If you visit regularly, you may recall that I broke my hand in early December and pretty much stopped updating this site for a while. At the time, I was in my favorite country of the Southeast Asia trip, Vietnam, and it was frustrating not to be able to post my wide-eyed ramblings. I kept a notebook for future transcription instead.

In the meantime, Adam Stein sent me a link to his Vietnam journal and immediately made my notebook redundant. He’s biking through Vietnam, which is the way it should be seen, instead of through the window of a Sin Café bus glumly cradling a cast. Otherwise, he seems to have made exactly the trip I made, and his travelogue made me snort with recognition.

Do check it out. It’s funny. It’s pithy. It’s about dog meat and saddle sores.

Mexico is not the obvious next destination for a person traveling around Southeast Asia. Those who, unlike me, are able to plan beyond the next taco stand carry smug little round-the-world tickets that get them from New York to London to Delhi, then Bangkok, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Lima, and San Francisco. It costs them less than the last-minute one-way tickets I buy when I decide, dammit, I have to get to New York: I want to see Jason, I miss my friends, and I have to move my stuff into cheaper storage. I flew for thirty-six hours in one endless day, which is about as long as the Martha Stewart travelers spend in the air in total.

Mexico was an afterthought, booked when I realized that US Immigration might not let me in without an onward flight. Before I left for Bangkok last July, I’d swotted up on Buddhism and Southeast Asian culture and read all the travelogues I could find. The space allotted to Mexico in my brain, on the other hand, was largely taken up by the movie Y tu mama tambi&eacuten, images of the food stands in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and a small hazy corner that involved Teddy Roosevelt and Ambrose Bierce. As for Mexico City: 20 million people, pollution, Volkswagen Beetles, pollution, muggings, pollution. I pictured Brasilia without the charm. When it was time to leave, I kept calling the airline to grant me just one more week in New York, and spun out the reprieve until they got sick of me. I wept all the way to JFK.

But it’s six days later, and I still haven’t left for Puebla. Mexico City, like Vietnam, is seductive. You can jay-walk with ease, the traffic is so slack. The weather is sweet as Los Angeles: seventy degrees with a faint yellow haze that so far has bothered me less than Bangkok tuk-tuk smoke. The public architecture makes London look like Levittown.

I lived in New York for five years and never went to the Whitney, the Frick, or the Guggenheim, not even for the motorcycles exhibition. But I’ve spent a happy week tramping around the Ethnology Museum, the Fine Arts Museum, Frida Kahlo’s house, the Palacio Royal, the cathedral, the post office (even the post office is more beautiful than anything in New York). They have parks here, and people use them. The university is just how it should be; a campus on the outskirts of the city full of students snogging on the grass, propped up on their backpacks. And the foodstands: ¡dios mio! My cautious verdict is that they’re possibly even better than Bangkok. I may have to stay here several months just to taste everything.

In Southeast Asia, my exotic celebrity status was continually reinforced by children yelling ‘Hel-lo! Sabaidee!’ Here, it’s noted by the men, who reflexively hurl pirropos, a sly catcall that still catches me off-guard. Apparently, grown men don’t wear watches in Mexico City; I’ve been asked the time maybe twenty times. When it starts to piss me off—‘¡Ay, preciosidad! ¿C&oacutemo est&aacutes?’—I whip out my invisibility shield, a pair of glasses that owe everything to Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep. They’re thick-rimmed Guccis, probably fake, bought for $25 in Hanoi, and when I wear them I walk in a politically-correct world once more. Much to my chagrin.

Mexico is foreign, but comfortingly familiar, too. I speak Spanish well enough to explain my castillian lisp, and I can ask vendors what things are; an unthinkable luxury in Southeast Asia where I gamely chewed on all kinds of mysteries. Mexicans read. There are as many book stalls as taco stands, and they sell real literature, not just Who Moved my Cheese? (though that’s here too). In Southeast Asia, almost all the bookstores sold second-hand English books only, or sometimes English language text-books. The market for Thai or Vietnamese literature appeared to be close to non-existent; those squiggly scripts were for commercial use only. I could never feel at home in a culture that doesn’t read, and here I give a little inward cheer at every blanket spread with classics.

It’s not clear to me how one would get by in Mexico without passable Spanish. Only in the poshest districts are store signs in English. While Southeast Asia sometimes seemed like a theme-park run for my benefit—from English operating systems in the Internet cafes to every single vendor, no matter how remote, being able to quote prices in English—Mexicans seem to be under the impression that they live in an independent, self-sufficient, proud country, and that monoglot English is your problem, not theirs.

I like it already. I want to stay.

Yolanda was horrified that we were being served nothing more than pretzels and soda. She had flown from Caracas to Miami, and was now heading from Miami to Mexico City. The extra miles were to double her baggage allowance, but American Airlines was rewarding her custom poorly.

‘!Es que tengo mucha hambre!’ she cried. The steward tossed her four extra bags of pretzels and explained that meals were served to business-class passengers only. No, she couldn’t buy one; they only had enough onboard for those passengers.

I passed her my pretzels, slightly in awe of a grown woman who would make her hunger known to a planeload of passengers. She leaned towards me, complaining in rapid, breathy Spanish. I was dizzy on her perfume. Both her lipliner and her hair were South American beige, a shade I recognized from my days living around the corner from Bergdorf Goodman. Her neckline plunged and her bosom heaved. I kept thinking, flesh. Like a hotdog, she was compact but bursting. This lush, beige-haired granny was now the instructor in my informal, pre-Mexico Spanish immersion course.

Yolanda Rodriguez had given up on Caracas. She had lost her business and was fleeing Chávez’s mess with four Vuitton suitcases. She wasn’t allowed to take money out, but this hadn’t curtailed her in the duty-free shops. Venezuela, she told me, had had everything.Wonderful people. Mountains. Beaches. Snow. Sun. Nature. Prosperity. (And a bargain cosmetic-surgery industry that had served half of Florida, I thought privately.) But now this man, this Chávez, this dictator, had crippled the country with his corruption. Venezuelans had never needed to emigrate, not like the Mexicans. The only ones who had moved to the US were the super-successful, the Carolina Herrerras. But now, what else could they do? They had to pack their bags like peasants and leave with practically nothing.

She wept loudly as she showed me her grandchildren, still in Caracas, where they were vulnerable to the street crime, the riots, and the shortages. Imagine, no more gasoline on sale in an oil-producing country! No Coca-Cola, no hamburgers. Nothing.

Then she composed herself, pouted, and asked me to guess her age. 52 and sun-damaged, I thought.
�42?� I said, ever the flatterer. She giggled like a little girl.
� �Tengo cinquenta a�os de edad!�
We agreed that she didn’t look fifty, that it was extraordinary that she had a daughter of 34.We discussed my age�thirty, same as her youngest�and my sad failure to reproduce. I’ve had this conversation in sign language many times over the last year, but at least now I get to partake fully. Progress.

‘I am exhausted today,’ she said, ‘Can you see the tiredness in my face? Is it very noticeable?’
I reassured her, though her face was so close to mine I couldn’t see clearly. Yolanda’s need for personal space was smaller than mine. (Just when I think we Irish are passionate, emotional Catholics, Latinos remind me that we are no more than Northern Europeans; practically WASPs, for God’s sake.) She was relieved, and confided in a loud whisper that it was especially important that she look well today. She was meeting her Internet boyfriend for the first time at the airport. They’d met at an online dating site and corresponded for three months. Juan was Mexican, distinguished, very passionate. Since she’d lost her business, she’d spent up to eight hours a day talking to him online and by phone.

‘He calls me his queen,’ she said, ‘Can you imagine? He is very emotional, much more than me. Here is his picture. Handsome, no?’

She had met many men online, but none like Juan. This one might really work out. She hoped they might build a life together in Mexico. Did anglos date online, she inquired? I assured her they did. She expressed sympathy for our obvious disadvantages in this art form. Although she spoke hardly a word of English, she knew it to be a cold language, lacking the rich vocabulary of Spanish, barely capable of expressing real sentiment. This must restrict our relations terribly.

I bristled. I speak Spanish, French, and Gaelic, but I’m a chauvinist for English. My language makes my prouder than my nationality. As far as I’m concerned, English is a beautiful mutt; muscular, infinitely flexible, and deserving of its world dominance.

But I conceded meekly. Spanish was a wonderfully passionate language well-suited to the needs of online dating, I said, and who knows what love poetry poor old Shakespeare might have tossed out if only he’d had that Junior Year Abroad in Seville? Yolanda patted my hand and offered to help me if I chose to use Spanish online dating sites. Perhaps I would be able to have a family then.

The flight attendants prepared for landing, and so did we. Yolanda applied her lipstick twice, and I helped her with the powder. We brushed the pretzel crumbs out of her cleavage, and she crammed on her Liz Claiborne straw hat. Together, we walked towards the four suitcases that would seed her life in Mexico. I kept stopping to let her catch up to my lanky strides—I walk like she talks—but lost her for good at the duty-free stores, where her nerves demanded a final, soothing retail therapy. I was happy to give her privacy for meeting the man of her future, though I’m not sure she would have seen it that way, such was her bounty.

I hope she’s dancing salsa and toasting her future with Juan and Mexico today. I hope she brings all her passion, her appetite, and her warmth, to inventing herself again. And I wish I could thank her for forcing me to land in Mexico with fluent Spanish again, after ten years of corrosion. Yolanda, !que sobrevivamos!

At Green-wood Cemetery

The fifth morning I put on the black turtleneck, Tricia asked if I wanted to borrow any clothes. She has a wardrobe full of groovy Rock Star’s Girlfriend outfits, plus a whole range of cosy stuff for February in New York. But I’ve grown so used to wearing the same thing every day that I’ve forgotten how to make those crucial decisions, and so I politely refused. Though you mightn’t know it, I have a good supply of clean undershirts and a choice of two, count ‘em, pairs of New York pants—one being jeans, yet. Still, it was time to do laundry ostentatiously, in case I was kicked out under the Skanky Houseguest provision of her Brooklyn lease.

I put my little collection in a Duane Reade bag and headed out to the laundrette on North 8th and Berry. As I shuffled sockless through the snow, I remembered the women who had washed my clothes in the Mekong over the past seven months. Sometimes the t-shirts came back with a riverine smell and a light brown cast. I never minded; it was worth it for the soft, scrubbed-on-rocks texture that adds two hundred bucks to the tag at Barneys.

Williamsburg laundrettes are generally good for one of my favorite art forms: the New York noticeboard. They pop with energy, these Americans with their tear-off phone numbers. The Dead Sopranos are just one good drummer away from the cover of the NME. You can get your film edited, join a protest, take Chi Gung, really take off with a vocal coach. All breeds of hipsters are looking for roommates to share creative spaces with specified dietary and musical tastes. One set goes so far as to explain that their eyes aren’t really as crazy-looking as those in their cartoon depiction below.

And someone wanted to know if I wanted to earn an easy 25 dollars modeling feet for a prosthetics company.

Well, shooah.

I haven’t had a positive cashflow day since last June. Figuring six bucks for laundry and four for lunch, this could be it. I called Eric, who sounded very nice. It would only take 45 minutes, and the studio was right opposite the laundrette. I made an appointment for 2.30, when my clothes were due for the drier.
‘ Only thing is, you can’t wear socks for an hour beforehand.’
I looked at my entire collection of three pairs spinning in the washing machine and assured him it wouldn’t be a problem.

Eric’s studio looked like any other Williamsburg art loft. Labeled feet stood on shoe racks and flaccid legs dangled from the ceiling. Some feet, I noticed, had red toenail polish.
‘So, casts of my actual feet go on the artificial limbs?’
‘Not exactly. We try to match them to the other foot. But we use models as a rough starting point, and then our artists shape the toes and whatnot. Feet vary so much. That’s why we need a big inventory of model feet. We ran out of friends and families to use.’
‘Can I touch one of the legs? Are these high-end models?’
‘They’re pretty high-end, yep. We get a lot of athlete clients.’

He arranged my feet on a square of tinfoil. We each tried to pretend there wasn’t something slightly creepy about a man making a cast of a woman’s feet for money. His patter was cheerful and practiced, like a dentist.

‘First I’m going to cover your feet and ankles with vaseline, so the material doesn’t stick. Then we apply silicone, which I’ll mix in the ice-cream tub right here. It’ll be cold right at the beginning, but then it should be fine. I’ll apply a coat, let it dry a little, then place your foot on my knee to do the sole. Then I’ll do another coat. Takes about twenty minutes a foot. I’m sorry I don’t have any magazines or anything for you.’
‘That’s fine,’ I told him, ‘I have a magazine in my bag.’ In fact, I had US Weekly, swiped from Tricia’s coffee table, and, obscurely, I didn’t want Eric to think I was the kind of person who would read that kind of magazine. Besides, the loft was interesting. There was a hank of blonde hair on the table next to me, for one thing, yet another odd prop. He explained that some clients insisted on leg hair.

‘This guy, we told him it’ll rub off in his jeans inside three weeks, just as normal hair does. But he insists. So now I have to spend the next three weeks hand-sewing leg hair onto his prosthesis. Look.’
He showed me a floppy leg-skin, partly sewn with tufts of blond hair. It looked like victim of the nasty kid in Toy Story. I told him about all the amputees I’d seen in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The street beggars wouldn’t have wanted a fancy fake leg’their lack was their livelihood’but the farmers and boatmen might have dreamed of the comfort of a basic American prosthesis, let alone a hand-molded, pedicured, hairy Cadillac-leg like these. It would have cost less than a daily bomb load in the Seventies to outfit them all.

‘Are they comfortable? ‘ I asked.
‘I just asked one of our clients who got a new one. Her physical therapist is making her run every day to break it in. She says it feels like someone is whacking you in the ass with a big stick on every step. But it gets better.’

My foot was now gleaming white, like a fresh marble statue, and I was half admiring it and half worrying about the rumor that toe-waxing was the new New York minimum grooming requirement. I could see two toe hairs clearly through the silicone. Goddammit.

Eric hauled my foot up onto his knee and started painting the sole with latex. His jeans were covered in the gunk. The doorbell rang, and his friend John arrived to fix the computer. He stopped at the sight of Eric painting my foot, slack-jawed, with a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me-this-is-your-job? expression. Eric directed him to the computer with guarded professionalism, and told him he could change the blues CD if it was bothering him. I think we were all trying not to laugh. Instead, we bitched politely about how Williamsburg had gone down in the ten years since they’d lived here, how it was full of hipster kids and fancy restaurants now. These days they reverse-card you in Williamsburg bars, the rumor goes, so that over-31s can’t get in without an accompanying minor.

I asked if I should prepare for notoriety when my foot molds got published on the Internet. Eric pointed to a pair of hammer-toed size 10s.
‘Well, as close as we get is that this woman is a stripper. I mean, she told us, voluntarily. I guess I shouldn’t disclose that stuff.’
‘It’s okay. I’m not ashamed of my modeling past. And those look like stripper’s feet’high heels kill you.’

Both feet now gleamed in their silicone icing, painted to the floor like weird wedding cakes. Eric slit each one down the back and had me wiggle my toes until my feet slid out. He held up the vinyl booties, and showed me how he would fill them with wax and and freeze the molds. Then my feet would join others on the shelves, neatly tagged ‘DERVALA’, as if they were attached to my dead body.

I spent some of the twenty-five bucks Eric sheepishly slipped me on two more pairs of socks for my collection, seeing as it’s cold in Bolivia. And when I hike up the mountains there, I’ll wonder who else is wearing my feet that day.

Anyone in the market for a pint of dairy-fed O Negative?

After four weeks of silence, the task of updating this website has become as intimidating as starting a new one. The new entry should be Momentous, a reward or at least an explanation for patient friends who have dropped by week after week to see the same tired title.

Sorry. I’m in New York. I’m sick in the racking-cough, whole-body-aching way that’s inevitable after flying for 36 hours from the tropics to Manhattan in February. I’m taking seven subway rides a day in the urban equivalent of Chicken Bus travel, and fellow passengers are noting my phlegmy convulsions with the same distaste I recently had for shitting ducks in the opposite seat.

But I’m ba-ack.

There is a New York City law which mandates that you are not allowed to eat eggs in your own home at the weekend, so my friend was eating brunch downtown. A ratty-haired young woman a few tables down looked familiar. In New York, the turnover is fast enough to forget a Tuesday dinner date by Saturday. He leaned across to his companion.

    ‘I have to talk quietly because I think I went out with that woman last week and I don’t want her to see me.’
    ‘Would you stop,’ she replied icily, ‘staring at Kristen Dunst?’

Over seven months in Southeast Asia, my assumptions unraveled just enough to glimpse how much I still don’t understand.

How did they cope, I wondered in Burma, where not just whole families but whole communities lived in single-room ‘long houses’? How did husbands and wives, young lovers, and kids, manage private lives when thirty people ate, slept, and bathed together? But as they quizzed me in pidgin English, I began to understand they did not mind their lack of privacy. They did not see themselves as separate from others, as I did. And then slowly it dawned—over months—that they felt sympathy, not envy, for my cherished independence.

For the first time, I met people who had almost nothing. They lived in mud huts not even graced by a chair. Poor things, I thought, as another part of my brain fretted about the storage costs for my stuff in New York. I missed my New York furniture sometimes. But as I sat cross-legged, aching, and fidgety, I began to notice that these folks had the stomach, back, and calf muscles that Pilates queens dream of. They sat regally on packed-earth floors for hours. My body was atrophied from years of school and office chairs, in which I sat to pay for more chairs. How nice to have strong sitting muscles, in place of strong wanting muscles.

I watched people give to monks on daily alms rounds. The monks smiled, the donors bowed and said thank you. I thought this was daft and hierarchical at first. But then, in village after village, people gave freely to this rich tourist with obvious pleasure. Giving, in poor Buddhist countries, is not a duty but a joy. It is an investment in karma for which the recipient should be thanked. I was humbled by—and envious of—this sense of abundance, and no longer sure which of us was rich.