I recently read this amazing book that dbauler left me called Motoring with Mohammed by Eric Hansen. It’s about his shipwreck on a desert island/rescue by Eritrean goat smugglers/driving with sheep in the backseat/Qat chewing in Yemen adventures. This gave my already itchy travel bug new life – it’s spasming. I’m starting to work on a local freelance photographer’s web site and one of the reference sites she gave me was Ami Vitale’s site. Wow. Knock-out photographs from far flung countries. I want to go somewhere really weird, somewhere that I never get over the culture shock, no matter how long I’m there. I adore Austin, but like all places one loves, one must occasionally leave it to love it more upon return. Anyone happen to have a spare ticket to Vietnam handy?
{ 2003 07 09 }
Kia | 09-Jul-03 at 3:43 pm | Permalink
How about LA? I’ve never gotten over the culture shock as long as I’ve been here! It’s uh, really weird being here. Really, really weird. Like Twilight Zone weird. But I guess you aren’t really looking for that sort of weird.
narrator | 09-Jul-03 at 6:44 pm | Permalink
Yeah, I’ve been to that weird, and I got enough just in the small doses from my teenage years. LA turns me into a bad person. It makes me want to shoot people. I prefer not to shoot people.
bro #1 | 16-Jul-03 at 5:18 pm | Permalink
how about rekivik, iceland. in the winter? real cheap from here. Jacuzzi in the arctic
amir | 28-Jul-03 at 8:16 pm | Permalink
Well, I’m aiming for Spain in the fall but that’s hardly knock-your-socks-off culture shock. If you wanna really sock it to your reality aim for south or east asia. India and Nepal are, of course, classics as earthbound alternate universes go but Vietnam and Cambodia are perhaps even more out there, if only because they haven’t had quite the many-decades-long torrent of western tourists. Still, India is, imho, the shizzie.
That web site is phenomenal. I was looking through the middle east pics and oddly tenough the one of the Israeli settler mother and child was the most disturbing to me because, apart from the M-16 leaning against the wall that image could just as easily be from any city here as well. It doesn’t have the crazy-shit-on-fire otherness of the others.