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At least, it wasn't big. It might have filled in some little niche of the world, but it wasn't popular, wasn't a big deal, and I didn't trust it. So I wrote my own, shortly prior to the huge trip around the world. I had never really allowed people to keep in touch with me when travelling, didn't have a cell phone until the summer of '03, and didn't care for mass emailing. If I never read a mass email to completion in my life, why would anyone else? They usually come at inconvenient times, are broad and general with a fake sense of personalness, and roll out of my inbox before I feel like reading them. So when people asked me how to know if I was still alive, I invented webkevin.com, the message center. Being a computer programmer, writing the software was easy, and it gave me a simple interface to add posts, even on a 286. Yet, the final software was exceedingly simplistic and functional (I could always embed html), but was a pain to make sure whatever serverspace I was borrowing allowed me to use perl. For the grand journey, I actually had the space reside on a friend's homepage because nothing I had access to allowed webpages to run scripts.

I also couldn't match colors. You probably know that. And so my style sheet.. well… sucked.

When I talked with some people about nifty blogs recently (2005), I decided to come into the stylistic century, and have someone else design the colors. I also wanted something that had nice formatting and was reliable. It would be a sad day that the temporary server I was using shut down and I lost everything. At least I should know if wordpress is going under.

So here we are. If you'd like to see the original page (while it exists), in it's hideous black, blue, and orange scheme, go here:

http://genomeold.wustl.edu/~kcrouse/webkevin/

Small Children Playing in the Mud

To see it in all its grandeur, right click, choose view image

    Red are air routes, blue is overland via bus, train, jeep, or truck

Although this will just be a quick post to give y’all an update, I am home! in St Louis, staying with Ken (my frosh year roommate, for those who know) for a week or two until I find a term place to live (probably a sublet in the area), and then looking to more permanent (read: maybe a whole year lease, or something completely different) towards the end of the summer.

That’s probably about enough, but I’ll mention the customs:

Cheese, apparently, is really really illegal to carry in from out of country (which I didn’t know). I bought some cheese in Ljubjliana before I left, thinking it would be fun to say “I’ve got some cheese from Slovenia.” When I arrived in London, giant posters saying something like “Meat, Cheese, Vegetables” … “Can be fined” … a lot. So I walk through the “Something to Declare line” ready to put up an argument that I could sit there for three days if they didn’t let me take it in; it is okay to carry in such substances from EU countries, but not from outside the EU. Slovenia joins on 1 May; so if I just sat in the airport for three days, I could take it in.

No worries, though, because no one was in the room to check! I just walked right through and into the main terminal . When I arrived in the US and was asked where I was coming from, I said “London” and the customs agent let me go right through. Heheheh.

More later, but I’m off! Take care.

Adding to the buildings (to note that the entire downtown is overlapped in three UNESCO world heritage sites), monuments, parks, and even bridges are all quite dramatic. Even the sky, and its shifting of overcast and nearly-clear-sun and complicated cloud formations (all in short repeating spans) feels dramatic…. and the rampant homelessness, majestic buildings doubled with for-rent signs (if not for UNESCO funds, I bet much of the downtown would look like North Broadway, St Louis).

The beggars confront me, which shocked me at first. Not dangerous confrontation, but they talk clearly when the beg. I don’t think I made comparisons with beggars before: In much of the Middle East, the beggers are silent, often sitting on the ground, heads down, arms raised. India has the wandering, usually quiet or “meeping” types of beggars who gently run outstretched hands into your shoulder blades while you’re in line. They might mumble a couple things, but the tendency is to not talk or to talk very little: culturally I think it’s somewhat inappropriate. The other type of Indian beggar was the well spoken storyteller who would talk about his family or the job he starts next week or the job he was told he would get if he moved here but did not get and then he would ask for money or, sometimes, some reasonable product that you could buy for him if you went for a five minute walk with him. Even these were legitimate, leaving us travellers to guess whether he sold it back or used it for other purposes. In Thailand… that was a long time ago now… I think…. I remember quiet street beggars with outstretched hands… Oh right! And those that would wait patiently, sometimes just still, silent, outside a restaurant, near you in line, watching their target. Again, generally quiet, as if waiting to be invited to ask for money. Here it’s more our western type of begging, “Excuse me, do you have some Euros for me to buy bread?” As if bread actually costs a few Euros. More clever beggars start in Hungarian and switch to English, as if they thought I was a locals.

Going back again to my last posting, I realized all sorts of holes and mistakes in my observations nearly as soon as I posted it… Sorry. I’m not going to revise it; that would be wasteful of time.

But I will go off on some personal reflections. This should be a new style for me, and at least somewhat reminiscent of the rambling I did earlier. You have the choice of reflective personal ramblings or character sketches from Bulgaria to the present, but I chose the former as I’ve done character sketches recently.

Those who don’t like the hyperpsychological modern american writers probably won’t like this. But I’ve been tendings towards walking for the past few days, and that sends me off. People who knew me would know… Or perhaps, if you knew me you might understand…. Even though I’ve told lots of people and several people have talked with me about it (big differences between those two), I have the impression that’s not a lot of people. This post will be full of tangents, as my thoughts have become increasingly overgrown and wild, like my hair was before I let a couple Bulgarian “artists” at it (I hope it grows back enough by my return).

Many of my current rivers of thought started on the train between Bucharest and Budapest. I had the compartment all to myself: me and five empty chairs, a window reflecting darkness on one side, and a window passing through the hallway to the distorted darkness on the opposite side. Every now and then I would look at the distortion and jump, thinking I saw a person
watching me (more than nerves, people did periodically come down from other compartments to use that bathroom at the end of the car). Steinbeck’s East of Eden was consuming a lot of my time between breaks for thinking.  It deals with a lot of great topics- truth, belief, perception, “goodness”, emotion… His style reminds me of Hawthorne and makes me think that a Hawthorne with better subject, or a Steinback with worse subject, would be about the the same as the other.

Anyway, at a chapter break, my thoughts wandered off to consider journaling or writing (I carry two notebooks with me and four ways of writing (left to right and right to left in each; one book is for “realish” things, journaling and studying, and the other is for “ingenuous” things (IN [not] + GENUINE), freewriting, poetry, “ideas” on things to do in the future); and I didn’t want to journal because it takes a long time to journal and it can only really get at one path. My thoughts are always divergent, and I would much rather follow the entire tree down until I have mapped out the roads through hell (adapted from J. Gardner, Grendel) than preserve one tree. Given my two great deficits, as they occurred to me then, it creates a huge contrast.

So what are these deficits? Do you know them? Here is what occurred to me:

What seems to possibly be a neurological problem with my hearing (I believe I tried to explain this to Z, although it might have been someone else). It’s not as big as it sounds, nor am I a hypochondriac. But it’s like this: I have trouble understanding things that I hear. Nothing new, when I think back to my first ten years calling a “direction signal” a “dereckshursignal” or my constant need to pay very close attention to someone talking to actually understand what they’re saying. It helps to explain why I would never pay attention in class, and frequently would copy whatever was on the board on the left side of my notebook and work on my own inventions on the right side, or skip class through the semester and read the book the last three days (not that I’ve graduated, you can say anything you want about that trend)… and the “neurological” comes from my memories of the Exceptional child class, in which we made a distinction between hearing problems (problems with hearing the sounds) and neurological hearing problems (I forget the exact term, but the interpretation of the sounds)… I always passed the beeping hearing tests.

So what’s the point of all that? Well, as my mind conceived it the other night, I would commonly reconstruct what was said based on how I understood/interpretted what I heard. For those of you that heard about the thirty something page paper on the 12-page third chapter of Ulysses (a book of which I skipped half the chapters) or my references to “interpretting colored symbols on a veil” (seeing), there has never been much of a difference for me between perception, projection, imagination, and memory (the thesis of my paper suggesting that Joyce felt the same thing, as proven in Chapter 3, with support from Chapter 12 and Finnegans Wake).

How does that fit into the conversation… err… discussion… errr…. posting. Ah! I’m not sure right now, but perception and construction (projection) are both chocked full of what my mind is really getting at, regardless about whether or not my writing portrays that.

To break away, are you ready for my second deficit (and it’s not my spelling!): memory. If anything worried me substantially, this would be it. If you haven’t noticed, and you may not have, my memory is scarily poor. Monumental events in my life, even somewhat recently, I have completely forgotten. Names, faces, dates (what day it is, for sure), all poof almost as soon as I know them. Kevin (not me, Clear!) was the first person whose birthday I really remembered (within 1 day…. I waver between the 25th and 26th), and it wasn’t until High School that I had a real graps of my parents’ birthdays (it wasn’t until I could link it by their anniversary that I now usually right). Emily+Kate+Penny are all easy because the first two are eerily anchored by a holiday; and less eerily, so is Penny’s . I have seasons for most other people, and aside from big events (Jessica Tanis’, if you ever read this, know that I remember yours is sometime around high school finals because there was that balloon thing that happened. I moved into the house and met Z during the week before her birthday)… The other day, an entire deluge of really really life altering things told to me during frosh year, college (not life altering to me, but that I heard them) returned to me: things that I had forgotten for years. That’s the thing, too…. I feel that I can remember crazy things, and that my memory is absolutely vivid, but it’s entirely disjointed, asynchronous, and unordered. I lose things from the day before that I should remember, and I can quote volumes from things I read in High School.

So memory, perception, and failures in both. What’s the point, Kevin? If you don’t see…. ok… so here I go trying to wrap it all up. First a middle step:

both with the failures in perception and the failures in memory, my mind unconsciously fills the gaps. Here’s projection, which I’ll define as the generation of a reasonable bridge. We can project into the future (I will be working when I return to St Louis) as well as in the past (Al Queda was responsible for 9-11). It’s likely to be true…. it might even be true. A big example; my mom told me I used to crawl out of the crib when I was little (big surprise, huh)… and now I have a distinct memory of ME crawling out of the crib in the living room and making my way towards the hallway. Is that a memory or a projection? I don’t know. I remember a time when I distinctly didn’t have that memory (I couldn’t find any memory that seemed to be before I was 6), but whether it just resurfaced or was generated, I can’t tell.

It was a long time ago that this first came to my attention, and I think the closeness of perception, memory, and imagination (to name projection what it really is) for me (as my memory and perception both have holes [HA! you didn't think I could link it all together, did you]) has helped to support my love of storytelling and playing with reality. For me, it has never been any more rigid than my imagination, and I’ve found I’m able to warp it by looking at it from different angles… and it still remains as true as it was before.

Ok, so the point of it all. I was sitting there, in the train, alone, contemplating all of this and heaps of tangents that stem from it and after the twenty-three seconds expired (projection), I began to consider my activities like so:

thinking and doing, roughly the same for me, are usually always intense, enjoyable or as necessary as anything else, etc. We could just say “good” and whatever your connotations are about it, that’s probably about how I feel.

Reading is ok when I have a break from the above, but I never really liked it (as you may know, I’ve only really read about 5 books on my free time before this trip; I would choose difficult, challenging books to read when I had papers and reports to do, but to freely read was a waste of good thinking time).

Writing allows me to record the thinking and doing for future time, to preserve a real record to show what I had been considering. This really appeals to the possibility of a future me, in another perspective, being able to look back and try to understand a more original (earlier, like the original of original sin) perspective… or, possibly, in my vainer moments (like now), allow someone else to have another clue to maybe understand a little bit about me. But then we have the linearity of writing mentioned way in the beginning, the terrible annoyance that gives me and the distortion it gives the reader about what I’ve been thinking…. and the limitations of words….  I met a guy in Bulgaria trying to invent his own language to be a theoretical international language, to be basic and simple and purely phonetical, consisting of only a few thousand words, so that everyone could speak and understand everyone else (it was his big college thesis project or something)… I complained, noting first that English is so mangled because people decided there weren’t enough words in old english and started borrowing from Latin and Greek, and then that there STILL aren’t enough ways to express even simple sentiments.

And on top of that, even though I can type fast (on my own keyboard, possibly as fast as a good secretary), I can never even almost keep up with my thoughts (maybe an hour here to put down maybe some of the main gist of my 23 (or was it 27) seconds of thought on the train).

So I would say skip the recording and keep the thinking, but with my deficiencies of memory….

Anyone still reading has probably had enough. I won’t go into the way in which I associate things. As if I really have any conception.

And all of that because I didn’t think I had given you a rant on my reflections in some time.

Having written scantily in the last few days, heaps of stuff (that’s Aussie English) has been building as possible things to log about… you’ll just get to see where I go with it, but I absolutely won’t cover everything.

It’s raining here, as it has been for the entire morning part of the trainride, and with free-internet offerred by the hostel, I’ll have a go at it until I’m bored.

To write briefly about Romania, I didn’t find it particularly enthralling. Parks, some beautiful and antique buildings, etc.- the general sites of a city. Many of the buildings were huge, massive monolithic beasts. Whereas in Sophia I had the impression no building was over three stories (though a few were), in Bucharest I had the impression that no building was under 8 stories (though some were), and they were built for either really girthy, broad people or tiny people who ride ponies horses inside. The people did not give me a great feel either; Bulgarians I found much friendlier.

When I woke up this morning and began watching the landscape, I had a reminiscent feeling of New England (Maine, in particular). Not that the architectures were similar, but something in the mixing of farmlands, narrow pairs of periodic train tracks, rivers, and the sporadic village…. But that could be anywhere I’ve been… It hit me after a few minutes: yards. In the villages, each house was sized only for a family (perhaps with some leeway for a number of kids or an older grandparent), and each house had a yard. This is my first real re-exposure since I left the US: the nuclear house, if you will, with its intent on a single nuclear family. I have returned to the West, though still in the East. I guess we can call it white-people culture (neither European nor Western really fits, if you want to consider Eastern Europe as not-exactly-west)….

After leaving Sophia, I’ve come to Veliko Turnovo, a really magnificent little place. But much of Bulgaria seems to be beautiful, tucked in the back corner of Europe (and eigth grade social studies’ memories). I’ve thrown out the plans to go through Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, and will instead go through Romania and Hungary into Slovenia. Why? I’m not exactly sure, but the reports on Budapest lure me there. Of course, I feel the same way about Bosnia….

Andrea had a fun conversation with him in which she pretended to be my sister Jen. I have copied it at the bottom for your amusement….

Anyway, moving on to Bulgaria…. Sophia, the capital, is a fairly pretty place with the normal trappings of an planned tiny capital city (somewhat reminiscent of Madison, Wisconsin). It is strange to be in a place with lots of white people again, but I’m slowly getting used to it.

Because of the whole AIM incident, however, this post will be mostly about tourists and what local people think about tourists. I tend not to consider myself a tourist…. As one other backpacker said, “I’m not a tourist, I’m a traveller.” We could consider a tourist one of these people that takes a short little vacation in a country and spends most of that time visiting tourist attractions or sitting around a beach. A traveller, I would say, is a person who is travelling for a prolonged but relatively definite period of time, interested in aspects more closely related to the lives of the people in the target countries, and sensitive to inappropriate customs of the people. I’ll throw in another broad category of “wanderer” (which is the coolest one) who has no definite timetable and tends to drift wherever and whenever they feel pulled.

That whole sensitivity to culture is the big indicator of the tourist. These are the folks who travel mostly with other tourists, don’t take the time to actually interact with locals that aren’t serving them in some way, and oblivious to local customs and actions that would be inappropriate. These are also the most blatant (if not common) types of foreigners, and the ones from which we obtain our stereotypes.

To look into the stereotypes, let’s take a look at some common types of tourists:

Families and retired couples who come for a few weeks on package tours in which they’re ushered through the countries by bus, boat, or plane and rarely leave each other’s company. In Egypt, there are over 100 Nile Riverboats in which such tourists leave the boat only to see some sights (and snap pictures). They are easily identifiable in the local markets by their shorts and hawaiian t-shirts that they were wearing by the pool on the boat all day. This dress, in Egypt, is absolutely unacceptable. In addition, these tourists have no concept of the real price for things, and help to propogate the idea that white people will pay anything for souvenirs.

In Dahab, I was haggling over a little Anubus statue, and my current price was 25 Egyptian pounds (about US$3). The Egyptian said “I know people like you, an this is the price I give you. No better price in whole Egypt.” A Swiss tourists came in and he asked me to hold a minute. She took a pair of statues (same material, a little bigger than mine) and asked how much.

He said “30 each, 60.”
She replied, “Dollars or Euros?”
“U.S., only.”
“Too expensive, maybe 30 for both?”
“Special price for two: 50.”

After a few more minutes, she bought them for US$37. I kept silent (laughing), and when he came back to me, he said, “See… For her, $37. 25 Pounds for you, no problem.”

The other tourists, younger folks usually taking time off before, during, or after college (different countries have different trends), end up getting drunk most of the time and talking about hooking up with both other tourists and locals enough that this becomes the fundamental stereotype of younger travellers. After watching the loud and abnoxious Aussie tourists (and others) here for Anzac Day (a military slaughter in Turkey during WWI that now ends up being a huge drunken festival every year) spending most of the day and all of the night drunk and raving, it’s not hard for me to wonder why. In Olympos (a big waypoint on the Anzac tourist circuit), I felt completely out of harmony with most of the tourists, and spent most of the evenings talking with a Tyler, the Vancouver-ish Canadian, Amanda, and Manuela (Italian).

Another fine story from Istanbul. Matt, a Canadian, and I were walking through the nightclub area trying to find someplace to have a beer and dance. After being rejected from a number of clubs, a Turkish guy came up to us asking if he could help.

We said we wanted to find a cool place to dance.
He asked, “You want to find someone to fuck?”
We responded, “No, we want to find a cool dance club to dance.”
“You want to dance and then fuck? I show you prostitutes.”
“No… Dance, have a beer.”
“There are transvestites on street few blocks that way” (misunderstanding the ‘No’).

For those of you that had the pleasant IM experience with the Turkish guy trying to be me…. you probably have more of an idea as to how much they think this.

Then, since I went off on the Aussie Anzac day tourists, most people (both locals and other tourists) think Americans to be loud, arrogant, and ignorant of all people except for themselves.  I haven’t found it untrue, and that may be much of the reason why I’ve travelled mostly with Canadians…. in fact, I’ve travelled with more people from Vancouver alone than from all of the US.

Just a second ago (imagine the coincidence), a Bulgarian asked me if I was German… And refused to believe I was American for a minute. After inquring, he said, “You don’t look stupid, and all Americans look stupid. You would be better in Bulgaria to say you were German; say you name is Krauss. We respect Germans. We have no respect for Americans.”

——————————————
Here’s Andrea’s final conversation with the Turkish jerk:

————————————————
Start of thesamana buffer: Mon Apr 19 14:03:14 2004
thesamana: who are you?
[andrea]: your sister
[andrea]: duh
thesamana: my sister
thesamana: i do not have one
[andrea]: Yes you do
[andrea]: nice try
[andrea]: I’m telling mom
thesamana: no i do not
thesamana: if even i do i do not know it
[andrea]: fine be that way.. see if i wire you the $1000 you wanted
[andrea]: you can just rot over there
thesamana: ok
thesamana: ok
thesamana: then send that money to me
[andrea]: no.. you apparently don’t have a sister
[andrea]: I’m not sending you any more money
thesamana: well if you sen it to me i might reconsider about it again huh?
[andrea]: No. I told you last time. if you screw around again, i’m not bailing you out
[andrea]: you can find another way to get the $1000.
thesamana: come on i can not do it in another way at the moment
thesamana: u know that
[andrea]: yes you can.
[andrea]: sell yourself on the street
[andrea]: you did it before
[andrea]: you can do it again
thesamana: what?
thesamana: what u talking about?
[andrea]: what you did last time before i found out you needed money
[andrea]: you know… in thailand
thesamana: well this time i can sell myeelf to you
thesamana: come on stop joking
[andrea]: hey.. our therapist said to never mention that again
[andrea]: that’s really mean
thesamana: u goanna send me the money or not?
[andrea]: no, i’m not
thesamana: ok
thesamana: fine
[andrea]: just because i’m adopted is no reason to say that i’m not your sister
thesamana: u know i was joking
[andrea]: you know you’re not allowed to joke about that
thesamana: i said if u send me that money i ll think about it again
[andrea]: wait until mom finds out
[andrea]: you’re in deep trouble
thesamana: what
thesamana: ?
[andrea]: you know how much it upsets mom when you make comments like that
*** thesamana signed off at Mon Apr 19 13:56:01 2004.
End of thesamana buffer: Mon Apr 19 14:03:14 2004