Southern Italy Days

From Salerno we took a two hour train ride south along the mountainous coast and got off in Sapri, a small town of maybe 15,000 people situated along a beautiful bay. Steep mountains rise just beyond the town and up and down this coastal area. We found a pleasant hotel across from the sea promenade with a view of the bay from our room. We are staying here four days visiting nearby towns, going for hikes and relaxing by the beach. The water here is warm and the air temps have been near 80 degrees every day. We have the hotel breakfast buffet and share a restaurant meal once a day at most. To limit our spending, we buy salads and casseroles from the supermarkets that we eat in our hotel room or have a picnic. We also grab food from the breakfast buffet to supplement our lunch.

Italy is gearing up for elections and you can see political posters all around, right, center, and left. In Salerno I saw two men systematically posting right-wing posters over the center-left candidate's string of posters. The right wing probably has a lot more money and a lot more publicity, like in the U.S., since they control the mass-media.

Italy has been very charming and picturesque and has been a delight to travel in. However, we have sometimes noticed seemingly hostile stares from local people maybe because Ana is perceived as an immigrant or else because of my scruffy appearance. On the other hand, many people, especially the hotel staff, have been very helpful and friendly.

Some difficult moments have occurred trying to get information at the train stations where people have been quite unhelpful. Sometimes we have waited at the track to get on a train and then at the last minute the track number is changed and we have to scramble to figure out where our train is leaving from to catch the correct train.

From Germany to Italy

After a long train journey through the Swiss Alps and into northern Italy, we arrived in La Spezia, Italy, a small city on the Italian Mediterranean coast about 90 miles east of Genoa. La Spezia has a beautiful location tucked between coastal mountains and the sea. A few miles to the west lies a rugged coastal area called Cinque Terre, a UNESCO protected area in which there are five medieval-looking villages perched along cliffs overlooking the sea. We took the train to the beginning of the trail that connects the villages (there is no road)and hiked the 6 miles along the coastal mountains. It is a wonderful area combining wilderness with some family farms with gardens and fruit trees (oranges, lemons, grapes, etc.) The weather was hot and there were many people from different countries hiking along the trail. In the afternoon, we diverged along a path down to the rocky shore, and Ana had a nice swim (I refrained because of my cold). In the evening we shared a delicious dinner at a restaurant near our hotel that included different kinds of seafood, especially clams, a mixed salad and clam and tomato sauce linguine.

Afer two days in La Spezia, we took the train down to Salerno, in the south past Rome and Naples. Salerno has a stunning seaside location at the foot of a high mountain ridge (the Amalfi coast). Arriving at the train station in the early evening, we walked along the beach promenade for a few kilometers to our hotel. Unfortunately, there is a lot of garbage along the beach. We passed many bars and pizzerias, the main businesses in this part of town. We had a great view of the sea and the mountainous coastline from our hotel room. Here we rested a day while I tried to recover from a bad cold. Nevertheless, I spent much of the morning trying to find a bank where I could change some t-checks into Euros. I had to go to four different banks before finding the bank that would change my travelers checks.

Arriving in Germany

Arriving in Berlin, Germany from Bangkok on May 11, we stayed a few days with our good friends, Maren and Feurio in Dresden. They have two kids, 12 and 14 years old and live in an apartment building in this city on the Elbe River in the former East Germany. Dresden was the site of the horrible allied bombing during the war that killed 10s of thousands of people of which Kurt Vonnegut wrote “Slaughterhouse Five”.
My father met Maren’s father (Walter) in 1968 on a visit to Berlin, his former hometown that he fled in 1934. Walter is a doctor and he and his wife Goodrun became very close family friends whom my parents visited quite often in the 70s and 80s. In 1987 Walter was able to visit us in San Francisco. Many were surprised he was able to get permission under the Communist ruled German Democratic Republic (GDR). Since the wall came down and Germany was reunited, Walter, Goodrun and Maren and her family have visited us several times in California, and Maren and Feurio and their children lived two years near Atlanta, Georgia where Maren taught in a high school for two years.

We spent two very nice days with Maren and her family. Maren teaches English in a public elementary school in Dresden and she invited Ana and me to be guests in two of her fifth grade classes. She introduced us and had the kids (about 25 in each class) ask us questions. The kids were very polite and asked many questions about our lives. In each class we also got a question about Obama and responded that while we have been supporters people need to watch what he does now and organize to make sure he does the right things because he is under a lot of pressure to maintain the status quo.

The physical conditions and technical infrastructure of the building on this particular school site were not on a par with most U.S. public schools I have seen. However, the beautiful surroundings with ample green space is very impressive and the children seemed happy. The lack of diversity among the students, compared to California schools, is very apparent. Even though Dresden is not a major German city, I am surprised to observe how rare it is to see a person of color in the streets of Dresden.

Lazy Days in Pai

We have been here almost a week now, and we are really ready to move on. Soon we will be in Europe, which will be the last part of our trip before returning to San Francisco on June 9. The weather here is like the dog days of summer in a New England heat wave. In the morning after our walk/jog and breakfast, we take a motorbike excursion into the surrounding countryside which is quite beautiful. It is interesting to pass by some villages and observe the life there. We have also seen about a dozen small snakes along the road, most of them dead run over by vehicles.

We do spend a lot of time on the internet and reading. I have read following fine books during this journey (besides several guide books):

1) The Tattooed Soldier - a novel about a Guatemalan refugee and the officer who killed his wife and child whom he runs into in Los Angeles.
2) Three Cups of Tea - the true story of a mountaineer's initiation of a successful project to build schools for girls in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan
3)The God of Small Things - a wonderful novel by Indian writer and activist Arundati Roy that takes place in Kerala, India
4)A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini, author of Kite Runner (about Afghanistan)
5)Fire in the Hole ( a U.S. Marine's account of experiences during the Vietnam War and after coming home)
6)The Quiet American by Graham Green (Vietnam in the 50s)
7)When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (a Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace)
8)The Good Women of China (Hidden Voices)by Xinran, a former talk show host in China
9) Forbidden Love by Norma Khouri (about "honor" killings in Jordan).
10)Miss. Chopsticks by Xinran - about three sisters who move from the Chinese countryside to the big city of Nanjing.

I highly recommend them all.

Northwest Thailand travels

Traveling from Chiang Rai by local buses, we spent the night in a primitive bungalow about 5 miles off the main road at the foot of a steep green mountain that towers about 4000 feet above the valley floor. It is the end of the dry season and extremely hot and humid (and buggy too). Our room has a fan but when the electricity went off it became unbearable in the room at night. There is an impressive Buddhist temple complex not far from our place that we walked to in the late afternoon.

The next day we took two buses to get to the small town of Pai, where we plan to spend a week before heading for Bangkok and flying to Germany. Pai lies in a wide mountain valley at about 2,500 feet elevation; there is a small Muslim community and many foreign tourists here. It is kind of a bohemian place with art, music and crafts for sale and many restaurants have menus in English and cater to Western food tastes. The weather is extremely hot and humid, but we have a nice simple room with air conditioning centrally located yet tucked away down a quiet ally. We have rented a motorbike for a week that we use to take daily excursions into the mountains. Yesterday there was a brief thunderstorm and last night we finally got a good rain (May is the beginning of the Monsoon season), so on my walk/jog this morning, it seemed that plants, trees and rice fields were slightly greener.

On the bus ride up to Pai, I sat across from an aging anarchist named Willow. He is 78 years old but in great condition and we had an interesting conversation. He has lived here for many years and is married to an Aka (hill tribe) woman. They have children and a coffee farm and a store. He was telling me that his wife has no formal education but speaks many languages and that the Aka consider themselves neither Thai nor Burmese, but just Aka. Willow considers our public educational system very oppressive and said it functions to control the kids and condition them to be good worker bees, accept authority and accept an inhumane system. I told him that he was oversimplifying a very complex issue, that to some extent I agreed with his criticisms especially with the "No Child Left Behind" educational policies carried out in the U.S. However, I tried to make the case that public education deserves to be supported because it offers opportunities for disadvantaged kids still could be progressive and promote real democracy; I argued that public education can be an important tool for societal reform and the empowerment of the working class. He gave me a look like I was out of my mind.

Willow also believes that there is absolutely no difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties which is an overstatement although the Democrats are also very connected to big business, particularly finance, insurance, real estate and technology interests. I finally told him that nobody has a monopoly on the truth, which is very complex, and that both our views might have validity to a certain extent depending on how you are looking at it.