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English Cops Shows & Karaoke

I found that most people who live in Newcastle are untouched by the Norman castle there, the one that looms over the River Tyne between the rail station and the Guildhall. To them the antiquities that all the tourists take pictures of are just rock walls. They want American culture, not this half-rate British ruralism. They are charicatures of the American college student: They drink a lot and start early, and they appreciate the finer parts of cops shows (including domestically produced versions, which are in some ways more violent since nobody has guns so they just beat people senseless with sticks). I stopped in Newcastle for a day on my way back south from Edinburgh to see the castle and the squat remains of Hadrian's Wall. None of the buses were running out to the best sites in the downs, so I settled for the Roman forts in the city itself. The British built a road over Segedunum before they knew it was there and never bothered to move it. It still covers half the buildings an...
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Let's Get Out of Here

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Autobots, let's roll. —Optimus Prime After leaving Crete, I was sorely anxious to leave Greece entirely. I planned the following days  with selfish efficiency. For the Fourth of July, I went to the new Acropolis museum, got a newspaper, and feasted at the Amerikaniki Agora. The market hall's high roof echoed with chopping cleavers and the butchers' rabid peddling. On learning of his death, I mourned quietly David Carradine, who passed a month ago without fanfare, hung naked in a Bangkok wardrobe. At the hostel, I met two Americans from California: one an ROTC cadet from the University of San Francisco studying in Germany for two semesters (and refusing to shave for the eight-month duration, just to enrage his commander back home), and the other an Orange County stoner with a Jewish grandmother, who used that connection to move to Israel, near the Syrian border, four months ago. We talked about beer, and I realized how much I missed hops, for there is no pale ale on the Medi...
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Heart of Darkness

Oh, what a place, what people! What a civilization is this of ours—this godless civilization founded on whiskey, Blackwood’s and the ‘Bonzo’ pictures! God have mercy on us, for all are part of it. —George Orwell The farang in Luang Prabang came in two broad varieties. First, the tourists, who found Laos on their itemized Lonely Planet itinerary after the tsunami forced vacationers heading to Thailand to move inland in 2000. These would stroll the colonial graveyard of the city, drink Lào-Láo in Veng Vieng, and head back into Thailand via the Friendship Bridge, with a Third World stamp to liven up their passports, and several complaints about the condition of the Laotian roads burning venomous holes in their mouths from all the retellings. Second, the travelers, who stopped in Luang Prabang because it’s in the middle of Laos, and who are quick to leave for the country’s fringes: the Four Thousand Islands of the southern Mekong, the backwater towns like Muang Ngoi or Muang Sing or Phon...
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