Live from New York

OK, so it's Tuesday afternoon and I'm back in NYC for a couple of days as a sort of layover between a flight from Sydney, Australia and one to San Jose, Costa Rica. Apparently the only cheap and easy way to get from Australia to South America is via New York, so here I am. I know I haven't posted in a while, but, would you believe I've been travelling? I know, it sounds kind of lame, but I was back in Bali for three days, then in Sydney for four days, then spent 28 hours flying from Sydney to New York. Since I crossed the Date Line, I arrived only a couple of hours after I left, and now I have the worst jet lag today, not just that my body is set a different hour than local time, it's actually set on a different day too!

Before I go anywhere else, I would just like to say thank you to all of those people who voted for Barack Obama while I was away. My absentee ballot never arrived, and fortunately, it was never needed. Everyone I met in Indonesia and Australia was also rooting for the guy. Poor man though, he's inheriting the worst mess in a generation. Be careful what you wish for.

Two quick comments to finish this post. First, I love Bali. I know I've said that about just about every other place I've visited, but there is something completely magical about Bali. Maybe it's how genuinely friendly the people are. Maybe it's because I didn't stay in Kuta with all of the other butt-head, hard partying Australian surfer dudes that made comments like "It's about f-ing time" in response to an Australian reporter's request for a reaction to the execution of the Bali Bombers. Maybe it's the incredible quantity of cultural options in Bali: traditional dance, gamelan music, sculpting and wood carving, painting; everyone seems to have an artistic hobby aside from their day job. Maybe it's the fact that you can walk 5 minutes outside of Ubud and you're in gorgeous rice fields surrounded by deep river gorges and coconut palms. Of all the places I've been so far, I will find a way to get back to Bali.

Second, the tropics are hot, humid, rainy, tend to have lower sanitation standards, and are cheaper than the temperate zones. All of this was easily made clear to me in Sydney, where I had to put on a sweater every day because it was only 80 degrees, where I stopped drinking 4-6 liters of water every day (and actually had three pints of beer in one night without sweating my ass off), where I did not have to hide behind thick gloppy layers of sun screen just to survive, where I could eat raw vegetables and rare meat without getting sick, but also where I spent more in four days than I spent in three weeks in Indonesia and Thailand. Sydney would have been great just to visit Ginny and her parents, Pam and Ken, who I haven't seen in years, but I'll always remember that night in Katoomba (an otherwise frightening dump of a town that happens to sit right on the edge of some pretty spectacular cliffs in the Blue Mountains) where I had a salad for dinner for the first time in a month and a half. Ah, the benefits of Western civilization.

TECHNICAL NOTE: ONCE AGAIN THE FTP SITE BLOGSPOT USES TO UPLOAD PICTURES HAS MADE CHANGES TO THE PHOTOS AFTER THEY WERE UPLOADED TO THE BLOG, AND THEY ALL UPLOADED EXACTLY BACKWARDS AFTER TWO ATTEMPTS, SO THE PRINTED PAGES READ BACKWARDS, NOT FORWARDS. I'VE ALREADY SPENT TWO HOURS ON THIS, AND FOR SOME REASON YOU CAN'T CUT AND PASTE THE PHOTOS, SO YOU'RE JUST GOING TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH YET ANOTHER TECHNICAL PROBLEM WITH THIS BLOG. I SHOULD ALSO NOTE HERE THAT THE ARIAL FONT CHOICE, WHICH I TYPICALLY USE FOR THIS BLOG, HAS DISAPPEARED BECAUSE I'M EDITING A POST ALREADY PUBLISHED. UGH! BUT WAIT, EVEN THOUGH IT PREVIEW IN TIMES NEW ROMAN, IT ACTUALLY POSTS IN ARIAL. HMM...