International Accountant of Mystery

Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling

2010-03-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, the ultimate comfort food was Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. If I was sick, or on a cold rainy day – and we had a lot of those in Oregon – she made the soup, with a little milk. Later she introduced me to others – damn, Campbell’s made some good soup. Chicken and rice, split pea, cream of tomato, bean with bacon. Then I graduated to Lipton’s instant chicken noodle soup, which sounds like a step backward, but with an egg beaten in, we were getting closer to some real cooking. When I was in high school mom got more adventurous, making lentil soup from scratch, and black bean soup, and then I married an Italian, and learned about lentils and sausage, pasta e fagioli, ribollita, straciatella … moved to California, discovered menudo, and pozole, and tom ka gai … and, finally, pho.

With pho, we’re back where we started from. Meat and noodles in steaming clear broth. Add a few things I’ve come to love since I was a kid – fresh herbs, freshly squeezed lime, chiles. With a complex broth, a little fish sauce, meats of different textures – steak, flank, tripe – pho is just the greatest. We had a disastrous vacation in Vietnam a few years ago, but we ate some damn fine pho there, pho for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was a rainy vacation (that was part of the disaster), but feeling sorry for myself in rainy, raw Nha Trang, pho was a comfort.

We do have cold raw days down here in San Diego, and Sunday was one, so we drove out to our new favorite pho joint, Pho Ca Dao, on El Cajon Boulevard. Years ago we hung out at a place whose name demonstrated the delicious culture clash of California – Pho El Cajon. But they’re gone now, and Pho Ca Dao is it.

Turns out my mom loves pho too. She goes to a pho joint on Sandy Boulevard in Portland, called Pho Oregon. They’ve got some culture clash up there, too, as it turns out.

Pho Ca Dao
5223 El Cajon Boulevard
San Diego, CA 92115

The Conflagration Will Be Televised

2007-10-31T09:58:00.000-07:00

The San Diego wildfires got official CNN disaster certification when Anderson Cooper and his black t-shirt arrived on the scene. To be fair, he was actually wearing a dark brown safari shirt – I suppose it won’t show ash smudges. Certainly the all-wildfire-all-the-time coverage was more palatable than some of the recent round-the-clock stories – all-Britney-all-the-time got pretty tired pretty fast. But there was something pretty annoying about Anderson hanging out in somebody’s burned-out yard, giggling with Dr. Sanjay Gupta about their madcap disregard of warnings to wear face masks.

All the same, at least with cable news, we know that the point is to exploit events for our entertainment. The next day, George Bush showed up, and my annoyance turned to disgust. As far as I know, the last time he showed his face in this purple town was to declare “Mission Accomplished” on an aircraft carrier a mile offshore. (And you thought he was in the Persian Gulf! That flight suit was necessary for him to travel one mile from shore to a ship they had deliberately turned around so the San Diego skyline wouldn’t be visible.) This time around, he “consoled” the well-to-do Republican voters of Rancho Bernardo – I’m betting FEMA will come through for them like they never did in the parishes of New Orleans. Governor Schwarzenegger asked him to go console some evacuees at Qualcomm Stadium, but Bush declined. I guess they concluded that people who don’t have the means to find private lodging may not vote Republican.

Sad how in Bush’s America, all turns to anger and politics. As far as I can tell, the city has handled the crisis very well, even without the National Guard, who are all in Iraq. I hope it’s clear that this was no Katrina. I can hardly begin to imagine what a nightmare it must have been for those who were evacuated with minutes to gather up their precious belongings, spending days in limbo, not knowing whether they have a home. But in a few weeks, except for those most directly affected, life in San Diego will be back to normal. New Orleans may never be back to normal.

And that’s the strange thing – for many of us, life was never really not normal. I live near downtown, and work downtown. My company closed our offices, but I kept going to work. Traffic on the freeways was light, NPR was off the air because their transmitter burned, and the air quality was really bad for a few days – that’s the sum of the impact on me. It reminded me of how I felt after 9/11: I was aware that others, including people I knew, were terribly, terribly affected. But it was somewhere else, far away, and the direct effects on everything I could see were small.

But maybe I minimize. We watched CNN morbidly, debating whether we should start pulling important papers together, though the nearest fire was at least 10 miles away. The day the fires started, before we knew how bad it would be, we happened to drive through a thick cloud of smoke that went on for several miles, and it was very alarming. The next morning, the sunrise burning red through the smoke, the office empty except for the few of us who lived nearby, I felt a vague dread. This lifted as the fires got worse – more upsetting not know what’s going to happen, than to know what has happened, if you have been spared.

The number of friends who have reached out from around the country has been deeply touching. When the news says the fires are in San Diego, people don’t realize that, like Los Angeles, the land area of San Diego is vast. I reassured each one that we are fine, our home is intact, and those we know who were evacuated had places to sleep. One friend asked if people in San Diego were talking about the implication of global climate change in this. I’ll admit to feeling irritated – no, I responded, this week, people in San Diego are talking about whether each other’s homes are still standing. But we’ll get back to politics soon enough. George Bush was in town, after all.

George Bush Giveth, and George Bush Taketh Away

2007-03-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

My partner is a civilian employee of the US Marine Corps, working as a psychotherapist with the guys returning from the war in the Middle East. Recently, on a flight home from London, he got to chatting with the American Airlines flight attendants, who were so moved by his work that they gave him a bottle of champagne, as a gift to thank him for his work.

When he arrived in Los Angeles, it was necessary to transfer between terminals, which in turn requires leaving the "secure zone" and going back through security ... where, of course, they took the champange away from him. His gift for his contribution to the War on Terror was confiscated due to the War on Terror.

Thanks, Jackie! Thanks, Pierre!

2006-07-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

I grabbed my DC walking tours book today and took a stroll around the White House. Here are some things I learned:

1. You can run but you can’t hide. I discovered the Renwick Gallery, a museum I’ve walked by many times, yet it never registered that it’s there, part of the Smithsonian. It’s a weird, eclectic, thing – one room holds the Indian collection, hundreds of portraits of Indians made in the first half of the 19th century. The rest is a museum of decorative arts. And in the men’s room, of all places, a poster commemorating my employer’s gift to the museum.

2. Pierre L’Enfant rocked. He should get some kind of posthumous Pritzker Prize for urban design. His design for Washington, DC is great, tying seats of power and monuments together logically. A note: my guidebook says that the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Jefferson Memorial were supposed to lie on one axis of the plan, but when it came time to build the Washington Monument, the site was too marshy, and it had to be moved slightly to the east. Lucky thing – that off-center Monument behind the White House is very photogenic.

3. Jackie Kennedy rocked. We already knew she was an architectural preservationist – her remodel of the White House is legendary, and she went on to save Grand Central Station. But while she lived in the White House, she also managed to save the Executive Office Building, and the graceful mansions that line Lafayette Square. Thanks, Jackie.

4. The Boy Scouts of America are one very strange outfit. The Boys Scouts Memorial, which sits just off the Ellipse, was proposed in 1959, the 50th anniversary of scouting in America, and was dedicated in 1964. The statue, however, is more reminiscent of the muscular realism popular in the 30s – when I run across it in Italy, I call it Mussolini Modern. It’s an interesting monument, but what’s up with those homophobe scouts presenting a naked Dad figure? Mom, I should point out, is far more demure – and little Billy has not a single merit badge.

Haircut on Capitol Hill

2006-07-19T16:57:00.000-07:00

If you can’t find it on Google, post on Craig’s List. Mine said this:

Where’s a Military Barber Shop? – Guy in town for a few months from San Diego. Used to paying $8 for my buzz cut at barber shop right outside MCRD. Can't see paying $25 for a high-n-tite ... any advice? Thanks.

I posted it in the gay listings, figuring some gay service member would point me in the right direction. Good call! I got about ten responses. One instructed me to go to the shop next to the visitor’s center in the Pentagon. Another suggested Fort Myers. All the rest had the same answer: Sneed’s Barber Shop, across the street from the Marine Barracks on Capitol Hill.

(I mentioned this on the phone to my partner, who works on a USMC base near San Diego. “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about that. I Street, I think.” I get the address, and indeed, it’s at the corner of 8^th and I Streets, SE. The man is scary, but we knew that.)

So on a Saturday morning, I took the metro to Eastern Market, and walked the few blocks to Sneed’s. On the way, I discovered that Capitol Hill is a great neighborhood, and made a mental note that there is definitely more to DC than Dupont Circle and Georgetown. Ethnically diverse, cool restaurants, galleries, gay bars, specialty markets … I’ll be back, for sure. After a few blocks, I came to Sneed’s.

The place is open 5am to 4pm on weekdays, and 7am to noon on Saturdays. At 9 on a Saturday morning, I expected the place to be packed, but to my surprise I got a chair immediately. Only four chairs in the place – one had a Marine, another a gay guy getting his head shaved, the third a little boy with his dad proudly watching – and me. The barber made me nervous, he mumbled to himself in a Tourette’s kind of way, but he gave me a good haircut, using a straight razor, which is rare. On the wall across from my chair was a signed picture of President Bush, and the price list:

Civilians … $15
Marines … $7
Military Police … $12
Mustache/Beard … $10
Bush … $20

Dirty joke, or put-down of Fearless Leader? I didn’t have the cojones to ask. The barber rang up $7, but I owned up to being a civilian, paid my $15, and walked home.

Business Travel - May 2005

2006-02-27T21:32:00.000-08:00

My Air France flight was due into Luanda, Angola, at 4:30am, and I was apprehensive. I had e-mailed my itinerary to my client – let’s call them Petrox – and they had acknowledged, but some details were lacking. How would I be met? Where would I be staying? I assumed my driver would know where to take me.

The flight landed a little early, and I was nearly the first off the plane. Immigration waved me through, customs was just a formality, and I arrived with two bags and a computer case on the sidewalk of the tiny airport. There was some commotion as people arrived and met their rides – but there seemed to be no ride for me. No one wearing Petrox’s famous logo, no one holding my name out on a card, no one looking like he was looking for a white guy looking for him. So I stood, not sure what to do, in the steamy equatorial night.

Time passed. I hoped that my plane being early, my ride was perhaps late, and soon enough someone would arrive. But the bulk of a 747-load of passengers filed past me, piled into busses, jeeps, cars, scooters, and disappeared into the dark. I cursed Air France, whose business class reps in Paris had insisted on doing me the service of wrapping my luggage in plastic. It had seemed a reasonable precaution against theft at a third-world airport, but now, standing on the curb, I felt very conspicuous, and my crinkly luggage, I feared, made me look the more a novice. I waited 20 minutes, 30, 45, and things began to quiet. The army guards with their machine guns eyed me curiously. I looked around for a phone, but I had no local money, and in any event I wouldn’t know whom to call.

I had to make a decision – was it safer to stand alone in the night as the last people filed away, or to ask a stranger for a ride? Across the parking lot was an SUV, looking very white and clean, with the name of a limo service on its door, and a driver in a starched white shirt. I had been watching him, the only thing that looked like a cab, for some time, assumed that he was waiting for someone, but now I decided to act before it was too late. I crossed the dirt parking lot with my bags on their creaky trolley.

The driver looked at me curiously. I asked him if he spoke English – no, only Portuguese. In my rusty college Spanish I asked if he could take me to the Hotel Tropico – luckily, this was my second trip to Luanda, and I remembered the name of the hotel. The driver told me he would charge me $20, and I agreed. Just then another man walked up, an older white man, with no luggage but well dressed, and in Portuguese he seemed to be asking me where I was going. In Spanish I told him that I didn’t speak Portuguese, and in Italian he asked me if he could share the ride. I was delighted.

On the way, the old fellow chatted with the African driver in Portuguese. After some time, we entered the city, and soon enough I recognized the hotel on the other side of the divided road. The car pulled over, the old man said he lived near by, pressed a $10 bill in my hand, and jumped out of the car. He disappeared into the night as the car pulled away.

My relief at being near the hotel disappeared when the car passed it and kept going. And going, and going, for what felt like a mile. My heart began to pound – at what point would it be clear that I was being kidnapped, not unheard of in this chaotic country only months out of a horrible civil war? But the car rounded a traffic circle, doubled back and soon I was at the hotel. I gave the driver $20, then another $5 as a grateful tip, and found myself in the bright air-conditioned haven of the hotel lobby.

Far more confusion followed before I located my horrified colleagues at Petrox. This global oil company, that emphasizes “safety first” and has a “safety moment” at the beginning of every meeting, had left me stranded, and it was only my travel experience that helped me keep a level head. And good thing – “Most people who take cabs are found dead under a bridge” was the way my contact put it.

I still have the $10 bill. I’m convinced it’s counterfeit.

* * * * * * * * * * *

As I prepared to go to Nigeria this year, I realized that my Angolan reception – lack of a reception – had been more traumatic than I had wanted to admit. It’s a great travel tale, what we in my milieu of, yes, international tax accountants call a “war story.” But as the day approached, I found I was dreading arriving in Nigeria.

I had been to Nigeria before, too, but before had arrived with my boss, an old hand, a charismatic Cajun whom nothing fazes, and when the pushing and shoving had started at immigration, he just pushed and shoved back. He stood behind me and almost inaudibly coached me – “Push up to the desk, Bob. Hand them your passport. Make them take it. Don’t let that drunken Aussie get in front of you.” And when we emerged into the baggage area, there was a Petrox rep who saw us through customs, helped us run the gauntlet of cabbies and hawkers, money changers and prostitutes, beggars and thieves who lined the sidewalk. He ushered us into a van that took us to the company compound, accompanied by armed guards.

This time, I had to assume it would be no different, but I was arriving by myself. We had made it clear to our Petrox contacts that I would be arriving separately, on the 6:30 pm British Airways flight, two hours before my boss arrived on South African Airways from Jo’burg. I had been to Nigeria before, I knew what to expect. What could happen?

Immigration was a breeze. No pushing, no shoving, no shouting. A gracious Nigerian woman examined my visa, an old man stamped it, and I mumbled “ese pupa,” thank you in Yoruba. I was in the baggage area, thick with people from the last flight, but no evidence of anyone from Petrox.

I tried not to be conspicuous. I waited for the carousel to start. I strolled the length and width of the area, trying to see everyone’s badge. Air France, British Airways, Nigerian Government, Lagos State, various oil companies, but no one from Petrox. The room became crowded with people from my flight. Finally the carousel lurched to a start. Outside, lightning began to flash, and several times, the airport went dark. The lights came back up quickly, but it took about five minutes each time for the carousel to re-start. It was an hour before I had my luggage.

I stood on an alcove overlooking the area. My new cell phone, which I had bought partly on the promise that it would work in Nigeria, didn’t work – I had made a point of bringing with me the number of my Petrox Nigeria contact. Finally I decided to go through customs to the last insulating area between me and the sidewalk. My heart sank – still no Petrox reps. If I pushed my way outside, I knew I could find my way to the car park – I have a great sense of direction, and once I’ve been somewhere, I can normally find it again. But the prospect of pushing my way through the crowds alone, a white businessman who looks like a white businessman – a mark, a walking wallet – didn’t thrill me. I knew it would be hard to mask the look of alarm in my eyes, and what if there was no one from Petrox in the car park? What then?

There was an information desk in the customs area. As Portuguese is the lingua franca of Angola, so English is widely spoken in Nigeria, in a beautiful dialect with long open vowels. I asked the woman at the desk if she would call my Petrox rep for me. She looked at the number on the page, then said “Yes, I will call him, but first I will page Petrox.”

She made a call, and about ten minutes later, the page was made, loud, clear, insistent, reassuring. Ten minutes after that, a Petrox representative appeared. My new friend at the information desk insisted on seeing his ID card – kidnapping of businessmen is not uncommon. (I don’t think of myself as a “businessman,” just a CPA with a really interesting job – but when a white guy shows up in Africa with a laptop and gets an armed escort, that makes him a “businessman.”) The rep had me wait in the customs area – the car for the compound had already left, but another one would come soon. Soon after, two guys in Petrox jumpsuits knocked on the window. They had been there all along – if only I had had the cojones to walk out to the sidewalk. It turns out the manifest had been wrong, and despite our messages, I had been expected to arrive on the same flight as my boss. An hour later, he emerged from the baggage area, sympathy in his eyes. If he was seeing me, it meant I’d had another unfortunate adventure – another war story. He had been met at the carousel by Petrox reps. Some guys have all the luck.

* * * * * * * * * * *

I like to call myself the “International Accountant of Mystery.” CPAs have an undeserved rep –actually our jobs are can be interesting and varied. I work in a tiny slice of the tax world that is often known as “expatriate services.” When a US citizen moves abroad, he still is liable to file US tax returns – unlike nationals of almost any other country. And that keeps me employed. I’m the guy your company hires to do your taxes when they get really complicated because you’re working in Nigeria.

I’m good at what I do. I’m a good tax guy, but perhaps more importantly, I like people. When Petrox sends me to Nigeria, what matters most is that, as I sit with each expat, I make him feel like things are under control. That’s not an easy proposition in Nigeria, where people have to ship a year’s worth of groceries from home, where the internet barely works, where it’s not safe to send or receive anything by post. These people are more cut off from civilization than most of us could imagine, and it wears on them. It wears on their wives – they’re mostly wives, not husbands – the “trailing spouses,” even more, and it’s hard on the kids. If they feel like their tax return is under control, that we’re on their side and will make it easy for them, we’ve done them a small but important service. So on these “fly in” visits, we International Accountants of Mystery must be many things. We must be tax experts, and we must be well-traveled. We must know what to do if we’re stranded at an airport in Angola. We must be old enough that the expats take us seriously. We must be senior enough to know how to handle a taxpayer when he throws a fit, for whatever reason, and stressed-our taxpayers on foreign assignment often throw fits. We have to be able to appear impartial while presenting the employer’s policies in a positive light, and we have to be ready for whatever oddball tax questions might come up. It helps if, in addition to being well-traveled, we have lived abroad, so we can nod knowingly when the expats speak of the petty hardships they face. So, we’re a rare breed, we International Accountants of Mystery. My company doesn’t pay me enough, I like to complain, and I mean it, but on the other hand, when you’ve got the travel bug, it’s pretty groovy when your job has sent you to 17 foreign countries. I write this from an Irish pub in my 18^th – Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

* * * * * * * * * * *

I know people who love Nigeria. I don’t know how to respond to that. What I’ve seen is a very narrow view, but I have no access to more. The country has no infrastructure, its government is corrupt, and so the people are cynical, wily, and impatient. The color of my skin marks me. It’s perhaps a good lesson to be on the other side of that divide, but I don’t like it, and I squirm in my liberal guilt. I squirm as the African servants in the Petrox guesthouse call me “sir,” deferentially, wait on me attentively, absurdly grateful for a $1 tip. I squirm at the inequity, the sea of tin-roofed shacks as far as the eye can see surrounding the eye-popping palaces of the elite. Lagos is bigger than New York and LA combined, yet you have no sense of it as you fly in at night, because it’s dark, just little cook stove flames dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see – there’s no power, no plumbing or sewerage available to most of the population, in a city of unknown size – 20 million, maybe? Expats and visitors knowingly joke about the stench of the place, and there’s no doubt about it, many Nigerians reek, but can I feel anything but sorrow for a person who makes a dollar a day and cannot afford to bathe?

For the expats, our arrival is a break from the routine, and we’re taken out to dinner by a group of them. No surprise that my boss, the Cajun good ol’ boy, is a hit with these oil workers, while I, the gay guy, go over well with the wives. This year they take us to the latest thing to hit Victoria Island, the central district of Lagos – a Japanese restaurant. Although my personal motto is “I work to travel and I travel to eat,” I find myself hesitant to eat raw fish caught in these polluted waters. But I am assured that the fish is all flown in from elsewhere – and how sad, I realize, that in this city of islands, I’m relieved to eat foreign fish. We visit one expat’s apartment, outside the compound – huge, an oasis really. Like so many, these are career expats, moving from one five-year assignment to the next, and at some point they cross a line. Five years in Angola, three in Indonesia, five in Thailand, four in Nigeria ... are you American any more? Can you go back to Houston and join a Baptist church and vote Republican and feel like you have anything in common with your neighbors at all? So they re-up, and some of them end up retiring in Thailand, or Costa Rica. These career expats have a beautiful home full of artifacts from their travels, and they’re generous with the beer and appetizers. I try to imagine how hard it must be to come by the Japanese rice crackers I munch with my Nigerian Heineken.

The compound is a tiny community, one of the wives tells me it’s just like being back in junior high, and I can easily imagine. A few dozen families, a few hundred people, most of them living inside the barbed wire-encircled compound, everyone knowing everyone’s business, the unemployed wives struggling to find meaning, to keep their kids in line, to run a household when there are some things you can only shop for once a year, others that involve going to the marketplace to change your dollars into thick wads of local currency so dirty you have to wash your hands after you settle a bill. Some wives love it, some hate it, all are affected by it. The kids undoubtedly will be more interesting for having had the experience, though I don’t know that a 13-year-old who has spent five years in Nigeria is really prepared for high school in San Jose.

Some of the expats and their wives are fresh and excited about what they’re doing, some are pretty crispy around the edges. But all of them are characters. Really, you have to be some kind of unusual to accept a three- to five-year assignment in equatorial Africa, a place that is very unlike Omaha, or Colorado Springs, or wherever you’re from. And for all the griping, all the impatience with the locals and their ways and the difficulty of being here, most of them, when you ask them, say they’re glad that they’ve taken the assignment. And, as they all freely admit, they’re being handsomely rewarded. But for me, the contractor, the International Accountant of Mystery who just has to fly in and deal for a week and get the hell out, it’s not that fun, and I don’t know how they do it.

The drive from the airport, which took 45 minutes on a quiet Sunday night, takes nearly three hours to re-trace. Lagos has no highways, no trains, almost no order. I thought I knew about traffic from driving southern California freeways, but the traffic of Lagos is epic. Even the simple van ride to the irport has my stomach churning. The bus lurches along roads that haven’t been repaired in decades, no traffic lights, no cops, the side of every road lined with stalls and shops and commerce. It’s a wonder we don’t run down any pedestrians. They send a 20-seat air-conditioned minibus to take two accountants to the airport, and we compete on the road with countless ramshackle yellow vans, the public transportation system of Lagos, each packed to the gills with people, hot, dirty, breathing unspeakable air, limbs hanging out the windows and open doors.

The airport is barely controlled chaos, again with pushing and shoving, so many passengers with an unspoken message – “get me the hell out of here!” The main departure terminal is famous for a massacre that happened a few years ago and I imagine the floor slick with blood. The security is better now, in fact the guards pushed several people aside with their automatic weapons to enable us to enter – the white businessmen aren’t asked for identification, but the black African locals can’t enter the airport terminal in their own country without documents. It’s almost more than I can take. We’re leaving Lagos a day early and managed to call back to the US to change our reservations, but it’s a challenge to check in with paper tickets that don’t match our reservation. Our Petrox minders see us through the process, and are thrilled at the $5 tips my boss gives them – he’s trying to get rid of his local currency.

When we get through passport control, there’s a sweeping view of the airport runways, greeted with empty jetway after empty jetway, betraying the sad optimism of the airport’s builders, knowing that this country is rich, and it could be great, but the despots bleed it dry. No one wants to come here, and an airport the size of LAX handles fewer flights than Burbank.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Our flight is a red-eye to Dubai. I have changed planes here, but never stayed before. Americans can enter the country with no visa, not even an entry card – I’m astonished that a Middle Eastern country should be so welcoming. The Arab immigration agent takes my American passport, smiles, and says, “You are coming from where?”

“Lagos,” I reply.

“Lagos! Welcome back to the world!” he says. I laugh and thank him. “Was your flight full?”

“Not really.”

“Good!” he says, and holds his nose and rolls his eyes. Ah yes, Nigeria reeks. What more needs be said?