For two months, my friend Jane had been stuffing a folder labeled “Inauguration 2009”—metro maps, walking routes, lists of prohibited items, and of course our pair of purple tickets, which she received for being one of her state’s earliest campaign volunteers. Those without tickets would be relegated to scrambling for spots on the far end of the mall, crammed between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

Jane lay out the plan for me the night before. We were to get up before dawn and take a bus downtown. From there we would walk to the purple gate, make our way through security, and stand for a couple hours before the program began at 11:30. We’d watch it all on a Jumbotron, basking in being a part of history and in the company of two million others moved by Obama’s message of hope and change.

I dutifully set my alarm, and Jane added a couple granola bars and some Toasty Toes to her bag. She was also bringing sanitary toilet seat covers and a battery-powered head lamp. “I have a fantasy that someone will stop me at the gate,” she confessed, “rifle through my bag, and congratulate me on being the best-prepared person at the inauguration.”

While Jane nodded off imagining being rewarded with a special seat to the swearing-in, I slipped into a strange, post-apocalyptic dream in which I was part of a gray-faced hoard trudging toward a destination we would never reach.

On inauguration morning, Jane and I wolfed down a good, hearty breakfast and walked to the bus stop. A handful of other people in coats and tightly-wrapped scarves were already huddled under the awning, their bulky silhouettes outlined in the breaking day. We smiled and nodded at each other. There were too many of us to fit on one bus, but the driver let extra passengers squeeze onto the steps, and as we disembarked she wished us a wonderful day. Jane and I coasted toward the purple gate as if on a rainbow, sliding along an arc of happiness and goodwill.

The trouble began three blocks out. A line of people four and five across was clumped on the sidewalk, looking sour.

“What’re you in line for?” Jane asked. She could see on her map that we were headed in the right direction, but the wall of people kept us from getting any closer.

“Purple,” snarled a man. He held up two tickets, their edges rimmed with a Professor Plum-ish border.

“This is the line for the purple gate?” Jane craned her neck. The gate was still too far ahead even to be seen.

“No.” The man jerked his thumb toward the crowd behind him. “That’s the line for the purple gate. Ya gotta go through the tunnel.”

The Mall Tunnel, I subsequently learned, is a four-lane stretch of I-95 that goes beneath the Smithsonian and the monuments, connecting the heart of Washington DC to the suburbs of Virginia. It is .65 miles long, 50 feet deep, and reinforced on all sides by giant slabs of concrete.

Because it is below sea level, the tunnel is damp and chilly, factors that probably don’t much bother the commuters whizzing through every day in their cars, but a significant detail to the thousands of purple-ticket holders who were shuffling along nose-to-nape on this frigid January morning.

“Wow,” said Jane. We couldn’t see even the tunnel’s proverbial light at the end, let alone the back of the line. “Wow.” Somewhere far away, her voice skipped beneath the steel girders, faded, and disappeared.

To be fair, Jane and I didn’t spend the entire morning in the tunnel. No, the line stretched the length of the tunnel, emerged again in the bright winter sun, wound around the highway, and came to rest beneath a green sign announcing the exit for Anacostia.

The woman behind us, an elderly African-American with a bad back, had been at the mall since 5:30 but had been misdirected and only finally staggered to the end of the queue.

In front of us, a white, geeky-looking man was a third of the way through a fantasy novel he’d begun that morning. As we inched forward he solemnly turned the pages, apparently finding even a hostile alien universe more welcome than his immediate one.

Still, we believed. After all, we had tickets, and hadn’t Barack Obama himself taught us that the small gains of many people can make even the most unlikely events happen?

To pass the time, Jane and I tried to name all the presidents, starting first with Washington and then with the current one, and we invited our neighbors to tell us when they first knew Obama was The One.

“All I know is that if I don’t get into this inauguration, I’m gonna be pissed,” the lady behind us said.

“Fuck yeah,” said somebody a couple feet away. “I fuckin’ paid good money for these tickets. I could’ve fuckin’ had silver. But I had to get fuckin’ purple. Fuck.”

Jane and I quit talking. When we finally arrived at the entrance to the tunnel, she peered up at the sign instructing incoming traffic to turn on their lights, reached into her bag, and strapped on her head lamp. It cast a slim yellow cone on the wall beside us, illuminating forty years of grease.

You might think there would be solidarity among thousands of people in a tunnel, and to some extent you would be right. There was solidarity when five women toward the middle took up “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” and those of us within ear shot stomped our feet and clapped our hands.

There was solidarity when some teenage boys kicked discarded coffee cups into a pile, and a few others obligingly added their trash, a system that worked fine until someone else ashed his cigarette over the heap and imbued the air with the smell of cheap, singed plastic.

And there was terrific solidarity when a group of stragglers come bounding into the tunnel, panicked that it was already 10:30 and they appeared to be closer to Monticello than the Capitol steps.

“No cutting!” a woman shrieked, and hundreds of others joined her cause, shaking their fists and hollering that the late arrivals had to go to the end of the tunnel like everybody else.

Even Jane’s and my new game took on a dark, threatening feel.

“Pacific or Atlantic?” she had begun. “Barbecue or sour cream and onion?” “Jackie or Michelle?”

By 11, we moved to, “Orthodontist or gynecologist?” “Drowning or burial alive?” “Never having tried or utterly having failed?” Above our heads the inauguration’s musical program had begun but all we could hear was the drip of icicles, reminding us that we could be struck anytime by something cold and toxic.

If we had not been so naïve, say, less idealistic and more realistic, Jane and I might’ve realized we were not going to get into the inauguration. There was no way the volume of people in line could fit into the space allocated for us—the event organizers seemed to have overbooked our section, distributing far more purple tickets than they really could accommodate.

And we certainly were not going to make it at the pace we were moving. While people around the globe tuned into the ceremony—gathering around radios, TVs, the Internet—we were in the only spot on the planet without access to the national mall: underneath it.

At 11:15, the line began breaking up. People spread the width of the tunnel, filling all four lanes, and some climbed on the concrete barriers and began walking tightrope-style. Something way up front had been loosened, too—security stopped checking bags and was letting everyone in, the rumor went—and bodies surged toward the exit.

“Yes, we can,” someone hollered, and every time a wave poured out of the tunnel the phrase was repeated. “Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.”

For a few minutes, Jane and I were euphoric. Laughing and blinking, I grabbed her hand and pulled her through the crowd. We passed the corner where we’d seen the sour-faced man, dodged a couple of cops and crossed the street, rounded a corner, and saw in the distance, silhouetted by a pair of bare trees, the sign for the purple gate.

Beyond the gate, we had a place; beyond the gate, we had a Jumbotron; beyond the gate, we had a view of the stage, where even now the Biden family was approaching.

In front of the gate was an eighteen-foot high fence. No fewer than five hundred people were pressed against it. Their voices were temporarily drowned out by the roar from the tunnel, but on a rest I could hear their chant: “Let us in. Let us in.”

The purple gate had been shut. At the time, Jane and I assumed we had not been up early enough, had not adequately planned, had not sufficiently cared. It now seems that there was very little we could have done. There were simply too many people and not enough direction, so security had closed the gate and sent people into the tunnel. If the line had moved forward, it was only because those in front of us had gotten wise or given up hope.

Now, with fifteen minutes until the swearing-in, Jane and I had nowhere to go. All the downtown hotels were closed to the public, and a place serving an inaugural brunch was too packed to get near a TV. Somewhere the Newseum and the ESPN Zone had set up giant screens, but I was too disoriented to find them and Jane had not factored these sites into her planning.

From the sidewalk, I caught a glimpse of two empty stools at a second-floor bar. I dragged Jane up the steps into a glass-and-chrome restaurant only slightly less cozy than the set of American Psycho. It was deserted except for three black women drinking red wine and eating pasta. An instant after I slid into one of the bar stools, a fourth friend joined them.

“Are you using that?” my neighbor said, pointing to the chair I was sitting in.

If there is one thing the Bush administration has taught me, it’s that you make do with the situation you’re in, not with the situation you want. When Justice Roberts asked the audience to stand, Jane and I slid back our stools and put our feet on the floor. When Obama took the podium, Jane and I whooped, a sound that made the tuxedoed bartender jump. And when our new president began his speech, calling for a more united America and a generous approach to international affairs, I looked around and saw that we had been joined by other refugees from the tunnel: a gay Latino couple, some young marrieds, a handsome man with a long, Ethiopian face.

“You had a purple ticket, too, huh?” I said, clapping the guy next to me on the shoulder.

“Yeah.” He took a deep draw on his beer. “But this is nicer.”

My neighbor on the other side leaned over and put her hand on the crook of his arm. For an instant, all three of us were entwined, a single beast of multiple colors, ages, and sexual orientations. Then she lifted her fork, gestured to her plate, and said with real satisfaction and relief, “The Bolognese here is terrific.”

So, I am back in the USA.

While I was traveling through Europe with my family (in a mini-van, a very American vacation), I received an email from a dear friend that he was getting married in two weeks in NY. Could I make it?

No, of course not, I wrote back. I am in Spain, and on my way to France. My ticket back to Bangkok is already purchased, and then I have a week there to tie up loose ends and say goodbye before making my way slowly back to SF and ... who knows?

But, after I said goodbye to my family at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and then took the RER back into Paris by myself, and spent a few hours wandering the streets, window shopping (in French the expression is "licking the windows") and making my semi-annual pilgrimage to the Picasso Museum, I was flooded with the tediousness of being utterly on my own, and filled with regret about all the weddings I had missed. I went back to the airport and climbed on the plane to Bangkok. And when I got off, I logged on to the Internet, checked the direct flights to New York, and booked a ticket. In less than 24 hours I'd packed what was left in my apartment, handed off my student to a new teacher, texted my entire phone book and told everyone to meet me at the bar for a goodbye drink, and was on a 17 hour flight to JFK. Goodbye Thailand. Goodbye my peaceful, cloistered life.

Interestingly, I can't get anyone to tell me this was a bad idea. You can spend 6 months saying goodbye or you can spend 6 hours, but it all amounts to the same.

I will add that it's also not for lack of affection that makes it possible to go so abruptly. If anything, it's a surfeit of affection; if I'd allowed myself to think about all the people I cared about in Thailand, and the pleasures of my life there and all the happy memories, I may not have had the strength to leave. But, spurred by the momentum of all the traveling I'd already been doing (did I mention the mini-van?), and the adreneline of an imminent departure deadline, I jerked up those roots as if they'd been in wet soil.

The downside, of course, is that it's utterly shocking to find myself back in NYC, seemingly (and literally) plunked from the sky. The weather is beautiful. It's spring, and the parks are all bright yellow green, women are in skirts and men in short sleeves, the East River road lousy with joggers. Lynn Marie's neighborhood is not much changed: same church next door, same German beer garden on the corner, same sqare-faced dogs nosing around the lamp posts and fire hydrants. What's different is more money. A new apartment building has gone up, with beautiful, thick-glass windows. Every other block there is a swanky cafe -- here, in the neighborhood two blocks beyond the avenue I absolutely would not cross when I first moved to Manhattan in 1998. The faces on the jogging path are mostly white, and a pretty young woman I encountered on the footbridge was wearing a t-shirt that said Choate. Just over her shoulder, I could see the projects.

Manhattan increasingly belongs to the trust fund babies, said an acquaintance of mine over coffee. She has been living in Stuyvesant Town, a sprawling residential development on what used to be outskirts of the urban center, the closest Manhattan has to a suburb, for twenty years. Last year Stuyvesant Town was bought by developers for some-odd billions of dollars. The new owners have hired private detectives to trail people who have rent-controled apartments, trying to catch them in some violation of their lease so the owners can boot them out and rent the unit at five times (or more) the current rate. Most people who live in NYC are not poor; they are just average, but there is no place for them. I am reminded of a line in a friend's poem, describing how lightening scoops a hole in a tree, like a butcher ripping the heart from a sheep. That seems to me what is happening to the middle class in New York.

So, I will stay here a few more days, seeing as many friends as I can (one from Bangkok and I are having dinner tonight at a Thai restaurant on 58th and 9th; I've only been in town for 72 hours and I am already nostalgic for Asia) and attending a conference on politics and the Internet on Friday. The definite upside of NYC is that it is jam-packed with smart, ambitious, agitating individuals, and I am lucky to know some of them. If I haven't been able to sleep the last few days, it's probably only partially due to jet leg (my poor body doesn't know what clock it's on) and mostly due to stimulating conversation. If truth be told, it's this energy and sense of being plugged in that I came back for. In Europe, I remembered how nice it was to argue politics, to be among beautiful buildings (Bangkok is a lot of things, but pretty is not one of them), to exchange wry remarks with shopowners and fellow commuters. (This last one is surely my fault for not learning Thai; they are witty there, too, I just don't know it.) My boat was beginning to drift in Bangkok, and I needed a quick trip to shore to remember what solid ground felt like, if only so I could push off from it again later.

Tomorrow Boston. Sunday San Francisco, in two weeks DC, then New Haven, then Idaho to see my family, then Kentucky for another wedding (the first one was beautiful, I have no regrets and am grateful I was able to be there), then we will see how things look. It is all a bit crazy, but it is a life.

Last night I went to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand for a talk on the changing diplomatic power of China. At the Q&A at the end, an older man walked stiffly to the microphone and introduced himself as from Richmond, Virginia. Now, it is rare to hear an American accent in Bangkok, and a rare pleasure to hear a Southern one, and I grinned as he drawled his question ("Ah perceeve theah is a lot of A-rabic unrest in South Asia. What does China think about all this?" Blink, blink. "I don't think they do.") and then was pleased when he sat down next to me, presumably too tired to walk all the way back to his seat.

After the talk, I turned to him and said, "So you're from Richmond?" hoping to hear a little bit more of that accent. Needless to say, he was delighted to talk.

It seems he "made a bit of money on a piece of land" and has been traveling the world. At 71, he's staying in the youth hostel in Bangkok, so I wouldn't say he's exactly going the gourmet route, and I admired him for taking off on his own and exploring. (He's been in Bangkok a month because he loves the street food.)

He also has so many of those lovely qualities of Americans -- earnest curiosity, assumption that everyone will like him, utter candor ("Ah tell you, ah'm not what ah used to be. Not just my knees...[thumps head] mah brain."), and a don’t-know-a-stranger willingness to engage.

About ten minutes into the conversation (my broken arm was a big hit: "Did your boyfriend do that to you?" ha, ha...ha?), he returned to the question he'd posed to the speaker and lamented he perhaps hadn't explained himself very well. It seems that he had lived in Egypt and Morocco twenty-five years ago, and since then he'd been alerted to the "Arab problem."

Islam was a violent religion, he said, and Arabs [nevermind the conflation] didn't have any respect for anyone but their own kind. He couldn't walk down the streets without getting hassled: everyone wanted to have sex with him. Because it costs something like $40,000 to buy a wife, many Arab men couldn't afford to get married until they were in their thirties; until then, they did it with each other. However, my friend assured me, he never let anyone butt-fuck him.

Deep breath. My American instinct (because I'm as American as my friend, with all the same no-problems-here characteristics) is to see his perspective, empathize, try to tease out what's honest conflict and what's bigotry and cant. But my own biases and suspicions have already kicked in: I begin to hear in his voice not the charming soft slur of the South but hundreds of years of racism and abuse. I hear it when he says "the Arabs" (he might as well be saying "the Blacks," or worse), and I hear it when he praises China for lining up anyone accused of stealing and shooting them in the head.

I am also experiencing feminist rage. Yeah, how about that, not being able to walk down a street without getting hassled? And what about $40,000 to buy a wife? Can we just take a minute and think about what it must be like to be a woman, a piece of property?

My friend sees I'm flustered. "Ah didn't mean to upset you," he says. "You're pretty."

My superficial analysis -- a theory I've applied to other American men of the same generation -- is that my friend experiences the world as revolving entirely around him. The "Arab problem" is derived from his personal discomfort; on the other hand, China is not a problem because my friend enjoyed his previous visits there so well. "You go to these 'English corners' and sit in a chair. Pretty soon, all these Chinese students from the university sit on the floor all around you, and you talk for an hour." (Ah, yes, you're the center of attention and everyone wants to speak your language. God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.) "At the end of the hour, I point to the prettiest girl and say, 'let's have lunch.' The next day all the guys say to me, 'how did you do that?'" It is good to be king.

But then I think, shit, isn't this the doctrine of feminism: the personal is political. Women often take their personal experience and then extrapolate it into a social concern; however, I might add that ideally this scenario works when the solution is for the common good, not the convenience of the individual. My friend admitted that he, too, needed a break from America: "Our government doesn't do a very good job anymore. They let dogs bark and people play their stereos all hours of the night. I had to get out because I couldn't sleep." My gut reaction is -- great, you're a fascist. My real reaction is, I don't know how to answer this question: where does my liberty end and yours begin?

Interestingly, for all our differences (there was no doubt by now we were on opposite sides of more than the Mason-Dixon line), he was better adept than I at acknowledging them and moving on. "I had to leave America, too," I said. "I couldn't live in the same country as George Bush." "Now isn't that interesting?" my friend said -- and he seemed really to mean it. It was interesting, but not worth getting all hot under the collar about.

I also was struck by how I didn't have the language to respond meaningfully to him. I am so used to talking to people who share my viewpoint that I'm startled to come across someone who has another, and I haul out my own cant and propaganda to counter. "Ah do believe yours is the majority view," my friend said when I started in on Iraq. He seemed nonplussed to be in the minority; he also seemed to have heard everything I was saying before. We didn't even have a foothold to start a meaningful conversation.

After an hour, I stood up to go. He was disappointed -- he didn't get too many opportunities to speak English, he said, and he liked me -- "a real lady athlete" -- and invited me for a drink. I said I needed to get home. "Husband?" he said. "Girlfriend?" The anger flares: my personal life, to say nothing of my sex life, is as none of his business as his was to the Arab pedestrians in Morocco. But of course he's not trying to be rude; he's trying to show some gentle affection and perhaps be a bit flirtatious, because he'd like the company and he is, after all, a stranger alone in a foreign city. I'm pulled in diametrical directions: sympathetic to my friend's sincere intentions but intolerant to their expression.

Which I guess is the nub of my disquiet this morning, still thinking about our conversation. I am intolerant. Not of the people and culture in other countries -- I do great with Thais and my international friends -- but of my own. I take offense easily, and I experience a kind of waterfall of white noise when I pick up on anything that strikes me as homophobic, racist, sexist. Trapped in my own generation and gender, I can't stand for any of the rules I recognize to be transgressed. (Is this the same as railing against barking dogs and loud steroes?) And I am burdened by the weight of my country's history. There is a line Humbert Humbert says in a poem to Lolita -- "Lolita, qu'est-ce que j’ai fait de ta vie?/Lolita, what have I done to your life?" -- that I think of whenever I encounter other Americans abroad and we are confronted by even the slightest suggestion that race and ethnicity might matter. America’s history of slavery and subjugation continues to reverberate, and it makes me squirm even in 2007, even in Bangkok, even in conversations that are ostensibly about something else.

You know how sometimes when you are in a small, quaint place and leave for a day to camp or hike outdoors, you return and find the village's hustle and bustle overwhelming? This is not true for Luang Prabang.

Yesterday Susanna and I rented mountain bikes -- single-gear mountain bikes, good for flat mountains -- and pedaled furiously but slowly out of town. It seems the main sights around Luang Prabang are a waterfall and caves; we opted for the waterfall. Thirty-five kilometers away, at the end of a dusty road, it turns out to be your basic waterfall with a few small swimming pools at the bottom. There are also bears and tigers behind bars. Susanna and I bailed into the swimming pools, but not the animal cages (deterred by the sign -- translated only in English, natch -- advising onlookers not to put their fingers in the tiger's mouth.) We also hiked up the slope and took a nice walk up the mountainside, which is maintained by a stooped over man with a bristle brush, assiduously sweeping the dirt. It seems the definition of a Sisyphan task. When we returned to Luang Prabang via tuk tuk (it turns out our mountain bikes' chains balk at hills), the city looked no less sleepy or charming.

The best way to describe Luang Prabang's almost-comatose pleasure has to be the disco. The disco, a nightly event that closes at 11:30pm, is about two kilometers outside of the city center, situated behind a restaurant and flanked by bantam-weight bouncers wearing white leather shoes and welcoming smiles. For an entrance fee of US$2, we were ushered through quilted red doors into a hall that is some combination of 1950s prom, community hall wedding reception, and 7th grade Catholic school dance. The live band played Thai and Lao traditional music on instruments plugged into amplifiers, so it seemed like pop but without the kick -- like flat Coca-Cola. Balloons decorated the stage. Every couple minutes, one would pop; Susanna suggested that when all the balloons popped, the dance would abruptly end and everyone would go home. The seating was half-circle beige nagahyde benches, as if we were going to watch a lounge act in a diner, and co-ed groups sat politely sipping Beerlao (alcohol content approximately .02%; apparently there is a Beerlao Lite, which I can only conclude is the native word for "water") and watching the dancers.

The dancers. The dancers! Susanna's and my jaws literally dropped when we saw them. What does it say that the only thing more shocking than prurience is chastity? Young men and women in modest western clothes -- jeans and cotton Gap-ish shirts -- walked in a solemn circle, with whole feet if not yards between them (I am reminded of the nuns saying, "Leave room for the Holy Ghost"; these couples had room for the Trinity, all of the disciples, and several centuries of popes). There was obviously a dance step pattern, but it involved rather more plodding and synchronization than wild abandon -- a Communist horah. The song ended, all dancers immediately cleared the floor, in five seconds a new song started, and the dance floor was flooded again, this time with dancers diligently walking a circumscribed box step, a Macarana for the anesthetized.

This is not to say the disco was not an absolute blast. Susanna and I quickly left our Beerlao and joined the fray (by "fray" please understand "group of gently swaying individuals"), Susanna doing a much better job than I of figuring out the line dance pattern. We were with our friend Jason, an American from Texas (and hence a natural line dancer) who's lived in Luang Prabang for a year or so and goes to the disco every few nights. He's very tall and handsome and white and bald, and he kind of hovered above the rest of the crowd like a benevolent spirit, floating gracefully through the steps. The music changed again, and we all "fast-danced" to "La Bamba," although without any use of hips, hands, facial expressions, bodily contact, or general recognition that we were sexual beings in proximity to other sexual beings. Even our Lao companion wearing black leather pants (it remains a mystery where he managed to buy them) looked more like he was submitting to a dentist than getting it on with a bunch of tipsy girls in a late night out. It was trippy.

Home at 10:30 (the band takes a break at 10:30, only to return again for a twenty-minute finale to wrap up the evening in plenty of time for people to get eight hours sleep and be alert for work in the morning; I drank Beerlao for six hours straight and didn't have a trace of a hang over) and asleep by 11, only to be woken up at 4am by rhythmic gonging outside our window. It seems a fife and drum is the standard wake-up for the monks; only, the monks seem to exercise the "snooze" option, because the gongs went off about every half hour til 6:30, when the monks finally roused themselves for the morning alms-giving.

Minus the early-morning symphony, life remains gorgeous in Luang Prabang -- lulled by two rivers, a tropical sun, a socialist work ethic, a Buddhist belief in infinite second-chances, and a French colonial legacy of chocolate croissants for breakfast, a nap at lunch, and evening gin and tonics on the veranda. In dramatic contrast, the new airport at Bangkok is predicated to burst into flames at any moment; happily for us, Susanna and I may be stranded in Laos indefinitely...

I am writing from Luang Prabang, which, as my friend Greg says, sounds like magic words, as in,

"Copperfield covered his outstretched hat with a handkerchief, said the magic words 'Luang Prabang' and, poof, disappeared, leaving only his hat."

Luang Prabang IS magic. Nestled between the Khan and Mekong Rivers in north-central Laos, it is a gentle, sun-drenched place, with old, squat French buildings and slender teenaged Buddhist monks in orange robes.
My friend Susanna, who's visiting from New York, and I had lunch today at an outdoor cafe overlooking the river. There were some terraced farms on the far side, and two little girls fording the river. One of them had a silver mylar balloon that she lost hold of; fortunately, it didn't have enough air to float away, but unfortunately, it was swept downstream on the current. She bailed in after it, and sure enough, in about three seconds both little girls were swimming like otters, drenched and squealing.

We came up yesterday from a border town in northern Thailand. Since Luang Prabang is truly in the middle of nowhere -- bordered by Myanmar, southern China, and northern Vietnam, all places that aren't exactly world hubs [on a side note, the Bangkok Airport may be closing for repairs, and Susanna, worried about her return trip, and I tried to make contingency plans. It's pretty bad when your plan B is an international flight from Burma.] -- it's expensive to reach by air, far and somewhat treacherous by road, but accessible and pleasant to reach by boat, as long as you don't mind a long day on the Mekong. A long day on the Mekong! Although I can see that might not be appealing if one is engaged in a land war in Asia, to Susanna and me it sounded charming. We left at dawn, picking our way through fog-shrouded roads in a mini van, with a pink almost-Vermont light on the hills, shivered for thirty minutes at the border (the Lao and Hmong wear fur lined hats, hand-woven scarves, and Western t-shirts; they look like every hipster kid at NYU, only with soft, broad faces, the old people's worn smooth like pennies), then climbed onto a covered wooden boat about 100 feet long with seats that looked like they'd been retrieved from a defunct airplane. Apparently concerned we would starve, Susanna and I had brought a grocery bag of cashews, Thai fruits, granola bars, pretzels, and Pringles, and we spent most of the dribbling crumbs down the front of our shirts while we read. At sunset we had a Beerlao and watched the fishermen pull up their nets from the banks. Not much is happening along the Mekong in Laos, save for the fishermen, some bathers, and a few naked kids; is it CCR that points out that life on a river is the same everywhere? The most remarkable thing is really how peaceful it is, with clean air tinted by the smell of harvest fires, and shifting sand banks, and soft pock-marked rocks, and some sort of Lao cow grazing in the woodlands. (Our guide helpfully told Susanna, "Cows eat grass." "I guess it's hard to gauge foreigners' knowledge," Susanna reflected afterward. "I mean, if I don't even know how to say 'hello,' it's possible I don't know cows eat grass.")

Now we are enjoying a few days in town, eating French pastries for breakfast and Lao catfish salads for lunch. Tomorrow we'll rent bikes and try to find a waterfall. What a miracle to be so far from anywhere and yet feel so much at home.

I know I haven't posted very much recently, but I finally have a Jacob-worthy story. (My brother Jacob is sending wonderful blog entries from France, the latest about his stolen bicycle.)

So, I ducked into the mall this afternoon, as I do almost every day. It was a surgical strike -- I just needed to pick up a book on the third floor. But, wouldn't you know it, there was a 70% off sale on Thai designers on the second floor, so I was forced to stop and have a look.

Mid-browse, my cell phone rang. Bangkok Post, calling to confirm my subscription. (Now that they are publishing me, I figure I should read them.) I hung up the phone and continued shopping.

A few minutes later, I went up to the book store, bought my book, descended to the basement, made a pit stop to the bathroom, and settled in at an Internet cafe to get a few hours of work done.

Out of habit, I reached for my phone to see if I'd missed any calls, and ... no phone.

Now, I have been in Bangkok, what, a year, and so far I have gone through four cell phones. One I left on the grass in the park while I ran, and amazingly enough, it wasn't there when I got back, so I can't say I exactly lost that one -- more like donated it.

Then I forgot the second one in a hotel room in Malaysia. Then my friend loaned me one, and I'd had it a day and it broke. Then another friend loaned me hers, but it was already broken when she gave it to me (as my mother would say, "The couch was on fire when I laid down on it.") and spontaneously turned off mid-phone call, which I kind of liked, but proved to be unpopular with others. So I bought this phone, this current phone, now missing.

I should add, it's not like in the US when you lose your phone and you call your service provider and have the number suspended and simply replace the hardware (I assume. I've never lost a phone in the US. I swear.). In Thailand, you have to buy a separate SIM card, with a particular number that you lodge into your phone like its own little brain. No phone, no brain.

Every time I've replaced my phone, I have to go to the mall (of course), wait in line for an hour, convince the agent that I am the owner of the no-longer-in-evidence SIM, pay a fine, and retrieve my number (but not any of the numbers stored on it).

Then of course there is the utter hassle of going to the electronic black market mall, which I swear is my own personal version of hell, and haggle for a new phone, which is crappy but not cheap, then either the shame of asking friends for their numbers AGAIN, or, my usual strategy, wait around til someone text messages me, send a friendly but vague reply, offer to meet them soon, and show up to see who the hell they are so I can surreptitiously code their name back into my phone. This is to say nothing of all the people whom I will never hear from again.

Anyway, all of this is going through my mind as I dig through my purse, my gym bag, my pockets, the plastic bag from the book store, the folds of the newspaper I'm carrying around... No phone, no phone. I retrace my steps, up the escalator, around the sale, down the hall, through the aisles. No phone, no phone.

I approach the Thai cashiers. They get a look of panic in their eyes -- I am fairly charging them at this point, an enormous white woman with a mad look in her eye. We play a speed-round of charades. They direct me to the fourth floor, where the mobile phones are sold.

Finally I trudge to the Help Desk, knowing that is always the admission of a lost cause, and they kindly inform me there have been no phones turned in at the lost and found.

Of course not. It's not really that I think someone has stolen my phone. It is just that I have no idea where it could possibly be. It has to be somewhere -- it couldn't have just disappeared. And yet I can't imagine how it could have vanished from my bag, which prompts a whole meditation about how I can't seem to hold on to things, how I am utterly stumped by anything that has a physical property at all, how surely this must extend to my current isolation in the world, far from family and friends, so butterfingered with things I hold dear I can't even keep hold of the virtual data of loved ones nor communicate with anyone around me just what it is I've lost.

Then I remember. When I was in the toilet, in the middle of the flurry of unburdening myself of bags before I could do the same for my bladder, I heard a funny thwack sound and noticed the empty trash can was kind of spinning. I assumed that I'd whacked the trash with my gym bag as I swung it off my shoulder, and hadn't even looked inside. Could it be...

Back to the bathroom, where I loitered like a stalker until my stall came free. I opened the door, looked at the trash can, and saw... Well, here's the thing. Thailand is mainly Westernized, but not quite, a fact that is never more obvious than in the plumbing. There are lovely flush toilets here, but they don't take very kindly to toilet paper. As a result, all your basic bathroom refuse goes in the little bin.

Mine had been just emptied when I had used it, but in my forty-five minutes of searching and self-recrimination the bin had been pretty well filled. I stared down at it. I thought briefly of dumping the trash out in the toilet, but that would back up the pipes for sure, and I didn't really want to be responsible for flooding the mall. (Can you imagine? I'm sure it would be considered an act of terrorism.) I thought about just turning around and walking away, but then I imagined the look on the telephone agent's face when I came in for another SIM card, and I figured they'd throw me out of the country just for general idiocy. One way or another, I was getting deported.

I picked up the trash can and gave it a shake. Thud thud thud. There was something heavy in the bottom of that can. Inspired, I took the book out of the plastic bag, slid my hand into it like a glove, plunged into the wadded tissues and maxi pads, and retrieved my phone from its filthy and would-be anonymous grave.

Hoorah! A rinse for both of us in some soapy water, and we are back in business. Of course, there is some irony that I was too mortified to tell people I lost my phone again, but I am shamelessly going to post this story... Is it that things like this don't happen to other people, or is my family just willing to talk about it?

Hey! Check out my book review in today's Bangkok Post.