SUN / MON / TUE

Tuesday: Dubai



Monday: London.
(Above: Eccles cake with lancashire cheese at St. John.)



Sunday: Wake in Louisville KY — find my courtyard and trashcans on the front cover of the Sunday NYT real estate section. Fly to NYC, shower, dump trash in said cans. Night: Fly to London.
Below: My brother Josh's head (left) containing the brain that invented his diabolical Thanksgiving tradition — Krispy Kreme pie; my head (right) containing the mouth that ate too much of it.

NYC (weekend)

Exterior: Charlton Street.


Interior: King Street. Vegetable lasagna w/ thinly sliced grilled zucchini. Not bad. Too tomato-y. Nothing two pounds of slow-cooked pork shoulder couldn't have fixed.

Maasai

Life of the Maasai warrior:
Pros = Colorful robes; women do the wood-gathering and hut-building; spears.
Cons = Circumcised at 15; diet of cow's blood and milk.

Pavement Life

"Overbreathed" — grumpy V.S. Naipaul re: Bombay air. I am missing it I guess, even while I'm relieved to be home. Or not so much missing it as thinking about it a lot. Or belatedly processing it. Or something deep.




More Naipaul: "The main roads there are wide, wet-black and clean in the middle from traffic, earth-coloured at the edges where pavement life flows over on to the road, as it does even on a relaxed Sunday morning, before the true heat and glare, and before the traffic builds up and the hot air turns gritty from the brown smoke of the double decker busses; already a feeling of the crowd, of busy slender legs, of an immense human stirring behind the tattered commercial facades one sees and in the back streets doesn't see, people coming out into the open, seeking space." (India: A Wounded Civilization, 1977).

Dreamers with empty hands/ They sigh for exotic lands/ Its Autumn in New York / It's good to live it again.

It's the nicest season in the best city in the world. Woke up in Africa, took a crap in London, watched sixteen bad movies in coach, was at Pegu by 10pm & at Ssam bar for pork belly buns and head-cheese terrine round midnight. New York is oddly, wonderfully, weirdly quiet after the insanity of Bombay. Silent and serene. Happy to be home.

Zanzibar - almost

My scowl and I landed in Zanzibar today but didn't stay long. Zanzibar is not—like say Pittsburgh—a place you expect to just spend a layover in the airport. But my flight to Dar es Salaam from the bush did stop here and, while I've really wanted to see Zanzibar I've been away from home for too long & just couldn't extend the trip any longer. I've had romantic notions about Zanzibar ever since I fact-checked a piece about the island some awful number of years ago — so I got to fly back to Dar thinking maudlin and common thoughts about travel anticipation versus travel reality and the horrible passing of time. Ah, well, I'll have to go back. In the meantime, I'm putting my head (which is made of a kind of pink, chewy candy) down for some rest before flying back early tomorrow. See you in America, imaginary readers.

Good Luck/Bad Luck: Tanzania

I've been doing fancy safari things in AFRICA for the past week. And liking it. Tired now — more pictures soon.
For now, two views of the topi, a big elegant antelope. Above: Standing proud in the endless plain. Below: Another topi, not so lucky, caught by two female lions and beginning to be taken apart by their very cute (and totally deadly) young cubs.

Morning in the Serengeti

View from tent at about 5:30am.



Some time in the middle of the night I woke up and recorded these crazy sounds right outside my tent (I had the camera handy with the vague idea that if some menacing thing came to kill me in the night I could, at the very least, take a flash picture of it.) These were probably the same hyenas who snuck up and ate a bowl of nuts while we had dinner nearby.

So long, Bombay

Leaving India later this morning. Sad to go. Been an amazing time. I'll post more pictures but now a little sleep. Next up: TANZANIA.

Short film about trying to cross the street.

Press the little arrow to play. Apologies to Wes Anderson.