MARRAKESH, WE GO! SOMETIME, THIS SPRING. OKAY? I GET TICKET.

WE GO! OKAY?


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/11/11/travel/1111-36Hours_11.html

Congrats!

I was headed to Morocco in 1967 but never made it. I prepared by taking a French class and getting my ear pierced. Was gonna slum it on a tramp steamer and upon arriving in Marrakesh I would be met by a couple junkie friends that hung around with William Burroughs. Instead I wound up running from the cops all over America and making radicalism and acid a popular way of life. I wish I'd made it to Marrakesh.

When you're there see if it's still possible to find one of those leather "seed bags" the farmers used to sow their fields. They were incredibly elaborate leather weaving and made beautiful shoulder bags. I had one that cost about $1.00 and would probably sell today for a few hundred.

My friend was called the Tiba because he was so tall. He got himself thrown out of the country for taking acid in the King's pleasure garden. He always stayed in the Medina even though back then they warned westerners to never go there because it was so dangerous. Another example of people not realizing what assholes they were and what the natural consequences of being that way are. If you were cool, the Medina was the best place to be.

Enjoy Morocco and if you find an opium den still open to westerners, think of me and how I long to end my days in just such a place.

wow what a great story david! well it's still months away, i'm not leaving the tropics in the wintertime ever again. but today i bought a ticket for kuala lumpur! only 225usd, i'm leaving next thursday for a week. it will hopefully be epiphanic (is that a word?) seeing as it will be my first time visiting the place i spent a year planning on before i switched on a dime at the last moment and came to viet nam instead! it certainly wasn't the sickening advertising jingle of theirs, it was thai air asia's awesomely el cheapo fare prices.


going to go see penang, and possibly singapore depending on how the money gets spent. funny, until this morning it didn't look like i was going anywhere at all for tet, and was going to settle for buying a new macintosh computer, but when i popped into airasia's office this morning the cost of the flight was so inviting i just plopped down the money without giving it much thought. so here i go! lol.

i'll be posting pix here long as my shitty camera works and the interweb isn't too dear down there.

right now i'm just a bag of shite with my work schedule, which thanks god ends on wednesday, and now i hear ends on tuesday since the kids will have a fun day on the last day, which i'm not obligated to attend!


it's going to be a grand old time! i hope.

Have a Great Time! It sounds like an exciting place to get away to for holidaze. You'll be very close to where all the 7+ earthquakes happen and the source of the big tsunami. I was thinking about Malaysia a few days ago and it occurred to me it sounded like French for Bad Asia LOL. I'm sure it was meant in some punk rock sense of being way cool. Kuala Lumpur is a huge city, bigger than Toronto I think and probably even cleaner. I hear it's so strict you can be arrested for not washing your car or ironing a crease in your trousers. I wonder if they have opium dens there too? Probably have to go to Shanghai for that. I hope you can post photos, I love your point of view, it's so human.

Have a wonderful time! I really am happy for your good fortune. You are deserving of such marvels in your life because for you they expand your already considerable grasp of the human condition. You are indeed a teacher and these are the life lessons of your graduate school.

Check out the formerly world's largest building while you're there. I'm sure you can see it from anywhere in the city. It's a twin towers just like the WTC only bigger and looking very Gaudi. When Bush budgeted $2 Billion Dollars for a new embassy in Iraq it was noted that the then world's largest office building in Kuala Lumpur was for sale for a bit less than that. Perspective... I guess it proves that KBR and Halliburton weren't involved in building it.

Enjoy Tet and come back safely to the rest of your story.

lol, you're thinking of singapore, where i was actually inquiring about, but kl is like 100usd less to get to. singapore isn't 'that way' anymore, and gotten itself some better fitting panties in their bid to be a 'global city'. still very uptight by all reports, bigger than ever, the biggest seaport in the world, it's only a 5 hour bus ride but i'm probably going to check it out, the vietnamese are gaga over singapore, they love that modern shit.

but kl, well it should be very interesting at the least.





penang should be a nice few days too. i only have seven. i have no plans naturally. probably will end up all seven in kl, it's a big city too. but penang's apparently a must for the malaysia tour thing. not like i've ever really managed that sort of trip!

fuckin grad skool eh! a friend was telling me i might be wasting my time going back for a degree, and i agree in many ways, i feel the whole idea has been a succubus for the last number of years. i still feel though in this line of work that not much else can grant the ease of doing it anywhere i want.

i don't know yet. but i'm going forward with it anyway and not worry too much if i let it go halfway through again. you need credentials to sell though. even though i don't have much respect for them, and know that getting them won't pay for themselves for decades. buddy's like: you're going to put yourself through that 4 year straitjacket to be able to earn two dollars more than you get now?


and i'm like


well i got this other idea i've been playing with a few yaws now too, if writing a guerrilla ethnography of some of the poor women i deal with regularly, making biographical/ethnological profiles of them and packaging it up. i reckon it could at least be a magazine article, or a series, but this friend of mine,

a local, he's actually an mba student but it's totally not his bag and is much more inclined to social work. anyway, i was telling him about this, and asked if he would help out a few hours a week, conducting interviews in tieng viet and translating for me, just talking with people who know me and are comfortable with me. we relate every day but of course not much linguistic like, lol.

well he was totally keen on it! we'll go visit my ladies with a recorder and he will ask a series of questions for me and we'll get inside their lives, visit their homes and meet all their people kind of thing, and write and take pix where appropriate. i told him i'll call him co-author. he's really congenial and i just know it would be in the very least a lot of fun. and i would pay him and my ladies a stipend at any rate if the gig made no money.

yah, but the premise would be anthropological, and they would be treated as studies as a means to enlighten and inform and entertain along semi-social sciencey lines. sounds cool eh? topic is women and poverty in district five, where i work.

we'll be talking about it over the email for awhile, i'm busy with work and he's back in skool next month. but this has a really good feeling, i've never considered finding someone who would actually be fitted to help out like this!


and if i can flesh it into something real, getting something like this published would be an excellent substitute over having proper 'credentials' in my line!

thinkin big eh. whine not! lol.

Your ethnological study sounds like a great idea, too bad you can't include Chaiyah in it LOL

Have fun on the trip and definitely check out that Golden God House in Penang.