Turpan: Karezy like Kerouac in the Taklamakan

Turpan is the hottest place in China and the second lowest depression in the world (154 m below sea level). Turpan belongs to the category of silk road towns that were once epicenters of trade and adventure but are now wastelands in the desert. As we drive from the train station to the main town, we pass stretches of the Taklamakan desert.

I ask the driver to play a cd I bought in Morocco and I suddenly feel transported to the High Atlas. The desert landscape is eerily similar. We arrive in Turpan proper; the synthetic sounding syncopation of Berber voices blaring into the hot desert air. The drab utilitarian architecture we see for miles is suddenly broken by trellised vines. I feel I am in Cyprus. We spend the evening walking around this oasis town aimlessly and have a quite night reading and trying to get our bearings straight. There seems to be no other travelers in Turpan.


The next day we decide to hire a driver and vehicle to drive around the city. Our driver Kalak Khan picks up two exotic looking Uighur women on the road. KK claims that one is his girlfriend and the other his friend and that they have come for fun. One is Khaddariya (Arabic for one who offers respect to Allah) and the other is Gul Noor (Arabic for rose jewel). Our first stop is Emin Minaret founded by Emin Hoja in the late 18th century.

Outside the minaret, a Uighur woman tries to sell me a cd of local music and then offers me pictures of Moa. Mao, a larger than life iconic figure in history had become trinketized in the desert. CD or Mao? Maybe necklace for my girlfriend instead of Mao. I decide on a necklace. If I ever become (in) famous I hope I am never subjected to this calculus of consumption. But it is an inescapable fate. Bach and Mozart have become musak and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare can be bought on the pavement of MG Road where they lie in the esteemed company of Deepak Chopra , Osho, Scott Peck and the Harvard Business Review (new age punters of psychobabble and business pornography). But I degrees….

Our next stop is the Jiaohe Ruins. The heat gets unbearable and so we decide to eat watermelons and abandon any pretence of being interested in the ruins. Jiahoe means
“confluence of rivers.” However, we find ourselves at the confluence of sweat and heat!
We visit a museum on the Karez, an irrigation system that is over 2000 years old; one that originated in Iran and spread to China and all over the Iberian Peninsula. I don’t quite understand the mechanics of the system but in essence, people have found an ingenious way to get water from the melting snow at Mount Tian Shan all the way into the desert.

We break for lunch and over lunch, Kalak Khan hands us a bag of crushed grapes. As we eat them unsuspectingly, KK and his girls giggle. I have eaten a handful of grapes and Arjun has eaten four times as much. As lunch concludes I suddenly feel my head spinning. Arjun is laughing ecstatically and his eyes are blood shot. We have unwittingly consumed a drug of sorts. The rest of the day is a blur. I remember spending many hours laughing as KK and his girls speed in an out of narrow streets with Uighur music in the background. It seems like, theatre. We eventually get dropped off at our hotel, gather our belongings sloppily and make our way to the bus station on rented bicycles! Arjun decides to circumambulate the bus station over 200 times and says that he feels engulfed in a “ring of cold blue flame.” I finally manage to get him on the bus and we leave Turpan for the next oasis town on the silk road.

On the bus, my head starts spinning again. When I close my eyes, I see fabulous yellow roman candles explode like spiders across the stars and in the middle I see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww.

Urumqui: A Central Asian Hodgepodge, Up to Heaven Lake, Down to Earth

Urumqui lies in the Xinjiang Province in north west of China. Xinjiang is bordered by eight countries (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia) and used to called “Eastern Turkestan.” It is home to the Uighurs (pronounced Way-gurs) and a thriving Chinese muslim community (Dungans). While it is the largest land mass, (16% of China) it does not feel like China at all.

We fly into Urumqui in order to make our way down the northern silk road. I have never felt more physically and culturally dislocated in my life. Our hotel is filled with smarmy looking businessmen from Russia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Han Chinese people hover around the front desk of the hotel nervously while blue eyed Uighurs covered in dust and grime work on a construction site on the road. On learning that I am Indian, a Uighur who runs the hotel's “travel agency” takes me to a computer excitedly and plays Bollywood videos. I feel I have entered an alternative universe, a surreal Central Asian no-mans-land.

We pass a restaurant that boasts the “best sea food in China.” Arjun and I exchange suspicious glances because we know that Urumqui has the distinction of being the place on earth furthest (2250 km) from the ocean! My sense of dislocation is exacerbated. Urumqui is best described by one word: chaordic (chaos with the semblance of order). There is nothing to do in Urumqui but to embrace this feeling of chaos and order and to watch the interplay of races, faces, attitudes and expressions.

Arjun is ill and decides to rest in our hotel room and so I make the day trip to Heaven Lake.



When I read Vikram Seth's travels a couple of months ago (where he hitch-hikes his way from China to India through Tibet) and read his descriptions of Heaven Lake, something deep within me stirred and I felt an odd spiritual connection, an unfounded limerance towards this place. I am really excited to finally be here.

Imagine many shades of rolling green hills, mountain goats galumphing along merrily, wild horses grazing gracefully, igloo shaped yurts and light eyed Uighur and Kazakh women enjoying afternoon tea... and in the middle of all this beauty, imagine a turquoise blue lake nestled between snow capped mountains and Taoist temples. That’s what Heaven Lake is like. I spend the entire day wondering around the lake, drinking tea in a Kazakh yurt, praying in a Taoist temple and meditating on the tranquility of the place. I eat nans, kababs and polo (pilaf) for lunch.

The next day we leave the place farthest from the ocean for Turfan, the lowest point on the earth after the Dead Sea! Dislocation continues…

Xian: Megalomania, Mutton Soup, The Father of Serendipity

Xian used to be Changan, the capital of China spanning over 13 dynasties. It is also located at the eastern terminus of the silk road. The Lantian man was discovered here and Xuanzang (spelt and pronounced differently each time I encounter his name!) the Buddhist monk, scholar and itinerant traveler returned to Xian to establish a Sanskrit translation center after two decades of studying Buddhist scriptures at Nalanda University in India. However, this 3000 year old place has become synonymous with the Terracotta Warriors.

We visit the site of the terracotta warriors on our first day here. I have never seen anything like this. The Emperor Qun Shi Huangdi ordered over 700,000 of his craftsman to build 8000 + life-sized replicas of his army. These warriors were buried with him in his tomb. Our guide tells us that Emperor Qin feared death so much that he wanted his army to protect him in the afterlife! His tomb is also said to have “flowing mercury,” pearls and lots of gems. What megalomania!

As we walk through what remains of this necropolis, we suddenly spot an old man behind a table signing books. A crowd gathers around him. Overcome by curiosity we walk towards the table only to learn that the old man is the farmer who discovered the warriors in 1974. Our guide tells us that it is an uncommon sight and so we buy books and get them autographed by him. He signs my book and smiles deferentially. I realize that this man in front of me is the father of serendipitous discoveries. Imagine farming and chancing upon thousands of terracotta warriors built by a powerful Chinese emperor before the birth of Christ!

Awe-struck and dumbfounded, we leave the site and spend the rest of the day in the Muslim quarter where we eat mutton soup (a famous Xian dish) and then end up, for better or worse, in a massive night club where Chinese policemen patrol the sides of the dance floor watchfully as Chinese men and women dance with semi-reckless abandonment.

Tai Shan: Thugs on the Midway Gate to Heaven, A Parable for Travel

Tai Shan, located in the Shangdong province is considered China’s holiest mountain. Pilgrims have ascended the mountain for over 3000 years and it remains the most climbed mountain on earth. From its peaks, Confucius is supposed to have uttered the phrase “the world is small” and it here that Mao declared that the “East is Red.”

We start our climb by mid-afternoon (the morning is spent retracing our path to our hotel that we checked into as we manage to forget our hotels name – an intractable problem to have in China). As we begin the 7200 steps journey through deciduous trees and beautiful temples, we pass a group of septuagenarian women making their way up effortlessly. In a country of atheists, it is strange to see such devotion that could easily pass for religious zeal. I later learn that the worship of heaven as an omnipotent force is central to Chinese panentheism. This Chinese belief in Heaven predates Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism etc. Tai Shan was a place where imperial sacrifices to heaven were made.

As we climb, we pass rocks with ancient inscriptions and break many times for water. I can feel my legs burning and by the time I reach the top, I am drenched in sweat. We learn that pilgrims who are able to make it to the top will “live a hundred years.” As I dwell on the lofty possibility of living to a hundred, I am struck by a more immediate and real problem: blistering barnacles we have two hours to make the train to Beijing! It took us over six hours to climb to the top and so we have only one option: to run down like mad dervishes! We sprint down vertiginous steps and pass many confused and disapproving faces. Out of context, it looks like Arjun and I have made a sport out of the sacred. Imagine bike racing in Bodhgaya, boat racing in Varanasi or flying kites competitively in the Kaaba!

We finally reach the Midway Gate to Heaven (half way down the mountain) in less than 40 minutes. I am overcome by a wave of exhaustion and by the realization that, even if we continue sprinting down the holy mountain, we will miss our train.We see a small tour group waiting patiently for a bus but quickly learn that the last bus has already left the place. Our only option becomes a jeep that is parked on the street. We negotiate a price with the driver and as we are about to jump in, a small thuggish looking dude emerges from the darkness. He wants us to pay twice as much and will not let us get into the jeep. I mistake him for a member of the tour group, who wants to make a quick buck and so I take him aside and “sought him out.” Lets just say, my arm twisting and badgering is futile as I find out that this seemingly diminutive character is a self-ordained thug of the Midway Gate to Heaven! He takes a cut out of every transaction that takes place on the mountain. To make a long story short, we end up paying him a lot of money (he is infuriated by my chutzpah) and drive all the way down the mountain. We make it to our train in the nick of time.

As I leave Tai Shan, I feel that the whole experience is a parable for travel: You have to know where you come from and where home is before you begin (we spent three hours finding our hotel room before climbing the mountain), the journey can be physically and emotionally taxing, the rewards at the end are always great (we will live a hundred years now!), you will eventually come back to where you started, the way back can be fraught with physical or mental barriers but ultimately you are one (or 7200) steps closer to heaven!

Pingyao Part 2: Everything is Ting Bu Dong (TBD)

I have always held the belief that you can learn a lot about a people by studying what they read and what they eat. So I visit a bookstore in Pingyao and a restaurant where the locals eat. Like an earnest student, I make a detailed inventory of everything I see.

The bookstore has the following sections (the books are all in Chinese but the signs are in English):

Hundred Branch Knowledge, Children Dance, Poetry Couplets Hung in Front of a Hall,
Theory of Natural, Pursuing a Goal with determining to mature, Pop Care, Great Books (this section was under lock and key and all the books had a golden sheen to them!)

I am most interested in figuring out what the Pursuing a Goal with determining to mature section means. I finally decide that it is a self-help section. However, what throws me off completely is a video game in this section entitled the “Bards Tale.” The picture above says it all: A barbarian looking dude gallops towards a hot blond chic with cleavage and an overflowing mug of beer! Must take a lot of determination for the poor “bard” to pursue such an arduous goal? I mean beer and blondes don’t come by easily in China do they? If you do crack this one, please e-mail me.



Moving on to gastronomical absurdity of astronomical proportions. Below is an inventory of my favorite items from a local restaurant (picture above captures only one section):

Pingyao beef, The hand grasps the beef, Steamed rolling wish Otes flavor, Domestic life skoal beans a round mass if, Syrup long chinese yam, Pingyao bowl gets wet bare, Sour picked cababe with mound, Burn the eggplant, Bum (my favorite! austere in its simplicity but so insane!), The red flour rubs cha mound fights, Orchid Zhou knife cut face, Powder vegetables if water...

The list goes on! So if you have an existential crisis in China I recommend the following routine:
Wake up early, visit the Pursuing a Goal with determining to mature section. Pick out your favorite bards tale where you can chase blond chicks with big boobs and beer. When you are exhausted, treat yourself to a grand meal of Burn the eggplant + hand grasps the beef and you will be all set!

On a more serious note, the Chinese can be inscrutable to the uninitiated traveler. One needs to dig a lot deeper than bookstores and Chinese restaurants to even ask the right questions. At the same time, the inability to understand, speak and comprehend is what makes your experience beautiful and humbling. When you lose your sense of language, you are inadvertently attuned to non-verbal expression.

While everything is Ting Bu Dong (Chinese for I don't understand), in the absence of language, China becomes a celebration of eyes, smiles, colors and transcendental interactions. Your other senses come alive and mix in a synesthetic whirl.

Pingyao Part 1: Wild Jujubes, Red Lanterns, Quilin Arrives

Pingyao was a Ming and Qing Dynasty city along the trade route between Beijing and Xian. At one point in history it was the financial capital of all of China but it quickly fell into a state of poverty and decay. The charm of the place lies in its state of preserved disrepair. Imagine taking Miss Havisham and placing her in amber for hundreds of years! Pingayo has that feel to it. It is definitely one of my favorite places in China and it serves as the perfect antidote to the chaos of all the big cities we have visited so far. Red lanterns sway in the cool evening breeze (Raise the Red Lantern was shot here) and we (Morgan comes along as well and decides to travel with us up to Xian) spend many hours walking around dusty streets, playing badminton with street children and luxuriating on 400 year old heated beds!

We meet two adorable girls (twins) who work at our hostel and decide to take them for a bike ride through the narrow cobbled streets within the boundaries of the 6 Km Ming city wall. As we meander through narrow lanes and by-lanes we see signs for a Theatre Group called the Wild Jujubes plastered all over the city walls. We decide to christen the twins “wild jujubes” and they seem happy with this moniker. At one point we accidentally leave the city wall and find ourselves staring into the hot desert. I suddenly realize that most of China is actually made up of arid desert! As we bicycle back we spot the real Wild Jujubes performing street theatre!

In Pingyao I learn about a mythological Chinese creature called Quilin (pronounced chillin). Apparently this guy shows up only when times are harmonious. As I write this, Arjun is playing badminton on the street, music from a loud speaker is wafting through the air, a food vendor makes yuan xiao (a round white snack which symbolizes the moon), red lanterns move softly in the wind and Morgan is practicing yoga on our 400 year old bed. Times could not be more harmonious and so I might spot Quilin today!

Beijing Part 2: The Great Wall, The Great Fall, Unbuilding It Again

On the second day in Beijing, we wake up at the crack of dawn and make our way to Simitai, a section of the Great Wall that is three hours away from the city. We spend four hours climbing different sections of the wall and hike 10 K up and down painfully beautiful hills and rivers. This part of the wall is not for the faint hearted. Each time my legs hurt I get reminded by a Mao DeZong quote that says "he who has not climbed the great wall is not a true man." After the four hour climb we reach a section of the wall where you can zipline from one hill to another. Morgan (from the adventure capital of the world) says it’s a no-brainer and quickly ropes himself to the wire and glides across the sky. I am a little apprehensive but eventually muster up the courage. I waft through the sky, over a river and green mountains with sharp precipices. What a feeling! An intoxicating mix of adventure sport and ancient history.

Our third day in Beijing is spent lazily. We check out a mosque on Nuijie Street. I have never seen Islam in such a miniaturized form. If the little mosque is symbolic of the strength of the community in Beijing then the community is like a struggling fish in an ocean of sharks. A small Chinese Muslim community piously walks in for their evening prayers. Arabic words are engraved on the mosque but the architectural structure is ultimately Chinese. The mosque reminds me of the Haghia Sophia where Islamic and Christian architecture is integrated.

We leave the hubbub of the city and have a peaceful day walking through the gardens of the Summer Palace (Garden of Clear Ripples, Garden of Everlasting Spring, Garden of Perfection and Brightness, Garden of Tranquility and Brightness, and Garden of Tranquility and Pleasure!). We learn that gardens are the physical instantiation of poetic abstractions. Imagine building a garden "based on" a poem. I think about how Neruda gardens might differ from gardens fashioned after Cumming's poems. The former orthogonal and melancholy, the latter cubic and confounding. We learn that the Dowager Empress Cixi, diverted funds from China's navy to build the gardens and also built a marble boat while she was at it! I have never seen a stationary marble boat! What extravagance and whim.

Our last day in Beijing is spent with Justin Fong, a friend of a friend who runs his own NGO that provides programmatic help to local nonprofits. Morgan and Elise accompany us as well. We meet Justin’s girlfriend who is helping old people fight for the rights of other old people! Justin takes us to his favorite restaurant and we order all kinds of crazy Sichuan food. We have a million questions for Justin and he enlightens us about how resource allocation takes place in China, about the tensions between the Hans and the Uighurs, about central vs. provincial decision making. I learn that power in China actually lies in the hands of provincial governments and that politics is more localized than nationalized. I also learn that ascendance in the civil service ranks is closely linked to mastery of the language! The Chinese never stop studying their language!

After excellent food and intellectual banter, Morgan, Elise, Arjun and I head to Beijing's bar/club area. A night of madness ensues. There is phenomenal energy and flow. We dance till 5 in the morning and on our way back we see Federico (a crazy Italian dude who kept appearing and reappearing throughout the night like a jack-in the box). In our altered state of consciousness, we decide that Federico is a new age prophet. Arjun says that Federico is like Shelly’s cloud and begins to quote the last lines of “The Cloud.”

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.

We sleep the whole of the next day as we are exhausted from hiking, revelry and China in general and eventually leave Beijing for Pingyao where we hope to spend several days unbuildign it again!

Beijing Part 1: Opera Houses, Palaces, Historical Smallness

The night we arrive in Beijing, the city is downcast and it rains the whole evening. Arjun and I spend the early evening reflecting on our travels and ambling around the courtyard of our international hostel. These international hostels are melting pots, little island universes of Kiwi, English, German, French, Danish, American people. At one level it feels great to able to connect and converse with these intrepid travellers as much of China is impenetrable due to the language barriers. On the other hand these 'western' travellers are a little distanced from the place and their experiences only skim the top layer of the landscape as they try to recreate their ‘homes’ in foreign spaces. That said, we make two good friends here. One is a Kiwi called Morgan who plays in a band called Anbaric (derives from the word anbar/an electric substance described in one Philip Pullman novel) and the other is a girl called Ellise who is on her way to work on adolescent issues in Ulaanbaatar!

As we drive through Beijing, the city reminds me of some bastard offspring between LA and DC. Three words come to my mind as I think about Beijing: monolithic, grey, sprawl. Lots of identical buildings and uninspiring communist architecture.

Our first night in Beijing is spent at the opera house. Arjun and I try to make sense of what is going on. We see a women dressed up in an elaborate costume singing to a man dressed up in an equally elaborate and absurd headgear, in a high pitched nasal voice. After the first twenty minutes, we decide to order a jug of rice wine. Seven glasses later, the opera becomes bearable! We learn that there are over 300 types of opera in China, that most opera is composed of four central characters (the man, the women, the clown and the painted face) and that the one we are watching is set in the Han Dynasty. I try to draw parallels between Kathakali and Beijing opera but give up quickly and consume more rice wine!

On the first day here we walk around Tiananmen Square and visit the Forbidden city. Tiananmen square is huge, kites dot the sky and Chinese military men march up and down comically. There is an underlying tension in and around Tiananmen’s environs; a sense of being watched closely. As the kites dance above me, I close my eyes and try to walk back in time to 1948 when Mao proclaimed the existence of the People’s Republic of China at the Square and to the sad events of 1989. The air is definitely charged with history. We walk through the Square and eventually find ourselves at the gate of the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is grandiose. I have visited seats of power in Rome, India, Turkey etc. but this place is on another order of magnitude and scale. So strange to think that the place was walled off for over 500 years.

After walking around for hours here, marveling at Ming and Qing architectural structures we walk to Jingshan Park. This was Beijing's highest physical point during the Ming dynasty. The park is green, lush and offers spectacular views of the city. We find a quiet corner and lose ourselves in our reading. I am reading Marco Polo's travels and am disappointed that the book reads more like a merchant’s diary than a colorful historical narrative about the world in the 13 th century. On our way back we see a locust tree where the last of the Ming emperors hung himself as rebels swarmed the city walls. I am struck by a feeling of historical irrelevance, a sudden insight into the insignificance of the self. I become acutely aware of my own cosmic and historical smallness in relation to dynasties that have risen and fallen. The late evening is spent at a bookstore on a street called Wangshu Fujian. We lose ourselves again in the known and familiar confines of a bookstore as the sun sets on the imperial capital.

Suzhou: Venice of the East, Paradise on Earth, Mellifluous Women in a Plastic Balloon next to a Giant Tea Pot

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that says " in heaven there is paradise, on earh Suzhou and Hangzhou." Suzhou is about two hours away from Shanghai and is famous for its gardens, canals, waterways and “mellifluous women.” Chinese men actually believe that women from Suzhou are more beautiful than women from any other part of China ! Marco Polo passed through in 1276 and by the 14th century it was the leading producer of silk in China. We spend the day visiting several gardens.

The gardens are built on Daoist principles of harmony and balance and borrow from the evolving artistic sensibilities of the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. All gardens consist of four basic elements: rocks, water, bridges and trees. We learn that these gardens were designed by painters and not architects! There is definitely an other-worldliness to these metaphysical spaces – a fusion of nature, poetry and philosophy.

We visit the Garden of the Master of the Nets (Wangshi Yaun) where I think about the role of gardens in society. I think about a gross garden index and a google maps mashup where one can see and rank cities based on the number of gardens it has. While it is an unfair association, my own city (Bangalore) which used to be referred to as the “garden city” pales in comparison to the artistic sophistication of the gardens in Suzhou. I even wonder if these gardens rival The Hanging Gardens of Babylon or Japanese Zen gardens.

We climb the top of a 10 th century pagoda and then visit the Humble Administrators Garden. As I walk in, I am struck not by the geometric perfection of these tranquil spaces but by a giant tea pot spurting and burbling water into a pond where a mother and a baby are frolicking in a plastic bubble! I feel I am a character out of a Lewis Carol novel and that a Jubjub bird will emerge from the tea pot with a vorpal sword and a Tumtum tree!

What a frabjous day!

Shanghai Part 2: Barbarosa and Reinhardt in an Expatriate Swirl

I am abruptly woken up by loud clamoring at my door where I find Arjun looking disheveled and mad having just bicycled all over Northern Vietnam. Arjun is my fourth grade class mate from India who happened to have 6 months off before starting a job in Boston. We had exchanged one email where I had informed him that I was going to be in Shanghai on May 17. I wasn’t expecting to see him! I would soon find out that Arjun’s sound core of lunacy, social effusiveness, infinite energy and deep commitment to push the boundaries of normalcy (he would eat anything, sleep anywhere, talk to anyone, insert himself in group photographs of strange Chinese tour groups) made him a perfect travel companion.

We spend the next two days immersed in the vibrant “expat scene.” My girlfriend Rushmi puts me in touch with her classmate Jess from Hopkins who lives in Shanghai. Jess is an interesting cat. She was a trader on wall street, taught in Argentina, was a sex columnist, spent time studying esoteric Tibetan scrolls and works on next generation educational software in Shanghai. Her boyfriend works for a firm that is trying to commercialize toy hydrogen fuel cell cars with miniature solar-powered refueling stations! These two are my first introduction to the colorful expatriate scene in Shanghai.

We go out drinking at a Moroccan bar called Barbarosa, eat zesty Sichuan food at a famous restaurant and watch a highly entertaining Sichuan mask routine. We spend another night at a hip bar called Bar Lulu in the French Concession where I meet expats from all over the world. Arjun charms one Annie Hall doppelganger who tells him how she placed a video camera on her head because she realized that she was missing a whole dimension of reality by never looking up. I look up as she tells this story and see a chandelier built with soup spoons! A Spanish band plays my favorite Django Reinhardt numbers in the background and we have a debauched evening that ends in a fist fight!

After another day or so at the urban museum, the Bund and the Yuyuan Market we decide that it is time for the next episode. Shanghai was a blast but Arjun and I quickly realize that we must leave in order to explore real China that lies beyond the veneer of the Bacchanalian expat scene, the Sichuan masks and Michael Jackson videos.

We sit at the Old China Hand bookstore with a map and plan our next stop. China is HUGE. We start to get a sense of the epic distances involved in traveling south and then north again. The southern part of China will have to be another trip. To Suzhou it is! After navigating the impossible complexities of the train station (buying a train ticket is a non-trivial endeavor) Arjun and I are on are way out. On the train to Suzhou, Arjun looks at me and asks a pointed question “Does Shanghai have a soul?” I pause for a minute and answer “No.”

For all its stupendous growth, Shanghai had traded imagination for speed, culture for glitz and form for functionality. Its soul was bought by Mephistopheles at the altar of cheap commerce in a nameless mall. Balancing economic progress with cultural, environmental and aesthetic consciousness will be the great goal for humanity in the 21st century, as urbanization continues and cities get built on layers and layers of history.

In the Book of laughter and forgetting, Milan Kundera writes that the “The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In the context of the urban landscape, this power is the march of progress, corporate Juggernauts that occupy and shape so much of our urban ecosystems, obfuscating ancient cities and trampling over personal histories.

With these sophomoric thoughts on the nature of the urban soul, we leave Shanghai behind us and speed towards Suzhou, the “Venice of the east.”

Shanghai Part 1: A Remembrance of things Fast, Warhol in China, Nubile Tea-Temptresses

On the plane from Dubai to Shanghai I brace myself for the big red dragon which will soon engulf me with its multifarious wings. I land in Shanghai early in the morning and take the Maglev (magnetic levitation transport) which is the fastest train in the world. It travels at 1/3 the speed of sound (around 430 km/h) and runs from the airport every hour. The Maglev is a great symbol for everything Shanghai: addicted to speed, relatively new (Shanghai was a fishing village up until the mid-19th century), invented by the west (the Germans built the maglev, the British, French and Japanese built Shanghai), a little detached from reality (the maglev floats half an inch above the track. Shanghai soars above the rest of China like a bejeweled Phoenix) but ultimately efficient. After gliding through the city in less than 8 minutes I check into an international hostel and am ready to tame the dragon.

When you are in new places, certain aspects of the foreign seem drearily familiar; but the happy surprise of traveling is that the familiar can seem wondrously exotic. As I walk aimlessly through the Peoples Square, I see a sign outside the Shanghai museum that says “Art in America: three hundred years of innovation." I am curious and so I wonder in. While the museum is replete with Chinese ceramics, bronze art and calligraphy I am irrationally drawn to the American exhibit. I spend over an hour learning about American art from colonial portraits commemorating wealthy landowners to gilded age visions of the good life to the social realism of the great depression to the glorified kitsch of pop art! I see a Andy Warhol, for the first time in China!

After a fulfilling afternoon at the museum, I walk towards Nanjing Donglu (the glitziest part of town). I notice two Chinese girls following me. They giggle and wink flirtatiously from afar. I smile back politely. Having captured my attention one of them walks up to me and says “Hi my name is Diana, I am student from Xian and my friend and I want to practice our English because we want to go America.” Learning English to go abroad is an admirable goal, I think and so we begin to chat and walk towards the Bund. They ask many questions about my life in America and tell me all about what it means to be a young student from Xian. One of them strokes my face and says “you look so handsome, you look tom cruise, we want to show you real authentic tea ceremony because we like you so much.” My fragile male ego is inflated. I accept their offer and find myself in a sketchy looking bar where a pot of tea is being served unceremoniously. As time passes, they get more “tactile” and I realize that something is not right with the whole affair. I ask for the bill. The man serving me, accompanied by two thuggish looking men stand around my table and asks me to pay 3000 yuan!!!! I am shocked. I begin to explain to them that this amount is preposterous. The “students from Xian” who are, up to this point, demure, coy and flirtatious transform into cold-blooded killers. They stand up and scream at me in Chinese and broken English telling the thugs that I have touched them (untrue) and I need to pay for their “service.” I decide to make a scene and scream back at them. Everyone is shouting and suddenly the king-pin of the place sees a group of six white guys (his future customers) at the entrance with three girls (also “students from Xian”) and realizes that the scene I am making might dissuade the guys from entering his joint. I seize the moment, place a hundred Yuan note in his hand and barged past the thugs and the unsuspecting white guys dramatically into the night. Fortunately no one follows me. I rush back to my hotel room and spend the rest of the evening watching Michael Jackson videos in the lobby with a curious collection of international travelers.

As I recap the days madness: Supersonic trains, american art 101, the ‘joy’ ride of the unceremonious tea ceremony, I think that the red dragon hath become a Jungian Ouroboros, engulfing me and its own tail in one big thunderclap!

Essouria: A Sea-Undine in the wild wild wind

On the bus to Essaouria, I meet three kids from Wharton who are traveling around Africa on a summer MBA program. I am initially wary of them as they are a physical reminder of the life in am trying to temporarily suppress – the world of business and graduate degrees and professional posturing. However, they turn out to be really fun. We reach Essaouria in the evening, I check into a beautiful riad (a traditional moroccon home renovated into a guest house) and we decide to explore this little fishing village on the coast of the Atlantic.

If Tangier is a whore who may be bought with money and Fez the girl next door, who may be wooed, then Essaouria is a wild, sea undine, the dark daughter of adventure. Her ephemeral embrace is ecstatic and she leaves the traveler wanting more.

While most of what you see in Essaouria is relatively new (built in 1765 by Sidi Mohammad) it has an illustrious history with the Portuguese colonizing it the 15th century and French, English, Danish and Spanish rulers passing through and vying for its control through the ages. What struck me most about the place was the WIND (alizee) and the picturesque sea port (Orson Welles shot the opening scene of Othello here) with its fish stalls and Eleanor’s falcons journeying to Madagascar!

As I walk on the beach, mesmerized by the sea, an incredibly powerful wind blows sand through me. The wind is so great that it makes my whole body thrust forward, towards the ocean, leaving me covered in sand. I decide that Essaouria is a sea-undine pulling me towards the sea passionately with her prehensile grasp. In german mythology, sea undines are beautiful creatures without souls. The only way to obtain a soul is to seduce and marry a mortal! To avoid such a fate and to avoid getting wet in the tremulous storm that is brewing, I make my way back to safe confines of my riad. I have dinner with my new friends from Philadelphia and catch an overnight bus to Casa where I will board a plane to China

Eudaimonioa is a greek word which means “human flourishing.” I like to think of it as a kind of psychic ordering of the mind, body and soul that leads to a higher state of consciousness, a state of sustained happiness. As the bus speeds along with Essaouria fading into the soft evening light, I think about how I am happiest, even flourishing when I am on the road. With a book in my lap, new people and places to explore and the silence of a bus broken only by shifting landscapes, I feel completely at peace with the universe.

Marrakesh: Feeling the Beat of a Universal Drum

Even though Marrakesh is considered to be a tourist trap by many travelers, I loved every minute of my time in the city and thrived on the infinite energy of the place. My first encounter with the city was Djemaa el-Efna, the greatest open-air spectacle I have ever seen. If places were people, Times Square would be a gawky teenager reading Ayn Rand and dressed in Goth while el-Efna would be Gilgamesh on crack!

As I walked into the square I was drawn magnetically to a circle of drummers. Men clapped and howled and chanted as a group of drummers drummed in unison. My legs started to move and I danced to the ritualistic incantation of the mass chant. I danced for an hour before finding myself enthralled by another group of musicians playing Gnawa music. I closed my eyes and I could feel a paroxysm of voices and sweaty faces moving rhythmically to a beat. Monkeys, acrobats, storytellers, hustlers, snake charmers, jugglers and local drunks all jostled their way around the shambolic square while smoke rose chaotically from open-air food stalls. After a while the whole place took on a singular lunacy transforming itself into a caterwauling giant, writhing spasmodically to the beat of a universal drum. What energy!

My days in Marrakesh are spent admiring historical monuments like the Koutoubia -- its brooding minaret towering over the ochre cityscape. I walk around in my newly purchased djellaba and my two week beard and seem to have convinced the local hustlers that I am one of them! While every tourist around me gets haggled, I walk through the myriad souks (slipper souk, blacksmith souk, dyer’s souk, souk of carpenters) unscathed. I watch the hustlers closely as they walk up to many an unsuspecting foreigner and patterns of hustling begin to emerge. I decide that hustlers follow a four part act.

Act 1: Platitudinous pleasantries. The hustler singles out his prey and follows him around saying things like “ where you from…I am your friend…I no want to sell you anything…welcome to morocco…welcome to Africa.” The victim is disarmed into believing that this hustler is just a gregarious young native wanting to converse with a foreigner.

Act 2: Proffering of Service Unbeknownst to Foreigner. The hustler has invested 5-10 minutes chatting up the foreigner and has spent time “showing the foreigner around.”

Act 3: Cold-blooded kill. The hustler suddenly stops in his tracks and asks for money.

Act 4: Display of epic disappointment. On failing to collect money for the imaginary service, the hustler looks forlorn and says things like “you are not man…you no have integrity.” 30% of the time, the foreigner (out of pity, ego or loss of patience) gives the hustler some amount of money.

I celebrate my twenty seventh birthday in Marrakesh with the enlivening company of Steve, Bill and Laura. We drink wine from Meknes and enjoy a grand meal of chicken tagine. I fall into postprandial torpor as El-Efna rises below me like a large slumberous lion awakening uproariously from a deep sleep. The drum beats continue…..

Ait Benhaddou: Perfecting the art of losing and (not) seeing in the kasbah

Ait Benhaddoud is a jewel of a town. We stop here for the night on our way to Marrakesh. There is a certain stillness about the place. We check into a hotel right opposite the world famous Kasbah (Lawrence of Arabia was shot here). The day is spent meandering through palm groves (palmeria) and ruinous chocolate colored walls of the Kasbah. A languorous, contemplative day doing absolutely nothing. I get so lost in my thoughts that I manage to misplace my bag which contains two pairs of glasses and a book (total value = $400). I retrace my footsteps but alas I have lost my bag and my glasses (reading and sun glasses) forever! I am upset at my callousness but feel liberated in a strange way. As our land cruiser drives away from the Kasbah, I think about two of my favorite poems. One on loss, on the ‘art of losing’ and the other on not being able to see.

Travel on the road allows you to cultivate a certain detachment from things and when divisions dissolve, the heart does expand to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--- Elizabeth Bishop

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.

Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

-- Lisel Mueller

QUARZAZATE: Monks in the desert

I have always held the irrational belief that movie making is the most exalted art form. Movie studios therefore take on spiritual significance for me. And so when I heard that there was a movie studio on the way to Ait Benhaddou in a place called Quarzazate (pronounced war-za-zat) I decided to make a half-day pilgrimage out of it. I made the case to Steve and the Germans (we hired a land cruiser to drive from Merzouga to Marrakesh). Everyone thought it was a great idea and we so we stopped our hired jeep outside Atlas Studios.

At first, we were turned down as “they” were in the process of shooting a movie (they would not tell me which one). I had to gain entry and so I said I was a Bollywood producer living in New York checking out different studios around the world for my next billion dollar movie. My hyperbole and air of false pomposity seemed to work like a charm. On hearing the word “Bollywood producer” the gatekeeper apologized for her initial curtness and let me and my “crew” explore the place. As I swaggered in confidently, she smiled at me and said “I big fan of Salman Khan….people in Morocco love Bollywood.” As I would quickly discover, Bollyood was not a parochial Indian phenomena. Its long tail stretched from south India across Africa into the Caribbean and through South America. Bollywood like the cell phone and anti-bush fervor had become ubiquitous through out the world.

As I entered the studio, the first think I saw was a strange bulbous looking monastery. It looked anachronistic, incongruous in the desert. I learned that Scorsese’ Kundun, a movie about the 14th Dalai Lama was shot in Quarzazate of all places! 700 monks were flown in from Tibet for the making of the movie. They spent 10 months here. My mind was filled with questions. Why had Morocco become a suitable place for films? It could only be one of two things I inferred: cost or location. I later learned that it was neither. Apparently the quality of light in Morocco is extremely unique and it lends itself perfectly for film making! We walked through the sets of Babel, The Last Temptation of Christ (I had just finished reading Kazanzakis’ book and hence was particularly interested in the set), Astrex, Alexander the Great, Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven! What a wonderful afternoon. After satiating my child-like fascination for movie studios and my nascent megalomania, we set off to Ait Benhaddou with an ersatz Sphinx fading into the distance.

Merzouga: Shooting Stars, Fulvous Babblers, Slumbering Sahara

One of the greatest joys of travel is being able to cross paths with a motley cast of characters and being able to form genuinely rich human bonds with kindred spirits. On the bus from Fez to Merzouga I meet a beautiful old man called Steve – a man after my own heart. Steve had biked all over France, was a multiple- marathon runner, doctor turned aid worker (he works for a group called Doctors without Borders) and a famous geologist. Steve becomes my travel companion for the next four days as we make our way through the desert and eventually to Marrakesh.

Merzouga is a little village that serves as a base for travelers venturing into the Algerian Sahara. We arrive at Merzouga in the morning and check into a spartan looking
building made out of dung and dried mud. On gaining critical mass (steve, bill and laura, two flamboyantly gay Frenchmen, one stoic German couple with a 1 year old baby, one loquacious Japanese girl, two loud Danish women and myself) we hire camels and make our way into the desert where we will pitch tents and spend the night.

The desert landscape is hauntingly beautiful. Sand dunes change color – hues of pinks, browns, yellows and purples against a perfectly brilliant blue sky. Steve and I have long conversations about rock formations, tectonic movements of the earth and unstable isotopes.

“ One can learn a lot from the rocks" remarks Steve with a quizzical air about him.

"For instance Zincum is one of my favorite rocks. It resists metamorphic change. Metamorphic activity makes unstable isotopes escape but it resets the clock. What would you like to be Vikram? Would you like to be Zincum, stable and resisting change or would you like to be a rock changing but losing history?”

As he posed such koan-like philosophical conundrums we pass exotic desert birds. I spot a fulvous blabber (I love the name!) and pink flamingoes by a small oasis. We spend many a hot sweaty hour trudging through the desert and as evening approaches we dismount our camels and climb up to the highest dune to watch the sun set over endless expanse of sand.

At night a local berber makes dinner, we eat and tell stories. The air gets chilly and we all decide to sleep in our tents. The Danish girls, Steve and I are more adventurous and sleep on the bare sand outside the tent. I have never felt so alive. My body is shivering but when I open my eyes I see the most ethereal sky above me. I follow the projectile movements of shooting stars. I show one of the Danish girls the big and small dippers while she shows me where Polaris, the north star is. We collectively locate Orion with his big dogs standing next to Eridanus while Steve educates us about Cassiopeia. I want to stare at the night sky forever.

Two of the Danish girls have fallen asleep in symmetrical fetal positions next to me. These loud, assertive women seem so tame and calm in their sleep. Steve’s lips are puckered and he resembles a baby. As I doze off myself I think about how Saint Exupery was marooned in the Sahara desert and my mind conjures up a line from Le Petit Prince:

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

In the quietude of the Sahara night, I suddenly see my fellow travelers and the stars above from the eyes of the heart and everything takes on a magical quality of innocence and purity.

Fez: A Medieval Maize

On the bus from Chefchaouen to Fez I meet two Americans (Bill and Laura) and we decide to share a room once we get to Fez. We arrive at Fez in the middle of the night and check into a dusty little hostel in the heart of Fez-el-Bali (the medina). I shower and attempt to fall asleep on a rickety bed with no pillows. Bill is saying something about how Fez is famous for tanneries and how the adarga (leather battle shields) originated in Fez. In my semi-conscious state of half-sleep I think about my own leather shields -- layers over layers built from life in the gilded cage of big Indian and American cities. I think about how strange it is to share sleep (an incredibly private activity) with a group of complete strangers and conclude that herein lies the goal of travel: to discard the many layers until the shield is wholly removed. Only then will one experience the world as it is and be able to enjoy the raw intimacy of sleep with strangers.

Fez is an assault on all five senses all at once. I step out of my hostel room and am engulfed in a swirl of noises, smells, faces. There are over 9,000 zigzagging streets in this 1,200 year old medieval city and one has no choice but to get lost many times over. I walk into a berber pharmacy and am made to smell musk, amber, saffron (“the red god, come smell, the king of spices”) and argon. The portly man at the counter tells me to sniff one spice which is a concoction of 42 spices. He calls it The Elixir because it cures “asthma, snoring, lower back pain, mental problems” and is also an aphrodisiac! When I look at him incredulously he points to a small tortoise in the room and says “ see how health he look, he take all 42 spices and live over 100 years.”

I walk away in a dizzy spell and stumble into a 14th century mederesa (religious college) and strike up a conversation with a wisp-bearded, djellaba-robed member of the clergy who enlightens me on the significance of the number 5. There are five pillars of Islam, people pray five times a day, the city has five concentric rings (religious center, souks, residential areas, walls and gardens) and there are five societal institutions (mosque, school, public fountain, communal oven, hammam). Black smoke billows from a ceramic shop in the distance as I walk into a tannery, the air rancid with the smell of pigeon excrement emanating from ancient vats. I follow a scrofulous cavalcade of donkeys (the only method of transportation in the walled city) and am invited by an old berber lady who calls me into her house for lunch. To my surprise I see Bill and Laura and a couple of other tourists inside a cavernous little room eating from a large bowl of couscous. I am invited to join and partake in an age-old tradition of ritualistic, communal eating.

The evening is spent in the frenzied maze of many little streets. I see a water clock and try to figure out how it works and learn that in late 07, Fez celebrates the 800 th birthday of Rumi at its annual world music festival.

There are few spaces in the world that remain untouched by the march of modernity. The medina of Fez is one such space. It is in this city that I felt my frenzied DC life begin to fade away and it is here that I began to remove my leather shield making it easier to throw myself into new travel experiences without restraint.

Chefchaouen: Losing the I in a Blue City

If cities could be defined by one color, Marrakesh would be ochre, Beijing would be grey and New York might flit between shades of black. Chefchaouen is a charming little mountain village nestled in the Rif mountains. It is characteristically blue. Founded in 1471 by Ali ben Rachid, it served as a hideout for Muslims and Jews escaping Spanish persecution in Grenade. I had initially planned on going straight from Tangier to Fez but I met one wide-eyed German who marveled about Chaouen’s magic and forced me to cancel my bus ticket and take the next bus to Chaouen instead. I did exactly that and found myself on a bus, next to an avuncular looking man carrying a goat in his lap as if nursing a baby. He flashed me an iridescent smile and asked me where I was going. When I said Chefchaouen, he gave me an affirmative nod, cupped his hands and sucked on an imaginary pipe. He smiled again and said “ I know you foreigner, you come for the Kif….best Kif in all of Africa.” I later learned that Kif (the word derives from the Arabic word for ‘pleasure’) is like hashish and it is grown all over the valley

I arrived as the sun was setting and checked into a place called Hotel Paradiso that had phenomenal views of the valley. From my room window I could see green hills, a mosque and farm boys running after sheep. The next day, I smoked some Kif and walked around this blue city wondering why it had been whitewashed blue. I decided that there was a story of unrequited love involved where a Spanish prince besotted and heart-broken by a beautiful Berber women decided to paint the whole city blue to immortalize his despair and wistful pangs of longing. My flight of fantasy landed very quickly as I learned from a toothless shop owner that the city was painted blue to “get rid of mosquitoes. Mosquito don’t like blue.” On learning this piece of information, I climbed a small hill that overlooked the valley and spent an indolent afternoon breaking the mid-day heat with the some mint tea and walking around the medina thinking about how Chefchaouen had all the vowels of the English alphabet except I. “Chefchaouen has lost its I” I remarked over lunch to an Irish women sitting across me. “That’s why we travel” I said “…..to lose the I.” With that thought I dissolved and melted into this blue, charming mountain village in the Rif.

Tangier Dangier

From Casablanca I decided to make by way to Tangier. I had extremely romantic images of this place. As the bus trudged its way forward, I thought about how every other marauding European kingdom had left its indelible mark on the city. The Phoenicians arrived in the 5 th century BC, the Romans followed suit 400 years later. The mad Vandals swept across North Africa through Tangier; the town was later subsumed into the Byzantine Empire and then changed hands between the Arabs, Portuguese, British and Spanish! This was a place that had become enslaved by the lure of its own strategic location between the southern tip of Spain and the northern tip of Africa.

Tangier has also been safe haven and sybaritic capital to many aesthetes and artists including Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Pawl Bowles, Henry Matisse and the Rolling Stones. Ruminating on the idyllic beat spirit of the place I heard my dad’s croaking Dylan impression. “If you see her say hello she might be in Tangier.”

I did find her. She was not the women who had left Dylan “last spring,” the one who makes him invoke the “yellow moon.” She had in fact become a hideous moroccon prostitute on a bar stool offering up her body and cheap romance to a middle-age Spanish huckster who thought he was a libertine. Tangier was a rude awakening for me. My tendency to romanticize places by weaving together a tapestry of “exotic” facts and fanciful impressions that wildly departed from the truth, had to stop. I spent a night walking around the city and saw its dark underbelly. Little boys tried to sell me hash, aggressive hookers followed me around (“I give you full love for 1000 dirham”) and the only English speaking person I met was a dodgy looking British guy who had just finished serving a prison sentence for trying to smuggle hookers AND hash across the border. I asked him how he thought he could get away with such an egregious crime. He looked back at him with cadaverous eyes and said “that’s why the Morrocon’s say Tangier Dangier man….but sometime dangier can lead to big reward..you got to take your chances man.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into his Moroccan “friend” who giggled flirtatiously at me and licked her lips seductively. Feeling that I was in the tenth circle of hell, I beat a hasty retreat to my hotel room, ate a cold sandwich and buried myself in Tom Robin’s Jitterbug Perfume. I drifted in and out of sleep thinking about Alobar’s quest for immortality, the Bandaloops and vice-ridden Tangier.

After a fitful night of sleep, I awoke to the sound of loud Moroccan music from the streets. The day proved to be much better. I walked to the Grand Socco (socco = Spanish for souk = market) soaking in the sun, the smells from fruit stalls and the cacophony of sounds from street vendors and hustlers. I made my way to the medina and passed the Church of Immaculate Conception (which was built by the Spanish in the late 19th century) and eventually to the Kasbah which is perched at the highest point of the city.

I spent two hours under a tree in the Sultan’s gardens and the remainder of the afternoon contemplating and admiring Moroccan zellij (tile work). Every door of every house I passed had a distinctly different style of abstract tile work. I took out my camera and clicked away indiscriminately. The evening was spent drinking mint tea, learning how to play backgammon with two locals and gazing into the Straight of Gibraltar from the terraced gardens of Café Hafa – a favorite joint of the Rolling Stones. Spain looked tantalizing close and I wondered if I should jump into the next ferry and explore southern spain. But Fez beckoned and my realism got the better of me

There is a Sanskrit word called “Darshan” which means seeing the divine. I like to think of it as a “way of seeing,” a philosophical viewpoint. Tangier was dirty and ugly in many ways but if you looked close enough, and if you saw through the right lens, it had its moments of beauty.

Casablanca: Bogart and Bergman engulfed by a big bustling city

On the plane from Paris to Casablanca, I lost myself in reveries about Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. In my head, I replayed scenes from the 1942 classic and felt my stomach churning with excitement as the plain landed. However, Bogart and Bergman are the stuff of movies and big cities (like happy families) are all alike with their stupefying sameness and sprawl. Casa today is a large, recumbent city with 7 million thronging people and very little charm. My Moroccon friends had advised me to spend as little time as possible in Casa (“casa is not real morocco”) and so I decided to stay for one day and a night before moving along to the next stop on the map.

The first evening was spent strolling along the Corniche and gate-crashing a private Moroccan family party celebrating the opening of an Italian restaurant that one of the family members had financed. I drank to the health of Abbas, conversed with two old ladies who wanted to marry off their beautiful daughters (also present – they were stunning) to a suitable bachelor at the party and watched many boisterous Moroccan couples writhing awkwardly to a live band playing upbeat local pop songs.

The next day, I visited the Hassan II Mosque which is the second largest mosque in the world boasting the tallest (700 feet) minaret. As I spent my first afternoon walking through the mosque --- my hair bristled from the cool breeze of the atlantic -- I was struck by the shear size and scale of the whole affair. I learned from a devout worshiper that the building of the mosque was inspired by a line in the Quran which stated that the “throne of God must be built on water” and that the mosque’s retractable roof sent laser beams into the night sky towards Mecca! While the mosque was distinctively Moorish (and built by a Frenchman) I would later learnt that it drew strong influences from the Mezquita in Spain. French builder, Spanish design, monolithic mosque with sound and light show – my first taste of the complex and variegated nature of the largest metropolis in the Meghreb.