Killing Batteries

In Italy “five minutes” means an hour.

[See the full "What I've Learned" list here. Start at the bottom and read up.]

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Take care in Romania when you try to use your Spanish language skills to compensate for your lack of Romanian. The very common word “muy” means “very” in Spanish. In Romanian, “mui” is the infinitive of “to give a blowjob.”

[See the full "What I've Learned" list here. Start at the bottom and read up.]

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My presumably much loved, but rarely commented on series “A Keyhole into Burma” is entering its second week over at Gadling.com. Even the hate mail has been pretty light. If you’re unimpressed, pretend otherwise and leave profound/reverent comments. Grazie.

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Amsterdam prostitutes do not like to have their pictures taken.

[See the full "What I've Learned" list here. Start at the bottom and read up.]

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I discussed it here intermittently all summer and any poor bastard/bastardess that crossed my path in the terrene world couldn’t get me to shut up about it. I was suffering from writer burnout.

I didn’t want to write about Italy. I didn’t want to write about Spain. I didn’t want to write about Spain’s topless beaches. And I really didn’t want to write about writer burnout. But I sucked it up and wrote anyway, because I’m a professional (at least that’s what I tell people).

The problem was an extended interval (like going on two years) of over-work and under-sleep, both of which were exclusively my fault. Each year my sleeping skills drop a little and it’s really starting to harsh my waking mellow. In addition to that deficiency, I was formerly loathe to say ‘no’ to any writing job no matter how time consuming, low paying and not getting me any nearer to meeting Natalie Portman it may have been. I’ve recently taken measures to rectify two of those three predicaments.

I’ve moved back to my cherished hometown of Minneapolis, which incidentally made a good showing earlier this week at the dangerously arbitrary “America’s Favorite Cities” poll conducted by CNN and Travel + Leisure. This brilliant scheme has allowed me to start a regimen where I sleep in the same bed every night. Furthermore, there are no Italian Noise-Making World Champions in my building doing training sessions at midnight, three, five and seven in the morning. Nor are there any insomniac Romanian carpet-whackers, toiling away with their rhythmic, gun-shot sounding pounding just before 7am every Saturday.

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Immigration officials at Heathrow Airport do not like to hear the words “Well, technically I’m homeless.”

[See the full "What I've Learned" list here. Start at the bottom and read up.]

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In 2003 I started to keep a list on my travelogue of the accumulated, hard-won kernels of knowledge that I’d collected while on the road. I abandoned the list in 2004 for reasons that I don’t immediately recall, but it probably had something to do with girls.

I’ve decided to re-start the list here, recycling old entries and adding new ones, in the form of sporadic posts when I feel like it.

Feel free to add your own in the comments sections.

• Do not skip rocks into the sea, while holding a plastic cup of wine.
• Do not sneeze, while holding a plastic cup of wine.
• Do not pee, while holding a plastic cup of wine (ladies excluded).
• Do not run, while holding a plastic cup of wine.
• Do not watch the movie “The Ring,” while holding a plastic cup of wine.
• Do not jump for joy, while holding a plastic cup of wine.
• Do not jump for thrown keys, while holding a plastic cup of wine.
• Do not jump for more wine, while holding a plastic cup of wine.
• Do not walk backwards, at night, on uneven beach, while holding a plastic cup of wine.
• Do not pan cook, with extra grease, shirtless, while holding a plastic cup of wine (once again, obviously, ladies excluded).
• Do not wear the same light blue shirt that you spill wine on, without fail, every single time you wear it, for eight months straight, while holding a plastic cup of wine.

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The first post of my series entitled ‘A Keyhole into Burma’ went up this morning over at Gadling.com. There’ll be one vignette every weekday for the next three weeks, plus a huge, wicked awesome picture gallery. Here’s the RSS feed for the series.

That should get me on the Burma visa blacklist once and for all.

And the hate mail… Oh the hate mail cometh.

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OK, I’m still a little pissed off about Italy’s “new” registration regulations for US tourist (and possibly other nationalities) staying more than eight business days. Part of the reason I’m in a tizzy is that I still can’t find a definitive answer. The US Consular Information Sheet for Italy (dated August 13th, 2007) that was emailed to me conflicts with the Consular Information Sheet on the US State Department website, updated October 11th 2007, which still says that a permesso di soggiorno is only needed for stays over three months.

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As some of you have already read, after nearly four and a half years of balls-out, homeless, clueless, godless travel writing, I have decided to move back to my home town of Minneapolis.

Several people have misinterpreted this development. Though it’s true that I am closer to financial ruin than I’ve been since I finally beat my Star Wars trading card addiction in 1979, I am not returning to Minneapolis to re-enlist into the Federal Reserve System. This move is, in fact, a long term freelance writing power play (as well as furthering my short term goal to re-familiarize myself with the sensation of waking up in the middle of the night, confidently knowing what city/country I’m in and knowing which direction to go to the bathroom).

I’ve come a long way in the past four and a half years, most notably transforming from someone that couldn’t fathom being paid to write to someone who gets indignant when cheap, blood-sucking, S.O.B. publications offer less than 50 cents a word to write.

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