free time, because robots would be doing things for us, and we'd be able to fly our helicopters to the Hamptons whenever we wanted.
They lied to me, the bastards. Technology hasn't set us free from anything, because new laptops and kick-ass TVs cost money, and in order to get money, you have to do something for somebody. That's what work is, in case you've forgotten: doing something for somebody else. Unfortunately, people work harder when you pay them for it, which is why a deck built by a pro is level, and the one built by your cousin Todd is a piece of crap. I wish my job came with a billion dollar paycheck like the movie stars get, but it just ain't gonna happen. What most people do for a living doesn't have as big a price tag as what the movie star does. For some reason, millions of people want to watch Julia Roberts cry, but they don't want to see a guy shovel dirt. Strange.
So yes, work has taken up a lot of my time lately. But as said, I can't bitch. At least, not right now. But give me five minutes, and I'm sure I can think of something...
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Heat
Sitting around in Costa Rica gives you a chance to unwind, relax, and sip Pina Coladas while watching the world go by. It also gives you a chance to sweat.
Heat is a funny thing. Like water, human beings love it. We flock to it when winter comes, can't wait to strip down and bathe in it over Christmas break, long to lie in it until we are crispy brown or lobster pink. Sun and surf are all that comes to mind when daydreaming behind the snow shovel.
It's a relatively new phenomenon, this love of heat. For one thing, vacations are a fairly recent concept. Nobody got a vacation until the last century, and even if they did, there was no way to get to St. Bart's and back within a week. Ships helped, but still took too long. Then airplanes arrived, but they were too expensive.
Nowadays, it's amazing how blase we are about the ability to leave a cold February in Toronto on a Thursday night, hit the beach in Barbados on Friday morning, then be back in the office by Monday at nine. Sixty years ago, that would have been an HG Wells fairy tale. Thanks to expedia.com and their ilk, you now hear it all the time from the dude in the next cubicle.
I have spent years in the world's hot spots and amongst the tourists they attract. Tourists are a funny bunch. Anyone that tells you they travel in order to learn about 'culture' are full of baloney. After sailing, flying, and hitchhiking around various parts of the earth, I have come to the firm conclusion that nobody wants to learn anything about anybody. At least, not anybody that is alive. People might fly to Italy, but they don't do it so they can rent an apartment in some Palermo craphole and learn the culture of getting mugged. No, they fly to Italy to check into a hotel, look at David's genitals, take a stroll around the Colosseum, then have a pizza at an 'authentic' restaurant.
Let's dissect that for a moment. First, David's privates aren't as big as they look on the postcards, though he's doing all right. But that's isn't the point. The point is, his balls are old. There may be a few dames out there that fly to Italy to look at real Italian balls, but for the most part, tourists want to look at things that were built by dead people. Living people don't interest them in the least.
Take the Colosseum. There's all kinds of modern buildings standing around in Italy, but everyone wants to go to some old joint where people were butchered by the thousands. Invariably the tourists can be heard to say something like, "It's smaller than it was in Gladiator." I shudder at the thought that one day, Auschwitz might attract people with cameras dangling from their necks and zinc oxide plastered to their noses. When you get down to it, what is the difference between the two, besides the fact that one's in Poland and the other's in Rome?
As for the pizza, don't believe the hype. I have eaten about 20 pizzas in Italy. They all sucked. I'm sorry, but it's true. Every single travelling friend of mine tells me that they love 'real Italian pizza.' I was on a two month tour there once, and if I heard the words, 'real Italian pizza' one more time, I was going to butcher someone in the Colosseum.
Italian pizza is flatter than a pancake, has maybe three pieces of pepperoni on it, and cheese that makes you wonder what cheese is made out of. Italian pizza blows. But no matter: if you're in Italy, the pizza must be great, just as when you are in China, the Peking Duck must be good (even though it's always served lukewarm and tastes like a Goodyear tire). The bottom line is, I have yet to find a pizza anywhere in the world that is as good as the Pizza Hut two blocks from where I grew up.
No, culture is not that big a deal to a tourist, though they think it is. Recently graduated college chicks are always carrying on about how they love to hike around mountains and cities and immerse themselves in culture (ever notice they're always 'taking a year off'; how can you be taking a year off when you haven't started anything yet? Who, exactly, is missing you in the workforce? Certainly they're not taking a year off from their dad's wallet). Anyway, their love of culture is cute. I'd even believe it, were it not for them bitching that their hair dryer doesn't work in the 220 outlet when they get back to the hotel.
I've seen a lot of culture. My first experience with culture was when I was 5, and my mom took me to kindergarten. I learned how to say the ABC's while sitting in a formation called circle. Another experience was going to Star Wars with my dad and eating popcorn. Everyone was facing a large, bright rectangle, and we giggled at moving pictures. Another time, my dad took me to a funny game called baseball, and we sat and made loud noises when men hit round objects with a stick....
Oh, wait. You mean culture-culture? Oops. I forgot that culture only counts if it has a different language, or if it's found in a faraway place. My mistake.
And, of course, that's where the culture thing breaks down completely. I don't have much time for the backpacking crowd. I did it myself for a while, but it was too depressing listening to pot smoking losers talk about culture when they didn't even know what the word meant.
Culture, in a word, is anything. It doesn't matter if it's downtown Toronto, East LA, or Mozambique. If you're sitting in a room right now and are completely alone, look around you. There's your evidence of culture (if it makes you feel better, the stereo may have been made in Taiwan). If you're on your laptop at Starbucks, check out the people in line. There's culture.
Culture is not about differences. Culture is about being. That simple. You do not need to go to Tibet to find culture, nor Paris. Go downtown, get on a bus, and take a half-hour ride. Do it for two weeks. Take notes. Congratulations. You've done an in-depth study and are now ready to begin your thesis. If you fill it with enough mumbo-jumbo and make it long enough (over 3000 words should cut it), then you can call what you've written an ethnography. Anthropologists do it all the time. Hurray.
So culture is not what people are after. What they're after is something cool. They're also after it in a hot place. No lover of culture seems to study it when it's cold outside. I hear all kinds of people tell me they love England, and it's history and culture, but they follow that up with, "Don't go in January, it's too damn miserable."
Yes, the heat is where it's at. And what spoiled brats we are, too, to be able to enjoy these hot places without the minor drawback of dying. The Panama Canal attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year. I'm going to see it for the tenth time next week. It really is a modern wonder of the world. It's also hotter than hell.
I mean hot. A heat that drives you to your knees and makes you sweat endlessly. Then you go inside and have another margarita. Then you go back outside and sweat some more, and curse the heat. So you go back inside and get a blast from the air conditioner, then go back outside and sweat some more.
Sounds miserable, doesn't it? Of course, not. We've all been to hot places, and we bear with them because we have margaritas, and cold beer, and ice, and air conditioning. But it is sobering to think of the guys that built the Panama Canal, and the Pyramids, and other big things in hot places. No ice or AC for them.
The Panama Canal claimed tens of thousands of lives. From the heat, from yellow fever, from malaria. For the French, it was the jaws of death and they gave up building the thing before it wiped out too many more men (over 20, 000 Frenchmen succumbed in the disastrous attempt to build a sea-level canal across Panama between 1881-1889). For the Americans, it was a good dose of hell, but better hygiene, equipment, and the theory that mosquitoes spread disease saved many.
Yes, that pesky mosquito, the bringer of death. Malaria kills scores of people each year, and he keeps right on humming (or rather, she does. It's the female mosquito that causes so much havoc). The numbers are hard to nail down, but it's estimated that 1 to 3 million people buy the farm every year from malaria, with more than three hundred million infections annually. DDT did a good job wiping them out in the more impoverished parts of the world. But hey, DDT might be bad for the environment, so the WHO told everyone to stop using it and the impoverished people could go back to doing what they do best: dying while we don't care.
In any event, while we sip tropical drinks and enjoy the sun, it's well to remember the people that hated the heat and ultimately died from it. A vacation to Panama would have seemed a laugh to any of the 27, 000 that died there building the canal. I'm sure the slaves that built the Pyramids would feel the same. Nobody will ever know how many of them perished in the desert, but the number must be extreme. Think about that the next time you're at the McDonald's gazing out at the Pyramids and eating a McFlurry.
Heat and culture. Two good reasons to take off early on a Friday and enjoy some rays. While you enjoy them, just try to remember who you're standing on. Literally.
Heat is a funny thing. Like water, human beings love it. We flock to it when winter comes, can't wait to strip down and bathe in it over Christmas break, long to lie in it until we are crispy brown or lobster pink. Sun and surf are all that comes to mind when daydreaming behind the snow shovel.
It's a relatively new phenomenon, this love of heat. For one thing, vacations are a fairly recent concept. Nobody got a vacation until the last century, and even if they did, there was no way to get to St. Bart's and back within a week. Ships helped, but still took too long. Then airplanes arrived, but they were too expensive.
Nowadays, it's amazing how blase we are about the ability to leave a cold February in Toronto on a Thursday night, hit the beach in Barbados on Friday morning, then be back in the office by Monday at nine. Sixty years ago, that would have been an HG Wells fairy tale. Thanks to expedia.com and their ilk, you now hear it all the time from the dude in the next cubicle.
I have spent years in the world's hot spots and amongst the tourists they attract. Tourists are a funny bunch. Anyone that tells you they travel in order to learn about 'culture' are full of baloney. After sailing, flying, and hitchhiking around various parts of the earth, I have come to the firm conclusion that nobody wants to learn anything about anybody. At least, not anybody that is alive. People might fly to Italy, but they don't do it so they can rent an apartment in some Palermo craphole and learn the culture of getting mugged. No, they fly to Italy to check into a hotel, look at David's genitals, take a stroll around the Colosseum, then have a pizza at an 'authentic' restaurant.
Let's dissect that for a moment. First, David's privates aren't as big as they look on the postcards, though he's doing all right. But that's isn't the point. The point is, his balls are old. There may be a few dames out there that fly to Italy to look at real Italian balls, but for the most part, tourists want to look at things that were built by dead people. Living people don't interest them in the least.
Take the Colosseum. There's all kinds of modern buildings standing around in Italy, but everyone wants to go to some old joint where people were butchered by the thousands. Invariably the tourists can be heard to say something like, "It's smaller than it was in Gladiator." I shudder at the thought that one day, Auschwitz might attract people with cameras dangling from their necks and zinc oxide plastered to their noses. When you get down to it, what is the difference between the two, besides the fact that one's in Poland and the other's in Rome?
As for the pizza, don't believe the hype. I have eaten about 20 pizzas in Italy. They all sucked. I'm sorry, but it's true. Every single travelling friend of mine tells me that they love 'real Italian pizza.' I was on a two month tour there once, and if I heard the words, 'real Italian pizza' one more time, I was going to butcher someone in the Colosseum.
Italian pizza is flatter than a pancake, has maybe three pieces of pepperoni on it, and cheese that makes you wonder what cheese is made out of. Italian pizza blows. But no matter: if you're in Italy, the pizza must be great, just as when you are in China, the Peking Duck must be good (even though it's always served lukewarm and tastes like a Goodyear tire). The bottom line is, I have yet to find a pizza anywhere in the world that is as good as the Pizza Hut two blocks from where I grew up.
No, culture is not that big a deal to a tourist, though they think it is. Recently graduated college chicks are always carrying on about how they love to hike around mountains and cities and immerse themselves in culture (ever notice they're always 'taking a year off'; how can you be taking a year off when you haven't started anything yet? Who, exactly, is missing you in the workforce? Certainly they're not taking a year off from their dad's wallet). Anyway, their love of culture is cute. I'd even believe it, were it not for them bitching that their hair dryer doesn't work in the 220 outlet when they get back to the hotel.
I've seen a lot of culture. My first experience with culture was when I was 5, and my mom took me to kindergarten. I learned how to say the ABC's while sitting in a formation called circle. Another experience was going to Star Wars with my dad and eating popcorn. Everyone was facing a large, bright rectangle, and we giggled at moving pictures. Another time, my dad took me to a funny game called baseball, and we sat and made loud noises when men hit round objects with a stick....
Oh, wait. You mean culture-culture? Oops. I forgot that culture only counts if it has a different language, or if it's found in a faraway place. My mistake.
And, of course, that's where the culture thing breaks down completely. I don't have much time for the backpacking crowd. I did it myself for a while, but it was too depressing listening to pot smoking losers talk about culture when they didn't even know what the word meant.
Culture, in a word, is anything. It doesn't matter if it's downtown Toronto, East LA, or Mozambique. If you're sitting in a room right now and are completely alone, look around you. There's your evidence of culture (if it makes you feel better, the stereo may have been made in Taiwan). If you're on your laptop at Starbucks, check out the people in line. There's culture.
Culture is not about differences. Culture is about being. That simple. You do not need to go to Tibet to find culture, nor Paris. Go downtown, get on a bus, and take a half-hour ride. Do it for two weeks. Take notes. Congratulations. You've done an in-depth study and are now ready to begin your thesis. If you fill it with enough mumbo-jumbo and make it long enough (over 3000 words should cut it), then you can call what you've written an ethnography. Anthropologists do it all the time. Hurray.
So culture is not what people are after. What they're after is something cool. They're also after it in a hot place. No lover of culture seems to study it when it's cold outside. I hear all kinds of people tell me they love England, and it's history and culture, but they follow that up with, "Don't go in January, it's too damn miserable."
Yes, the heat is where it's at. And what spoiled brats we are, too, to be able to enjoy these hot places without the minor drawback of dying. The Panama Canal attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year. I'm going to see it for the tenth time next week. It really is a modern wonder of the world. It's also hotter than hell.
I mean hot. A heat that drives you to your knees and makes you sweat endlessly. Then you go inside and have another margarita. Then you go back outside and sweat some more, and curse the heat. So you go back inside and get a blast from the air conditioner, then go back outside and sweat some more.
Sounds miserable, doesn't it? Of course, not. We've all been to hot places, and we bear with them because we have margaritas, and cold beer, and ice, and air conditioning. But it is sobering to think of the guys that built the Panama Canal, and the Pyramids, and other big things in hot places. No ice or AC for them.
The Panama Canal claimed tens of thousands of lives. From the heat, from yellow fever, from malaria. For the French, it was the jaws of death and they gave up building the thing before it wiped out too many more men (over 20, 000 Frenchmen succumbed in the disastrous attempt to build a sea-level canal across Panama between 1881-1889). For the Americans, it was a good dose of hell, but better hygiene, equipment, and the theory that mosquitoes spread disease saved many.
Yes, that pesky mosquito, the bringer of death. Malaria kills scores of people each year, and he keeps right on humming (or rather, she does. It's the female mosquito that causes so much havoc). The numbers are hard to nail down, but it's estimated that 1 to 3 million people buy the farm every year from malaria, with more than three hundred million infections annually. DDT did a good job wiping them out in the more impoverished parts of the world. But hey, DDT might be bad for the environment, so the WHO told everyone to stop using it and the impoverished people could go back to doing what they do best: dying while we don't care.
In any event, while we sip tropical drinks and enjoy the sun, it's well to remember the people that hated the heat and ultimately died from it. A vacation to Panama would have seemed a laugh to any of the 27, 000 that died there building the canal. I'm sure the slaves that built the Pyramids would feel the same. Nobody will ever know how many of them perished in the desert, but the number must be extreme. Think about that the next time you're at the McDonald's gazing out at the Pyramids and eating a McFlurry.
Heat and culture. Two good reasons to take off early on a Friday and enjoy some rays. While you enjoy them, just try to remember who you're standing on. Literally.
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