Taking Time for the Taj

Say what you will, the Taj is just a big tomb.

Stunningly beautiful big tomb, of course, but it serves no other purpose.  Or at least it served no other purpose when it was built.  Now, it brings millions of visitors to Agra, and they bring millions of dollars, which brings out what seem to be millions of street vendors and millions of beggars.

Our ship is docked in Kochi (also known as Cochin), on the western side of the southern tip of India.  So going from Kochi to Agra is like pulling into New York City and deciding you need to see the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.  But only if you had to fly into Chicago and then take a train to St. Louis. 

We’re in India for 6 days, and I spent 4 days going to see the Taj Mahal.  The only way I can really justify that is that I didn’t fly from Washington, D.C. to do it.  By comparison, Kochi is just around the corner.

Our landing was scheduled for 8 AM and our flight for 2 PM, which doesn’t sound like a difficult connection to make, but nothing is simple when you’re dealing with immigration.  Because we live on the ship, it can be easy to forget that we are coming into a foreign country as fare-paying passengers and the security is as stringent as your average airport.  One thousand people have to pick up our passports, show them to customs officials, get stamps, and officially enter the country.  Then we each have to go through ship security and port security to leave the area where we are docked.  The airport is 90 minutes away, and there’s a whole set of security measures there, too.

I was in the first group of people to get off the ship because of my flight schedule, and things went very smoothly, so we made it to the airport in plenty of time.  Leaving the ship around 9:30, we got to our hotel in New Delhi around 8:30. 

The next morning, we were up by 4 to take a train to Agra, arriving there are around 8:30.  After touring the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, we drove back to Delhi via a bear rescue center.  We got to our hotel around 7:30.  We had one full day in Delhi and then back to the airport (leave the hotel at 7) to return to the ship.  In all, two and a half days of travel to see the Taj.

Also:  ship, bus, airport shuttle, airplane, bus, bus, train, bus, electric bus, Taj, electric bus, bus, plane, bus.  Add tuk tuk and ferry for yesterday’s travel around Kochi.  Have not gone anywhere by rickshaw, motorbike, or elephant.

The Taj is definitely worth going to once.  It’s big and it’s beautiful, and being a “high value woman” I got to go inside.  You go through separate lines for security—yes, there’s airport type security here, too—and there are signs pointing the way, but in fact I didn’t even have a ticket.  Our tickets were good for both the Taj and the Red Fort, so our tour guide kept them until we were done with both.  Perhaps the assumption is that every Western face belongs to a high value ticket?

You can’t take pictures inside and there’s nothing spectacular about the inside, so touring the grounds is actually quite sufficient.  (A hint for those who might find themselves in the vicinity some day soon.  Also, closed on Fridays.  You’re welcome.)

The Taj Mahal is in the middle of two smaller, identical buildings.  One is a mosque.  The other is not; it was built for symmetry.  (Being symmetrical with the mosque, it is facing away from Mecca.)  It was built, as you probably know, as a memorial to the favorite wife of one of the Moghul kings, and it took over 20 years to finish.  A 2-mile ramp was built to haul stone to the top.  It was never intended to be a public monument, just a private expression of his grief.  It was the British, our guide told us, who “romanticized it” and put it on people’s must-see lists.  The king planned to build a black marble replica for himself across the river, but he wound up imprisoned by an ungrateful third son (who also assassinated his two older brothers, suggesting that first-born ascension to the throne is not a universally appreciated custom), so now both the king and his wife are buried together. 

In modern India, people are cremated rather than buried, and their ashes are taken to the Ganges for interment.  Some people whose families cannot afford cremation just dump the bodies into the Ganges.  This makes the Ganges a very holy and very polluted river.

On our way to the airport the final day, we happened upon a funeral procession.  Four men carrying a wrapped body on their shoulders.  We zipped past it too quickly for me to get a picture.  Our guide told us that in India, whether the deceased is male or female, only the men go to accompany it for cremation.  The women stay home and mourn (for 13 days). 

A happy birthday today to the wife of my own first born; here is your “funerary customs in India” post.  

Quick tour of Burma

We are told that traffic is worse in India, and traffic is impossible in Ghana, but Burma must be getting us ready for those countries. 

The “motor mile” in Burma is at the port, where lines of used buses wait for government inspection before being allowed into the country.  If they look beat up, it’s because they have lived out their useful lives elsewhere.  About half of them are right hand drive, although Burmese drive on the right side of the road.  One result of this is that you can’t predict very well what your commuter bus will look like, or even what side of the bus to jump on. 

This does not deter people, of course, and the buses are jammed with people.  Our ship docked in the deep sea port about ten miles out of town, which is a one-hour commute.  On two different days, we went in at rush hour, seeing the roads lined with people waiting to stuff themselves into those trucks and buses.  

There are two different kinds of buses.  The traditional city bus has 40 or so seats and the “light truck” has an extended bed and bench seats along each side.  I think it holds 40 people.  It’s impossible to count them.  There are no official stops; people run up and jump on.  Sometimes, they fall off.  I have no idea how they pay for their rides.

You see these vehicles everywhere.  They are the minivan of Burma.  They cart people and goods, privately and publicly.  I find them most fascinating from a distance.

There are almost no motorbikes.  Motorbikes inside Rangoon are limited to the police and the postal service.  The story I heard was the mayor was involved in an accident with a motorbike (presumably not driving one) and banned them.  The streets must have been chaos with them, because they are truly awful even without them.

The day we docked in Burma, some combination of tides, dredging, and immigration kept us on the ship until 5 PM.  Shortly after, I headed into town with a tour group to see Shwedagon, the famous pagoda, at sunset.  The roads were crowded with people heading to a local pagoda festival, which is like any small town festival:  rides, games of chance, fair food, music, and dancing.  When we passed an oxcart laden with a local family, our guide stopped the bus so we could jump out and take pictures.  You know, in that way that tourists blend in seamlessly with the locals.

The great advantage of organized tours is that someone else has to find a parking place.  All of our tours include a guide, a driver, and a helper.  The helper is in charge of holding the bus step in place, handing out wet wipes, rounding up people—an extra pair of eyes and hands.  He (they are always he) never says anything, but he is doing as much people watching as we are.

Another advantage, we found on our last day, is that with the right connections, you can blast through traffic.  I was leading a tour to the local markets, an ill-conceived tour of three markets, set to arrive back at the ship at the last minute. 

The advantage of this kind of tour is that you can make the most of your last day and not be penalized if you come in late.  Usually, we leave port at 8 PM, and our on-ship time in 6 PM.  But if everyone plans to get on ship at 6 PM, most of us will be late.  Getting on the ship—even if you’re living there—is like getting on an airplane.  Our bags go through a scanner, some of us get scanned or patted down, 

contraband (fruit, bottles of water) gets seized.  In Singapore, it took half an hour just to get through Singapore customs before we ever arrived at the ship.  So it’s a big advantage to have that “free pass”:  no matter how late you are, the ship won’t sail without you and you don’t get dock time for being late.  (Dock time means you’re stuck on ship when everyone else is cleared to leave.  A few minutes late translates into hours of dock time.)

The original plan for Burma did not include transportation from the dock to the town, so people signed up for the SAS tours, which included the bus.  Then a shuttle was offered for $18 for the week.  Then the shuttle was changed to a $10 fee for everyone, which made a great deal of sense if it had started out as the plan, but as a change penalized those of us who had bought SAS tours and didn’t need the shuttle. (Grumble) 

In order to make the trip into town feel like a tour (and be worth the charge), the plan was to go to three markets—a local produce market, the famous Scott Market, and Chinatown.  We left at 7 AM.

There was, of course, nothing we could buy in the local market.  Fruits, vegetables, flowers, meats, seafood are all banned from the ship.  I did see a young lady selling religious items for a nearby temple while wearing a shirt that said, “Put your lips on my butt, 5¢.”  Such a temptress!  I never found anyone who would take one dollar bills, much less a nickel.

I wandered down a quieter street of shops and found myself in a temple that was empty of the usual tourist crowd.  It had a neighborhood feel, with people stopping in to say a few prayers before they got started with their day.

Scott Market, now renamed the General Aung San Market, doesn’t officially open until 10:30, so a 9-10 stop there allowed us to see a lot of stores setting up shop.  Most of us had little money left, further complicating shopping. People either had none or had way too much, it turned out, but we did not realize this until too late to make adjustments.  The guidebooks (and the State Department info) all say that Burmese merchants accept pristine $1 bills, but I found they did not.  The smallest the money changers will take is a $20, and the slightest crease gives you a lower exchange rate. 

This is after you manage to find someone who changes money in the first place.  Money changing consumed a lot of time in Burma:  the ATM is rare, the banks aren’t open, the line is too long, the excuse is in Burmese, untranslated.

It is difficult to boost the local economy when someone will not take your money.  Nevertheless, we plowed on.  Leaving the market, we were scheduled for Chinatown, and our guide was clearly rattled.  She had planned a time in a local tea shop, a walk through Chinatown, and a return to the ship by 1, and she was trying to figure out how to fit it all in.  Sitting in the front of the bus, I saw we were weaving in and out of traffic, driving on the wrong side of the road, following a police officer on a motorbike.  This is not a foolproof way of resolving traffic issues—there is a surprisingly large group of vehicles that ignores cops and will play chicken with a bus—but it is a thrilling way to drive through a city.

Two of the girls on the bus told me the officer had been exiting the bus when they got on at the market, and that their cameras had been switched.  They concluded that he was looking at their photos.  Our field office, however, assures me that our police escort was part of the VIP treatment our tour agency arranged to fit an impossible itinerary into our last day.

Whatever the explanation, we did make it back to the ship on time.  Our flustered tour guide practically threw wet wipes and bottles of water at us.  (I think she forgot and didn’t want anyone to find out she hadn’t provided them earlier.)  She also managed to scare up $190 for people who wanted to change money, including $60 of her own money. 

The job of the tour guide is never done.  As we pulled away from the port, a line of guides from Cruise Asia twirled red parasols and waved us off.  Goodbye, Burma!

Dem Bones

Kristina, my daughter-in-law the osteologist, loves bones and graveyards.  This makes souvenir hunting difficult, but today, on a street corner in Rangoon, she knows I was thinking of her..

We went on a fast swirl through three markets on our last day before on-ship time at 2 PM.  The last stop was Chinatown, where we were told, “stay between the bus and the traffic light.” 

I got to the corner with the traffic light, and looked around to see if it was worth going around the corner and down the main street.  I had only about a buck left, and twenty minutes to get back.

If there is any municipal system of trash collection in Burma, it is not apparent.  We did pass one place where our guide said the Indians recycle plastic bottles, but I don’t know how they get them.  Trash accumulates in certain areas along the road, and I have no sense of how one area becomes an informal dump and another does not.

At the corner of the traffic light, there was a pile of rubble, mostly in earth tones.  Jagged edges, curved edges, broken pieces.  At first I thought some kind of construction project, until I started to pick out familiar shapes. 

Teeth!  All the curved edges are jaw shaped.  Here and there, you can see clear impressions of teeth.  In the compartmentalized world of Myanmar, this is the dental lab’s dump.

Kristina, I’m sure, can tell us more.

Road to Mandalay

Living in a city where it takes about 15 minutes to get anywhere, whether you travel by car or by bike, I've found it a challenge to visit cities that make New York City seem downright puny.  Add temperatures of 100 degrees, pollution, and crazy traffic, and it really zaps your energy.  So it was particularly nice to visit Pyin Oo Lwin for a few days.  Getting there was an interesting story in itself.

Traffic around Rangoon is terrible, and it took a full two hours to go the 20 miles to the airport.  Our schedule had allowed three, and our plane was delayed an hour, so we spent a couple of hours at the Rangoon airport, waiting for a flight to Mandalay. 

Sadly, the roads are too bumpy to allow for decent pictures out the bus window.  I would have liked to capture the trucks and buses jammed full of commuters and the interesting shops along the way.  I particularly liked the sign at the airport:

Travelers Warmly Welcome
Drug dealing may punishable by death

The sign at security, "Respect all, suspect all," was a warning with no teeth.  Our tour guide issued us stickers, and boarding passes that assigned seats but had no names on them.  No one ever looked at our passports (we were in the domestic terminal).  Our luggage did go through scanners, but I went through the scanner with random stuff in my pockets and a purse around my neck. 

This may have been because we had a professional handler.  Win traveled with us for three days, starting and ending at the ship, arranging for every detail and making changes on the fly.

The airport in Rangoon has two terminals, international and domestic.  The domestic terminal has two gates, which is to say there are two different doors out to the buses that take passengers out to the planes you can see waiting a couple of football fields away.  Our plane had stairs that folded out from the back of the plane, although there were stairs that could be rolled up to the plane, and one jetway to nowhere. 

A bit like Charlottesville, actually, although it serves a city the size of New York.

There were no ticket agents, although there are counters for several airlines.  There are at least 100 seats in the ticketing area, and at some signal, everyone on your flight goes through security.  The departure area looked pretty much the same, but more crowded.  There is a VIP lounge and a second floor with a restaurant (empty), and a couple of stands selling drinks, food, and newspapers. 

Although we waited for two hours, only one plane took off before ours.  While it was boarding, an employee walked through the waiting area carrying a "Ready for boarding" sign with the flight number.  Outside the terminal, I could see that ear protection for the airline personnel was sticking their fingers in their ears.

Our plane was an old prop plane, which meant actual legroom.  And food service, just like the good old days.

Mandalay International Airport makes Rangoon look like the JKF it is.  I guess it's Dulles in the days when everyone was still flying out of national:  ready, but empty.  Win told us it has four international flights per day.  One in, one out, to each of two cities.  I don't remember which countries, maybe Thailand and India?  The day we flew back to Rangoon, there were four flights leaving for Rangoon, none to anywhere else.

From Mandalay, we took a bus to Pyin Oo Lwin.  Win treated us to a recording of Frank Sinatra singing "Road to Mandalay."  Whoever wrote that song had clearly never been to Mandalay.

The highway starts out wide and smooth, a superhighway without an obvious destination.  Mandalay had an airport in town, but the runways were too short and couldn't be lengthened, so the new one was built.  (A familiar story.)

Along the way, you see piles of sand and gravel.  Sometimes you see work stations, but nothing like the construction areas you might see on an American highway.  It is being built by hand, with shovels.  You never see road grading equipment or even trucks.  I saw a couple of places that were brick manufacturing sites. 

There's a large quarry along the way, and you see trucks carrying stone of various sizes down the mountain.  Many of them have workers atop the stone, and large baskets for carrying smaller loads to and from the truck.  In Burma, everything is still done by hand.

We were told the quarrying is done by prisoners, but I saw small children in the complex and free passage in and out, so there is plenty of work for everyone.  What I did not see was any kind of construction site with heavy equipment, anywhere along the road.

All along the way, there are places where vendors have set up roadside stands with water and snacks.  As it gets steeper and narrower, you see hoses stretching for miles along the side of the road for cooling off the brakes.  The road looks barely wide enough for one truck, but it is two-way traffic.  We climbed up through a series of switchbacks to a high plain.  Pyin Oo Lwin sits at 3500 feet above Rangoon.

Pyin Oo Lwin (formerly Maymyo) is a former British Hill Station, a place the Brits came to escape the heat.  Now it's a place for Burmese to come to escape the heat.  It's in the mountains, about two hours' drive from Mandalay, on the road to China.  So there are also a lot of Chinese traders there.  It's now a small city, about 40,000 permanent residents and another 40,000 students.  Pretty much your standard college town, Burmese style.  Lots of buildings left from the British colonial days, and lots of empty lots, teardowns waiting for a Burmese McMansion.  More on Pyin Oo Lwin in another post.

The Chinese are building pipelines for oil and gas and a railroad for other goods.  This will allow them to go overland instead of around the Malay Peninsula, significantly shortening the trip to market.  We saw the deep scars in the earth where the pipeline is going.

This plan depends on development of the deep water port where we docked, an area that is also undergoing rapid development.  It is not clear that these changes will improve the economic situation of the average Burmese, however.  The government has already relocated people from 6 of 7 villages that were in the economic development area.  The poor people get pushed further from their jobs, with no compensation for their houses. 

Off the main road, there are dozens of brand new roads leading away from the highway.  In the distance, we could see gated communities with American size (or larger) houses.  Or huge industrial buildings.  Pyin Oo Lwin has quite a few schools, colleges, and training centers for the military and for civil service.  (Initially, the Burmese knew so little about bureaucracy and red tape that they imported Indians to be their civil servants!)

Burma is struggling to open up to the rest of the world.  During the years of sanctions, they manufactured Adidas shoes, shipped them into China, and paid off the Chinese to wink at the "made in China" labels.  They are rich in natural resources, and eager to sell their products to the highest bidder.  But I am worried that their eagerness to join the developed world will make the old ways impossible without providing any new ways to take their place. 

Quiet reflection

There are not a lot of quiet moments on a ship with 630 undergraduate students, and there are not a lot of times when the community comes together.  Our largest room only holds half of us, so mandatory events like Logistical Preport are televised and people see them in the classrooms or in the cabins.  Last night, we came together in silence to say goodbye to a faculty member who died in Shanghai.

Like everything on board, the memorial service brought special challenges and was changed by the unique community in which we are living.  He died three weeks ago, and the ship sailed the next day, leaving his widow and one of our staff members behind to deal with the logistics of death in a foreign country.  Our psychologist rejoined us in Hong Kong as the wife (also a faculty member), flew home to the US for some time with her family.  With her brother, she rejoined us in Singapore, and we all came together to say goodbye to our colleague last night.

One of our local tour guides found us 800 perfect roses to cast upon the waters.  Two children of another faculty member provided piano and sax music and a student arranged some haunting melodies to play on her violin.  The Archbishop officiated in flowing white robes. 

(It's amazing what people bring with them.  But I guess if you're the Archbishop, you don't leave home without clerical robes.)

Wherever Arch goes, there is magic, and some of us are happy to listen to him order lunch, just to experience his presence.  There was absolute silence in the Union as we wait to hear what would he say on this occasion.  He is not an orator--he talks as if he is having a conversation--so we had to strain to hear.

"The minister was in the bedroom with his wife," Arch started, "and the wife said [falsetto voice], 'I can't sleep tonight, my dear.  Would you please tell me one of your sermons?'"

Should we be laughing at a memorial service?  Well, it's clearly a joke, right?  Is it ruder to laugh at a memorial service or to not laugh at a little joke?

It was classic Arch to knock us off balance a little.  It's a little hard to pull of self-deprecating when you're a Nobel Prize winner, but it's his way of saying, under these fabulous white bishop's vestments, I may or may not have pants I pull on one leg at a time.  This is not about me, folks, it's about us.

He went on to talk about how the ship becomes your home, and the people your family.  He talked about how shipboard life forces us to slow down and pay attention.  He talked about how we take care of each other, how we'd learned to take care of each other.

It was a good message for a group of young people who have little experience with death. My day to that point had been so hectic I needed the reminder—as well as the forced time to slow down and pay attention.  There was nothing groundbreaking about this.  It's probably Memorial Service 101.  Still, I love to see Arch in action.

I saw people putting their arms around each other and people clearly wrestling with grief.  A memorial service is a chance to take a breath and consider the losses in your own life, beyond the person being remembered.  I talked with several people who were revisiting their losses, on into the next day.

At the end of the service, we filed silently from fore to aft, then down to Deck 4, a deck that's off limits under normal circumstances.  The ship started a long, slow figure eight, a symbol for time stretching on infinitely.  Because we could see nothing but sea, the only evidence was the wake, a graceful arc from the stern, fading out of sight.

One by one, we threw roses into the ocean, which swallowed them up immediately.  The widow and her brother stood, greeting each of us and graciously receiving our inadequate condolences.

Our procession down the stairs was marred by a shout from the dining room.  Someone called for a doctor who is a passenger on board.  He ran up the stairs, followed by his wife, who is a nurse.  She looked stricken.  They had been on the scene when our colleague died, and were also longtime friends of his from Charlottesville.  Both had tried to resuscitate him in Shanghai, performing CPR until the ambulance arrived.  It seemed especially cruel to call on him again. 

My mind went immediately to the direst scenario.  Could this be happening again?  How could this be happening again?  The staff captain called a "Code Blue" medical emergency over the intercom.

As it turned out, it was not a life-threatening emergency.  A student had fallen and hit his head, probably fainting from dehydration.  There were three doctors in the dining room at the time.  (There is currently a delegation on board of residents and med students from Charlottesville, along with two board-certified docs, in addition to the two full time docs on the ship, so it's not unusual to have a doctor nearby.)

The community gathered on Decks 5 and 6

I ate dinner with the new widow on her first day back on ship.  Her husband had no history of heart disease, and he appeared fine right up until he wasn't.  He is in some of my pictures from that morning in Shanghai, just part of the crowd around the temple we were visiting.  Then suddenly gone. I was following him as he boarded the bus and collapsed that day, and now I was returning some things left behind in their hurried exit from the bus.

It's hard for me to accept that reality; I don't know how my friend is making it through the day.  She said to me she knows what she's doing.  Being on the ship keeps her from being at home.  I guess it's a more manageable hole in her life, to not-see her husband where he was for only a few short weeks instead of missing all the small things of their lives together.  She said the experience has given her some insight into caring for others, as she has seen how she has been cared for.

I've been struggling with this death since Shanghai.  It was a private moment on a crowded street in Shanghai, not my story, but important to me.  Thoughts of death triggering thoughts about life.  Thoughts about privacy and responsibility. 

I have now visited (we were told at preport) more countries than 95% of the people on earth will ever see.  In most of them, I have taken pictures and told stories, treating other people's faces and stories as if they were my own.  Watching death on a Shanghai street brought the participant and the observer together in a new way.  When the dying man is a friend, the details become intimate, and the responsibility becomes great.

In my "back home" life, I am privileged to have extraordinary people in my life.  I said to one of them, "I don't want to make this about me.  It shouldn't be about me," and I got the gentle response, "It's always about you."  Gentle, not to point out self-centeredness (which I have in abundance), but to say, "If you didn't make that connection to you, there would be nothing there." 

I hope those reading this will be equally generous in judging my telling of my connection to this story.  

Safety is no accident

Man overboard, port side!

It gets your attention, doesn’t it?

Having enjoyed the loop-de-loop of yesterday, we were treated to another one today, as the crew sprang into action for a drill which includes running, life jackets, blankets, medical kits, and lowering of the smallest life boat.  All very exciting.

The staff captain announced over the intercom, “For exercise only, for exercise only. Man overboard, port side. Report to stations, Team B.”  Suddenly people were everywhere, rushing to the port side on Decks 5 and 6.

Passengers, too.  Who could resist?  What a day to have left the camera in my room!  My desk is Deck 5, midships, port side, so I saw them rush by the door and then by the window.  We are, of course, not permitted to go out where the action is, but I got a report from a student who watched the drill from the dining room.

A dummy was thrown overboard, and a life preserver thrown after it.  But the dummy did not catch the life preserver, and so the launch was lowered to go help, loaded with medical supplies and blankets.  In the meantime, my source tells me, dolphins arrived on the scene to surround the fake guy.  Dolphins are very smart, and I’m sure they can tell the difference between a real drowning person and a dummy, but maybe they wanted to get in on the fun, too.

The ship made a tight turn (the tightest turn it can, anyway) and we felt it heeling as it went back to pick up the imaginary passenger.  Looking out the window, we could see a great arc of wake.

The ship has fairly frequent drills, most often a call to stations for evacuating passengers, (which is hard to simulate as we’re strolling around the decks).  It’s interesting to me to see how everyone has a part to play.  Today I saw line officers, cooks, and housekeepers, as well as people in white jumpsuits, blue jumpsuits, and khaki (uniforms whose inhabitants’ roles I cannot pinpoint).  Disaster can move more quickly than men in white jumpsuits, so practice is important. 

A new friend, Leah, who has sailed on several voyages, told me she wanted no part of the drill today.  She saw a man overboard rescue in 1999 on the Red Sea, and that was quite enough for her.  Late one night, a student decided he would like to “touch the sea,” and lowered himself over the rail with a life preserver.  The life preserver was swept away when he hit the water and it took a few hours to rescue him.  By that time I suppose he had sobered up.

I was surprised not to find more documentation of this online.  Here’s an amazingly offhand account from the Executive Dean of that voyage, and a third hand report from someone who sailed on a subsequent voyage (almost to the bottom of the page.

The 1999 voyage was a different ship and a different sponsoring university.  Not that we don’t have our share of drunk students making poor choices, but I thought the disclaimer was only fair.  I am confident that the crew then was just as concerned with getting everyone back safely as we are.

Tomorrow is Burma.  Venomous snakes, parasitic worms, and a river so shallow they are dredging it for our arrival.  But so worth it. 

Spontaneous parade

Searching for pictures for the last post, I discovered this one, taken on a side street in Ho Chi Minh City.  Four kids having a spontaneous dragon parade in honor of the new year.  Some pretty impressive drumming, too.