The Stray Dogs Of The Yucatan

by Elizabeth Seward on

“Dog!” I exclaimed to my husband, who was driving our small rental car along a toll-free road that meanders slowly through the towns of the Yucatan, slowly meandering much like the many stray dogs along these roads. Sometimes the dogs would sleepily walk into the road and stop, find a warm spot and lay down in the sun. These dogs don’t know about time; their previous moments determine their next and that is all. I rescued one of my two dogs a year ago from a street in Laredo. He casually trotted in front of a car that screeched to a halt to avoid hitting him while I closed my eyes and hoped for the best. When I peeked out to see that he’d made it back onto the sidewalk, I got out of the car and beckoned him over. He didn’t have tags, a chip, “wanted” signs or any ads online. And so I took him home with me and he’s been a part of my family ever since.

The last thing I wanted to do during my recent trip to the Yucatan was hit a dog, so I watched the roads vigilantly as my husband drove. We didn’t hit any dogs while we drove around the peninsula, but we came close. Since there are so many stray dogs in the Yucatan, they don’t get spayed or neutered and the stray dog population keeps growing. There isn’t any sort of government-operated SPCA or Humane Society in the Yucatan. Private organizations try to combat the situation and a Planned Pethood in the Yucatan aims to aggressively implement spay/neuter programs throughout the region, but the problem is still widely apparent. For anyone who has traveled to areas of the world wherein programs like these aren’t financed fixtures, stray dogs are usually just an unfortunate truth of travel.

%Gallery-174158%Winding our way through the small towns between Cancun and Merida, the dogs came in all sizes and colors. We occasionally passed an identifiable breed – a Doberman here, a litter of newborn Rottweilers there – but most of the dogs we saw on these roads were that recognizable mix of everything. Usually tan with a medium build, these dogs were wherever people were. Begging for food or attention, they weaved their way through pedestrians and cars in the towns we passed. Some of them looked surprisingly healthy with shiny coats and smiling faces. Others were mangy and diseased. Some were dead.

The reality of the stray dog problem in places like the Yucatan cannot be negotiated without concerted effort. These dogs are part of the culture and landscape of this peninsula, for better or worse, and for all intents and purposes, they always have been. Ancient Maya communities included domesticated dogs. The Maya used the dogs for hunting, companionship, food and sacrifice. They fed the dogs corn and some Yucatec Maya today continue this tradition and give dogs tortillas. Spanish explorers in the 16th century visited Merida and documented the breeding, feeding and sale of dogs in the city.

Maya literature incorporated dogs, too. The Popol Vuh is the K’iche’ Maya creation story. According to it, the gods failed horribly at their second attempt to make humans. The legend says that these humans were made out of wood. These humans were emotionless and would not feed the dogs, so the dogs retaliated in anger and destroyed them. The lesson in this story resonated with the Maya and they placed strong emphasis on respecting and feeding dogs. Associated with human life, renewal and death, dogs were of incredible symbolic importance to the ancient Maya. They held the job of leading people into the Underworld and protecting the home. Dog remains have been found buried alongside humans in Maya graves and royal homes. Presumably, the dogs were buried with their owners in order to guide them into the afterlife.

I clenched my teeth each time we passed these dogs, dead or alive. Dogs have long been an important component of human life. A dog was found buried with a human in Palestine in a 12,000-year-old grave. A dog and human were found together in a 14,000-year-old burial site in Germany. In my experience, most people who grasp the unique relationship between dogs and humans have a difficult time witnessing the kind of abundance of stray dogs I saw while navigating those small-town roads in the Yucatan.

As I was getting ready to leave the market in Merida one afternoon, two little girls walked past me, both cradling tiny, dirty puppies in their hands. I asked the girls how old the dogs were and if I could pet them. I crouched down in the plaza and held one of the one-week-old puppies. I didn’t know whether or not they belonged to the girls or the street and in that moment, it didn’t matter. Just like every other puppy from every time period and every part of the world, the little dog eagerly welcomed my affection.

Read more from my series on the Yucatan here.

[Photo Credit: Elizabeth Seward]

LA Is Still The City Of Dreams

by Dave Seminara on

On my first night in L.A., I had pizza with a rock star and an actor. I didn’t confirm it, but the guy who handed us our slices probably has a screenplay in the pipeline. Los Angeles is still the city of dreams and dreamers.

I’m fascinated by cities people flock to in order to pursue a vocation. Writers love New York. Techies settle in the Silicon Valley. Car people need to be in Detroit. Those who are interested in politics and government go to D.C. And anyone who wants to work in the entertainment industry moves to L.A.

Every city also has accountants, police officers, teachers and the rest, but L.A. wouldn’t be the same without the swarms of people who moved there in the hopes of becoming famous. If you live in a city that’s saturated with people who’ve all moved there for roughly the same reason, I can see how it would be a bit annoying. I’ve lived in D.C. three separate times and never warmed to the place in part because it’s a transient city filled with hyper-achieving, my child is going to speak Chinese better than your child, type A personalities.


But while living among the aspiring and working actors, directors and musicians in L.A. might get old, I never get tired of visiting the place. On the first night of my recent trip, my wife and I fell into conversation with a guy who had movie star good looks while waiting for slices of a pizza in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. I don’t watch enough Hollywood movies and T.V. to know if he was famous, but he looked the part. But then again, there are all kinds of beautiful people in L.A. and only a fraction of them are famous, the rest wait tables, take off their clothes in strip joints and do 1,000 other things to pay the rent while keeping their dreams of stardom simmering.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask him, “hey, are you on TV?” because I didn’t want to be too much of a rank tourist. We went outside with our slices and sat at a table next to a guy with a big mop of curly blonde hair and two slices of pizza. He had a guitar on his lap and I couldn’t help but ask him what band he was in.

“We’re called the Mowgli’s,” he said.

The name meant nothing to me but immediately resonated with my little boys, who are fans of “The Jungle Book.” The young man told me his name was Michael Vincze and, while I naively assumed that he was just an eccentric dreamer that liked to walk around L.A. with a guitar, he casually mentioned that they’d recently played at the House of Blues in Chicago and on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

In many ways, emerging artists like the Mowglis are forced to be consummate travelers. Vincze told us that his band had crisscrossed the country in a van several times, playing gigs in towns and cities all across the fruited plane.

Later that evening, I rode an elevator at my hotel with a strikingly attractive black woman and thought, she’s probably famous or soon will be, and later found out I was right. It was the British R & B singer Laura Mvula.

Of course, if you’re serious about stalking the mega-stars while in L.A., the real household names, there are a number of websites that list their home addresses, where they eat, pray, shop, etc. I have little interest in celebrity stalking, but I love to simply drive around L.A. and marvel at all the ridiculously expensive cars.

I saw more Rolls Royces, Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Maseratis in four days in L.A. than I’d see driving around Chicago, my adopted hometown, in a lifetime. These kinds of cars would be considered ostentatious in most corners of the planet but in L.A., hardly anyone seems to bat an eyelash.

On our last day in L.A., I was reminded what I like most about the city after reading a beautiful, heartbreaking story in the Los Angeles Times about Seth Burnham, a struggling “Mid 30s-ish, early 40s-ish” actor who moved to L.A. to pursue his dream and, like many, hasn’t made it but keeps hope alive. The story is part of a series called Chasing the Dream that neatly encapsulates how hard it is to make it in the entertainment business.

As a traveler, I like to be in a place that’s filled with dreamers like Seth Burnham. D.C. is filled with practical, serious career climbers, the kind of people who pay obsessive attention to their 401k portfolios and have panic attacks if they go more than 3,000 miles without an oil change.

But L.A. is chockfull of impractical people following dreams, people who carry their guitars around with them, waiting for inspiration to strike, people who, if given a million dollars, would rush right out and spend it on a Rolls Royce, people who, when you ask them how old they are, respond: “Mid 30s-ish to early 40s-ish.” L.A. doesn’t get much love from travel writers but there is no better place in the country to rub shoulders with fun, idealistic people who are this close to making it big.

[Photo credit: Frankenmedia on Flickr]

Video Of The Day: Where The Water Settles

by Elizabeth Seward on

“Where the Water Settles” from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

I can’t get enough of the videos from The Perennial Plate and this newest video, “Where The Water Settles,” just reiterates that fact for me. The way in which Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine approach traveling is rewarding for their audience. They dive into culture based off of personal interactions and stories they hear along the way, it seems, opposed to shallow suppositions of what to do in certain areas of the world. These two clearly love the art of exploring their subjects in depth and this method can easily be observed in “Where The Water Settles,” a video that takes you through a 1300-year-old system of rice farming in China in just a few minutes.

If you’d like to submit a video for Video Of The Day, reach out to us with a link.

Vagabond Tales: Welcome To Portland, Strip Club Capital USA

by Kyle Ellison on

As I squeeze the last bits of orange garnish into my pint of Blue Moon, a man to my left is having his nostrils plugged by a gyrating set of female genitals.

Releasing him from the flesh cave, the attractive blonde stripper – to the immense enjoyment of the sophomoric and semi-erect set of friends he’s brought with him – suddenly doubles around and stiffly slaps a hand across his clean shaven face. This is my fourth strip club of the night, and even I didn’t see that coming. It’s all part of her shtick, however, and from the look of things the two are no more than 10 minutes from a trip to a private room.

No, this isn’t some testosterone fueled frat party, it’s just another night out in Portland, Oregon, strip club capital USA.

Despite the fact that this northwestern city is lauded for its microbrews, coffee and eco-friendly public transport, believe it or not, Portland is also home to more strip clubs per capita than any other city in America. Not Las Vegas. Not Detroit. Portland.

So just like the brilliant minds that put together Strip City, the documentary featured above, I, too, came to Portland on a mission to try and find out what it is that keeps the city so excessively nude.

—

“Well, the girls are definitely hotter than in Bangkok.” The woman making the observation is my wife, an oddly willing participant in the evening.

We’ve entered into Stars Cabaret in the suburb of Beaverton, and through info gleaned from local friends, the place is meant to be slightly more upscale. From the way a customer is strategically inserting a $10 bill, however, I question the level of class.

With dancers operating on four stages, to the far right of my table a dancer is removing her red thong with a tool called another man’s teeth. No expert on yoga or anatomy, it appears as if she’s tearing something potentially used in childbirth.

Like many other PDX establishments, Stars offers a fairly wide variety of food to accompany the cocktails and nipples, a service I haven’t encountered in the seedy strip joints of my past. Amongst the specials being advertised is free prime rib on Wednesday’s (a $20 value, apparently), and I question the morality of luring customers to a strip club by offering free chunks of meat. The promo seems to be a common one around town, however, so I figure it must be alright.

As the DJ switches into an up-tempo house beat, I ponder my own personal theories on why this Northwest city has such an affinity for poles and panties. Is it the weather? Are the 10 months of gray drizzle an excuse for erotic indoor fantasies? Perhaps it’s an extension of Portland’s well-known arts scene, an avenue for exercising freedom of expression and the beauty of the human form? Or, maybe it’s as simple as Portland is just full of a lot of really kinky people hopped up on microbrews and ready to get weird.

The answer I get from a woman named Diane who is working the entrance paints a far more logical picture:

“I think it’s simply because of the laws.”

Disappointed by its blandness, I’m amazed it’s a reasoning I hadn’t thought to explore.

“Yeah, Portland just has some really lenient laws when it comes to the ability to serve liquor and stay open late. Plus, the girls can be fully nude.”

Intrigued by the legal leniency, I decided to delve deeper into the issue and discovered that, yes, Portland does in fact have remarkably casual laws. I could give you the legal jargon that I discovered (which pertains to Article 1, Section 8 of the Oregon constitution), or, I could simply allow you to ponder over the blunt quotation I found on the Portland Bar Fly site:

According to Mr. Bar Fly, “our laws kick ass in that strippers can show their beaver while you drink whiskey and eat steak. You’ll never, ever be alone”. Yeah. Pretty much sums it up.

I thanked Diane at Stars for their hospitality, and I decided to take the question downtown to where the Portland stripping scene all started: Mary’s.

Originally a piano bar owned by Mary Durst, new owner Roy Keller decided in 1965 to spice his shows up by having topless girls rile up the crowd between piano sets. When it became apparent that customers were far more interested in girls than the piano, Mary’s Club changed tacks to become Portland’s first official strip club, swapping to fully nude shows once the law allowed it in 1985.

Closer to a historical landmark than a glitzy new club, I enter the dimly lit room to find a buxom blonde requesting money for the jukebox in three different languages.
That’s right. A jukebox. I told you this place was old school.

I order a Pabst Blue Ribbon and a plate of fish tacos (which were phenomenal), and sit back to watch the show. Adorning the walls are the famous hand-painted murals that Roy used to attract customers prior to realizing a set of bare breasts would do the trick. Unlike Stars, where the cocktail waitresses prance about in neon excuses for clothing, the staff at Mary’s is conservatively dressed.

I speak with our waitress, a daughter of the family-owned and operated establishment, and she agrees on the theory that the laws simply allow a lot of, shall we say, flexibility in their ability to give people what they want.

A man in the front row tells the dancer she’s sexy and slides her a $20 bill. Ultimately, it seems they’re both getting what they want. More than just seduction, at the end of the night, this is still just business as usual. A standard case of supply and demand, for every man (or woman) out there who’s in need of some immediate nudity, there is a woman (or man) who is need of some hard earned cash.

According to “Rocket” of the “Rocket Report” column that appears in Exotic Magazine (yes, Portland has its own erotic magazine that features ads, maps, and directions to 52 different clubs), “in Portland, strippers can achieve a level of public status that rivals rock stardom. If you play your cards right, it can also equal big money.”

One of the cocktail girls at Stars tells me that the girls at Casa Diablo across town are making some real good money right now. She says it’s one of the current hotspots, and it’s got a reputation as being one of the “dirtiest” clubs in town. I find this to be ironic seeing as it’s also an all vegan establishment, which according to their site, is the first of its kind in the entire world.

I look up their ad in Exotic magazine and notice that they promise, amongst other things, live “girl on girl” shows.

Vegan food and lesbian fantasies, you ask? In a town with dozens of strip clubs I suppose it’s a constant battle to stand out from the crowd, a malleable science from which I am sure the patrons of Portland greatly benefit.

Unable to make it all the way across town to Casa Diablo, I instead walk down East Burnside to a club called Union Jack’s. Recommended by a friend with an intimate history of Portland strip clubs, he claims that the last time he visited “the place totally fired me up.”

I pay my $5 cover to the doorman and head inside, my expectations running high. Within 30 seconds I can tell the place is completely lawless, and it does, in fact, totally fire me up.

A dancer fresh off of her turn on the stage casually walks to the bar and orders a drink with the rest of the crowd, her completely naked body a stark contrast to the clothed pack of gentlemen conversing with her. As I head to the bathroom I’m bumped by a door I didn’t even notice was there. Again, a completely naked woman scurries out from a backroom, apparently in the middle of something and needing some assistance.

While some of the other clubs I’d visited had a semblance of professional separation between dancer and patron, this scene is little more than a souped-up frat party gone awry. You have the feeling that at any moment you might get lucky, an atmosphere, which I’m sure contributes to the place being packed.

And then, as I watch a man nearly suffocate while fully ensconced in a young girl’s breasts, everything suddenly begins to clear: the lenient laws may seem to be the reason for the explosion of fully nude clubs in Portland, but they are simply a catalyst for greater human tendencies.

To sell your body is often referred to as the world’s oldest profession (though by no means are strippers prostitutes), and for thousands of years humans have paid money to tickle their most primal urges. For those who are doing the disrobing, many times it’s more than simply the money, as many strippers I know have told me there’s also a sense of beauty, confidence, and empowerment that goes along with the job.

On both sides of the stage, these are all emotions in a human’s life that need addressing, and the laws simply allow the greater root cause to express itself in its overtly lustful form.

So here’s to you Portland, Oregon, for managing to keep an entire city sexually sated and passionately intrigued; when it comes to celebrating the beauty of the flesh, your frosty pint of microbrew decidedly runneth over.

Want more travel stories? Read the rest of the “Vagabond Tales” over here.

[Photo Credits: Kyle Ellison]

Stalin Back in Style In His Hometown of Gori

by Dave Seminara on

Two years ago, Georgian officials carried out a secret, dead of night operation to dismantle a statue of Joseph Stalin in his hometown of Gori. But on Thursday, a municipal assembly in Gori voted to restore the monument. According to press reports, some 6,000 people signed a petition in support of the move. The fact that officials in this impoverished corner of the world have pledged $15,000 toward venerating one of history’s greatest mass murderers is a scandal, but the news was given just a one-paragraph treatment under the New York Times’s World Briefing section on Friday.

I visited the Stalin sites in Gori’s main square 12 years ago and can’t help but wonder if this recent move is an ill-conceived scheme to attract tourists, an effort to embarrass President Mikheil Saakashvili, whose party was defeated by a coalition that, according to the Times, “promised to restore monuments to Stalin in Gori and other cities,” or simply a move to honor Stalin.


Gori is a place that looks just like it sounds: pretty gruesome. When I told the woman whom I was staying with in Tbilisi that I was taking a day trip to Gori, she practically pleaded with me not to go.

“There is nothing in Gori, nothing!” she said.

But I wanted to see the Stalin birthplace and museum, so off I went, early one morning in a battered minivan with a shattered windshield and about three or four too many passengers. Walking around the forlorn town, I felt like I’d stepped back in time about 100 years. Peasants in heavy, homemade-looking woolen outfits lined the streets, selling produce and household items, like Barf brand detergent, made in Iran and other developing world backwaters, on top of cardboard boxes and from the trunks of dilapidated old cars.

The sidewalks were so deeply cracked that one could easily break a leg if they weren’t paying close attention. The stench of poverty and despair filled the dark streets and I couldn’t help but conclude that Stalin, born Joseph Vissarionovich, the son of a cobbler, couldn’t be blamed for abandoning the place as a young revolutionary.

All I had to do was say “Stalin?” and people knew to direct me toward his humble boyhood home, which was venerated with a huge, columned building around it to make it look more grand after his death. There were five women huddled in the cold around an inadequate little space heater at the adjacent Stalin museum. One of them walked me around the pitch-dark place, turning on and off the lights above each exhibit as we strolled through. There was little of interest, save for an old pair of Stalin’s boots and other memorabilia, especially for an English speaker.

After the impromptu tour, one of her colleagues offered me a selection of souvenirs – a book of Stalin’s awful poetry, a Stalin keychain and some postcards.



“Now you will visit Stalin’s private train car,” said my guide, who spoke some English.

As we walked out to check out his elaborate train car, I asked her what she thought of Stalin and an unpleasant expression, half-disgusted, half-exhausted came over her face.

“I don’t have to tell you that,” she said.

“Yes, of course you don’t,” I said. “I was just curious.”

“My opinion about Stalin is private,” she said, cutting me off.



I couldn’t decide if she hated Stalin but felt that she shouldn’t admit it because of her duties as Stalin Museum and birthplace tour guide or if she respected him but didn’t want to admit it to an American, knowing that I’d have a rather low opinion of Stalin. Who knows, perhaps she’s one of the 6,000 people who signed a petition to bring back the statue?

[Photo credit: Dave Seminara, Giladr and Rapidtravelchai on Flickr]