Letters from Titan

I have now been in Ha Noi for a week. I am less overwhelmed than when I wrote that last post, which, I should note, significantly understated the degree to which I was overwhelmed.

But now I can cross streets (still terrifying), cook good food, work with the money, survive haggling, and even explore.

Today I went to Ngoc Son Temple at Hoan Kiem Lake, after visiting the Old Quarter to get Patty her birthday gift. I am so ridiculously glad that I am living two miles from the Old Quarter. It was the first time I’ve seen tourists since I got here, and I immediately wanted nothing to do with it. People wouldn’t even haggle with me in stores tourists were in, because they were just jumping on whatever price was named, so that was annoying.

What wasn’t annoying was the lake or the temple or the bridge or the park around it, where I had this lovely moment stumbling on a group of people jamming with guitars and a fiddle and lots of people gathered around them randomly to sing along (I have awesome video; what I don’t have is an Internet connection that will let me upload it in any reasonable amount of time).

You know, I picked up guitar again recently because I wanted the experience of communal, casual music-making, which isn’t something that’s been a part of my limited music experience and something that makes me sad to have missed: when I’m in a room with a bunch of people screwing around on instruments for fun, I feel exiled from something that is really a very good fit for me.  So it was nice to stand there and watch people play and sing songs in a language I don’t know, but be able to recognize finger positions and chords. That was a new thing for me, and the moment was perfect, and felt very private despite all the people.

It reminded me a little bit of when I was in Australia and went to a big deal sushi restaurant alone, and got a little bit wrecked off of my first legal glass of absinthe that was mixed with apple juice and shredded carrots. The food and drink were divine, but none of it was a big deal; it was awfully silly and internally self-indulgent, but it was the thing I didn’t know I had gone to Australia to do, but was surely, absolutely and completely, was why I was there.  The guitars and the fiddle might prove to have been that moment here for me.

Meanwhile, even as work and exploration here continues apace, Patty and I are planning our India trip. She’ll be picking me up at the Delhi airport, and then we’ll see Jaipur, Agra and Fatehpur Sikri and spend several days in Delhi while I’m there. It won’t be long enough, mainly since she won’t be leaving India with me, but it’s a much needed reunion, and I should have her back at least relatively soon thereafter.

Of course, I also know I desperately owe you all some pop-culture time. It’s hard, all the way over here, although I confess I have moments where I try to imagine this city through Jack Harkness’s eyes or Blaine Anderson’s. It’s a defense mechanism, of course, the search for a fictional character’s comfort or discomfort with a place, other than my own, but it’s also how my brain works, as someone who both writes and pays attention to stories. I am many people, perhaps too much of the time.

But good topics for writing here do seem at least close at hand suddenly.  Glee has offered up the bizarre possibility of an episode of The Who’s Tommy, which is fascinating and distressing all at once, and almost too juicy not to rub my brain all over. Additionally, I read The Hunger Games on the flight here from Warsaw, and that (and Jennifer Lawrence’s publicity tour dresses), are certainly also worthy of commentary; for a book I felt completely outside of, I was startlingly moved by the language in just a few small passages. It is really, astoundingly, a story of cadences.

So more soon, I guess, from a less real world. But for now, have some images of the very real, but completely dreamy to photograph, Ha Noi.

So, I’m in Hanoi.

I’ve started a lot of emails that way in the last few days, because I haven’t really known what to say after that. There’s really no way to describe how utterly unprepared I was for this part of the trip; I just sort of went, “It’s a work thing, they’ll take care of it,” and showed up, which is high on the list of ill-informed decisions I’ve made.

Our house is near the old quarter, in something called Valley A, which is a warren of narrow, twisting streets accessible only by scooter and on foot.

Let me tell you, if nothing else, Hanoi has given me a very, very healthy respect for the Vespa/scooter/motorbike and everyone’s ability not to actually hit me with theirs. Patty always talks about the innate sense you gain as a New Yorker of how to weave through foot-traffic without crashing into anyone. That skill is trivial compared to watch I watch in action here.

One day, I’ll actually feel confident enough to cross by myself the one major street I have to deal with on my daily travels. For now, I’m happy that I can at least find my way around to necessary destinations now, even if my internal sense of direction is based on things like recognizing certain street dogs, construction sites, advertisements, and the particular sound of one cat’s meow, which has been the only way I can find our house in the dark.

I’d tell you the epic story of how my housemate (who is from HCMC and so is also learning to navigate here) and I got ridiculously lost trying to find the flat late one night after all the lights had been turned off in the Valley, but it’s not very interesting, we just had to get back out and start again, but that cat was very helpful.

The level of sensory input here is higher than I am used to, and it makes it hard for me to focus, but I’m getting better at it. At night, I really, really like it, because things are a bit more mellow and suddenly I can pick out details and spend time on them. During the day, I’m getting there, but the moments where the wind shifts and I can smell plant life and wood fires, food and the lakes, as opposed to traffic and highways are amazing.

Little things are the markedly different from home, of course. Crouching on the floor to cook my dinner or not having a refrigerator, those stand out. But the house stays very cold, and fresh food is available everywhere, so it doesn’t really matter.

The fact that the whole of the bathroom is the shower (no dividers or anything) is unfamiliar too, but I’ve managed not to flood the house several days in a row, so yay me. Never have I ever been so glad that I roll up my jeans though, because it takes a long time for that water to drain. My hipster ways have saved my ass, or at least keep my ankles from being soggy.

Meanwhile, finding ATMs that accept my card has been the most notable small battle, but one that I think is now solved (thank you HSBC).

One thing that’s sort of nice about this experience is that I’m not in any sort of ex-pat community here. It’s just me and my Vietnamese colleagues, who have been gracious and patient with my many confusions and issues (celiac disease is a whole ‘nother thing to navigate here).

I’ll confess there’s a part of me that almost wants to seek out some of the toxic ex-pat drinking culture badness that I know is here for some sort of context of what’s expected of me here, versus what I’m actually doing, but I know that would actually be a terrible plan. And probably a boring one.

I promise I’ll take pictures soon, and figure out how to cross the street, and come up with adjectives. But right now, I’m just here, taking it all in, and figuring out the basics of an experience I never asked to have, but suspect I’m going to be very fond of before it’s all over.

When I was in high school, I wanted more than anything to study abroad for a semester in Berlin. I don’t know why, exactly, because I wasn’t studying German in school or anything, but I wanted to get away from home, and the idea of Berlin was in the air — my mother was being particularly obsessive about German and Austrian art from the periods just before and between the wars at that point, and I was dealing with having a thing for a boy who didn’t even know I was alive by lying on the the floor of my bedroom listening to David Bowie’s “Heroes” over and over. I had it on cassette, and that meant play, stop, rewind, play, as my heart unhealed itself each time it had to wait for the song to that hissing noise of a cassette rapidly winding.

I didn’t get to study abroad though — not in Berlin or anywhere else. The reasons were many: money, my parents not wanting to so let me out of their sight at so young an age, and the fact that we are, or at least my mother is, Jewish (I’m the product of a mixed marriage and religion is deeply complicated in my family). My plan just wasn’t a very comfortable idea for anyone.

And so I did not go to Berlin. But if I had, I would have been there when the Wall came down.

When that happened, we watched it on the news during dinner. I kept expecting to sob into my salad, but I said nothing, eventually turning to my parents and saying, “If you didn’t keep my passport in the safe deposit box I would steal it, and your credit cards and buy a ticket and go right now.”

I was so petulant, and I was so wrathful. And my parents didn’t say anything, they just kept watching the news. I’m grateful, really, that they didn’t laugh in my face and let me have what power I could.

More than twenty years later, it is for me, right now, midnight in Berlin. I landed an hour ago and am currently ensconced in a gloriously comfortable and cheap hotel room a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie. Everything is, already, completely surreal.

For starts, the late plane on a Friday night from Zurich to Berlin is totally a party plane. With no one here bothering to go to nightclubs until well after midnight, people get on the plane a few hours after work, have a few drinks, arrive here, freshen up, and then faintly begin to consider going out (hell, it’s what I’m doing right now).

So my flight was rowdy and featured a very loud conversation about Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga that I couldn’t otherwise understand a word of. But that hardly mattered considering it also featured a drunk gay soccer team coming to Berlin for the weekend to go dancing and visit fetish clubs (no, really, I saw people checking on their high-end latex-wear in their carry-ons).

What was their mild dismay at the pre-flight music, an odd mix of Natalie Imbruglia and Neil Diamond that has perhaps damaged my pop-culture receptor sites for life, evolved into a gloriously angry sing-a-long to “Sympathy for the Devil” once our flight landed and we couldn’t deplane for ages because of a work action at Tegel.

So there we are, on the plane, ready to start our Berlin nights, but there’s no gate, no staircase, no plan for us to deplane, and the flight crew puts the music back on, I suppose to appease us, and then my soccer team is up on their chairs singing along. No one cares.

Well, I care. Because it’s beautiful and, well, bizarre.

Eventually, they get us a staircase, and we deplane onto the tarmac, where the air is full of fine frost and there’s no organization to speak of, and so there I am, my first moment in Berlin, ever, and I am windswept and damp and wandering amongst planes and drunk gay soccer players who are working their way through random two-line snippets of Rolling Stones songs. It is everything I never knew I wanted.

After that, I’m out of Tegel fast, hopping right into a cab and overwhelmed nearly immediately.

Berlin is so many things to me. So many pop-culture moments I never had in a way that’s made any sense. It is watching Christiane F. when I was twelve, and choosing to believe in the giant lie that is “Heroes.”

It is Steve Erickson’s Arc d’X, a novel about the way freedom and love bow to each other and what happens in Berlin on a single day between two millennia that is constructed entirely out of all the moments previously lost to memory.

It is Wings of Desire.

It is names I don’t understand the meaning of but remember from books and stories the whole of my life and that I whispered to myself like talismans the semester I didn’t get to go to Berlin: Alexanderplatz, Savignyplatz, Potsdammer platz.

It’s dark on the drive, and someone on the radio is singing about it being too cold for angels to fly. My chest feels like someone is sitting on it, because every random building I look at that isn’t made of glass makes me feel like I’m in a room where someone recently died — there is a sense of endurance and of witnessing here; how exhausting it must be, I think, to be Berlin.

I sit there in the car that’s sort of swerving wildly for no good reason other than maybe I’m just not used to places that aren’t on grids, trying to come up with these words. The song about the angels keeps going, and I think I could sign what I am feeling, or dance it — this, this, is what all those years of Martha Graham technique were surely for, a way of speaking with wrath and cupped hands and my hollow hips — but I don’t know how to write it.

We pass the Bundesrat, and I think of a hundred things I want to tell Kali for our infinite novel project, and, after a long time, up ahead, I see a poster of a man in a military uniform. That turns out to be Checkpoint Charlie, and there’s a tacky museum across the street just like all the guide books said, and my hotel is just around the corner.

So now I am here, and it’s magic and scary and overwhelming and really, so far, just twenty-plus years of my own history made up in my head and foisted upon this place where the entire 20th century happened. But I am deeply, gloriously moved, and secretly, shamefully grateful I never came here when I was sixteen; I wouldn’t have understood.

Despite my best intentions to only give you one entry per destination on my itinerary between now and mid-April, I think, Berlin, necessarily now demands two. Because this one’s really about me. I’ll see what I can do to make the next one really about the city.