In search of stamps and a laundromat

It seems in Guam all roads lead to Marine Corps Drive, literally, because all the roads are really just a series of intersecting loops. I keep getting lost, and then realizing that I'm not lost, because if I just keep driving I end up, inevitably, back along the same strip of chain restaurants, hotels, car dealerships and gas stations.

For now, it's convenient; I'm sure at some point it will become like some sort of gratingly familiar race track. But, again, I can find my way back to my hotel, so it's working for now.

It's Friday night, and I got out of work early. I haven't really explored anything beyond my hotel and the parking lot across from my work, so I went driving in search of stamps and a laundromat. I swear I've seen about a dozen laundromats while driving around looking for other things - like Supermarkets and local businesses that have no address - but of course I didn't find one when I was looking for it.

I did find the micronesian mall, which looks like a mall from the outside but seems to only sell things people don't need. And by people, I mean Japanese tourists. I actually parked in a lot with these huge parking spaces, and thought I was in some kind of weird world of giants until I read the sign that said the whole lot was dedicated to Japanese tourist buses. I guess any tourist buses, really, but the Japanese are the only ones who bother visiting Guam. At any rate, they had stores selling fur coats and puffy jackets, and those little cheap knick knacks, and a Macy's, and a "Fiesta Court" with a bunch of horrible fast food restaurants, which, to be fair, may be for the locals as well.














I also found the beach, which isn't hard. I actually drive past this incredibly aquamarine blue beach every morning that I'm sure was once prime real estate on the island. Someone had the brilliant idea of building a giant highway on most of the bay though, so instead there are only a few abandoned parking areas and steps leading down to the beach.

I'm always incredibly confused in the morning when I see this long beautiful beach practically abandoned. I figured it was something the locals just took for granted, or ignored due to the proximity to the highway.








Alas, further investigation proves otherwise.




















Apparently everything within 400 yards of this sign is infected with some sort of bacteria, which makes the beach somewhat hazardous, and empty.

Rocktoberfest in Guam

Jeff’s Pirate Cove is a local outside dive bar in Talofofo, a village on the eastern side of the island, which, according to my world-weary 24-year-old tour guide, a fellow reporter, is too far south to be a tourist attraction, but is one anyway.

The bar is a series of outside patios, underneath a main overhang and a peaked roof with a painted display of mermaid paraphernalia in between stone picnic benches. It’s only my second day here, and I’m being shown the sights. We’re going to the Rocktoberfest, an annual occasion that merits keeping the bar open until the late hour of 9pm. Jeff, I’m told, likes to go home at 6.

Despite an array of sloppily parked cars on the highway out front, the place is only half full. There’s a band in a tent playing on the green slope leading down from the main bar. I see an occasional Micronesian waitress, or perhaps simply Octoberfest enthusiast, wearing what can only be described as the traditional outfit of half-naked German wenches on beer steins everywhere. I’m jealous of the leather bustier and green short skirt, but assume that if all goes well, in a year or two, I may also join the ranks of girls wearing Bavarian-inspired slut attire in a tropical locale.

I’m told there’s a beach on the other end of the grass, but it’s dark, and all I can see are lights from the northern end of the island, where the hotels catering to Japanese tourists have taken over the skyline. Little kids swirl around in gaggles of hysteria, seeming to have almost as much fun as their bleary-eyed adult counterparts. They clamber along the sloped roof and run beneath our feet. One little girl grabs the coattails of a man, who swings her around while he or she, I can’t remember which, flash pictures of the merry-go-round effect.

I’m introduced to the “hash” guys – friends of my colleagues. They seem to be different versions of the quintessential American ex-pat, leathery men that seem to be made of gray and meet newcomers with half-leering glances, and seem attenuated to the finer points of hedonistic nihilism in a way that only years of practice can achieve. I miss their names – but on the car ride over I am told that the hashers have elected someone called “the tyrant,” and casually refer to each other by names such as “tampon” and “sex.” Or maybe that’s just what their names are, and have nothing to do with hashing.

Hashing is explained to me as an international sport that involves drinking and running hastily navigated trails, usually in the dark, sometimes in wholly inappropriate places like the middle of rivers. Here it seems to be the favorite activity of my new colleagues, and I’m told, along with boonie stomping, the weekly community hiking expedition, will quickly become a pastime for lack of else to do.

In between hearing the conversations of the hashers, and the drunken cheers as the cover band plays a favorite 80s retread, I pick up snippets of a coded and apparently long-running joke between one of my colleagues and a lawyer, a year and half into her tenure in the local government. The joke goes something like, “what does it take to get fired from GuamGov?” The answer is not, according to the local government, raping a child at work, because, well that doesn’t actually affect one’s job performance.

They laugh and then say, “It would be funny if it weren’t actually true.”

“I work for the mafia,” the woman says casually. “And by that I mean, GuamGov. Maybe I should have thought of that before taking this job. Ha.” She laughs.

My colleague launches into a story about the pitfalls of reporting in Guam. “The teachers’ union slashed my tires,” he says. “How do you know it was them?” the lawyer asks. “They used No. 2 pencils,” he quips back.

He’s joking, and not joking.

It’s early, but seems late, and around me the scene has achieved no more or less cathartic revelry than when we arrive. Work is tomorrow, and so I head out with another colleague, who will start her new job at the news desk.

I ask her if she’s nervous, moving into a position that might someday end in getting her tires slashed. She says yes, a little, and then I say something about the role of journalism, and how this is what, technically, we’re here to do.

She agrees, and sighs. “It’s good we cover stuff that we do. But sometimes I wonder if it matters. Because no one does anything.”

We drive back in the dark, contemplating years ahead.

Obligatory photos of the new locale

Not wanting to get fired from my first real reporting gig for publishing impolitic things on my blog, I have decided, much like proper English artistocrats of days past, to stick to safer subjects such as scenery and the weather.

A word on titles...

I'm not really a dilettante, although I think that I would be better at being one that pretty much anything I can see myself doing professionally. And I would say I am more of an aspirational wanderer than an actual one. But, pithy titles that are somewhat accurate are hard to come by, so this is what it is.

I have always had images of myself wandering the wide world and seeing things. I'm not entirely sure how that has worked out for me so far. But, you know, everywhere is somewhere, and if you count the past 6 years of hopeless yearning and malcontented stumbling through the boroughs of New York City, then yes, I would say that I've wandered, a bit anyway.

This image is a statue in a courtyard of a cathedral near Columbia University. It's funny how long I lived in New York City before I found this one, lovely place, that reminds me of the profits of wandering, or rather, finding things when you look for them, even in crowded, whirling, impervious cities.

Every time I visited it, here and there, when I had time, I would think that if someone could manage to construct such a weird thing, and attach it to an important and stoic institution, without anyone noticing that it was a hulking, schizophrenic rendering of half-formed and tortured bronze creatures, then maybe there was hope for living a not totally dull life after all.

My current wandering plans are somewhat farther afield than this. And promise all sorts of new discoveries. But, I guess I will just have to see how these things work out, and when I get to where I am going, decide if I am, indeed, going to bother looking for things, or writing them down, in any way, or if I am going to forget, like everyone else that there are surprises in the corners of things.