The Most Latrine Republic

Venice is, arguably, the most beautiful city in the world. You don't need me to tell you that. It's also a tourist-infested, hideously expensive, and frequently reeking dump, and you probably don't need me to tell you that either.

This is compounded by the fact that virtually every Venetian I encountered was a dick. I don't blame them, entirely. All of those awkward hordes of Brits, Americans, French, Chinese, and Germans wear you every down, every neurotic food phobia – “como se dice 'vegan options'?” – every demand for snappier customer service, every slackjawked gawker getting in your way when you're just trying to pick your kids up from school, it takes its toll.

But my god, those infinite tangled alleys, the weight of centuries, the tiny standing-room only enotecas, the elegant interplay of land and water...

And so my mood in La Serenissima oscillated accordingly, between rapt enthusiasm and wonder and absolute dejected cynicism, from the moment I arrived as a Marco-Polo-in-reverse on the fast train from Milan.

I could admire the splendid beauty of Saint Mark's, beneath its Baroque clock with Zodiac symbols and its intricate pattern of gold stars on a royal blue background, watched over by the severe and imperious winged lion that stares across the city from infinite bas reliefs, its snarl as cruel as the statue of the Assyrian demon in the opening sequence from The Exorcist, a symbol of a conception of the world constructed on wholly different terms... only to be brought crashing back to reality as I lined up to enter the basilica, only to realize one could enter a QR code to pay double the price for the priority queue – tiered-service neoliberalism married to an institution that would rather spend its bucks sheltering sex offenders rather than restoring the masterworks that their faith supposedly built.

Similarly, on the other side of the Grand Canal, I traipsed through the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, admiring the lovingly collected works of Magritte and Kandinsky and Joseph Cornell and Duchamp and my beloved Di Chirico, as the autumn light danced through the cool white hallways, as I idly wondered whether I would be finishing the day and pairing my evening cicchetti with an Aperol spritz or a lush, apricot-scented glass of Lugana, reminded of every thing I love about visiting Italy, only to run afoul of a horsefaced and posh Brit sneering before Max Ernst – and even, God help her, Di Chirico's La Torre Rosso – whining “oh no, I don't like this a-tall...,” wondering why the fuck she would even come at all, this updated E.M. Forster character with her potbellied and Tory-voiced husband muttering about “shithole countries” on the way out, and further wondering why the fuck I didn't keep my earbuds in.

The Biennale was on, and being a good pilgrim, I made my way there on my knees, only to find the whole thing presented via the worst sort of mushmouthed academic jargon commonplace in the art world, pioneered by hucksters like Jacques Lacan, Michel Serres, and Luce Irigaray. Doubly depressing was the fact that the main exhibition's focus on female surrealists had taken their frequently militant socialist politics and stripped them away, replacing them with a vague witchiness and an even vaguer anticolonialism. And so all these brave women who in many cases sacrificed so much for their commitment to truth and solidarity were dragooned into service as handmaidens of late-stage capitalism – poor Cecilia Vicuña stuffed into a pussy hat.

But no matter, I loved the art, and the Venice Biennale most notably features pavilions from various countries competing for the big prize, and so it becomes a more bohemian version of Epcot, and I mean that in the best of ways. Let's take a global tour... 

Denmark – Horrifyingly real sculptures of eviscerated centaurs, slashed apart and noosed, amid the wreckage of the pastoral farmstead. The sort of thing that gets right under your skin. Is it any wonder this comes from the same country as Lars von Trier? The hell is going on in Denmark? 

 

Romania – Video of people having sex, gay men with “Elfriede Jelinek” written across their arms (hell yeah), a severely disabled man lain down and fucked by a curvy blonde in thoroughly kinky dungeon sex. Weirdly hot. 

Japan – Artful arrangements of ethereal light, because what could be more simple and elegant and jawdroppingly gorgeous? 

US – It's very funny to me that the State Department is going out of its way to lampshade its support for black feminist art, because, well, I think we can safely say that many feminists of African origin in the Global South have a few words with regard to the US State Department. 

Germany – Mostly empty, but the building itself is partially taken apart to reveal how it was constructed under fascist regimes, and it's as intellectually rigorous and abstract and stern-faced as I would hope. 

UK – Painful attempt at fun. Lots of women making music, and videos of them making music in Abbey Road Studio, when I'd rather just listen to the music. Even Brits can make good music. 

France – Actual fun, because French people are far more capable of having fun. An absolute junk-drawer wonderland of cast-off artifacts from the Algerian and French mid-century, welcoming enough that people were actually sitting around and talking and chilling and laughing, because after that much po-faced bullshit, sometimes you just want a glass of wine and a couch. 

Australia – Confusing imagery on loop I tried to figure out. Then I read the artist's statement, saying it was supposed to be confusing imagery. Mission accomplished, mate. 

Spain – Literally nothing there. Supposed to be a commentary? Apparently? 

Canada – Mentioned revolution in the title. The sample image they used was – I swear to God I'm not making this up – a Stanley Cup riot. 

Egypt – Uteruses that look like Kirby. 

Russia – (missing entry)

Writing that cheered me up. I hope it cheered you up too.

And all that stupidity, all that backlog of grievances, it quickly fades when you actually get to your second Aperol spritz, and you walk around Venice at sunset, feeling it a little, enjoying the long shadows falling over the lagoon. Sure, there's a tubby middle-aged American couple in matching Pittsburgh sports hoodies (Steelers for him, Pirates for her), wifey with a mobility cane for her rotundness, right in front of you blocking the view, but unironically bless their hearts for actually making it this far from Western PA. I smile briefly, and turn up The Psychedelic Furs as loud as they will go as the sun slowly sinks over the Lido. And if that doesn't appeal, I don't know what's wrong with you.

There is a melancholy in my last night in Venice – the kind that comes at the end of any visit to any place, even if it's at the beginning of a trip. And part of that is knowing that this is the last time I'll be in this place for a long time. Maybe forever.

Maybe I'll die before I get another sunset over the Lido. Maybe that final acqua alta will come and swallow this most vulnerable of cities whole.

But for now I have this. And that is enough.

Ghost Towns

Many years ago, at a time in my life when the future seemed more possible, I sat in a class taught by an old grump who seemed the perfect stereotype of the liberal-arts college professor, tweed and beard and bourbon and all. The class was on Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, and as one of our texts, we read Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night."

Hardly hip reading, and generally considered a second-fiddle player to Gatsby, complete with a corny-as-fuck title. But it has moments of absolute transcendent beauty, all revolving around the central thesis of the dying world of the French Riviera as the pall of the Great Depression settled over the world, and the protagonists, an alcoholic couple, almost acting as a stand-in for the horror of Fitzgerald's contemporary world, as well as the alcoholic miasma that Fitzgerald was settling into, that would eventually take his own life.

I don't know why these are the lines I remember best:

"The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names--Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo--began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha's eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast--their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. 'We'll be back next season,' they said, but this was premature, for they were never coming back any more."

And many years later those were the lines on my mind as I traipsed through the largely boarded-up beach towns of Southern Thailand -- first Chaweng on the island of Koh Samui, followed by Kata, towards the south of Phuket.

I had gone south to use up vacation days I couldn't use in the annus horribilis of 2020, to escape the confusion and drudgery of my urban life. After all, don't the movies so often provide a sense of reconciliation, of future, by having the protagonist run down to the sea? I went to do a quick journalistic assignment, to spend a happy week or so swimming and sunning and drinking elaborate rum cocktails and possibly sharing my (heavily discounted!) resort room with a nice woman. 

It was not to be.

From day one, I was plagued by sickness, technological failures, heavy rains, vicious rip tides, attempted scams, trying to figure out if I was being scammed by listening in on the people around me but being stymied by their incomprehensibility, given their speaking in the harsh seagull squawk that is the Surat Thani accent, a couple screaming at each other and smashing glasses in the next room ("I do fucking everything for you, you fucking bitch!"), services canceled, and above all else, the absolute lassitude of the place.

Everywhere I went were the signs of what once was, 90 percent of shops closed. There were the shut-down hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, souvenir shops, tailors, massage shops, health spas, travel agencies offering cheesy elephant tours and GoPro rentals for your sea kayak, convenience stores (not a single 7-11 or Family Mart left open in Kata). There were the signs -- in Hebrew ktav ashuri, Chinese characters, hangul, katakana, and Cyrillic -- indicating the people who were once here and would likely not be back for a very long time.

The few shops open in Chaweng seemed mostly Indian-run -- the upcountry Thais seem to have had the good sense to pack up and go home, but given the current desperation of India and their possibly questionable legal status in Thailand, they found it best to stay on and weather the storm. They smiled at me, offered Hawaiian shirts and garlic naan. 

Perhaps saddest of all, there were the remnant sex workers, "masseuses" in black cocktail dresses and blush awkwardly smeared on over their pancaked foundation, doing their best attempts at a sexy dance to pounding mor lam music in front of massage parlors where fluorescent light illuminated the peeling floral wallpaper in the reception area, pouting their best at me and tutting "pai nai?!" as I refused their come-ons.

I did my best to enjoy myself, truly. I swam many long, happy hours in the South China and then the Andaman Sea. I drank strong mojitos at one of the few "beach club"-type bars still open where they were for some damn delightful reason playing the club bangers that my 20 year old self obsessed over, Glass Candy and Kavinsky and LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends," I ate (with sheer joy at the weirdness of it) a violently spicy (true South Thailand spice, for those in the know, with an obscene amount of still-green black pepper ground up into it, the copious coconut cream doing nothing to blunt the spice levels) sea-anemone curry. I read the gloomy anarchist philosophy of Max Stirner and the optimistic Marxist science fiction of China Mieville. I gathered branches of many species of coral that had washed up on the beach on my long walks.

And yet inevitably, I ended every evening with a sighing solo beer, staring out at the crashing waves, the eerie green lights of the squid boats flickering along the water.

The last night in Kata before I was due to fly back to Bangkok, I decided to stop in one of the Russian restaurants that were still open (it's called Veranda, by the way, shout out if you're on Karon or Kata Beach, dope-as-hell food), and the only one that seemed to have a fair number of Russian customers, seemingly the last on the island -- young men who looked like MMA champions and their girlfriends with pulled-back blonde ponytails, roots exposed, in awkward ballerina dresses, and their elders, men looking like Ohio highway patrolmen with short-cropped blonde hair effortlessly fading into their sunburned neck fat.

The meal itself was excellent, a nice chilled bowl of okroshka made with proper kvass and bittersweet radishes for the hot weather, followed by chicken-mushroom croquettes, all washed down with plenty of vodka. But as I sat back at the end of the meal, saw the signs of neighboring restaurants fading across the road, the chalk menus offering an "ekzotika" menu of weird local meats and fishes that were probably no longer even kept in the walk-in, the white lattice and fake flowers evidencing a still-Brezhnevian aesthetic sensibility, that I thought again about Fitzgerald's lines again.

And then I realized the inevitable sadness of tourist towns, even in peak season -- that they are inevitably defined by people who are generally not there.

And I was one of those people who was generally not there. And 12 hours later, I was there no longer.

The Tea That Strikes the Dust, Part 2

As we traipsed across Myanmar, we entered into another era of travel, one before ATMs and the Internet. The unpaved roads that criss-cross the country go over remote brooks, where the traffic is slowed by parades of white bulls, their horns garlanded with jasmine and chrysanthemums, a procession of the town's virgins carrying golden vases. It wasn't so much that the technology was more primitive-- this was something I'd anticipated-- it's how obviously entrenched each town was in its local culture, in its rituals and traditions, its superstitions and conventions. And when we entered into a remote town, we could count on a cup of green tea.

The tourists are slowly trickling in. You see the kids with backpacks checked into cheap guesthouses on 25th Street in Mandalay, on Mahabandoola Road in Yangon, in little towns like Kalaw, Hsipaw, and Nyaung Oo that are starting to develop a reputation for mellow vibes and cheap beer.

If you believe the press, the country in a "state of transition." Sanctions are being lifted and political prisoners released. The Tatmadaw, the military government that deposed U Nu in 1962, things that resemble what the international community thinks of as elections are being conducted.

But the people's trepidation remains. "The generals have just changed their uniforms," a Shan princess told me in the parlor of her decaying palace. "In my country, no reason, no democracy," a boozy Tamil-Catholic surveyor told me at a restaurant in the frigid hills of Pyin U Lwin.

A video plays for us on the bus, repeated Buddhist prayers in sung Burmese and whispered English, 30 minutes of a dharma talk filmed on a Camcorder, an anti-drug use anthem, followed by a military parade down Sule Paya Road in Yangon: stultifying religious dogma followed by something that looks cribbed from every Americans' elementary school don't-cave-to-peer-pressure-and-do-drugs seminar, washed down with a healthy dose of paranoid fascism.

And in Mandalay, the old royal capital memorialized by that great imperial apologist Rudyard Kipling (who never visited the city), you see the traces of the profoundly anti-democratic: boulevards that can accommodate tanks, Orwellian concrete nightmare buildings falling to pieces in the oppressive heat, bronze statues of generals smeared with pigeon shit, and the surviving banners: TATMADAW AND THE PEOPLE COOPERATE AND CRUSH ALL THOSE HARMING THE UNION!

And beyond the central state, there are the multiple civil wars on the fringes, the many flavors of ethnic strife that occur when groups with long, bitter histories-- Mon and Wa, Rohingya and Rakhine, Chin and Kachin, Kayin and Kayah-- together have to deal with finite resources. It occurs in waves, with the current horror being the purges of Burmese Muslims.

Visual media have made the image of violence universal and distant. But then, as I pass through the burned down remnants of what was once the Muslim Quarter of the town of Meiktila, and see a girl staring out from a charred doorway, all of that universality and all of that distance collapses into immediate delirium and nausea.

***

Yet the persistent violence only existed on the peripheries of my trip, making itself known through palimpsests. And in my personal interactions, it all melted away, and I was greeted by a consistently kind-hearted and generous populace.

I spent much of my time reading Patrick Leigh Fermor on buses and trains, and it felt a little like we were in the old Europe of inscrutable tradition and generous curiosity towards the few travelers who passed through. And, as with Fermor along the Rhine, there were the constant small gifts en route. We were given plates of chicken and rice at a Yunnanese temple, a cup of coffee from an old man, preserved plums from a group of schoolgirls, jellied candies from a shopkeeper, the bowls of rice wine offered to us by Shan villagers, a tube of epoxy to fix a broken shoe. And, after a day of hiking, we were offered a ride back from a waterfall outside the little village of Anisakan.

Up around that part of Myanmar, it gets quite chilly at night, even in the sweat-drenched depths of the hot season. And in the back of the truck, with the wind sweeping our faces, I sheltered myself behind a canvas flap.

On one side of the road, a bright vermilion sun sank into the haze of the burning rice fields in the valleys far below. And on the other side, an equally vermilion full moon rose from above the pines.

***

There will always be that next valley, that next river, that next point on the map-- a town with an inscrutable name, the triangular symbol representing a mountain, the slightly different shade indicating a new province where the people's palms are tattooed with mandalas and compass points, or where they eat oxtails simmered in a thick turmeric sauce, or where the laurel trees sway in the high winds at the base of a snow-capped mountain.

For the map isn't just a diagram, it is a web of possibilities, a reminder of the million pathways that spiderweb out from the point at which you stand.

The Weight of Signs

On hungover Sunday mornings, I've taken to going on long walks through the shopping malls of Bangkok. One can find secret passageways, down long, white hallways, across hot asphalt alleyways, between littered chicken bones and smashed mangoes. Somehow the world becomes less pressing-- the things you regret from last night, the noonday sun-- when you're in an air-conditioned bubble with so much sensory stimulus that you don't have to choose any one thing. Simply turn your brain off, listen to your headphones and get lost in the white noise.

Which is how I wound up at Center One, one of the handful of cheap, chaotic shopping centers clustered around the Victory Monument. In a city where the large-scale malls inspire the same degree of devotion as the golden temples of the old city, this is but a minor shrine-- a few chain restaurants, mobile phone shops, and cosmetic counters, all fitting its location next to a large technical school. But far more than anything else, there are the countless tiny vendor stalls with their piles of women's clothes.

Each shop has its name written in balloon-shaped Roman script, and each is a testament to the truly awful taste of petit-bourgeois Thai teenagers. In every stall, you see the same merchandise-- giant Minnie Mouse bows, knock-offs of dresses worn by K-pop stars, gaudy costume jewelry, gathered together in cluttered racks and particle-board discount bins.

What I find repulsive about these isn't the cheap fabric and general ugliness-- I'll leave those critiques to more fashionable people than myself-- but the sort of transcendental image that they're trying to project. A lot of this is an import from Northeast Asia. Within the Japanese sphere of economic influence, Tokyo necessarily expanded its aesthetic values to the then underdeveloped states of Southeast Asia in the years around the Second World War. And this sort of kawaii or proto-kawaii attitude has permeated international pop culture in Thailand since then, from Japanese enka singers back during the '40s and '50s to the modern hallyu-- the Korean wave of pop stars, fashion, and soap opera.

And in that mall basement, it strikes me as especially garish. The women are giggling schoolgirls-- eternal virgins wrapped in ribbon. They pair perfectly with the men-- passive, kittenish, heavily made-up male teen idols with perfectly coiffed hair and plastic surgery to give them occidental features. Combined, it is a pop culture idiom that blends the moronic adolescent consumerism of my own country with the bitterly hierarchical Confucianism practiced on the shores of the East China Sea.

I want to sit down, and wind up at a chain restaurant, with a strawberry smoothie with more refined sugar than strawberries in it.

And I have to realize that despite my own opinions, despite my attempts to learn a language, to be a part of another country, I remain so explicitly an outsider, not only through the color of my skin and hair, but through my own sense of otherness. When I'm in an American shopping mall, I can scoff all I want, but I can comfortably read the semiotics of it. But here, I barely know what I'm looking at. Not only am I alienated from consumer society as a whole, but from the form that consumer society has taken in a culture on the far side of the planet.

I'd like to think that my response is one of good taste versus bad taste... that not only am I responding viscerally, but that I'm pursuing a line of thought in the tradition of Adorno's critique of the culture industry, the Marxist and Gramscian critique of the commodity fetish, and Veblen's studies of the leisure class. These are claims that I can make with far greater confidence back in the States. But especially when I'm less aware of the sign systems being processed, I start to think that my political readings of the aesthetic are simply an intellectual smokescreen. Rather than making a lucid analysis, I'm terrified that I'm simply deeming my own bias and ennui to be an absolute truth.

This is the trap into which I fall. Everything is shaded thusly. Depression becomes reasonable acceptance of life in a late-capitalist society. Happiness becomes collaboration with the invidious forces of primitive accumulation. Loneliness is our natural state in an atomized modernity.

Of course there are countless antidotes to such a way of thinking-- religious people take faith in the idea of otherworldly salvation, capitalist enthusiasts make dubious claims about the equally otherworldly "free market," bohemian types choose to simply to inhabit a bubble, and certain types of postmodernist try to celebrate the hybrid and the liminal-- all of which seem equally lonely and/or defeatist.

I sit in my corner, hide out with my book a little bit. And then when I leave the mall I walk out into the late afternoon in Santiphap Park. Old couples picnic by the little pond, a few workmen tearing down the old love motel on Rangnam take a smoke break on the far soi. And stepping out into fresh air, the signs rearrange themselves into something more cogent. And I am here, in a port city of 15 million people, and like the countless others who pass through here I'm trying to make sense of it, trying to extract some kind of meaning.

A light rain starts to fall, and this is one of those moments, when the whole city opens up like a flower at sunrise, and it, for 30 seconds, is just as lovely.

Christmas in the Province of the Million Rice Fields

Chiang Mai is a city within an image. To the outside world, it is a city of mists and golden stupas, nested in the lofty Thongchai Mountains, and encircled by its ancient brick walls and jade-green moat. This romantic vision is propagated within Thailand by countless romance movies and airline promotional packages; internationally, it's propagated by the Lonely Planet guidebook, that comically misinformed and sloppily written vade mecum of the Khaosan set.

I'd visited Chiang Mai a couple of years previous, and remembered it as a sort of Asian parallel to Santa Fe: the same old hippies parked at vegetarian restaurants, the same young hippies riding bikes shirtless, the same cozy used bookstores and mountain views, the same hemp bags and long cotton scarves, the same elderly tribeswomen peddling silver trinkets, and the same galleries selling cloying tourist art.

But as I stepped out into the slightly chill evening air on Christmas Eve, I found the town far more tawdry and knockabout than I'd remembered. The crumbling laterite chedis and teakwood verandahs were overwhelmed by all manner of architectural detritus: boxy insensitivities, commercialized fake deconstructivism, extruded-aluminum imitations of traditional Northern-Thai rooflines. Following an alley just outside the moat, I walked down streets I vaguely recalled from a whiskey-laden Songkran festival. Most of the bars and restaurants I had eaten and drank at were empty, save for the occasional grotesquely fat white man, perhaps accompanied by a troglodytic Thai wife.

Lost in the back alleys, the same storefronts kept recurring: the empty restaurants with solitary, obese Western customers, all of them with high ceilings and lone fluorescent lights, their only decoration a calendar with a picture of the monarch; food stalls with piles of limp cabbages and velvety curtains of tripe hanging inside a refrigerator case, pools of stagnant, stinking water accumulating on the pavement; dimly lit brothels, their windows blacked out, illuminated by rainbow-colored Christmas lights; dark, jungly parkways with uneven sidewalks; bearded European backpackers smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in front of their hostels.

Every street seemed a dejection. Row after row of guesthouses all promoted the same activities. The adrenaline-laced extreme sports they offered seemed to differ from ordinary sports only in their requirement of hundreds of dollars of technology. And the "hill tribe trekking" that is ubiquitously promoted revealed itself to be nothing more than a bunch of privileged, predominantly white youth regarding the indigenous people as safari-park creatures in their native habitat.

The grotesquerie of posters advertising the human zoo was doubled by the sight of impoverished Hmong and Karen, either displaying their wares on blankets or simply panhandling. The Thai bourgeoisie romanticizes their own tribal populace with the same vigor that the American bourgeoisie romanticize theirs, fetishizing their, oh, simplicity and building the occasional school while at the same time turning a cheery blind eye to the crass exploitation of their home regions by corporate entities (Western, other Asian, and local alike), the militant spread of evangelical Christianity through coercive tactics, and the routine export of local women to the fleshpots of Bangkok.

Despondent, I looked for someplace to sit down and maybe get some reading or writing done, have an antisocial drink, watch some band of local hacks play Creedence Clearwater covers, whatever.

Which is how I wound up at a French cafe-bar on a terrace adjacent to the city's night bazaar. The annoyances-- women trying to sell wooden frogs, that asshole Michael Bublé on the TV-- made themselves known, but for the most part, I could just concentrate on the beer in front of me, the marble-top table, the lights strung up in the palms.

And then from behind a fountain, a Thai marching band strikes up into a Christmas carol. All those songs that in America I find to be obnoxious and overdone are suddenly rather sweet when they're played by middle-aged Buddhists below the Tropic of Cancer.

These are the unexpected delights of going someplace else. Of course we expect to see things we haven't seen before, meet new people, eat new foods, walk down unfamiliar streets. But hidden within the unknown is that which is known, suddenly re-imagined. And, what is better, something you found so tired and dull and insipid suddenly given new life. You find traces of another time, another place enveloped in entirely different circumstances, and suddenly everything is brought into slightly sharper relief.

The Tourist's Eye

A traveler arrives in a foreign land from the English-speaking world. His first experience is the international airport-- its McDonald's, its Starbucks, its steel and plate glass and molded plastic and people rushing down the concourses dragging wheeled suitcases. A few localisms appear-- a flag, regional dishes on the menus of the restaurants, and the accents and complexions of the customs officials-- but ultimately the environment is without nationality.

He takes a taxi into the heart of the city and arrives at a hotel recommended by the guidebook. The desk clerk speaks English, and the hotel restaurant has its menu typed out in neat 10-point Garamond. He orders a curry or a plate of noodles to sample the national cuisine, and it's tailored to the tastes of foreigners, its fishiness or spice toned down, served on a gleaming ceramic plate with a white linen napkin.

In the daytime, he goes to the tourist sites, and sees representations of the culture of the country. He visits shrines and palaces, dusty museums with 18th Century cannons and early missionary Bibles. He snaps a photo of an old building with a bearded man smoking a cigarette out front. Of a statue of the Buddha or Shiva or the Virgin. Of exotic birds pecking at cast-off ice cream cones in a public park.

As he stays on, he learns the signifiers of the land. Word by word and phrase by phrase, he acquires the rudiments of the language, pointing and miming his way through open-air markets and train stations. He learns the sign systems of the culture-- a storefront with a duck hanging from a hook by its beak is a restaurant serving a spicy soup with duck breast and egg noodles. What had been blank landscape, immediate and without context, emerges as a web of symbols strewn throughout the country.

Days pass into weeks. He loses the sense of time that he had in his old country, he adapts to the local currency. The passage of the Sun across the horizon follows a different route and rhythm, and he becomes accustomed to its colors and shadows. He learns more of the language, and acquires the meaning of new signs: the mortar and pestle, the basket of bananas hanging from a rope, the different colors of buses corresponding to different destinations and prices.

His eyes turn homeward. He sits on the beach staring at the waves lapping at a nearby island, glinting in the sunlight. When he goes out for a swim, he looks back at the seaside town, and he is ready to leave. Thinking of the drab weather of his homeland, of the coffee at the shop down the street from his own apartment, he is suddenly filled with a longing for familiarity. It's a little after dawn there now, and at his apartment, the cat is resting a shaft of morning light, waiting for breakfast.

He gathers up his souvenirs that he's bought for people back home, and takes a taxi back to the airport, returning to the place between places. For a moment, he looks at the potential departures: Tokyo, San Francisco, Oslo, and Karachi all beckon. But then, his mind settled and his return ticket in hand, he grabs a quick gin-and-tonic at the airport bar before boarding a plane and jumping back across the ocean.