Saturday, November 19, 2005
And then stepped down from the ship
Because it is hard to know where to start. What do you say after something like this? How do you sum up? How do you bind up the billion strands of experience, "extreme and scatt'ring bright," into some tidy fasci of a paragraph? How do you proceed?
As it turns out you mostly pick up where you left off. You try to remember precisely where it was you left things, of course, and this is no easy task, but bit by bit it returns. There was an interesting sensation on coming home, in the first few days: you become so accustomed to seeing with the traveler's eyes, seeking out the new and foreign, refracting everything through that unique prism, that out of habit you find yourself looking at your home as though it, too, were the undiscovered country. I feel like I'm still traveling, still locked in that mode. Still using the vocabulary. Yesterday Yitzhak and I found ourselves in an herbalist's shop in Chinatown, having our respective afflictions of the large intestine (in Nice, a month ago, colitis, long-dormant, erupted again. Your sympathy is welcomed) diagnosed by means of a camcorder hooked up to a television screen, with which he snapped hi-res photos of our eyes. Apparently the capillaries in the eye hold keys to the various regions of the bodies, and lo and behold, the sector of my eye corresponding to the large intestine looked like a red lightning storm. Yitzhak's didn't look so hot either. His IBS, though, is not ulcerative, nor is there much of a way to drive into remission (as there is colitis), so we were in the market for something that might suppress the symptoms. After an entertaining conversation in Chinese and English which I was proud to catch repeated references to "duzi," stomach, and, of course, "da bien," big comfort, which Yitzhak and I have been doing rather too frequently, we walked out with $31 worth of queer-smelling herbs and dried deer penis. Or something. Jelly Bowels himself managed to hondle a "student discount" and knocked $3 off the price. He also did the same thing at Dynasty supermarket. As we walked through Dynasty, which really looks no different from your average Chinese supermarket, except there's a strange sushi counter, also they have Chips Ahoy and Ferrero Rocher, we found ourselves talking loudly, obstreperously, as we would have in China, where you can be assured that not only can they not understand you, but they are often furthermore mesmerized by the sight of laowai doing American things, and hence we act as American as possible. And so in Dynasty, we slipped right back into that mode--until we realized, "Oh, wait. They speak English here." It was unnerving, vaguely uncanny. I still haven't adjusted to people speaking English, I really haven't. Especially not the American accent. But the point of this digression is, we rationalized the $31, as well as the purchase of Macau beer (cervejaria de Macau, of course it exists), which tastes pretty much like your average shitty Chinese local pijiu, the same way we rationalized my haircut/torture in Dali, the attempted consumption of chicken feet in Chengdu (inedible--not because they're nasty, but because man is not meant to eat them, it's as simple as that), the sharing of tsampa with the monk in Lhasa, our 50-hour train ride across China, our five-day drive across Tibet, sleeping four to a bed, our hanging out with Alvin, Simon and Theodore, our demented adolescent friends in Luxor, my spending four hours in a sheesha bar in Cairo, my sleeping in the filthy corridor of an Italian train, and every other stupid, absurd, senseless, painful, delirious thing we did which we would never in a million years do at home: cultural experience. We will do anything in its name. We will cause ourselves pain, serious pain. We will mortally embarrass ourselves. We will consume unknown and curiously prepared animals and plants. We will eat and drink whatever is put in front of us, no questions asked. We will hurl ourselves into situations we have no business butting into. We will deprive ourselves of basic amenities such as showers, pillows, beds, sleep and health. And looking back, spent, exhausted, ravaged from three months' unrelenting trial, we will not regret a moment of it.
As it turns out you mostly pick up where you left off. You try to remember precisely where it was you left things, of course, and this is no easy task, but bit by bit it returns. There was an interesting sensation on coming home, in the first few days: you become so accustomed to seeing with the traveler's eyes, seeking out the new and foreign, refracting everything through that unique prism, that out of habit you find yourself looking at your home as though it, too, were the undiscovered country. I feel like I'm still traveling, still locked in that mode. Still using the vocabulary. Yesterday Yitzhak and I found ourselves in an herbalist's shop in Chinatown, having our respective afflictions of the large intestine (in Nice, a month ago, colitis, long-dormant, erupted again. Your sympathy is welcomed) diagnosed by means of a camcorder hooked up to a television screen, with which he snapped hi-res photos of our eyes. Apparently the capillaries in the eye hold keys to the various regions of the bodies, and lo and behold, the sector of my eye corresponding to the large intestine looked like a red lightning storm. Yitzhak's didn't look so hot either. His IBS, though, is not ulcerative, nor is there much of a way to drive into remission (as there is colitis), so we were in the market for something that might suppress the symptoms. After an entertaining conversation in Chinese and English which I was proud to catch repeated references to "duzi," stomach, and, of course, "da bien," big comfort, which Yitzhak and I have been doing rather too frequently, we walked out with $31 worth of queer-smelling herbs and dried deer penis. Or something. Jelly Bowels himself managed to hondle a "student discount" and knocked $3 off the price. He also did the same thing at Dynasty supermarket. As we walked through Dynasty, which really looks no different from your average Chinese supermarket, except there's a strange sushi counter, also they have Chips Ahoy and Ferrero Rocher, we found ourselves talking loudly, obstreperously, as we would have in China, where you can be assured that not only can they not understand you, but they are often furthermore mesmerized by the sight of laowai doing American things, and hence we act as American as possible. And so in Dynasty, we slipped right back into that mode--until we realized, "Oh, wait. They speak English here." It was unnerving, vaguely uncanny. I still haven't adjusted to people speaking English, I really haven't. Especially not the American accent. But the point of this digression is, we rationalized the $31, as well as the purchase of Macau beer (cervejaria de Macau, of course it exists), which tastes pretty much like your average shitty Chinese local pijiu, the same way we rationalized my haircut/torture in Dali, the attempted consumption of chicken feet in Chengdu (inedible--not because they're nasty, but because man is not meant to eat them, it's as simple as that), the sharing of tsampa with the monk in Lhasa, our 50-hour train ride across China, our five-day drive across Tibet, sleeping four to a bed, our hanging out with Alvin, Simon and Theodore, our demented adolescent friends in Luxor, my spending four hours in a sheesha bar in Cairo, my sleeping in the filthy corridor of an Italian train, and every other stupid, absurd, senseless, painful, delirious thing we did which we would never in a million years do at home: cultural experience. We will do anything in its name. We will cause ourselves pain, serious pain. We will mortally embarrass ourselves. We will consume unknown and curiously prepared animals and plants. We will eat and drink whatever is put in front of us, no questions asked. We will hurl ourselves into situations we have no business butting into. We will deprive ourselves of basic amenities such as showers, pillows, beds, sleep and health. And looking back, spent, exhausted, ravaged from three months' unrelenting trial, we will not regret a moment of it.
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