Clubbing in Cambodia

Whatever expectations I had of this trip, it did not include doing the Macarena in a Phnom Penh riverfront nightclub with my Laotian and Cambodian colleagues.  The organization I'm volunteering for, DDD, is having its board meeting this weekend, so a bunch of the Laotian managerial staff is in town, and they instigated the idea of everyone going out clubbing after dinner.  About twenty people ended up at a dance club that could've been anywhere, really, except that beers were$2 apiece.  About half the crowd from DDD were expats and half were Laotians and Cambodians, and at one point I was the only expat on the dance floor with about six Laotian women doing the Macarena.  I joined in, quite badly, but judging from the reaction, I think I provided good comic relief.

In the car home, I cramped myself into the front seat and five people stuffed themselves in the back.  After the subject turned to Karaoke, I found myself being taught a Laotian song, in Laos, by a very drunk Laotian project manager, who was impressed enough by my abilities that she quickly graduated me to Laotian tongue twisters.  I didn't do so well on those.  I had her try English tongue twisters ("Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers"), which she did fine on, and then graduated her to French ones ("If these six sausages are six pence, it's too much").  They of course made me try a Laotian one ("When I stick a sweet potato in my mouth it sticks to my gums").

All in all, a promising harbinger of my stay in Vientiane.

Bike truck

Seen as I was walking around Phnom Penh yesterday sans camera: a rickety truck carrying a tremendous pile of bicycles stacked on their sides about thirty feet into the air. I couldn't even tell what they were until I got closer - they looked like a pack of metal pipes. They dwarfed the truck they were stacked on top of. There was a colorful dilapidated apartment building in front of them, and the two men perched at the top of the pile, looking out over the city, looked cool as cats on a refrigerator.

The Yom Kippur war on acid

I made friends with the shomer at the youth hostel where I was staying, and will now try to share a story of his in his own voice. I am sure to get the details wrong, but hope to capture the spirit.

This story is set in October 1973.

"I was tripping on acid, and was talking to this Dutch guy, he was new on the Kibbutz, and he was clearly stoned. Judging from him, it seemed like good stuff, and I was about to ask him to break it out when I see this plane, this Syrian jet, come streaking over the horizon, and it's going the wrong way. That plane should not have been going that way, so I say to him, 'Man, that plane's going the wrong way,' and we both look at it, and then these two Israeli jets come in from out of nowhere and start chasing the Syrian jet, firing at it, these white streaks going through the sky. They don't shoot it down, but they kind of force it down, chase it into the ground, and it crashes with this big cloud of dust, you know, but we don't hear anything, cause it's so far away. Then, a few seconds later, we hear this big sound, this kind of whooooomp sound, and the Dutch guy leans back and says, 'What kind of music is that?'

"And that was the beginning of the Yom Kippur war."

There were many other stories, only one of which I'll mention, and then only briefly. He once met Jimmi Hendrix, and, mistaking him for his friend Ernie, greeted him with, "Ernie, man, where did you get that hat?"

Hareidim have a serious sweet tooth

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent time at dinner tables in Orthodox communities. But it really came home to me when I was wandering around Mahane Yehuda, a famous open market in Jerusalem. The candy stalls there are phenomenal. There's enough candy to turn the anyone diabetic. And the customers are all Haredi.

I was also struck by the midrochov, the main street, in Tzfat. Everything's kosher, and the food stands fall into two categories: pizza or schwarma. In the main supermarket, I went in search of whole wheat crackers for a drive, and all I could find were chocolate wafers. A little diversity would do this community good.

Israelis don't care about your shoes...

...or at least, not at the airport they don't. Nor are they concerned with how many milliliters of shampoo are in your carry-on. No diagrams illustrating different bottle shapes and where the 100 ml line may lay. No doffing and donning of shoes. Just 2 minutes of intense questioning by Israeli security, and then you're either done or you're not done. And if you're not done, you're really not done.

The difference between the Americans and the Israelis is yet again one of scale. In a country with 5 million people and one major international airport, it's easier to have top people doing security. But when you have 250 million people and many international airports, it's a little more challenging. It's hard to find quality people and the money to pay them. So what do you do? You look to see if you've faced other problems in a similar domain, and try and apply the same solution.

A TSA employee is to an Israeli security agent as a McDonald's hamburger flipper is to a gourmet chef. How do you create efficient, reliable security given a limited budget and unskilled labor? Break security down into a series of small, defined steps. Write the steps down in large type. Reproduce. Laminate. Bind. Distribute. It's security as a franchise, and it works well with clearly defined problems of limited scope, like exploding shoes. But when the problem has fuzzy borders and a broad scope, then you actually need well-trained, proactive people you can depend upon.

It all makes me wonder what the TSA is there for. Are they an actual security instrument, or are they just a sort of pacifier, a way we reassure ourselves that we can do something about a problem whose solution is too expensive or too difficult for us to tackle head on?

Getting toasted in the Golan

When I was in Tzfat, I stayed at a youth hostel recommended by Lonely Planet that also happened to be a religious outreach organization - the stay was cheap, the staff were outgoing, and God was the constant topic du jour. For any number of reasons, some my fault, some theirs, I felt totally out of place. The people were sincere, well-intentioned, and genuinely nice, but, unfortunately, being there made my skin crawl.

The saving grace was the night watchman, the shomer, a fifty-something chain smoking ex-hippy from Seattle. He'd been in Tzfat ten years, spoke Hebrew with an unapologetically American accent, and was quite happy to have the job (employment rates in Tzfat suck; if you're not an artist, a rabbi, or a guide, you're going to have a hard time finding work). When I asked him for directions he responded with a five minute speech that went from detailed directions into a discussion of why the streets were so dirty to a history of Tzfatian politics. This, I thought, is my people.

I have a friend who had spent the summer in Israel learning about wine at an Israeli winery, and inspired by her blog, one of my goals this trip was to visit some Israeli wineries. After hanging out talking to the shomer a few nights in a row, I not only had learned a wealth of information about Tzfat, I had also gained a companion for my trip to wineries in the Golan.

The shomer and I went to a few wineries, but the most interesting was the Dalton, a kosher winery not so far from Tzfat. We arrived early Friday morning to the pleasant visitor center, a wood paneled affair with an elegant, craftsman feel. Gourmet cheeses were spread out to taste, and wines lined the counter, punctuated by that occasional graceless accoutrement of wine tasting, the spitbucket. Oddly, there were no other visitors, and the guide offered to take us on our own private tour. I think they mistook the shomer for my own personal guide and me for a wealthy tourist. With a private tour on the table, I wasn't about to correct any mistaken identities.

The tour was great, and the wine tasting that followed, given in a private room at the guest house, was even better (the 2004 Cabernet reserve was my favorite, with the 2004 Merlot select a close second). I told the guide I was driving, and the shomer was trying to hold back as well, but neither of us did very well. We were both pleasantly toasted by the end.

We took a long walk after that, and spent the rest of the day driving around the Golan, during which time I got to hear some of the shomer's many stories about living in Israel in the seventies and surviving both the Yom Kippur war and the most recent war with Lebanon this past summer, when Tzfat was rained upon by Ketyusha rockets.

Some of the stories I would definitely like to share, but I will save them for a future post.

Jamba Juice, Israeli style

As I was approaching passport control in Ben Gurion airport on my way out of the country, I gritted my teeth and decided to stop at a food stand for something to tide me over. I always feel like a trapped mouse when I have to buy anything at an airport - they know they've got you, you know they've got you, and you might as well just open your wallet and let them take what they want for their watered down coffees and their stale croissants.

And though this food stand did feature prices three times the norm, it also featured something quite unexpected: real food. I had a smoothie, and watched as the attendant plucked fresh slice after fresh slice of mango and honeydew melon from the fruit arrayed in front of her. All the way to the brim, then orange juice, and finally, to top it off, mint leaves. Mint leaves! What a change from the squirt of synthetic peppermint you get at Starbucks, or the precisely measured quarter-cups of fruit you get at Jamba Juice. All this for nineteen shekls. And it was delicious. I felt like I got quite the bargain.

Israel, modern though it is, is still a tiny country. Even in its sleek new airport, you're still not that far removed from the corner market, the shuk. A franchise could never afford that kind of quality, but in a country of only five million people, there's still room for smaller businesses whose focus remains on the customer and not the bottom line. What a pleasure. what a relief it is to be in a country not (yet) dominated by economies of scale.

Hitchhiking as a skill

I tried, and failed, to hitch my first ride today. I'm in Jerusalem and had left my car, and after fifteen minutes at the bus stop I decided I should have enough positive hitchhiking karma stored up to get a ride pretty easily. Not so. I stood there for fifteen minutes with my hand out. I tried it with the cap on, the cap off, casual stance, formal stance, smiling, not smiling. Nothing.

After a while this woman came to wait at the bus stop and so I shmoozed with her. She mentioned how she's always being stopped and searched at the bus station because she looks Arabic (she's a Yemeni Jew). She said it didn't bother her. She understands the situation, she said.

So then I mentioned that I thought I was having a hard time catching a ride because of how I looked.

"This is not the reason," she said, in her thick Israeli accent.

"You don't think so?"

"In Israel," she said, "we know to tell between someone who is scary and someone who is not so scary."

"Yeah, but I'm a guy, I'm six feet tall, I haven't shaved in a while. Bushy beard, you know, people might think, who knows, this guy..."

"No," she said, looking away.

"No?" I said, hopefully.

She gave me another quick glance. "Not even little bit."

Super-friendly soldiers

In the old city yesterday I once again came across a group of Israeli soldiers gathered for some kind of training, this time on the old city rooftops with the sun setting behind them. Once again, I started trailing after them, like a puppy, and when I asked one of them if they were going to the kotel and could I follow them, they said they weren't but they'd take me there (!). I then spent the next half hour wandering the streets and alleys of the old city with these guys. They wouldn't admit that they were lost, and they wouldn't ask anyone but a fellow soldier for directions. Since most of the soldiers around were from the same unit, nobody knew how to get around, but of course no one would admit they didn't know, so we went in quite a few circles.

Of course, I was happy as a clam, getting to shmooze with these guys. They were all commanders training commanders in the infantry unit, which, I got the impression, was not a small deal. I asked them about what the toughest thing about their job was. They answered that it was the responsibility of command (they thought of their charges as their children), and the sleep deprivation (they count themselves as lucky if they three hours a night). The one I spoke with the most is in his last year of service and is continuing on to officer's training - another year and a half. Both of his older brothers and his father were officers, so for him it's not even a question. Plus, he says, the money's good - 7000 shekels (~$1700) a month, tax free, all of which goes into the bank.

I asked about last summer's war, which they all served in, and heard first hand all the horror stories I'd read about - being trapped in Lebanon, with the enemy behind and in front of them, no supplies, feeling abandoned. I asked if he was angry and he said yes, and then I asked if he was cynical and he said no - he was more energized. He, like most Israelis I've spoken to about this, is absolutely sure another war with Lebanon and probably Syria is coming, and he is also convinced that Iran and the U.S. will be pulled in as well. Though last summer was bad, everybody is training now with a purpose, with an acute awareness of the stakes, and with a certainty that the training will be put into action in the very near future.

Banjo Kodesh (Holy Banjo)

I wandered into a religious CD store during my first day in Tzfat and saw this on the shelves. I had to ask them to pop it in, and when I heard the bluegrass 'oy yoy yoy's, I had to have it. The first song is straight ahead bluegrass, with a Shabbos niggun for a lyric, and it's surprisingly good - the Yiddish inflection goes well with a fiddle and a banjo. Unfortunately, the album soon succumbs to the overproduced bombast typical of Orthodox popular music, though recovers a little bit. File this as another entry into the surreal world of Orthopop (there are many YouTube videos out there to demonstrate, but I don't have the time to find them -- I'm sure some of my readers can provide links in the comments).