random travel destinations - India

When you think of India, what comes to mind?

Poverty? Overpopulation? Pollution? People with diamonds on their foreheads? Curry?

Slander and calumny. There's so much more to the place than that.

First of all, it ain't just a country. It's a subcontinent.

It's the home of some of the world's rarest animals, including the golden langur and the last remnants of the Asiatic lion.

India is the manufacturer of the world's cheapest car, the Tata Nano, which goes for around $2,000 American dollars. Because of the nutty-bonkers-hundred-percent-off-your-rocker price tag, it's colloquially known as "The People's Car." I remember reading about it in National Geographic a while back, and liking the idea immensely. I remember thinking Huh! Imagine, a small, efficient, cheap car that nearly every family in India can afford! A four-door in every pot!
Speaking of building amazing stuff, another thing I read about in National Geographic was the Golden Quadrilateral, a massive superhighway running all around the subcontinent. It was a massive project, years in the undertaking, but finally finished not long ago. The story of its development read like a small country's revolution.

I've also read that India was home to Asia's first Nobel laureate. And I heard that back in the day some Mughal bigwig built a rather fancy house for his wife. The memory of his wife, to be exact. Crazy, huh?
Oh yeah, and apparently there's people in India who don't truck with victuals, either. Hoopy!
I've heard intoxicating things about India. The railroads that span the entire nation. The deep jungles, where elephants, tigers and (a few) lions still roam. The mystic palaces. Monkeys running up and down the street and bugging you for snacks. Sacred bulls wandering everywhere. Beautiful women with deep, dark eyes, and some of the most colorful clothes seen anywhere on Earth. Epics to rival The Odyssey and Beowulf. Pearls the size of your fist. Veterinary schools that set the world standard. Temperatures that can soar up to 120 degrees in the shade in summer.

As you might have guessed, I'm not so keen on that last part. But the rest of it's incredible. Truth be told, I want to go to India.

To follow in the footsteps of Paul Theroux as that loquacious curmudgeon rode the train down the length of the nation. To see the shores with brand-new eyes, as the first representatives of the East India Trading Company must have, all those hundreds of years ago. Take a dip in the sacred Ganges River. Explore the jungles of Sri Lanka. Beat the heat in Calcutta with a glass of gin. Visit the new deli in New Delhi. Swim with the planet's ugliest dolphins.

Even the mere name speaks bewitchment.

India.

Home of a certain bald-headed troublemaker we all know. Home to over a billion people, some of the finest minds and hardest workers on Earth. Producer of high-grade doctors, soccer players, artisans, chefs, and holy men. A center of religious thought, architectural achievement, military might, cultural development, and historical wonderfulness for thousands of years.Not to mention the setting of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, my second-favorite movie of all time. And, of course, the inspiration for the title of a rather good Led Zeppelin song.

Sorry. I just had to throw that in there.

singing in a house with plaster walls

When I was a kid I had a big book full of Aesop's immortal fables. Forget everything you know about sour grapes and golden eggs. This book had every fable the man ever wrote in it. Fables that never would've made it into a fifth-grade classroom or a kid's television program: fables which dealt with nasty things like grave robbery, diarrhea, big scary lions, crucifixion, shipwrecks, exploding frogs, and the like.

I loved that book. I sure wish I knew where it was. I'd probably get an even bigger kick out of it now than I did back then. It was unabridged, you see. It wasn't really a kid's book. Some dry wit had translated it right out of Greek in a clipped, academic fashion. Many's the time I had to stop and look up a word, or puzzle my way through a rather sinuous turn of phrase. But I understood most of it. Each page had the full text of a fable printed on it, and, italicized underneath, the moral. There were some fables which didn't pass muster, of course. Aesop believed that people's personalities could be judged from their physical appearance, and as we all know, that just ain't true (except in Disney movies). But most of them taught good common sense, and demonstrated it in a rather captivating way, which is why I was so hooked.

The very first fable in that little book was one I didn't heed at the time, because I hadn't yet realized its relevance. Later on, though, it came back to me, and it's recurred to me again and again over the years. Particularly now, as I shall tell you. But first, the fable. I'm afraid I don't remember what it was called. But it went something like this:

There was once a talentless singer who used to practice in a house with heavily plastered walls, which amplified the sound so much that the fellow imagined that he had a first-rate voice. But when he went up on stage to perform, he sang so badly that the audience chased him off the stage with catcalls and vegetables.

And so we see that the disparity between how good we think we are and how good we actually are is often greater than we care to admit.

That wasn't the moral. The moral in the book was shorter and more profound. But you get the gist, right? Seems like every time I read something new, my eyes get opened to a new aspect of writing—and invariably, I hope to incorporate it into my own scribbles. William Faulkner has drawn my attention to the most debilitating defect of my current novel (and my new WIP, second in the series): Voice. The voice in my writing bothers me. It's so...remote. Third-person omniscient the P.O.V. may be, but as everyone from Jules Verne to J.K. Rowling to Douglas Adams to Mark Twain has proven, you can write in third person and still have a personal, lively, engaging voice. My novel manuscripts are anything but. The writing is sterile. Formal. Distant. Puerile, too. It's as intimate as a chastity belt, as approachable as a porcupine.

I suspect this is the chief reason why I'm having such difficulty writing this second book, and why I had such tremendous difficulty with the first, which, as I've mentioned, went through something like 27 versions and took four years to complete. I'm not having fun when I'm writing this crap.

Say, this reminds me of a song. Namely, Frank Sinatra on "I Get a Kick Out of You":

My story is much too sad to be told,
But practically everything leaves me totally cold.
The only exception I know is the case,
When I'm out on a quiet spree,
Fighting vainly the old ennui...

The story is good; the premise is there; heck, the dialogue could be worse. Even the tone is starting to shape up. But the voice is awful. There's nothing there, no spark, no flash, no touch, no soul-to-soul resuscitation. Everything's leaving me totally cold, and I find myself, once again, "fighting vainly the old ennui."

I've got to fix this. I'm not getting a kick out of my writing. I need to relax and write the way I feel like, and worry about how it sounds later. I've got to settle back, get down to basics again, just have fun with the process of creating. Faulkner reminded me of that. Granted, The Reivers is told in first person, but still—the way it's written literally sucks me into the story. It gets me engaged, makes me a part of the world I'm reading about.

A little while ago, I read a quote on The Sharp Angle from an author who figures his (or her) writing is good because he (or she) becomes immersed in the tale he's (or she's) telling. It feels like the characters are real, and that sincerity comes across to the audience. Maybe that was that ancient Greek singer's problem. He wasn't sincere enough. He thought he sounded good bouncing off the plaster walls, but up on stage, it was a whole different ballgame.

I need to muster up some sincerity. You should, too, if you're writing. If you like what you're doing and (even more importantly) know what you're talking about, it'll come through in the writing, and you'll have a decent work on your hands. That's my other problem: ignorance. I've got some research I really have to do, quite a bit for both novels—historical research. I need to know a little bit more about what Wild Bill Hickok did with himself before he became a sheriff in Abilene—namely, his days of scouting and trailblazing. I need to know a little bit more about Nitenryu, the two-blade style of swordsmanship which the great Japanese duelist Miyamoto Musashi practiced. I've got a lot I need to find out about the ancient Akkadians. What they wore, the weapons they used in battle, just exactly how their subjugation of Sumer went, that kind of thing. The Epic of Gilgamesh was good, but it wasn't much on historical detail. Once I get some hard facts (and some other, more nebulous ones) confirmed, I'll feel a lot more confident about the quality of the work. Thus it'll be much easier to get personally invested and calm again.

And somewhere in between, I've got to remember to go outside and play fetch with my dog Harriet every now and then. A doughty challenge, but as I'm starting to learn, challenges look a lot smaller after you've passed 'em. I chronicle these thoughts not to complain, or hedge, or equivocate. I'm not fishing for compliments, or hoping to garner the sympathy of an electronic support group. You can take away whatever you want from it. This is for me, you might say. Years from now, when I'm an accomplished novelist, I want to remember these years of youthful insecurity, those long hours I devoted to a labor of the heart whose success was anything but certain. I suspect I'll laugh. Hard.

Now, if you want a real piece of poetic justice, the word "music" (which is central to the fable I related earlier) is a derivative of the word "muse," originating with the Nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and the patronesses of intellectual and artistic pursuits. ...like writing, for example.

So tell me, why should it be true that I get a kick out of you.

recommended reading

• THE BOOK: The Reivers, written by William Faulkner and published in 1962.
• THE PLACE: Jefferson, Mississippi.
• THE TIME: 1905, when Civil War veterans were still alive, when automobiles were still a novelty (and were still hand-cranked), when it still took several days to travel anywhere and back.
• THE CHARACTERS: Boon Hogganbeck, the big, brawny, juvenile carriage-driver, one-eighth Indian, a boozer, a womanizer, and a terrible shot. Ned, the giggling, fractious, black retainer with a rebellious mind and a keen eye. Lucius Priest, the eleven-year-old son of a freight company director (Boon and Ned's boss), hovering somewhere between heaven and hell.
• THE TRICK: How to get these three guys and one stolen car from Jefferson, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee, raise as much hell as possible, and get back before the boss returns from the funeral in Louisiana.

This is William Faulkner's last novel, and my first taste of the man's writing, which, by all accounts, was uniformly superb. Everybody calls this guy one of the world's greatest writers, a giant in the world of scripture. I never understood why. I thought I'd already read some pretty good stuff. My first impression when I opened up The Reivers (pronounced like "reavers," meaning people who steal by force or stealth) was one of disbelief. He seemed to be committing, unapologetically, all of the venial mechanical sins which I've been attempting to forcibly train myself out of since I first began writing: extremely long sentences, excessive use of parentheticals, a lot of needless words and phrases. I was flabbergasted.

I said to myself, "How can this guy be considered one of the best there ever was? This is nothing but a single, rambling, pretentious, pointless description. I could write a better novel than this in a storm at sea with both hands tied behind my back."

Well, to be truthful, that last sentence has been embellished. What I actually thought was "This guy's about as good a writer as I am. I could write a novel about this good, and probably am."

As far as first impressions of Faulkner go, mine were anything but auspicious. But I kept reading. I stuck to it. I was determined to see it out. Because, as critical as I was of Faulkner's style, I was rather enjoying the story. I liked this corner of the world he'd set up for my mind to play in. The characters (see above) were absolutely scintillating as well as believable; and in general, the style of the thing was agreeable to me, an immediately recognizable rogue's tale in an unfamiliar guise. I appreciated not only the way that Faulkner was telling this story, but the way he approached it. I don't mean to put on airs, but Faulkner seemed, with this book at least, to be coming at it from the same angle I might've come from: dip the audience immediately into a colorful place, filled with light and life and memorable people, and extract from them a laugh or a gasp or a head-scratch or two. Faulkner and I, perhaps, liked to read (and write) the same kinds of stories, and we went about it the same way.

Irritated by style but fascinated by story, I forged ahead. I got halfway through Chapter 3 when it finally hit me. William Faulkner was a transcendent genius. He is, indeed, an inimitable, masterful writer. He makes it look not only easy, but natural. As I read, I gradually got the feeling that Faulkner was telling this story with almost careless facility, that the whole of it had just popped into his head one day and he'd merely sat down at his typewriter and banged it out. An absurd notion, of course. That's not how the writing process works. It's agony, raw and unattenuated torture. The flow of words stops and starts like a broken water main; any leftover initiative, inspiration and determination are squeezed out of the writer's soul by the gristmill of revision. But Faulkner, apparently, was a good enough writer (and editor) to make it seem as if he just slapped the whole thing down on a Saturday afternoon. But beyond this (and what struck me the hardest) is that Faulkner had powers of perception beyond the scope of my and most other writers' wildest aspirations. He saw and heard and felt, and translated his experiences onto the page completely intact. Whereas I have a tin ear for dialogue, no penchant for vivid character, and only the most rudimentary grasp of description and setting, Faulkner sweeps the board in all. In three short chapters we have scene, character, conflict, advancement, emotion, invocation, investment, power, and (as a result) the last and highest peak of the pyramid: story. And I am enjoying that story immensely. I am amazed, at every turn of the page, by the depth with which Faulkner explores his characters' motivations, their fears, their doubts, their emotions, their wants; his impudent use of run-on sentences and parentheses; the sheer amount of thought, observation, and characterization that went into this book; and the staggering range of Faulkner's (and his protagonist's) perceptions. This book is humanity on parade, an intimate exploration of people, morals, virtues—and their attractive antitheses. It is also just a rompingly fun story about three guys swiping a car and going to a cathouse in Memphis. Read it and you'll see what I mean.

• THE (SECOND) BOOK: Blind Man's Bluff: The untold story of American submarine espionage, by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, published 1998.
• THE PLACE: the world's oceans.
• THE TIME: the Cold War, 1947-1991, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. jockeyed for political and military supremacy in an undeclared war of intimidation, subterfuge, and arms races.
• THE CHARACTERS: American spy submarines and their crews.
• THE TRICK: How to build submarines capable of remaining hidden from the sophisticated senses of the Soviets; fill 'em with spies and able-bodied seamen; and get 'em close enough to Russia to scope out the Commies without being spotted, killed, or used to provoke a nuclear war.

For my next new conquest, I decided to delve once again into nonfiction, pursuant to a rather curious obsession that's been asserting itself over my mind recently: nuclear submarines. Lately I have become obsessed with nuclear submarines. Subs in general, really. The reason baffles me. Maybe it was because I was mentally going over possible novel plots (or, in comic book lingo, story arcs) the other day and, seeing as how my novel series is an allegorical history of the world, the Cold War crossed my mind. And with the Cold War came thoughts of spies, atomic secrets, spy planes, and...submarines.

Then I caught a documentary on the Military Channel about famous American subs. It wasn't particularly good—it didn't go over much of anything in detail—but it got the wheels turning, if you know what I mean. Soon I was on the Internet, looking up some of the Gato-class submarines which served in the Pacific during World War II, and the nuke subs that came after. These last all came with captivating names like Scorpion, Thresher, and Seawolf.
Come on, now. How could any self-respecting young man not be fascinated by the mere concept of submarine warfare, particularly in the cloak-and-dagger context of the Cold War? A cigar-shaped submersible, run on the principles of atomic fission, a cylinder of fragile black steel holding off the unforgiving ocean, crammed full of top-secret specialists and their high-tech listening devices, shepherded through the troubled water by a courageous crew and a devil-may-care captain, trained to ignore Soviet boundaries and push deep into enemy turf, as far as they dare, in constant peril of their lives?

And so I opened Blind Man's Bluff. It was one of the first books to address the then-still-mostly-classified and highly touchy subject of the "Silent Service." But that didn't stop Sontag and Drew. They interviewed as many sailors and commanders as they could (their interviewees often received stern reminders from Navy brass about their secrecy contracts). They combed through old newspaper reports and records, American and Soviet archives. And then they wrote a book. But this book isn't a drab, humdrum collection of accounts and data, nor of the governmental grandstanding and policy-making, the hallmark of the era. No. This is a story about submarines, and the people who crewed and commanded them. Blind Man's Bluff reads like an adventure serial, with stories of close shaves and disasters and incidents told in real-time, third-person narration. When my dad first gave it to me a few years ago (jeez, when I was like, nine, and way too young for that sort of thing) I thought it was a Tom Clancy novel.

I'm hooked. In the first chapter, "A Deadly Beginning," we learn of the diesel submarine Cochino, one of the very first spy subs, which in 1949 conducted surveillance operations near the port of Murmansk, on Russia's northwest coast. This was before anybody even believed that submarines could be used for spying instead of sinking enemy ships. Enter Harris "Red" Austin, a radioman descended of a long line of redhead Scottish warriors, who transferred from surface ships to submarines to being a "spook," all in search of adventure. Together with Commander Rafael C. Benitez, Austin conducted a series of daring sweeps of Soviet radio waves and communications, trying to divine whether the Russians were readying a nuclear onslaught. Just like the breaking of the sound barrier which had occurred barely two years before, submarine spy operations were a ticklish business. Submarines in World War II weren't submarines in the strictest sense; they were merely submersible boats, designed to run primarily on the surface and dive briefly into combat. GUPPY-class diesel submarines like the Cochino were the same kind of deal, but they were retrofitted for spy duty with some rather daring modifications: namely, adding a snorkel and an exhaust vent to allow the sub to stay submerged longer, and drilling holes through the pressure hull, the crew's only shield against the millions of gallons of seawater outside the sub, to accommodate the antennas of Austin's spy gear.

The mission went well until an explosion in the Cochino's battery compartment knocked out power and sent massive doses of toxic gas spewing through the sub. Cochino's sister sub, Tusk, was nearby, but a massive storm complicated matters. Things rapidly went from bad to worse. Men wounded by the explosion were cut off in the aft part of the sub by the fire in the battery compartment. The seas were so heavy that Tusk drifted out of sight. Further explosions destroyed what little chance Cochino had of recovering and limping away under her own power. And the toxic gases kept building up. As they waited for Tusk to pull side-on to evacuate them, the crew of the Cochino were faced with an agonizing choice: stay below and be poisoned, or go out onto the slippery, heaving deck in subzero temperatures. It wasn't long before half the men were groggy or unconscious, and half were hypothermic. The executive officer, Wright, was horribly scalded attempting to force open the door to the battery compartment. Six men were swept off the Tusk into the sea as it pulled alongside Cochino, and were drowned. In the end, Tusk managed to effect a rescue. A long plank was run between the two submarines. The seas tossed and rolled. The men had to wait for the precious few seconds when the plank was level to scurry across, else they would fall and be crushed between their submarines' hulls as they ground together. Everyone made it. Wright—in terrible agony, the entire front of his body burned—somehow managed to stand up, climb a ladder, cross the heaving deck, and get over the plank. Six sailors from the Tusk and a civilian engineer from Cochino were lost, and Cochino itself sank.

It was a disaster. But the surveillance had worked. Though he hadn't discovered any Soviet plots to blow up the United States, Austin had managed to tap the Russian lines of communication, convincing skeptical naval commanders that submarines were a viable platform for subterfuge and special reconnaissance operations. And that was just the beginning.

Can you see why I'm hooked? Mind you, not every story in Blind Man's Bluff is like this. The second chapter, "Whiskey A-Go-Go," details the adventures of another snorkel-equipped diesel sub, the U.S.S. Gudgeon, the first submarine caught red-handed in Soviet waters. Already low on air and battery power, the Gudgeon accidentally let its antennas and sail break the surface, and was spotted by Russian observers. The sub was consequently hounded for 48 hours by Russian ships, dodging one way, ducking the other, trying to evade the clouds of small-sized depth charges raining down from above, desperately seeking a temperature layer (a mass of cold water) to hide in, oxygen levels sinking and carbon monoxide and dioxide building up. Eventually, Commander Bessac was forced to quit on the business. In danger of losing his men to suffocation, horrifically low on power and unable to send out a call for help, the Gudgeon surfaced. A Russian ship took a sideswipe at the American sub, forcing it to dive again, only a gulp of fresh air in the snorkel. The Americans held out for another few hours, then surfaced again. The Russian ships dropped back. The Gudgeon spat out the bad air and sucked in some fresh. The diesel engines fired up, recharging the batteries. And a much-delayed call for assistance was sent out. The Russians didn't press the attack. They sent the Gudgeon a message, asking for identification. "USN, returning to Japan," the sub replied. "Thanks for the anti-submarine warfare practice," the Russians quipped, and disappeared.

Did I mention that I'm hooked on this book?

In ensuing chapters, I'm going to read about John P. Craven and some of the nutty ideas he came up with to advance undersea warfare; the death of the U.S.S. Scorpion, which something I've been burning to find out more about ever since this obsession with submarines set in; and a few tips and tricks about fighting underneath the Arctic ice cap, which plays merry hob with sonar. Don't worry, I'll keep you posted.

an F-bomb in K-Land

So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair by the fireside, a whiskey sour in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I accidentally dropped the F-bomb in front of my students?

It was 2008. I was 22 years old, and teaching English under contract in South Korea.

Now, as much as I try to deny it, I'm rather sensitive about my image. Not in regards to my appearance or personality, oh no. Knock on my door any given day and I'm liable to greet you in a pair of stained cargo pants and a ratty old T-shirt with a stretched collar. The hand I'll extend for you to shake will likely be the one I was picking my nose with five minutes earlier. Spending time with me is a crash-course in sexual innuendo, judgmental commentary, godawful puns and (consequently) social tolerance.

I'm sensitive about my image as an American, though. One of the things I dread about traveling is being perceived as the "ugly American." You know, one of those strident, bulbous, glassy-eyed jingoists who came to Paris because they wanted to see "the LOOV-ruh," and spent the whole time complaining about how unfriendly the natives were and how weird and different everything was. These folks put up a stink if they can't find somebody who speaks English (fancy not finding an English speaker in a foreign country!). They never bother to read up on their destination's cultural and social mores, and therefore unknowingly and repeatedly commit crimes of etiquette. They mispronounce names so egregiously that passers-by are physically sickened. And they try to touch or carry away a piece of every monument or museum piece they see. These are the people who poke fun at the Queen's Guard standing outside the gates of Buckingham Palace; send sushi back and ask for it to be cooked longer; and spend their entire Mexican vacation in a deluxe resort and come away twittering about what a nice country it was. Loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless and ethnocentric, as Wikipedia puts it.

Every red-blooded American is allowed to jones for a double cheeseburger with fries while they're overseas, but jeez, people, don't harp on it. Just because the United States is the greatest country in the world doesn't mean you have to remind everybody within earshot about it. I don't want to be one of those ugly Americans. I am sometimes, but I try not to be. Americans have acquired such a stigma that I fancy I can see a little twinge of displeasure come into foreigners' eyes when I tell them where I'm from. The old "Oh-God-he's-an-American-this-is-going-to-be-just-great" kind of twinge. Not that I care, of course. I'm busy thinking I'll bet you've never fired a gun in your life, sucker. Bet you wish your country had the balls to enact a Second Amendment, don't you? This didn't happen much in Korea, I'm glad to say. When I said, "Miguk saram imnida" ("I'm an American"), people's eyes usually lit up...as long as they were under 40.

I'm not apologizing for anybody. I'm proud of the country I was born in. It's a swell place. There are a lot of intelligent, worldly, culturally-aware people here. But as usual, a tiny contingent of dimwits is mucking things up for the rest of us. Not every American tourist is ugly. And that's what I've set out to prove, no matter where I go. It's my unofficial mission, when I'm wandering the globe, to show people that Americans aren't evil, stupid, obtuse or ethnocentric. Whatever foreigners I meet are going to scratch their heads afterward and say, "Hmmm...that bloke wasn't all bad."

Well, except for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If I meet that guy on the street, I'm going to give him the wedgie of his life.

With this promise in mind, I set out to learn the Korean language almost immediately upon arriving there. No, before. I was familiarizing myself with the alphabet and basic grammar before I'd even left Wyoming. I was only a few months into my tenure at my hagwon (academy) on Geoje Island, but I was already starting to get comfortable in the lingo. I had the alphabet down, the number system was beginning to coalesce, and I even had some rudimentary sentences under my belt.

I was so proud of what I'd accomplished that I thought I'd trot out some of my skills before my students. Impress 'em, you know. Let them see that I was getting comfortable in their language, even as I was acclimatizing them to mine. Fair trade, you see. It would make 'em feel like I was making an effort, and that I wasn't some overbearing, self-centered xenophobe.

So I started calling out the page numbers of our textbook in Korean. You know, instead of "twenty" I'd say "i-ship." "O-ship-gu" for "59," etc. "Sam-baek-chil" in place of "307," and so on. Then I'd stand up there in front of the whiteboard and bask in the smiles, widened eyes, and delighted gasps of the little ebon-haired tykes.

Then it happened. The time came to turn to page eighteen.

There's a rather interesting quirk of the Korean language involving the number eighteen. It's spelled like this: 십팔. However, the pronunciation, ship-pal, is EXTRAORDINARILY similar to the Korean F-word, shi-pal (시팔). It's almost exactly the same, in fact. 십팔 is pronounced SHEEP-pal, but you don't aspirate the "p" at the end of "sheep." You can't hardly hear it. The Korean F-bomb is pronounced SHEE-pal, without any "p" at the end of "shee." Unless you're a lifelong Korean speaker, it's very, very difficult to hear—let alone pronounce—the difference between the two.

Just my rotten luck, huh?

Wondering why my entire class burst into peals of raucous laughter whenever I said "eighteen," I went to my Korean colleagues and asked them what the deal was.

Charles asked me, "How are you pronouncing it? Say it for us."

I did.

Eyes bulged. Jaws dropped. Hands clamped over mouths. A universal gasp of horror went up. Charles, who had perhaps been expecting it, was laughing. He put a friendly hand on my shoulder and said, bracingly, "You are saying the F-word."

A frayed little piece of paper went spinning through the whorls and eddies of my mind and burst into flames, disappearing forever. I suppose it was the last forlorn shred of my dignity, self-assurance, and pride. For the rest of the day, I slunk around campus with my head between my shoelaces, while Korean kids and teachers alike snickered into their sleeves.
It took me ages to live this down. Charles was a lot gentler than I deserved; he only ragged me once or twice a month for the remainder of my sojourn. The kids, however, wouldn't let it rest. Any time I paused in my lecture for more than two seconds, Arthur and Edwin would pipe up: "Teacher! Say eighteen! Eighteen!"

There were no consequences; no parents were called, no disciplinary action taken. No fire-breathing ajuma showed up at my apartment door, out for scalps. I don't even know if word got back to the school director. But me pulling the rug out from under my own attempt at cultural awareness was punishment enough. My worst nightmare had come true. Not only had I been guilty of the most grievous linguistic impropriety, but I'd also negated the pains I'd taken to disprove the theory of widespread American unworldliness. I'd done the exact opposite of my intention. My vaunted assiduousness had been thwarted by ignorance.

Oh well. It made for a good story.

School of Hooch (last call)

I'm done with bartender's school.

That's right, folks. I have successfully mixed, poured, shaken, stirred, blended, and garnished my way through the School of Hooch. Passed the final practical exam today. Phase I of my Tripartite Plan for Total World Domination is complete.

It was relatively simple. I drove down to Riverside this morning, studied up on a few drinks I was uncertain about (the kir royale, champagne cocktail and blow job foremost among them). Then Tanya gave me the test, and I passed it. Perfectly. Not a single mistake.

I didn't call out the cherry garnish for the Mai Tai, but that was because Tanya had already ordered the next drink, and she didn't dock me for it.

This was my third try, but what the heck? I'm finished, and that's what matters, right?

Then I got me some training on the POS system, using the school's computer in the corner of the room. I familiarized myself with the intricacies of charging people money for their poison, and then suddenly I was done. Tanya printed me out my certificate of completion, and I left the school with my head spinning and my heart singing.

Next Monday, I'll be going in at 9:30 with my résumé in hand to see about getting placed with a job at a bar somewhere. Needless to say, I sang along with Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some" especially loudly on the way back up the I-15 this evening. There remains but to finish getting my pilot's license, and get my novel published. Then I'll have accomplished almost everything I wanted to do in my lower twenties. ...well, except for obtaining my commercial pilot's license, that is. And going to Antarctica. And singing in a barbershop quartet. And getting laid in the back of a Camaro.
But I'll get around to those eventually.

cocktail review no. 36 - Swirling to the Beat of the Haggis Wings

As I've previously delineated, the Golden Rule of cocktails is this:

More than three ingredients = massive suckage.

There's a corollary which follows:

More than three words in the name of the drink = you're on your own, buster.

Some drinks out there have feckin' weird names. Like so:

• Much Fuss for the Conquering Hero (sweet vermouth, applejack, apricot brandy, pineapple juice, lemon juice, orange bitters)
• Shooing Away the Tribes of the Night (dry vermouth, brandy, triple sec, Ricard, cherry brandy, bitters, cherry, orange slice)
• Evans Rescues the Damsel of Garstang Tower (sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, gin, strawberry liqueur, orange bitters)
• Strong-Armed Chris Returns to the Den (dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, maraschino liqueur, cherry, white crème de cacao)
• A Night in Old Mandalay (light rum, añejo rum, orange juice, lemon juice, ginger ale, lemon twist)
• The Sacred Mountains of the Pekingese Cloud Gods (dry vermouth, Southern Comfort, orange juice, blue Curaçao)

I have to admit, based on the ingredients, most of these drinks don't tickle my fancy. But every so often, I run into a drink that has such an odd name that I just have to try it. It doesn't even matter what the components are. The drink could be fried horse dung mixed with Komodo dragon spit and I'd still be interested. One evening in Korea, a long, long time ago, I was flipping through The Bartender's Bible on a lonely Friday night, wondering what my evening tipple was going to be. I flipped a page and— SWIRLING TO THE BEAT OF THE HAGGIS WINGS —I knew I'd found my destiny.

• 1½ ounces Scotch
• 1 ounce lemon juice
• ½ ounce triple sec
• 1 teaspoon grenadine
• 1 teaspoon egg white

In a shaker half-filled with ice cubes, combine all the ingredients. Shake well and strain into a cocktail glass.

You remember what I said earlier about egg whites? I was well aware of this cardinal rule before I made this drink. I mixed it up knowing full well what I was about to do to myself. But I didn't care. The phrase "haggis wings" conjured up such a ridiculous and awe-inspiring image in my head that I plunged recklessly forward without any thought to methods or results.

The results wound up being better than expected, but still poor. The mixture of (blended) Scotch and lemon juice is never a bad thing. It's just an unsweetened version of a whiskey sour. The peaty flavor of the whisky and the sourness of the lemon juice are a perfect complement. Triple sec isn't a stretch, either: the semi-sweet orange flavor buoys up the already-considerable citrus presence. Grenadine, however, is pushing it. Now we've got three fruits piling in on each other, and their battle for primacy obscures the Scotch. (I mentioned earlier that three fruit juices was the upper bound, didn't I?) Top this off with the egg white and the drink's transition from a steady glide to a fiery crash is complete. Egg whites make drinks slimy and foamy, ruining consistency. I've never met a drink with an egg in it that I liked. Of all the egg-drinks I have sampled, though, this was the least odious.

Try it if you dare. But don't say you weren't warned.

random travel destinations - Wales

Jeez, I've practically covered the entire U.K. before even doing a tenth of the EU. Oh well, the hell with it. This one's going out to Smithy, who's currently peddling his brand of awesomeness over in the Republic of South Korea, but will soon be whooping it up in Wales. Might as well tell you all what the old lad's in for.

Now, I don't know much about the place, myself. Here's a bullet list of what I do know:

• It's tacked onto the southwest corner of England somewhere.
• It's rather small.
• The spelling of the Welsh language in no way resembles its pronunciation.
• The eminent Terry Jones is from there.
• So is Catherine Zeta-Jones (please tell me you don't need a hyperlink for her).
• And Hugh Griffith, too (you know, the actor who played that Arab guy from Ben-Hur).
• And, truth be told, it's also where we get Mr. Fantastic. Or Horatio Hornblower, depending on what shows you watch.

Abandoning all pretense of assiduous research, here's a list of things I found out from Wikipedia:

• Wales has a population estimated at three million. This means that, if the entire population of Wales was teleported into Los Angeles, they could form their own street gang and still reasonably expect to compete with MS-13.
• The Welsh once had a king named "Llewelyn."
• The word Wales stems from the Germanic word for "foreigner" or "stranger."
• Wales didn't fall into anarchy after the Roman withdrawal in 410 A.D. In fact, a series of "successor states" sprang up and thrived, and battled with other English kingdoms for territorial control. One of these English kingdoms was Mercia, famous for being mentioned in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. ("Where'd you get the coconuts?" "We found them." "FOUND them? In Mercia? The coconut's tropical!")
• In the Welsh devolution referendum of 1979, the majority of the Welsh population voted against a proposal by the U.K.'s Labour government to establish an Assembly of Wales.
• A popular Welsh national symbol is the Red Dragon (Y Ddraig Goch). That means that if the United States and Wales ever had drunk sex and spawned a love child, it'd look something like Quetzalcoatl. A reddish Quetzalcoatl. How cool is that?
• There's a rather neat clock tower by the city hall in Cardiff. This would explain why the British PM is constantly ringing up the First Minister of Wales and saying, "My clock is bigger than yours."
• Wales has its own set of seven wonders.

Pretty neat, huh? Bet you didn't know about the whole "Llewelyn" thing.

Lesson to be learned here? Yes, Wales is actually a country. And it has its own unique culture, history, traditions, language, cuisine, natural attractions, landmarks, and...

...clock tower.

Don't you forget it.