Dr. Dave's Journal

I can spit on Mt. Everest and you can't. Nyahh, nyahh.

davidrgaines — Wed, 7 Dec 2011 09:45:00 GMT

I am sitting in a bar in Kathmandu, Nepal. There are four other people here and a band consisting of four twentysomethings sitting (yes, sitting) in a row on the stage at the other end of the bar. They are playing a mix of well-worn American pop/rock tunes and Hindi songs that are apparently favorites of the other four barflies. They're all Nepali. I am clearly not. I'm also the only person who notices that the electric guitarist is hopelessly out of tune and that the cabernet I'm drinking is awful. In its defense, though, I should point out that it only costs $5 as opposed to the $11 or $12 I had been paying at hotel bars all across India.

Kathmandu is a fascinating city - has more of a western feel than cities in India but the same chaotic traffic (though not nearly as much horn honking) and much of the same poverty. The air is also quite polluted and all of us have acquired various degrees of colds, sore throats, stuffy sinuses, etc.With all the people milling around the streets, signs and billboards everywhere, and massive traffic jams, it's hard to believe that this is one of the remotest places there is. Mt. Everest is basically just across town.

Tonight we catch a flight back to Delhi, rest up for a few hours at a hotel near the airport, then head on to Paris and then Washington, DC. And then a day or so of sleeping.

Day 10 - Ganges River Boat Ride

davidrgaines — Sat, 3 Dec 2011 09:30:00 GMT

I think my numbering of days is all cockeyed at this point - today is definitely day 10. Up at 5:00am and dragged ourselves downstairs and onto the bus before dawn to see the Hindu devotees from all over India who come to Varanasi to bathe in the Ganges. Fascinating. And the streets are pretty busy before dawn, then become chaotic in the late morning, morphing into full tilt intolerable insanity in the evening. I stopped looking at monkeys, dogs, cows, goats, and water buffalo because you see all of the above in great quantities on every street just doing their thing. There is an increasing awareness of the concept of animal welfare and a correspondingly increasing number of AW and AR organizations, but no evidence of any of that to date.

Jim and I both bought wooden Indian flutes for 100 rupees ($2). We'll figure out a duet or two before the trip is over.

After breakfast and, hopefully, a brief power nap, we're off to the site where the Buddha sat under a banyan tree and became enlightened (i.e. Buddhist #1). Tomorrow we say namaste to India and fly to Kathmandu where I will hook up with an Esperanto speaker or two.

Day 4 - I channel my inner Sebastian Junger

davidrgaines — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:46:00 GMT

Today we get up early to hit the road to the Amer Fort, formerly the home and palace of the maharajah of Jaipur, who built it in the16th century. This is a major tourist attraction, something that is not hard to believe judging by the large number of hawkers shilling for everything from unidentifiable trinkets to bracelets to postcards. They descend on tourists exiting a bus and only the strong survive the experience, which ends only when the paying customers are safely inside the fort. These guys are unbelievably aggressive, to the point of touching people, grasping their arms, and interrupting conversations. It's hard not to feel sorry for them because the extreme poverty here forces people to look for rupees anywhere and everywhere, and Indian commercial culture doesn't really look past going for the moohlah, whatever it takes.

But sometimes you just want to be able to talk to the person next to you without having to compete with 10 bracelets for 50 rupees shaking in your face every 10 meters.

The main attraction besides the fort itself is the elephant ride most people take to get up to the top (the complex is a rather imposing place on top of a large hill). The elephant ride is somewhat controversial, as all of these things are in India and elsewhere, because of the elephants' working conditions and treatment behind the scenes (click here to read about what Wildlife SOS is doing to protect, rescue, and provide sanctuary for the elephants of Jaipur as well as bears that used to be forced to dance at the side of the Jaipur highway). Alaina and I discussed this before we left and based on what we had read decided not to be involved. I explained to the tour guide after we ran the hawker gauntlet that we were going to pass and walk up instead (I probably should have done this the day before....oops). After he got over his why-would-you-not-want-to-ride-on-an-elephant expression, he waved his hand and said "you'll come with me." We got whisked into the back of a tiny jeep that had two small padded benches facing each other, just barely big enough for four adults. We took off up the road that winds along beside the elephant path and I thought of Sebastian Junger doing the same thing, except in Afghanistan while wearing a flak jacket and watching RPG's whiz by overhead.

We then enjoyed walking around the palace grounds and there are quite a lot of photos to check out. Stay tuned and I'll tell you about the rhesus monkey families that crawl around anywhere and everywhere in Jaipur and Agra. They get into all of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites for free. Who's going to stop someone with a big, bright red butt on display?

I have to mention the hotel staff in each place in which we've stayed. Only men do housekeeping, which is one of those everyday things you don't think about much so when you first see it it strikes you as unusual. There are women at the front desk and a woman at the front door to pat down female guests, and that's about it. No waitresses in the restaurants, no female bartenders, no female housekeepers. And everyone is very earnest about his job. They are very focused on providing service, in a very efficient way, almost to the point of being robotic about it. They seem bewildered, as if you've forced them off script, if you deviate from that. For example, we always hang out the Do Not Disturb sign on hotel room doors 24 hours a day. That's how we like to travel. We don't need our towels washed every day, we don't need our beds made every day, and we rarely if ever use anything in mini bars. We also leave a lot of stuff lying around which would get in their way anyway. Basically we just like to be left alone and we like to walk back into our hotel room to see everything where it was when we left. This is never a problem anywhere we travel (USA, Eastern Europe, whatever). Here in India, it produces quizzical looks and what seems to be a vague disappointment, as if I'm preventing them from doing their job, or maybe I'm committing a cultural faux pas by turning down hospitality. Maybe it's just paranoia. But it does seem clear that they don't run into it very often.

Another example: last night at dinner (I'm skipping ahead to Agra, but that's OK) I chose an entree that featured sauteed spinach and some accompanying vegetables, one of which was bell peppers. I ordered it and asked if they could leave out the bell peppers. The waiter - who was incredibly polite, eager to please, and friendly - seemed to have been rattled by being thrown off script by my request. His response was to summarize the description in the menu of what I had ordered. I said yes, and could you leave out the bell peppers? He asked me if I didn't want the bell peppers. I looked around the table to see if anyone was finding this as weird as I was. I confirmed his observation. My refusal of the rice he offered me later produced an even more intense level of bewilderment, which at this point is really amusing and not at all irritating. In fact, even the waiter decided to get in on things at the end of the meal when he came over with rice one final time and asked me "would you like some more rice," emphasizing the word "more" and looking around the table. We all broke up and he smiled as if he had just won a lottery. That is a classic foreign travel moment.

I almost forgot about breakfast yesterday morning. I was wondering why everyone kept walking by our table with coffee but never stopped to ask if we needed any (I got down there late and spent quite awhile staring at an empty coffee cup....you serve yourself everything except coffee). Finally a waiter came over and I pointed down at my cup and said "coffee, please." He went away, then came back a few minutes later with a duplicate set of utensils which he dutifully dropped onto my plate next to the ones I already had. I was totally bewildered. Apparently when I said "coffee" and pointed at my cup, he had thought that I said "cutlery" and pointed at my plate. I'm still laughing over this one.

Finally, it has also been a bit weird getting access to each hotel's Wi-Fi. In most cases you have to sign multiple times and go through a ritual at the front desk. Apparently they're used to sending someone up to the room to set it all up, and of course there isn't anything to "set up," I just need your Wi-Fi network's security key, thank you. My netbook will set it all up while I make a cup of coffee. This produces the aforementioned quizzical look, but eventually they produce a "coupon" with instructions for accessing the Wi-Fi, which of course they could have simply handed to me in the first place. This type of exchange and way of communicating with hotel staff is, at this point, so common and predictable that it has become part of the ambience of the tour. Here in Agra they even insist on bringing the coupon up to your room. Are most Americans who travel to India incredibly lazy and self-indulgent, so hotels have just adapted, or are Indians insistent on providing maximum levels of hospitality, or a bit of both? I don't know what the answer is, but the little ins and outs of staying in hotels while travelling in this part of the world is extremely interesting (to me, at least).

Next: the moment you've all been waiting for.

Day 3 - The Road To Jaipur

davidrgaines — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:39:00 GMT

Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan state and known as "The Pink City," is today's destination by motor coach. The endless juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary continues to amaze me. One minute we're stopped at one of the ubiquitous Mickey D's to troop in en masse and use the bathrooms (standard issue wall-mounted electric hand dryer just like you see in fast food restaurants all over the USA), the next minute we're on the highway looking out the window at a large patch of grass, the grassiness of which is actually hard to determine because it is literally covered with litter, as if someone had carefully and deliberately emptied out a Dumpster, Jackson Pollock-style, so that the trash would be evenly yet randomly distributed all over this grassy area, presumably for the benefit of feral dogs and cows. Cows walking up and down sidewalks and lying down in front of shops is given as much notice as you would give to birds landing on a park bench or squirrels bounding across the road. Rickshaws, bicycles, and overloaded wagons and carts that look exactly like what you see in Fiddler On The Roof or a John Ford western move along next to scooters, motorcycles (rarely ridden with helmets), automobiles constantly honking their horns in a sort of improvisatory audio semaphore, and an array of massive trucks with the inevitable HONK PLEASE painted or stenciled on the back door. The apparent lack of large external side mirrors on trucks makes this a necessary request, the alternative being a regular flow of tractor-trailer-on-Fiat collisions.

The tour group is surprisingly diverse, both ethnically and chronologically, and seems to have come from all parts of the USA. One couple shared our flight in from Paris (though we didn't meet them until our travel rep met us outside baggage claim). They're from Tuscaloosa, Alabama and immediately amazed me when the wife explained that they had driven 70 miles to Birmingham, caught a flight to Atlanta, transferred to a flight from Atlanta to Paris, then to our flight from Paris to Delhi. And I thought WE had a long journey to get here. We also have a couple from Ecuador that politely tolerates my Spanish; after we started chatting on the bus yesterday morning the wife said that she had never met a composer before. I've heard that many times, the context usually being something like a cocktail party where a person half-listening to me says that as if he or she had just been introduced to a toilet salesman. You know that somebody, probably a lot of somebodies, are engaged in that activity, but you just think those things sort of just show up where they're needed.

The grand prize and Holy Grail of photographs on the road to Jaipur is one of the occasional camels, used as working animals pulling carts and such. I always seem to be occupied when I turn to the left and find myself staring at a camel for a second or two before the bus rolls onward. I can't tell what their treatment is like but the 3 or 4 I've seen so far are not working in what anyone would think of as pristine, sanitary, comfortable conditions.

We're now in Jaipur, and if you think you've seen poverty, you've seen nothing. Trust me. To be continued.

I just lost....

davidrgaines — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

....an hour's worth of work trying to post a blog entry here when my web browser crashed suddenly. And now it's 7:00am and I have to shut down so we can go to Jaipur (known as The Pink City) at 9:00. Not happy. Will attempt to reconstruct on the 6-hour bus ride. Meanwhile, enjoy this photo of Mahatma Gandhi's cremation site memorial.

Photos: India/Nepal 2011

davidrgaines — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:40:00 GMT

Alicia's and Jim's wedding excursion to the Indian subcontinent

Bonjour from Paris

davidrgaines — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 07:45:00 GMT

Nice flight. Air France knows how to fly. A first: they have a water & snacks bar up front in one of those tiny alcove/passageway things that enable you to cross from one aisle to another. Pour your own Coke, water, mineral water, orange juice......have a lemon mini-cake. On us. Bon voyage. And check out the dozens of movies you can play at your seat. Or compose music on your netbook with a portable MIDI keyboard. Not having a passenger in the middle seat makes it possible while your wife leans over and takes a nap.

Our five-hour layover is now down to about two hours. If only the alleged Samsung charging station over there were actually spitting out electricity. Having all the right adapters and converters is accomplishing nothing without juice to which to adapt....

Here I am blogging and Facebooking up a storm as if I had never left Maryland. Maybe I never did. We report, you decide.....

Let's Go To India

davidrgaines — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:46:00 GMT

Getting to Dulles Airport and proceeding to the gate on Thanksgiving afternoon was a major occasion for......well, giving thanks. Fastest check-in in family history. The photos are where we're at while waiting on Air France to whisk us off on leg #1 (Paris), after which a five-hour layover will prepare us for leg #2 (Paris to New Delhi). I love the wine on Air France like a puppy loves fire hydrants. We are loaded with vegan snacks and all devices are fully charged. Stay tuned.

Let the incursion begin

davidrgaines — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 23:25:00 GMT

Alaina and I will be joining Moraine on their short east coast "incursion" this weekend starting in New York City on Thursday and moving south through Central New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Alaina's sister Alicia is their electric violinist and Alicia's husband Jim is their baritone saxophonist. You've met both of them before if you've read this journal of mine from top to bottom. ;-) Stay tuned.

Dan The Man

davidrgaines — Mon, 10 May 2010 13:00:00 GMT

This is Dan Nichols. He plays acoustic guitar like a madman at Jewish Sabbath services. Every weekend. All over the country. Including Ethan's bar mitzvah on Saturday. He is really something and I recommend you check him out if you're in North Carolina (where he lives) or any of the towns in which he happens to play: www.jewishrock.com

The Morning After

davidrgaines — Mon, 10 May 2010 08:43:00 GMT

Following a massively successful bar mitzvah and party, a group of family and friends trooped down to Larkspur the following morning to walk along the stunning Tennessee Valley Trail, which ends at the Tennessee Beach. The whole experience is very Irish or New Zealandish as you can tell from the photos. I ended the day in John & Bonnie's outdoor hot tub, and sitting in a hot tub outdoors in northern California is about as good as it gets. Our hotel has one as well, and our room is right above it. An interesting view. By the way, I'm typing this on my laptop in our bathroom (Alaina is sleeping), which is about the tiniest bathroom outside of a train or plane that we've ever been in. It cannot comfortably accommodate two adults and you have to close the door to get anywhere near the bathub/shower. Other than that, a delightful little space with free wifi and a pretty comfortable bed. Back down to John & Bonnie's this afternoon and then into SF to have dinner at a great vegan restaurant called Herbivore with John Bilotta, the other composer on the chamber music album that's coming out next month.

Photos: West Coast USA 2010

davidrgaines — Mon, 10 May 2010 08:30:00 GMT

San Francisco and Seattle and environs

The main gig

davidrgaines — Sun, 4 Oct 2009 18:23:00 GMT

There is video that I took of each movement of the trombone concerto performance on Friday, September 25th. Here's a link to the first movement; you can find the other three linked inside that one.

The grand finale

davidrgaines — Sun, 4 Oct 2009 18:20:00 GMT

The hotel room was great, the view from my window onto the town square was perfect, but the wi-fi connection was horrible. I ended up having to use a public network out on the square, and even that was occasionally dodgy. I must have looked rather odd walking in circles around the square holding out my laptop, trying to get a connection to the internet. This is why I stopped posting entries to this journal midweek......

In any event, the concerts went off without a hitch except for the fact that, during the Saturday afternoon concert for the conservatory alumni, the members of the orchestra who weren't playing during my concerto apparently didn't realize that while they were offstage in the lobby warming up, we could hear every note, especially during the quiet parts. Robert Kozanek's father, the conductor, actually had to dispatch one of the back bench 2nd violins to tell them to shut up. I wonder how much of that we'll see/hear on the DVD that's being produced.....

There were many Esperanto speakers in the area, all of whom were friendly and helpful. In fact, as was the case in Bulgaria and most parts of Brazil, Esperanto was much more useful to me than English. Few people around Kroměříž speak English, and the ones I ran into who do only speak it passingly. The one exception was the son (Petr Kuznik) of the man who interviewed me for the local paper (Antonin Kuznik). He became my de facto translator when no Esperantists were about and really enjoyed the role, seeing as how he had never had the experience of putting his school English to use translating in real time for an American before. The story of how Petr and I ended up at a Kroměříž nightclub until 6:00 on Saturday morning is perhaps best left untold. I will say that it involved glasses of absinthe that neither of us cared for.

There is a short review of the Friday concert and an interview with me in the 9/29/09 edition of their local weekly paper. You can see both the Czech originals (with color photos) and English translations in the Articles and Interviews sections of my website.

If you like quiet, inexpensive, out of the way places with great architectural and cultural history, and can find your way around a Czech phrasebook or learn Esperanto, or both (I would recommend the latter!), I recommend Moravia (the eastern half of Czech Republic) in general and Kroměříž in particular. I could see living there. It is the quietest place I've been in since our honeymoon in the middle of nowhere in Maine.

The Venue

davidrgaines — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:58:00 GMT

This is the venue for this weekend's concerts - Assembly Hall in the Archbishop's Castle in Kroměříž. Milos Forman used it for scenes from the movie Amadeus. It was also used for the movie Immortal Beloved.

The arrival

davidrgaines — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:58:00 GMT

Dulles Airport seems to have gotten its act together; the interior is actually attractive now and I didn't have to get on one of those ridiculous trams to be carted off out to Mars to get on my plane. This is all more than I can say about Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, where I had to connect to my flight to Prague. The journey from the arrival terminal to the Prague departure terminal was endless; it must have taken 20-25 minutes of me huffing and puffing with my too-heavy carry on's through the entire airport (note to self: on the way home check the two bags they allow you to check, instead of just one). Then it was another 10-15 minute trip inside a sardine can of a shuttle to the airplane, topped off by a walk up two steep flights of stairs between the shuttle bus and the walkway into the plane. I feel sorry for the guy who sat next to me and my sweat-soaked T-shirt that I had been wearing for over 24 hours at that point.

The Esperanto delegate for Olomouc, Czech Republic, Ladislav Lani, is someone I had met in 2000 on my last trip to Moravia, and he came out to meet me at the Prague airport. We got on a shuttle bus to the main train station to catch the Pendolino train (very fast and modern; it tilts from side to side) from Prague to Olomouc. The first class car on these trains are nice, and they wheel a cart down the aisle just like on airplanes. 1/2 liters of nonalcoholic beer foreverybody! Not sure why that was; maybe they keep the real thing in the bar car.

Another Esperanto speaker from Olomouc who is a friend of Ladislav met us at the Olomouc train station, along with an Esperantist named Jan Duda who played violin in the Moravian Philharmonic back in 2000 for the recordings and performance they did for me. He can't make it to the concerts this week but wanted to meet me anyway (very friendly fellow, by the way). I posed for pictures with each of them in front of the train, then it was off to the Olomouc Esperantist's ancient Skoda, which is a rear-engine marvel of eastern European fly-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth engineering. He stuffed my carry-on's into the front hatch (haven't seen anyone do that since the last time I saw someone open up the front of an old VW Beetle) and off we went. With the noise suppression properties of sheets of toilet paper, the engine noise in the rear seats made conversing difficult and overall I was reminded of a mad dash I was part of through the streets of Stara Zagora, Bulgaria back in 1994 in an East German tin can.

Anyway, we did finally arrive in Kroměříž, after which the fellow said he had an idea. He handed me a magic marker and asked me to autograph the inside of his rear passenger side door (the top part of which is metal). I scribbled a friendly message in Esperanto, thanked him again for the ride, and left him with his magic marker and the most peculiar piece of graffiti in eastern Europe (which is saying something).

The wi-fi network here at the hotel is very dodgy, and even when it works I cannot seem to get any video clips to upload to YouTube (like in Slovakia last year, sadly), so irregular text posts and random photos will have to do for the time being......BTW I needed a lesson from Pavla at the front desk here at the Hotel Boucek last night on how to lift up the drain plug in my bathroom sink so the water will drain out. I had forgotten this but it's not uncommon not to have a little lever or rod on the sink here - what you do is just push down on the drain and it flips up vertically, perpendicular to the sink. Simple. I'm trying to be an impressive ambassador for the USA but Pavla's chuckling sent me quickly back to the clueless stereotype. I will rectify that on her shift tonight with some deftly memorized Czech phrases.

Gallery: Kroměříž

davidrgaines — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:41:00 GMT

It's pronounced KROHM-yehr-zheezh

davidrgaines — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:01:00 GMT

To keep you occupied until I arrive in Kroměříž, check out the official town website, which includes a nifty Town SquareCam so you can spy on the town square 24 hours a day. I'll try to find it so I can wave at you at some point. Every Czech town has one, by the way. A town square, that is, not a webcam.

Friendly? You betcha

davidrgaines — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:10:00 GMT

I thought Brazilians were the friendliest people around until I met Hawai'ians. Wow. This whole island is infected with aloha. Here's a video tour of the resort that I put together this morning. Enjoy.

Golf, anyone?

davidrgaines — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:47:00 GMT

We have a lovely room with a cozy little patio off the back. Said patio faces right on the 7th (8th? 9th?, okay, I'm not really sure) fairway of the golf course here at the R-C. One beginner with a bad slice and we'll be hoping that Kapalua has a decent hospital. There are a couple of pictures of the view in the gallery. Alaina will be at continuing professional education classes for accountants from 7a - 1p every day. My lower back and the lowest joint on my left thumb are telling me that I need to be in continuing professional education for hot tub enthusiasts out in front of the hotel every day.