Nihal on the Move

Apologies for neglecting the blog, but I've been traveling across Western Europe and America for the past month. I’ve been able to savor the cultural dissonance of sharing a second class sleeper compartment with 5 teenagers on the way from Paris to Venice, and being schooled by my cousin on the finer points of traditional Gujarati dancing in a Dallas hotel ballroom exactly a week later. A few observations along the way:

--US airline security’s right back to where it was on September 11th, when was horrifically proven to be more show than substance. TSA officers minutely examine my driver’s license, eyes and ultraviolet penlight jumping from boarding pass to ID multiple times. But when a pilot or maintenance worker gets to the same checkpoint, they simply flash a badge at the officer without stopping. My shaving cream container could hold at least 300ml by volume, but it meets the 100ml threshold because the label (which could be forged by an adept fifth grader with his laptop) reads 75ml. I learnt that shoes and laptops remain on feet and in bags at German checkpoints—and I think we can all agree that the Germans know how to do security. But most importantly, the Europeans and Americans baggage screeners wear markedly different expressions. In Europe, the screener’s visage radiates the concentration that you expect from a security professional. In America, the prevailing expression is boredom, confusion, and usually both. But when you’re being paid a mean wage of $35,000, your mind would probably be elsewhere, too.

--My night train pulled into Venice on a cloudless, sticky Saturday morning, giving me a day and night to wander without a map through a perfectly preserved medieval city of canals. But the numerous vacant houses gave the city’s non-touristy quarters a melancholy feel—not surprising, since the city’s population has shrunk by 2/3rds since 1966. But this city-state was the most powerful economy in Europe for 250 years, leveraging its location on the Mediterranean into a near-monopoly on the goods that passed between Asia and Europe. Today, tourism’s the only game in town, making the city a dying Disneyland. It’s a history lesson for consumption economies that begin to party more than they produce. After a summer that saw America’s leadership borrow $150 billion to write $600 “economic stimulus” checks to its citizens, the Venice moonlight reflecting off the dark canals somehow felt less romantic, and more foreboding.

--The stereotypes are true: Parisians and New Yorkers do compete on who can be more unfriendly to tourists. Perhaps it’s because both cities are inundated with befuddled tourists, or that both cities are two of humanity’s finest attempts at the urban ideal (and its residents know it). Whatever the case, I can report that I ate the best sushi I’ve ever eaten in Paris, but only wish that the waiter didn’t react to my request for tap water as if I was asking to urinate behind their dumpster. And I’m convinced that the Parisian public bike system would be embraced by New Yorkers—stations are everywhere, bikes are flawlessly maintained, pricing is set to encourage trips of an hour or less, and best of all, calories (rather than hydrocarbons) provide the fuel.

--Want to topple Barack as the world’s favorite citizen? Try throwing in a y’all as you casually chat about terrorism with a German desk clerk, forget that a rental car agent in Dallas won’t necessarily know how to respond to an accidental danke as she hands you the keys, and bring it all home when by asking a Taco Cabana worker to add jalapeños to your quesadilla, por favor. Somewhere, Lou Dobbs is fuming.