Honeymoon in Belize

My wife Christine and I were married on August 30, but because we’re both teachers we had to put off our honeymoon until the end of the semester. This was fine by me, as a honeymoon somewhere warm in December beats a honeymoon somewhere warm – or not warm – in early September. We actually didn’t have the official reception until late October, when we somewhat randomly decided that, as warm places go, Belize would work (neither of us had been there – we both had to look at a map to make sure of exactly where it was).

So, for a week in December we were in Belize. We dropped the dog off in Jersey on Friday, December 12, and left for Newark the following morning at 4:00am. As if to shuttle us off with some idea of why we were leaving, it snowed the whole way to the airport.

We went through Miami, perhaps the most illogically constructed airport in the US, without a hitch, even switching to an earlier flight to Belize and cutting a 4-hour layover to one. Perhaps it wasn’t that bad. We spent the whole 2 hours from Miami to Belize talking to the guy Andy in the seat next to us, or more specifically listening to him – it turned out he was going to San Pedro on the island of Ambergris Caye, same as us, and he acted like he owned private shares in it, telling us about the island like he was living there, rather than visiting. Christine finally asked him how many times he’d been there. “Oh, once,” he said.

When we landed in Belize City, it was 80 and sunny. We hopped on our propellered puddle jumper to Ambergris Caye. Andy jumped on ahead of us and hopped into the cockpit next to the pilot and started talking to him, winking at us like he was in on some secret. The pilot just rolled his eyes.

That was the last I remember of the pilot, because once we took off my eyes were looking out the window at the endless shades of blue below, sprinkled with sparse dots of green land every now and then. Christine pointed out the line of whitecaps breaking against the reef way out there surrounding everything. After 15 minutes or so we saw a larger strip of green, then we landed on it.











After unloading onto the airstrip, we hit the streets of San Pedro, Ambergris Caye. The “downtown” streets were filled, what with bikes, golf carts, tractors, foot traffic, a couple of “San Pedro Taxis” that were all converted American minivans from the late 80s, but, conspicuously, no cars. And no lanes. And for the most part, no sidewalks. So every street was a loose juxtaposition of different pods going in different directions, with only the loosest of norms preventing them from running into each other. We hailed the first minivan we saw and headed to the Royal Caribbean, checked in to our cabin, rented bikes, locked them up, and rushed away from concrete and toward sand.

The Royal Caribbean itself is a simple setup of 30-some cabins, with a swimming pool, garden, cabana bar, and lots of lizards (but not inside the cabins). The first thing the manager told us as we were sallying forth was that every inch of beach at Ambergris Caye is public, which lent an easy retort when the first beachfront condo we stepped on the beach in front of a gaggle of college-age kids came running out yelling, “This is a private beach, yo!”

About the beaches – the key word is “blue.” The azure sky reflecting simpatically on the deeper blue of the water, with distant whitecaps on the reef just at the end of the horizon – witnessing that was probably the moment we both forgot where we left earlier that same morning.

After we burned the remaining couple of hours of daylight, we went to our lodging’s watering hole, the Sandbar. The owners and bartender immediately introduced themselves to us, and we were talking for the rest of the night. The only interruption was when a group of about 10 Texans, all couples vacationing at a neighboring condo took over the place for a couple of hours, insisting on giving me a new nickname every 30 minutes, first “Kansas” when I told them where I was from, then “Dad” when we told them we were expecting, then “Dirty Banana” when they bought me said drink to congratulate me, and finally “30 Minutes” when I told them how often they were giving me new nicknames.

We also met two nurses from New York City, who we talked to about home, then they recommended we book our snorkeling and fishing trips through Tanisha Tours. But more on that later.


OBSERVATION #1

On the flight from Miami to Belize we both noticed the guy across the aisle from us wearing a band on his shades saying “Belikin: The Beer of Belize.” It didn’t take long on arrival to find out how true that is. Even before we landed, we noticed the Belikin Brewery building next to the airstrip, enclosed in barbed wire and camouflage (and, we later found out, surrounded by uniformed armed guards). Andy made it a point to get a Belikin at the airport right when he got off the plane. But it wasn’t until we started drinking on Ambergris Caye that we found out that every bar literally only sells Belikin. More than one bartender used the term blacklisted, and the owner of the bar at our resort told us, pointing to their Belikin cooler, that as per their contract they could be sued by Belikin if they put any other brand of beer in the cooler. Belikin brews a stout, lager, and premium if you want to get fancy, but almost everyone simply orders a “beer,” the pale ale that pretty much tastes like Rolling Rock. While it’s not a distinctive beer by any stretch of the imagination, it is light, refreshing, and goes well with the fish and hot sauce (pass the Marie Sharp’s, please) characteristic of most Belizean food.


The next morning we hopped on our bikes and headed to George’s, a diner the nurses had recommended that was on the road back into “town,” which is what they called the area around the landing strip with the highest concentration of restaurants and tour guides. We had the Belizean eggs there – otherwise known as a western omelet in the states – and headed into town to find Tanisha Tours and get some beach time. We actually rode all the way to the northern tip of the island, where you have to pay a fee to ride across the bridge to the next island, and were promptly accosted by salespeople trying to get us to stay at a private resort on the other side.

After a half hour of passive-aggressive back-and-forth, we finally got rid of them and headed back down the beach to Tanisha Tours headquarters, which was actually the beachside residence of the family who ran it. The wife booked our snorkeling tour, to be guided by her husband the next morning, while their 4-year-old daughter was cooking lunch and their son chatted with us.

We finally set up on the beach and I took my first dip in the water. I immediately found a conch shell, which I was pretty proud of until a little boy who was wading in the water with his younger brother told me, “Yeah, they are everywhere.” The older one was catching little fishes with a dip net the size you’d use for a 10-gallon aquarium, and putting them in a tiny clear plastic tank that was hanging around his brother’s neck. His brother was holding his hand in the tank and giggling while the little fishes swam around his fingers. “It tickles,” he said. The older one then showed me around the beach, picking up a sea urchin and letting me touch its porcupine-like prickles (“They are softer on the bottom,” he told me), then a sea anemone (“They will sting you,” he said while fondling its tentacles), then a tiny barracuda swimming a couple feet from us. We found the island teeming with young marine biologists like these two, who knew every form of life in the ocean around them like they were related to them. I was a little jealous.


The next morning we got a glimpse of what those kids would probably become in our Tanisha Tour Guide, Daniel. He pulled up to our dock at 8:00 instead of the standard 9:00 because, he said, you see the best animals before everyone else gets in and scares them all away. We headed straight out to Hol Chan, the premier spot on the reef for snorkeling. This was my first time snorkeling – Christine has been since she was a kid – and it almost wasn’t even my first time when a shark swam leisurely under our boat as Daniel was explaining how to use the equipment. For some reason this excited him and Christine.

It all became clear, though, the first time I looked under the water – a huge school of horse-eyed jacks had parked themselves leisurely under our boat and were already playing chicken with our appendages, and a big terrapin was sidling along the bottom eating seaweed. As we went further, we saw that shark, some eels, a whole fleet of leopard rays, and many other things I can’t even name, although Daniel tried to find them all in his reef wildlife book once we got back on the boat. Unfortunately we had to get in the boat an hour or so earlier than expected, as I got sick from swallowing so much saltwater. Both Christine and Daniel tried to assuage my shame, but I was marked for that trip as the designated landlubber.

The following morning was my chance to redeem myself – fishing. As our guide Tony and his son helped us onto the boat, I told him about growing up catching catfish on the Wakarusa River in Kansas. He asked how big they got – I told him some got into the near-100-pound range, but the biggest I’d caught as 35. “Oh yeah?” he said, “I guess we’ll have to spend some time trolling for barracuda then.”

We spent the first hour catching bait, following pelicans that were diving for sardines and netting our share to cut up for use on the reef and keep live to troll for barracuda. Trolling on our way out to the reef, Christine caught the first, a 2-pound barracuda we’d later have for lunch. Once we got to a channel by the reef, we anchored and threw sardine chunks out. It was like fishing in a bucket, really – it seemed like every cast brought a different kind of fish out – porgies, snapper, grouper, parrotfish, and quite a few I couldn’t name, including one that snapped my line when I tried to get cute with the drag. But the best was Christine’s, toward the end of our day – a 12-pound barracuda she spent a good 15 minutes pulling in after we started trolling beyond the reef. Long and shiny, it looked like a sword fighting down below the surface of the clear blue water. When she finally got it in, the guide told us, “Thanks guys, I’ll be eating good tonight!”


We did give him that one, and in exchange he filleted 2 parrotfish, 2 grouper, and the smaller barracuda. While he was filleting them on our dock, a group of pelicans were circling above us. “We have a saying here in Belize,” Tony told me as I watched them warily, “Never look up with your mouth open.” We then took the bounty to our cabana bar, where they grilled them in garlic butter for us. It was maybe the best meal we had in Belize.


OBSERVATION #2

Perhaps the most pleasant generalization I could make about Belize is that things seem to happen so organically. Our experience was that we met a few people, they told us about a few cool things to do, and the people we did those things with told us about other cool things we should check out on the island. The nurses told us about George’s and Tanisha Tours, the guys at Tanisha, told us about a DandE's Frozen Custard, and the lady who owned DandE’s told us we needed to have dinner at Hidden Treasure, which was so well hidden we never would have thought to look for it much less found it without the advice. The coolest thing about this is that I’m convinced, even though we loved our experience in Belize, we could come another time, do entirely different things at different places, and have just as much fun.


By our last full day there we were both thoroughly burnt so we kept it simple, walking up and down the beach, stopping for a drink at various seaside bars, reading in the shade, snorkeling off the ends of docks – a lot less to see, but at least I didn’t get sick – and towards the end of the day we rode our bikes down the main rode south from our cabin – the “town” is north – to see what was there. We rode about 5 miles down the rode, and it got progressively dustier and smellier, until Christine mentioned that the smell was kind of a burnt, trashy smell. It wasn’t long before we saw the piles of burning trash. Hey, I guess island garbage has to go somewhere.

A couple blocks before we got back to the hotel, we stopped at the lone freshwater lake on the island. Christine swore she saw an alligator, and sure enough when we got to the water’s edge there was a huge scaly back and two eyes that reminded me of Pitfall. “Hey guys,” a group of kids called from behind us, “Wanna sponsor a chicken?” The deal they proposed was that the chicken we “sponsored” would be tied to a rope and thrown into the water, giving a show when the gators – or, if we were lucky, Diablo himself, king of the island gators – descended upon it. We rode off quickly, not asking if they chickens were live or dead.

That night we went to dinner at Hidden Treasure Restaurant . It was some of the best advice we got, rivaling our fresh-caught fish for the best meal we had there. The ambience was very cool as well – you really had to go out of your way to get there, and when we did it was like entering a little open-air paradise, with gas lamps and waiters who actually wore shoes. (Not that we did.)


OBSERVATION #3

One thing I haven’t mentioned – there are a lot of stray dogs on Ambergris Caye. But I don’t think stray is perhaps the right word. They all seem to be from the same brood, and they’re all friendly to strangers. When I asked the owner of our bar about them he said, “Yeah, the mean ones don’t last long around here.” I think every day we were there we had a different dog adopt us for the day, walk leisurely down the beach with us, park itself under our seats at the bar, lap up any scraps that would “accidentally” fall to the ground, and just as leisurely walk off at some point with someone else. I don’t know if they officially belonged to anyone – in fact I’m not entirely sure if we ever saw the same dog twice.


And the next morning we packed up, checked out, said goodbye to the friends we’d made at the hotel bar, and took a minivan cab into town. We had a couple hours to burn before our puddle jumper left, so we squeezed in a bit more beach time and had some fried jacks at Estel’s. And then we left.

On the puddle jumper back to the mainland I started thinking about Andy, the guy we met on the way into Belize. I remembered how he seemed to think of the island like a distant but close relative, one he always knew would let him in and take care of him. I remember how many of his facts didn’t add up, like the multiple texts he said his wife was sending him while he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, or the conflicting number of children he said he had while telling different stories about them. And then, when Christine mentioned how well he knew the island and asked him how many times he’d been there he replied, “Once.” And that part I now believed.

Playin' Possum

I spent last summer in rural Pennsylvania, sorting through a collection of 30,000 books in my mother’s basement. Needless to say, I needed to time away from the basement, so I got back into the running habit. I ran pretty much the same routes every day – there weren’t too many options, either into the hills or out of them. Out of them was easier due to the decreased grade, but it had its moments too. Probably the most noticeable was that every time I ran in front of the Laurel Health Center at the bottom of the range I had to sidestep a big dead possum. Through the passage of weeks it bloated out, until it settled into a slow decomposition. Each time I ran by I thought I should move it, but I didn't.

I have a strict policy of not moving dead possum. The reason is simple and deep-seated. It goes back to possibly the first cliche I discovered the true meaning of, when I was five and living with my grandparents. My only real job was to take the trash out, but I always managed to put even that off until the last minute each night. So one summer night, right before my bedtime at 9:00, I lugged the garbage bag out to the trash bin, and when I opened the lid there inside was a dead possum curled up in a fetal position. I'd never seen one so close before, so I of course wanted to pet it. But when I reach my hand in, the second I felt fur that dead possum reared up, hissed loudly, and jumped out at me. They don't call it playin' possum for nothing. I screamed, my grandparents came running out, and the possum scurried off. The next week I got pneumonia; as my grandpa was dunking my head under the ice water in the tub he told me, "That's why you don't touch dead animals, son."

But I can't say it stopped me completely. When I was 10 or 11 I was riding my bike down the old highway to Tee Pee Junction when I saw another dead possum by the side of the road. I at least had sense by then to keep my distance, but I couldn't help stopping. It was pretty obvious this possum was a goner, as its head and chest were ingrained in the highway. But what made me stop was that its entrails seemed to be arranged in a line behind it across one lane of the highway. When I looked closer, I realized its entrails were still crawling away - four or five little pink possum fetuses had crawled out of the maternal pouch and were pulling themselves all in the same direction, further into the street. My curiosity combined with my undisciplined sympathy compelled me to pick each one of them up and pull them to the side of the road. But when I realized my parents would kill me if I brought another wild animal home (we won't even get into the copperhead, snapping turtle, squirrel, and rabbit babies I'd already tried sneaking in) I quickly deduced that the best I could do for them was to dig a hole, put them in it, and put some dead grass over the hole. Come to think of it that was maybe the worst thing I could do for them as they must have died a slow death of either freezing or starvation, but I was never much of a quick thinker. I did wash my hands profusely when I got home though.

That must have worn heavily on my subconscious through the years, because when I was a graduate student and crew coxswain in college I found myself in a similar moral quandary. We were on our way to a training camp in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and our van got lost. Now I don't know if you've been to that neck of the woods, but it's hairy. Our van driver got lost in the middle of the night, and we ended up at some police station so far into Bumfuck Egypt that the one cop in town had put a sign on the door saying he was out and would be back in less than an hour. When he returned he was lugging a trashbag over his shoulder and had a shoebox under the other arm. He apologized; he had a call to exterminate a pest under someone's porch. It was dead now, he said, but it had a brood. I knew what was in the shoebox before he opened it.

Six baby possum were wriggling all over each other in there, and I immediately asked if I could have them. My crewmen looked at me - well, you can guess how they looked at me. But I told them this was my responsibility and it wouldn't be any bother to them. The cop was strangely tender with them for such a big, gruff man, and it was with a little reluctance that he gave them up after rescuing them. The last thing he told me was not to get too attached, they'd die within a day or two anyway.

I was late for our first practice on the river in Natchitoches, as I got up early, found the nearest pet store, ran there, and got pet bottles to feed the babies with. At first everyone on the team was wondering aloud if I came down there to cox or to rear wild animals, but after the first practice I let my roommates at the hotel help me feed them, word got around on how cute they were drinking from the bottle, the girls' team started coming over to our room, and everyone was happy. We kept the shoebox on the heater to keep them warm, and they seemed rather comfortable with us.

The next morning every one of them was dead. I had to tell the news to every visitor who came to say good morning. I dated a girl on the crew team for a couple of months after that, and I think half the time we were together we were talking about those dead baby possum. I don't know whether to feel bad about that.

So every day when I sidestepped this big dead possum in front of the Laurel Health Center, I restrained myself from moving, poking, or otherwise disturbing the fate nature dictated for it. Well, I did take a picture of it - that's not too disturbing, is it?

The New York Cool Archives

As you probably don’t know, I spent a decent chunk of 2007 writing for NewYorkCool. It was a pretty sweet gig, work-wise – Editor Wendy Williams always gave me full creative freedom and responsibility for arranging my own pieces, and I got a couple of nifty assignments I wouldn’t have learned about otherwise. If it wasn’t for this whole “making a living as a writer” thing that led me inevitably to higher-paid (read: paying) pastures, I would have been happy to graze in the verdant NYCool meadows for the foreseeable future.

I’m a little more financially stable now (as much as a freelance writer and tenure-free college professor can be) and should be putting out some more stuff with NewYorkCool pretty soon, so in honor of that I thought I’d do a quick retrospective:

Calling All Nerds: Williamsburg Spelling Bee @ Pete’s Candy Store - This was the first piece I wrote for NewYorkCool. I still go to the WSB regularly, winning my first one a couple of months ago and finishing third in the mosr recent finals. Go me!

Alexi Murdoch @ Mercury Lounge 2/7/07 – The sheer brilliance (and overexposure) of his breakway single “Orange Sky” and his own reluctance as an artist for self-promotion – he took a year or so of being courted by record labels until self-releasing his first album to follow up the single – have probably destined Alexi Murdoch for one-hit wonder status. This was his first US tour, a good 2 years after Orange Sky’s popularity made his name for him. My response to his gig at Mercury Lounge was mostly “eh.” The opening act Midnight Movies was a revelation though, and they did a couple of songs with Alexi for the highlight of the show.

Beyond Race Launch Party 2/21/07 – When I was invited to this party, I really didn’t think Beyond Race Magazine would make it past their first year. First, there was the name – they’re not really about race, which I guess they were trying for with the title, but why put race in the title if it’s not about race? Also, the grammar nazi in me wanted to mark up the issue they were throwing the party for. And finally, they seemed so intent on promoting the print copy at the expense of a their website not even coming close to being interactive. But here we are a year and a half later, and they have a nicely designed website with plenty of links and a few advertisements, and they seem to have a copy editor now. Go Beyond Race! (Hey, a little double entendre action never hurt anyone.)

The Bowmans @ Joe’s Pub 3/3/07 – This gig was special to me for a number of reasons. For one thing, it marks the only known recorded instance of my voice online, as I included a pre-show interview with Claire and Sarah Bowman. Even better, it started a fun email exchange with the opening act, a folkie who accused me of slander when I compared him to Art Garfunkel. My response: “Hey, I like Art Garkfunkel!” But most importantly I got to finally write about one of my favorite acts, AND I got Claire into Nicolai Dunger, another of my favorite acts.

Langhorne Slim @ Southpaw 3/23/07 – In many ways, Langhorne Slim was my last shot at hipsterdom. He played his first gigs at Asterisk near my apartment in Bushwick, where my good buddy Domer has been rhyming for years now. He also tends to attract crowds at least 10 years younger than I am. But most importantly, he was most likely the last artist about whom I’ll be able to say, “I heard him before he was big.” That smugness is fairly evident in this piece.

Chris Smither @ Joe’s Pub 3/9/07 – The day after this show, Chris Smither called me from the road northeast of NYC. He couldn’t give me an interview the day of the show, but I pestered his publicist enough that she told me he’d call me the next day, but I never thought he really would. I absolutely loved talking to this guy. His knowledge of the songster tradition, his general intelligence, and just a good dose of that down home charm completely won me over. The show was pretty convincing, too – you can tell he’s been doing what he does for over 40 years now. If you’ve never listened to him, pick up Leave the Light On, which he released in 2007 shortly before the show. All acoustic, the album has a presence that actually makes me look forward to getting old.

Erin McKeown @ Southpaw 4/20/07 – In a lot of ways, Erin McKeown is like a younger, female Chris Smither – she does quite a bit of public domain material, is a first-rate guitarist, and probably feels most comfortable playing to a coffeehouse crowd. But se’s also firmly in the Lilith Fair tradition, with a hefty lesbian following and plenty of more personal songwriting to go with the songster material. I truthfully thought this gig might be a flop, as her material and persona aren’t necessarily a match for Southpaw’s wide-open sound and sometimes raucous, sometimes indifferent crowd, which wasn’t challenged when her publicist told me she only allows photographs for the first 30 seconds of the first 3 songs of her sets, with no flash. But she really rose to the occasion, with an energetic, fun set.

Punk Rock Record Fair 5/12/07 – Now this is what I’m talkin’ ‘bout. There’s nothing like spending a verdant spring morning and afternoon in a dimly lit music venue looking at musty old records and watching people compare their tattoos. There was no sarcasm in that statement.

That 70s Show @ PowerHouse Arena – This one was new to me – the only art show I’ve ever reviewed. I toured the collection with Melinda MacLean, who contributed the other half of the review. Really, though, it was more of a pictorial history than an art show, with lots of good shots of 70s punk rock acts at their unashamed best and, even better, some truly wondrous candid shots of NYC at a time during which I’m not ashamed to say I’m glad I didn’t arrive here. Check it out here.

Serendipitously, I recently wrote my first piece for NewYorkCool in over a year, a review of the Latin Alternative Music Conference in July. Enjoy.

On Tour: Germany

Our friends Chris and Melissa are a mixed couple. Not in the racial sense – you wouldn’t be able to tell from looking at them that they weren’t from the same town, and they’re so evenly matched in disposition you might think they were brother and sister. But she’s from the south – Kentucky – and he’s from the south of Germany –Bavaria – so when they decided to get married it was apparent that both of their families would demand a wedding on their respective shores. Hence, last month they were wed in Louisville and last weekend they did it again in Schwandorf, Bavaria.

Christine and I told them from the start that we’d only be able to attend one of the weddings, and especially after Canadian Customs didn’t stamp my newly-minted passport on our recent trip to Toronto I wanted to finally have a documented trip out of the U.S.

Our flight out was to Munich, and we even got seats together, which was fortuitous since we'd booked last minute – I’d just bought and paid for a ring, and I couldn’t help myself from popping the question 3 hours into the flight. I’d thought up a scheme involving the flight attendants where they’d ask us if we’d like anything, I’d say, “Yes, I’d like a ring, please,” they’d procure it, and I’d ask her to marry me with the smiling stewardesses looking at us in approval, but I decided against it when both of the flight attendants were men. How it happened was somewhat less planned – she got up to use the restroom and when she came back I let her in, then got on one knee between the seats – not an easy task in Economy Class – and asked her to marry me. And thus did we leave the ground single and land engaged.

Which made the rest of our trip somewhat of an engagement honeymoon. We landed in Munich at 1:00am EST, or 7:00 in the morning there, which meant we we’d missed out on a night’s sleep. We were lucky Hotel Royal was both near the Hauptbahnhof and allowed us to check in early. We got in a couple hours of sleep, then headed out to meet Melissa, her family, and Chris’s brother Stefan at the Englischer Garten. It was there that our weekend of heavy drinking began. Both Christine and I had the Weisse Bier in mugs that were bigger than our heads while enjoying the greenery and artificial ponds as well as our first opportunity to use our 2 years of college German.

After a good 3 hours of drinking, Stefan took all of us from there to the Hofbräuhaus, where there were more Americans than Germans. We enjoyed the enjoyed the dirndels and lederhosen, and even got the pretzel girl to take a pic with us. Afterwards Stefan took us to a more low-key place, where I promptly fell asleep at the table.

The details of the night are a bit hazy, but we somehow made it back to our hotel and the next morning we had the hotel’s breakfast – which was delicious, by the way – and headed over to the Marienplatz to see the world-famous glockenspiel before splitting town for Regensburg. Our timing was perfect as the noonday tinkerbell chimes were playing on our arrival. I have to say, though, that my big discovery in Munich was the Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum, complete with a giant catfish statue in the front and wooden fishing reels and very disturbing ancient paintings of hunters in heated battle with their fictional prey inside.

When we boarded the Deutsche Bahn (DB) train, we were surprised how nice the plush seats were, folding down for sleeping in roomy suites holding 6 capacity . We enjoyed this for about an hour of our 1 1/2 hour trip, until the conductor finally came by for our tickets, saying yada-yada-ersterklasse-yada-yada while pointing at the big “1” on the door until we took our places at a table in the adjoining dining car for the rest of the trip.

I was disturbed to find the train station at Regensburg was surrounded by a shopping center that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any American town its size, but Christine told me to just keep moving, it only gets better. I’m glad I listened; after we checked in at the Hotel Ibis, we went directly down Martin-Luther-Straße into the. Coolest. Town. Ever.

It’s hard not to sound like a dumb American tourist at this point, but it was just so, well, different. The way each street led you down its own cobblestone path, cathedrals that truly felt sacred (except for the 2 neighborhood toughs drinking from their beer bottles on the steps), and the bier, er, beer…We started out with dunkelweissen and this mixture of beer, cherry brandy and coke that labeled us as out-of-towners – hey, the dunkelweissen was great – then made our way past the Rathaus and down the Donau, with stops at 2 or 3 more biergartens along the way, and ended up at this renaissance fair on the river (they called it the Regensburger Spectaculum).

But by far my favorite part of the Regensburg was our 4-hour stay at the Spitalgarten, not just for its fine selection of weissebier but for our conversation with an older German couple that sat down at our table. Both Christine and I had 2 years of German in college to fulfill our foreign language requirements and like most American college students hadn’t use it since, but we’d been slowly making our way back into the language ever since our arrival. But we were thrust into full conversational form when this cheerful lady with lots of makeup asked us in German if they could sit with us while her companion looked the other way. I’m pretty sure she thought we were German, and her man harrumphed in disgust when we said in our broken German that we were Americans and our German wasn’t that good. But she sat down anyway, and tried to speak to us in English. It turned out her English was about as good as our German.

But we managed to string together a conversation in Germenglish, and the woman seemed quite taken with the novelty of it all. And he warmed up to us eventually as well, eventually getting through to us that his wife had died 15 years back and he wasn’t getting married again, then showing us pictures of the cottage his companion at the table was moving into and complaining that it wasn’t any different from her old one, which he then showed us a picture of; he was right, they looked identical to us. She told us how she had one son from from her only marriage, and then I thought she was talking about church – Kirche in German – and started to lose interest, but Christine then pointed out she was actually talking about her job sorting cherries – kirschen – and pointed to the woman’s nails, which were stained completely black. They bought us round after round of bier, and we all together watched the sun set over the Donau.

The next morning it was off to Schwandorf, and Chris and Melissa’s wedding. Unlike our train to Regensburg, this one was really crowded - we seemed to be on the G train of Bavaria, as it was only 3 cars long and there was a very drunk guy spilling beer all over the woman who had to sit next to him. But it was short at least, and we were at the Schwandorf station within a half hour. Outside the station, we saw a group of people dressed up, and took a chance that they were also headed to the wedding.

“Fahren sie zum Kleins?” I asked in my broken-but-less-hesitant-than-yesterday German.

“Sorry,” one of the women in the group said. “We’re American.” Turned out one couple was coming from Frankfurt and the other from Helsinki. We offered to share a cab, but they insisted they had a car coming for them. It’s funny, we didn’t see much of them again until 3:00 the next morning at the reception, when we discovered we were all staying at the same bed and breakfast and made the drunken decision to walk the 3 miles back there. But more on that later.

The time between our arrival at Chris’s parents’ house and the reception was a blur of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, friends of friends, relatives of relatives, and a magnificently corpulent Bavarian priest who attempted to do the nuptials in both German and his wonderfully broken English in the small but heavily decorated country church where Chris was once an alter boy. Oh, and the ringbearer had a fauxhawk. Classic.

And then the reception started. Held at Zum Birnthaler outside the neighboring village of Krachenhausen on a meandering river (every town we go to in Bavaria seems to have one!), the reception lasted from 2:00 in the afternoon until well after we left at 2:00 the following morning. There was a Bavarian wedding band playing a voluminous mix of polkas, American pop, wedding novelty songs, and wild electric keyboard solos, 4 or 5 meals scattered throughout, a few of Chris’s old-school friends in their dirndels and lederhosen, and an open bar with unlimited draughts of – you guessed it – weisse bier. By the time the midnight hour rolled around , both Christine and I were pleasantly glowing but surprisingly not drunk – ah, the fine art of extended, sustained drinking.

It was around 1:00 when we ran into the Americans from the train station, and they all seemed in the same state. So ebullient did we all feel, in fact, that when we discovered we were all staying at the same place we decided we’d just walk the 3 miles to 12 Ringstraße together. It turns out that, it being so far in the country and all, they don’t bother with streetlights outside the town, so most of the walk was pitch black except for the moon’s reflection on the river we walked along, and one of the women with us, an urban planner in Chicago, freaked out thinking there was someone or something following us (it didn’t help that her husband kept saying he heard footsteps behind us).

Alas, we made it there without being hacked to bits by any natives, and the next morning we woke up, dressed, and met our hostess Frau Schön downstairs for breakfast. We had a pleasant conversation in Germenglish with her and Herr Schön while waiting for our ride to Frankfurt, and he even loaded us up with some fresh tomatoes from their garden for our trip. This was our only car experience in Germany – we rode with another mixed German-American couple who worked with Chris at Lufthansa, and we got a definite feel for German highway velocity. It ain’t just the Autobahn.

It may have been the weather (cloudy with patches of rain, as opposed to sunny and perfect the day before), it may have been that we didn’t arrived until well into the afternoon, it may have been that we were still bushed from the night before, but Frankfurt was a bit of a letdown. Bombed heavily during WWII, the architecture now is pretty haphazard – in fact, it reminds me quite a bit of NYC. There was an Ironman Triathlon going on well into the evening, so we just sauntered around the river mingling and then avoiding the massive crowds of heavily spandexed Germans before eating dinner at an average restaurant and retreating to the hotel for some German television. (I have to say, I thought Frankfurt-style Wurst tasted a ,lot like hot dogs – then I thought about it, and what’s another name for hot dogs? Frankfurters. And that, my friends, is what I learned on my first trip to Germany.)

And the next day, after waiting 45 minutes for our subway train (another way Frankfurt is like New York), we got to the airport and discovered that due to the amount of people already boarded, we could only fly in Business Class. Man, I didn’t want that 7-hour flight to end – massaging seats that reclined into beds, warm towels, gourmet meals with wine, we even got our own slippers. I personally think that’s how they tell the Business Class from the Economy chumps – I swear that when I went to use the Business Class restroom, the flight attendant looked down at my feet, saw my slippers, and nodded approvingly before letting me pass.

And then we were back in Jersey. It was at Customs that I knew I was back:

Customs Guy (looking at my passport): “Business trip?”

Me: “No, wedding.”

CG: “You come back married?”

Me: “No, engaged.”

CG (Shrugging and handing me my passport without ever looking up): “Takes all kinds, I guess.”

Williamsburg Spelling Bee Finals

I got third! I'm now the proud owner of the multi-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which, by the way, was quite a haul home on my bike), and a $25 Pete's Candy bar tab that we used to try the fancier drinks on the menu (I recommend anything with the elderflower liqueur).

Check it out here with a nice mugshot, although they do refer to me as Jonathan.

On Tour: Nashville

The year before last, my best friend Andrew got married and moved to Nashville after his wife got a fellowship at Vanderbilt. We used to spend quite a few weekends down there in college, as it offered both a nightlife and an abundance of musical venues, two things sorely lacking in Murray State’s surrounding retirement community in a dry county. (Certain districts of the town of Murray have since gone “moist,” a kind of creepy way of saying they allow beer to be served in establishments that derive at least 75% of their income from food.)

Anyway, I finally got to make a trip down to see him this past long weekend, and I’m now on the plane back. We’d planned on at least 2 days of fishing on Percy Priest Reservoir, but that was cut down to one after we busted the prop on our rental boat. We weren’t having much luck anyway, with our catch of the day a 1-pound largemouth bass not even legal to keep, and a bunch of undersized white bass.

I got some real keepers at the record stores, though – I forgot how great The Great Escape is, with Van Morrison’s and the Old 97s’ new releases weighing in at $8.99 each, Stereolab’s The Groop Played Space Age Batchelor Pad Music (sic) at a paltry $5.99, and a “Welcome to Nash Vegas” bumper sticker rounding out the purchase at a less-of-a-bargain $2. Drew, though, clued me into Grimey’s Records, a more out-of-the-way place with an even better used CD selection. I got 2 more Van Morrison CD’s – Common One and A Period of Transition – to almost complete my collection of his domestic releases, as well as The Cream of Clapton (I saw Crossroads listed as the 4th-ranked guitar song of all time in a Rolling Stone at the garage while Andrew was getting a hubcap, and had to hear it), Golden Smog’s latest, and Beth Orton’s Best Bit (say that as fast as you can 5 times) EP, all for under $35. (On a how-themighty-have-fallen note – Metallica played at Grimey’s tiny basement venue the night before, and I was intrigued how they’d spun their epic battle with Napster as a “vinyl vs. digital” thing rather than the much more plausible “corporate band defending its label’s profits” thing. I guess they had to make sure they sold all 200 tickets to the show.)

We had a good time out at some of Nashville’s eating and drinking establishments, though. I passed Friday afternoon while Drew was working, and then Friday night when he joined me, at the South Street Smokehouse drinking pint after pint of Sweetwater Pale at the bar with the local crowd, then w e woke up late Saturday morning and had country ham, biscuits, and grits at a tiny soda shop with a pleasantly ancient waitress. After spending the whole day on the water, we took it easy Saturday night and packed up for the beach Sunday, an entirely enjoyable day of chargrilled steak, Coronas, and manufactured sand. Sunday night we wound down with the Game 6 of the NBA Finals at Bosco’s Brewery. Monday morning it was Pancake Pantry, the place for breakfast in Nashville – at least that’s what Andrew says, until we find that his crazy neighbor who accosted him last weekend for letting his cats too close to her pit bull she has chained to her porch is in fact our waitress. But then she apologizes and gives him his breakfast for free, and it becomes the place to eat breakfast in Nashville again. That evening we did a final-evening whirlwind trip through Flying Saucers, home of more brews than I could drink in a year; Trivia Night at the Corner Bar (proper noun) with his wife and her friends; and 4 hours of karaoke at Lonnie’s, perhaps the seediest place I’ve had the pleasure of playing a fool at.

Book Review: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

I normally put my book reviews on GoodReads, but this one wouldn't fit:

My friend Todd’s finishing up his PhD in Urban Planning at Louisville this year, and he’s been telling me since he started the program that I should read this book, especially since I live in New York City.

I bought the book awhile ago, but never got around to reading it; it just didn’t seem to be my kind of thing. “It’s more your thing than mine,” Todd said. I didn’t know what he meant until I decided to incorporate it into a freshman orientation class I teach on the history and mystery of New York City. After reading it, I’d say that anyone living in New York City (or any other major metropolitan area, “Great American City” in Jacobs’ words) should not just read but ingest it.

The introduction states her thesis, which is essentially that traditional urban planners (as of 1961, the original date of publication, but most of her points about NYC planners remain valid today), instead of addressing cities on their own terms with their own distinctly, well, “city” relationships and problems, try to make them fit into smaller-town prototypes. This, she argues, is by nature destined for failure.

She divides the book into four sections. The first section, The Peculiar Nature of Cities, lays out what makes cities function, specifically:

• Interrelated primary functions – In other words, the reasons people are commingling on the streets, and how those functions work off of each other. She uses a beautiful passage on pp50-54 to describe the “ballet of Hudson Street,” where through the course of every day the strete remains alive with people putting out the trash, kids going to school, local vendors setting up shop, mothers walking their babies, kids acting crazy on the streets after school, night workers stopping by the bodegas to pick up their lunch, the local taverns picking up the night crowds, lots between and after.
• Limited privacy – Her argument is essentially that people don’t want to have long, drawn-out interractions with strangers, but they want to feel safe that if they need help they’ll receive it.
• Uses of sidewalks – She devotes three chapters to the way that sidewalks socialize (or don’t socialize) people, and how decreased sidewalk usage is directly related to reduced street safety.
• Uses of parks – She’s not big on them, at least in and of themselves, as she sees many city planners following the “Garden City” plan of simply producing open green spaces on the assumption that people naturally flock to them to get away from the streets. They often achieve the opposite of their intention, she argues, as the primary group to flock to them are criminals and the indigent if the parks are simply put in and left alone.
• Uses of neighborhoods – I thought this was the best chapter of the section. She dismisses forthright the notion of neighborhoods as self-sufficient within a city, and sets out the hierarchy of neighborhood-district-city that, if connected, keeps neighborhoods functional and not simply warring “turfs.”

The second section, and in her words the most important, The Conditions for City Diversity, points out specific necessities to maintain diversity. I must state here that by diversity, she doesn’t necessarily mean cultural diversity (although that contributes to the diversity she speaks of) but rather a more universal diversity, including functional, economic, educational, cultural, and other forms. These conditions include:

• Mixed primary uses – By “primary” she means the reasons a street, block, building, or other landmark is a destination rather than simply a place to pass through; these include work, residence, education, entertainment, and recreation. The needs for there to be a variety of primary uses goes back to her earlier statement on the need for interrelated activity to keep a street/block/neighborhood alive.
• Small blocks – This is a relatively short and succinct point, essentially that the longer a block is, the less spontaneous traffic it will have, and thus the less interactivity of uses.
• Aged buildings – This to me was one of the most elucidating chapters of the entire book. My first thought while reading was that she would address the historic and aesthetic value of older buildings; instead, she spends the majority of this chapter dealing with their role in generating economic diversity. The argument is simple, actually – older buildings are the only lodging that smaller, riskier, and/or newer enterprises can afford, so essentially they are the incubators of small business, which in turn stimulates economic diversity. She is positively prophetic in her use of Brooklyn as a prime example on pp196-198; she writes – in 1961, mind you – of Brooklyn’s potential as an incubator of small industry with its surfeit of huge industrial buildings. Living and running my business out of a factory loft in Bushwick with a vibrant, hipster-enterprise-filled community all around me, I can vouch for the wisdom of this assessment.
• Concentration of population – Here is her argument, which has become a pretty standard one in liberal urban planning circles, against suburban sprawl. One thing she makes clear early – by concentration (and density) she doesn’t mean overcrowding. In fact, she argues, overcrowding usually occurs when the conditions for diversity aren’t met, and additionally the most dangerous areas of most cities are the ones with densities low enough that there is little community surveillance.

In the third section, Forces of Decline and Regeneration, Jacobs focuses her energy on the forces that encourage, sustain, defer, and/or destroy diversity and vitality in a city:

• The first force for decline in a city or a neighborhood is the most ironic – a neighborhood made successful by its diversity and dynamism self-destructs by allowing one or two industries or purposes dominate it. She mentions banks, insurance companies, and high-end office buildings as prominent diversity destroyers, as they are economically conservative, investing usually only in established successes, and that they have the financial resources to supplant any other industries in the near vicinity. Once again I’ll use my beloved Brooklyn as an example: Williamsburg, over the last 5-7 years, has found itself an apex of hipster, artistic, and industrial uses; the city, in response to the increased desirability of the area for residential yuppie traffic and the attendant increase in financial resources, has rezoned both Williamsburg and the riverfront-area Greenpoint to encourage high-rise and condominium construction. Already, every inch of Greenpoint’s riverfront has been bought and sold, never to be used by anyone but the proprietors and renters. The waterfront is boarded up invisible from land, and with the housing market the way it is I haven’t seen many lights on in the buildings that have been put up.
• Another negative force is what Jacobs terms “border vacuums,” areas in cities and neighborhoods where a buffer zone forms between different uses and/or demographic groups. These areas, she states, tend to form “gray zones” where few people from either side go, and end up the most dangerous places in the area. She includes railroad tracks, waterfronts, campus edges, expressways, parking lots, and large parks as obvious physical barriers, but emphasizes that these areas can form anywhere there is little overlap in activity between the groups of people who occupy and/or work there. Her solution is to turn borders into what she dubs seams, “a line of exchange along which two areas are sewn together.” To offset the negative Williamsburg-Greenpoint example I used in the last point, I’ll bring up a successful “seam” area on the Brooklyn waterfront, the pier off Owl’s Head Park. When I lived in Sunset Park I would run down there frequently, and I found there the closest approximation of the Old New York I imagined before moving here – skaters ramping, fishermen fishing, teenagers flirting, runners running, parents strolling, and all of this with freighters meandering by on the water and the Verrazano Bridge in the distance; a complete diversity of uses, with each peacefully sharing a relatively small space.
• Her next point addresses perhaps the most cliché problem in city planning, slums and projects. I think this section in retrospect (remembering that Jacobs wrote it in 1961) was perhaps the most influential in changing the perception of slums from an unavoidable leftover area for economic charity cases to addressing gradually eliminating the economic influences that necessitate them. Her solution to the problem is not in decimating or moving slums, but making them nice enough that people want to live in the areas they are. The clue that this is working though, she says, can be misleading because if the strategy is successful there should be not a rise in population but a drop; this would be due to the drop in overcrowded dwellings and a return to normal population density for the amount of residential units. One last important thing to note about her proposed solutions for unslumming is that although she states unequivocally that city funds must be a sustained part of the process, the process will only begin at the behest of the businesses already set up in the slums, as they are the ones economically invested enough to stay and they are also the ones to benefit most economically from the upgrade.
• Next, she engages the issue of money and its use, both to good and bad effect. In doing so, she basically divides funding into 2 categories: gradual funding, and cataclysmic funding. Of the two, she says only gradual, sustained budgetary allowances can truly sustain a neighborhood in a city, and even states that large amounts of money given to any one project at once can have disastrous effects. In light of her theories on what makes a successful neighborhood, it’s easy to see her reasoning – if any one project or division gets a large amount of budget, then naturally the outlaying areas will be negatively affected, which leads to a loss of diversity when the well-funded project becomes the neighborhood’s only attraction. Another key point she expounds on is the power a city authority has to destroy a neighborhood by withholding credit; this, she argues, happens quite frequently when a city’s central authority decides an area or community is economically dead then effectively “blacklists” it, discouraging lenders from funding enterprise there and fulfilling their own proclamation.

The last part of the book is sort of a mishmash of topics that are probably here because they couldn’t fit into the precepts of the other sections. It’s probably the weakest section of the book, perhaps for the unsettling reason that Jacobs is better at pointing out problems than forging viable solutions. Her views on automobiles in cities, for example, are hopelessly dated; she essentially explains how to restrict private automobile usage as if it would go away if you made it hard enough for individual car owners to get around, which sounds like it was written, well, around 1961 (or before). Her ideas for subsidizing dwellings in response to the problems of unslumming she addressed in the last part – subsidizing housing costs for working renters according to their income and adjusting the rent up or down as their income fluctuates – pose similar problems as the more generalized federal welfare system, as it essentially provides negative reinforcement for making a more liveable working wage. And her proposals for salvaging housing projects, while mostly viable, are essentially rehashes of suggestions she’s made in previous chapters, like tying in borders, cutting up blocks, guaranteed-rent dwellings, incorporating street-level vendors, and eliminating turf-like xenophobia, and she accompanies all these suggestions with the final ominous line of the chapter pertaining to the salvaging projects themselves – “Think better of it.”

The last 2 chapters of the section, though, are perhaps the most instructive and incisive of the book. “Governing and Planning Districts” lays the groundwork for building successful districts by building on her neighborhood-district-city hierarchy from the book’s first section. Unlike many of the solutions she proposes in this last section, Jacobs reveals here some obvious and hard-won experience with district jurisdiction and administration, and the structures she describes had already been working well in her district of NYC, Greenwich Village. The last chapter, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” contains Jacobs’ plea for looking at cities not as chaotic mass needing a shape to be imposed on them, but systems of “organized complexity,” with interconnected systems that reveal themselves through inductive reasoning, i.e., looking at specific examples to figure out the systems they work within, rather than by imposing systems formulated by planners upon them that mostly work against the natural complexity that already exists. And speaking of nature, she closes out the book by making a compelling argument for cities as products of the natural world rather than forces imposing on the surrounding natural world that leaves any lull from the few chapters preceding it a distant memory.