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My wife sometimes wonders why I can’t take normal pictures. When we go to new places, I’m often more interested in taking pics of the gift shop, the tour guide, or the ad posters, than the place itself. Anyway, I tried to take a normal pic of the Sydney Opera House. I swear!

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When we got to the south island of NZ, it was cold and rainy. I put on every piece of clothing in my suitcase and started looking like an old fisherman. I began talking funny, warning people about foul winds. Then I got a strange desire to sail out into the cold ocean and seek the white whale. This was unusual for me. I’m from Nebraska.

Kaikoura is one of the few easy places to spot a sperm whale. So we climbed on a boat and went looking. We heard their call but unfortunately, the horrible beast never surfaced. Alas, we did manage to see a juvenile humpback, breaching over and over again like a trained seal. I wonder how much he was being paid? Here’s some of my wife’s shots.

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zombie-me after 30+ hours of travel to get to the other side of the planet and after the airport algorithms shunted us to a Korean hotel. . . .but hey, at least I had access to deep nature.

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After ten minutes in Rainforest Cafe, the place went bananas. The sky darkened and lightning flashed. The animatronic animals started seizing. The air filled with howls, squawks, and trumpeting elephants. And I lost my shit.

I thought back to all the fake nature that I’ve visited, all the way back to the Enchanted Tiki Room. I wondered if these places were bad. Fake nature can be used for all kinds of things, right? Education. Art. Religion. Entertainment. Solace. Marketing. But how does it affect us? Does it hijack our primitive wiring? Hearken us back to original biomes? Remind us of places that no longer exist? That never existed? And why was the Rainforest Cafe trying to spook the fuck out of me?

I turned to my wife. “This place is a portal to hell. We gotta get out of here.”

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Here I am standing in a ridiculously ostentatious room in Charlottenburg Palace, one filled with cups, saucers, plates, and numerous other vessels? Displaying this stuff was a status symbol for Prussian royalty. Hordes of craftsmen built palace wings dedicated solely to ceramics. Maybe if the Prussians spent less time goofing with their tableware, they wouldn’t have been routed by Napoleon?

This room also reminded me of that old Carlin bit on stuff.

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Water is a big issue in Portugal and Spain, similar to the Southwest of the US.

  • There’s been a continual drought. All the rivers seemed low.
  • We biked through huge agricultural expanses, especially orange groves, sucking the aquifers dry. There was also almonds, olives, and avocados groves.
  • The southern coast is full of resorts and golf courses. And it’s biggering. High-rises were going up everywhere.
  • Most restaurants insist that you buy bottled water and refuse to offer tap. We got a ten-minute lecture from a restaurateur in Lagos when we tried to bring in our own water bottles (people often carry around their own water bottles in Arizona). He explained that there is a government-sanctioned clean-water certificate mafia that makes restaurants pay for water stations. If they don’t sell bottled water, they can’t pay for these stations.
  • Even though Portugal has boasted that their water infrastructure had been upgraded and tap water is safe, If you ask for it at a restaurant, the staff will not only refuse, but they’ll think you’ve gone mad. We got all kinds of reasons not to drink tap water. It smells, it’s unclean, it has too much limestone. We did occasionally drink it, and the chlorine was obvious, but we had no problems.

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Spent the weekend in Chicago so that my wife could run the marathon. I walked around the “bean” where this weird dude kept following me, giving me nasty looks.

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A troubling sign that I found in the woods near an abandoned cabin site. The last line is particularly disturbing. “When I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Whoever wrote this was obviously worried about zombies.