Foreign Country

You’ll have noticed this space has been keeping its own counsel for a few days, quietly soaking up the sights and sounds of Nairobi and waiting for something to strike me with enough force to knock some words out. The only thing that’s come close is a Cape buffalo, and as luck would have it, the closest it got was about 50 yards. So instead, I’m going to let someone else do the talking.

We (excellent lady traveling companion and I) took a taxi back from the cacophony of Club Tribeka in downtown Nairobi the other night, and found ourselves in a sudden sanctuary of sound, the sound being Nashville, circa 1963 (?). Turns out there’s more than one universal language.

Travel Tips #3 – How Not to Get Kidnapped

Swamp Things is back, as we temporarily depart the sea-swept decency of the Pacific coast for a re-descent into the boglands, courtesy of a Glamorous African Media Exchange, itself courtesy of the US taxpayer (that’s you and me, except for you, Sarah.)  Next stop is Nairobi, a high-altitude former swamp unlike Mexico City in every way except, that is, in being a high-altitude former swamp.  But before we leave the frigid DC basement where we had our pre-trip orientation day (thanks for the tacos, guys!) there are a few… sensitive… items we should discuss.

TRAVEL TIPS #3 – HOW NOT TO GET KIDNAPPED

Our guest travel expert today, the excellent Mr. Q, may not be aware that he is our guest travel expert. On the other hand, I would be the last person to underestimate what Mr. Q knows – he certainly knows a lot more than I do, about all kinds of things that upon further reflection, I would actually rather not know. And that’s why the Glamorous African Media Exchange called him in to scare the wits out of our orientation session in DC, leaving a trail of our sweaty palm-prints on our visas and disturbing unanswered questions in his wake. (Wait, what do we say to the cops?) Mr. Q runs an international security consulting firm that I’m reluctant to name, because he seems like the kind of guy who keeps a low profile, and also like the kind of guy you don’t want to piss off, unless you’re the leader of a Mexican cartel, and even then, you might think twice. But he wasn’t there to scare us, or at least not exclusively. He had a message to deliver, pasted together from cut-out newsprint letters and smeared with the blood of cold hard truth.

YOU ARE ALL IN DANGER.

Think that airport “driver” is going to take you to your hotel just because he’s got his sweaty mitts around a piece of cardboard with your name misspelled on it? Think that anonymous phone call with an exclusive on the local Islamist terror cell is your ticket to Pulitzer city? Think your starry, stripey freedom of the press is going to spring you from that Nigerian prison? Think again, Scoop. There’s a whole world of bad guys out there just waiting to snap your photo with today’s paper in the back of their bad-guy vans, and if you don’t watch out, you’re going to end up one of the statistics Mr. Q can’t give us as a matter of policy. (“We don’t discuss individual cases.”) Here’s what he can tell you, though, and you better listen.

HOW NOT TO GET MUGGED

1. Don’t wear headphones. According to Mr. Q, listening to that Daft Punk song again isn’t only going to kill your brain cells, it’s going to distract you from that guy with a knife sidling up beside you on the way to your car. Headphones off.

2. Quit yer yappin. And yer textin’. And yer Words With Friends. Just put the damned phone away, don’t you see there’s an entire gang of thugs following you on both sides of the street? For chrissakes.

3. When they get you, and they will, here’s hoping you’ve already split your money from the rest of your stuff. Then, there’s a handy rule of thumb: if the guy’s got a gun, hand the money over and back away slowly. If he’s got a knife, drop the money to the ground and run, unless – and here Mr. Q betrayed a glimpse of his tough-guy heart of gold – he’s a twelve-year-old kid, in which case, beat the crap out of him.

HOW NOT TO GET ARRESTED FOR REPORTING WITHOUT A “LICENSE”

1. Don’t keep any messages on your cell phone.

2. Or photos in your camera.

3. Or business cards in your pockets.

4. Don’t take any notes.

5. Actually, maybe it’s better if you just stay home.

6. What the hell is wrong with you people, anyway?

7. Don’t be such a f*ing boy scout about paying the “fine”. Would you rather bribe a police officer, or spend the weekend in jail? Exactly. Now shut up and go.

HOW NOT TO GET KIDNAPPED

That’s what I promised you, right? Sorry, Mr. Q was a bit mum on this one, but certainly not because his company specializes in negotiating kidnap victims’ release. The idea is, don’t be stupid – know who’s driving the car; don’t go meandering down dark alleys with your family’s financial statements in hand; when someone offers you an interview with El Chapo, maybe think it over before you dive into that trunk. If you should get the old hood-over-the head treatment, stay cool, and make sure your boss has Mr. Q’s number.

More comforting, perhaps, although here I may be grasping at the proverbial straw, is the risk map he sent us as a follow-up, calculated from his assessments of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, corruption and infrastructure. Kenya is a cool yellow spot in a burning red Africa, comparable to Russia, most of South America, Turkey and, yes, Mexico. The only completely safe places turn out to be Japan, Scandinavia, Canada and Australia and New Zealand – and who wants to go there, anyway?

Update: Baby Names

Remember the porters at our old building and their mysterious baby, “born” to a mother invisibly pregnant and then unseen for several months?  We doubted its existence, and then wished we had just shut up and quit asking when we learned the baby’s name, Nazi.

We moved out last year – for reasons unrelated to the baby or its unfortunate christening – and hadn’t been back to visit since.  But on a recent sodden evening at the start of Mexico City’s summer rains, we took a walk in the old neighborhood and ran into dad, sweeping the wet sidewalk outside our old front door.  We exchanged some very short pleasantries (he is a man of uncomfortably few words) and then I couldn’t help myself.  I asked about the baby.

“He’s almost two now,” he said.  It was his longest sentence of the whole conversation.

“Two!  How wonderful.  How time flies.”  I said.  And then, maybe because I just still couldn’t believe it, or maybe I wanted to hear it again. “What is his name again?”

He looked at the ground.  He gave a rueful sort of laugh.  “Well,” he said, “Nazi.”

The way he said it, I could tell he didn’t know before.  But he knows now.

Magical Realism

“I like your wings.”

They weren’t my wings, of course – much too small for me, and purple isn’t really my color.  But in the absence of the little fairy who will eventually wear them, I fielded compliments with the practiced manner of a fairy queen.   Or a monarch of butterflies, which was the other thing people thought the wings were.

Striding around a 20-million-person megacity with them slung casually over my shoulder, hustling on to the subway protecting them in front of me, leaving sprinkles of glitter in my urban wake, I did notice that not a single person looked askance at my new appendages, and quite a few looked envious.

Blame it on Carlos Fuentes, or accept it as the natural legacy of a nation founded by a snake-eating eagle and forged in the bloody martyrdom of syncretic half-Catholic saints, but Mexico, and especially Mexico City, have a deep tendency toward the weird.  Apocalyptic destruction seems just around the corner, as Popocatepetl smokes on the horizon. Centuries-old churches sink into the ground as floods rise with every rainstorm, because as the head of the city’s Storm Unit says, the city “wants to go back to being a lake.”  The other day, my taxi driver bragged about the high-speed 180-degree turns he learned to pull as a bodyguard for one of the country’s rich industrialists, then launched into an earnest preview of Armageddon.

Where else does cocktail hour involve caterpillars in the bottle and grasshoppers in a bowl?  What other Latin American country has an Olympic skiing team comprised of one man, a 50-year-old German prince?   And where else outside of fiction do actual shadowy political powers actually pluck a handsome but vapid man from obscurity and make him president, complete with soap-star wife?  In Mexico, surreal is the new real.

Some magic is fleeting, however; in the case of my wings, it lasted until I had to get them into my suitcase.  But I managed to fly with them anyway, so who knows?

First-World Tragedy

oh, the humanity – photo Greg Nelson pic.twitter.com/mOcfRNer

From the NYT, on Washington’s killer thunderstorms:

Julie B. Rubenstein, a lawyer who lives in Northern Virginia, said that after suffering through the night with no power and no air-conditioning, she retreated to her office.

“It is great that I had an office I could go to,” she said, “but so many people don’t.”

One-Shot Horror Movie

dinner time in La Santísima

Shooting – Hoops – in Tijuana

It’s Saturday evening in Tijuana, and a throng of hulking men from this notorious narco-battlefield are about to face off against a muscled crew of visitors from drug-plagued Culiacan.  The sun goes down and the city lights come up on the littered, lonely hills separating us from the US, a mile away.  But north-of-the border apprehensions and misapprehensions notwithstanding, the only shooting planned in the city tonight will be right here on the basketball court, where the Tijuana Zonkeys are about to batter and humiliate the Culiacan Caballeros to a 100-76 defeat.

The Zonkeys, named for the only-in-Tijuana fake-zebra-painted donkeys that trudge Avenida Revolucion as walking photo ops, were born three years ago in the height of the city’s infamy, a hobby project of sorts for a Chicago venture capitalist who also owns the Mexicali Bomberos.  (What happens when they play each other?  The team’s announcer, Tony, shrugs.  “Double the money.”)  For us, it’s a novelty outing, to see a sport I haven’t watched for decades in a city known better for other, less virtuous, pursuits.  But for the modest crowd snacking on salad out of plastic corn chip bags, the middlebrow normalness of the event is itself a little revolution. The most dangerous element of the evening is probably the hotdog I have for dinner.

Murders, kidnappings, bodies hanging from bridges — so 2009.  Remember swine flu?  Tijuana has moved on, thank you, and three years, several new police chiefs and a multitude of human rights abuses later, the city is now a place Mexicans fed up with drug war violence flee to, rather than from.  Expert expat Derrik, who has organized our sportive jaunt this evening through his excellent alt-tourism venture Turista Libre, introduces us to two sisters in their 20s who left crime-ravaged Monterrey four months ago for the relative – and novel – safety of the border.

One of the sisters tells us that before she came to Tijuana, she hadn’t been out at night for two years.  Both girls are making up for lost time in the Californias, with a social schedule on both sides of the border that would make Scarlett O’Hara blush, and over craft beers at a local hipster joint before the game they regale us with illustrated tales of the Coronarita, a margarita with a Corona beer tipped upside-down in it you drink with a straw.  The other sister, a yoga teacher, sneaks on to the court with a camera when Derrik is called up to join a group of spectators taking foul shots before the game (he misses).  We don Zonkeys t-shirts – pink for the ladies, black for the gents – and take in the show.

The Tijuana Auditorium is about half-full, and with our excellent connections – Derrik and announcer Tony share a birthday – we have third-row, center-court seats that afford us a dizzying view of the game and an overwhelming variety of cheerleaders who take the court at every timeout and between every quarter, like human commercial breaks.  Their basic schtick is variations on the old standing-on-hands-in-short-shorts routine:

When they’re on break, we are entertained by the Zonkey Babies, who practice for a future standing on hands by throwing souvenir water bottles into the crowd:

By now you may be wondering, this is Mexico, what about the babes?  Never fear – the Sexy Zonkeys, otherwise relegated to the sidelines and concealed by pompoms, switch them out for some incongruous shimmying at halftime:

They are in turn relieved by a troupe of break dancers who shed Salvation Army bandleader coats for leopard bikinis, and by the team doctor, who steals the show miming three-pointers to Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” while the manic guy-in-a-Zonkey-suit mascot swings from the baskets.

But between dance shows, basketball is still the main act, and there is dunking aplenty, and fast breaks and layups and the occasional clever steal.  The game, to be perfectly honest, is dominated by guys whose stature suggests a provenance north of the border.  (The league requires only some of the players be local).  When the Zonkeys hit 99 points, the crowd erupts in chants of “cien! cien!” and just before the buzzer goes, they make it.

After the game, kids throng the court for autographs and pictures with the players, and for a few minutes more, Tijuana feels deeply wholesome.

The drug war is present everywhere in Mexico, the way the culture wars are present in the US; it’s a frame of reference that colors everything you see.  We have been  cracking wise all evening about the dangers of playing against Culiacan, the narco-capital of the state of Sinaloa (as in Sinaloa cartel).  I ask who owns the Caballeros, and the answer is as obvious as a knock-knock joke: “drug lords, probably.”

But in Tijuana in 2012, it actually gets a laugh.

Marvin: the Reason for the Season

When it comes to observing obscure holidays, Washington DC is doubly the nation’s capital.  Presidents’ Day?  We shoot off muskets. Flag Day?  We get tattoos.  Emancipation Day?  We get the day off from work. (And you get to file your taxes two days later, this year only.  You’re welcome.)

And so it should come as no surprise that April 2, otherwise known as Marvin Gaye Day, sets off District fireworks like the Fourth of July.  If the city is a bit short on baseball diamonds for commemorative games or shopping malls for holiday white sales, who needs them?  Not Washington, and not its silver-throated, golden-libidoed native son. Instead, we turn the lights down and the bass up and spend April 2 conjuring Marvin’s music, conscience and especially his soul.

This is less of a stretch for DC than it might be for some other cities. In some (small) parts of town, every day is already Marvin Gaye Day, most obviously so at 14th and U, site of Restaurant Marvin, a Belgian-soul food restaurant-bar dedicated to the commemoration of Marvin’s 2-year self-imposed exile in Belgium, 1982-1984.

Don’t tell me you didn’t know about Marvin’s self-imposed Belgian exile.

The moules-frites-scented rooftop deck was this year, the 28th posthumous commemoration of Marvin’s birthday, host to the latest incarnation of Marvin’s original doo-wop group the Marquees, founded in the 1950s by Marvin and friends from DC’s Cardozo High School.

The last original member of the Marquees died in November, but so what?  His heirs funked up instrumentals of Marvin’s greatest hits, and crooned a set of the doo-wop songs that inspired him when he was a DC teenager. Apropos of nothing we could discern, their much-younger lead guitarist also rocked out a fast and furious Johnny B. Goode, just because he could.

We were politely but firmly kicked off of the front-row barstools reserved for family, and indeed they filled up, with Marvin’s ex-wife, his nattily-dressed much-younger brother and his wife, and at least one candidate for DC Councilwoman-at-Large, who sang and danced in big black cateye sunglasses and spent the break handing out business cards.

Night fell, and as Marvin himself would surely have agreed, nighttime was the right time for smooth and sexy renditions of What’s Goin’ On, Mercy Mercy Me, and of course, Sexual Healing.

 Channeling the honoree to karaoke backup tracks was this slick young thing from North Carolina, whose name I can’t remember, but who admitted to me later that he had only just learned the songs.  No matter – he burned them up.

April 2 is also National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day.  But we don’t celebrate that in DC.

Travel Tips #2: How to Bribe a Traffic Cop (Or Better, Not)

It’s been a while since my last missive, and I know some of you loyal readers (hi, Lisa!) have been concerned I might have ended up in a Turkish prison, writing I will not mock the greatest nation in history ten million times on a blackboard made of razor tape.

Happily, no. In fact, the last months have been relatively uneventful, unless you count catching up on taxes and acquainting myself with my new robot vacuum cleaner. However, the last few weeks I’ve been tootling around my spiritual home in the swampy Mexican motherland, and have returned with vital information to share about a subject near to the hearts, and wallets, of all Mexicans and the people who visit them: traffic cops.

This is not a tale of the drug war. The deep institutional corruption that has left Mexican towns servants to the drug cartels, as their local police are bribed and coerced into collaborating with the gangsters, is something else. This is just poorly-paid local cops shaking down the gringos. Think of it as a rip-off margarita. Or ten.

Let’s say you run a stop sign in La Paz. Or are doing 70 in a 40 in Cancun while clandestinely filming a police car out the window. It happens. The familiar blue lights start flashing, and through a loudspeaker, you hear a polite but stern voice tell you to pull over.

Your first clue this is not about the speed limit is the great big smile the cop has on his face when he gets to the window. “You’ve been very naughty,” he says. He is actually waggling his finger.

“What did I do?” you say, in Spanish. First mistake.

Travel Tip #2.1: Never speak Spanish to the traffic cop, no matter how chuffed you feel about being able to.

He is prepared, with a speed gun whose display has shown 71 since 2004 and a map showing the speed traps Cancun has laid out for unsuspecting gringos driving rental cars with Thrifty stickers on the back. He asks for your license; you hand it over.

Travel Tip #2.2: Never hand it over; your license is in the hotel.

Now you’re done for, because you can only retrieve your license after paying the fine at the station, and the fine, he explains, can only be paid after a lapse of 24 hours, and today is Friday. (The 13^th, it should be said.) Which means you’ll have to drive 5 hours back to Cancun on Monday to pay $100 and fill out reams of paperwork. “This is going to take a while,” he says. You have to be somewhere in ½ hour – in La Paz, you are catching a plane – and you panic.

Travel Tip #2.3: Don’t panic.

Here’s what several long-term residents, who deal with this all the time, told me after I had successfully, if regretfully, negotiated an immediate and costly rescue of my driver’s license, the second time in a year: You’re a sucker. Who cares about your driver’s license? When you hand it over to the police they give you a receipt, so if you get stopped again you can prove you can drive. Replacing it will cost you $30 and you can do it online when you get home. Anyway, the cops don’t like the paperwork any more than you do, and if you accept the ticket, chances are they’ll let you off with a warning. Deny any knowledge of Spanish and your chances are double.

“You know, I could get in a lot of trouble for this,” says the cop. “It’s important that no one find out.”

Getting to Know Ü, Getting to Know All About Ü

The neighborhood where we’re staying in Istanbul is one of those exotically crumbling warrens of dim alleys and up-and-coming shoe shops, chockablock with gilded youth scowling at each other over $4 espresso.  I had read somewhere that after an Ottoman heyday, it fell into ruin somewhere in the 19^th century, and has only just recently risen from the ashes to become what it is, i.e. another European real estate bubble of art galleries, mojito rooms and aspirational plumbing.  But I’ve just come across a 1989 guidebook to Turkey, which describes the recent and hitherto glossed-over past of my home away from home in such lively detail I have to share:

“…The whorehouse area itself is only for those determined to see a little bit of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ here on earth. Frisked by a policeman at the entrance to the area, one plunges through the gauntlet of a thousand elbows…The ladies themselves range from ‘nice-girl-next-door’ types to hideous old hags with dyed hair and bellies as large as their busts.  Although allegedly controlled by health officials every second day, many of the girls go through a dozen customers a night, and in this day of herpes and AIDS (this is a favorite call for multinational sailors) only those deranged for want of sex should brave the hygienic hazards of the place.  Price for the truly hardup [sic] starts at around $5 and goes upward; expect to spend less than five minutes inside with the lady of your choice, however.”

– Thomas Goltz and Lyle Lawson, Insight Guides Turkey, 3^rd edition 1989

May I again stress, 1989.  A beacon of hope for urban pioneers everywhere.

Is it just me, or did guidebooks use to be a lot racier?  Top marks for the service info, though.

I’ve been in Istanbul for nearly two weeks now, and each day brings new wonders.  The magnificent Turks never fail to awe, whether it’s their adorably short uphill subway lines, their impressive tolerance for tea or the way they gargle those üs.  (The best baklava in town is at a place called Güllüoglu, with a little thing over the second g that means you don’t pronounce it.  It’s easier to say if you turn it upside down).  I do love my megacities, and the Turks have done this one up just about right: fun ferries everywhere, tap water as sterile as a bottle of Clorox, and spectacular mosques which are not sinking into the ground – Mexicans, take note!

But the magnificent Turks are so magnificent that you, dear reader, certainly know all about them already.  Why don’t you test your knowledge, by taking my little quiz? (Answers at bottom).

HOW MAGNIFICENT ARE THE TURKS?  OR, A SHORT COURSE IN TURKISH HISTORY AND CULTURE.

1. Which is better, Turkish raki or Greek ouzo?

a. Turkish raki

b. Greek ouzo

c. Turkish Efes beer

2. In which ancient Turkish city were young girls expected to earn their dowries with prostitution?

a. Sardis, capital of the Lydian empire

b. Aphrodisius, dedicated to the goddess of love

c. such a thing never happened in Turkey

3. How many Armenians died in the 1915 Turkish ethnic cleansing known and sometimes not known as the Armenian Genocide?

a. One million

b. One and a half million

c. You’re under arrest

4. How many of the carpets sold to unwitting Americans as priceless antiques in the Grand Bazaar are actually priceless antiques?

a. none

b. almost none

c. none

5. What is the greatest and most magnificent gift of the Turks to the modern world?

a. yogurt

b. Turkish baths

c. kebabs

d. Orhan Pamuk

e. all of the above and then some

(answers: c, a, c, a curse on your impudence, a)