You can’t go wrong with that as an opening sentence. Esspecially if you follow it up with:

I’m writing this from an Internet cafe in Naples.

So, ok, I’m willing to stop my travel whining and admit that I am privileged beyond reason to be able to go to places like these. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but next time I ever moan about traveling, just slap me across the face with something spelled in Italian. Anything.

The flight was fine: I got an aisle seat and saw an episode of Scrubs I’d missed. 1.5 dramamines knocked me into a veal-like sleep for almost 4 hours. Then we drove to Rome where, after a few loops, I hooked up with Derrick de Kerckhove. Derrick heads the McLuhan program at University of Toronto, teaches at the University of Naples, and occupied an endowed chair at the Library of Congress. Not too shabby. We took the train to Naples and a cab to my hotel, the Chiaja Hotel de Charme, which, without Derrick as a guide, I would never ever ever have found: You have to know to ring the bell to be let in through a 4-foot high door within a massive brown door. Lovely on the inside, though. I left immediately to walk around a little, had a terrible slice of pizza, and found this Internet joint. (3.50 euros per hour).

Anyway, the day has been way too rich to capture. I haven’t even said anything about the fascinating hour conversation I had at 3am (Boston time) with Jon Luca Botanica (whose name I’m undoubtedly mispelling massively – Sorry Jon Luca! [Embarrassing Stoopid American correction: Gianluca Baccanico.]) on the ride to Rome about his attempt to understand the Internet via Kant’s sense of space and time. Jon Luca is one of Derrick’s students. I am in for a stimulating few days.

Must go drain my senses by going through my email…

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Doc’s photos from Les Blogs 2005 in Paris, the lucky bastard! [Technorati tag: lesblogs2005]

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Traveling to Seattle today for two days at a Microsoft social software conference, a morning at Amazon doing research for my book, and a morning talking with CNN about taxonomic stuff. Back on Thursday night, possibly too late to catch Steve Johnson’s free talk at Harvard, which you would be nuts to miss if you’re anywhere nearby.

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As I prepare to get on yet another plane — and I have a cold that has pushed me into the bottomless well of self-pity — I’m thinking about the three trips to Europe I’m making in the next couple of months. They’re all red-eyes. I don’t sleep well on planes. I have on occasion dosed myself with dramamine because it knocks me out without leaving much of a hangover. Some people I know swear by melatonin to reset the diurnal clock. I’ve never tried it. Any suggestions?

Alternatively, if you’d like to upgrade me to business class, I’d be happy to give up the drugs. It’s your choice really. [Technorati tag: melatonin jetlag]

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I’m on the first of three trips to Phoenix over the next eight days, for three unrelated events at which I’m speaking. Weird.

On the America West ride from Boston, the guy in the seat ahead of me was surprisingly annoying. He was about my age (115+) but he rocked in his seat like a 5 year old. And for much of the trip he sat with his hands clasped behind the top of his seat. They were lovely hands — pale, freckled, soft red hair. But they were 4 inches from my face.

I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to move his hands, but I did “accidentally” brush them with my book a few times as I turned pages. He didn’t seem to mind.

I don’t know why I found this so annoying. But I did. I mean, doesn’t he understand that one person’s back is another person’s front?

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After a particularly crummy of upright, intermittent sleeping on a crowded flight from Newark to Madrid, the day took a decided turn for the better when I went for a long walk with Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon. We’re here for the Internet portion of a conference on democracy and terrorism. It starts tomorrow, in closed session, and then moves to open session session on Wednesday.

What we saw of Madrid was beautiful. And it was a perfect day — maybe 50F and not a cloud all day. We walked, we had lunch (a delicious veggie paella for me at a small cafe), we sat, we walked, we had coffee, we walked, Ethan went to eat ham at one of the Museo de Jambon’s, we walked.

Joi Ito, one of the organizers of the Internet portion of the conference, has set up a backchannel IRC, open to anyone who wants to eavesdrop: #madridopendemo on irc.freenode.net. See you there. [Technorati tags: safedemocracy madrid]

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On Saturday, Leah and I walked from Union Square to Alamo Square, home of the “painted ladies,” AKA, “Where Full House was taped.” Leah was wearing her Ashley and Mary Kate t-shirt. I saw part of a “Full House” once and found it unbearably dopey, but, well, what are you going to do with kids today, especially when they’re 20 and have a complex, post-Modern relationship to the media crap that forms a mythic background in which they themselves don’t believe?

From there we went to the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge and walked back to the SF side. It was a perfect day for it.

Then we went to Haight-Ashbury, a part of the world that makes me embarrassed to have been a hippie-hanger-on … I didn’t put flowers in my hair, cut off the soles of my shoes and come to SF for the Summer of Love, but I did the best I could while still managing to be a middle class Jew from Long Island at a preppy college in the middle of Pennsylvania. At this point, going to Haight-Ashbury is an occasion for explaining why all that hippie shit wasn’t as dumb as it looks.

We ate at a restaurant with perhaps the worst name in history: The Squat ‘n’ Gobble. Fortunately, they allowed us to sit in a chair and when we refused to peck at grains of food on the ground, they consented to let us pay them for crepes. Pretty good.

We headed back to the hotel, stopping in a couple of stores looking for a gift for our neighbor Judy who had gotten us a good deal on the hotel room. We went to the Golden Era (572 O’Farrell) for an excellent fake-meat meal — sweet and sour “chicken” and “beef” with broccoli. Delicious.

We fell asleep watching Team America in the hotel room. [Technorati tags: San Francisco]

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Puhlease! I was there for three days. The only overview I’m entitled to was from the airplane when we took off, and on that basis I can report that Singapore is mainly cloudy.

Now I’m back in the Newark airport, waiting for the flight to Boston. Is there a longer commercial flight than Singapore-Newark? I’m glad to be home, eager to see my family, and would love to find a way to go back to Singapore someday soon.

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I spent from 9-5 leading a workshop on “conversational marketing.” Forty-three participants from a variety of industries. And, because irony is the basic law of the universe, I went on so long that I cut into the time we slated to spend in an Open Space exercise, facilitated by Edgar Tan, with Patrick Lambe in the wings. The Open Space went very, very well: Strangers engaged in open-ended, organically directed conversations. As for my long talky part, lord knows how it went.

Now I’m going to meet James Seng for dinner. We’ve only met in the bit sense, so I’m looking forward to this.

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On the advice of my host, I took a taxi to the Indian Temple in Chinatown, a plain building crowned by a colorful pyramid of sculptures of gods. The streets around it are lined with little open-front shops selling tourist junk. After wandering in and out of dozens, I bought my son a present (he’s reading this so I can’t say what) and almost got the bargaining thing right: It was marked $8 (= US$4.80), I offered $5, she said $7, and I lost my nerve so we didn’t complete the dance that was destined to end at $6. I don’t like bargaining because the differential means so much less to me than to the vendor, but it feels rude not to.

I more than made up for it an Indian shop where I bought two items at full price. They didn’t give an inch even as I initially walked out of the store. They must have had me pegged as an American.

By the way, the going rate for USB cables at the electronics stores in Chinatown ranges from US$18 to US$32 — that last price actually made me laugh out loud. At a tiny sidewalk Internet cafe and electronic parts booth a few blocks away, the young man who sold me a replacement mouse told me that the real price is US$3. He as out of them, so I’m still looking.

Perhaps I should feel foolish wasting my time shopping instead of seeing sights, but, well, shopping in the streets is fun. I get to touch cloths, smell restaurants, hear parents quiet their children, and talk with Singaporeans. I’m a tourist, so whatever I do is going to be touristy.

After a couple of hours, I stopped at a modern sidewalk restaurant that advertised a vegetarian version of mee siam, which for all I know means “On sale,” “snake pee,” or “Warning: Condemned by the Singapore Board of Health.” Whatever it means, it turned out to be a delicious bowl of sweet ‘n’ peppery broth, noodles, tofu and a sliced egg. I came into the store sweating enough to grow grass wherever I walked and left with children splashing through my mist as if I were an open hydrant. But mmmmm, spicy good!

Note to travelers: When in Singapore, always say yes to orange juice.

I decided to head towards the colonial area of the city, as recommended by www.fodors.com. It was just a few blocks over, but it’s much further if you first go in the wrong direction for over half a mile. I have the innate sense of direction of a 5-legged spider and am retarded about reading maps, so I wandered and circled and got lost yet again. I saw many indistinguishable financial and official blocks, or maybe just the same ones over and over, punctuated by tiny shops with aisles too small for the likes of me — it’s possible I’m the fattest person in Singapore — and restaurants serving parts of animals I didn’t even know animals had; apparently every chicken contains a snake as part of it. Live and learn.

By now the sky had cleared and the sun was crisping my duck-like skin to a rotisserie orange. Should have remembered the sunblock. I have noticed that many Singaporeans avoid the sun on the streets; there are even some parasols around. Not me. I rely on my big floppy hat that completes the image of me as a lumbering, careless American.

I finally made it to the colonial section — some pretty buildings and very little life on the street. So, I took a cab back to the hotel where I collapsed like dirty laundry, an assortment of twitches shaped like a man. In a couple of hours, I’ll join my host for dinner.

It was a thoroughly enoyable 4.5 hours walking in Singapore.

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