A Very Personal Message

When I was in college, I had good friends from India, England, France, Bahrain, Turkey and Bulgaria. My Indian friends identified themselves as Brahmins, and there were certain things they would not do. One day, we were playing ping-pong, and my buddy Amit was close to beating my buddy Ram, when the ball bounced into a large, plastic garbage can. The players approached warily, casting shameful glances into the garbage can, as if they were watching a woman shower in the next apartment. Neither was willing to reach into the garbage. Nor did they ask me to get it. What they did, the kicked the can onto the floor. A bunch of garbage fell out, and the ball rolled out, and they went back to their game. My friend from Bahrain was so scrupulously genteel that he offered you toffees and mints every time you came into his room, even if you lived next door and stopped by to play FIFA eleven times a day. One night I was at a house party with my English friend. We were sitting on the couch when all of a sudden he turned to me and plaintively said, as if he were about to cry, "Someone's nicked me skins, mate". ("Skins" refer to rolling papers). There are less cheery stories, like the time my very pretty Turkish ladyfriend referred casually to the "Kurdish Problem". (One gets the sense she wasn't far from calling it the "Armenian Problem"). I liked the foreign students better than the Americans, on a whole, because they tended to hold strong political views, often as a result of what they'd witnessed, or because they were better-educated. However, now that I've moved home to California, I've lost touch with many of my foreign friends. My social circle consists again of the people I knew in high school. They are fine people, but they are divisible only into "liberal" and "conservative". Nobody has experienced anything you will read about in the history books; nobody's life was ever in danger. One of my dearest college friends, from Croatia, told me that when the Serbian military directed artillery into the medieval, Croatian-held towns, they used tourist maps, with large and garish insets, in order to target cultural sites, rather than war industry. So for the last couple months I've been seized by a wanderlust that drove me from my California abode, into the unfamiliar environs of European and Asian cities. I hope you will excuse my absence from this fine site, and I hope you will follow some of the accounts of my travels that I will begin to publish.