Twelve Black Code Monkeys

A few days ago, I posted a list of states in textual form that I’d lived in, visited, etc., which was generated from a script I found. As I wrote, I have long wanted to keep a kind of visual record of where I’ve been. I love maps, and so I always had the thought of creating one that was color-coded based on where I’ve been – at least in the U.S. to start. I finally created such a map which you see below. It is at least a start. I figure this is something that I can work on building up, but it is at least the beginnings of something that represent my travels here. It’s color-coded based on three main divisions – where I’ve visited, where I’ve lived, and where I’ve driven through or had a layover in.

To describe the division a little better, I would say that “lived in” is if you stayed there for more than a couple of months. For example, many people go to camp for a couple months when they are young, but I don’t count this as “living” in a place, rather you are just “staying” there for a while. I know, it’s not the best choice of words, but I suppose that will be in the next draft. “Visited,” I think, requires an intentional visit to a place. I’m not sure whether sleeping there is necessary but I think in all my “visited” states, I’ve slept over. Anytime you were simply in an airport in a state as part of a layover, or if you had to drive through a state in order to get to your destination (even if you got off the road and had a bite to eat or visited some place of interest), these would count as the third category.

One thing I’m a bit unclear about is my stay in California. I was apparently very young – probably about 1 – so of course don’t remember it at all. Does this still count? Or is it yet another category?

Also notice that I am colorcoding with a neutral green – too many damn red and blue state maps have gone and ruined those colors for maps! You start thinking that the color-coding has something to do with politics, which in this case it doesn’t!

This is a static map which I edited in Photoshop. Other than doing this yourself, there’s another tool out there, but it only delineates whether you’ve been to a state or not. You can’t really customize it. And the map it produces in not all that great in quality. I’m still looking for something similar that is dynamic and lets you create graphical representations of this sort but haven’t found anything yet. I think it could be programmed in Flash, but not knowing Flash very well, I would have to spend large amounts of time learning Flash and playing with it, something I don’t have time to do at the moment. Perhaps a Flash wizard out there could punch something out in a couple of hours?

The first year or so I was writing this blog, I wrote a bunch of entries about places I’d traveled. I haven’t written about these in a while, but came accrosss this site that lets you produce a list of U.S. states you’ve gone to, lived in, etc. I’ve actually had the idea to create a color-coded map myself, but in order to program something like this I would probably need something like Flash, which I don’t really know. Maybe I will set up something similar but with more fields, like “layover in airport only,” “born in,” “driven through,” etc. For now, though, here is my list:

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now… Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

“Travel narratives” as they are called, are one of my favorite genres of book. They are a kind of autobiographical story or diary that tell the story of visiting a new place. Unlike your standard travel guide, they do not simply contain lists of standard attractions, accommodations, and the like. They are instead, a personal perspective on one person’s experience visiting or even living in a new and foreign (to them) place.

Probably one of the better known ones to come out in the last 15 years is Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. Mayle and his wife, both English, bought a house and moved to Provence in the late ‘80’s and describes the process of renovating the house, getting to know the local culture, and that of France as a whole. Mayle has a wonderful, wry wit and describes the absurdities of everyday life in Provence with great humor. Mayle is also self-deprecating and although he describes many local eccentrics, they eccentricities as described are just as endearing as they are baffling. Food, as it does throughout France, plays a supporting role in the book. Food is such a central piece of French culture and life that listening to A Year in Provence, I often feel as though living in the United States has deprived me of a key facet of “quality of life.” If the stereotypes are true, one can only imagine how much more a brit might feel comparing his native cuisine to that of France!

The beauty, the wonderful food, and the fascinating people of Provence shine through this wonderful travelogue of Mayle’s and I heartily recommend it for those who like this type of book. I listened to an abridged version through Audible.com, and would have loved to listen to even more via a fully unabridged version, but so it goes. Sometimes you must take what you can get and hope that eventually more will be offered in the future.

The late veteran newsman came out with his Charles Kuralt’s America a while back about his “perfect year” where he visited twelve of his favorite locations for one month each. They are all in America, and vary wildly in terrain, climate, population, and culture. Kuralt jubilantly describes the unique beauty of each and every one of them. This is kind of a condensed travelogue. Well, I should note that I listened to it as an abridgement. Nevertheless, you still see very clearly through his eyes as if you were there yourself.

Kuralt visits New Orleans, Key West, Charleston, Main, Vermont, Montana, and Alaska, amongst many other places. You don’t get the typical tourist views either, but much more of a native’s view, since Kuralt over the years has built friendships with people in these places and they show him a lot of stuff that is off the beaten path. His commentary is always self-deprecating, charming, and informative. We hear about little historical anecdotes, legends, and obvious tall tales, but Kuralt manages to couch even the tall tales as imaginative creations as opposed to demeaning them as ignorant ruralisms.

My only complaint about this book is that it was too short! As I mentioned, I listened to an abridged version through Audible.com, but if you can read the book or find an unabridged audio version, all the better!

One of the many 36-hour trips via train we took when in the USSR was to Tallinn, Estonia. A fellow classmate, Matt, had helped host an Estonian women’s soccer team that had come to his home town in Minnesota, so we had people who could show us around and house us. Actually, my memory of my time in Estonia is very hazy. I don’t even remember if we stayed there overnight. I think we did, although that wasn’t the norm for our trips. The only other thing I remember besides some of the women we met from the soccer team (tall and blond), was that we went to a party of sorts where they had homemade beer that was being dispensed from a plastic container and rubber hose. Perhaps we were shown more of the town, but I don’t have any pictures and can’t remember anything else. The one Baltic country that I did not get to go to on during my stay in the USSR was the one I wanted to visit the most – Lithuania. I wanted to go there because supposedly that is where some of my ancestry is from on one side. Actually, it seems like I have ancestry from all over that area – Byelorussia, Lithuania, Austria-Hungry, and Poland. My mother’s mother’s family even traced one of their relatives to Italy, so maybe I am 1/32nd Italian and that’s where my fascination with Tuscany, Vino Nobile de Montelpulciano, the Italian Language, and espresso all come from!

When I came back from the USSR, I was faced with having to find a job since I was at that point done with college. As luck would have it, the organization that I went through for my study abroad, CIEE, was losing a program assistant for their Eastern European and Russian Summer programs and I was in the right place at the right time. I started working there in January of 1990 and by the spring on 1991 I was able to convince them to at least in part sponsor a trip to some of the program sites. Basically, I wanted to visit my sister who was at that time studying abroad for a semester in Scotland, and somehow I came up with the brilliant proposal to CIEE that if they paid for my airfare over to Eastern Europe and I paid the rest, I could take over a video camera, shoot some footage of the programs for promotional purposes, and I would also get a more intimate understanding of the programs by being at the sites. Amazingly enough, they went for the idea and were generous enough to pay for all my airfare. The video I took was probably not the best quality and I tried to get a friend to edit it, but it never happened. They never asked for the video, so probably it they were not expecting anything much anyway.

So, my first stop was Hungary – Budapest to be specific. I remember getting to visit the university the students held classes in and riding on some trams, but I was only there a few days, and apparently I did not get to do much that was memorable. I remember seeing some McDonalds and maybe Burger Kings on the way to the train station and was taken aback by how westernized the country seemed just a couple years after the iron curtain had come down. I can’t imagine what it looks like now! I wish I had had a longer stay so that I could have gotten a better look at the place and a better feel for the culture, etc. The resident director for CIEE’s program escorted me and perhaps this was part of the problem. Either she just was not a very good escort or it would have been more helpful if I had tried to explore more on my own.

A friend of mine, Scott Meyer, recently set up a website with a bunch of pictures he’s taken over the last couple of years on a few trips - Belize, US, and Spain and Portugal. Some very nice shots.

I will post some shots of my more recent trips as I get to them. I do have some pictures from older trips to Russian and Mexico, but they are all prints or slides and I have not had the energy to scan them yet. At some point I want to get a slide/negative scanner that will just scan a whole bunch of slides at once. I have a shoebox full of probably 1000-2000 slides from my youth and would love to digitize them, but it is such a mamoth job. I know you can get these done by services, but they are, I’m sure, prohibitive…

While “studying” at Leningrad State University, I went to Latvia twice. Once it was on one of those 30-hour stints via two overnight train rides with a few fellow students. All I remember from that trip was that it rained the whole time and that Riga looked almost western to us in comparison to St. Petersburg. They had these Penguin ice cream shops that looked like Ben and Jerry’s or some other western chain. The streets were clean, the people polite, the food edible.

Our next trip was with the entire (thirty-plus person) group of students and resident directors. We stayed at a nice hotel and toured some monuments, and then somehow ended up on the shore of the Gulf of Riga. Although it was December, the beach was still a tourist destination and there were a fare number of people walking in heavy coats along the beach and even an old woman going for a swim.

Being a tourist destination, there was a guy set up to take pictures of people at the beach for a small fee. He was apparently helping someone when an Asian tourist (Russian) came up to me and started asking how much it was to take a picture of her. I was a bit confused and then figured out that she thought that I was the camera guy, since I had my Nikon FE2 hanging around my neck! At this point the real photo guy realized what was happening and came over to clear things up. It was all very funny and we all had a good laugh about it and I ended up taking their picture together that I still have. Still on the beach, a few of us ducked into this little café that was on the beach for a bite to eat.

The whole memory of the place is a bit surreal. We were only there for a couple of days, so the little pieces I do remember seem odd and I might not even remember a lot of this but for the photos I still have. I will endeavor to post some eventually, but none are scanned and digital photography had not really come about (at least commercially) when I was over there. So now I am faced with the mammoth task of scanning in negatives and prints from the 30+ years of my life before digital! If anyone knows of a cheap service where bulk scanning of prints and negatives can be made, I’d love to hear about them!

We made our way down to the Kiev from our Moscow trip, I believe, but it’s a bit hazy. We had been planning on going down as far as Armenia but at the time the area was unsafe due to fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

I don’t remember a whole lot about Kiev. We were only there for a day, I think, and a bit too much Armenian wine (20% alcohol and 20% sugar) killed a sufficient amount of brain cells to make the visit somewhat hazy. What I do remember is separating from the group with a fellow participant in my program, Matt, and exploring a bit of Kiev. We started to see crowds of people and banners but not knowing Ukrainian, we could only make out so much.

Ukrainian is not that far from Russian, but for a non-native speaker it probably takes a good while to start to divine some of the Ukrainian words. It’s just different enough in other words, so that a non-native speaker of Russian would still have a very hard time understanding. Kind of the same as if someone learning English but without a mastery of it was all of a sudden faced with a really extreme Cockney Accent, or one from the hood, or something similarly distant from standard English. Maybe even a little worse then that since Ukrainian is actually considered its own language whereas Cockney et al are simply “dialects.”

Anyway, we tried asking some of the locals what was going on, but again, the language barrier made it difficult. We got to the hub of the excitement that was in front of some official building. We waited around for a bit and then what everyone was waiting for happened – Boris Yeltsin arrived in a limo, got out and started shaking hands in the crowd before going into the building. People were clapping and cheering (this was of course way before he became president and so his reputation was generally as a progressive and not as a drunk). My friend Matt was actually able to get through the crowd and actually shake Yeltsin’s hand. I was a bit more timid. I may have tried to get some pictures, but I can’t remember if I had my camera there. If I did try to get some of Yeltsin, I wasn’t able to due to the swarming crowd… I at least caught a glimpse of him – my only brush with fame while in the Former Soviet Union…

I began studying the Russian in my sophomore year in college. At the time my major was journalism and they required 2 years of a foreign language. I’d taken Spanish in high school but was never very good at it, and not very interested in learning it. But somehow Russian was different. It was more of a challenge, more “exotic” and besides I was really interested in the initial churnings of democracy that country was going through - this was back in 1988 and I was listening to Radio Moscow on short wave if not every night then at least a few times a week.

Anyway, I really took to Russian and eventually switched my major to it, but I did this somewhat late and would not be able to graduate the year I should have - 1990. So I determined that I would get my last credits while on a study abroad program at Leningrad State University. Luckily my professors let me go through the graduation ceremonies even though I hadn’t fulfilled all my credits.

So at the beginning of September, 1990, I headed off to the Soviet Union (as it would still be called for a couple of years) along with about 30 other 20-22-year-olds (and maybe a few who were a little older). The program we were on was sponsored by the Council on International Educational Exchange, or CIEE (It was SMOO in Russian, so that’s what we called it). Most of us spent 4 months there, but some of my classmates became so entranced with the place (or at least with the men/women they met there) that they ended up going back and staying for much longer periods of time. I longed to return for a long time even though my time there was not always “fun.”

It was definitely a growing experience in a lot of ways for me. I mean of course culturally I got a flavor for a very different (and yet in some ways very similar) environment to where I grew up. I somehow got it that despite language and cultural differences, people were basically the same at heart. But at the same time those language and cultural differences can be a big barrier for some in actually communicating with others.

Other then this, I had started to come out of my own shell a bit. I was painfully shy during much of high school and college and really stuck to a very small circle, didn’t really venture out all that much, although I think given the chance I would have. But being in a foreign country without any good friends kind of forces one to either withdraw completely (which I probably did for the first few weeks), or actually put ones self out there and start actively trying to make friends.

Although some of the places we went to within the USSR were then considered part of it - “Republics” - I thought it would be better to address them seperately since they are now countries in and of themselves. So I will try to mention a little only about the places that are still within the borders of Russia. As I mentioned, we studied at Leningrad State University, which is in Leningrad, of course, but Leningrad is now referred to by its older name St. Petersburg. Our dorms were on Vasilevsky Island, right next to the beach that looked out onto the Gulf of Finland. We were only a few blocks away from a big hotel called the Pribaltiskaya where I would go every night to get dinner from one of the many “bufets” on almost every floor of the place. They would take rubles and even at the government rate at the time (which was much worse than the black market rate), you could get a good meal for next to nothing. It was much better in any case than going to the cafeteria at our dorm where you had no idea what exactly it was you were eating! The holy grail at the Pribaltiskaya was getting into one of the restaurants and getting actual restaurant meal items like roast chicken, blini, etc. But this was next to impossible it seemed. They only wanted to serve guests at the hotel, and we were only able to trick or cajole them a few times during our stay. Of course people who weren’t guests were not supposed to be in the hotel at all, and often some of my friends would get asked to leave as soon as they came in. For some reason I was usually allowed to come in without any hassles but I think I did a good job of looking like a dumb tourist so they just assumed I was a guest.

Aside from Leningrad, we went a few other places in Russia proper. We went to some outlying areas of Leningrad which I can’t remember exactly now, but they were sites of royal homes of various tzars. We also took a trip to Pushkin and Pskov to visit some very old churches. Actually, this turned out to be so much of a theme of our trips outside of Leningrad that we all proclaimed we never wanted to see a church again! Finally, we went to Moscow. Once we went with our entire group and another time I went on a type of weekend excursion that a few of us had designed and repeated a number of times to different locations. Basically we would get on a really late train and get a sleeper car and sleep on our way to Moscow (or wherever). We’d spend the next day at our destination and then do the same thing going back. Thus we never needed to arrange sleeping accommodations. Hey, we were in college! I don’t think I could do that sort of thing now! I remember once we even decided to play hookie and took off on Tuesday night and returned the following night!

They had just started opening some western places when we were over there and we of course had to take advantage of the McDonalds where everything was sold in Rubles. If we were able to exchange dollars for rubles on the black market, we could basically get everything on the menu combined for a couple of dollars! Generally food was cheap there at the time, although it was hard to find quality unless one went to one of the farmers markets where people were selling produce that you might want to eat. If you went into a “grocery store” one tended to just lose one’s appetite, either that or you just didn’t see much of anything on the shelves. We did go once a week to the top of the Pribaltiskaya where they had a foreign currency bar and we’d buy draft beers for $5 and feel like we were throwing our money away since that could have been a week’s worth of dinners bought with rubles! But I think the most expensive “meal” I had while I was there was in Moscow at a place where they served about 15 different dishes at least, banquet style. This extravagent meal came to all of $2.50. I know this is no longer the case in Russia or Eastern Europe. Westernization has brought a much greater leveling of the currencies. Still it was nice to feel “rich” for once in my life…

The only regret I have about the program is this. One of the stated goals of the program is to immerse you in a foreign culture. With this aim, there was a rule that you weren’t supposed to speak English to your classmates with the possible exception of in your dorm room. I tried to obey this rule and even as others spoke to me in English I would still speak Russian, but after a while this became absurd. It was either speak English or cut myself off even more from the people I had much of any chance of becoming friends with in this foreign place. Because of this, my Russian proficiency during this period may have improved slightly, but not nearly as much as I had hoped. I met people I still call my friends on this program and yet sometimes I wonder how much deeper of an experience I would have had if I had done a home-stay and really was not able to speak English with anyone.

Addendum: Siberia! Sorry, somehow I completely forgot about this one! In the middle of our stay I, along with my two American roommates (Jason Pontius and Bill Reichert) and one Russian roommate (Igor Savelev) travelled to Syktyvkar which was in the Komi Autonomous Republic of Siberia. I’m not sure if Komi still exists in any kind of administrative way anymore. It was a cute town, but the only thing I remember doing is getting shuttled back and forth between Igor’s Parents’ Apartment (that’s where he is from) and his Wife Sveta’s Parents’ Apartment. We just kept getting fed all this great food wherever we went, but after a while it almost got to be too much! Thankfully we did actually make it out cross-country skiing at one point which was great exercise and fun, and probably burned of half of what we ate. It was a very memorable part of my trip even though it was just a weekend. Thank you Igor and Sveta wherever you are (unfortunately I’ve lost touch with them)…