Pushups in the Prayer Room

By Norm Schriever

In the spring of 1999, Norm Schriever leaves his old life behind and backpacks around the world for a year, not returning to the US until the spring of 2000. Throughout his journeys he touches down in more than 20 countries in 6 continents, spanning 70,000 miles total, or the equivalent of almost three times around the equator.

There is never a dull moment on this wild and irreverent adventure, whether Norm is evading armed carjackers in a high-speed chase in the barrios of Venezuela, exploring ancient wonders of the world like the pyramids, the Great Wall, and Machu Picchu, almost landing in a Bolivian jail for mistakenly being accused of cocaine trafficking, or witnessing the holiest sites on earth in Jerusalem. Along the way, Norm encounters a broad spectrum of human existence and experiences a blossoming of consciousness and spiritual growth that he never anticipated. What started out as a wild, raucous party trip evolves into a man’s quest for his life’s purpose in the world.

Pushups in the Prayer Room: Reflections from a Year Backpacking around the World is an honest, no-holds-barred account of that year-long odyssey around the globe. Norm’s writing, which is enlightening, gritty, filled with self-deprecating humor, yet always authentic, picks you up and carries you along on that crazy journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Norm Schriever
• Release date: Feb 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781935953333

Norm Schriever

Norm Schriever is a humorist, cultural mad scientist, and enemy of the comfort zone. He grew up in Connecticut and graduated from the University of Connecticut, where he was never accused of over-studying, and went on to live in North Carolina, Colorado and most recently in Northern California. Dissatisfied with a conventional existence, Norm sold or donated all of his possessions and moved down to Costa Rica in 2011 to pursue his lifelong dream of traveling the world and writing about his journey. His first book was written in the sleepy surf town of Tamarindo with the help of his secret weapons: fresh ocean air and Baileys in his morning coffee. He's since lived in Nicaragua, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and, currently, the Philippines. You can contact Norm at [e-mail] or visit www.NormWrites.com for more information.

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PUSHUPS IN THE PRAYER ROOM

Norm Schriever

Copyright © 2012 by Norm Schriever. All rights reserved.

Some names and identifying details of people described in this book have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Pushups in the Prayer Room: Reflections From a Year Backpacking Around the World

By Norm Schriever

1. Biography & Autobiography : Adventurers & Explorers 2. Travel : Special Interest - Adventure

3. Humor : General

Cover design by Lewis Agrell, image provided by Bigstock.com

Typography by Stephanie Martindale

Printed in the United States of America

Authority Publishing

11230 Gold Express Dr. #310-413

Gold River, CA 95670

800-877-1097

www.AuthorityPublishing.com

Dedication

I would like to give a heartfelt thank you to the following people who have helped and supported me: my incredibly loving mother and hero, Angelika; my awesome sister Barbara, Sean, and my world: Colin, Ryan, and Madeline; my aunt Barbara; of course Phil Rigney — eternal thanks and blessings, bro — there is no one else I would want rebounding for me in the game of life; my best friend Mitch D, and Lisa and Jackson and Amelia; Mr. and Mrs. D; Nydia for your unwavering support and positivity; Sean Dolan, Caitlin and Cayla; the immortal Reilly, and Mel; Luis El Toro for being my first Tico friend and helping with the cover art, and Wendy; Jodi Martinez and fam; my agent (unpaid of course) Joey Famous; Uriel Carrazco and Bella; my buddy Adam Groth and fam; my Hamden posse, always keeping me grounded; the Goo Rasta tribe — all love; Monina Applebum; Sue Espo for helping us get to the airport 11 years ago; Stephen White and family; Dan Schuman; Steve Levine; Mike Mercurio and fam; Kristin Marshall for your friendship and helping to make this happen; all my peeps in Tamarindo; Pistol Pete — stay strong homie; Cynthia; Steve Rowland and the crew at Seasons, Jon Phillips; Trevor and Blade in SJDS; the Pueblo Del Mar crew; Bernard Agosta, the paparazzi of Tama; Sarita’s Bakery; Sarah Long; the nice people at Rusty’s Pizza; my friend Hector; Reese Fitzpatrick; Dirty Dieter; Bun Lai at Miya’s Sushi; May Chavez and fam. To my Sacramento family — a huge shout out to Tracey and Paul; Heath; Fidel and Steve; Gale and Joyce Flores; the amazing ML, and Pete; Sheila Garcia; JuCu making it rain; Dan Pearsen; Jasmine; Michelle B; Stephanie and Amberly at Authority Publishing; Jason Matthews; Jason Everett; Krysta Prater; Sherrie Larolo Matusz and Alison Fineman Seidenfrau for your help; Jason Sheftell; Judd, Patrick, and Mike from Tamarack; My brothers, and friends from UConn, Audra and Amy. To Marcus, Daryl, Aunt Lily, and Jobo, R.I.P. and love you all; Nancy and Jack Fuller for showing me how to live a life of honor; my kindergarten teacher Ms. Spillane for nurturing my creativity; all of my teachers who cared about me, even though I was a wise-ass punk; to my father, Ferdinand Johannes Schriever, R.I.P., who I will drink a beer with in heaven one day; and finally this book is dedicated to the richest street urchin in Cairo — may the world hear your voice now.

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Shooting at Superman

Pork Chop

The King’s Inn

Frisbee Head

Wolf Tickets

Mamani Mamani

The Helicopter Brothers and Other Madness

Danger Is My Middle Name (actually, it’s Johannes)

Walking With Fire

Flip-Flop Heroes

The Afternoon Ice Cream Club

The White Ghost

Popcorn Zealots

The Blind Man and the Mosque

The Richest Urchin in Cairo

For Sunflowers and Survivors

Heading Home

Fuegos Artificiales

Epilogue

About the Author

Foreword

You’ve thought of it. You know you have. We all have. What would it be like to walk away from it all? Not one piece at a time, but all of it. To change it all. To take the neatly shuffled 52 cards in the deck and throw them all into the air, all at once. That is what Norm and I decided to do: drop out, leave everything behind, and travel around the world for a year.

It started over drinks after playing basketball. Maybe it was the type of drunkenness you can only get after physical exertion, maybe it was the buzz of being in your mid 20s in San Francisco, or maybe it was that the conversation turned to shared heroes like Hemingway and Cassidy and Kerouac; likely it was a combination of all those things. But somewhere between the drinking, the daydreaming, and the dusk, it was planned. On the back of a bar napkin we sketched it out. Just walk away.

I had the good on paper life. Good, well-paying job. Law student girlfriend. Cheap rent in what I believed to be the coolest city in the world. But I couldn’t help but feel like I needed to be doing something more. My girlfriend lived near the ocean, and I would lie awake at night and listen to the fog horns blow and the sound of them would haunt me. They were saying, It’s all out there. The journey, the experience, the unknown. And it is waiting there for you. But it won’t wait for you forever. You will never be this young again. And if you scratched the surface a little further, there were cracks in the façade of the good-on-paper life. My job didn’t stimulate me. I loved my girlfriend, but was self-aware enough to know that we were both better off with someone else. And my apartment, though cheap, was a dump. The fog horns became Sirens. And they were beckoning me toward something more.

It is a rare and great thing when you meet the right person at exactly the right time in your life. I have many good friends, but no one who could have ever been better to be on the road with than Norm. Too modest to sing his own praises, I will do it for him. Norm was naturally great with people and this transcended language. He lit up the room immediately. So it became easy to make friends in strange places. Because he was naturally athletic and adventurous, I could always count on him to take on physical challenges I set and for him to set challenges for me. Most importantly, he was good-humored enough to take the inevitable hardships of the road in stride and often turn them into some of the most entertaining events of my entire life.

I can never truly be 27 again, but the stories in this book are true, and because of them and my time on the road with Norm, a part of me will be 27 forever.

So what would it be like to walk away from it all? Here is the story of one guy who did.

—Shane

The bigger the searchlight the larger the circumference of the unknown.

—Anonymous physicist

Introduction

I’ve been meaning to write this down. It’s all been swirling inside my head, begging to get out for way too long, for more than ten years now. I’ve wanted to share with my friends and readers the year I traveled around the world, placing them right in the middle of all I’ve seen and experienced. Those 365 or so days felt more like 10,000 days and changed my life permanently and totally, shaping who I am and what purpose I have here on earth. But I was scared for so long to commit these words to paper because that would make them real and I was worried that my writing would fall short of the true thing; I was afraid my writing wouldn’t measure up.

I started a few times but grew frustrated, or life got in the way. But then one day it came to me: I was right — my writing could never accurately portray everything I’d seen, nor do justice to the readers — but I could still give it a hell of a shot. I was doing more of a disservice to the people I’ve met all over the world by not telling their stories. So I got started.

In the spring of 1999, I left my old life behind and backpacked around the world for a year. I didn’t return until the spring of 2000, a profoundly changed man coming back to an unfamiliar home in a new millennium. Along my journeys I touched down in Costa Rica, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, China, Japan, Israel, Palestine, Sinai, Egypt, Jordan, Germany, and the Netherlands. I stepped foot on the continents of North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and Europe, with only Antarctica left out.

I purchased a round-the-world ticket through United and the Star Alliance, which was ridiculously cheap — only $2,500 for 35,000 miles. That was good enough to drop me in the theaters of the world that I wanted to explore, and from there I took trains, motorcycles, commercial airlines, little puddle-jumper planes, buses, taxis, ferry boats, high-speed hydrofoils, bamboo rafts, horses, camels, and elephants to get to my outlying destinations.

I read somewhere that the circumference of the globe at the equator is about 24,000 miles. I sat down once to track all the legs of my travels that year, not only the big intercontinental flights but every jaunt to remote locales, and I estimated that I traveled around 70,000 miles total, or almost three times around the globe.

I had company, departing with my buddy Shane, a newfound friend whom I met playing basketball in my home city at the time, San Francisco. We conceived of the whole trip in a bar one sunny afternoon after playing hoops. Shane and I both longed to travel and had similar tastes in writers and pursuing unconventional adventures, so right there we scrawled out our future on bar napkins, changing our destinies in ways I never could have imagined. I couldn’t have asked for a better travel companion. Sure, we sometimes got on each other’s nerves because we grew at odds about what we wanted out of the trip, or our personalities sometimes clashed. Shane had a black-and-white view of the world that was non-negotiable, which served him well in overcoming a tough childhood and achieving great confidence and success, but sometimes it was difficult to soften his world view. I, too, had a strong ego and way too many faults of my own, so we were often in a tug of war about what we wanted out of the trip, but it was more like brothers who fought because they spent so much time together, and when it came down to it he had my back, and I, his. There is no one else I would even consider having in that foxhole with me.

We traveled about eight months together and then parted company so we could be free to roam unencumbered wherever our curiosities called us; he had never been to Europe and loved big cities, while I desperately wanted to experience the Middle East and explore the beaches and small towns. I give Shane a lot more credit than I can claim because he had to sacrifice almost everything to take that trip: a relationship with a girl he loved, a fun, full life in San Francisco, and a lot of money by taking a leave of absence from his job as a pharmaceutical rep. To walk away from all of that takes some real courage.

I, on the other hand, felt lost anyway so figured I might as well go for it and embark on something epic that would put my stamp on this world. Sure, I had good friends and good times in San Francisco, but I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. I watched people go to jobs they hated, stress about money and bills, go home to a lover they barely knew, laugh with superficial friends and get wasted on the weekends, only to start it all over again on Monday morning, and then add fifty years to that equation. There had to be more to it. I needed something that would separate me from that mindless monotony and challenge me every day. Ever since I was a kid I didn’t want to be a medium-sized fish in a small pond, or even a big fish. I wanted to prove myself on the biggest stage possible, or fail with dirt and blood on my face, but at least I’d know I had fought the good fight. Like Bukowski said, What matters most is how well you walk through the fire, and there was no bigger stage I could think of than the whole wide world.

And I had pragmatic motives as well for leaving the States. I was coming out of some serious legal trouble, getting cuffed and stuffed for possession of marijuana and mushrooms in Colorado. The judge gave me a couple weeks in jail, and suspended the rest of the four-year sentence, which meant that if I got in any trouble (even a ticket for jaywalking or drunk driving) for three more years, I would go to big boy prison immediately for four years — do not pass Go; do not collect $200. So I thought it would be best to flee the country to kill some of that time, where it was impossible to get in trouble with the U.S. police.

Traveling was not easy; I figured that on average I was on the road every two days, and believe me when I tell you that even a two-hour bus trip can be an excruciating, all-day affair in a Third World country. It was dirty and difficult and constantly uncomfortable. I got sick everywhere I went and had to fight off thieves, hustlers, and scam artists at every turn. I never had enough money and was constantly trying to keep my past life and relationships in the U.S. from unraveling. Most people in the States thought I was crazy and didn’t understand what I was doing. Most people I met while traveling thought I was crazy and understood full well what I was doing. I was a pariah, an outcast, a citizen only of the world, blazing a trail that had very few footprints ahead of me. Was I scared? Hell yeah — every moment of every day, but it got to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference between fear and feeling alive, and true happiness was having a front-row seat to watch the death match between the two.

In preparation for the trip I moved from San Francisco back home to Hamden, Connecticut, where I humbled myself by sleeping in my mom’s basement on a futon and borrowing $800 to buy a car, a jet-black 1977 Chevy Nova. That wasn’t exactly a glamorous existence for a 27-year-old whose friends were working responsible jobs and starting to get married and settling down in nice houses. But I had good friends around me, like Seanny Doles, who kept me well hydrated with pints of Guinness at the Irish pub, and my best friend, Mitch D, who helped pimp out my new car with black fuzzy seat covers, a stereo system rigged from a RadioShack intercom, and a disco ball hanging off the mirror.

The Whip, as she was called, was a hell of a ride that looked like the Batmobile, and I didn’t hold it against her that the brakes didn’t really work so I had to stop a whole city block ahead of time to avoid screeching and smoking through red lights. Still, she served her purpose and even acted as my work truck for a small house-painting company I started that allowed me to stack some cash away. Before we departed the States, Shane even flew out to help me finish up my painting jobs so we worked 18-hour days for a week straight. We were so dead exhausted, our nerves fried from last-minute preparations to leave for a whole year, that it was comical. The Whip, too, was breaking down from the stress, and my last night the steering decided to join the brakes in noncooperation. She would only turn left, any right turn yielding metal-on-metal rubbing and smoke at a top speed of three miles an hour. We finished up our last painting job at 2 a.m. and had an hour’s drive home so we could get a few hours’ sleep before heading to the airport at 7 a.m. the next day. We did the best we could considering the Whip’s handicap, but had to drive 30 mph on the highway and take three left turns every time we needed to actually take a right. It was time to get the hell out of there and hit the open road.

We departed from JFK airport in New York on May 3, 1999, eager to prove ourselves to the world and alter the course of our lives forever. They say that a mind stretched never returns, and looking back I truly believe that my psyche could only absorb so much before it suffered from sensory overload. Our normal day-to-day surroundings are so familiar to us that our minds hardly have to register any energy to navigate the details, but I was spinning on a dizzying carousel of sights and sounds and movement almost 24 hours a day for a year straight; every few days a new city, a new country, with new people and currency and language and customs. It took years for my mind to sort through and process all of the memories, like a box of dusty photographs that you take out to look at one by one on a rainy day.

In my idealistic youth I thought that I would conquer the world, when in fact the world changed me, giving me empathy for the millions of people whose existence I came to witness. That was both a blessing and a curse, for the more I grew conscious the more I had to carry with me, and the heavier my load became. More than anything else the journey was extremely humbling. It was quite a jarring revelation that in the eternal panorama of existence I was just floating here for less than a flash of a millisecond, no more important or immortal than any other, but until then I was alive, and I realized how amazing a gift that was.

The epiphany came to me one day on the road in an improbable setting: Every day while traveling I did pushups and situps — it was one of the few routines I could cling to, and the only way to guarantee a daily workout was to push out a few sets on the floor. I was staying in a hotel in Chang Mai, Thailand, and the room was so small that I couldn’t even stretch out without bumping into the bed or without my head poking into the bathroom. So I walked down the hall to look for a place to do my daily exercises and came to a room at the end that was different from the others. It had a plaque over the door with writing in four languages. I didn’t understand most of them, even though I could recognize that they were Arabic, Thai, and French or Spanish, but the last words on the plaque were English and said, Prayer Room.

I walked in and the room was empty and silent, chairs arranged neatly on the perimeter of a plush red carpet facing a gold-leafed altar with incense burning. It was a place where the hotel guests could come to pray. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jews all make prayer and worship a regular part of their lives, and this room had subtle elements that would make a person of any religion feel welcome. I was in a Prayer Room.

I sat in the room for a while and collected my thoughts and felt a certain sense of peace. I still needed to do my pushups for the day and the red carpet in the Prayer Room looked spotless, so I sprawled out and started counting them off as my thoughts wandered.

I had seen so much during my journey, and yet no matter where I went, or how foreign and strange my surroundings seemed, people just basically wanted the same things: a roof over their heads, a safe place to sleep at night, a chance to earn a little money so they could feed their families, health, happiness, and to have a better life for their children. And they wanted to pray for these things, and sometimes that hope was the most essential of them all. It was no different anywhere in the world.

We were all on this wild ride together and sharing the same energy in the cosmos, but I realized also that there was so much that divided us and kept us from appreciating that connection. It was in our flawed human nature to feel the fear and the sense of self that bred anger, hatred, and jealousy, so we often chose to plant our flags in the false comfort of the citizenship of a nation, or being Muslim vs. Christian, Republican vs. Democrat, black vs. white, rich vs. poor, Biggie vs. Tupac, or even the Red Sox vs. the Yankees … it went on and on. Those false separations kept us from sympathizing with our brothers and sisters and gave us an excuse to pretend they were somehow different or less than human. We all suffered from the same imperfections; there was good and bad in all of us, just like there were equal parts darkness and light in the world, but both were necessary and beautiful.

I jammed out a few more pushups — 34 … 35 … 467, and contemplated my role in it all. It was great to feel a kinship and love for all human beings, and I wanted to help make peoples’ lives better, but I realized that was a hollow sentiment without conscious action. The world needed spiritual awareness and tangible action, no matter how small the steps; it needed pushups in the Prayer Room.

So what could I do to help? How could I possibly touch people’s lives, not only giving them hope but breaking down some of the walls that separate us as human beings? How could one little person make a difference to the whole wide world? I didn’t have the answers yet, but I was asking the right questions, pure questions, and that meant I was on the right path. What was I looking for on my odyssey around the world? I wasn’t sure yet, but that really didn’t matter because it was going to find me anyway.

Shooting at Superman

Costa Rica, May/June 1999

It’s as if the world was turned upside down, like we were characters in a novel by Gabriel García Márquez where the whole town retires in the noon heat with shutters drawn, and women are all beautiful and live to 139 years old. That’s what I felt like when Shane and I touched down in San José, Costa Rica, the first stop on our trip around the world.

We found ourselves dropped in the vortex of the Third World without amnesty or orientation — the energy, the poverty, the gritty streets, the seduction of perpetual motion. We were two buddies from the United States with backpacks, round-the-world tickets, and a lot of starry-eyed dreams to burn; nothing was familiar, nothing easy, and as foreigners I realized that we would always be targets, like voodoo dolls of our past selves. And I loved it instantly.

Within a few days we found a little apartment in the sleepy suburb of San Pedro for our six-week stay in Costa Rica, next door to five Dominican girls who worked at the sleazy Hotel Del Rey at night. There wasn’t much remarkable about San Pedro — a small college, a few bars, pizza shops, mom and pop grocery stores, and a small colonial church stained with centuries of bird crap overlooking a soccer field that was sloped at an improbable angle — except an enormous mall on its outskirts.

The San Pedro Mall couldn’t have been more ill-planned, in typical Costa Rican fashion. It sits in the middle of a traffic circle where two highways spill out onto the city streets. They have no crosswalks, bridges, or even traffic lights to aid a walk to the mall, so thousands of patrons have to sprint across the traffic circle daily, dodging cars and yanking their children airborne by their arms but carefully protecting their new shopping bags. It’s understood that your whole family might not make it back from a trip to the mall. Every man, woman, and child is on his or her own when it comes to crossing the six lanes of traffic, including the 100-year-old grandma scooting her walker across at record speed so she won’t get clipped. Walking on a Costa Rican street is a full-contact sport. Stop signs and traffic lights are considered optional, and they have a saying that Ticos love to use their horns but hate to use their brakes. The scramble for safety on the roads around the San Pedro Mall even extends to the sidewalks, where it’s customary for the woman to walk on the inside of the man when a couple strolls together, not only so people won’t think she’s a prostitute for sale, but so she’ll be further away from traffic in case a car jumps the curb. It’s so bad that the slang word for speed bumps is "son muertos," or, literally translated, the dead people.

The main form of entertainment for most of the local Ticos in San Pedro was to browse the mall, especially on rainy days. Other than the usual cell phone, video game, and teen fashion shops, it had a multiplex movie theater and a huge disco called Planet Mall that took up the entire top floor. The club was ultramodern and cavernous

Reviews for Pushups in the Prayer Room

[zmagic69 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I first read the author's second book South Of Normal, and 3 years later I got around to reading this book Pushups in the Prayer Room. This being his first book it is a little rougher than South Of Normal, but his experiences of traveling around the world pre 9/11, are both fascinating and entertaining. This is an author, who doesn't just go through the motions but instead truly tries to make a valuable contribution to the locations he travels to.

[cmwoodys · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

While I appreciate the author sharing his adventure, it seemed to me that quite a bit of the writing was spent describing his and his friend's drinking, smoking weed and experiences with different women. I was left wondering why, when there was supposed to be this big spiritual awakening happening especially with the story of the Cairo boy, there were still more stories being written of drinking, smoking weed and experiences with different women. Where was the examination of the awakening? For it seemed that little time was spent on real soul searching and change until the end of the book and even then it was barely touched upon.