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  hardie karges 8:13 am on March 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Morocco, tour guides   

  Morocco 

  The problem with Morocco is the Moroccans.  There’s always one there if you need one; there’s always one there if you don’t.  They’re not subtle about it, either, following you up and down the street, offering their services as guides, translators, or whatever.  They get you what you want.  They’re good, too, speaking three or four languages complete with street slang and most current usage.  These are not children, mind you, but grown men.  You’d think they’d have something better to do, but like free-lancers everywhere, I guess they don’t.  The guy in Tangier finally offered to get out of my life, for a price.  He knew my Achilles heel, and my sliding scale of morality.  It WAS good shit; I’ll have to admit.  I DO prefer blonde sometimes.  Why these guys can’t get real businesses with real tourists with real money, I don’t know.  Morocco DOES have some incredible scenery after all, straight out of the Bible, with tourists clustered in only a few places.  I guess what they do somehow pays the bills.  Hey, work’s work.

  Moroccandude is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Moroccandude 5:56 pm on March 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    Hey there,

    Nice post, I like it coz it’s honest, most people who go to Morocco and don’t like one or two things focus on them and forget about whatever good thing they found over there.
    Thanks for being honest about my country.

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  hardie karges 6:42 am on March 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Britain ( 2 )   

  British Resolve 

  I can easily see how the Aztecs and the Mayas maintained vast empires, sure, but the British?  How could they fall so far behind in such a short amount of time?  Britain is a country of brick ovens in an age of glass and steel.  I guess she didn’t have the luxury of being bombed to oblivion and having her conquerors rebuild her.  Britain is a frumpy old lady, down at the heels, shabby and stained, dodgy and doddering.  She’s looking for her glasses, but can’t seem to find them.  She’s fallen down on the floor, and can’t seem to reach her beer.  All of her sons have left her, and the hired help have taken over the house.  This is the price of colonialism- you lose your own mother country in the process.  Just ask Manchuria.  But still Britain is lovable, if a bit of an anachronism, a bunch of drunks fighting over the bones of a rotting carcass.  For me there’s nothing of Britain left but some dark ale-inspired pee strains on my drawers.
   
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  hardie karges 7:55 am on March 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), Europe ( 19 ), language ( 173 ), mathematics ( 3 )   

  Cultural Relativity 

  Europeans are internalized, Americans external.  Multi-lingualism leads to useless complexity and introversion.  Uni-lingualism allows mental space to be devoted to other things, like science and technology, without devoting so much effort to translation and bad grammar.  There are two broad fields of knowledge in the world from which all others derive: mathematics and linguistics, on the surface at polar extremes from each other, mathematics revealing knowledge of the other, linguistics revealing knowledge of each other.  In reality the two are not so different from each other, linguistics with a strong logico-mathematical basis, math also capable of a distinct relativity of perspective.  They both thrive on the little stick-men of culture that live in the pages of books, on the pages of experiment.  Numbers and letters are not so different, really.  Everything else is derivative knowledge, recipes for fulfillment and short histories of nearly everything.  The thing is in the name, a convenient substitute for the thing itself, virtual reality in graphic symbols.  It’s like my movie scripts.  Nobody wants them; they just want the titles: “Good Day to Die”, “Virus”, “Reality Check”, and “Lost in Time”, my names just hung on any old shit piece of work. 

   
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  hardie karges 4:00 am on March 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Amsterdam, cigarettes, coffeehouses, Europe ( 19 )   

  SMELLY BUTTS 

  Europeans aren’t content to smoke themselves to death; they want to make sure you smell their butts also.  The lady in the buffet line in Madrid smokes a cigarette while she peruses the entrees, ash dangling off the end of the ember precariously.  British pubs smell like death warmed over, old Las Vegas, broken hearts and broken dreams, all your failures splayed out before you with a splash tray to catch the liquids gone astray.  Italians lean on the counter, coffee in one hand and cig in the other.  Let ‘em sit down and they’ll never leave.  French twirl cigarettes like batons leading the band of romantic endeavors.  It’s all changing, but I won’t miss it, unless it’s all a sinister plot to shut down the Amsterdam coffeehouses.  Even though I hardly smoke pot anymore, and am rather pathetic when I do, that’s a point of progress not to be undone.  The first time I was in an Amsterdam coffeehouse, I took a couple hits, then had to leave, weaving my way back to a hotel that I could barely find, trying to insert my key in a lock that kept moving the closer I got.  I finally made it through the door and into my room, literally crashing down on to the bed as the universe spun around me, and the lights ‘did funny’ for the next two hours.  Not only did I not make it to the bathroom to piss, I could barely make it to the sink.  Russians come to Amsterdam and think they’ve found the Promised Land, no milk and honey, just cannabis and hashish.  The wizard behind the counter mixes weeds instead of drinks.  Of course there’s always a backlash and some new places proudly advertise ‘no drugs’.  Worse than that, though, are the bozos right off the bus ready to show off their newfound freedom, toking up in the Burger King.  French police wait with dogs in the Paris bus terminal waiting to greet buses from Amsterdam.  Apparently they’re threatened by the whole thing in the heartland of liberte’.  Somehow the picture of lovers smoking joints over candlelight just doesn’t work, I guess.  Of course, they’re so anal that they’ve learned how to fart with their mouths.

   
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  hardie karges 11:57 am on March 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Europe ( 19 ), history ( 42 )   

  European History 

  Europe is a living museum, tourists crawling through the bowels where Romans tortured Christians before Christians tortured Protestants, where the English passed laws and the Germans baked bread.  It’s ironic that one of the most technologically advanced cultures in the world does more than almost any other to preserve its past.  This is easily justified by the large numbers of tourists it attracts, but I doubt that that is the reason.  Preservation is expensive.  To tear down and rebuild is relatively cheap.  It’s hard to find any architecture in a modern Chinese city over a hundred years old, far fewer the Renaissance-era buildings ubiquitous in Europe.  And China is probably the most socially conservative nation in the world, remember.  It is also probably the most face-conscious, that is, pretentious.  They want to be seen as the wave of the future, for whatever that’s worth, probably not much, aesthetically.  Europe is proud of its artistic and cultural heritage, and so preserves it.  So would be America, if it had any.  It’s just too young.  Europeans like to rag on America’s lack of refinement and culture, but that’s just jealousy at America’s rapid rise to the top of the world heap politically, economically, and culturally.  America is more creative than the rest of the world put together, by far.  Most of the world’s patents go to America, with Japan coming in second.  In terms of popular culture, there’s no contest.  America almost single-handedly creates the world’s movies and music.  Africa’s got the animals and Asia’s got the girls.  But for history, you go to Europe. 

  TraveloVacations is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    TraveloVacations 11:41 pm on March 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    I think Europe is a very great history.

    Thank you. 🙂

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  hardie karges 12:55 pm on March 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Gypsies 

  The worst thing about stereotypes is that they’re so damn accurate, like European white trash beating their wives in the train station at Timisoara, unwashed masses smoking cigarettes to stay warm.  It’s good to see Gypsies begging for coins instead of merely telling fortunes for tunes or fortunes in American sweaty palms, Gypsies in their own subculture, the East European Slavic slavishness.  I wonder what it was that inspired a group of people to migrate from India headed for Europe during the height of the Middle Ages and just keep going, as if there were nothing else to do in the world.  They probably realized early on there’s always work for those willing to do what others are not, and that there’s a sucker born every minute.  Put the two together and you’ve got a winning combination.  These are more than just people fallen through the cracks.  These are masters of the cracks, creators of the cracks.  They keep alive an ancient tradition of shuffling listlessness and creative adaptation that define us as a race, going against the grain and loving every minute of it. 

   
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  hardie karges 9:05 pm on March 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Gypsy, Romania, street people   

  White Trash 

  The sketchy guy in the bus station is always there, like the legendary hitchhiker, white trash, twitching and pacing, shoulders pinned back by the force of gravity, occupying some form dictated by his inner child on drugs.  Back and forth without a gyroscope he cuts his nervous system loose on an unsuspecting populace, guided by some inner GPS.  It’s the same guy wherever I go- blood-shot eyes, unshaven face, hair matted from tortured sleep or lack thereof.  Go to Timisoara and it’s still the same guy, except he’s waiting for a train instead of a bus that’ll never come, part Gypsy and all a blur, pencil lines on white paper, cheap animation from unemployed sketch artists, cheap wine on cracked pavement.  It’s good to see a time capsule of evolution.  These are the guys that scoured the world in search of fame and fortune and fresh femmes, everything to gain and nothing to lose, drunk and scurvied and dripping with gonorrhea.  They changed the world in somebody else’s image and likeness.

   
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  hardie karges 9:33 pm on March 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism ( 21 ), czech   

  Communism 

  Eastern Europe is losing weight fast, the dead weight of Bolshevik dictatorship, commonplace communism, and ironic curtains.  This is quickly being replaced by common criminals, Mafia protection, and tinted shades to soften the glare of an all-too-bright future.  Paint the scene in yellow and green if you want it to mean what I think it means.  Save the gray for the drab old cold of Communism, long given over to rigor mortis on the fast track to rot.  Prague rocks from the underbelly up; experimental music and flying cows with psychedelic milk dot the landscape.  Bohemian boozers give their western Celtic brothers a run for their beer money in the race to drink each other under the table.  It’s a Bohemian rhapsody, complete with nods and winks.  Czechs bounce back from a shuddered past, an iron curtain and a blind smile, and try to forget their history as slaves for whatever marauding band happened to pass through.  Now I know just a little of how it feels to live in the Communist bloc, cell block apartments and fare-thee-well projects.  They are quickly being converted to tourist accommodations by enterprising individuals.  It is sobering to think that Communism intended to unite the world under the banner of heavy industry, gray skies, and mass pollution, regardless of local conditions and traditions.  Only when that world started to disappear, being replaced by the information industry, did communism itself begin to crumble.

   
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  hardie karges 10:32 pm on March 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Jeopardy, Mexico ( 7 )   

  Mexican Jeopardy 

  On Mexican ‘Jeopardy’ the contestants always start at the bottom highest-priced end of a category and work their way upward toward the easy questions.  It’s as if the correct answer to a question ultimately comes from luck, not skill or knowledge, certainly not something that might be gained from thirty minutes of practice and familiarity with the subject.  People wonder why the Third World is the world of poverty and start pointing fingers of accusation at rich countries and rich corporations that ‘suck out’ the resources of the rest of the world while leaving nothing in return.  At the same time they ignore the reluctance of many of those same people to improve their individual and group situations by incremental steps and simple logic, the powers of two, double your money, then double it again, then so on to the limits of one’s ability.  This is the conservative approach to progress, conserving what already exists while moving forward one step at the time, best exemplified in reproduction.  Gene-splicing is a shortcut to nowhere.  The power of reproduction is the power of twos, in fractional terms, two unite and become one in the flesh, over and over to infinity.

   
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  hardie karges 11:01 pm on March 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: chat, Peru Thailand, sex ( 39 )   

  CHAT 

  Chattiness is a national personality trait that I value highly, an open society without pretenses or pretensions.  This is not something to be taken for granted, especially between sexes.  In fact, in many, if not most, cultures, men and women can’t simply meet and chat each other up casually.  That might lead to bigger and better things, after all.  Yep.  Or maybe they can, but they don’t, for lack of opportunity or appropriate setting.  Village communism is the flip side, not bad necessarily, in and of itself, but so mathematically imprecise as to be maddeningly annoying.  If you get ahead of the pack, then you can be sure that every one else will have his hand out looking for a piece of the action.  By the same token, you have the right to call on others for help when you need it, but for some people that’s simply not the way of life.  Still the trade-off is largely worth the downside.  Too often smiles are forgotten in the transactions of existence, the currency of personality, the personality of life.  What’s the good of life if it has to be stressed or strained, coaxed through filters and reduced to mush?  Not surprisingly, the countries best at this are the least macho countries, like Thailand and Peru.  Also not surprisingly, these are countries with beautiful women, an obsession with sex, and a total dearth of logic.