Thursday, April 27, 2006

Sodom or bust

(Nageev desert, somewhere 40 miles east of Be'er Sheva and -500 ft. below sea level) - I feel like Hunter S. Thompson sending up a rooster tail of dust behind me as I fly through the dessert in my rental car just a touch too fast to be safe... only except that Dr. Gonzo is not beside me, I'm not jacked out on qualudes, and I'm 8000 miles east of Barstow, CA.

I'm here in Israel at the invitation of a collaborator at the Weizmann institute. I flew into Ben Gurion Monday, ran on the beach Tuesday morning from my hotel in Tel Aviv to Jaffa (where Jonah had that date with a hungry whale), and then spent the last two days in Rehovot talking to various people in the physics department there.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to bag the plan of traveling by bus for some post-work touristing and sacked up for a rental car to give me more mobiblity. I'm traveling 130km an hour on an local road through the south Israeli Nageev dessert and now loosing altitude rapidly on my way to the Dead Sea. Mountains lie in the distance and dull scrub plants are in the foreground. I could be outside Barstow. Every window is rolled down, Hebrew hip hop blasts from the radio as the hot dusty dessert wind swirls through the car and I fly past Bedouin camps, typing with one hand (and one eye) on my laptop and the other on the steering wheel and road ahead. When the muse calls it is best to listen. It's 90 degrees in the shade and only late April. My mind reels. The Dead Sea was like Oz to me. You couldn't get there from whereever I was. It wasn't a real place. In 30 minutes I'll be floating on my back on a salty lake at the lowest elevation on the planet - 1400 ft. below sea level. Then it is back on a highway through the West Bank and the night in Jerusalem's old town. I'll have a full day and evening in Jerusalem, before dumping the rental car back at Ben Gurion at 2:00 AM Saturday morning to make the 3 hour prior to flight security check in at 3:30 AM, a few hours on an airport couch and before making my 6:30 AM flight. And be back in Geneva by noon.

"KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?"

"I went over to the sargent, said, "Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send you fingerprints off to Washington."

And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do ... "

-Arlo Guthrie in Alice's Restaurant

Life Redux

(Geneva, Switzerland) - I've been holding off posting anything recently 'cause stuff keeps happening yet I feel like I have to update the old stuff before I can update the new stuff. It has all piled up though and I'm so paralyzed with too much to write, so I write nothing at all. Here's just a smattering offload so we can move on to other things. Shall we?

Seoul redux: I am not going to be able to do Seoul and Korea the justice they deserve ... as I wanted to a few months ago so. I noticed ...
-that Seoul is HUGE! I had no idea. There is so much here and hustle and bustle. I feel like I needed one more day to "do it" at a totally superficial level. I was there for 3 days and probably needed four.
-a sign in the Korean cultural museum describing traditional village games "Games include stick hitting game and game of slap match!" Stick hitting game was always my favorite also when I was about 5. Somethings transcend culture.
-the two finger "V"'s is flashed by every cute Korean girl when getting their picture taken in front of tourist landmarks
-mirror image swastikas with the same aspect ratio and proportions used by the Nazis on the nave of Bhuddist temples. A traditional Bhuddist symbol, but the exact correspondence (except for the 180 deg flip) was visually arresting and vaguely unsettling.
-that Seoul is huge!

Baltimore redux:
-Like something out of Alice's restaurant I got a ticket for drinking coffee on the metro between Baltimore and BWI. An overly serious young turk transit cop wrote me a $30 ticket for taking a sip of my coffee in front of him despite the 'IT IS UNLAWFUL TO EAT OR DRINK' signs. "Do you know what the word unlawful means!" he hollered at me, "wipe the smirk off your face, I will slap the cuffs on you so fast your head will spin". Unfortunately, I had a plane to catch, but I feel Officer Brown and I will get to know each other better when I have more time.
-Baltimore is cool. Spent part of a Saturday afternoon reading through the Balimore alternative weekly City Paper and then spent part of Saturday night in bar with an old friend and met half the stuff of said City Paper.

Chamonix redux: Skied off the top of the Auguille de Midi in above Chamonix and down the glacier of the Mer de Glace. My brother Alex and I wanted to do this when he was here in March, but the weather was bad then.

So, two weeks later, I skied off the top with coworker Alexey with absolutely phenomenal weather. It was almost 9000 vertical ft. descent and totally awesome. The snow on the lower southern exposed slope of the valley is totally gone, but since you come down the north exposure after the glacier we could ski almost back to town. It seems to be a traditional late season thing to do among the locals because there were lots of people saying goodbye for the year at the end of it.

It is billed as a kinda touristy thing to do because the technical ski challenges rise not much beyond usual expert level, but it was still awesome and the sheer scale of it and the mtns around (next to the Mt. Blanc) make it one of the coolest things I have ever done on a Saturday afternoon. A guide is reccomended, but my opinion is I that as long as the weather is good there hasnt been snow then it is not necessary if you have rudimentary mountain skills, an idea about glaciers, and exercise common sense. There is real danger from crevasses, but it since the route is so skiied if you just stick to the main pathway then you can be sure than a few hundred or so have skied it on that route since that last snow fall. There were probably a hundred over it before us on the day we did it alone. So it is safe... unless the weather is bad. Weird weather things can happen of course at 3800 meters, but they we did it the weather was beautiful and forcasted to be for the next 36 hours. We took a bunch of pictures and I won't miss the opportunity to post those soon.