This film looks pretty amazing. Will have to put it on the Netflix queu pronto as it looks like it came out awhile.

Really puts the desk job in perspective…

A couple shots from the big apple in December, 2008.

My beautiful virgin wife, Jill.

Holidays in the Flatiron.

Festive even in the slumdog economy! In hindsight — the set in, the belt tightening had just begun and felt kind of good — before it started to hurt a bit. People feeling this at different times. Some are undoubtedly harder hit.

poster in Union Square

Jill and I spent a day in the big apple over the holidays. Took the “Dragon Coach” (Chinatown to Chinatown) and spent our day split between Chinatown and the Flatiron. We were lucky enough to hit the Union Square Holiday Market. People were out and the atmosphere was festive.

It’s easy nowadays or so says the hitchhiking guru, Anton Krotov, but you don’t know it until the end. And to the armchair traveler, Siberia seems a wild and windswept place. Not uninhabited but wild wild west for sure, and in that — not even counting geography, culture, history, languages — completely foreign.

My friends, Mac and Aaron, hatched up a plan to follow the merchandise from Vladivostock to Moscow traveling by green power alone — that’s right folks, the almighty dollar. This tale and these photos are the result. As Ken Kesey once said, “the intrepid traveler never fails”.

Well, I spent a good bit of today catching up on reading my friend, Dave’s, blog. After some deliberation earlier this winter, he decided to accept another stint as a videographer/filmmaker in Sudan. He was there briefly last summer, but this commitment is big for a young man with a huge community here in Seattle and a future poised like a weather vane, perched like a bird ready to fly, but in what direction?

So today I read back through his February posts. Perhaps after our soccer game last night, I am missing him. At any rate, I’ve been meaning to read his blog for a long while now, but what can I say? Life with a 14 month old is busy.

This though provides a wonderful contrast for Dave’s stories. It was like reading about a far away planet. So focused is my world around my home and providing for my family. I often feel like I just yoyo back and forth from work to home and have to prod myself to keep eyes open to actually see the world and take in any spontaneous, unusual beauty. There’s is the amazing spontaneity and constant flux of my home in which Jill and I watch Dylan grow, steering a bit here and there, but it’s easy to forget about the rest of the world entirely.

And I don’t want to forget. There is so much there. So suddenly Sudan! Trying to imagine the villagers reaction to Dave’s health education films as he sketches out the plot lines. Trying to conceive of their mindset. And imagining Dave there with the teacher writing songs about him and hanging out under the tamarind tree with his translator and the witch doctor.

The reading is incredibly exciting. Yet the pace there must be slow. Slower certainly than here. I mean 6 hours where the primary activity is waiting (in one entry)! Amazing what routine does to one’s sense of time. In the routine, days pass, weeks pass and it can seem like nought has happened. If nothing stand apart from the routine, it can be like that and you have to think hard sometimes to remember what happened when. But Dave is out there, way out there, seemingly away from the routine and every moment seems so rich and storied. God, it’s been a long time since I’ve traveled! But good to live vicariously and be reminded that the world is large and perhaps beyond imagination. This is what I bring home tonight.

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Since I didn’t know where Dave was in the Sudan, I did a bit of research and created a couple maps to locate him (below). In the entries I read today, he spent some time in the Ayod compound and went up to Gar which I hope I have located correctly and there is mention of the “the guy from Old Fangak” who can sit on his plastic chair in the shade forever.