Notes from the Road

Days on the road: 32
Airports: 15
Hours in the air: 50
Continents: 3
Countries: 6
Cities: 10
Languages: 5 (counting U.K. English as a separate language, which it is)
Coffees: 47
Pounds gained: I'm guessing my shoe size, and I have very big feet.
Carbon footprint: I believe that I am now obligated to reforest Paraguay.

Back in the USA

An all day layover in Santa Cruz, two options, Alexander's for coffee or the zoo. We go to the zoo. The llamas look more nervous these days. The sloths are campaigning for autonomy. In Bolivia it seems everything is politics.

American Airlines is a sad airline. Now even the pretzels are gone. But it isn't the pilots' or the stewardesses' fault. One of our flight attendants wears a button calling on American's CEO to resign, before he collects six more bonuses. The pilot who takes us from Miami tips his cap to my small daughter and invites her to have a look inside the cockpit. "Mariana, don't touch any buttons!" I yell. But not even that seems to knock him off balance. Too bad he's not CEO.

Southern California – people here are spoiled. They take the beach and burritos for granted. They should try living in Bolivia for a year. I tried to convince my 5-year-old daughter that all the people with a little telephone receivers in their ears are robots. She thought about it, but then decided I was joking. But I wasn't.

Big news for those who make that oh-so-California of treks, the car trip up Interstate 5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Starbucks has a pair of drive-thrus along the route. I consider this as evidence that civilization in the U.S. has continued to advance. My eldest daughter is a 'barista' at a Starbucks in Jacksonville FL. Who invented the word 'barista' anyway? It sounds like a Latin American political movement…"armed baristas have taken control of the national parliament and have demanded more logical names for coffee sizes…' If Starbucks measured 'barista' height the way they measure their cappuccinos my daughter would be 'tall', which would be really something for someone who barely measures 5 feet.

Marin County California, everyone seems to have a smile on their face. Affluence and redwood trees will do that to people. We hang out in Fairfax. We eat white yogurt-covered pretzels and marvel at houses where people leave their doors unlocked when they go out.
In San Francisco I go on a father/daughter outing with my five-year-old. We take a boat there. My daughter calls Chinatown "China City." At the restaurant where we ate lunch she spends most of the time looking at the big silver fish swimming in the tank waiting to be eaten. We have a joke we like to make. "Hey, you know what they call Chinese food in China City? Food!"

In Berkeley I run into an old friend of mine. She is leading a group of women dressed in pink who are protesting at the U.S. Marines recruitment office. The police guarding the door don't seem terribly happy to be there. But better there than in Iraq I suppose. I am happy to see Berkeley hasn't changes completely since I went to school lived there 150 years ago. I might be exaggerating that number, but only slightly.

I meet an old friend for drinks in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel and strike up a conversation in Spanish with the waitress who is from Peru. She gives us a second round on the house. I like having conversations with immigrants in the U.S., even when they don't give me free drinks.

Washington. Here's how conversations there go these days:

"Hello how are you?"

"Fine, and you?"

"Fine."

"Okay, now that we have that out of the way, shit! What about Obama!!"

Fully-grown adults seem to be living a glee that most thought they left behind when they bought the theory that Santa isn't real (disproven, by the way).

Also a phenomena in Washington, the city's conservative, the Washington Times, seems to look for photos of Barak Obama that will make him most look like Malcolm X having a bad day. I like to imagine the editor barking orders like that character in Spiderman. "Jesus, can't anyone get me a good snarl on that guy?!"

In the U.S. capital saltenas cost $4, but they are really big. But less big than my feet.

Across the Atlantic

London, a city where it seems that everyone is inexplicably obsessed with imitating the voices Monty Python characters, is also the financial capital of the world. I think I know how Londoners make their money. In a cinema in London the price of a Bolivian movie ticket will roughly cover the cost of seeing one preview, which is actually not one of the admission options. Public transport in London is partly financed by requiring passengers to by tickets from coin-operated machines at the bus stops that mainly seem to eat the coins without dispensing a ticket. This happens to me every time. I am a major financier of London public transport.

In the Vienna airport all the guys who work at Starbucks seem to have the same haircut, which involves using gel to make your hair in front stand upright in a triangle. They also didn't seem to notice this until I pointed it out. "Wow, I guess so!" Is a guy a 'baristo'?

In Pristina, Kosovo's capital, people are very proud of their newly declared national independence, but they still have a few kinks to work out. The main one is that the city's electricity goes out several times a day, sometimes for hours. I discover this, unfortunately, while taking a pee in a suddenly-pitch back public restroom.

I like Montenegro, the tiny Republic (population of less than 1 million) carved out of the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps it is a sign that I was allowed to watch too much television in as a child, but when Montenegrins speak they all sound to me like Boris and Natasha, the Russian spies who sparred with Rock and Bullwinkle. Maybe it is their sentence structure. Here's a sign posted over a toilet in a UN office in Podgorica:

"When flushing, we are kindly asking you to push the flushing button once again. In this way you will avoid leaving the water in the running state which could, God forbid, cause flood."

In Europe in general, the man-purse is in. Men across the Balkans and Spain can be seen with small rectangle bags hanging at their hip from a strap tossed around their necks. Just big enough for a cell phone, a wallet and perhaps some mysterious European man-snack. I consider myself a trendsetter here. I've been a knapsack guy for thirty years. But the purse? What's the point if you can't carry a book? I'm just saying.

Something I read (in Spanish) on the back of a waiter's t-shirt at a Madrid street café (I don't think they call anyone in Madrid a 'barista': "The secret to life is to eat and drink without moderation." Many people in Madrid were practicing that advice on Sunday night when Spain faced Italy in the EuroCup quarterfinals. Ninety minutes, a scoreless tie. Twenty minutes of overtime, more scorelessness. Spaniards filled every café with a big screen in the city center. Television stations reported the largest audience in the history of Spanish television. Plaza Colon was filled with thousands watching on really big screens there. A decades-old curse of penalty kick losses just like this one hung over the nation. And with a pair of blocked Italian kicks a nation seemed to explode in celebration in one collective cheer. Nations need that from time to time.

The Way Home

The Miami Airport. It is a scary thing to know an airport so well that the bagel guys know my name and I can tell you which store sells Flaming Hot Cheetos. Tips about the Miami airport. There is a post office hidden on the fourth floor where few visitors ever go. Handy for sending gifts while in transit. There is a small park outside just beyond the Airport Hotel. You can actually go outside on a long layover.

Airports all have aquariums now, but they are for people, not fish. People who smoke. If you want to put yourself on display, anyone can. You just need a cigarette and sour looking face.

Decency is not hard to find in the U.S., even though the face we often show the world is far short of decent. One place you can find it is in the lost and found at the Miami Airport. I passed by the door without meaning to and strolled in for a chat with the fellow behind the desk, Ernie Alonso. He's worked behind the Lost and Found desk for 15 years.

"A wheel barrel came in today," he tells me. "We've also had human ashes." It is hard to imagine that someone could accidentally misplace their cremated uncle at the Borders Books here, but things happen. In the case of the ashes Alonso used information on the side of the can to track down the funeral home that had handled the cremation and through them was able to contact the family and Ecuador that had come to fetch a relative's ashes and then lost them somewhere between terminals E and D. "We don't just sit around and wait for people to come in. We make phone calls. We send emails." Maybe instead of making a fifth round of those CSI shows that seem to be so popular they could do one about Ernie as detective extraordinaire. They could call it, "L&F Miami!"

The La Paz airport. From summer to winter. From sea level to more than two miles high. From men with purses to women in wide skirts and bowler hats.

Way to American, three hours late so my connection to Cochabamba left me behind. Sometimes I think AA is channeling LAB.

But eventually I will find a way home – to my family, my dogs, my hidden eucalyptus grove. Oh yeah, and to a bed, my own.