A Weekend in Small Town America

A wooded hill on our left, a glistening Mississippi River on our right, and the road stretches out before us.

I am in the car with Alicia, a friend from way back, come to visit her in Minnesota. We’re in Wisconsin at the moment, though, and on our way to the family cabin where her mother lives on 200 acres of woods and apples and crops of soybeans.

The day of our trip south, US President Obama is at the Target Center to talk about his plan for health care reform. It’s a big issue in the States right now and NPR radio broadcasts the speech.

Sleepy towns drift by as Obama tells the crowd about Americans who have trouble with health care coverage –coverage that is cancelled, too expensive, or simply not enough to keep up with medical need.

We’re headed up a gravel road, now, named after Alicia’s family and the grandfather who bought this property to get away from his life in the city. I can see why he did: the land is a sunlit picture, beautiful and silent. Our car finally stops, as does the radio.

Built with full electricity and plumbing, the cabin is the one modern thing in the wild. It has settled in amongst the trees, looking across at green mountains, and stops at the edge of an embankment that continues on down to be swallowed up by animal noises.

Alicia’s husband and her mother come out to greet us. Hand shakes and smiles all round, and I get the tour of the place. Later, there’s drinking beers, grilling burgers and chatting around the fire pit. We hear the occasional chestnut clatter and skip through the trees to remind us that we’re outside and tell Willie the dog that, no, the nachos aren’t for her.

We stay there until the fire is no longer warm enough, then play cards inside until it’s time to go to bed. This first full day away from home has helped me along to full relaxation.

Next morning, the health care issue reappears on TV. Four suits argue about government costs and who’s doing what to whom and, during commercial breaks, attack ads take up the fight. President Obama’s health care plan will raise taxes and explode the deficit, says a silky smooth voice.

We turn off the television and head outside for a Sunday meal. Scrambled eggs, bacon and toast crowd our plates and conversation comes around to squirrels and their need to raid the deck. They keep getting at the bird feeders, which is very troublesome and leads to much discussion about just how to foil the buggers.

After breakfast, we head out on a rambling tour of the property. Alicia and I jump into a golf cart; Sean and Willie the dog, tail beating at miles per second, leap onto a six-wheel ATV and gun the engine. I can see why the dog is excited.

The crops of soybeans are impressive. I never thought they could be but there they are, growing, existing, doing nothing special, but looking impressive nonetheless. They stretch on to the end of my eyesight, yellow as the sun in the full light of day. We bump along the uneven track, circle home and head into town.

Stockholm, Wisconsin (population 97) is a quiet artists’ community. Among other small businesses, it has a café and a little pub, a small insurance company and two art galleries, one of which houses the post office.

I notice the slow pace to everything here. Alicia’s mum chats idly with store owners about the weather, upcoming social events and, because this is the US, church. The weekenders sail along Lake Peppin, really just a wider stretch of the Mississippi, in the warm September weather. There isn’t much more to do, nor would anyone want there to be.

This impression of small town American life is not a façade; the people are far more relaxed that their urban counterparts. They do have their concerns, however, which struck me while I wandered through Stockholm’s pottery store. The woman behind the counter, having discovered that I’m Canadian, asks me a question.

“You wanna trade health care systems?"

Couched in Success

I found a couch the other day. My new apartment had seemed kind of bare without one, but being back at work I hadn’t had the time to fill the space. So I was glad when my neighbourhood stepped in to solve the problem.

Fernwood is a community of murals on walls, of posters searching for lost pets and unwanted furniture left on the sidewalk. Walking home from the pub one evening, I found a couch being moved onto the grass outside a house. It was worn but okay, small but comfortable and not possessed of a cat pee smell.

“Is that a couch?”

“Dude, yeah. Do you want it?”

“Dude, yeah.” We had a deal.

This all seemed so far from Asia. Furnishing an apartment?! Going to work and wearing a tie?! What happened?

I’ll tell you.

My flight from Hong Kong arrived at the end of March in rain that spat out of a midnight sky; a familiar chill burned my ears. Welcome to Victoria the Puddle, I thought.

Apart from narcolepsy and oddly-houred food cravings in the first two weeks, life had been waiting for me. I got right back into hanging out with my friends, frequenting all my favourite restaurants, coffee shops and bars.

I found a new apartment a month later, then returned to work.

As these things happened, the bits and pieces from my trip faded to memory. Places I’d been turned to pictures; all but the most important people I’d met on the road drifted out of existence.

The pace of change frightened me: a backpacker and travel writer in March; a civil servant in June. Would I lose touch with the traveller?

Nope. I have an incurable need to see the world, even have a plan to keep travelling. I’m also not the same guy who left the job he’d been in for 4 years. Witnessing poverty has a way of making one grateful for what he’s got.

So I’m back and having fun – working, but having fun! I can be both travel writer and civil servant, and you'll hear from me again.

Through New Eyes

Dad stumbles again. He's busy looking at China for the first time and not watching where his feet are going.

My parents arrive in Hong Kong, the first stop of a trip to visit their youngest son on the mainland. The first stop ever in Asia; they will see a different world. My plan to loiter here and visit friends coincides with their vacation and Justin decides to join us from Guangzhou for a day, so we have a mini-family gathering across the world from Canada.

Except that this isn't an ordinary family gathering. At home, parents are the venerable and wise hosts, to be respected. They invite us to their house and have us around their dinner table. Here, Justin and I are the ones with experience and the roles are reversed (except for the food. Mum and dad pay for dinner on their first night in town).

I notice the difference between us right away. I get off the escalators and start walking, part the crowd. The parents move at a snail's pace, turn their heads upwards, get stuck behind the masses.

"I'll always remember this street as my first glimpse of Asia," says my dad. The street is Lockhart Road in Causeway Bay, all lit up with signs and storefronts and crowded with vendors, an anywhere street in urban Asia.

Later, he stops my mum on the Mid-Level Escalators and says, "Look at those roof-tops." He points to the overlapping, haphazard, seemingly temporary shelters erected over the noodle stalls below us - a standard sight throughout the continent.

We take a bus to Stanley on the south side of the island and dad complains about the air conditioning.

"It's freezing!"

"Of course," I reply. "It's Asia." Bus drivers here take a perverse pleasure in blasting cold air onto the heads of their passengers. I've just learned to ignore it.

"Oh don't be so...!" and he smacks my arm. He doesn't appreciate my dismissive tone, which has been common for me in the past few days. Five months in Asia and I don't think about how culture and business and infrastructure are different from North America. I have just gotten used to how things work.

But my parents' insistence on being new gets me thinking. I shouldn't be dismissive. I shouldn't be jaded. I should walk off the escalator with my head up, looking.

So I stroll the streets, not with wonder - I've been here too long for that - but with an appreciation for what's there. From the southern hills, I see the majesty of the lights in a nighttime city. I see the sweat of a man holding a loaded-down push cart from rolling down the hill, one slip from certain disaster. I see the hysteria of a food stall.

I see marvellous Hong Kong, and all I need to do is look through the new eyes that my parents brought with them.

A Dose of the Familiar at the End of Asia

This blog has not been updated for three weeks. The reason: I traded in my backpacker label for the more relaxed one of house guest. I've been enjoying myself.

My transformation from rugged adventurer to sedentary lump resulted from increased sentimentality for Canada. February and the beginning of March saw bits of home sneak up on me, grab me by the throat and not let go. A memory popped up, other travellers had their tireless what-will-you-do-when-you-get-home conversations, or a piece of Canadiana would be adapted for local use and I would be temporarily obsessed.

An excellent example: my reaction to the presence of gravy at a Singapore food stall. The young woman behind the counter poured it all over a basket of fries and cheese and I got excited.

ohmygodOhMyGodOHMYGOD!, I thought. "Is that poutine?" I asked. She nodded.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! "How much is it?"

"$4.90 [about $4 Canadian]."

"Well, I've just bought these fries from another stall - crap! Stupid damn sweet potatoes! - but I'll be back tomorrow."

And I was back. I planned the entire next day in Singapore around buying an order of fries, cheese and gravy. I paid my money and ate the first poutine I'd had since last September. Months and months of rice and noodles and I didn't know that the stuff was missing from my life until it showed up at a food stall: a basket of grease; the promise of home.

Incidents like this one told me that I had to change my method of travel for the last month of my trip. Changing countries, changing currencies, changing languages: I needed something different than constant change. I couldn't travel alone, either; the solo routine wouldn't work anymore. I needed a dose of the familiar and an escape from my backpack.

That escape came from acquaintances in the region.

I first visited a friend in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he had taught English for more than a year. The high speed train from Taipei, modelled on Japan's bullet train, took me south at a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour and, in the darkness of an evening arrival, only chunks of blurry neon told me where people lived.

Chris picked me up from the local metro station on his scooter - the two of us doubling on that little bike was reason for locals to comment and look again. Five minutes from the station, Chris opened the door and I found a home and a dog and a place to stay for a while.

I played tug-of-war with Toby, the white lab. He pulled and yanked and jerked the chew toy and galumphed to the corner where I threw it. He climbed onto the couch and stood over me to show that I wasn't winning, not really. He played in a way that the feral dogs of Asia never could.

I went out on the town with Chris and his Czech roommate and his roommate's friends. They lived in town and went to the local bars. They knew how to avoid tourist trap restaurants. They showed me how local ex-pats and Taiwanese lived.

Chris and I watched television shows and movies. North American humour got me laughing and the bright lights of Hollywood made sense to me.

I lived more like a real person here, not like someone who stayed for a while then moved on to see the next thing. I dropped my backpack in the back room and forgot about it.

This life didn't end with Taiwan; my next flight took me back to Hong Kong, where this whole thing had begun.

My best friend, Dennis, seemed determined to reintroduce me to the life of a working, settled person and, that first Saturday in town, he took me out to party with his co-workers on their weekend at the bars of Lan Kwai Fong and Wan Chai. We hit Balalaika with its bust of Lenin, its freezer room full of vodka and its fur coats; an Italian restaurant where Ravi, the bar manager, served me a waterfall shot, which nearly singed what remains of my hair; and Agave where we had margaritas better than I've had.

We talked about issues that matter to working people: politics, jobs, families. We avoided the standard, machine gun traveller questions of where-you-from, where-you-been, where-you-going. Well... I didn't avoid them but my point is that I got to talk about those other topics too. I didn't have to limit my conversation to one-word answers and lists. "Canada." "I've been to Mainland China, Vietnam, Cambodia." "I'm going to the rest of Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and Singapore." I was grateful to spend time with these civil servants.

As I chatted and laughed, I began to realize that the benefits of living a stable life in Taiwan and now in Hong Kong ran deeper than simple novelty. I would go back home in a handful of days to be faced with North American culture and more white people than I ever remembered being in one place. I would be faced with serious culture shock.

"It was harder for me going back to Canada," said Dennis of his own trip through South East Asia a few years ago. "Give yourself extra time to adjust."

Perhaps, though, spending time outside the transient world of a backpacker would save me the difficulty. Someone last night referred to Hong Kong as "a good departure point" at the end of Asia. This town is a hybrid of west and east. The crowds and open-air markets and Chairman Mao knick knacks remind me that I'm in Asia, but the caucasians in business suits and the almost limitless North American and European cuisine also give me a taste of home.

To start, Taiwan and Hong Kong were only meant to indulge a fancy for friends and the familiar. To end, they might have become essential to move me from the road to home.

A Real Fine City

Air conditioning hits me full in the face as I enter a souvenir shop across from St. Andrew's Cathedral. I find the flag I'm looking for , but there's also a coffee mug that catches my attention. It reads "Singapore is a Real FINE Place."

The mug is blue and carries a list, pictures circled and crossed out in red, of the various offences in the city and their associated fines. No Spitting, $500; No Chewing Gum, $500, No Urinating in Lift, $500. Though there are more, these examples get to the heart of Singapore: it's a place that likes rules and order. One piece of tourist kitsch has summed up an entire municipal attitude.

At least they can laugh about it, I think to myself.

I leave the shop and get to thinking about what I'll find on my day's walk. My route goes through Chinatown, a place the world over that evokes very specific sights and sounds and smells. The clatter of humanity. The grunge of not enough time in the day. The stink of deregulation.

Will all of those things be there in a city where littering is punishable by a $500 fine? I catch the metro to get my answer.

Outside of Outram Park station, I turn onto Eu Tong Sen Street and know I'm in Chinatown. A big red arch with Chinese characters rests over the passing cars - that's about it. Otherwise, I am on a street like any other in Singapore. There are multiple lanes of traffic, office buildings and department store, coffee shops.

I find my way to the incongruously named Smith Street and think, this is better! Shops are crammed together and filled to overflowing. Red lanterns string their way overhead from one side of the traffic to the other.

Something, however, is still not quite Chinatown about this Chinatown. A monolithic office building stares across at the Chinese merchants; Oriental Plaza is just around the corner, full of niche clothing stores. I have yet to smell anything that requires me to re-straighten my nose hairs.

I duck into one of the shops, hoping. Lots of places in any other Chinatown - Hong Kong's, for instance - will have dried birds nests and snakes on sale, among other things. Not here. Vitamin C and Calcium are on offer in sterile glass cases. The place is brightly lit. Dinge is nowhere.

I keep walking. My feet take me to the pedestrian haunts of Trengganu and Pagoda Streets. The path between the stalls allows four or five people to pass and not once do I have to say, "excuse me" or use my elbows to get anywhere. Tables and chairs at restaurants do not have that ragged, abused look; they're all new and shiny. There are still no stinks to report.

I buy a pair of chopsticks and three silk ties just to say I got them in Singapore's Chinatown, then walk a few blocks and have a coffee in another crisp shopping mall. It's called China Square Central. The cappuccino is very good and I sip slowly, then catch the metro back up-town.

That night, I read about the area of town where I'm staying. Bugis Village, on Rochor Road near Victoria and New Bridge Streets, used to be full of "rowdy sailors... transvestites and prostitutes", which ran contrary to the country's image. The current version opened in 1991 and, along with the Bugis Junction Shopping Centre, provides a cleaner alternative, glistening and exact.

My next day takes me to Little India. At the shopping arcade, the first shop I see is 7-11. Despite the encouraging fog of incense from somewhere in the back, the floors are covered in bright linoleum and the walls give shops here a contained look. It is more of the same, a striking uniformity.

Thinking over everything later, I realize that citizens have had to adjust their way of living to meet a common expectation in Singapore. Business attire and casual street clothes walk the streets far more than head scarves and fezzes and saris. Shopping malls satisfy the public need to purchase and push little knick-knack corner stores to the sidelines. Singaporeans live in a world of polished commercial pursuit and urban cleanliness.

People here have conformed to the rules. The city - and its expectations - defines them; they do not define the city.

I'm not complaining. Services and amenities that meet Western standards are wonderful. Clean streets are great. I just wish they didn't come at the cost of being able to buy a bird's nest in Chinatown.

The Jungle Train to Jerantut

Every now and then, it's important for a traveller to remind himself that he's in a foreign country.

This is more necessary than may be outwardly apparent; a trip abroad can very easily become one big opportunity to socialize with the western world. Travellers, particularly those who carry a backpack, go to see all the same sights and stay in the same places. English is the chosen lingua franca and one rarely has to step outside of it to be understood.

Locals, too, stay in the background. They bring a plate of food, accept a thank you in their words and mumble a return you're welcome, turn and walk away. They sit in the front, drive the bus and rarely do more than point or gesture in answer to a question.

They're also terminally self-effacing about language: their English is always "bad" or "not very good". Mostly, locals in South East Asia don't talk to foreigners.

And why should they? There's often a large group of us and we have a good grasp of English. We're intimidating.

So meeting locals, or at least seeing what they see, is a challenge and an opportunity not to pass up on.

My opportunity came from the Jungle Train. I saw that its track ran from the border with Thailand to the south where it joined the coastal line that carried on to Singapore. For most of the day, the train would rattle through the jungle and villages at the western edge of Taman Negara (literally "national park" in Malay).

My guidebook also explained that, for residents of the area, "the railway is the only alternative to walking." Perfect!, I thought and booked my ticket to Jerantut, a gateway to Taman Negara.

The train carriage was a grubby, rundown affair. Fabric on the seats was faded and dusty; a spring poked out of place and told me not to sit there - I didn't. Food trays from the seat backs and sometimes the toggles that held them in place were missing, though I could see where they'd been. Windows, dirtier than they had any right to be, were permanently opened inwards at a forty-five degree angle from the bottom of the frame.

But I didn't care. Malaysians in fezzes and head scarves crowded aboard and made themselves at home. Leaving from the Wakaf Bharu station at 6:33am, I could sleep knowing that my day would be full of the sights that locals see.

When the sun lifted its head about an hour later, a landscape appeared that was worth the price of admission - roughly $3.50 Canadian. Palm fronds and tree leaves swept at the sides of the train. Now a gap in the foliage and a field full of fog, quick as a flash bulb or a photographer's trigger finger: there suddenly and gone. Then a river, glistening and curled.

There was village life in between jungle scenes. At stations like Marek Urai, Bukit Abu and Dabong, men sat, elbows on knees, working the end off a toothpick with their teeth, and watched. Women watched, too, though only a little, and chatted or kept an eye on stray and possibly delinquent children.

Not many people got on the train. They often stayed in their seats as we pulled into the stations and out again, which suggested that they waited to meet people from this train or that one, or to get on a train going in the other direction. Or maybe, and very delightfully, it suggested that the Jungle Train's arrival was a major event in the village day.

Or perhaps the station was just a convenient place to sit and worry at a toothpick.

Families were in the seats as well as out the windows. The children were generally good, though one little boy discovered that I spoke English and decided that I was entertainment.

He thumped up to me, shouted "Hello!", smiled with his gawky and uneven teeth, and thumped off down the aisle.

"Hello," I said and waved, but he was already gone.

Thump, thump, thump, and he was back. "Hello!" Thump, thump, thump.

"Hello." I didn't wave this time.

Thump, thump, thump. "Hello!" Thump, thump, thump.

And so on.

Looking up after the last time he came past me, the boy's mother was talking to him. I smiled, remembering when I was a kid.

She was probably saying, Calm down! And leave that man alone. You're bothering him.

He chattered back, breathless and excited. But mum, he speaks English! And why do I have to leave him alone? He likes me! (He shot me a grin after this last part.)

Mum got her way in the end and he stayed at the front of the carriage.

Thinking about the scene later, I realized that it was like hundreds of versions of the same conversation I'd had with my own mum. The why-do-I-have-to-stop-doing-that conversation. I never found my mum's point of view that pursuasive, always asked why, and never got a satisfactory answer. I had to stop what I was doing, though.

It was funny because I'd come to South East Asia, taken this train, in search of the local experience and found more of the things that were familiar to me. That kid, having that conversation with his mum.

Sure the train rattles through the jungle, which doesn't happen anywhere else in the world that I know of. But looking under the skin of the local experience in foreign countries, peeling it back, people are more similar from place to place to place than perhaps is evident at first glance.

We all have the same conversations, though we have them in different languages.

Articles of Faith

Under a sweltering sun, I learn about faith.

The Batu Caves are home to Kuala Lumpur's (KL) celebration of Thaipusam, a three-day Hindu festival in honour of Lord Muruga. It occurs in January or February each year and I am there for this year's event.

I arrive on the last day, a Sunday, and the festivities are in full swing. Though the caves, in the distance and up a long flight of stairs, are where devotees make offerings to their lord, people also bear their burdens along the street below.

They are burdens to be certain. This is a festival of doing penance, of washing away sins, of being blessed. The burdens are the penance.

Some Hindus support kavadis, large platforms built with a metal framework that is attached to head, shoulders and waist. They are ornately decorated with different colours, feathers and religious figures. They bob in the heat, lifting then falling into themselves.

Other Hindus are pierced. To say that they are pierced doesn't exactly hit the point if only because the piercing, in most cases, occurs in an all-over-body sort of way. It's not permanent, either. People don't walk around the everyday streets looking as they do; I have the distinct impression that their adornments have been done very recently and will be removed at the end, which makes the effort even more impression.

Many of the pierced have hooks running through the skin of their backs, up and down in rows. Some hooks hold apples; others are attached to ropes held by other Hindus who hold back their charges when they strains too much. The skin pulls and stretches.

The piercings also include metal rods, spears and tridents running through cheeks and horizontally through the upper lip. There is no blood. All the pierced Hindus have the dazed and holy look of the penitent, but there is no blood.

Those who don't carry burdens of penance, carry burdens of a beat. Thaipusam is a celebration and drummers make music so the devoted can dance. To the crack and thunder of a drum, they dance. They dance and they dance and they dance.

One woman twirls and stumbles in the middle of a circle of people. She sticks out her tongue, eyes wide and wild and seemingly senseless to the world around her. She stops, takes a breath and keeps going. The sun beats down.

Away from the crowd - I am wilting in the heat - a Hindu man asks me what I think of all this. He is the one who explains about penance and washing away sins.

"For me, coming from the West, I have no context for this," I say. "It's madness."

The west coast of Canada is not an overtly religious place. There are probably pockets of faith to be seen, spaces for belief. But they're not very obvious and one would have to go looking. Largely, these places stay out of the light and the public spaces.

But in KL, articles of the people's faith are there to be seen: on heads, in backs and cheeks. Faith, here, is not Paul Simon's "island in the setting sun."

Faith, here, is to be celebrated and worn on the body, a badge of belief with no blood.