duck-shaped pain

28 March 2001
Day One

Depending on what you receive, getting home to a big pile of mail after a trip can be the best or worst thing about returning home from a trip. It was mostly good this time. I got a bunch of magazines, some lovely reader mail (a postcard with peaches on it!), a book I ordered from half.com (Sara Midda's South of France Sketchbook -- tiny, delicate watercolors of the most pampered fruits imaginable), many coupons for dry cleaning and lube jobs, and some other stuff that went straight in to the round file.

But, on the other hand, I also got mail from my student loan company, telling me that my loan was finally going to become due in June. Which is a surprise, although not entirely unexpected.

What makes it amusing in a way is that this is a loan I look out seven years ago, to help finance a fairly dismal year of college at the University of Denver [1] It got deferred after I transferred to another school, and stayed deferred out of computer error or sheer dumb luck, even though I haven't been in school for three years now. It wasn't that big a loan to begin with, so it's still not very big now, even with seven years' worth of interest piled on top. So I'm not too worried about it or about being able to make the payments -- it's just sort of fascinating how I just got sort of overlooked there for awhile.

Of course, watch me make a payment a day late or so and see how long they overlook that.


I'm more or less recovered from my trip now. It was a good idea in the financial and get-to-know-the-land sense to go on foot, but my feet and legs have paid for it. There were a few moments during the trip where it felt like they would go No More, but they seem to be fine now. More than fine when I think about the fact that this time last year, I had one of my legs in a big incapacitating airboot and had spent about a month and a half doing not much but sitting, sleeping and floating around in the Kingdom of Demerol. Anyway. I guess it's about time to do the day-by-day, blow-by-blow recap. So, today, I present:

Day One

I like to get to the airport early. Like way, way early. Two or three hours early. I have no problem with flying itself, but I get palpitations about the idea of not getting to the airport in time to check in properly, so I always try to go quite a bit ahead of time. This annoys every single traveling companion I've ever had who is not my dad (who shows up even earlier than I do). But when you're traveling alone, you can show up at the airport whenever the hell you want.

Of course, my plane left at 6 in the morning, so the best I could do was 5:10. We have a large, cavernous airport -- built in a burst of too-hopeful civic pride and quite unsuited for the amount of air traffic that actually moves through there. So I got there and checked in, along with the six other people who were flying out that morning.

Seven passengers = teeny teeny tiny plane.

It didn't even have a flight attendant or restroom or much a center aisle. My backpack was too big for under my seat, so it sort of got placed on the floor behind the pilot. I've actually flown on a smaller plane on a commercial air flight -- a four-seater on a really pointless 10-minute flight from Denver to Fort Collins about nine years ago. [2] Anyway, it was a non-interesting flight. Nothing happened. We landed at Denver okay.

When I made my reservations, I had the choice of either a 15-minute or a two-hour layover in Denver. Anyone else who has ran as fast as they can through the long-ass United concourse at Denver International would also have wisely chosen the two-hour layover. It gave me time to think. Plus, all flights from the hinterlands of the Mountain Time Zone all land at Gate 61, which is the last gate at the eastern end of the concourse, and all but guarantees that any connecting flight you have to catch will be boarding at Gate 2.

I sat. I read the paper. I stared into space. It was getting time for my flight to board, and there were almost no people gathered at my gate. I decided to go to the bathroom one last time and on my way, took a gander at the monitors listing all departing flights. Great -- my flight was cancelled.

United Customer Service is usually the last place on Earth I want to be, but the line was short and the people were actually helpful and pleasant. My flight had been cancelled for mechanical reasons, and they put me on another flight to San Francisco that left in three hours. I was eager for my trip to begin, but at the same time, I didn't have any scheduled activities for the day, so a few hours wasn't going to make a whole lot of difference to me.

"But," the customer service lady said, "if you want to wait standby in the meantime, there's another flight leaving in an hour."

I didn't really care, but I also didn't have a whole lot else to do, so I went to the gate of the standby flight and waited. There were many surly folk milling about, and I talked to a few of them, who were all going to Honolulu or Hong Kong or some other place and who were really close to being screwed over in the connection department if they didn't get on standby on this flight. So we all waited and watched everyone board and people got tenser and smiles began to crack.

The woman at the counter gets on the horn and announces that there is no standby room on this flight, except for one seat. And then she calls MY NAME. Me. Who does not have anywhere to really be today. I had previously announced this fact to the people now having silent coronaries at the possibility of missing their once-in-a-lifetime trip to Kauai or wherever, and now these people are all glaring at me with the heat of a thousand tandoors.

Did I mention I got an upgrade, as well?

Sure, I didn't my special vegetarian meal. [3] And I had to sit next to someone with a belt buckle as big as a dinner plate, but I still got an upgrade.

So we land. Belt Buckle Man is hesitant to get off the plane -- he doesn't want to get lost in the airport. I've flown into SFO about five times, so I tell him where to go and he thanks me, sort of. He could have been just scratching his nose.

Pointless Airport Celebrity Sighting of the Year, Possibly A Lifetime: Huey Lewis, arguing loudly on the white courtesy phone.

I wait outside for the bus which will take me to the nearest available BART station. Waiting with me is a man with an application on his Palm Pilot that gives exact real-time locations of desired buses. He keeps us all informed. "Only five minutes away!" It's nice to know, I guess, but the other people waiting at the stop didn't look like the sort that you'd want to be wrong around.

Get on bus. Bus to train. Train to civilization.

The hostel I stayed in mailed me all these varied directions on how to get to where they were from almost anywhere in the Bay Area. It wasn't really that hard, anyway, since it was located in Union Square, which even toddlers can find. I stayed here, and would recommend it to anyone trying to travel on the cheap.

I checked in, after enduring a conversation with the front desk guy, who had seemingly been everywhere in Colorado except where I live. I'm always happy to idly chat about home, but this guy kept trying to guess where it was, instead of just letting me tell him. "Is it near�Julesburg? How about Salida?" [4]

My room was small and functional, with three beds and an attached bathroom. The single bed was taken, and I had been assigned the bottom bed on the set of bunk beds. I unpacked, placed my things in one of the lockers, and set out.

I didn't have any plans. Mostly, I was just in a daze to be there, to be anywhere other than where I live. I watched people and looked at buildings. As far as directions go, I headed north through Chinatown. I wasn't ready to get my guidebook out just yet, and as I'd been there before, I figured I knew enough about the place to find my way around while still acclimating myself.

I looked at Chinese grocers. I saw beautiful baby eggplants that could make you cry. Lots of interesting greens and yams and shiitakes [5] up the wazoo. Sweet shops with pork and bean paste buns. Tapioca and lychee shakes. The terrible thing was that I wasn't even hungry yet.

Headed up further, and walked around North Beach for awhile. I wasn't really ready to do anything yet -- just being was enough. Listened to people talk, watched them walk fast, watched where they were going.

Even in my most dazed-out, contemplated moments, I can't really pass up a bookstore, especially a good one. I walked by City Lights, went in, looked around for a couple of hours. And I didn't buy anything.

This is an important theme in my trip. In my quest to pack light, I only brought my backpack and my small satchel that I use as an everyday bag. I went through three or four variations of my stuff before I found one that fit correctly yet still included underwear. So I did not have a whole lot of room to bring souvenirs back. Which was fine with me, really. It left me more money for food and helped curb my usual habit of bringing tons of new crap home from trips. I did buy some things, eventually -- I just saved that for the end.

I still wasn't too hungry, but I was sort of tired, so I walked back to the hostel. I met my roommates. One of them, R., was a woman from Austria, a few years older than me, and the other, O., was a 20-year old Japanese high school student. As soon as she told me that, she reassured me that the reason she was 20 and still in high school was that she was sick for awhile. We all talked for a bit about why we were there and where we were from, dispelling notions and misconceptions about where we were from. Yes, Colorado is cold. No, I do not live in the mountains. I live in the desert. O. was from a place in Japan I had actually visited, so we talked about eel for a while. They have a big eel festival and Eel Manufacturing Concern in her town.

I laid down and took a load off for awhile. After a while, I decided I was hungry, but that I also was not in the mood to hike anywhere to eat. According to the guidebook, there was a cheap Indian restaurant just a block and a half away. You cannot get even bad Indian food where I live, so the decision was made.

Yum. I had a big bowl of lamb kofta and a big order of the garliciest garlic naan known to man. Coffee, too, served with a lot of rigamarole and ceremony -- a tiny silver pot for the steaming beverage, a tiny dish for sugar cubes, regular infusions of cream, and a new, clean stirring spoon for each cup. Mango-yogurt drink for dessert.

The couple next to me fought over their palak paneer. She said it was too gross and green for her. He rightfully disagreed. She stormed out. He ate the rest, and she never came back.

I walked back to the hostel, and checked out some of the facilities. There was a 24-hour meet 'n' greet room, complete with always-occupied Internet access (for those wondering why I didn't update or check mail while I was gone -- also, I had better things to do), a TV room constantly showing the worst movies ever (I had the chance -- twice -- to view Major League 2 during my stay), a kitchen with pink lemonade in the vending machine (big bonus) and dusty backpackers everywhere.

Finally, I just fell asleep.


[1] Don't go there. I warned you.

[2] Yeah, I know it's only an hour by car. It's really not even worth asking about.

[3] Judging by the one I got on my way back, this was no loss at all.

[4] Not even close to either one.

[5] Don't know what the Chinese word for them is, sorry.

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