Archive for January, 2009

2008-1-28, Lourdes, Midi-Pyrénées, France

“Seven years ago we treated Lance Armstrong at this hospital,” said the anesthesiologist as he felt for a nerve in my shoulder. “He fell during training, it was not… uh… grave… comme est-ce que on dit grave? he asked the nurse.

“Serious” I chimed in.

“Ah, yes. It was not serious.” He pointed to an exact spot just below my shoulder. “I will do the injection right here” he told the nurse, who then applied a wide circle of cold, orange disinfectant.

Next came a small jab.

“This is just for the skin.”

Four minutes later came the serious injection. Thoughtlessly I tilted my head to look.

“No! Don’t move. I am very close to the nerve. If I hit the nerve it will be very bad. Very, uh, serious.”

* * *

Ne bougez pas!” Don’t move.

‘Don’t move’ was the first thing the two skiers said to me. They could see as clearly as me how my left arm was hanging just wrong, which is why, when I had come to my senses just moments before, I sat still, grabbed my left wrist tightly with my right hand so the arm wouldn’t just, well, hang there, and started shouting “Aidez moi! Aidez moi!

The girl who told me not to move took off my helmet very, very gingerly, while her companion zoomed off to (bless his soul) alert ski patrol.

* * *

I’d woken up just before dawn to a view of cloudless dark purple skies and a good five inches of fresh new snow. Hell yes. I got suited up, had my petite dejuener alone in the little old hotel restaurant with it’s 60’s décor, and I hit the slopes. The resort of La Mongie is not huge in terms of vertical drop. The snowline and timberline are about the same here and that seems to constrain local resorts in that dimension. But the crowns of the mountains are rugged indeed, and the resort is spread widely across three bowls under masses of black rocky spires. A great deal of avalanche activity was apparent on the steep slopes above the resort boundary. No ducking under any ropes for me today, I resolved.

It was a big blue-skied fresh powder Tuesday, and the last day, I am confident, that there will ever be a president named George Bush; just kind kind of conditions under which it is profoundly easy to not consider one’s lack of medical insurance. With just a four-hour pass and a big resort to explore I thought it unlikely that I would do the same run twice. But, after a fun ride through the modest terrain park I saw a sweet route over some steep, untracked powder that happened to lead right back to the top of the terrain park. Seemed like good fun, so I was off again.

* * *

The layout the La Mongie terrain park is thus: there are two rails parallel to eachother, both about eight feet long. One is wide and flat on the top. The other is about four inches wide and rounded like a double handrail – which of course it would once have been if entrepreneurialism had not started making such structures specifically for snowboard parks. (High1 even had something shaped like a picnic table made smooth for jumping on and sliding across.) Rails, provided they are straight, are actually easier than they look, so long as you counter your natural instincts and go over them very fast. Angular momentum, you get the idea. Of course, start putting kinks and curves in your rails and the story changes, along with the likelihood of great bodily harm.

Anyway, La Mongie’s rails are straight and true, and were not to be the source of my impending injury.

After the rails are two tables and a quarter-pipe, in series. A quarter-pipe, just so you know, is perhaps better thought of as a half-half-pipe. This one was maybe 12 feet high and shaped like the positive side of an x=y2 parabola. As it’s effectively vertical at the top, the idea is to ride up until one stops – which may of course be in the middle of the air by that point, potentially show off by spinning around or grabbing one’s board, and then to come back down the same way you came up.

The quarter-pipe did not hurt me either.

So now to speak of tables, the source of my most recent and tragic of downfalls. Tables are essentially big piles of snow shaped to have a steep ramp up, a flat bit across the top (hence the name), and then another steep slope back down again. You may wonder why bother, since it is obviously possible to have a jump be just a simple ramp. If you’ve watched ski jumping in the winter Olympics, this is what you’ve seen. The key here is that the slope underneath that jump is really, really steep. After a big jump, one has a damned lot of downward momentum, and it’s pretty important to have ample time and space with which to translate that momentum into forward speed and to do so in a controlled manner. It is, however, impractical, if not impossible, to build an entire terrain park on a slope so steep. The way to build big jumps in a less steep terrain park is then to extend a flat “table” out horizontally after a jump’s ramp and then to drop the snow away at the point in a rider’s trajectory that should roughly be the intersection of air and snow. This subsequent slope for landing can thus be made much steeper than the main slope below.

* * *

On my first run through the terrain park I hit the first table just right, only to land directly on top of some kid’s dropped ski pole. I turned to avoid said kid on his way to picking up said ski pole and shed too much speed. The second table looked quite big, and I felt I was going too slow to clear the flat part on top. I veered around the jump, hit the quarter pipe, and was on my way.

My second time through the park I made sure to have plenty of speed when hitting the second table. Turns out, the jump was somehow not so big as it looked. I flew and flew, while beneath me first the table top, then the whole landing just glided on by. I landed upright, but I’d missed the landing so the slope was too flat and, well, gravity is a real bitch. I caught en edge an thwack! all that force went straight into my left arm.

I flipped around instinctively, stopped, sat up, gathered my senses. My arm was wrong. It was too long and it was just, kind of, hanging there.

I grabbed my wrist firmly and Without any further thought: “Aidez moi! Aidez moi!”

* * *

“You still have the smile,” remarked, in English, the first ski patroller to show up after that skier had gone to alert them.

“What else should I do?” I am in fucking shock, dude.

There’s no point in freaking out after horrible things happen. Immediately before or during a catastrophe, maybe. But not after. We engaged in idle chitchat while waiting for the snowmobile. I kept opening and closing my left fist, afraid that I might soon not be able to do so.

Intriguingly, I’d been struggling to speak French the past few days, not having practiced the language in years. But sitting there, clutching the absurdity of my new disfigurement, the vocabulary was just flowing on out. My memory had been somehow jump-started. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken French so well. There was, though, the notable exception of the names of letters when they asked me to spell my name and address. Then again, I’m not sure I ever bothered learning those in French.

The second ski patroller took it upon herself to give me an emergency sling and to take a closer look. As she unzipped my jacket I looked away proclaiming that I did not wish to see. She enthusiastically agreed that I should not look.

“I think it’s not broken. Just dislocated,” she opined, “mais, je ne suis pas médecin!

I wanted to believe her anyway, the way it was just hanging like that.

It was at least another five minutes until “le scooter” came. I do not imagine le scooter is how one really says snowmobile in French – but it was a common word and the word for now. It was not, however, the word of the day:

“Fuck.

“Fuck.

“Fuck.” I found myself mumbling repeatedly. “Aaaaauuurmmghh… fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

Those were five very long minutes under that bright blue sky and inspiring crown of Pyrenean peaks. Skiers periodically rubber-necked by. Whatever wonderful chemicals the shock had flooded into my brain were rapidly wearing off.

“Aaaaauuurmmghh… fuck” it sure was

“fuck” starting to

“fuck!”

fucking hurt.

The first ski patroller chuckled. “Yes,” he said in English, “exactly. ‘Fuck’ is the word for today! Fucking sheet!

* * *

The ride down the groomed ski runs on “le scooter” was not nearly so painful as the ride in “la ambulance” which, I was surprised to see, was actually just a black taxi with “AMBULANCE” decaled on the side. The meter was running.

The road back to Barrèges, which had seemed so short the day before, was suddenly much more curvy and unspeakably bumpier. I clutched my left wrist. The driver berated me for not having insurance. Fuck, lady, I get it. I politely agreed that I was an idiot.

Barrèges’s cabinet medical is a small office right next door to the old hotel with 60’s décor that I’d just spent the night in. There was a Dutch woman inside. She was holding a baguette, so I thought she was French. She took my snowboard inside for me after the “ambulance” driver left it outside and drove off without charging me. (Though that might be included in the bill sent to me by the ski resort, assuming that they did manage to get my name and address right and do bother to charge me.)

There was a sign on the wall, in Spanish, saying “This is a private medical clinic. You can pay immediately with VISA. You will be given an invoice for your insurance in Spain.” The doctor came in. She sat next to me right there in the waiting room and took off the emergency sling. Well practiced, she helped me take off my ski jacket in a way that did not hurt at all. Her eyes widened. She pointed at the bulge below my shoulder, now obvious under my shirt sleeve.

Qu’est-ce que c’est ça?

“That’s my arm.”

She gasped. “We need to make an x-ray. Now.”

Seconds later there it was, right on the screen: the bone in my arm was completely snapped in two. No wonder my arm was hanging wrong and strangely too long.

Before.

“You need surgery. I am calling the ambulance.” I was headed to the nearest hospital, in Lourdes, and this time it was the real deal. It went “weeeeeeee-ooooooooo-weeeeeeee-ooooooooo” like French ambulances should.

* * *

I had to piss. The nurse came back with a weird plastic bottle that fit between the legs. It had a nice wide opening and a flat bottom and the shape was such that there was even no splashback. The nurse took the bottle and changed me into some kind of sterile surgical paper underwear. They were awfully tight. I reached down for a much needed readjustment. My hand bumped something. That’s odd! The nurse had left something on my stomach. I picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy, and warm, and, damn that feels like a human hand. I lifted the sheet. It was my hand. But that surely was not right! I could still feel my arm. The top, broken bit was still resting on a pillow and the lower part was still lying across my stomach. Both my eyes and my right hand, which was clearly holding my left arm up in the air, disagreed.

I tried to move my fingers. While my brain still imagined it could still feel a hand where a hand had been, it did not give any signals of that hand moving. This, at least, agreed with my other senses. It was kind of gross to hold my own, dead hand. I gently put it back and tried not to think about it.

The trauma surgeon came by and introduced himself. In good English he described our two choices: either open me up along the fracture and put me back together right there by attaching a metal plate, or, cut two little holes at my elbow and shove a couple rods up all the way up to hold the bits of bone in place so they might then fuse back together. The second, he said, was a much harder operation, but would be better in the long run. I told him I fully trusted his decision and to do as he pleased. He said I was lucky that they could schedule the operation for that same evening and wandered off.

Lying as I was, I could just see a piece of sky out the window. As that piece of sky started darkening, I considered that there was no TV in the room and that I would soon be missing the hope-and-changefest which would have been on at 6:oo p.m. here. Some nurses came by with a wheelchair, only to load it up with the pile of stuff that had been dumped in the corner of the room by the paramedics: my snowboard, my backpack, and the pile of snowboarding clothes that had earlier been stripped off me. They said they were taking it up to ‘my room.’

Time ticked by. I could do very little but imagine over and over again the act of cutting my arm open and shoving metal rods in it. Lying alone, staring at the sky and missing Obama’s inauguration, I wanted nothing more than to just get the damned thing over with. The worst thing is to have something frightening be about to happen, to know that it is inevitable, and to have enough time to turn it around and around in your head, exaggerating all the worst parts of it.

When a nurse finally came to check on me, I tried hard to explain this psychological phenomenon to her in French. She just gave me a compassionate look and said I’d better tell the anesthesiologist, he could give me something to make it go away.

I didn’t have to. They soon came and transfered me to a rolly-bed. It was time.

Lourdes has a relatively small hospital, but they somehow still found lots of corridors and double swinging doors to roll me through while a team of medical folks trotted along with me, talking hurriedly and in serious tones. After one last set of swinging doors we arrived in the operating room. I was hoisted onto another bed and green blankets were pulled up to my chest. People in blue suits with blue mouth covers and blue hats furiously adjusted a many armed monster of bright lights with diffusion covers on them, they were just like the light hanging over the chair at the dentist’s. Other people in other blue suits rushed in and out, pushing and pulling tables and trays of this and that.

There was a commotion to my left. To my surprise and amazement, I saw that someone had placed my left arm along a skinny metal table to the side, and various people were moving it a little this way, a little that way and doing the same with another metal arm hanging down from above, this time with an x-ray apparatus on the end. The surgeon came in with an assistant carrying a lead blanket. As this was laid over my mid-section it seems to me the surgeon said something about always using protection, but I wasn’t not sure if this was meant to be a joke. They made a test x-ray then moved something, either my arm or the x-ray apparatus, I couldn’t tell, and then ran another x-ray. Someone pronounced this satisfactory.

I did not like that strange arm. It lead away from my body in just the way that an arm would were it attached to me. But my arm was still lying across me, where it had always been! So that must not be my arm. This is really messed up. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about it.

Much to my delight, someone replaced my arm to the position in which my brain had still been sensing it to be all along. There was further scurrying and readying. Another arm-table was brought out, this time for my still-feeling right arm. A drip was put in and a great many sensors attached. The scurrying died down. The surgeon and three or four other people assembled on my left. I saw that my left arm was pulled back onto the other arm-table. I could not feel it, of course, so it only occurred to me after a few moments that I was lying cruciform.

I watched an assistant slathering that strange, dead arm in orange disinfectant. I did not like to watch this.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

What is that sound? I had to look. From my angle of repose I could not see too well.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

Someone was dragging something along it. They’re shaving me, I realized. She could even cut me, and I wouldn’t know!

Oh, right. That’s the point. Again I closed my eyes and tried not to think about it. A sheet was thrown over my head. Soon thereafter I could not particularly breathe. An older male voice pointed this out, a younger female voice apologized very quickly and the sheet was lifted a few inches away from my face.

It’s starting, and they aren’t going to let me watch! An instant later I decided that had been a very stupid thought. I did not want to watch at all. I did not much want to listen either, and I thought it would not have been a bad idea for them to give me earplugs as well.

I don’t recall hearing the initial incisions, but the sound of a drill working its way through bone was quite clear. I can’t say I understood too much of the specialized surgical French being spoken, but a few things were pretty obvious:

“OK. Push… slowly. Slowly…”

“To the left. Non! I said to the LEFT!…”

Merde! Merde! Take it out. Try again…”

Thankfully, such statements were interspersed with the occasional:

Voila! C’est parfait…

Or at least:

C’est bien, that’ll work.”

I learned some new words too, like the word for hammer in French (marteau). It’s close enough to Spanish that I figured it out right away when I heard the surgeon asking for one. My inference was quickly confirmed by a loud, unmistakable tapping sound.

I had nothing to look at but a bed sheet a few inches from my face and no way to ignore what I was hearing. I started reciting Lewis Carrol poetry in my head, desperate for a distraction. An assistant checked on me, “vous êtes bien monsieur?

“Yeah,” I told her, “but I wish I didn’t have to listen!”

The surgeon replied, in English “I’m sorry but this the more difficult operation. It is very technical, but it’s best.”

This I interpretted as ‘I know. So shut back up, we can’t have you squirming!’ so I just said “no, no! I understand. Take your time, I trust you!” And I shut back up.

Worryingly, after some time, and I have no idea how long – hours, it seemed – I began regaining a bit of feeling around my shoulder. I was soon aware of a lot of pushing and tugging. By then my ghost arm no longer felt like it was still lying across my stomach, but rather like it was floating up from my body. It felt as if I was submerged and had just relaxed the arm completely. Rationally I knew it was not so, but I really could feel my left arm, and it really was floating in midair.

I resolved not to say anything about regaining some feeling in my shoulder unless it really started to hurt, which it actually did at one point when the surgeon started shaking my arm violently, or so it seemed. I said, in French, “I felt that. It hurt!”

One of the assistants freaked out, peered under the sheet a bit, “What? It hurt? Where? Tell me!”

But the surgeon interjected, in English, “when did it hurt.”

“Just now, when you were shaking my arm.”

He translated this into French for the assistant.

“You can relax, Mr. Skory. The game is over. We are done.”

I understood that he’d been giving it one final test to see how well the rods would hold.

All I managed to say was “Oh. Good. Thank you.”

They took the sheet off my head. My arm looked about the same and there was hardly any blood. I was cleaned me up, the incisions bandaged, and an immobility harness was strapped on me – the same one I am wearing right now. They tore off the various sensors that had been stuck to my chest and my right arm, and then put in a catheter to drip anesthesia into the nerves controlling my arm. This kept me from feeling much of anything in there for the next couple days.

I was transfered to a rolly-bed, rolled back through swinging double doors and corridors, put in an elevator, and brought to a big room that already had my stuff in it. I was thirsty as hell. I was not well hydrated while snowboarding, and they wouldn’t let me drink anything before the surgery. Eventually I was brought water, and dinner too.

French hospital food turned out to be pretty tasty, except that they kept giving me the exact same soup.

* * *

I ended up spending two days in the hospital. They wanted to keep me another day, saying I was not ready for the pain if they took the catheter out of my arm. Somehow I convinced them that I really would prefer to dull the pain with pills in a hotel room rather than pay for another day of hospitalization. As it turned out, I do not have to pay for the operation, but there is a flat rate for the hospitalization of about €700 per day. About US$2000 for this kind of surgery is a bargain, really. But if I can avoid paying another €700 I think I can damn well deal with the pain!

Being that I was alone, broken, and somewhat helpless, a social worker found a hotel room for me near the hospital, and a nurse to visit me every couple days to change my bandages (and help me wash my back). Tomorrow morning will be a week since they released me, and I have an appointment with the doctor for some x-rays and an evaluation of my progress.

He might even let me leave Lourdes, though I’m not so sure if I can afford to risk trying to heal without the spirit of St. Bernadette so near.

After.

Monday, January 19, 2009, Barrèges, Haute-Pyrénées, France

The French for hitch-hiking is “faire du stop,” and even with a nearly 6-foot long snowboard it was relatively easy to do so this morning. That is until, sadly, I was unable to get a ride over the Col (Pass) du Tourmalet. This was not for a lack of generosity on the part of French motorists, however: “c’est fermé, too much snow, avalanches, that sort of thing,” informed me my ride, a middle-aged French man on his way for an afternoon of skiing.

“Is it possible to hike over the pass?” I asked, not particularly intending to try. We had just pulled into Barrèges, the little village just before the ski resort of La Mongie which is, it turns out, the end of the road until Spring. In response to my question he laughed, and abruptly pulled back into the road.

“Let’s go up the road a bit and then I’ll come right back down into town, ok?” Zooming off already, that was clearly not much of a question.

He asked, “you know the Tour de France? I hear many Americans don’t care much about cycling.”

I confirmed by saying that I indeed didn’t care too much about cycling. But I assured him that I’d watched the Tour de France a few times.

“Well, the Col du Tourmalet is maybe the most difficult pass in the race!” He pointed up the road, made a thwooping sound, and swept his finger back down the valley. “Lance Armstrong” (and do be sure to read that name in the strongest of French accents) “descended down this same road. You know Lance Armstrong” (remember, accent) “right? I hear some Americans don’t know him…”

“Yeah, some probably don’t. But I know of him, yeah.”

We agreed he was a very good cyclist, and a liar for planning to ride again. I was not surprised to hear that the French are getting very bored with him winning.

The discussion of cycling ended as we came around a slight bend and the narrow alpine valley turned immediately into a high expanse of ice, rocks, and snow. We’d reached the base of the resort, about two miles from Barrèges. He pointed at what looked like the end of a narrow ski run. “That,” he said, “is the road to the pass and that,” he waved vaguely at the ridge high above, “is the pass.”

It was a very effective way to convince me not to try hiking over the mountains. I didn’t much need the convincing, but I thanked very much for the ride. He dropped me off back in the village only to turn right back around towards the resort.

Looking at the road map of the Pyrénées that I bought only this morning I feel (somewhat) justified in not quite taking these mountains for what they’re worth. The map shows Tourmalet Pass at 2,115 meters. In the Sierra, that’s an altitude at which things only start to get interesting – not to say anything of Tibet. But for whatever reasons of climate and latitude, treeline in these parts is probably only about 6,000 feet. The Pyrenees jut up very abruptly from the green pastoral hills to their North. By the map they are clearly not the biggest of mountain ranges, so my expectations had them far less steep and pointy than they have turned out to be.

Spiky as the peaks are, the valleys are deep and green, and unlike anything in the American West, dotted with little ancient villages. Those near ski resorts, such as Barrèges, have converted to ski shops, restaurants, inns, and real-estate offices. But the stone buildings still look centuries old – and many of them likely really are. It is strikingly different from American ski towns, built after ski resorts, with their homogeneous over-sized condos and slushy snow in the parking lot stripmalls.

I’ve decided to stay in Barrèges tonight. Rather than see myself thwarted by the snow up there, I hope to spend tomorrow morning sliding down it before taking off in the afternoon on my way South and East, should anyone be so kind as to faire me du stop. I’m hoping to pop down into Spain and across to the Principality of Andorra, where the best Pyrenean skiing is said to be found.

I’ll check on the passes better this time.

Mon., Jan 12, 2009, Reykjavik, Iceland

The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Eaten
“Wanna try it?” asked the fish monger.

“Uh… ok.” I respond with a mixture of caution and intrigue.

“Brace yourself.” Commented the Icelandic lady standing next to me at the Hákarl counter in the food section of the Reykjavik’s indoor weekend market.

Her British companion expressed interest as well, but she refused.

“Don’t smell it!” our fish monger friend advised us, strongly.

::fuzzpic-right(“Iceland/thumbnails/IMG_6385.jpg”,”So very much Hákarl.”)::
I didn’t. I just took the sample of rotten shark off the tooth-pick and started chewing. Hey! It’s not so bad, I thought at first. Really it just burned so much that I couldn’t taste it. As the aromas spread to my nasal passage and the back of my throat, everything burned there too, for a few instants. After the burning wore off the taste came on like a deluge of putridness. The shark tasted more like urea than I imagine urea would ever have tasted had I ever had the cause to imagine the taste of urea.

“Now you can smell it,” he said, smiling, and held out the tupperware yet two-thirds full of sample-sized Hákarl chunks. It does smell worse than it tastes.

I feel no need to ever eat that again, but even knowing what I know now I would try it again for the first time.* *(This is of course a hypothetical impossibility, so please indulge me by making up something to do with time-travel or [¿¿tele-oleathy??].)

“So how is it made?” I asked.

“We bury it in the ground for three months,” was his simple answer. Apparently it is actually poisonous were they not to do so, rather than just very convincingly poisonous-tasting.

Hot Water

This is a mostly-barren volcanic rock in the North Atlantic. Now that I’ve seen this place I can really understand why the Vikings once had to get so creative as to bury something poisonous in the ground and check back a few months later to see if it’s not poisonous anymore.

::fuzzpic-left(“Iceland/thumbnails/IMG_6374.jpg”,”Hot springs in the middle of town.”)::
Now they grow their own tomatoes, in greenhouses heated with geothermal water and lit during the long nights and overcast days with almost-free geothermal electricity. It’s not just the greenhouses, but nearly every home in Reykjavik is heated with geothermal water, pumped straight out of the earth and into your radiators and showers. People don’t buy water-heaters here – they’re living on top of one. You get used to the sulfur smell after a few showers, trust me.

The cold water tap comes straight from the ground too, and in the case of public water fountains, it does so all day long. 24/7 superbly delicious and pure spring water burbles out whether you want to drink it or not.

::fuzzpic-right(“Iceland/thumbnails/IMG_6418.jpg”,”Driving by a big geo-thermal power plant.”)::
It’s not just geothermal water heating homes, but ocean water heats the whole island. Thanks to the Gulf Stream it was warmer when I arrived in Reykjavik than when I had left New York. There wasn’t even any snow save on the distant ridge across the harbor.

Locals, and younger ones at that, regaled me with stories of how much colder the winters used to be, something I’m sure you’ve heard to if you’ve traveled anywhere non-equatorial in the past few years. Apparently centuries ago it has been much warmer and the ancient Icelanders had a nice spell of successful agriculture.

Hellvítas Fokking Fokk

If I was more of a gambling man, I might start buying up future farmland and wait for global warming. Nearly free water, heat, and power are quite appealing, as is Iceland’s Nordic-style market socialism. Free education, health care, liberal social values, etc., lead to one of the highest qualities of life in the world. In recent history all this has been available with taxes quite low relative to the large Scandinavian countries as well. But now that the Icelandic economy has crashed and the treasury is bankrupt, Icelanders are very worried about all these nice things going away. For six months after losing one’s job the government used to commit to paying 50% of ones paycheck. This sounds very unlikely, and the many young, unemployed people I met with immediately plans to head overseas know it well. Unemployment is shooting very quickly beyond 8% at the same time as the government is running out of money. The exchange rate has plummeted by half in a year, and inflation soared.

“Iceland is small, so it can crash very quickly. But, similarly, it can recover much more quickly than other countries,” an optimistic Icelander explained to me, “actually, it’s good. The crisis will make us more creative. All of our best, most successful companies were started during the last crisis, in the nineties. This crisis will lead to political reforms too. So it’s an opportunity too.”

Many Icelanders are very interested in that question of social reform, but not necessarily so optimistic about the current situation. I saw one of the very friendly Icelanders I met on Saturday night presented with a shirt from another friend. On the shirt was written “Hellvítas Fokking Fokk!” A phrase you should be able to more or less figure out yourself, it has become quite famous in the past weeks. For several past Saturdays a motley crowd of students, radicals, unemployed, and grandmothers have been demonstrating in front of the parliament building. Recognizing the face that none of them really knew what they were protesting, a young man (friend of the friend of the guy with the new shirt) simply scrawled “Hellvítas Fokking Fokk!” on a large sign and held it out in the crowd. The next day he was all over the newspapers, and the sense of panic, outrage, and uncertainty felt by Icelanders was immortalized in those three words.

Utsala Utsala Utsala

The economic collapse is only obvious in a few ways, such as the few large construction projects on the Reykjavik periphery obviously halted indefinitely. Very noticeable are the number of “Útsala” signs in every downtown boutique. Previously the most expensive country in the world, many fancy shops are selling luxury goods, considering the new exchange rate, at well less than they must of paid for them. But a stroll in the evening, or a night out in the bars, and Icelanders certainly do not seem depressed. Nearly every beautiful young person was out bumping, griding, and buying expensive drinks when I was quite ready to quit and stumble back for the night. I’d assumed it was around 2:00 in the morning and accepted that I was just a pansy to be heading to bed. Much to my shock, I got in and saw the clock: 5:00 a.m. On the walk home I’d even seen bars that still had lines to get in.

Dear Iceland, you have lived up to your reputation for being fokking hardcore. Rest easy, your friend, Adam Skory.

Fri., Jan. 9, 2009, Flying Somewhere Just South of Greenland

New York looks like it does in the movies, and I know you’ve seen the movies. You’ve probably also been there yourself, so I will not bother describing it.

But a few things were interesting to me:

* It takes damned long to get around. I always pictured New York as this super-dense pile of sky-scrapers with nothing too far apart, like some kind of anti-LA. In fact, even most of Manhattan is still a sprawled out American metropolis and riding the subway for 2 hours to meet a friend is not unheard of.
::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6241.jpg”,”Subway.”)::

* The subway is old. In China nothing is old unless it’s really old. I spent several happy weeks riding Beijing’s various spotless and modern new subway lines mere weeks after they’d opened. The New York subway, on the other hand, is cramped, creaking, and has almost no escalators. The tracks are usually full of some sort of strange liquid apparently attractive to rats. There are narrow steel support beams everywhere and station names written by hand in little blue on white tiles.

* Time Square was very underwhelming. Just kind of looks like your average major intersection in Seoul, just it’s been in more bad movies.
::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6238.jpg”,”Meh.”)::

* You have to get scanned, x-rayed, and looked at suspiciously to board the Liberty and Ellis Islands Ferry. Clearly, the terrorists have won. There is a very detailed and thoughtful museum at Ellis Island with far less unnecessary patriotic sop than might be expected – though how our past reflects on our current immigration policy is left for the visitor to conclude.

* New Yorkers are very friendly.

* Many Californians seem to find life in New York difficult and unhappy.

* I been a few places, and New York is without a doubt the most diverse place on the globe. Maybe someday I’ll try my hand at being unhappy there for a while, if for nothing else than to try a different ethnicity’s cuisine everyday for a year.

::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/images/IMG_6282.jpg”,”Yay America.”)::

Monday, January 5, 2009, Rolling through the Hudson Valley, New York

Dearest Weblog,

It’s been ever so long since we last corresponded. I’m riding a train in New York now, and rail travel made me think of you. The East Coast sure is a strange place. By now I’ve been to both Europe and Asia more than I’ve been to the East Coast, and last week was my first time ever to New York City – layovers of course excluded.::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6162.jpg”,”Albany Amtrak Station.”)::
Things are similar here to California, more so than, say, Kansas. But something is still just kinda off about this place. People speak about the same as I do and even tell the same jokes, but then they talk about things like turnpikes. (Why “turnpike”? I imagine some sort of spirally roadway with gypsies careening hither and thither.) The architectural ambiance here is old, brick, and less than earthquake-ready. People dress kinda different and care about hockey. Snow is not a fun thing to play on in the mountains, but instead a nuisance on the city streets. There are pizza places on every block and none of them have Parmesan cheese.

::fuzzpic-left(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6132.jpg”,”No! No! Car wash til Brooklyn. Brooklyn!”)::
New York is my first stop on my scenic Eastward journey towards starting a job, I hope, in the Netherlands. I have accepted a formal job offer, but the bureaucracy involved with getting my Dutch work permit is, appropriately, excruciatingly slow. All I can do for the moment is wait, and waiting any longer in Berkeley would be far too stagnant.

::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6161.jpg”,”Gene has his laptop too.”)::
I’ve got my laptop, my snowboard, a few changes of clothes, a ticket via Iceland, and a Eurail pass. Everything else I’ve shipped to the house of my friend’s parents’ friends’ cousin’s son, who (if he really exists) happens to live in the town of Nijmegen, where I will (again, I hope) be working for the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics..

For now, New York is not just on the way, it’s full of old friends. Since I’ve been traipsing about the Far East, a great number of my friends have moved out here in the meantime, and they were all due for a visit. My goal has been primarily to spend time with friends long-missed, and I have not yet done much of touristing value beyond a trip up to Albany, from which I’m now returning. I’m 20 minutes out of Penn Station and I’ve got three more days in NYC. I suppose I’ll try to buy a hot dog on the street and take pictures of the Statue of Liberty of something.