Oakwinter.com

Car’s in the shop, bike needs a new seat, what’s a lad to do? Bus it is, then.

For those in the audience with short attention spans, let’s summarise: the bus system here in Music City, USA, was designed by someone with a serious mental retardation. I don’t think this person even knew what a bus looked like before getting the gig. I’m happy to provide further libelous statements as needed.

Consider the following:

• In real bus systems (for values of “real” approximating “the ones in Switzerland”), they know exactly when the bus will be passing a given stop, down to the minute, and they let you know it; the schedules are phrased like, “a bus will stop here at :03, :18, :33, and :48 past the hour”. Except, you know, in four languages.

  In Nashville, the best they can tell you is the interval between busses. The intervals are usually something like, “a bus will stop here once ever 25-40 minutes”. Let me translate that: “we have no idea where our busses are”.

• In Nashville, there’s a bus stop at every street corner. Americans are apparently too lazy to walk to a bus stop, so busses end up spending more stopped, picking up passengers by the ones and twos, than actually moving. Real bus systems know to space the stops out so busses can actually cover some ground between stops.

• Bus stops aren’t covered, nor do they have timetables or route maps. You should just know. Fool.

• Every route in the city (save one or two) run through a central choke point in the core of downtown Nashville. I don’t mean a covered central station. We’re talking about a single section of street, one city block long, one lane in either direction. Busses end up spending about 10-15 minutes at a dead stop here, waiting for the busses in front of them to move.

• The only places to buy bus tickets are on the busses themselves, and you have to have exact change. Have a $5 bill instead of the $1.25 for a ticket? Well, you get your change back in bus tickets. Sucka.

• In places like Basel, you buy a ticket and it’s valid for a certain number of zones for two hours. You can take as many busses as you need within those two hours, so long as you stay inside your concentric zones. Here in Nashville, everytime you change busses, you have to buy a new ticket, even if you were only on the first bus for five minutes. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is so brilliant.

All this combines to lead to a bus system that is so colossally inefficient, I cannot figure out how it functions. Going the two miles from Centennial Park to 4th Avenue took 45 minutes. Two miles. 45 minutes. I walk faster than that.

Today was a strange day in America.

The whole country was somber today. The corporate media, the blogs and everyone in between spent the day deep in anniversary journalism — where we were, where we’ve been. NBC, ABC and others replayed their broadcasts from five years ago. CNN included the hour of coverage leading up to the first attack; they covered a fashion show in New York, some white girl gone missing, etc. One of my coworkers commented how shocking the contrast was, how silly and trivial the things we cared about back then were. He was clear to use the past tense: “silly and trivial…back then”. The more things change…

I remember someone saying, when it happened, that this was our generation’s Kennedy assassination. My parents — and maybe your parents, too — remember exactly where they were when they heard JFK had been shot by some lunatic in Dallas. The comparison is exact. I can tell you, without looking it up, that 11 September 2001 was a Tuesday. I was in my last year of high school, coming back from a class retreat out in the woods. We were crossing the river, back to the buses from our island, and it rippled through the crowd that someone had flown a plane into one of the World Trade Towers. No one had the facts — they had heard it from someone who heard it from someone who had heard the bus driver mutter something under his breath. We went around, trying to find someone with one more scrap of information than we had, trying to piece together what was going on back in the world. The whole ride back, the radio was at full blast. We sat in silence the whole way, listening to someone somewhere trying to keep it together when the Pentagon, then the Towers, then a cornfield in Pennsylvania disappeared.

38 years on from the end of Camelot, not much has changed. Like my parents, I have a picture-quality mental image from 9:30 AM on a Tuesday; the radio man bringing the bad news; and our madmen still come from Texas.

My country is dying, and we’re doing it to ourselves. It took Rome 500 years to take over the world and another 500 to lose it. America went much faster: what took us 60 years to conquer, we gave back in five.

I say we gave it back because that’s what happened. It’s not like we were desperate to have it, and the Visigoths came in and took it from us by force. No-one made us lose. The Huns came out of the east, kicked us in the shins, and we lay down, crying for mommy, terrified that they might do it again.

Our democracy is dying, and we’re letting it bleed all over the floor. Americans got comfortable. We forgot that democracy doesn’t take care of itself, that it only works if We The People care enough. You know how I know? Look at Iraq; we went in and thought we could give them democracy. What shit. You can’t “give” democracy — it has to be taken. Unless people are willing to die for it, to wrest it away and keep it healthy, democracy simply won’t work. Democracy is too hard, and autocracy is too easy.

I’d like to hope things are coming around, that the American public is gradually waking up and realising that we’ve been lulled asleep with shiny lies and pretty what-if stories. I’d like to hope that outrage will soon sweep this country, that we will refuse to tolerate any longer the reckless policies that are being concocted and carried out in our name, both at home and abroad. I’d like to hope that we will once again insist and demand that our nation comport itself in the spirit and ideals of our heritage and traditions, and that America would assert herself anew as vanguard and defender of Liberty and Freedom for the world.

I’d like to hope this, but I don’t.

When Americans support racial profiling to the point where simply wearing a shirt with Arabic script is enough to make you a suspect, I know that Freedom is dead. When Americans see no problem with the government spying on every phone call you place and every purchase you make, I know that Liberty is dying. When Americans want jail time for reporters who publish details of illegal government programs, I know that the Bill of Rights is burning. When Americans want to build a wall to keep the brown people out of our cities (but not out of our gardens), I know that somewhere, someone is remodelling the Statue of Liberty and in this new design, there’s simply no room for the Tired, the Hungry and the Huddled Masses.

A year after being destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still abandoned and desolate. Soon, Americans won’t have to go to all the way to Italy to see the ruined cities of a fallen empire.

Begin sleep-deprived rambling….now!

“Three Modes of Transportation” made the title too long, so just use your imagination to insert it in the right place.

Don’t let anyone tell you different: just because you sleep on the plane doesn’t mean that “today” at any point turns into “yesterday”. As I remarked to myself on the escalator in Victoria Station, “ah, yes, it’s still today”.

Cincinatti has a nice airport. I appreciate that there’s a sizable food court on the secure side of the security checkpoint; Frankfurt Terminal 2, I’m looking at you.

Speaking of security checkpoints:

• It took no more than 20 seconds to go through security in Atlanta.

• I never went through out-bound Customs in the US.

• The British passport authorities weren’t nearly as interested in me as the last few times.

• The guy at the French passport control-point on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link took an uncomfortable amount of interest in my old passport photo. He took some convincing that 16-year-old me is the same person as 22-year-old me.

There’s a French couple sitting next to me in the Eurostar to Brussels (as I type this). The woman is looking over my shoulder, pretending to not read what I’m writing. She’s doing a bad job; my blog entry is clearly more interesting than her magazine article about the Seychelles Islands.

Apparently, the French word for “Internet cafe” is “Internet cafe”, appropriately French-accent-ified. This could turn out to be useful information.

I’m in London and the sun is out; something is clearly wrong here. However, it’s nice to see the place with actual green on the trees; Europe in the wintertime (and even early Spring) is a pretty bleak affair.

Seeing the English countryside by train reminds me of Thomas the Tank Engine. Man, I loved that show when I was 6. I think I even had a little action figure of Sir Topham Hatt.

At this point, Collin goes underwater.

He also goes to sleep. (I don’t know why I expected a tunnel — of all things — to be interesting. I blame the History Channel.) Fortunately, he had the foresight to turn his laptop off before sleeping all the way from England to Belgium.

First impressions of Brussels: it’s chilly, windy and they speak French…all the time — just like in the movies! Flemish sounds like a long stream of nonsense syllables with a vaguely German rhythm.

Let me rephrase that “windy” part: it’s currently so windy that I have trouble walking in a straight line.

Today’s main agenda involved wandering aimlessly around Brussels, trying to stay awake until a reasonable bedtime. I was successful on the first count (my feet have seen numerous kilometers of Belgian sidewalk), not successful on the second (I passed out around 8PM).

I’ve been back in the USA for about a week now, and I’m still going through reverse culture shock:

• I almost got into an argument with a cashier when she charged me $3.27 for something where the sticker clearly said $2.99. Oh, right: in America, they add the sales tax afterwards. (This one has gotten me several times.)

• For a now-forgotten reason, I had to write down the day’s date when I bought something yesterday. I wrote “6-4-2006″ for 6th April 2006; the woman looked at it and said — clearly embarrassed for me — “oh, dear, you wrote it backwards; let me just fix that”. I couldn’t understand what she meant until the lightbulb went on: in America, they write dates “MM-DD-YY”.

• I was buying groceries the other day and saw a sign advertising $3.99 for vine tomatoes. “$3.99″ I think. “What a good deal!” I get another dose of “what the hell” when the woman rings the tomatoes up at a price of $8.32. “What? That can’t be 2 kilos-worth of tomatoes!?” Aha, yes; in America, produce is priced by the pound, not the kilo.

• I haven’t quite gotten out of the habit of carrying my passport with me at all times. My pockets-filling routine has yet to learn that, in America, I am not a foreigner.

• I went shopping at the local mega-mall the other day and immediately felt crushed by the onslaught of sales staff trying to impress me with how “customer friendly” they are. I had gotten so used to Europe’s “signal me if you need me” model that I seem to have forgotten that, in America, everyone in a sales position feels the need to check on you every 45 seconds.

• I’ve been taking crap from some of my friends for wearing the same outfit for a week or so at a time. The first time anyone said something, my reponse ellicited a few confused looks: “Why wouldn’t I wear it for a while? It’s not like I got it dirty”. Silly me: in America, you have to change clothes every day, waiting a few weeks before re-wearing a given article of clothing.

• Speaking of clothes, people must think I’m crazy for wearing close-toed shoes, jeans and several upper layers even when it’s 23°C out, when everyone else is dressed like they’re at the beach (a bit of a shock in itself). Remember: in America, sandals, shorts and a T-shirt are appropriate attire.

• And speaking of temperature, whenever I say something about “degrees Celsius” or “meters” or “kilograms”, all I get are blank stares. I’m going to have to spend some time relearning the English units because, in America, only drug addicts know the metric system.

On the plus side, it’s good to be back on my bike, riding in the green Chattanooga hills again. Fortunately, I’m not nearly as out-of-shape as I had thought, and I can already feel my muscles coming back. My goal is to be able to summit Lookout Mountain again by the end of April.

Here’s a little immigration-related tidbit for you: I may be back in the US, but my legal status here is “visiting citizen”. Not “resident citizen”, “visiting citizen”. You see, because of the super-restricted hours kept by the Germersheim Auslaenderbehoerde (9:30AM - 11:30AM), I was unable to have my German student visa invalidated. This means that there’re still two pages in my passport that scream, “I live in Europe”. Until I can get the visa nullified, my official residence is Germersheim, Germany, 76726. My plan is to swing by Germersheim when I return to Europe in July and finally get things sorted out (the visa expires in October, so I’ve got time).