This Must Be the Place

And... The end is nigh. No more travel to plan. No more TripAdvisor reviews to parse for clues on commenter quality, no more flights to book, no more wearing the same thing three days in a row. In fact, there are just two things left: 1) a flight home (leaves in a few hours), and 2) culling the best pics out of the 3,000 I took for the three-hour slideshow I'm debuting at the August Family Christmas Party and taking on tour afterward.

Right before I left, my buddy and music sherpa Lee jokingly (?) predicted I'd be so homesick that I'd be seen walking around random European cities, headphones in, rocking The Mowglis' San Francisco with tears streaming down my face. And he got everything right, except for the part about the Mowglis and the crying. I was definitely homesick a time or two, and I had a pretty consistent soundtrack accessing my brain place through buds in my ear holes. 

I remembered this little prediction and it got me thinking. If I'm going to string together three hours worth of pictures into a single slideshow, I'm probably going to need some sort of soundtrack to spare my voice from telling so many stories. If the 80s taught me anything, it's that a well-placed montage is an effective diversion when you've run out of good dialogue. So while San Francisco didn't make the cut, here are a few of the songs that did.

Octopus's Garden, The Beatles

Last Tuesday, I went diving at the Murat Navy Pier in Western Australia. Ranked among the best dive sites in the world, it's in the extreme northwest tip of the continent on the Ningaloo Reef, which any Western Australian will tell you is more impressive than the Great Barrier Reef. (I'm sure that has nothing to do with regional bias.)

They call it an "open-water aquarium," because something about the pier, which extends a couple hundred feet (~75m) into the Indian Ocean, attracts an incredibly diverse array of marine life. There's a little spot on the floor called "Octopus's Garden" for very literal reasons: octopi hide among its coral and rocks, and they all continually sing Ringo's best vocal contribution to The Beatles. Which is pretty cool, I must say.

But that's not even close to the most impressive part. I'll just tell you this. I did not take this picture, but I could have if a) I had a camera and b) I wasn't busy suppressing my reptilian brain's very strong fight or flight response. I wasn't winning this fight, and, well, I wasn't winning this flight, either. So I floated there, 45 feet (~13m) deep, and watched three of these guys swim for awhile, making enormous groupers and entire schools of 25-pound cods look like goldfish. Absolutely mesmerizing.

Grey nurse shark (sand tiger shark to we Yanks)

Don't You Worry Child, Swedish House Mafia

I only include this song because Jenny O'Connor rocked our world in Cambodia by telling us we had the lyrics wrong. It turns out Sierra doesn't have a plan for you at all. "See, heaven" does. I know, shocking, right?

Which brings me to the rough silk shirt.

Siem Reap is one big commercial hub that sprung up because Angkor Wat attracts so many tourists. The most popular attraction in town is called the "Night Market;" essentially, it's a den of cheap consumer swag that's open at night, but you can get the same stuff during the day, too.

The protocol is simple: you look at something, the shopkeeper offers you a ridiculous price for it. You haggle for the sake of it. He laughs at you. Then you start to walk away and he cuts his price to 50% of the original. And if you're me, you end up walking away with a shiny blue shirt with a priest's collar and big buttons down the front, made of silk and looking damn cool in the package. 

Then I got home and put it on. We were all headed out to dinner and didn't have big plans the next day (just going to see Angkor Wat, one of the wonders of the world, that's all), which, unbeknownst to me and the shirt, sealed its fate. Out of the package and on to my body, I noticed some disturbing flaws the first glance in the mirror. I knew it was shiny when I bought it, but now it looked like a smurf with a greasy forehead. And the "big buttons" were clearly stolen from somebody's couch cushions. At least the collar still looked money. I mean, I'm sad they're not popular in the West. I'd wear them every day.

Hoping nobody would notice how ridiculous it was, I still wore it to dinner. 

Everybody noticed. 

"Did you mean to buy that?"

"Once you're done with it, you should cut off the sleeves and make it a vest."

So I did. Four hours later. At the club in town, which we decided to hit up since we didn't have to get up early the following day. I was busy imitating my friend Jill's favorite dance move (signaling "touchdown" and bouncing around with a huge grin on her face), and the right sleeve decided to rip at the armpit. Two minutes later, with help from my new BFsF Jill and Margo, I was rocking a one-sleeve shirt. Twenty minutes after that? Sleeveless.

Classy.

The buttons didn't even survive the 15-minute walk back to our hotel, and I just felt bad for whoever's couch they stole them from. What a waste.

The only known pic of the shirt: Vey thought his spell would make the shirt look better; I was too ashamed to show my face. Note: if you think you have another pic of the shirt, you don't. Right?

Something Good, alt-J

This song isn't really going on the soundtrack, but I wanted to brag that I'm going to see alt-J at the Fox in Oakland on Thursday night. 

And I believe I just did.

Lie in Our Graves, Dave Matthews Band

One of the best songs I know about carpeing the diem, it's made even better by DMB's classic technique of pairing Dead Poets' Society lyrics with Downtown Disney riffs. Dance, smile, laugh, feel good, and ignore Dave mockingly question why we live our lives as tiny bits of disposable tread on corporate tires.

A nagging feeling last year made me realize I had some serious day seizing to do, and in December I decided it was time to hit the road to find the reset button. I set off in March with loose plans and no official end date, figuring I'd find that damn button somewhere. 

And I did. Time and again, in very different places doing very different things. 

I found it while running six miles in Budapest with a fun and inspiring pair of sisters; carb loading with awesome new friends before running a half marathon in Oslo; in deciding to change my plans and go to Australia and Budapest and Bali because, well, why not?; while scouring this picture in a bar late one night in Hanoi with a few Limeys trying to figure out who that familiar face is right behind Joe DiMaggio (see below. And please help. I'm stumped.).

She's got Bette Davis Eyes. But who is he?

I found it with all the new people I met, including incredibly cool Brazilians in Copenhagen and Krakow (Brazil is definitely going to take over the world), Turks in Istanbul (a week before the shit went down, sparing my mother's blood pressure), Oklahomans, Jerseyans, Minnesotans, and Texans in Positano, Germans in Bali, and, in Eindhoven, an Israeli who heard I was from San Francisco and immediately assumed I was that thing everybody in the world thinks all San Franciscans are. A raging...

...stoner. 

They all spoke English, of course. Well, except for the Texans, but we didn't have much in common anyway. To keep up my end of the bargain, I learned how to speak the metric system, Celsius, the 24-hour clock, and attempted to use local pronunciations, which was the least I could do. Who am I kidding? It was the absolute most I could do. Balls, there are a lot of languages out there. It's hard not to feel like an atrocious stereotype when exchanging stories about how many languages you speak. My new German friend speaks five. I claim one and a bit, but my Spanish and French probably don't really qualify as "and a bit."

Nonetheless, in the last five months, I learned how to say "cheers" and "thank you" in a dozen languages; my favorite being, as always, England, where they mean the same thing. 

Aaaaaaand I've forgotten most of them by now. Whoops. 

Never Mind the Strangers, The Saw Doctors

I've had a very strategic adulthood, making sure to plop good friends throughout the world; it keeps the hotel bills down and all. And my trip has been full of them: Jay Malihoudis in 'nam; Jules, Gina, and Vern in various European locales; Nicky Carter in six different countries; the Donger in Bali; Al, Nat, and Ro in Tonbridge and Al and Nat again in Oz. (They're tough to shake.) I saw the Hans to my Franz, Mr. Evan Aydelott, and his lovely bride Crystal for dinner on Lake Zurich. I drove from The Netherlands to Switzerland with Tommy Ten Bucks; Ian Young and I solved all the world's problems in a four-hour drive from Zurich to Lake Geneva. (Don't ask. I forgot to write them down.) I had lunch with Liam Carroll and Jason Holowaty right after landing in London five months ago. And my old roomies, Ryan, Loni, and I rekindled our traditional roommate dinner night in London, being that they're still living together all these years later… since they're married. And I saw a shining example of how love and commitment can still look in 2013 while getting ice cream with the Lindberg family in Ahous, Sweden.

How did I spend the last two weeks of my trip? Partying hard, raging against the dying of my early retirement, refusing to accept my pending triumphant return to corporate life? Nah. I sat in Western Australia and made the same jokes about vegetarians that I've been making since I met Alex Malihoudis in 1997. Every night, I watched about 15 minutes of a Disney movie with his daughters before they went to bed (usually Sasha's choice...honest), and then Alex, Natalie, and I sat up and talked about everything and anything while half-heartedly watching a movie. 

It was absolutely perfect.

What's a great friendship if not one long conversation over several years between two people whose brains are somehow cosmically connected, conveniently interrupted by the other stuff they have to do so they don't get bored or, you know, go hungry? If they're lucky, they keep picking up those conversations where they left off, even as they start new ones. And I've been extremely lucky.

This Must Be the Place, Talking Heads
also: This Must Be the Place, Kishi Bashi cover (I couldn't decide)

And now I'm headed home. Tomorrow night, I'll be a zombie playing softball in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge Anchor Steam Brewery (unless the damn fog has other ideas) and in a week I'll trade in the five t-shirts I've rotated since March for buttons and collars in my cubicle at the end of Pier One. 

I want to thank all four of you for reading my ramblings while I crossed the globe. It's been fun to write about some of the stuff that happened, and I hope you chuckled a time or two reading about it. I also hope some day you'll get on a plane (or 32!!) and see a slice of the world and write about; I can't wait to read about what you find. I know the list of places I want to visit got longer in the last five months, which tells me I'll never stop hitting the road.

Until then...

"If someone asks, this is where I'll be"

Where I went. Lots more to do. Africa? You're next. Unless South America beats you to the punch.