Itinerary from Cabarete

---

Cabarete has a varied international permanent and vacationing population — Russians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, French, Italian, English, Norwegians, Swedes and so forth. You never know who you are going to meet, where they are from and what work they do.

One such man is a Muscovite. He used to earn big bucs working for a major bank trading government bonds. He quit because of the stress and he was not seeing much of his wife and daughter. They moved to the north coast of the Dominican Republic where the stress factor is much lower.

To some extent, he took after his father who was also a banker, a governor of the Soviet Union’s central bank. He told me his father was not too happy with the economic situation as now run by the current government. He was a good card-carrying Communist and as such, he knew and worked with such outstanding leaders of capitalism as the Rothschilds.

Another was a young Canadian gal who I guessed was a writer after she asked a merchant a series of very well-formed, simple, yet pointed questions. The odd thing about her is she wrote children’s stories. That was not odd, but what was odd was they were published by a university press. Those guys usually only publish scholarly, dull books. Her children’s stories have to be mighty impressive to be picked up by a university press, sort of like Scheherazade’s 1001 Arabian Nights, which really aren’t children’s stories anyway.

I gave her my email address. She wrote me about three weeks later and asked if I wanted to keep in touch. I answered, and by so doing, implied yes. She said her travels would next take her to the States for a management training seminar. She asked where I was going to next, as if when you are living Cabarete there is a need to go somewhere else.

This was my answer.

>>> As regards to where I am going next, the question might be, is there anywhere I really need to go after being here?

That having been said:
Next is the last three days of the Olympics. Then to Beijing and to the Great Wall. After that, down south to the Emperor Chin's grave site. I will stay with a school friend of my middle brother’s who lives nearby. A few years back he said he would make a trek to Confucius' birth place with me to visit vegetarian restaurants that are 125 years old. He would take the pictures and I would write the articles.

Tibet is next. A roommate from college who is retired (so he says) Chinese military intelligence has lived up there for eight years. His wife is from Georgia, not the Soviet one, but ours.

They met in Paris when he was visiting me on one of my annual jaunts back when I stayed for a month in the spring in the Imperial Suite at the Ritz. Those were the big-buck times of the heady days of trading derivatives.

He was in Paris recovering from the death of his first wife, a niece of Mao Tse-Tung, who died from falling off a cliff while climbing Mount McKinley in Alaska He used the spare bedroom, which beats the hell out of a real one just about anywhere else.

We were at the top of the Eiffel tower, which he was visiting for the first time, when a cute little gal walks up to him and asks him if he is Chinese and would he answer a question she and a girlfriend had about the Emperor Chin. It must have been Karma, because he had written several articles about him in Chinese scholarly magazines.

The rest of the day we spent wandering the neighborhoods along the banks of the Seine. As the day became cool, we returned to the suite for tea and dinner. She spent the night and stayed. Her friend went back home to Buckhead without her.

She did not return to her law practice and moved to China where they got married and later moved to Tibet. She is an oddity up there, being the only blue-eyed blonde in that neck of the woods. He says she cooks better Chinese food than his mother. That is not saying much, as his mother mostly burned food --- yet another example of how politics and cooking don’t mix.

Next is a visit to one of my nephews who lives in Australia. However, that is not where I am going. We will meet in Ho Chi Min City. He, his wife, boy and I will hike through Viet Nam’s great rain forests.

We will make a point of getting to the delta. The kid wants to take a ride through the tangle of rivers on a retired American river boat used during the war.

Then to Cairo to get a really good falafel, which I cannot find here, and to see what is new in the museums. My main reason to be there is to get into the halls under the pyramids and the Sphinx. The last time I was in Cairo, I missed meeting up with guide who was to take us there because of a two-hour traffic jam caused by a car blowing up and leaving a gargantuan pothole that had to be filled before the police let the traffic move.

Then to Paris for a week before returning to NY to visit my brother and watch the great fireworks on the Fourth of July.

That is it, for the time being. <<< 😊

---