Killing Batteries

Just as an FYI to my groupies and stalkers, I’m going to be without internet access starting the morning of November 30th, through (at least) the evening of December 9th while I’m traveling to and then bobbing around on a smallish (45.7 m / 150 ft long) ‘adventure cruise’ ship off Chile’s Patagonia coast.

The ship has a helipad, jet boats, a Zodiac, a spa and three gourmet meals a day, but no internet. Must’ve been built in Italy.

I haven’t gone this long without internet since before there was internet. I’m a little freaked.

So, there will be no answering of emails offering ridiculously high paying work and travel TV show hosting invitations. However, having accidentally discovered the delayed posting thingie on WordPress, there will be a few posts, so don’t despair. Your unscheduled at-work productivity interruptions will continue as always.

Now, does anyone know anything about fly fishing? They’re gonna make me do that. Can I catch a salmon? I could dig on some salmon right now.

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Even if you have a co-conspirator, even if you spill some, even if you’re celebrating something really awesome, three bottles of wine on a Tuesday night is too much wine.

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

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F*cking Italy!!!

OK, OK… Let’s just calm down and try to discuss this like rational, levelheaded F*CKING ITALY!!!!!

Here’s Italy’s latest piss me off endeavor:

Last April, I rented a car from a so-called “car rental agency” in Florence through a broker web site called Nova Car Hire, to use for my Lonely Planet research trip (I’m omitting the name of the car rental company until the situation has been resolved). The car rental office is located in the historic center of Florence.

For those of you who have not had firsthand, piss me off, Italy driving experience, most cities have restricted areas in the historic center where only approved vehicles can go. This is so the tiny streets aren’t constantly grid-locked, thereby making more room for the double-wide butted tourists to stagger blindly down the street, get in my way and piss me off.

The Italians enforce access to this restricted area by setting up little cameras and shooting photos of license plates as cars enter the area. At the end of the day the newest/dumbest guy at the police station is supposed to sort through these photos and check them against a list of approved cars. Anyone audacious enough to drive into the historic center without permission gets a ticket sent to their home in the mail, but only after deviously waiting seven months so you have no hope of contesting the violation – que piss me off, no?

In the case of my rental car agency in Florence, I was clearly informed that all of their cars had universal approval to drive in the historic center, because if they didn’t no one could ever return their cars. Sounds pretty reasonable and straightforward, doesn’t it? Ah ha! That is where you are wrong idiota! This is Italy! Making sense is no permesso qua! Pissing people off, however, is a national sport!
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It’s looking like this space hotel thing is going to be a reality. And thank Buddha for that. Never mind universal healthcare, we’ve gotta be able to blast a handful of recreational tourists into space a couple times a year. On a completely unrelated, but bitterly sarcastic note, I wonder how many decades of universal healthcare 12 billion dollars in unguarded, contractor Mercedes-buying cash would buy? (Note to self: bookmark for future “What’s Pissing Me Off Today” post.)

All infuriating, aneurism-inducing diatribes aside (Note to self: cease all aneurism-inducing activity until I have health insurance), let’s get to work on how I’m going to be the first travel writer to get a comped room at the Space Hotel.

Just as a reminder to all the hacks and filthy rich “celebrity journalists”, I called dibs on being the first travel writer in space way back in August of ’06, so you all can eat my vapor trail. This gig belongs to Space Cadet First Class Leif Pettersen.

However, there’s the little matter of the 12 million dollar room rate. Admittedly, that’s a mighty big comp. In fact, I think that might roughly equal the sum total of all journalist hotel comps in the history of print media. A bit ambitious I know, but this is outer space, where even a cup of tea with the marketing director is going to hurt some wallets.

So, it’s strategy time. Who do I pitch to? Directly to Mr. Bigelow himself? Or maybe his Space Hotel hospitality manager? And what magazine will hand over that mother of all assignment letters? Will syndicated newspapers that don’t print stories written on the strength of free trips relax their rules for this special occasion or do I need to go into my pocket for the 12 mil to earn their $120 fee like usual? There’s gonna be a lot of free crap solicitation ground breaking being done here. The upshot is these efforts will help pave the way for my seat on the manned space mission to Mars in 2025.
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This is just a link alert for a topical post that I just put up over at Gadling, entitled “Independently produced travel guides – pipe dream or way of the future?”

The post is in honor of Robert Reid’s recently completed free online guide to Vietnam, though I take the opportunity to plug several other free online travel guides, including my own to Romania and Moldova.

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We Americans have a lot of pent up anger. The reasons why this is the case could fill a Michael Moore trilogy, so I’m officially handing that task off to him.

Meanwhile, how’s an ordinary guy supposed to vent this tidal wave of boundless fury, aside from demolishing the occasional pay phone with one’s bare hands? Complain like an early-onset cranky, paranoid old bastard, that’s how.

Accordingly, I’m starting yet another updated-when-I-feel-like-it KB series: “This Is What’s Pissing Me Off Today”. Anything is fair game: News stories, personal offenses, Berliner Schadenfreude, intellectual property thieves, people who don’t signal when they turn left in front of me, you name it.

So let’s get on with the wrath already:
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[Continuing the shameless recycling of my "Don't Go There" series while I drink wine and sleep late, the Monaco installment was written after an October 2003 visit where we were made to feel like lepers, criminals and gypsies.]

I’d heard stories about the nonchalant, frittering of millions of dollars in Monaco for years. Though I’m not normally a supporter of raging materialism, I was nevertheless excited to see the effects of a little wretched excess in the form of fast cars, faster women and yachts so big that their helicopters had helicopters. I never imagined that I’d rate on the Monaco Welcome Scale just above gum on the shoe and just below an elevator fart (as if anyone farts in Monaco).

Our Monaco visit started out on a giddying high note. The first thing my hostel companions and I saw after exiting the lavish, marble festooned train station was a Ferrari that looked like it was about five minutes old. The guy apparently saw us staring because he laid extravagant rubber when the light turned green and gunned the car for a rip-roaring 50 meters to the next stop light. “Four inches” one of my companions muttered.

In the next five minutes we saw two more Ferraris, three Aston Martins and a sea of Mercedes and Porsches. It was flabbergasting and exhilarating. Sadly, Monaco’s allure wilted from there on out, sinking to tedious and then plummeting to tragically hateful with startling speed.
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More senseless football (soccer) related violence in Italy. This time a fan is killed, strangely while sitting in a car. I suppose authorities will dream up some wacky explanation as to how the guy sitting in the car was the most dangerous one at the brawl. Or maybe they’ll blame everything on a nearby dog.

Tit for tat I guess, after a cop was killed while sitting in his car in February when a fan tossed a homemade explosive through the window.

This is just the stuff that makes international news. Smaller, non-fatal skirmishes happen constantly. Pseudo-solutions like stopping games and playing to empty stadiums for a week or two has done nothing to cool things down.

The way I see it, there are only two ways to resolve this issue permanently:

1. Play games to empty stadiums for a decade. Yes, a whole decade. Let the fucking hooligans watch games on TV and tear up their own apartments if they wanna get rambunctious. After 10 years they can reopen the stadiums to fans. By then the current generation of hooligans will have matured a bit (maybe) and the new generation of fans will not have grown up in that atmosphere and won’t be prone to kicking up trouble for the sake of kicking up trouble.

2. Inject valium into every man, woman and child as they enter the stadium.

If they’re gonna act like children, treat them like children.

Discuss.

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[Continuing the reuse of my "Don't Go There" series, the Naples installment was written while I quietly whimpered in a corner of my hostel in November 2003. Unlike Berlin, Naples has apparently gotten worse in the interval since I visited.]

I’d initially only intended to stay in Naples long enough to break the Guinness World Record for Sprinting the Length of a City While Carrying Two Heavy Bags, before diving onto the ferry to Sicily. I’d formulated this plan on the strength of several reliable sources warning me that Naples was an unequivocal shithole and my feelings were that in the previous six months of backpacking Europe, I’d categorically filled my Shithole Quota.

However, in the days before I hit town, a few people had swayed me, enthusiastically ensuring me that Naples had been given a bad rap. I even ran into a native Neapolitan who was very nearly reduced to tears while singing the praises of his home town. So at the last minute, I dipped into my Lonely Planet to sort out accommodations. Things looked up immediately. Lonely Planet raved more ardently about Six Small Rooms, a hostel in the heart of Naples, than any other accommodations options that I had read about previously.

Although Six Small Rooms was within reasonable walking distance of the train station, I had it on good authority that the immediate vicinity around the Naples train station, Piazza Garibaldi in particular, was a free-for-all of thievery, hustlers, junkies and a few entrepreneurs employing a scary combination of all three. Those who weren’t in the aforementioned demographics were selling stuff that was so recently stolen that you could detect what the former owners had had for breakfast.
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[Also posted over at "This Is Why I Love Minneapolis (And Sometimes Saint Paul)", due to cross-over appeal.]

The story of how immigration agents at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport harassed, threatened and defaced the passports of some noteworthy Finnish visitors in September for absolutely no reason is still harshing my mellow.

Here’s the local paper’s account and the coverage over at The Perrin Post Travel Blog.

I’m mortified on behalf of both my city and country. The conduct of these f*ckwits smacks of the amateurish, rent-a-cop antics you’d expect from nightclub bouncers in West Los Angeles. No manners, no reasonable communication, just straight to apeshit hysterics and unnecessary cruelty. I don’t care if Pablo Escobar staggers off the plane with a 30 gallon trash bag of cocaine, a loaded bazooka and a lead for an illegal job vacuuming offices in downtown St. Paul, there’s no excuse for that kind of behavior.

And, as with most gross misconduct complaints like this, you know for every one famous visiting musician that gets a little press over their incident, there’s 20 hapless dupes arriving from Uruguay or Thailand who get detained and bullied for five hours and then tossed out onto the street without so much as cursory explanation or, Buddha forbid, an apology.
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