An old woman walked by my cabin in the hallway and motioned for me to follow her down the train. I left my belongings on the seat, hoping that nobody would steal my rucksack. I had nothing of value inside, but the bag itself had garnered me a lot of compliments lately, so I was a bit weary.
This woman was undeniably ancient and Old World, with one of those heavily-lined faces you only see in National Geographic. Probably the type of woman who makes her own shoes and butter and has a pantry stocked full of cabbage. She had on a dark head scarf, and all of her clothes were made out a heavy, coarse fabric that probably could have chaffed all the hair off my body. One of her legs was a good three or four inches shorter than the other, so she had to lurch around with a considerable amount of difficulty. She had an old, knotted-up, crooked, walking stick, like a wizard.
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When it was hot in Korea I would leave my apartment and go down the block to buy a beer or a soda from the old man with no teeth.
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Hungary has some excellent food, especially if you like hearty food full of sausage, potatoes and paprika. It’s the kind of food that kind of sits in your stomach like a rock and you don’t have to eat again until the next day. A lot of times my meals would be served in a frying pan and my waiter would caution me, “Be careful! It’s hot! That’s the pan we cooked your food in.” I often wondered if they even had plates in that country.
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Old fishermen never die. They just smell that way.
In Istanbul, there’s a group of old fishermen who sit on the Galata Bridge all day, pulling fish out of the Bosphorus. Sometimes old women will bargain with the fishermen over their catch, and if the fish is still alive, he’ll bang on the fish’s head with a spiked mallet until it stops wriggling around, then pull a huge knife out of his apron and cut the head off before slicing it open and ripping all its insides out. The old women will pay the fisherman, and she’ll walk away with a big bag of fish heads and guts.
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Saturday, February 23, 2008
An artist friend of mine was hired to make a bunch of big lollipops and teddy bears, and other cutesy kid stuff like that, for a bar mitzvah that has a budget of $10 million. I’ve never been to a bar mitzvah, but this seemed a bit extravagant to me, especially once I heard that they were hiring a group of midgets to play with the kids*. My birthdays have never been that luxuriant. I mean, there’s only so many ways you can drink a bottle of scotch by yourself.
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Saturday, February 16, 2008
My friend the other day was telling me all about her dog she had in high school. It was a little terrier, purebred to be as hyperactive as possible so it could run around all day in the woods chasing birds. Unfortunately, this dog was also clearly a moron.
Maybe it was because the dog was so hyperactive that it had an uncontrollable appetite. One time he ate an entire 12-pack of beer, including the aluminum of the cans and the cardboard of the box. Despite the fact that chocolate is supposedly poisonous to dogs, he managed to eat an entire pan of brownies, and despite the fact that fluoride is supposedly poisonous to everything, he managed to eat an entire tube of toothpaste.
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Thursday, January 3, 2008
When I was in high school I worked at a grocery store with this big, kind of fat, and completely bald guy. His name was Roy.
He was a nice guy, but he was also clearly a little burned out and sometimes had trouble making complete sentences. He said something once about spending most of the 1980s sniffing glue. All that glue had made him a little forgetful, and one time he left the back door open and a raccoon got into the store and ate a couple of dozen boxes of Kashi.
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Monday, December 31, 2007
I was watching an Italian cooking show the other night at a friend’s house, and I’m not exactly sure what the chef was making because I wasn’t really paying attention, but it was basically just a huge pan of boiled cabbage.
I begrudgingly ate cabbage practically every day for over a year when I was traveling and very rarely enjoyed it. For some reason it seems to be the vegetable of choice for most of Europe and Asia. I think it’s also the main reason I was so bloated and gassy the entire time I was abroad, which definitely made the whole trip less fun at times, not just for myself, but especially for other people on crowded buses and trains.
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Friday, December 14, 2007
I started a new day job the other week, and I’ve been preoccupied working there instead of doing more worthwhile activities. I now work in the back room of a high-end kitchenware store for the holiday season. Although it’s not too terrible, I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s exactly like unloading a dishwasher for eight hours in a row.
Although most of the stuff sold there is high quality and durable, unfortunately, like any retail store these days, there’s a fair amount of pretty worthless crap. I made a list of my favorites yesterday.
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Saturday, November 17, 2007
I was taking an overnight train to Warsaw, Poland, killing time by talking to a Ukrainian guy who was in the same cabin as me. He was on his way up to the Baltic Sea to work at a resort for the summer. He was leaving especially early to make sure he was able to find a job once he arrived.
“Never fall sleep on this train,” he was whispering at a volume that was almost impossible to hear. He was somewhat creepy, and missing a fairly large number of knuckles and fingernails from his hands. He clearly must have been pretty clumsy with a band saw at one point in his life. He told me how on this train it was common to be drugged and robbed by thieves who would pump sleeping gas into your compartment at night. “If you begin to fall asleep, leave and smoke a cigarette outside.”
He had a lot of scary stories about overnight trains through Poland. A few years ago he had been on the train when the conductor found a mutilated head in the bowl of the toilet. The police were never able to find out the identity of the head, much less the person who had chopped it off and put it there.
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