Category: Travel

Posted on

Unemployed Drifting in America

Sandy Springs, Georgia

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?

It’s now 86 days since I had a job. In those twelve weeks, I toured New York with an old friend; visited Vietnam for the first time, gave a talk on how Jews raise kids, and came away with a book project; spent a month falling in love with Korea and Korean and Koreans again; took the last steps to secure my master’s degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University; and moved out of New York once and for all. I’ve been busy.

And now I’m not.

It’s been 12 days since I moved out of New York. My apartment has been cleared out, the deposit check is on its way, and the movers have delivered my stuff to my parents’ house in Arizona. All my big worries are, for the time being, handled. It’s a nice feeling, as I sit here in Georgia in my brother’s house, listening to the rain come down and smelling the pot roast that will be Shabbos dinner tomorrow.

Riding Shotgun

I’m sort of in Atlanta but not really. I haven’t actually been to the city, or much of anywhere outside of my brother’s suburban orbit.

I’ve been to his shul down the street, and to the the rabbi’s house, and to the houses of a couple of other members of the community. I’ve also been to the nearby Kroger supermarket, a few kosher restaurants, two different malls, and a Lowe’s to buy reflective vests for the Shabbos walk to have dinner with some friends who live where there aren’t sidewalks. (The house, and the meal, were lovely.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time working from a Caribou Coffee with either my brother or his wife. It’s good coffee, and there’s a great view of the Walgreens across the street.

Once we went to a National Recreation Area for a short hike, and also to do tashlich, a Jewish ritual where you cast your sins into a body of water. Then later we went to a birthday party for a three-year-old at a playground next to an airport for private jets and small planes, where you can sit and watch the planes take off and land. What with shul and the holidays and Shabbos meals and the birthday party, I’ve spent more time around children and pregnant women in the past eleven days than in maybe the eleven years before that.

My brother has a good life here with his wife and his baby. I’m glad to have this time to bond with my little nephew, to take it easy and not do very much, to ride shotgun in someone else’s life. My brother and his wife are working hard — unlike me, they’re not unemployed drifters, and they have to deal with the baby when he wakes up in the night — which all means that they don’t have much time or energy to entertain me or take me places. Which is fine. I sit around. I work on my book. I nap. I read. I drift a little. I do some pushups, because pushups are good. I help out with the baby.

I have spent a lot of time watching the baby, who is seven months old. He laughs, he climbs things, he topples over and bumps his head. He eats pureed bananas with terrifying excitement and intensity, flapping his arms and lunging for the next bite, until suddenly he is done; usually he sneezes out a big gob of snot somewhere in the middle of his meal, and it looks more or less like the banana, and he flaps and complains while we wipe his nose because we’ve cut off the banana supply for no reason he can discern. His eating habits remind me of Alex from A Clockwork Orange.

The baby likes his set of colored plastic cups very much. He has started to like me too, I think, now that I’ve fed him. He climbs me and smiles at me. And then sometimes he cries for a while, which reminds me why I never kept one of these things at home. My nephew has poor manners and lacks skills. He doesn’t know anything about anything; I’m pretty sure the notion of representation, of things standing for other things, simply hasn’t occurred to him yet. Which limits conversation.

Sins Committed Through Light-Headedness

I’ve also spent a lot more time doing Jewish things and thinking about Judaism than I have in a while. I’ve been working on my Vietnamese book about Jewish child-rearing, and I’ve finished a draft of the background section, about who the Jews are, our history, the basics of the religion. I have done Shabbos and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — by the end of the latter, I had a wicked caffeine-withdrawal headache, though a little snuff helped. As we read through the list of sins for the thousandth time, I began to wonder about the sins “committed before You through light-headedness” in particular.

I think the experience of writing my thesis on Korean shamanism has helped me to approach Judaism with a little anthropological distance, and maybe a lighter head too. I’m less judgmental about it than I once was, more able to engage it on its own terms without fussing overmuch about my own beliefs. This is also the one of the few times that I’ve been involved with Orthodox Judaism away from my parents, and that changes the dynamic: here it’s not a replay of my adolescent rebellion if I decide I’m done with shul for the day or duck out for a while or skip the night services.

America

So this is my sojourn in America. I sort of hate it when people say New York City isn’t America — we’re Americans too! — but the New York City way of life is very different from what I think of as normative America, with its cars and strip malls and wide-aisled supermarkets. By the time it’s done, this will be my longest stay in that normative America since 2003, when I got back from living abroad the last time.

I suppose it’s OK, but I don’t really get it. Somehow a coconut plantation on the Mekong Delta makes more sense to me as a place to live, and a giant city, whether it’s Saigon or Seoul or New York, makes way more sense to me.

It’s just about a month until I’ll be touching down in yet another Asian megacity, Bangkok this time. In the meantime, I have a book to work on, family to enjoy, naps to take, strip malls to visit. And I have to go soon, because Kroger awaits!

Posted on

New Beginnings

If ever there were a Rosh Hashanah that might symbolize new beginnings for me, this is it. For 23 years — even for the year I lived abroad — I have called New York home. Not anymore. Today I closed the door for the last time on my Brooklyn Heights apartment and walked out into a new life. Today I’ll fly down to Atlanta to meet my nephew, who will be experiencing his first Rosh Hashanah.

I have read that while our culture imagines us as walking forward into the future, some cultures see the future as something we walk backwards into: we can see the past clearly, but the future is hidden. It’s very easy for me to catalogue the things I’m leaving behind, and much harder for me to bring to mind, at this moment, what it is I’m heading towards. I suppose that I’m still in a bit of a pause before the start of what I have been thinking of as my new life, which is my life in Asia. For the next couple of months, I’ll be in the US, not at home in New York, but also not on my new adventure.

But this is also my real life, and something new and different. I am taking a pause, an interregnum, as we enter into the Jewish season of reflection and renewal. There’s an arc to the whole thing. Rosh Hashanah is the entry point into a period of sanctification, with Yom Kippur as its climax, the moment when (we hope) the purification is complete, and we are ready to begin the new year. Then comes Sukkos, a reconnection with earthy reality, where we build huts and eat outdoors under starlight and leaves and wave branches and fruit around. It’s a festival that focuses on joy, coming to its conclusion with a burst of celebration for the Torah, the text and the way of life that links the high spiritual plane of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with the material reality of crops and dirt and fecundity that Sukkos celebrates. 

I am thinking about all of this not just because my life is changing, but because of how it’s changing: among other things, I’m co-writing a Vietnamese book about Jewish childhood education. As I step away from what my life has been and prepare to set forth into what it will be, I’m interested in taking a fresh look at the Jewish part of my upbringing — a look that will be, I hope, a little distanced from all of the adolescent conflict that charged my experience of Orthodox Judaism when I was at home and living it. I will be writing my book over these next weeks and months, looking back on my own childhood to discover what was best in it so that I can share these things with a nation on the far side of the world about which I know very little.

As with my New York life as well, I will spend some time sifting out the resentments and frustrations, the disappointments and discomforts, to find the jewels I’ll carry with me. They will need to be compact and lightweight and durable enough for the unpredictable road ahead, and useful enough to be worth carrying.

Posted on

Committed

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back; always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.”

Willam H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, quoted in Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

Posted on

Travel Photos

Just a quick note to let you know I’m now posting travel photos. These are links to Facebook galleries, but you don’t have to be my friend on Facebook, or even a Facebook user, to see them. I’ll be adding more photos as I go, of course. Enjoy.

Posted on

The Language School Bubble

When you go to a Korean-language immersion program, there are certain illusions to which you’re likely to fall prey, especially if you’re at something of an advanced level.

First, you might start to think that what you’re doing is normal. After all, everyone around you has also devoted years to learning your target language. You can lose sight of how uncommon it is — how downright weird it is — to spend hours upon hours trying to parse and retain this obscure and difficult language. And you can forget that not all people from Japan, England, Spain, France, Taiwan, and China have an interest in Korea, or even know where it is. You start to think that everyone everywhere cares who EXO is.

Second, you might come to believe that you’re actually pretty good at Korean. I’ve been hanging out with a group of Japanese women, communicating almost entirely in Korean, and we’ve been able to have a lot of fun and even some intelligent conversations about things like religion. But it’s an illusion created by the fact that we’re all at the same level: we know more or less the same grammar and vocabulary, so we don’t tend to use stuff that’s way beyond what our counterparts can understand.

But as soon as I get into a conversation with actual Koreans, I’m in trouble — especially if they’re talking to each other rather than just to me. I catch words, sentence endings here and there. I get general ideas, maybe, but miss important key points, like that the entire conversation was about someone’s boyfriend rather than about not having a boyfriend. In other words, I have no idea what’s going on most of the time, but now speak Korean well enough that I feel like I should be paying attention anyway.

Some of this is the midpoint letdown — I’m two weeks in, with two weeks left to go, and feeling frustrated by all the short trips I’ve had to Seoul these past few years, when what I really want is to live here, to settle in, to be able to commit myself to an extended period of learning. Two weeks is such a tiny span, but I feel like I’ve learned an enormous amount, met interesting people, started conversations that I want to continue. But I’ll be leaving again in two weeks. What I need here is time.

I’m excited for my upcoming travel in Southeast Asia, and I have no intention of giving that up. But this visit to Seoul has reaffirmed my desire to be here and stay here. And I know that when I come to stay, I will finally get an experience that right now feels tantalizingly just out of reach.

Posted on

The Student Life

I am currently in Seoul, lying in bed in what is the tiniest room I’ve ever stayed in, resting my head on a pillow called Ratasha. I’m here at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, in an outlying and moderately dumpy neighborhood, for a month of intensive Korean language study before I take my proficiency exam at Columbia University. I’m staying at what’s called a goshitel, which is a combination of the words goshi (exam) and hotel, and is a kind of fancified word for what’s more often called a goshiwon, or exam housing. They’re basically dorms with tiny little rooms for students who are cramming for tests or studying at universities. Mine is so small that I sleep with my feet under my closet. But it’s reasonably clean, reasonably cool, there’s a laundry machine down the hall, there’s free rice and kimchi in the kitchen, and it’s costing me a little over $400 for the month.

I’ve actually grown kind of used to the little place, as one does with pretty much anything in life. And I like the student life here. I have Korean classes every day from 9 am to 1 pm, at a high enough level that we’re having somewhat interesting conversations. My classmates range from a passel of undergrads of various nationalities — English, French, Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese — to an 80-year-old Japanese guy who’s pretty much deaf, shouts a lot, and tends to make lots of semi-rude comments about drinking and the attractiveness of HUFS teachers. There’s also a retired Japanese woman, a Japanese woman who’s something like my age (she’s secretive about it), and a Spanish woman who teaches Spanish in Spain and wants to teach it here instead. After class we all go to the shitty campus cafeteria, where cranky ajummas dish out low-grade Korean food but it only costs $2 for lunch and you buy your meal tickets from big computerized vending machines.

It’s hard to believe I arrived just a week ago. It feels like I live here.

When I think about my plan to move to Seoul, I sometimes go down this rabbit hole of fear where I imagine myself all alone and miserable in the middle of a long Korean winter, with no one to talk to, living in some hellhole and hating myself for having come here. But every time I do come here, I find that my schedule fills up to the point that I have to plan time to be alone and do the alone things I want to do, like writing or studying. I have friends here, and I make new friends here easily, and I’ve been having fun on both counts. I’ve been all over Seoul, out to Gimpo, down to Suwon. I’ve seen foreign friends and Korean friends and gone out with classmates. I have discovered new neighborhoods where I might want to live when I come back. I have also studied quite a bit. I like it here.

Seoul by now is easy. I still have fears about living here, but it’s easy both because I’m used to it and because it’s improving. You can get flossers now at Daiso, and I’ve been told that you can walk into a pharmacy these days and just ask for the medicines you want — not like the old days, where you told the pharmacist what was wrong with you and received a mystery packet of pills. There are bagels, though they are not ever going to be New York bagels.

There are friends. There are, in fact, people here who love me.

Things that used to be sticking points have come unstuck. I can make it here. After all, I made it in New York, and the song tells me I can make it anywhere after that. And in the meantime, I’m having a blast, learning a ton, and occasionally even sleeping.

Posted on

Vietnam and Korea

Just a quick post to note that I’m alive and well in Korea, after five fascinating days in Saigon. While in Saigon, on my first day, I had the privilege of delivering a seminar on Jewish child-rearing practices to an audience of 120 Vietnamese. They were hungry to learn new ideas — many were taking notes — and I was glad to be able to share the best aspects of my own culture, like Judaism’s emphasis on asking questions and following one’s curiosity. The seminar was held in a beautiful cafe in the Bitexco Tower, Saigon’s tallest building.

Beyond that, I spent a bunch of time with my good friend who showed me all around the city and took me on a Mekong Delta tour as well. Vietnamese food is delicious, and you knew that already, but it’s delicious in ways that surprised me: the fresh herbs and greenery that come with just about every dish, the fish, the curious rice cake concoctions.

Saigon is a city that’s going through rapid changes, growing into a modern city, with bits of Communism still, and bits of third-world chaos, and bits that look as new and organized as the fancier stretches of Seoul. (Korean investment is everywhere.) The people there seem excited by the changes but still uncertain about the future, and it will be interesting to see where Vietnam goes in the next decade. I can’t wait to go back.

Seoul, meanwhile, is my future home, and I’m pretty used to it. My goshitel — a sort of student dorm hotel — is fine, though this is the tiniest room I’ve ever stayed in. Classes are good, the neighborhood by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies is more OK than I thought it would be, and I’ve been busy with old friends and new. I have this longstanding fear that when I move to Korea, or when I visit, I’ll spend long stretches of time alone and lonely, staring at the walls, with nowhere to go and no one to talk to. And then I get here and discover I don’t have a minute to think. Since I arrived Thursday morning, I’ve taken a placement exam, started classes, spent time with a couple of different friends, gone out to Gimpo for a night and a day, and today went down to the Suwon Folk Village for the first time since 2002, in the company of a Japanese classmate, and then afterward met a bunch more classmates and a couple of their Korean friends for a barbecue dinner. In other words, Seoul life!

There’s much more to say about both Vietnam and my time here in Seoul so far, but I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to say it, so I figured I’d better start now and fill in the details later.

Posted on

Electronics for the road

As I’ve planned for travel, I’ve thought a lot about what electronics I’ll bring with me — finding balance between keeping the weight down, keeping the cost reasonable, making sure the electronics are durable, and making sure I can do all the things I want to.

Here’s what I’ve decided to take with me:

In addition, to keep everything charged and connected:

In choosing items, I had a few principles in mind:

  1. Keep it light. I will inevitably end up hauling around too much stuff. I can at least start by paring down the weight of my technology.
  2. Keep it cheap. Who wants to spend a ton of money on something that may well end up at the bottom of a river in Laos?
  3. Keep it USB-chargeable. When you see laptop weights, they never include the weight of the charger. And what do you do if you lose or break your specialized charger when you’re halfway across Java? Micro-USB chargers will probably always be around to buy or borrow. And anything that’s USB-chargeable can be charged on the go with a backup battery.

Laptop

HP Chromebook 11-1101

Some of the loneliest moments in my life have been in hotel rooms, when I felt too tired or sick or overwhelmed to go out but totally isolated inside. Back then, your only option for connectivity was an Internet cafe.

But Wi-Fi is replacing Internet cafes, and it’s a great comfort to be able to hide out in your hotel room and get on Facebook or Skype, or just watch episodes of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. (There are other things on the Internet that it’s also probably better to look at in the privacy of your own hotel room.)

I considered a tablet-plus-keyboard setup, but laptops are just more comfortable to type on — especially if you happen to like typing in bed — and I type a lot (cf. the thing you’re reading now). That meant picking between a MacBook and a Chromebook. (I haven’t used any Microsoft software in years, and this didn’t feel like the moment to go back.)

A MacBook, either Air or the new gold thingie, is more graceful and powerful than any Chromebook. But the chromebook I chose — the HP Chromebook 11-1101:– has a number of advantages:

  • Price. Listed at $239.99, I got mine for about $25 plus some points that had mysteriously accrued in my bank account. Even a used MacBook Air is more than that.
  • Weight. The MacBook Air plus the charger weighs 3.16 pounds, while the HP Chromebook 11-1101 weighs just 2.38 pounds. (The new MacBook is lighter, at 2.02 pounds, but a lot more expensive, plus it requires its own power adapter.)
  • USB chargeability. No risk of wandering around Cambodia in search of a MagSafe 2 charger or a USB-C power adapter.

I’ve had the Chromebook for a while now, and it feels good to use, plus it has good looks for a cheap device. And if you’re going to look at something every day, it might as well be decent.

Camera

Sony DSC-RX100M III Cyber-shot Digital Still CameraI have a camera. Several, actually. Plus also a phone. So why get a new camera?

A while back, the artist and photographer Gina DeNaia let me in on a dangerous secret. She taught me about sensor size. It turns out that the size of the sensor in a digital camera makes a huge difference to the quality of the photos, especially in low light. I got myself a Fujifilm XF1, which has a 2/3″ sensor — much bigger than a typical point-and-shoot, much less a phone — and I like it. Sort of. But it has the annoying quirk that the way you turn it on is by twisting the lens barrel, which means you can’t shoot one-handed.

In the meantime, there are now point-and-shoots with 1″ sensors. The competition came down to the Sony DSC-RX100M III Cyber-shot and the Canon PowerShot G1X Mark II. They’re both impressive cameras that can fit in your pocket, but ultimately the Sony won out. I got mine used for $689.

  • Big sensor. OK, they both have big 1″ sensors, so that’s a wash.
  • Viewfinder. Yep, that thing’s cool. I’ve used it a bit, and it’s fun to try holding a camera up to my face again like I did with my old film camera.
  • USB chargeability. There it is again. No risk of leaving behind my charger and battery in a hotel room somewhere. If the battery dies in the middle of the day, I can toss the camera in my backpack with the backup battery charger and power up again.

Was it really worth it? The camera will be the most expensive thing I carry, though it’s pretty cheap compared to a typical DSLR rig. But I’m going on the trip of a lifetime. I want to record it well enough that I could print the images later for professional use. Compromising to save a few hundred bucks probably wouldn’t seem so clever in the end.

Phone

A smartphone is a necessity for world travel these days. With a local sim card, you can get maps and figure out where you are. You can send messages to locals and other travelers. You can function like a normal person.

Right now I’m likely to take my Nexus 5 with me. I already own it, and it’s a perfectly capable phone. And why spend a bunch of money now, when there will inevitably be newer and cooler phones by the time I get to Korea in 2016?

The only thing that tempts me about pricier phones is the memory capacity for downloaded music — nice if you’re going to be away from Wi-Fi for a while and want music for the road — but that’s probably not enough to get me to spend $800 right now. And I can always change my mind and get a phone later on, whenever Google rolls out its next Nexus or whatever.

E-reader

Not exactly a necessity, but nice to have. Reading on a phone is a drag and a battery killer. And since I already have it and it’s tiny and light and cheap, I’m taking my Kindle Paperwhite with me.

And guess how it charges? Right.

Other stuff

I decided to get myself a backup battery to charge on the go. Plus I got a card reader so I can upload photos to the web via my Chromebook without having to go through a Wi-Fi or USB link.

Addendum: I’ve added a JBL Clip portable bluetooth speaker. at 5.6 ounces, it doesn’t add much weight, but it means I can add reasonably good-sounding background music to any room I’m in, or watch TV on my laptop without headphones, or throw a little party somewhere. We’ll see if it turns out to be worth it.