A Voyage to the Exotic East

The one-year anniversary of my trip to India is approaching, so I guess I should haul this half-finished post out from under the couch cushions it seems to have gotten lost under for the better part of a year and finally finish it. I'm glad I unexpectedly found it in there, along with the loose change and the icky old hairbrush. I really should vacuum that out more often.

So here's the story. The consulting company I work for has an office in Pune, India. During the approximately two years I'd been with the company at the time of my trip, there were many people in Pune with whom I'd emailed and spoken on the phone, in some cases on an almost daily basis, but never actually met face-to-face, save for the few who have occasionally come to the US for management-level meetings or to work on a project. Periodically I contemplate what a weird facet of modern life it is to have this close and longstanding working relationship with so many people while not having the faintest idea of what they might actually look like.

Back in the 1990's I worked for a large international bank, where I managed engineering and maintenance of various IT security systems. That also necessitated a lot of cross-border interaction by phone and email. To promote collaboration I would occasionally take trips to some of the international offices to meet people in person. Sometimes my counterparts and I would coordinate a week-long meeting of people from the various global offices in some single location. Since we were spending company money to do this, there was always an agenda of dull presentations and discussions during the day, but the real value of the event was just hanging out together in the evening and getting to know each other, usually while consuming significant quantities of adult refreshments (something for which my British colleagues generally displayed a particularly outstanding proficiency). With this in mind, I agreed with my present boss that it would be a good idea to finally visit the Pune office and meet everyone in person.

Apart from that, over the past decade I have worked with so many people from India that I've had a general curiosity just to see what things look like there and to get a sense of what life is like where they come from. Also, I really like Indian food.

Curiosity notwithstanding, I was kind of apprehensive at the same time. For one thing, it makes no sense to make a long trip like that in anything less than a week, and I knew that while I was gone, it would be hard to maintain contact with the clients and project teams I'm responsible for here in the US. No doubt I would end up working a lot of long hours after my return to catch up again. Also, it would be likely that at least part of my travel would have to happen on a weekend, and those limited free days I have during the week are extremely precious to me. And then there was the matter of the travel itself; back in my banking days, I could fly business class on international trips, but those days are long gone. Nowadays I have to fly coach everywhere, and even a flight of a couple hours in length can be torture, so the thought of a 14–15 hour flight in each direction to Mumbai and back (Mumbai being the closest international airport to Pune) left me in a state of profound dread.

But anyway, it came to pass that I finally set a date. This was not done without some deliberation, because, at least if you are traveling from the Land of the Free^TM, you don't just hop on a plane and go there. First, you have to have a visa. Interestingly, to get a visa for India, you don't go to the nearest Indian consulate because, irony of ironies, they have outsourced that process (to a company called Travisa which, incidentally, processed everything fairly quickly and efficiently). Second, you have to get a bunch of immunizations for things like yellow fever that are pretty unusual here but not so uncommon there. The doctor who gave me the shots (a whole bunch in each arm, all at once, leaving me feeling like a pincushion) also gave me a prescription for anitbiotics to take before, during and after the trip as prophylaxis against malaria, plus some extra-powerful antibiotics which I was to take in case of a prolonged episode of severe diarrhea. The curious thing about the latter pills is that the bottle came with a warning sticker to admonish me that a possible side effect is—guess what?—severe diarrhea. There's something to ponder.

I ended up taking the trip when I did after I., a colleague who is the other senior project manager in the US operation and had been with the company even longer, mentioned that he was way overdue to finally visit the Pune office for the first time and was probably going to go at the same time that R., our company CEO, was planning to make one of his quarterly visits. I suggested that we make the trip together and, having heard about this, R. decided to ask T., a new PM, to make the trip as well and we would turn the week into a US-India company project management summit with a structured agenda. R. would already be in India when we got there, so I., T. and I would meet in Newark, NJ to take the same direct flight to Mumbai and back.

And thus did it come to pass that, armed with my visa and my drugs, I finally embarked on my trip. I can indeed confirm to you that 14 hours is a loooooong time to sit in an airline coach seat. I was lucky on the trip over insofar as I had a window seat and the middle seat was empty, so I had a little extra room and didn't have to engage in one of those subtle but determined battles with the person sitting next to me for control of the armrest.

The coach seats also featured individual video displays offering a pretty wide variety of different movies and TV show episodes. This was good, because I have an extremely hard time sleeping on planes. I didn't want to sleep anyway, because I was going to be arriving around 9 PM and I didn't want to get there so well-rested that I would be wide awake for much of the night. I think I watched four different feature-length movies that I probably would never have watched otherwise.

The only thing I was a little annoyed about was that the crew insisted that the passengers in the window seats keep their shades closed so that anyone who wanted to could sleep, as we would be in daylight for much of the trip. Given a choice, I pretty much always book a window seat on a day flight because I enjoy looking at the landscape. I periodically flaunted this ridiculous rule to see at least some of the sights. Among other things, I managed to get a fairly impressive view as we flew over Afghanistan; it was interesting to see high peaks separating valleys in which it looked like every usable bit of space had been carved up into agricultural plots.

Sitting there on that long flight, I had to think back to a time in the early 1980's when My Favorite Wife (at the time My Future Wife) was in Germany and I was in the US as we completed our respective university studies. During the summer and the winter break I would visit her by taking direct flights between San Francisco and Frankfurt which, if I recall correctly, were also a good 12–13 hours in duration. That was back in the days before personal entertainment systems, before laptop computers and before iPods. I can't remember if the Walkman was around yet, but I didn't own one if it was. In those days, if you were lucky, you might be close enough to one of the few video monitors to be able to discern what was going on in the one movie that would be shown. So relatively speaking, I felt pretty pampered in the entertainment department on this flight, although I think the legroom was slightly (slightly!) more generous back then.

Arriving—finally!—in Mumbai, my colleagues and I went through immigration, collected our baggage, passed through customs, changed some money and set off to meet our destiny. As we exited the secure arrival area, we found ourselves in kind of a large corral-like area that was ringed with metal barriers, over which the drivers from various limousine and car services had hung little tablets bearing the names of the people for whom each driver was waiting. We searched among the 70 or 80 such tablets for our own names, as arrangements had been made for a driver to pick us up at the airport and bring us to the hotel in Mumbai where we were to spend the night before heading out to Pune the following morning.

Before long we located what turned out to be two drivers who were waiting for us. The drivers insisted on labeling our luggage with little tags bearing our respective names and giving us corresponding receipts. There was immediate confusion, as the drivers couldn't quite understand which one of us was Mr. Charlie, Mr. I. and Mr. T. Finally this operation was completed, though. Then, before getting into the car, one of the drivers opened up a little ice chest he had in the trunk of his car and, with a flourish, asked us if we would like a Diet Coke. This was done with such ceremony and enthusiasm that I had to say yes, even though I have an intense dislike for the weird metallic aftertaste of diet sodas.

I started to open my complimentary beverage, but then I remembered something about which I had been admonished repeatedly by seasoned India travelers in preparation for my trip. The contents of that can of soda were almost certainly safe to drink, but where had it been before I took possession of it? In our driver's cooler, of course, swimming in partially melted ice. And with what water had that ice been made? Better not to put my lips on the outside of that can. I stuck it into my laptop bag, which the drivers had not succeeded in wrenching from my hands, and got into the car. My two colleagues got into the other one of the two cars that had come to collect us.

The driver was a nice guy who engaged me in conversation throughout the short trip to the hotel. Where was I from, he wanted to know. "Boston", I told him. "Ah, Boston," he said, with a touch of longing in his voice. "You know Boston?" I asked. He told me he had never been there, but from driving American visitors around, he knows about all of the major US cities—Boston, New York, Orange County, Texas…

That trip from the airport to the hotel was my first experience with driving in India. As in the UK, Indians drive on the left side of the road rather than on the right, as we do in the US; that was already a little disconcerting. The traffic was heavy, even though it was around 11 PM, and we seemed to be driving down one (sort of) paved road after another in what looked to be a gigantic construction site; apparently the Mumbai Airport is building some kind of elevated railway through its entire site, which is enormous. From what I could tell during that first short trip, the only traffic law they have there is the law of the jungle. More on this later.

We got to the hotel and attempted to collect our baggage from the cars, but the drivers would not have it, insisting on carrying the bags into the hotel for us. I hate this kind of thing; I feel very uncomfortable being pampered in any way. Maybe it's my American ethic of self-sufficiency on the frontier, or maybe it's just my liberal guilt, but I can't stand the idea of someone carrying my lugagge for me. The Young Master would probably say it's just because his father is a cheapskate, which to some extent is true—in hotels, for example, I get a little irritated when some bellhop joker insists on putting my little suitcase, the same one I've already trundled behind me for miles through the airport, on a little cart that will travel from reception to my room on the third or fourth floor and then stands around expecting a tip for this utterly useless service. But world traveler that I am, I figured this is the way they do it here, so I'm not going to fight it.

Checking in was a long and complicated process. In the US I am accustomed to handing the person at the front desk a credit card and (sometimes) a driver's license, and it takes only a few minutes for them to locate my reservation, check me in and hand me my key card. (It's been a really long time since I was given an actual room key at a hotel instead of one of those credit card-sized key cards. The cards are more convenient, and no doubt more cost-effective for the hotel, but why do they always insist on giving me two key cards unless I specifically say I only want one?) In the last couple of years I stayed in hotels in Europe, check-in speed was comparable. But in this hotel I had to fill out a big form and sign or initial what seemed like an absurdly large number of places in the form. It took around fifteen minutes for the whole process. Rather than handing our key cards out to us, the lady at the front desk then insisted on accompanying our whole party of three to show us where our respective rooms were and open each door for us. I don't know, maybe to her we looked like a bunch of helpless yokels with no knowledge of modern door technology. I think it took a good 40–45 minutes from the time I walked up to the front desk until I was finally alone in my room.

It was a nice hotel that the company had reserved for us. Often when I first walk into my room in a nice place like that, the TV is already turned on and tuned to an information channel; it might have some kind of "Welcome Mr. Charlie" message on it, or it might be advertising the on-demand movies or maybe some local attraction or other. True to tradition, the TV in this room was on, but it was showing a shampoo commercial when I walked in. Then came another one, and then one for hair conditioner, and then another shampoo commercial, and then the cycle repeated. I wondered if  was tuned to The Shampoo Channel. Each commercial featured a model with a head of long, full hair that sort of waved and billowed in an obviously computer-animated sort of way. The commercials were slickly made but to the point of being kind of over-produced and just sort of weird, at least for my taste.

I Wish My Hair Could Do That

I was pretty puzzled about the shampoo connection, but then I went into my bathroom and saw that it was well-stocked with samples of many of the company's hair care products. That's when I noticed that the shampoo is manufactured by a company called ITC, which I guess is one of those conglomerates that is involved in just about every imaginable business, including operating the fancy hotel in which I was staying. An interesting application of cross-selling, I guess.

After turning off the TV, the next order of business was to take a shower, brush my teeth and hit the sack. This posed a potential problem that we here in the US don't normally consider: What about the water—will it hurt me? It looked fine coming out of the tap, but who knows what invisible creatures might be lurking in there, waiting to work their magic on my insides. I didn't want to begin my trip with a major intestinal event. I decided I would shower normally, taking care not to get any water in my mouth, then brush my teeth using bottled water.

Another thing I learned later in my stay is that you have to be careful with even the bottled water. To be more precise, you need to be certain that the seal on the bottle hasn't been broken, as it's not entirely uncommon, especially in tourist-class hotels, to be given bottled water that is just water from the tap that's been filled into a used plastic bottle.

Having survived the night, the next morning I went down to the breakfast room, met my traveling companions and then the colleagues from Pune who had been sent to collect us. We didn't go straight to Pune, though. First we had to go with our local colleagues to the office of some other company that had just installed the same line of office furniture that our company was thinking of buying for the new building that we would be moving into soon, so that they could see the stuff in action. I can assure you after this experience that looking at office furniture in India is just dull as looking at office furniture here at home.

The trip to Pune, once we got our stimulating office furniture viewing excursion behind us, was somewhat more exciting. As I was soon to discover, pretty much all driving in India is exciting. About the only rules I was able to discern were (1) drive on the left side of the road and (2) honk whenever you pass another car. Beyond that, it's every man for himself. The roads are populated with a colorful mix of cars, trucks, motorcycles, buses, three-wheeled motorized rickshaws, an occasional bicycle and a few random cows thrown in just to make it interesting. I didn't have a vantage point from which to get a wide shot of traffic, so here's a taste from someone else's YouTube video:

Don't Try This at Home

What doesn't come across in that one, though, is the unbelievable racket of traffic. I am often on conference calls with my Indian colleagues, and sometimes it's hard to understand them through the incessant honking of car horns in the background. I always assumed that they must be speaking to me from a conference room that's right next to a road and that they must have all the windows open. Once I got there I saw that no, they have always been calling from inside an interior room in a building that has a farily reasonable setback from the street; it's just always that loud, I guess. Here's a short snippet of video I shot during the drive between my hotel and the office, for illustration.

Driving Through the Wall of Sound

You will probably notice in the above videos that two-wheeled transportation is pretty prevalent. The cost of even a small car is beyond the reach of many middle-class Indians, but they can afford a motorcycle or scooter. It turns out that you can fit a lot more people onto a motorcycle than I previously would have thought possible. It's not at all unusual to see a family of four or five traveling on a single two-wheeled vehicle. Also, the traditional women's garment, the sari, is not exactly motorcycle-friendly, so you frequently see women riding side-saddle on the back of a motorbike. Helmets are of course optional for all concerned.

Biker Chicks of the Subcontinent

I did all my traveling in one form or another of four-wheeled transport. Most of the time I was in a taxi or a car hired by the company, but I went for a few rides with colleagues who had cars. I would not even consider driving on my own without a lot more acclimation to the local driving practices. But if I did ever have a car there, it would almost certainly have a little idol of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, on the dashboard. It's the Hindu equivalent of the St. Christopher medal or the plastic Jesus dashboard figurine I recall from my youth (I can't remember having seen either recently, but maybe it's because I live in godless Massachusetts). I don't think I was in any car during my visit that was not under the protection of the elephant man.

I Don't Care if it Rains or Freezes

Ganesha also has his own little shrine in the company office I visited. Coming from a country in which we bend over backwards to avoid any overtly religious symbols in the workplace, this was sort of a surprise, but I'll guess that over there it's pretty much standard practice to enlist the God of Success and Remover of Obstacles to help keep an eye on your business.

The Remover of Obstacles Will See You Now

While I was speaking with one of my Indian colleagues about how he spends his free time, he mentioned that among other things, he goes on little excursions with his kids to visit various temples and perform the associated rituals. He went on to philosophize more generally about how important it is to him that they grow up with the proper devotion to their religion, so that they will turn out to be good, upstanding people. What, with no Jesus? No Moses even? People I've spoken with back home about the various religious expressions I observed on my trip find them amusingly weird, in a "How can those people believe all that crazy nonsense?" sort of way. I won't say that I don't share that sense of bemusement to a certain degree, but then as a Hebrew-American, I grew up fairly accustomed to being surrounded by people who believe, with varying degrees of conviction, in systems of supernatural order considerably different than the one I was raised with, so it wasn't a totally unfamiliar experience.

To us westerners, the notion that saying prayers to a little statue while rubbing it with butter and spices, and offering it food and money, could be the way to achieve eternal salvation sounds pretty crazy. But then, here at home I live among a considerable number of people who will tell me, in all seriousness, that salvation is at least partially the product of periodically consuming wine and crackers that have been literally (not just symbolically) transformed into the blood and body of their deity of choice. The more devout members of my own tribe will lay out for me, in excruciating detail, why it is that I can separately consume cheese or a burger, but by order of the Almighty himself, under no circumstances may I eat a cheeseburger. As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to explaining how the universe works, we all have our own familiar brand of crazy, and treat it as the baseline from which to judge everyone else's chosen brand of crazy to be a bunch of crackpot foolishness.

It was fun to finally meet in person so many people I have emailed with or spoken to by phone but never actually seen. They all seemed really excited to have me and my other two colleagues there; many of them have been to the US for varying lengths of time, but it's not that often that anyone from the US side of the company comes over to spend any time with them. They extended a tremendous amount of hospitality, especially in the culinary department. We went to a lot of buffet-type restaurants where I got a chance to sample all kinds of good stuff. I like Indian food a lot, so this was one highlight of the trip for me.

While enjoying this culinary extravaganza, it was hard not to be conscious of being surrounded by people who would have been thrilled just to have the scraps off my plate. Not that there are usually any scraps left on my plate, having grown up under the influence of the "clean your plate, mister" philosophy, but you know what I mean. Hundreds of millions of India's approximately one billion people live in pretty severe poverty, and you don't have to look very far to find it. Just a block from my hotel there was a kind of shantytown built along an open drainage ditch in between some more middle-class apartment buildings; driving past it on the way to the company office, one of my colleagues expressed considerable shock at the sight of a half naked guy who was apparently "bathing" by scooping up the murky grey water in a pan as it flowed by and then pouring it over his head.

The same daily ride to the office took us by a traffic island sheltered under a sort of highway overpass, a space maybe twenty by thirty feet in size, which appeared to be the open-air camp of a clan of around twenty or so people of assorted ages. When traffic was slow, a group of three or four small children, a couple carrying infant siblings, would wander out from their camp and into the traffic, begging for food or money by hammering on the closed windows of the cars that were stuck there waiting for traffic to start moving again. You think you have problems? Don't tell me about it.

How the Other Half Lives

What a relief to finally be in the office, where the houseboy (a kind of company servant, or go-fer, apparently a standard fixture in many Indian offices—his name escapes me so I'll call him Rakesh) would greet us with a large bottle of cold water or, sometimes, a Diet Coke. After being there for a few days, I started to wonder about this Diet Coke business. Did I say I hate that stuff? It started with the one the driver offered me on the way out of the office. Then there was Rakesh with his frequent offers of Diet Coke. Also, one night when my two traveling companions and I ventured out on our own to get some food, the semi-upscale place we ended up in had no fizzy drinks of any kind on its menu save for—what else—Diet Coke. I eventually asked R., who has spent a considerable amount of time in India, why everyone wants me to have a Diet Coke. He just shrugged and said, "It's what they think white people like." It's interesting to be on the receiving end of a cultural stereotype when you're not used to it. On a similar note, it also took some persuasion to get Rakesh to bring us Indian food for lunch instead of the horrible stuff he was bringing in from the local Pizza Hut franchise.

The whole business of considering what to put in one's mouth and what not was probably the biggest challenge of the trip. One day we were going to have lunch brought in for a meeting and were asked by Rakesh what he should get for us. "Something that won't kill us", one of my American colleagues joked. We Yanks all laughed; the Indians in the room nodded knowingly. Several US-based Indian colleagues called or emailed us during the trip to ask whether anyone had gotten sick yet; this may have been out of concern for our welfare, but I'm guessing that they had money riding on who would be the first of us to experience a sudden and spectacular gastrointestinal meltdown in a meeting.

At one point I was speaking to one of my colleagues who had relocated back to India after having spent three or four years in the US. I asked him how long it took him to readjust to the water, expecting to hear that he had problems for maybe a couple of weeks. "Six months", he told me. I had that in the back of my mind when, on my last night in Pune, rather than using bottled water to wet my toothbrush I absentmindedly wet it under the running tap and then began brushing my teeth. I imagine my eyes were about as wide as a pie plate when I suddenly realized what I had done and began frantically rinsing my mouth with water from the bottle.

Besides that one colleague, I spoke to a few others who had been living in the US and then relocated back to India. Interestingly, none of them said it was because they thought they had a better quality of life in India; invariably it was because they needed to care for elderly parents or had other family obligations that made relocation unavoidable. Otherwise, they would have been more than happy to put down roots in the US.

Sadly, it is becoming harder for them to do that anyway. Since the banking crisis of 2008 and the ensuing recession, it has gotten harder and harder for the company I work for to get any kind of visa to bring people over to work in the US. Now, the latent conservative in me says that's only right; we should be filling those jobs with unemployed American citizens and not Indian immigrants. But the fact is, in the case of our company at least, we have a hard time finding people with the specific skills and training needed to fill a lot of open positions, so if we don't get a visa to relocate one of the Indian staff to the US—where, I should add, they receive a market-rate US salary—that means a project that does not get sold, value that does not get generated, and taxes that do not get paid on the associated personal and company earnings. I could probably spend a couple of pages reflecting on the political conclusions to be drawn from that, but buried in there somewhere are some implications for both immigration and education policy that deserve consideration.

Being there also put the whole globalization discussion in a slightly different perspective for me. There are many in the US who worry that countries like India and China will somehow overtake us economically, draining our jobs through their massive populations and their cheap wages and rendering us irrelevant. I have never been to China, but after spending a short time in India I can say that yes, that is a dynamic and striving society, but it has quite a ways to go with respect to development. Poverty and disease remain widespread, corruption was a constant topic on the TV news I had on in my hotel, and much of the infrastructure I saw while I was there was in a pretty sorry state. At the same time, I know that our company is seeing a steady rise in the salaries we have to pay the Indian staff due to stiff competition for what are still limited skills sets, so while the wage differential between US and Indian salaries remains significant, that gap may be much less significant in the future. I don't want to generalize too much from spending a week in one small city, but I came away with an impression that while they may be eating our lunch someday, it won't be tomorrow or the day after.

And that's my story. I look forward to going back sometime when I can spend a little less time in offices and a little more time seeing the sights.

Oh, So That's What "Liberal Education" Means

I was going to try to stay off this blog this week and instead get to bed at a reasonable hour, but Rick Santorum just said too many irresistably crazy things over the weekend. There was the thing about wanting to throw up about Kennedy distinguishing between church and state, or the claim that elderly Dutch people are afraid to go to the hospital because the nice doctors will have them put down. But as the father of a high school senior who is presently in the middle of the stressful college selection process, one item in particular caught my attention. It was the one about him addressing some tea party group in Michigan and calling Obama a snob because "he once said he wants everybody to go to college".

The context of his remarks was that he was expressing the idea that not everybody is meant for college—there are many people for whom that's not the right path to a career. That's actually something I can agree with. I have known many people who never went to college and ended up in a trade or a job from which they earned a comfortable living and had a satisfactory life. I've known people who went to college for four years and found it hard to find any kind of job in their field once they graduated. I've also known people who never went to college or got any kind of real vocational training and ended up living a hand-to-mouth existence at minimum wage or a little more, bouncing from one more or less menial job to the next. I'll grant you that college is not the right thing for everybody. To be fair, Obama has also apparently never specifically said that every American should have a four-year college degree. This White House policy statement on education just says that "President Obama is committed to ensuring that America will regain its lost ground and have the highest proportion of students graduating from college in the world by 2020. The President believes that regardless of educational path after high school, all Americans should be prepared to enroll in at least one year of higher education or job training to better prepare our workforce for a 21st century economy."

I think the statistics show that the days when you could go from high school to a good factory job that would pay you enough to live a reasonably comfortable life with a home of your own and a decent pension waiting for you after retirement are long gone. You may not need a four-year college degree, but you need some kind of post-secondary training or education if you're going to have a chance in today's economy. You know those modern manufacturing jobs that the president talked about in the State of the Union address a few weeks ago? He wasn't talking about a job pressing the button that makes the machine stamp out another hubcap. The people who are hiring for the kind of precision manufacturing jobs that pay good wages nowadays aren't going to turn just any bozo loose on equipment that, if not run by an operator with some moderately high-tech skills, is going to spew out a bunch of very expensive garbage. And where are those kinds of skills going to come from? Rick, what's your solution to that?

What mostly caught my attention, though, was this: "There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his." That's great, Rick. I'm glad to hear that you are working hard to save my children from that horrible disease, that painful affliction, that eternal curse that is a college education. Let's make sure that they never grow up to become engineers or doctors or teachers. Or lawyers, like you, a guy who has a BA, an MBA and a JD. I can see what that kind of indoctrination leads to.

Santorum hasn't left it at that, though. He went on ABC's "This Week" show to further explain his position and told George Stephanopoulos this: "You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are… I can tell you personally… I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. This is sort of a regular routine. You know the statistic … that 62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it. This is not a neutral setting." Is that what's behind this? He went to a place where applying the scientific method is a core value and people gave him a hard time about believing in things for which there is no empirical evidence? Rick was intellectually bullied by a bunch of mean liberals when he went to college, and he's still mad about it. Good of him to warn me about the terrible fate that awaits my impressionable children. So I guess I'll take his advice and let the Indians and the Germans and the Chinese and the Russians get those college educations, and I'll just send my kids to church instead.

Congratulations, graduates! You're all
godless communists now.

Ronnie and Jesus

Something I find peculiar about Republicans/conservatives is the strange compulsion their leaders seem to have to perpetually, and loudly, trumpet their Republican-ness and conservatism. I don't see prominent people on the left perpetually going on and on about what exemplary Democrats they are, or accusing others of not being "liberal" or "progressive" enough. I am not saying that there is nobody on the left who does that, but I don't see leading Democrats like Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Kerry etc. going around impugning the leftist credentials of others, for example. Maybe I suffer from selective amnesia, but thinking back to the last presidential election, in which there were numerous candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, I remember them attacking each other in various ways, some of them pretty scurrilous, but I don't recall any of them accusing one of the others of simply not being ideologically pure enough to deserve the nomination, or putting him- or herself forward as the only one who is.

Observing the current race for the Republican nomination, I see all kinds of examples of that. Here's Rick Santorum telling you that he is the "true conservative" and here he is telling you that Newt Gingrich is some kind of impostor. Before dropping out of the race, Rick Perry wanted you to know that he is an "authentic conservative"; afterward, he insisted that Gingrich was the only true conservative left in the race. Romney says he's not just conservative, he's severely conservative. Today I see that Romney and Santorum are duking it out over each other's conservative credentials ahead of the Michigan primary. With the emphasis on ideological purity, I can't tell whether these guys are running for the presidency of the United States or for the chairmanship of some kind of right-wing politburo. Is it just an expression of insecurity? There's something weirdly fetishistic about this label obsession.

Despite differences of opinion about who today's One True Conservative is, there seems to be a fairly widespread consensus among those who think of themselves as staunchly conservative that one president who did govern in accordance with their worldview was Ronald Reagan. He vastly increased defense spending, and sent troops into Grenada to prevent the commies from taking over, and fought the reds by proxy in Central America. He went to Berlin and told Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall". He fought for deregulation and fired the striking air traffic controllers. He kicked off his presidency with that oft-quoted line, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." He did all this and more, establishing himself as one of the more important deities in the pantheon of conservative American heroes. Conservatives look back at the 1980's and wish they could have another president just like Reagan.

And yet… various observers have pointed out that Reagan also raised taxes during his presidency. He signed a law granting amnesty to illegal aliens. He opined that people living below the poverty line should not pay taxes. He cooperated with notorious leftist extremists like Tip O'Neill. Those observers have asserted that with a record like that, it's pretty doubtful that Reagan, the conservative icon, could ever be a serious contender for today's Republican nomination, and I would have to agree with that. I personally have a hard time thinking of Reagan as a moderate, but by the standards of today's Republican party he would be found guilty of too many counts of giving aid and comfort to the enemy to be considered "a true conservative" and an acceptable presidential candidate.

Mortal Enemies

There's another guy who looms large in the background of the current Republican primary race. His name is Jesus; you have no doubt heard of him. We have certainly heard a lot from the candidates about "Judeo-Christian values" in this campaign season, mostly in the context of how these values are under attack from all directions and how only Mitt/Newt/Rick P./Rick S./Michelle/etc. can defend the faith. Newt sums it up nicely: "In a sense, our Judeo-Christian civilization is under attack from two fronts. On one front, you have a secular, atheist, elitism. And on the other front, you have radical Islamists. And both groups would like to eliminate our civilization if they could. For different reasons, but with equal passion." Or: "We see a president who is systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian values of America" (Santorum on Obama).

I don't know of any other western democracy in which the appeal to religion is so constantly in the mouths of those who aspire to govern. This perpetual emphasis on how the man upstairs wants us to run the country puts us in good company with countries like, oh, Iran or Saudi Arabia. I guess that when you don't have anything substantive in the way of practical policy initiatives to bring the country forward, it's better to just change the subject and talk about your championing of "Judeo-Christian values".

And just between you and me, I wish these guys would drop the pretense of this ridiculous construction, "Judeo-Christian". Those of us to whom the "Judeo" part applies understand that the notion of shared heritage and purpose implied by that term counts only as long as we accept that wherever it conflicts with the "Christian" part, Jesus trumps Moses. Note to Newt, Rick et al.: We are deeply grateful for your willingness to accord us a kind of dhimmi status in exchange for our votes, but since we know you intend to govern according to the Jesus book, just drop the "Judeo" shtick because you're not fooling anyone anyway.

All this is not to say that living in the Jesus-driven state would necessarily be a bad thing. Let's keep an open mind. What would the Republican program look like if they really let Jesus write their platform?

For starters, I suppose they would push for a pretty strong social safety net: Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:34-40)

No doubt they would campaign to eliminate any special treatment for the wealthy, expecting them instead to contribute to society in proportion to their means: Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:21-24)

They might press for an even-handed and compassionate justice system: So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. (John 8:7)

But enough of that, you get the idea… This Jesus guy sounds like some kind of dangerous socialist nut. We'd better make sure none of these foolish ideas get implemented in our future Christian state. It's a good thing this guy isn't running for the Republican nomination. But then with ideas like that, I guess he wouldn't have a chance anyway.

I say unto thee: Thou must pull thyself
up by thine own bootstraps, my son.

For The Bible Tells Me So

I read earlier today that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has declared California's Proposition 8, which sought to outlaw same-sex marriage, to be unconstitutional. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who authored the text of the decision, wrote, "Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples." I have little doubt that this decision will eventually end up in the Supreme Court, that is, is if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case.

Here in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, we've had legalized gay marriage since 2004. Oddly enough, in all the intervening years fire has so far not rained down from heaven, nor have we been afflicted by plagues of frogs or locusts or boils. I don't think anyone in my circle of friends and acquaintances has left his or her opposite-sex spouse to take up with a member of the same sex because now it's legal. Basically, nothing has changed in any way that I can discern, other than that I am told that there are people whose life has been made a little more humane because they can do things like visit their life partner in the hospital with the privileges accorded to a legally recognized spouse.

The whole debate around gay marriage really kind of baffles me. I started out as a vessel of the same received wisdom as pretty much any other non-gay kid of my generation that men who prefer men, or women who prefer women, in, er, that way were weirdos and perverts who bring it upon themselves to be ridiculed and ostracized through their own deviant behavior. And then a funny thing happened—I grew up. Along the way I met and, in some cases, befriended people who were just like me in pretty much every way except that they were just sort of wired to want a same-sex rather than an opposite-sex partner. Sure, there were the occasional over-the-top-flamboyant guys or militantly butch women who were just kind of caricatures of themselves, but I have known at least as many straight people who were equally annoyingly in your face about their perpetual lust for members of the opposite sex. So at this point I am neither anti-gay nor pro-gay, I just really don't care who some friend or acquaintance or stranger prefers to spend his life with because I can't see how it affects me in any way. By the same token I fail to see what interest the government should have in depriving such people of equal protection under the law.

Now, you knew I wasn't going to get very far without somehow turning this into a rant against our Republican presidential candidates, right? Well, I don't want to disappoint you. I won't bother with Paul or Santorum, since they're kind of out of the picture at this point (although Santorum's perplexing interpretation via Twitter that "7M Californians had their rights stripped away today by activist 9th Circuit judges" is worth mentioning); I'll just pick on Romney and Gingrich, as usual.

But first, in the interest of equal time, I'll note that President Obama has been hedging his bets in a way that I find kind of irritating. His approach is to try to sidestep the topic entirely by treating it as a matter of states' rights while generally presenting himself as supportive of gay rights. Saying that his views on the matter of same-sex marriage are "evolving" is an obvious and ridiculous ploy to buy time and not have to come out explicitly for or against it before the next election. The word "hypocritical" may not be an exact fit in this context—maybe "disingenuous" is better here—but it certainly comes to mind.

Romney has predictably condemned the Ninth Circuit Court decision, saying, "Today, unelected judges cast aside the will of the people of California who voted to protect traditional marriage". He then went on to demonstrate his amazing capacity for holding two entirely incompatible opinions at the same time by saying, "as president, I will protect traditional marriage and appoint judges who interpret the Constitution as it is written and not according to their own politics and prejudices". So if the unelected judges are your unelected judges and decide accordng to your politics and prejudices, it's OK?

And then there's Newt, who never fails to disappoint with his special brand of professorial-sounding hyperbole. Newt says, "With today's decision on marriage by the Ninth Circuit, and the likely appeal to the Supreme Court, more and more Americans are being exposed to the radical overreach of federal judges and their continued assault on the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States". Newt's been on something of a crusade against the judicial branch in general and the Supreme Court in particular, saying things like, "If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, the president can in fact ignore it" and pledging to provoke a constitutional crisis on his first day in office: "I will issue an instruction on the opening day, first day I'm sworn in, I will issue an executive order to the national security apparatus that it will not enforce Boumediene and it will regard it as null and void because it is an absurd extension of the Supreme Court in to the commander in chief's (authority)." (The Boumediene decision was a ruling that prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay can challenge their detention in US courts.) So there's an interesting idea for you—let's elect a president who will swear to uphold the Constitution, except for the parts he thinks are really dumb.

Newt's aversion to same-sex marriage is apparently theological in nature, as put forth in an explanation quoted here: "It's pretty simple: marriage is between a man and a woman… This is a historic doctrine driven deep into the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, and it's a perfect example of what I mean by the rise of paganism. The effort to create alternatives to marriage between a man and a woman are perfectly natural pagan behaviors, but they are a fundamental violation of our civilization." I'm sure that the infamous serial adulterer Gingrich, bible scholar that he apparently is, is also familiar with Mark 10:11: "And he [Jesus] saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her." Seems like an open and shut case… for the Bible tells me so.

Bet you won't be smiling when you're burning in hell!

Send in the Clowns

Demonstrating once again his uncanny ability to present himself as a clueless rich guy, Mitt Romney last week told CNN, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there." Not to be outdone, metaphorically speaking, Newt said a day or so later, “What the poor need is a trampoline, so that they can spring up… So I’m for replacing the safety net with a trampoline.”

I'm not so sure that the poor need either a net or a trampoline. I think that if you are poor, what you really need is a trapeze! Am I right? Tell me I'm right. Wait, maybe not a trapeze. How about… a tightrope! How about if we teach the poor to juggle? Come to think of it, I guess that what the poor need most is to juggle flaming batons while riding a unicycle across a tightrope.

Or maybe what the poor really need is… decent schools? Safe and affordable housing? Reliable transportation? Protection from legal rackets like payday lending? Healthy food at reasonable prices? Could it be that some substantive policies and programs might be more effective at helping people out of poverty than abstract metaphors? I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud here…

Have I got an idea for you! No, seriously…

Not Concerned

Mitt Romney says he's "not concerned about the very poor". I wonder how many times we'll be reminded of that between now and November.

To be fair, here's the actual context of that remark on CNN today:

"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I'll continue to take that message across the nation."

So the point he was trying to make was that people at either end of the income distribution are doing OK, but there's a huge number in between who need Mitt's help. Fair enough. Let's not take one sentence out of context and use it to beat up on poor Mitt.

I am sure that he's right about the upper end of the scale. He knows that end pretty well, as I think we're all aware. But my problem is with his assumptions about the other end of the scale. He makes it sound like the poorest of the poor are cozily nesting in the soft, velvety folds of a fluffy, warm safety net spun of the finest cashmere. My, that does sound appealing, doesn't it? I'm sure that if you asked any of the affected population, they would tell you that it's not exactly that way. I don't think I need to elaborate any further on that.

Then there's this: "If it needs repair, I'll fix it." For all I know, that may be a genuine, heartfelt sentiment. But it's kind of hard to square it with his statement at the 2008 RNC convention, "It’s time to stop the spread of government dependency and fight it like the poison it is." And surely Mitt has noticed that Congress is currently paralyzed by and, come the next election, perhaps controlled by a Republican party for whom the need to slash bigger holes in any safety net, if not get rid of it entirely, is an article of faith. So that statement is an expression of either cynical calculation or breathtaking ignorance. (The determination of which one it is is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Mitt wants to portray himself as this guy who feels your pain, unlike his presumed opponent in the upcoming presidential election, in whom he purports to have detected an "extraordinary disconnect between what [the president] thinks America is experiencing right now and what’s really happening". This is coming from the guy who casually wagers $10,000 as a gentlemanly bet, or characterizes the $370,000 he earned in speaking fees in a single year as "not very much". To be sure, Obama is a wealthy man, at least by my standards, although he's not in the same league as Romney by a long shot; but I don't hear him going around claiming to be just like you or me. To me, Romney just comes across as the political equivalent of Vanilla Ice, trying to pass himself off as someone he's not in a hilariously obvious way. Joe Sixpack, I just hope you're paying attention.

Ice, Ice, Baby!

To Insanity and Beyond!

Goodtime Charlie's been on another long hiatus… What could be so important as to draw him back to the keyboard?

Glad you asked! I just wanted to make sure that all of you fine readers—yes, all two of you—are doing what you can to get Newt Gingrich elected President. No, I haven't taken leave of my senses, I'm just really excited at the prospect of moving to America's fifty-first state.

In case you missed it, Newt is now quite literally promising the moon if he gets elected. In a speech given in Florida on Jan. 25, 2012, he pledged that by the end of his second term (how's that for confidence), "we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American." He went on to remind his audience that he had once introduced a "Northwest Ordinance for Space" and said that, "when we get—I think the number was 13,000—when we have 13,000 Americans living on the Moon they can petition to become a state. And here’s the difference between romantics and so-called practical people. I wanted every young American to say to themselves: I could be one of those 13,000."

Per aspera ad astra

I'm hardly young any more (as my children perpetually remind me), and I will be less so in 2020, but sign me up anyway. I can think of nowhere I'd rather be than hurtling through space on a freezing cold rock living in one of a series of airtight boxes connected by tubes. I imagine it wouldn't be much different than living in Minneapolis. I could pretend to be a giant hamster! And I could finally catch up on my reading.

The whole proposition seems perfectly practical to me. It can't possibly cost very much, or be particularly hard, to get all those people, food, medical supplies, building materials etc. etc. across a quarter of a million miles of open space. Plus, we have all kinds of money that's currently being wasted on infrastructure, healthcare, defense, education, social security and other frivolous nonsense that we could invest in this instead. Or we could hit up China again. You just have to keep in mind the benefits we would get in return, which would be, umm, science and stuff, and it would be really cool.

My hat's off to you, Newt! Keep those great ideas coming!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Hi there, it's me again. I've been on vacation. But now I'm back to tell you about the trip I took to a distant and exotic land. I journeyed to a place where the inhabitants speak a mysterious language, wear a distinctive native costume, perform peculiar dances, eat their traditional foods and, in general, jealously guard their ancient cultural traditions. You guessed it—I went to Bavaria.

In the years since we moved from Germany to the US, back at the turn of the century, we have gone back to spend a few weeks every summer. We mainly spend our time in My Favorite Wife's native village in the Palatinate (die Pfalz, just north of the French Alsace region), visiting with her family and especially giving our kids an opportunity to spend some quality time with their cousins, with whom they've managed to maintain a fairly close relationship over all these years, despite the distance. It's not an inexpensive proposition and I agonize over the cost every year when I book the flights, but it's important to me that the kids have a sense of their larger family connections, especially since they don't have any cousins or other close relatives of similar age on my side of the family in the US. MFW and I of course also enjoy seeing friends and family that we only get to see once a year.

We don't spend all of our time in MFW's home village. We generally spend a day or two in Mainz, where we lived for many years, and visit old friends who live elsewhere in the general area. In recent years, as the kids have gotten older, we've been taking the opportunity to spend some of our German vacation time doing traveling a little further afield. This year the destination of choice was the land of beer and Lederhosen.

One of the things that I find fascinating about Germany is that in a country about the size of Montana, there can be considerable differences in culture within the span of relatively short distances. The most obvious manifestation of this is how dialects change from place to place. These are not subtle differences either—a German from one area can travel 50–60 miles in any direction and find people speaking a local dialect that is somewhere between difficult to understand and completely incomprehensible. Other cultural features change from place to place too; for example, the type of Weinfest at which wine is normally served in a half-liter (about a pint) Schoppenglas is something peculiar to MFW's area that you won't find anywhere else in the country. There are also many food specialties associated with specific areas. But for the most part, these kinds of things are minor variations on a more or less widespread base culture.


We'll Just Have A Small Glass, Thanks

Bavaria somehow stands apart. As you might expect, there's a distinctive Bavarian dialect (or family of dialects, actually) that is largely impenetrable for many outsiders, especially when you get out into the countryside, where many of the inhabitants won't make even a token attempt to speak to you in the standard ('High") German that is used in business, government, mass media etc. And there are various culinary specialties (such as beer served by the liter—my personal favorite) that are typical for Bavaria.

The Bavarians somehow go further, though, in expressing their cultural identity. One aspect of this is the style of dress. Many regions of Germany have a traditional folk costume of some sort, but it's not something that anyone would actually wear on the street. Not so in Bavaria; it would be an exaggeration to say that everyone runs around wearing Lederhosen (men) or a Dirndl dress (women), but it's also not highly unusual to see people wearing that kind of clothing, especially on festive occasions of one kind or another. There are distinctively Bavarian styles of music; what we Gringos refer to as "oompah music" immediately comes to mind, but there are many other styles of folk music, some of which is played on specifically Bavarian (or, perhaps more accurately, alpine) instruments. Bavarians also maintain a tradition of folk dancing in their own peculiar style (more on this later).


We Really Dress THis Way

My own first brush with Bavarian culture occurred around 1989 or so, when I worked for one of the Big Eight consulting companies (back in a previous century when there still was such a thing) in Frankfurt, Germany. I was sent to Munich for about six months to work on a project. My partner in this enterprise was a certain Herr L., who was representing our client, the Frankfurt office of a major electronics company; together we were supposed to be overseeing some work that was being done by a third company in Munich that was developing some banking software for our client. Herr L. and I worked mainly with Frau W., who was an outside consultant to that third company.

Herr L. was an interesting character. He was some ten years my senior and wore suits that were elegant, but about 20 years out of date. (Yes, this was back when we all wore suits and ties to work, something which I am surprised to find myself kind of missing sometimes, because it gave my job at least a thin veneer of professionality and dignity.) Herr L. was a skinny guy with thin, jet-black hair that was carefully glued into place by some kind of pomade, and he sported a jet-black, pencil-thin moustache à la John Waters; I always thought he looked a lot like a riverboat gambler. He never really produced any useful work in any of the various projects I collaborated on with him, but he was pretty amusing. His most prominent talent was his ability to drink copious quantities of beer, all the while chain smoking. Dinners with him generally started around 7 PM or so and inevitably ended about 1 AM with me suggesting that we might consider heading back to our respective hotels and him saying yes, but we should at least have one last Gute-Nacht-Bierchen (a "little goodnight beer"). For Herr L., getting the assignment to travel to Munich, the city of beer halls, was a little like Charlie Bucket winning the golden ticket to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

Six months was more than enough time to experiment with the local cuisine. There was one restaurant I remember that served pretty much every part of the cow except the hooves; I can't recall ever seeing cow's udder on any other menu, for example. Another weird thing that I encountered in various restaurants was Kalbsbriesmilzwurst, a word which I still can't say without laughing. It's a sausage made of calf's thymus (or "sweetbreads", a term which has always sort of mystified me) and spleen (which is another fun word to say). I swear I'm not making this up, even though MFW remains convinced that Kalbsbriesmilzwurst is just another word I made up for my own entertainment.

Munich is kind of an interesting place. It's full of imposing monuments and buildings that are meant to impress on you the power and majesty of Bavaria as a political entity, sort of like a Bavarian equivalent of Paris or London. Its culture is an odd mixture of snooty urban chic and provincial alpine charm. Frau W., who was a local, gave herself the assignment to ensure that Herr L. and I would be properly impressed by the city. We happened to arrive in Munich at a time in March, which, Frau W. needed us to know, is Starkbierzeit, or "strong beer time". It seems that the tradition, started by monks around 1630, is that during this period that coincides with Lent (Bavaria is highly Catholic), one drinks a particularly nutritious—and highly alcoholic—Doppelbock beer, ostensibly to maintain one's strength while fasting. Over the centuries, the two weeks of Starkbierzeit have taken on the character of a major festival, sort of like Oktoberfest but not nearly as overrun with drunken tourists. Strongly encouraged by Frau W., and with the enthusiastic participation of Herr L., we of course did everything in our power to maintain our strength, though we skipped the fasting part.

Wait, where was I? I've kind of lost the thread there. This was about my family vacation, wasn't it? I guess I should go easy on the brandy when I'm writing this stuff.

Enduring the Deprivations of Lent

Anyway… We started our Bavarian journey in the small town of Füssen, visiting what I assume to be one of Germany's most photographed landmarks, namely, the Neuschwanstein castle of King Ludwig II. You may not know the name, but I'm sure you've seen the picture of the fairy-tale castle that looks like it could have been designed for Disneyland.


A Modest Home

Neuschwanstein is one of three castles that King Ludwig II had built for him to feed his fantasies of how a monarch was meant to live. Ludwig was kind of a tragic figure. Crowned king of Bavaria at the age of eighteen in 1864, he reigned during a period when monarchy was becoming an obsolete model of government. He fantasized about living the life of an absolute ruler (he idolized Louis XIV of France), but the reality was that his power to govern was greatly constrained by both the Bavarian parliament and by the power of Prussia, the major center of power in Germany, who, sort of like that tough-looking kid from down the street who your parents constantly warned you not to hang out with, cajoled or coerced Bavaria into various adventures that weren't exactly in its best interest. Ludwig escaped into a kind of fantasy world, fueled by the heroically-themed operas of his idol Richard Wagner, and embarked on building projects intended to create a kind of physical manifestation of that fantasy world. His extravagant construction projects, of which Neuschwanstein was only the first, practically bankrupted the Bavarian treasury, ending with his removal from power by a government commission on grounds of insanity and his death under mysterious circumstances a day later.

I had been to Neuschwanstein a few times before, the first time with MFW alone, then later when my mother and then my brother came to visit us in Germany. One of the things I noticed was that the crowds seemed markedly smaller this time. In particular, there was an amazing absence of Americans. On previous visits the place was always crawling with GIs spending some of their free time seeing the sights, and with American tourists and students. The GIs mostly disappeared from the picture during the drawdowns of US military bases during the 1990's, but there were always still plenty of tourists. This time I noticed hardly any of my countrymen, though. I imagine it has a lot to do with both the state of the economy back home and the relatively high cost of turning dollars into Euros.

We went to look at a few other things in the area around Füssen. One of them is the Wieskirche, which is a fantastically ornate church built in the mid-eighteenth century in the rococo, or late baroque, style. From the outside, the building, which sits in the middle of what is basically a large cow pasture, is fairly plain-looking, so it's all the more remarkable when you step inside and see the amazing fresco and stucco work.


Go For Baroque

One of our other destinations in the area around Füssen was a place called the Partnachklamm, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The entrance to this place is very close to a stadium that was built for ski jumping in 1921 and used for the 1936 Winter Olympics. The stadium was open, so we could wander in and have a look around. Those ski jumping towers look big enough on TV, but it's even more impressive to see one up close, reinforcing my general feeling that ski jumping does not look like a good idea.


I'll Stick to the Bunny Slope

The Partnachklamm, our actual destination, is a deep alpine gorge that has been made accessible to hikers by means of a system of platforms and tunnels. The trail takes you past a thundering river that goes shooting down through the narrow spaces between the sheer rock walls of the gorge. I can't really describe the experience in words, so you'll just have to go and see it for yourself.


Built to Last

On the way back from the Partnachklamm we stopped at Schloss Linderhof (Linderhof Palace), another of the extravagant building projects of Ludwig II. Linderhof is comparatively small (by Ludwig's standards), but it's pretty opulent inside and surrounded by meticulous landscaping on the outside. It's the only one of his three residences that he lived to actually see completed. One of its features is an enormous artificial grotto that Ludwig had built into the hillside above the palace for the purpose of performances of Wagner's operas for himself and his guests.


A Tasteful Little Cottage

The next stop on our journey was Munich. As noted previously, I have been there many, many times, but the last time was well over ten years ago, so I didn't know my way around all that well anymore. I took the family on something of a wild goose chase trying to find one particular restaurant that I used to frequent while I was working there (the one with cow's udder on the menu). As far as I could remember, it was kind of diagonally across from the Hofbräuhaus, one of Munich's more famous beer halls.

As it turned out, we never did find the place. I think that it may have been on the site of what is now the Munich Hard Rock Cafe, which I have since learned has only been open at that spot since 2002, well after the last time I had been there. Curse you, Hard Rock Cafe! I have poked my head into a couple of those establishments and have yet to figure out what exactly the attraction is. It seems like nothing more than a place to buy an overpriced sweatshirt with which to commemorate your overpriced meal. I don't know what's wrong with me that I can't get all excited about seeing a few random relics like Jimi Hendrix's belt or Madonna's sunglasses on display.

While wandering around the inner part of Munich, which (like most larger German towns and cities) is a pedestrians-only zone, I observed a phenomenon which I didn't really remember from my previous trips there. Maybe it was because we happened to be there on a Saturday night, whereas when I traveled there for business it was always during the week. Anyway, apparently it's the custom for guys who are getting married to dress up in silly costumes with a bunch of their friends to celebrate Junggesellenabschied, or "bachelor's farewell". To finance the evening's festivities, the soon-to-be-married young gentleman collects a bunch of random odds and ends and then goes around with them in a large rectangular tray that is supported by a long strap attached to both sides, enabling the tray to be hung from one's neck. You may have seen something like this being worn by the cigarette girl in a nightclub in a movie from the 1930's or 1940's. In German it's called a Bauchladen, or "belly shop".

Said bachelor then accosts random passers-by, entreating them to spend a Euro or two to purchase one of his random pieces of useless merchandise. At least, this is the explanation I was able to puzzle together while talking to the somewhat inebriated gentleman in bright red lipstick and a Dirndl dress who was eventually able to talk MFW into spending our hard-earned cash on a sort of pocket-sized disposable raincoat, something which we had not previously realized that we need. I saw a few groups of women engaging in a female variant of this custom. Trying to find a picture of this somewhere on the web (my daughter, who was standing by with a camera, was too shy to take a picture of our bachelor friend), I came to know that this is apparently something done all over Germany, but I can't recall ever having seen this in all the years I lived there. Maybe it's something that's become popular more recently—just another thing to make me feel old.


Embarrassing Himself in the Name of Freedom

While in Munich we went to look at another curiosity, something that I had read about but never actually seen. Munich has a very large city park called the English Garden. The English Garden is to Munich what Central Park is to New York City (in fact, the English Garden is larger than Central Park). Through part of the English Garden there runs an artificial creek called the Eisbach ("Ice Brook"). The Eisbach enters the park at the southern end; it comes shooting out from under a bridge with a fast current that I think I read somewhere is created by a pumping station. The current creates a small but fast-moving wave that has turned the spot into a well-known place to go surfing. This has been going on since 1972; the city tried for years to ban it as a safety hazard, but finally gave up and officially legalized it in 2010.

The surfers take turns jumping from the concrete bank of the river with their short boards into a spot where the current creates a sort of upward stream. A surfer typically rides the current for around 30–60 seconds before either getting washed off his board or just losing the wave. It doesn't exactly look easy, but all of the surfers we watched seemed pretty skilled; I just wonder how much practice, including getting smacked up against that concrete, it takes to become proficient.


Kowabunga!

From Munich we moved on to Salzburg, Austria. Admittedly, Austria is not Bavaria, but culturally they're pretty much cut from the same cloth, so I'm still counting it as part of our Bavarian vacation, especially since Salzburg lies more or less directly on the border with Bavaria. Salzburg is well known as the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a fact which Salzburg milks for everything it's worth, touristically speaking. The other dominant feature of Salzburg is the Festung Hohensalzburg, a forttress built in 1066 and then successively improved and expanded through the early sixteenth century. It was the seat of power of a long line of archbishops who derived considerable wealth through their control of the salt that was mined nearby.


The City That Salt Built


I had been to Salzburg around 25 years ago, but I didn't remember very much about it, so walking around the old part of the city, visiting the cathedral, the forttress and other landmarks, it was almost like being there for the first time. There was one place I really wanted to visit, a beer garden at the far southern end of the older part of the city that I recalled from that earlier trip, but I was afraid that I might be leading the family on yet another wild goose chase, similar to the one we went on while looking for that restaurant in Munich; MFW didn't remember the place at all. However, in this case my memory proved correct—we located the Augustiner Bräustübl on the map about where I remembered it, and once we got there (me leading the way with my skeptical family in tow) it turned out to be the place I remembered.

The Augustiner Bräustübl is housed in a massive building that I think is part of a monastery. Inside the building there is a long hall with a number of alcoves that sell foods of different kinds. Off of the hallway there are a couple of really large beer halls, but on that day there were only a handfull of people in those, because the real action was happening in the outside beer garden, it being a pleasant summer day.

There is supposedly table service in the beer garden, but it didn't seem to be on offer the day we were there. Instead you go to a cashier and tell him what you want (either a liter or a half liter of beer, or a soft drink), pay and then he gives you a receipt. You take your receipt to the service area where you either select your soft drink or give your mug(s) to the guy manning the tap to be filled. You select your mug from one of the shelves that line the wall. These are heavy stoneware mugs; before you give it to the server, you wash it under a cold stream of running water in a big fountain-like thing. I am not sure what the purpose of this is; the mugs I got off the shelf all looked perfectly clean to me, and I can hardly believe that Germanic hygiene concerns would permit any such establishment to provide its customers with unwashed eating utensils of any kind under any circumstances. My guess is that the point of this may be more to cool it down a bit before filling it with beer than to clean it.

We enjoyed not only the beer and the food, but also the general atmosphere. Part of the atmosphere was a group of six or eight boys at the next table. They looked to all be around 16 or 17, and from their general demeanor I would have guessed that they had already made quite a few trips to have their mugs filled (the drinking age for beer and wine is 16 in both Germany and Austria). Most of them were in regular street clothes, but a couple of them were dressed up in fancy Lederhosen.

At some point both of our kids were up to get food from one of the stands that were along one side of the beer garden, so it was just MFW and me at our table. Without warning, one of the Lederhosen boys sort of stumbled over from his table and sat down at ours. He didn't say anything, he just kind of sat there with a foolish smile on his face. Unfazed by this unexpected visit, MFW immediately began interrogating him. His name was Roman and he and his buddies were in town for some sort of school trip, and were just having a few refreshments before getting the train home. He explained all of this in thick Austro-Bavarian dialect. He claimed that a few of them were dressed up in the folk garb because they just like it.

At some point our kids showed up and joined the Austrian guys at their table. Having been raised bilingually, they speak German well, but it was clearly a challenge for them to understand their new hosts. Roman continued to sit with us. Periodically his cell phone rang; each time he explained that it was his father admonishing him not to miss his train home (again).

When MFW and I see someone dressed in this kind of costume, we generally think of one thing: Schuhplatteln. Schuhplatteln ("shoe paddling") is a sort of Bavarian folk dancing style for men that involves hopping about while rhythmically slapping ones knees, thighs, and feet in time to music. Usually this is done by a number of men in unison. It's a lot harder than it looks, which we verified when MFW asked Roman, "Can you platteln?" "Of course!", he replied, looking faintly insulted. He cajoled one of his friends to join him and with MFW and I doing our best to imitate a generic oompah-band type song, the two of them flailed about wildly, an event which was captured on video by my daughter for your viewing pleasure.

Not for Beginners

During our stay in Salzburg we took a little trip back across the border into Germany, to the Berchtesgadener Land. At MFW's insistence we went on a little boat ride on the Königssee, a long lake nestled between alpine peaks. She has this thing about riding on boats; somehow, no matter where we go on vacation, we end up on a boat at some point. About half way through the trip, the boat stops before an enormous sheer rock wall, and one of the guys from the company running the boat tours plays a tune on his trumpet so that you can enjoy the very clear echo.

On the way back to Salzburg we stopped to look at the Kehlsteinhaus, a sort of mountain retreat built by the Nazi party high atop a tall mountain peak as a gift for Hitler's 50th birthday. We were expecting some sort of museum, but there's actually not all that much to see, much of it being not open to the public, and apparently Hitler himself only made ten or so very brief visits to the property, so the historical value is sort of limited. The most interesting part of the visit is really the journey up the mountain on a narrow, winding road; you have to take a special bus up and down. The view from the top is pretty spectacular.

Leaving Salzburg, we moved back into Bavaria, to a little town called Aschau im Chiemgau. Aschau is a somewhat nondescript little town situated at the foot of a chain of high alpine peaks. Our interest in it is almost purely a matter of family history. My son was born with a fairly nasty congenital deformity of the feet, and it was here, after much stress on the part of his parents, that he was operated on and his condition more or less corrected in a specialty orthopedic clinic for children. He has heard about the numerous trips made there for pre- and post operation care over the course of a good two years, but since he was just a toddler at the time he has practically no memories of the place, and he wanted to see it again. His sister, who was a couple of years older during the period, also wanted to visit some of the places she remembered from that time. The fact that it's located in a fairly picturesque area made it an appealing place to spend a couple of days anyway.

One of the things the kids wanted to do while we were there was to hike down a long trail from the Kampenwand, a long rock face high atop one of the mountains surrounding Aschau. One way to get up there is to hike, but that's a multi-hour trip even if you're an avid hiker in good shape. An easier way is to take the Kampenwandbahn. The Kampenwandbahn is one of the many cable lifts that operate throughout the Alps to enable hikers and skiers to get to the top of high mountains with relatively little effort. At the bottom of the mountain you get into a little gondola that seats four people; the gondola is suspended from a wheeled contraption that rides a cable that looks to be a little over an inch thick; a second, somewhat thinner cable pulls a whole string of gondolas along the thicker cable and up the mountain (around 5,000 feet high).

It feels reasonably safe as you leave the little station at the foot of the mountain because you're traveling maybe 30–40 feet off the ground at first; it's high, but not unreasonably so. But then… at some point you look down and realize that you're hanging from a little piece of wire, easily several hundred feet off the ground, and it's too late to turn back. Not for the faint of heart—MFW, for example, who does not like heights. It doesn't help that all the way up the kids are saying things like, "Look, mom! Look! Look how high we are! Look down!"

Don't Look Down

Against all odds, we did ultimately make it to the summit, where we found ourselves surrounded by breathtaking views and… cows. One of the features of Bavarian alpine culture is that in the spring, the dairy farmers drive their cows up to the Alm, a high mountain meadow where they will spend the summer grazing. Each morning the cows are milked and the milk is then more or less immediately processed into cheese. At the end of the summer the cows are decorated with flowers and driven back down the mountain for a sort of homecoming festival.

You Look Lovely, Darling

Making our way through the cow herd, we did eventually reach the cow-free part of our journey. Going up a mountain is strenuous, but hiking down a steep mountain trail for several hours is also pretty tiring. The last time I did this, I had my two-year-old son on my shoulders most of the way; I'm not sure how I did that, but I was a much younger dad then.

Aschau is not far from the Chiemsee, another large lake, in the middle of which are a couple of islands. One of these is called Herrenchiemsee, and is the site of Ludwig II's third major building project, Schloss Herrenchiemsee. This particular palace was intended to be a copy of Versailles and a monument to Louis XIV of France, who, you will recall, was Ludwig's great idol. This place is absolutely enormous, but only a small part of it was completed before Ludwig's untimely end. The parts of the interior that are finished are, as in Ludwig's other palaces, pretty overwhelming in their opulence. The building, huge as it is, is also only a fraction of its originally intended size; the plans were for another huge wing on either side of the main building, but only one of them was partially completed at the time of Ludwig's demise, and that was later demolished.


My, That's A Big One

While we were there, in one section of the palace they had an exhibition on the life and times of King Ludwig II. It was one of the better exhibitions of its kind I have seen; being something of a lightweight history buff, I found it tremendously interesting and was sorry I wasn't able to see more of it before the family began admonishing me that we needed to get moving so that we wouldn't be late for the Heimatabend in Aschau, which was to be sort of the crowning event of our trip before we returned to home base the next day.

The closest translation I can think of for Heimatabend would be "folklore evening". It's basically a show of music and dancing in the local style. You would think that most of the audience would be tourists, of which there are quite a few in Aschau in the summer, but it looked to me like there were plenty of locals there as well.

Our master of ceremonies was an old guy who told jokes and introduced the various acts, providing a little bit of historical or anthropological background for some of them. He spoke in a thick Bavarian that I had to strain a bit to understand, although he probably would have told you that he was speaking his clearest High German. His jokes were a rich source of cultural insight, such as the one about Fensterln, a practice in which a young man leans a ladder against the side of his sweetheart's house in order to secretly climb in through her bedroom window to, um, visit her. In this joke, old Alois sees young Sepp sneaking through the village, carrying a ladder and a flashlight:

Alois: And just where exactly do you think you're going?

Sepp: I'm going Fensterln, you old fool! Can't you see that?

Alois: Of course I can see that, but in my day, we didn't take along a flashlight!

Sepp: When I see your old lady, I believe it!

Ha ha! Most of the jokes were in this somewhat bawdy vein.

Bavarian Standup Comedy


There were a lot of musical acts in this show. It opened with about a half hour of the brass band just playing their music. They then became the providers of background music for the various folk dances that were performed by an adult group and a separate children's group. Now, these guys knew a thing or two about Schuhplatteln!

Don't Try This at Home

The musical acts were all of the folk variety, in keeping with the theme of the evening, but very professionally performed. There was an instrumental duo consisting of a guy who played an accordion while accompanied by a woman who played a harp, both instruments, as our MC explained, being of a specifically alpine variety. There was also a trio of three women who sang several lovely but mostly incomprehensible (for me) songs in harmony while one played a guitar.

The Real Deal

The final musical act was three guys playing the Alphorn. Our MC explained that this is really a Swiss thing, originally developed as a means of communication between mountain tops. I have seen pictures of these funny-looking things many times over the years, but it was interesting to finally get to hear what they actually sound like. Doesn't seem like a very efficient means of communication, though.

More Charming than a Phone

And that was my vacation. Then I flew home and went back to work. The end.