Music

Lao “Disco”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

ySKKSpbtXBjgyhP6z8LuC0-2006217035001655.gif

Last night a lively 50 year old woman that teaches kindergarten in Alberta Canada, a young woman from California who is a consultant to a California educational testing company, an even younger woman from Germany, Gabe a thoughtful young guy who is translocating from Washington D.C. to China to study Mandarin and two charming Lao trekking guides and myself all piled into a tuk tuk to go to the local Lao disco.

Traditional Lao dancing looks like a cross between Western line dancing, folk dancing and sometimes a slow salsa except that the hips don’t move much. In fact nothing moves much. Very Asian. Little feeling showing up in their bodies…but they are having great fun. We try it…stepping all over ourselves. Then suddenly…old fashioned DJ techno starts up and we are all on the floor…the Laos not changing their moves much. They are very sweet and refreshing…feels like a middle school prom in the States. I suspect that in years to come this will change.

We walk slowly all the way back on the dark road to our guesthouses…sharing travel experiences and insights.

The others walk me to my guesthouse first…I protest but I guess they are deferring to my age. Good grief! It is only 11:30pm and the metal gates to my guesthouse are closed. Oh F___k! This happened to me one time in Hanoi and I had to go find another guesthouse for the night. Look, the gates aren’t locked one of my friends says! Thank goodness…I pick up my key…the last one left in the bowl on the table in the darkened entry. After a CNN/BBC check on the Thai election results I fall into bed. When traveling in Asia, after fighting heat and humidity and noise, I am usually finished by eight pm. This morning my knee hurts. I am afraid we might have made a spectacle of ourselves last night.

Motorcycle Serenade

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Last night I hopped a motorcycle taxi at the corner. “Where you from?” the cute young driver asked. “America,” I said. “America Pie” he sang to me all the way to my dentist appointment. “I used to work at cocktail bar,” he laughed, “and I learn all the words to American Pie!” I enjoyed the song but really hoped I wasn’t going to lose my knees as he dodged in and out the cars and other cyclists at terrifying speed.

Motorcycles

Waiting For Riders

Alice’s Restaurant At Carnegie

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Last night Arlo Guthrie outdid himself in Carnegie Hall 40th anniversary of his song “Alice’s Restaurant.” Updated a little of course! What 50’s and 60’s folkie nostalgia with Pete Seeger (maybe in spirit) in the audience!

Arlo was preceeded onstage by the “Mammals,” a bluegrass band that included his musician son and daughter, who gave us a hilarious refrain about the “Bush Boys” in the long tradition of political folk-singing!

Arlo’s humorous home-spun wisdom and outstanding musicality was worth every penny and a trip into the city!

Odetta

Posted on by Laughingnomad

We had been years since we saw Odetta so when Bob read that she would be performing in a Village club we jumped at the chance to get tickets. She walked in dressed in a dramatic multi-colored red and purple silk and velvet gown and head dress…walked in very slowly and with help. She is still her inimitable self…but her weight is down to almost nothing and her songs were confined to softly sung spirituals. She is in her late 70’s and we worried about her health. The middle to late-aged folk-singing crowd laughed though when she cautioned everyone that in this day and age we should all be careful to use condoms!

Jazz In Familiar Old Quarter Hanoi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I had to check out of Thailand…thought my visa was 90 days that I got in Kunming in December but it was only 60 days. So at the end of March I had to pay a hefty fine at the airport to get out of the country…almost 10 a day!

I hopped a flight to Hanoi and stayed at the Classic Street Hotel again…this time thoroughly enjoying the Old Quarter with a minimum of running around.

Found a jazz club and while enjoying the free WiFi on my laptop had a great conversation with an American woman who, having been out-stationed in Hanoi for several years with Ford Motor Company, met and married the sax player and owner of the club. Even bought a T-shirt with an orange sax and name of the club that I have now forgotten!

At the end of a month at the Classic Street Hotel I flew back to Bangkok.

Free-Wheeling Moscow

Posted on by Laughingnomad

7yBXvp82X2gVlMeZe25DiM-2006198051115673.gif

Video

2004-09
Like in the big Central European cities we visited, there are cranes everywhere… old soviet buildings built during the Stalin era are scheduled to be razed and new one modern ones put up. Foundations for Stalin’s “Seven Sisters, called “Wedding Cakes” by foreigners, were laid in 1947 to mark Moscow’s 800th anniversay when Stalin decided that Moscow suffered from a ‘skyscraper gap’ compared to the USA.

Inextricably linked to all the most important historical and political events in Russia since the 13th century, the Kremlin (built between the 14th and 17th centuries by outstanding Russian and foreign architects) was the residence of the Great Prince and also a religious centre. At the foot of its ramparts, on Red Square, St Basil’s Basilica is one of the most beautiful Russian Orthodox monuments. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Moscow is a free-wheeling city. To the ambitious there are no limits…the streets around the hotels outside Red Square are lined with black Mercedes and BMW’s with black glass windows guarded by black leather clad “goon” drivers…looking like the mafia. I find a fancy hotel where there is free WIFI in the lobby while participants in a European Union meeting saunter back and forth and high-heeled jeans-wearing translators wait around having lively conversation with pipe-smoking goons.

While I sit here uploading text on our blog, Bob wheels off to find the American Medical Clinic where he has a smoldering tooth extracted by a Russian-speaking dentist before we get on the trans-siberian train for Yekaterinburg (birthplace of Yeltsin) Lake Baikal and Mongolia beyond. We miss each other at the end of the day and it costs me 600 roubles to get back to the flat in a taxi because I’m too chicken to hazard the buses and metros.

The night we saw “Spartacus” at the Bolshoi Theater, our bags were searched by monstrously big “security,” one at least seven feet tall. Tanya says, “I never see them there before…” I ask if it is because of terrorism and she says yes, terrorism. By the way, the suicide bomber that killed several of the people in front of the metro entrance was only about 5 minutes from her flat…she says she was at that metro only a few minutes before the bomb went off. People in Moscow worry she says, but what can you do? Yes, I said, I know, thinking of our Josh who works at a restaurant in lower Manhattan.

We are in the ozone at the Bolshoi, the first ballet for Bob who now says he is ready to take ballet lessons if you can picture that and we enjoy conversations with people around us during the intermissions…one older woman from Berkely and a young woman who is here for a few months to volunteer with an AIDS education Non Profit Organization. Come to find out, over a glass of champaign and caviar-filled pastry, her boyfriend, having graduated from Harvard, is working in Chicago as a chef and they are moving to Manhattan…so of course I take her email address to give to Josh.

We leave on a midnight train for Yekaterinburg.

Czech Jazz in Cesky Krumlov

Posted on by Laughingnomad

NikaFEAe66TwIiJDaeZZ7w-2006198180634090.gif

In Prague, we phone the Chinese embassy and they suggest coming for an interview after which they would allow a visa in one week’s time to allow for the processing and paperwork. Because the embassy kept our passports for Visa registration we couldn’t leave the country as planned so we retreated to cooler Cesky Krumlov, a medieval town in the mountains in southwest Czech Republic to spend a couple days in a lovely pension owned by a charming old German man and his wife who served us breakfast in their backyard each morning. Cesky was hosting a three day Czech jazz festival so we heard some great renditions of the Beatles and BB King…the naturally conservative Czech people politely sitting…getting the hang of the Blues.

Expatriates

Posted on by Laughingnomad

There are many expats in Bangkok who love this city and it’s people for many reasons. One day I struck up a conversation with a Brit woman sitting next to me on the SkyTrain who worked for an international finance company. When I told her we had been traveling for several months she noted that Thailand is addictive…people don’t go back to Singapore or Hong Kong she said…but they always come back to Thailand. “Write a book,” she says to me and then disappears out an exit.

After pleasuring sorrowfully to Mozart’s Requiem on September 11 at 8:46 am at St. Joseph’s Convent, we were invited to join a couple of retired expats from New York City to a breakfast of pastry and a huge bowl of caffe latte at La Boulange across the street. “What brought you to Thailand?” I asked one. “I came for a two week vacation and have been here 20 years now,” he says with a smile. How much longer do you think you’ll stay? They both quickly exclaim: “this is it!” “Do you have many Thai friends?” we ask. “No,” they say, “being retired we have no status. Regardless of how much money we have or what we have done with our lives or how much education we have, we have no status among the Thais… and status is everything here. “But so what?” they said.

Table Mountain & District 6

Posted on by Laughingnomad

S12J2pKbmw6zVZyRvmb7L0-2006193181305721.gif

The geographical configuration of the city of Cape Town at the foot of Table Mountain is as beautiful as everyone has said it is. We took the cable car to the top of the mountain on a clear beautiful day. We rented a car and took a ride down to the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town isn’t actually on the tip of the Cape) about 20 miles down the peninsula where Bob hiked up to the lighthouse to get a good view of the Atlantic on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other.

Music
The epic documentary by American Lee Hirsch, “Amandla! A Revolution in four Part Harmony,” had its first South African outing on June 16 at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. The film that earned two awards from the Sundance Film Festival describes the arc of the ANC’s resistance to apartheid from 1948 to the moment when Nelson Mandela dropped the first black vote into the ballot box in 1994 via the music that gave shape and direction to the war on apartheid. It has been entered for the US Academy awards. It will be showing in the States.

District Six
We visited the museum where a former Indian occupant expained that 60 to 70 thousand people-freed slaves, immigrants, labourers, merchants and artisans-used to live in the one and a half square km district spread along the flank of Table Mountain south of the center of Cape Town. In 1975 District Six was officially declared an area for white people only and bulldozed flat. All that remains now is a grassy area…but “they” had gotten rid of the Blacks, Colored and other undesirables that lived on the edge of the city…

The museum was established in 1992 to commemorate the destruction of the area and the sense of loss has been sensitively captured by the many artifacts donated by the ex-residents.

The Cannon is on Signal Hill right behind our apartment and is fired off every day at noon and makes your heart jump out of your skin. Started in the 1800’s we are told, when the English withdrew after the English/Boer War. They fire off the cannon 21 times at important times or when important dignitaries visit the city.

Hobas & Fish River Canyon

Posted on by Laughingnomad

t5vdleC6v9bjElbi1QdXwg-2006193172914229.gif

June 11, 2002
On the way from Serus the topography is incredible–perfectly formed mesas and buttes-almost Utah-like. We stop in the tiny wide spot in the road called Bethanie. Bob mails a card to his mom and I buy some pop and sausage in the little market. We notice some light skinned women sitting around-told Bob they looked exactly like Central Asians; James says they are probably mixed Bushman and White.

Later I read Laurens Van Der Post describe the Bushman in his “The Lost World of the Kalahari” as having the face of a central African black turning into “a lovely Provencal apricot yellow” and that “he moved in the glare and glitter of Africa with a flame-like flicker of gold like a fresh young Mongol of the Central Mongolian plain…his cheeks high-boned like a Mongol’s….” Some description!

It’s Bob’s turn to read “Bang Bang Club” about the experiences of four photographers during the last four years of the war in the townships of South Africa before Nelson Mandela’s release and the first election to include blacks. If you want to know what it was like on the ground in those days this book is graphic. Michael, who is from Johannesburg, says that his dad had the
photography shop that sold the photographers their equipment.

The Bohemian Rhapsody is lifting us high on the stereo-Freddy Mercury singing in that glorious and sadly gone away voice!

We arrive at the camp and Rod registers us with the camp operator in his native Afrikaner and then directs us to “toilets and ablutions” (showers).

We eat lunch while the wind blows sand in our faces and our food; to keep the tents from rolling away we have to put our baggage in them and detatch them at the top from the frames. Adrian asks if anyone has any clothes “pigs” (pegs) and I am mystified until I realize he wants some clothes “pins.”

The truck drives us to Fish River to watch the sun set over the canyon. When we arrive back at the camp a Catholic school has brought about 150 middle school children from Windhoek to hike the canyon and they are all ready to sleep out on the lawn next to our tent. Needless to say, Bob and I quickly move our tent to the other side of the park and then we have Kudo steak, mashed potatoes and carrots and peas for dinner.

In the middle of the night it starts to rain and we hear the kids…then in the morning we find them all sleeping in the camp bathrooms.