Intellectual constipation

Scratch everything i said about not being jet lagged. I woke at 1.30 on Tuesday morning and could not get back to sleep and the only thing on TV was late night news about how black people were going to come and kill you. all very annoying. but i lay there, tossed and tumbled, swore at myself, talked to Nini, God and Buddha. Swore again and eventually at 5.45 my alarm went off and i got up and got ready and checked out of the hotel. I got a taxi to the ferry terminal and was about 25 minutes early for the bus to the train station. For some reason I decided to check my texts, and realised in a shot of horrendous panic that i had left my phone in my hotel room. So i swore at nini again and hailed a taxi, every light was red, went back to the hotel, it took the guy behind the counter ages to reformat my key. But then again I can't see how the smartest people in the world would work the night shift at a reception in a hotel. Oh did I mention that this was the Raddisson and not only did my electricity not work but my entire bathroom flooded. It was worse that the worst places I had stayed in in Laos. Anyway got my phone ran back got into the taxi and got to the station just as the bus was pulling out. If the taxi driver hadn't pulled up in front of the bus then i would have missed it.

Got the Zephyr from San Fran, it was supposed to go as far as Denver but there was a land slide somewhere outside of Glenwood springs to after wandering around there for about an hour I got a bus to Denver and arrived 30 minutes ahead of schedule. The route is beautiful, you go through mountains and deserts, it's just fantastic. It was the polar opposite to the Trans-siberian, while Russia was one long empty flat boring landscape, with the odd cottage scattered maybe every 200 kms, this was spectacular. Snow capped mountains, beautiful trees coming into springtime bloom, dusty deserts, even the tree were covered in sand. I fell asleep for a while and as I nodded off there were mountains streams and beauty, i woke a while later and there was a desert outside. It reminded me of the Gobi. Without the camels. The contrast between the views in Russia and here couldn't have been more marked if i had tried to make it up. I actually couldn't make it up. I was in Idaho a couple of years ago and my uncle brought me on a road trip up to Kettering (where Ernest Hemmingway blew his brains out). It was the most beautiful place i had ever been scenary wise. I drove from Denver to South Dakota a couple of years ago to see Mount Rushmore, we drove through Wyoming and it was so boring. The thing that gets me about here is just how big it is. It's not bigger than Russia of course and one can only see so far anyway, but there is such a feeling of vastness and beauty. Whatever any of America's detractors say the one thing no one can dispute is that this is one fucking beautiful country.

And even the food wasn't too bad. At least it was burnt chicken with beetroot soup. I met some really interesting people a lady who had been visiting her son who was on an aircraft carrier home on leave and a philosophy professor who didn't really see eye to eye with the lady on the war. I just kept saying, well in Beijing, but they ignored me and had a pretty heated argument. I shut up. It's not my war. When they started to talk about abortion I excused myself. I met a guy who was in the navy during the Vietnam war and was chatted about Vietnam over a bottle of wine, so over all it was fine.

Even when we got stuck it wasn't that bad. Glenwood Springs is cute but like a thousand other small towns in the Rockies.

Something really weird always happens to me when i come to the States. It's as if my brain just turns to mush and i can't fend for myself even in the smallest way. I can't understand what anyone says to me, i constantly get lost and just sit there gormlessly trying to figure out what i am doing. It's as if I had smoked and big joint, drank 8 bottles of Sam Adams and used them to wash down some Valium. And that's the way I feel all the time. I'll give an example, I'm here in my friend Ann's house in Denver. I have been to Denver three or four times before. But I have no clue where i am. She pointed out all the directions to me last night but I haven't the foggiest idea how to get to 7 eleven. She has an espresso maker just like the one i used to have at home. It took me 20 minutes this morning to figure out should i put the coffee into the little scooper before or after the machine had been heated. . Now it is exactly the same as the espresso maker that i used maybe 800 times at home, before it diedI think it's because everything kind of looks the same, single story houses with little porches outside, the Rockies overshadowing all. You shouldn't get lost here, the streets are all numbered but I just know if I step outside the door i will probably never be seen again.

It took me all day on Monday to realise that I no longer looked like a tourist. For the first time since I crossed the border into Mongolia I didn't look like a duck out of water or an oddity with a big ass and big round eyes. It was when i noticed that no one came to me looking for a dollar except for a homeless guy who was white. I also have to keep reminding myself that the Asian people here are americans and can speak English and I am just being insulting by speaking slowly and making big hand signals. So I can't get away with being a bit of a tit or an absolute fool, i'm not given the benifit of the doubt anymore and people just expect me to understand them. Also there are just so many choices, I went to get a coffee yesterday and just got so exasporated with the number of choices the man insisted on giving me that I skipped the coffee, asked if I could use the net, and then got short changed.

I'm going to log off now and see if I can figure out how to use the TV and the DVD player without burning the house down. I'm Ann's maid of honour so i am not allowed to hurt myself, burn myself or get lost before Saturday. See this is why signs like this might actually come in handy.