So, enough personal foolishness; back to the trip:
Following what most guidebooks recommend, I hit the Taj Mahal (attractively pronounced "Taj Mel" by the locals) a little after dawn, before the balmy air in the ancient military city of Agra thickened to a hearty stew of celestial heat and earthy odors. It was tough not getting people into the shots, considering every other gringo seemed to follow the same guidebook advice. Still, I managed to capture an infantesimal degree of the wonder and awe induced by early morning sunlight striking a structure as magnificently designed as the Taj, a confection of marble as intricately woven as lace. Indeed a monument to eternal love. Enjoy.
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Yesterday, I accepted a job with a high school in Brasília, the famously-planned capital of Brazil, starting in January. No, it's not São Paulo, my favoritest city, but I'm pleased with the move for several reasons:
It's still Brazil and most of the 2.6 million people, Brazilians.
I'll have a steady paycheck, immediately, with bonuses and an apartment included.
I'll have my two months in the summer and month at Christmas for travel.
I'll have much less social activity to distract me from writing.
There are 91 embassies and 9 major universities in the city—there will still be a social life and plenty of cultural activities.
I can fly to São Paulo in 90 minutes, dozens of times a day (I see monthly raids to SP in my future).
There are daily nonstops to Lisbon and Atlanta.
After a couple years, it will provide me the financial cushion to write full-time.
So...Brasília it is. Holla!
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Today, I'm taking my last transoceanic flight of the RTW, leaving Kuala Lumpur at midnight and arriving in Los Angeles at 10am, via eight hours in Seoul. Total travel time: 25 hours. Because of a hook-up, I'm in business class. But watching this commercial, Korean Air even makes their economy service seem appealing:
Then, there's this enticing ad for their Seoul-Los Angeles-São Paulo service. Tell me you won't wanna be on the next flight down:
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We interrupt Fly Brother's Round-the-World Adventures for this important existential rumination:
Back in March, while finishing up my fourth year of living and working in Colombia, I was struck by a post-quarter-life crisis of modest proportions, elucidated not quite succinctly in this long but engrossing post, "Fly Brother and the Curse of the Aimless Intellectual." Basically, I had no idea of which of many paths to take: writing full-time and working part-time, working full-time and writing part-time, traveling indefinitely, loafing creatively, etc., etc. Eventually, I settled on traveling around the world for three months, then moving to São Paulo to concentrate on a novel whose storyline is set there. I chose to follow my immediate desires and attempted to let the universe steer me towards unlimited creative energy and subsequent financial success through the associated creative endeavors. There was nothing to it but to do it. But several things have happened in the course of my trip that have thrown my original plan off course.
First, I fell in love with Berlin. I felt like I was cheating on my baby, Sampa, but I also felt like Berlin could give me some of the things SP couldn't: ease of travel, logistically and economically, to other regions including Brazil; a larger artistic platform from which various creative projects could be developed more thoroughly; and better earning potential.
Second, I ran out of money. It's impossible to plan and calculate every expense in anticipation of a trip, especially one circumnavigating the globe. I completely miscalculated ($8 hot dogs in Sweden did not bode well for the budget) and ended up at the mercy of friends and family, essentially borrowing, begging, and (well, almost) stealing in order to complete my journey. I wasn't stationary in one place long enough to earn any real money and need for immediate income generation caused me to re-evaluate my timetable for resuming traditional employment.
Third, my mother was involved in a serious car accident: three cracked ribs and a totalled vehicle. She's doing well now, surrounded by her friends and the rest of my family, but I decided to cancel my Australia ticket and go home to Florida for the first two weeks of November. Ahm comin' home, Ma! At her urging, I've not cancelled my Brazil ticket yet.
But Brazil still not a foregone conclusion anymore because I'm actually being drawn more towards travel writing than book-length fiction. It could be the combination of being on an epic journey and the relative ease of penning articles from the road versus novel chapters in interminable need of rewriting, and as I ruminated in previously, it's much easier to base myself in Berlin or, say, Hong Kong and travel cheaply than be in Sampa and expect to pop out of town for the weekend.
Subsequently, I've found two paths toward offering something of a balance between the finances and the time: returning to high school teaching or joining the Foreign Service. I do think teaching in Barranquilla was on the extreme end of dues-paying when it came to student discipline and social life in the city, so I'm thinking that other schools in other places (like Brazil, Germany, or HK) would be a touch less stressful. Meanwhile, the benefits package for foreign service officers is unequalled, and My President is in the process of expanding the diplomatic corps. How fly is that?
I'm starting preliminary paperwork for both career paths. The uncertainty is anxiety-inducing, but I guess I should just enjoy the ride and see where the cosmos takes me.
Stay tuned.
We now return you to Fly Brother's Round-the-World Adventures, already in progress. Fly Brother welcomes your views. If this post hit the spot, please comment and/or click.
In India, there's often just too much traffic for an American-style SUV to go barrelling through the streets of Mumbai or Delhi. So, they've motorized an Asian transport icon, the rickshaw: originally a two-wheeled wagon pulled by a runner to move the social elite from one place to another without having to exert themselves. Over time, the runners stopped running and started pedaling, pulling the cart on a modified bicycle, as seen in this photo from gridlocked Karol Bagh, New Delhi. Cheaper than cabs, but certainly more convenient than buses, modern ricks rip and run throughout North Mumbai (they're not allowed in Town because of the chaos they'd cause), seemingly squeezing into whatever places, roach-like, the driver can fit the front wheel. Their hand-eye coordination and faith in bus and truck braking systems is phenomenal.
Steamy and sensual, a masala of disparate peoples, faiths, and tongues facing the Arabian Sea, Mumbai (still called Bombay by many of its residents) sprawls in languid grandeur like a vine-covered statue of Lakshmi in repose. At once chaotic and laid-back, the city dons the role of its most famous monument as the Gateway of India, riding astraddle its identity as wholly Indian with imported British sensibilities, place names like Chowpatty and Marine Lines only superficially reflecting this duality. If Mumbai's punctual, if crowded, commuter train lines were more like New York's subway system, I'd say I spent most of my time trundling the Number 1, between grungy Downtown, simply called “Town” and studded with oxidized colonial jewels such as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly “Prince of Wales Museum”) and the imposing Victoria Terminus (also, like the airport and aforementioned museum, named for ancient ruler Chhatrapati Shivaji), and Uptown, a mix of close-in residential suburbs bustling with upscale-to-low-end commercial strips and anchored by the heavily Christian colony of Bandra, where I stayed with friends of Protestant religious affiliation, Goan ancestry, and Portuguese nomenclature.
After a weak Monsoon, resulting in imposed water cuts to the more impoverished areas of the city, the heavens decided to make up for lost time and dump large quantities of precipitation over the country for four days straight; in southern India, hundreds of people were killed and over a million displaced as flood waters washed away their homes. Luckily, I stayed dry in the luxury of my friends' large concrete home; millions of others, of course, live in make-shift lean-tos along the many waterways and railroad tracks coursing through the city. I will say, however, that the shocking thing about India's poverty that I glimpsed only briefly in Mumbai, wasn't the degree of poverty—there was nothing I hadn't seen after four years of living in and traveling around Latin America—but the magnitude, caused only by sheer overpopulation. And while I am aware of the horrifying child deformity, elucidated in the controversial Slumdog Millionaire (which features a protagonist who, my friends say acidly, speaks English not as if he learned it from touting tourists at the Taj Mahal as suggested, but by having his knuckles rapped more than a few times for mispronunciation by a proper Catholic Mrs. Krabapple), other poverty-stricken burgs, like Rio de Janeiro with its astronomical crime rate and accompanying off-duty police brutality, have their own location-specific monsters to slay. I'm not saying, “See...India's not the only place with problems!” I'm saying that India's poverty is the most exoticized, as if the subcontinent is more of a lost cause than any other potential power (though some might say that with nuclear ambitions and plans to build a harbor statue bigger than Lady Liberty, our girl India might want to re-examine her priorities).
While I wouldn't say that Mumbai has the worst traffic I've ever seen in a major developing-world metropolis, I would say that it has the loudest I've ever experienced, with incessant high-decible horn honking despite government campaigns encouraging a quieter commute. But that Indian attachment to noise also stems from being a country delightfully smothered in sound: from the cawing of scary crows in the trees to the festive shouts of delivery boys (grown men, really) in Crawford Market to the bangalangalanga of Punjabi percussion and orgiastic hip-and-neck-popping Bollywood production numbers to hip-hop with DJ Candy at Zenzi—don't nobody know music like Indians know music!
Then there's the food, slammin' spicy cuisine with innumerable stews and rice dishes with a whole lotta names I can barely pronounce (plus okra) that tastes like somebody's Louisiana grandma put her foot in it (a Southern phrase for those who don't know). And the discourse: at birthday parties and in rickshaw rides, I became engaged in conversations about not just Obama, but black feminism and The Color Purple, spanking as essential to child-rearing, disgust at the continued availability of Pond's White Beauty cream and its perpetuation of self-hatred, and heated debate over non-violent Ghandi-style protest against oppression versus a more by-any-means-necessary approach (up for a spirited Martin v. Malcolm convo, anyone?). I'm starting to think that Indians are just black folk with straighter hair.
Indeed, even here, I was taken as a son of the subcontinent. Folks looked at me all funny when I didn't speak a word of Hindi. They said I could easily be from Goa, the former Portuguese stronghold in the South where more than a little mixing took place between colonizer and colonized. I can't seem to get the Indian head wiggle down, though. To see what I mean, check the bobble of my girl Adèle at the end of this video from Crawford Market on a random Thursday night in the heart of “Town,” then enjoy the photos of my stint in the largest city of a country of 1,150,000,000 people. Thems a lotta zeros.
Fly Brother tackles international travel in unabridged, unapologetic, full and complete color. It's also the blog name of writer and educator Ernest White II, a tall, ruggedly handsome, erudite, occasionally delusional Black American male living in Brazil's largest city.
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