Catherine Price (13 page)

MICHAEL BALDWIN

Mexico City on the First Day of the Swine Flu Outbreak

M
y timing in visiting other countries hasn’t always been the greatest. My first trip to Beijing happened just after America had bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. (Nothing says “Welcome” like a mob stoning your embassy.) Two years later, I bought a return flight from Paris to New York for September 13, 2001. Two years after that, I went to Rio de Janeiro, only to be greeted by drug gangs setting fire to city buses. So when I arrived in Mexico City for a weeklong vacation on the exact day that swine flu hit, it was par for the course.

I boarded my overnight flight in ignorant bliss and, since news of the outbreak didn’t come out until a couple of hours after we took off, I arrived at the Mexico City airport in ignorant bliss as well. Determined to experience the “real” Mexico as soon as possible, I decided to take the metro instead of a taxi.

That’s when I had the first sense that something was wrong: standing on the platform, I noticed several people wearing blue surgical-type face masks. Funny, I thought. Mexico City may not be known for the cleanest air, but this seemed a bit extreme.

I spent the morning walking around the historical center, becoming increasingly puzzled by the masks. But I still didn’t think much of them until I stopped by my hotel to ask the man at reception where I could find out about concerts going on that night.

“There aren’t any,” he said.

That didn’t make any sense. This was Friday night in a major world city. The problem must have been my Spanish, so I tried simpler words.

“Music. Tonight. Where?” I played some air guitar to reinforce the message.

“Everything’s closed,” he replied.

Confused, I found another tourist in the lobby and asked him what was going on. “There’s this pig flu going around,” he said. “The government’s closed all public spaces.” I checked an Internet terminal, and sure enough, the very first news headline for the entire world was: “Swine Flu Shuts Down Mexico City.” I had apparently spent a half month’s salary on a plane ticket to Ground Zero of a deadly plague.

Convinced of my imminent death, I tried to find distractions. But the government’s shutdown of all public venues—concerts, restaurants, nightclubs, even archaeological sites—left me with nothing to do. Instead I took to wandering the near-empty streets and amusing myself by keeping track of people with unusual face masks, like a woman who’d decorated hers with a smiley face, or a goth kid with a spiked collar and spiked hair whose all-black color scheme was rudely disrupted by his mask’s bright blue.

It was a lonely experience, which was made worse by the fact that Mexico City is at a ridiculously high elevation, so the air is extremely dry. Which, not being used to it, made me cough. A lot. Which, naturally, made everyone around me assume I had swine flu. And would kill them.

Then, on Monday, a 5.6 earthquake hit Mexico City.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. On Tuesday night, a Mexican friend of mine was determined to take me out
somewhere
. After calling his friends all over the city, he found the only thing open—an Irish pub that was technically outside the city limits, and thus not subject to the closing restrictions. So, in a metropolitan area of almost nine million people, we went to the trendiest, most happening nightspot there was. Five other patrons were there. At least they had tequila.

MICHAEL BALDWIN
is the creator of the CommonCensus Map Project.

I
n terms of food, the Wiener’s Circle, a hot dog joint in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, doesn’t stand out much from its competition. It’s got greasy burgers; it’s got cheese fries. What makes it different is its attitude: show up late on a Saturday night, and your food is likely to come with a side of screaming douchebags.

That’s because the Wiener’s Circle staff has made a game of insulting its customers, serving up orders with catch phrases like “For here or to go, motherfucker?” and “Pay me my money or get the fuck out.” According to the Wiener’s Circle’s owners, Barry Nemerow and Larry Gold, this tradition started accidentally when Larry, frustrated that he couldn’t get his patron’s attention, called a customer an asshole. That was fifteen years ago; these days they estimate that the Wiener’s Circle’s free-for-all nastiness has doubled their business.

If they were all playful, the back-and-forth insults might be okay. But as the night wears on and the patrons get drunker, a side of humanity begins to show that, as a video segment on
This American Life
pointed out, is better left unseen. The Wiener’s Circle is a microcosm of segregation in Chicago, with a black staff catering to a predominantly white clientele. Add alcohol, a hot kitchen, and an atmosphere free from the usual rules of social interaction, and the results aren’t pretty.

“Nice headband, you fuckin’ whore,” said one customer caught on camera.

“Fuck you, you sagging slut,” said another.

“It’s like an abortion, bitch!” shouted a different patron, presumably about his cheese fries. “I’m eating your babies and you love it!”

If you order a hot dog during the day, you should be fine. But when evening falls, the Wiener’s Circle becomes exactly what it sounds like: a gathering place for dicks.

R
eally? You really want to see the top of Mount Everest before you die? Why—because you want to boast to your friends that you’ve climbed the world’s tallest mountain?
*
Or is it because you want the thrill of adventure that comes from paying $65,000 for a guided climb and then risking a team of sherpas’ lives (not to mention your own) so that you can spend fifteen minutes breathing supplemental oxygen at the so-called top of the world? Unless you love frostbite, hypoxia, blinding snow, and high-altitude games of Russian roulette, do Nepal a favor and stay home.

G
arbage City is a reeking slum on the outskirts of Cairo that’s covered, literally, in trash. There’s trash in the streets; there’s trash in the houses. People live in it, work in it, and sometimes even sleep in it. And every day, there’s more. In fact, residents go out of their way to bring it home. Carried in by donkey in huge sacks, the trash, ironically, is what helps the neighborhood survive.

The slum’s residents are the Zabbaleen, the garbage people. Together with their pigs, which until recently ran freely through the streets gorging themselves on trash, the Zabbaleen used to take away about half of the sixty-five hundred tons of refuse the city produces each day. After separating valuable garbage like plastic, metal, and glass, the Zabbaleen fed anything organic to their pigs, which were not just garbage disposals, but an important source of meat—the Zabbaleen are Coptic Christians, and unlike the Muslim majority, they eat pork.

I say “used to” because in the spring of 2009, the government ordered the killing of all of Cairo’s pigs. Supposedly this was to prevent swine flu (a strange claim, given that no pig has been shown to carry it), but the Zabbaleen think it was a political move.

Regardless of the reason, the results have been disastrous. The Zabbaleen, down a major source of food, have stopped taking away most of Cairo’s waste. With no effective way to replace them, streets are piled with stinking heaps of trash, and the government is struggling to compensate for a system that it itself destroyed. In the meantime, the term “garbage city” applies to all of Cairo.

B
uilt in several stages between 3000 and 1600
B.C.
, Stonehenge is one of the mysteries of the ancient world. Was it a temple? An astrological observatory? A burial site? No one’s really sure.

What we do know: its stones each weigh more than fifty tons, and some of them came from as far as 240 miles away. All this was accomplished in days when a shovel made from a cow’s shoulder blade was cutting-edge technology. So whatever Stonehenge was for must have been pretty damn important.

Unfortunately, Stonehenge no longer commands the same level of respect. Tucked into what is now the Wiltshire countryside, it’s cut off from its surrounding fields by a chain-link fence. A large parking lot sits nearby with a gift shop, ice-cream vendors, Port-O-Potties, and a subterranean visitors’ center. Worst, the A344 highway passes so close that some people save money on the admission price by just looking at it from the road.

Consider following their lead. Thanks to previous problems with vandalism, visitors are no longer permitted to actually approach the stones. Instead an entrance fee of more than $10 only allows you to walk around the periphery of the circle, kept at a safe distance by a wire guardrail. (The main benefit of this experience, as compared to viewing it from the road, is that it allows you to take photographs of Stonehenge with the highway in the background.) Up close, you’ll find that the stones are not nearly as large as postcards make them seem, and whatever spiritual experience you may have hoped for is likely to be destroyed by busloads of tourists walking in dazed circles as they listen to the audio tour.

If you insist on visiting, pay the extra money and sign up for a before- or after-hours private access tour, which will let you get as close to the stones as you want. Or, alternatively, plan a visit in June—perhaps in keeping with its original purpose, Stonehenge hosts a great party for the summer solstice.

Dominic Righini-Brand

S
peaking of Stonehenge, does anyone remember the scene in
This Is Spinal Tap
where the band commissions a full-size model of Stonehenge for the set of an upcoming show, but, thanks to a mislabeled diagram, ends up with one that’s eighteen inches high? (It’s lowered onto the stage and then attacked by dancing elves. Anyone?)

That’s what the mosque at Pakistan’s Khewra Salt Mines reminds me of.

This is not a criticism of salt mine tourism. You should, for example, visit the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland. Over a thousand feet deep, Wieliczka was on the original list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites for the incredible salt statues created by some of its workers. Modern sculptors continued the tradition and the mine is now home to salt replicas of everything from Da Vinci’s
The Last Supper
to Pope John Paul II. Best is the salt cathedral—a cavernous room lined with friezes whose floors, ceilings, altars, and even chandeliers are all made from salt.

So at first I was excited to hear that there was a Pakistani salt mosque—score one for religious equality! But the real salt mosque is disappointingly small. How small? You can sit on it. Instead of being a soaring saline tribute to one of the world’s largest religions, it’s closer in scale to a gingerbread house.

Of course, since the mine extends about a dozen stories underground, there’s more to see at Khewra than just the salt mosque—for example, an assembly hall with backlit walls and a replica of the Great Wall of China. But be prepared: it too is smaller than the real thing.

I
ntroduced in 2003, the Yamaha Rhino is one of America’s most popular recreational utility vehicles. Reminiscent of a miniature Jeep, the Rhino’s been described as a “tricked-out golf cart,” but that doesn’t capture its true power. What golf cart, after all, can reach forty miles per hour and is recommended for use on sand dunes?

And that’s not all it does.

To quote from the legal complaint for an anti-Rhino class action lawsuit:

The Yamaha Rhino is prone to tip over and seriously injure its occupants due to several defects, including its top-heavy design, dangerously narrow track width, high center of gravity, wheels that are too small to maintain stability, steering geometry that facilitates rollovers and tip overs even at low speeds and on flat terrain, heavy rigid steel roll cage that has no safety padding, lack of doors, leg guards, or other enclosures to protect occupants, lack of handholds or handles for passengers, and defective restraint systems.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rhinos have been involved in a lot of accidents, causing everything from head, back, and neck wounds to severe crush injuries that often require surgery or amputation. According to the U.S. Consumer Safety Commission, at least forty-six drivers or passengers have been killed by Rhinos, including several cases where people were thrown from their RUV and then smushed when the half-ton vehicle landed on them.

In 2009, thanks to pressure from lawsuits and the U.S. Consumer Safety Commission, Yamaha announced a free repair program that retrofits Rhinos with several safety features that lessen the likelihood of a rollover and help prevent people from flying out. For example, doors. But they still haven’t recalled the Rhino—instead they continue to market it as a family-friendly off-road vehicle.

Ride at your own risk.