There is really little new that can be said about Beijing's air pollution, so I am generally reluctant to write about it. Nevertheless, I feel the last couple of days merit special notice. It has been bad. It has been bad in a way that the word "bad" just doesn't capture. The simple phrase "bad air", despite its elegance, leaves far too much open to interpretation. This is not unusual. Regular readers may recall that last June I had to invent the word "nastulous" [nast-yuh-luhs] to describe a particularly grim stretch of atmosphere because no existing vocabulary seemed to do it justice.
Again, however, I find that reality has outstripped even my dictionary-shattering lexicon, so I am forced to resort to metaphor.
How bad was the air the last two days? If it was a person it would have been a seedy, broad-shouldered thug, dressed in filthy leathers and reeking of grain alcohol, last-night's whorehouse and cheap cigarettes, that hauled you into an alley by your collar and beat you senseless with a lead pipe wrapped in duct tape, emptied your wallet, found your grandmother's address inside, went to her house and beat her senseless with the same pipe, cleared out her jewelry box and sodomized her golden-retriever on the way out the door before setting fire to her cottage, coming back to the alley and kicking you in the ribs one more time for good measure.
It was that bad. And even that may not quite capture the sheer evil of it.
The night before last I went to the gym to run on the treadmill but I could see the grunge in the air inside the gym swirling in cones under the spotlights. The idea of pulling any more of it through my lungs than absolutely necessary was appalling. I could achieve the same results by cutting my lungs out of my chest, rubbing them up and down on the street until they picked up a good coating of diesel soot, coal ash and cigarette butts, and then sewing them back in. So I gave up on the idea and went home to watch television instead, confident that it represented a net health gain.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
News from the soon-to-be-not-home front
The below is from Imagethief's China blog this week. I'm glad I'm not there.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Leaving town on the Reunifcation Express
I'm waiting for my bus to Quy Nhon, so I figured I'd post some journal excerpts.
Xmas eve in Saigon was quiet, so I resolved to try to make it to Nha Trang for Xmas night.
On Xmas morning I slept through my alarm, so when I woke up I was in a bit of a hurry to get things done. I raced to the Chinese embassy by motorcycle taxi, where I collected my passport and visa and paid in US dollars, the only currency they'd accept. You know you've been away from home for a while when your own country's currency looks and feels fake.
After the embassy I stopped at a Vietnamese bakery for a baguette, a pair of egg tarts, and what appeared to be some sort pistachio cake, I'm not sure. I then hurried back to the train booking office to buy a ticket on the Reunification Express to Nha Trang. It's a 7 hour ride, and the soft seat ticket was $10.
I tried to take pictures on the train, but the windows were dusty and they didn't turn out very well. So I wrote down a lot of observations and made some sketches:
The huge expanse of blue sky that I'd hoped to see in Saigon, but did not, is here, complete with fluffy white clouds.
There are legions of trees in rows going back from the train as far as I can see, and they've been continuing for miles. They're each tapped at human height, so I assume they're rubber or something.
There's a kid in an Adidas shirt hip-deep in a rice paddy. Rice paddies are the greenest things I've ever seen. As I observed in Thailand, I think there should be a Crayola color, Paddy Green, and it'd easily be the brightest crayon in the box.
The soil is a rich red color where it's bare of vegetation, but it's not bare very much. There are what seem to be baby banana trees in plantations. The trees are no more than 5 feet tall, but each has a cluster of yellow hanging from them. There are two types of houses here: shacks and porticoed, collonaded shacks. Some trees have brown leaves hanging from their branches and surrounding them on the ground. Winter in Vietnam? In other places the ground is a grey-pink color. I'm not sure if there's a pattern to the soil or what it means. (I later figured out that the brown trees and the grey soil are the result of burning to clear land. There were whole stretches of countryside on fire.)
Banana plantations stretch to the horizon after the hills pass and the ground flattens. The ground gets wavy again. Dotting the rows of banana trees are larger trees, standing like scarecrows or sentinels above the rest. The sentinel trees have fans of spiky leaves. I was already thinking about how tropical flora looked prehistoric, and these trees look like the back and tail of a stegosaurus. (My journal here has a sketch of the tree and a sketch of a stegosaurus).
Hills seem to come out of nowhere. This one is rocky, with patches of black. It's terraced about halfway up one side, but the other side is overgrown with vegetation. (Now there's a sketch of what the shacks look like, on stilts and the slanted metal roof also functioning as the back wall.) We cross a bridge and pass a much more gently rolling hill. This one isn't studded with rocks, and there's a patchwork of crops all the way up. White birds, in pairs, fly above the orchards. This is apparently more banana country than rice.
Actually, I'm not so sure those are bananas. The train slowed down, and now I can see that the yellow clusters are blowing in the wind, which bananas would be too heavy for. I think they may actually be coffee plants, but what do I know? I took a picture of one up close while the train was moving slowly, so I'll look it up later.
(At this point I figured out that there was a dining car with windows that opened, so I spent the hour before sunset hanging out there and taking photos. They also served excellent and cheap food in the car. I got roast chicken over rice, stir-fried bean sprouts, and soup all for $1.30.)
I keep seeing things that make me think about the war. The railroad I'm on was bombed, of course, and so was every bridge in the country, so each one we pass over is new. Every time I see someone missing a limb I wonder whether it happened during the war. Or maybe it was afterwards, as he was plowing his fields and triggered an unexploded shell or mine. Maybe it was just an accident, but it makes me think. On the motorbike today, at a stoplight, I looked over and saw a man with a heavily scarred face, and realized he would have been about 17 or 18 during the war.
And here, now, on this train, I see how beautiful this country is. As in Thailand, the colors seem so intense. Maybe they actually are more intense, something about the sunlight near the equator. But I don't really have words to describe the colors here, so hopefully some of the pictures I took will convey them.
The train arrived in Nha Trang about 2 minutes late, much to the credit of the Vietnamese train system. I actually only knew it was my stop because of the timing- there was no other indication. I decided to hoof it down to the backpacker area from the train station. I had planned to take a motorbike taxi, but they annoyed me as I walked out of the station, so I kept going. It's funny how that works. I'm so anti-tout and anti-heckling that even when I want the service they're offering, I'm still put off by it.
Xmas eve in Saigon was quiet, so I resolved to try to make it to Nha Trang for Xmas night.
On Xmas morning I slept through my alarm, so when I woke up I was in a bit of a hurry to get things done. I raced to the Chinese embassy by motorcycle taxi, where I collected my passport and visa and paid in US dollars, the only currency they'd accept. You know you've been away from home for a while when your own country's currency looks and feels fake.
After the embassy I stopped at a Vietnamese bakery for a baguette, a pair of egg tarts, and what appeared to be some sort pistachio cake, I'm not sure. I then hurried back to the train booking office to buy a ticket on the Reunification Express to Nha Trang. It's a 7 hour ride, and the soft seat ticket was $10.
I tried to take pictures on the train, but the windows were dusty and they didn't turn out very well. So I wrote down a lot of observations and made some sketches:
The huge expanse of blue sky that I'd hoped to see in Saigon, but did not, is here, complete with fluffy white clouds.
There are legions of trees in rows going back from the train as far as I can see, and they've been continuing for miles. They're each tapped at human height, so I assume they're rubber or something.
There's a kid in an Adidas shirt hip-deep in a rice paddy. Rice paddies are the greenest things I've ever seen. As I observed in Thailand, I think there should be a Crayola color, Paddy Green, and it'd easily be the brightest crayon in the box.
The soil is a rich red color where it's bare of vegetation, but it's not bare very much. There are what seem to be baby banana trees in plantations. The trees are no more than 5 feet tall, but each has a cluster of yellow hanging from them. There are two types of houses here: shacks and porticoed, collonaded shacks. Some trees have brown leaves hanging from their branches and surrounding them on the ground. Winter in Vietnam? In other places the ground is a grey-pink color. I'm not sure if there's a pattern to the soil or what it means. (I later figured out that the brown trees and the grey soil are the result of burning to clear land. There were whole stretches of countryside on fire.)
Banana plantations stretch to the horizon after the hills pass and the ground flattens. The ground gets wavy again. Dotting the rows of banana trees are larger trees, standing like scarecrows or sentinels above the rest. The sentinel trees have fans of spiky leaves. I was already thinking about how tropical flora looked prehistoric, and these trees look like the back and tail of a stegosaurus. (My journal here has a sketch of the tree and a sketch of a stegosaurus).
Hills seem to come out of nowhere. This one is rocky, with patches of black. It's terraced about halfway up one side, but the other side is overgrown with vegetation. (Now there's a sketch of what the shacks look like, on stilts and the slanted metal roof also functioning as the back wall.) We cross a bridge and pass a much more gently rolling hill. This one isn't studded with rocks, and there's a patchwork of crops all the way up. White birds, in pairs, fly above the orchards. This is apparently more banana country than rice.
Actually, I'm not so sure those are bananas. The train slowed down, and now I can see that the yellow clusters are blowing in the wind, which bananas would be too heavy for. I think they may actually be coffee plants, but what do I know? I took a picture of one up close while the train was moving slowly, so I'll look it up later.
(At this point I figured out that there was a dining car with windows that opened, so I spent the hour before sunset hanging out there and taking photos. They also served excellent and cheap food in the car. I got roast chicken over rice, stir-fried bean sprouts, and soup all for $1.30.)
I keep seeing things that make me think about the war. The railroad I'm on was bombed, of course, and so was every bridge in the country, so each one we pass over is new. Every time I see someone missing a limb I wonder whether it happened during the war. Or maybe it was afterwards, as he was plowing his fields and triggered an unexploded shell or mine. Maybe it was just an accident, but it makes me think. On the motorbike today, at a stoplight, I looked over and saw a man with a heavily scarred face, and realized he would have been about 17 or 18 during the war.
And here, now, on this train, I see how beautiful this country is. As in Thailand, the colors seem so intense. Maybe they actually are more intense, something about the sunlight near the equator. But I don't really have words to describe the colors here, so hopefully some of the pictures I took will convey them.
The train arrived in Nha Trang about 2 minutes late, much to the credit of the Vietnamese train system. I actually only knew it was my stop because of the timing- there was no other indication. I decided to hoof it down to the backpacker area from the train station. I had planned to take a motorbike taxi, but they annoyed me as I walked out of the station, so I kept going. It's funny how that works. I'm so anti-tout and anti-heckling that even when I want the service they're offering, I'm still put off by it.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Christmas in Saigon
The town is heavily decorated for Christmas, and a lot of retail staff are wearing Santa hats. Santa hats here and in China are anemic- they're a pale red, and not very fluffy. Neon and flashing lights seem to be a part of xmas here, with light up reindeer and some Santa hats that look like the Vegas strip.
I went to the Cha Tam church today, where the Catholic president Diem hid during the coup against him. He finally surrendered to the rebels, who sent an APC to fetch him at the church. By the time the APC returned to the center of town, Diem and his brother had been shot by the soldiers and their bodies stabbed. The flavor of Christianity practiced at Cha Tam also seems to rely on neon. Baby Jesus in the nativity scenes (yes, there were many) tended to be lit up like a bar or a brothel. A couple of my favorites- The one with fake snow piled up around the tropical foliage of Vietnam. Guys, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. They don't have snow there, either, so you can actually be more authentic than us Western types. My other favorite scene seemed to be built into a giant mound of aluminum foil or mylar. Astronaut Jesus, delivered to this world in an asteroid that cracked open on impact, explains some things. The star the kings followed? Burn-up on atmospheric entry. Virgin birth? Artificial insemination by the Zorn Medical School of Mars graduating class as a practical joke.
I also went to 7 pagodas today, and a mosque. The pagodas were all very different. Some were dark and quiet and everyone seemed respectful. Others were bright and packed with noisy people and their children. The decorations were aways ornate, but some pagodas seemed to have more taste than others, at least as far as the bright colors and fake gold goes.
At the Phuoc An Hoi Quan Pagoda, which was dimly lit and felt suitably sacred, I prayed for people at home. I bought a prayer card and wrote the names of everyone I could think of who's traveling soon, the idea being that the horse god Quan Cong is supposed to protect people on journeys. You hang the prayer card on a spiral of incense several feet tall, then the attendant holds the spiral up while you light it at the bottom with a candle. The attendant uses a hooked pole to hang the spiral from cords that cross the ceiling, along with dozens of other spirals. Then you rub the horse statue, ring the bell around its neck, drop some more money into the box, and you've purchased travel insurance from the gods. Gongs were ringing quietly from the next room when I touched the horse, so I figure we're safe in our journeys. Or we're all going to die, one of the two.
This evening I went back to the coffee shop where I've been getting my morning cappuccino (oddly cheaper than their black coffee, thus the extravagance). They have a small theater on their 3rd floor where they screen movies. They show a combination of Vietnam-themed classics and new releases. I came for I Am Legend, which they seemed to already have the pirated DVD screener version for. There's couch seating, the movie's free (not even a mandatory purchase), the room is air conditioned, there's a call button on your table for service, and the video and sound were pretty good, even if they were a bit out of synch with each other by the end. I Am Legend was pretty good, but getting to watch it like that was cooler.
So I haven't decided what I'm doing for xmas eve and day. If there seems like there's going to be a good party, I might stay out late tonight. Otherwise I'll go to bed early to get to the Chinese embassy to collect my passport first thing. I'm either leaving for Nha Trang tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow evening, depending on how cooperative the ticketing people are and what happens tonight. I wouldn't mind sleeping part of the day on a train, then spending xmas evening partying at a bar on the beach. Saigon's cool enough, but I'm ready for a change of scenery.
I've been eating great food, but describing it without being able to include pictures seems silly. But it's good. More about it later.
I went to the Cha Tam church today, where the Catholic president Diem hid during the coup against him. He finally surrendered to the rebels, who sent an APC to fetch him at the church. By the time the APC returned to the center of town, Diem and his brother had been shot by the soldiers and their bodies stabbed. The flavor of Christianity practiced at Cha Tam also seems to rely on neon. Baby Jesus in the nativity scenes (yes, there were many) tended to be lit up like a bar or a brothel. A couple of my favorites- The one with fake snow piled up around the tropical foliage of Vietnam. Guys, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. They don't have snow there, either, so you can actually be more authentic than us Western types. My other favorite scene seemed to be built into a giant mound of aluminum foil or mylar. Astronaut Jesus, delivered to this world in an asteroid that cracked open on impact, explains some things. The star the kings followed? Burn-up on atmospheric entry. Virgin birth? Artificial insemination by the Zorn Medical School of Mars graduating class as a practical joke.
I also went to 7 pagodas today, and a mosque. The pagodas were all very different. Some were dark and quiet and everyone seemed respectful. Others were bright and packed with noisy people and their children. The decorations were aways ornate, but some pagodas seemed to have more taste than others, at least as far as the bright colors and fake gold goes.
At the Phuoc An Hoi Quan Pagoda, which was dimly lit and felt suitably sacred, I prayed for people at home. I bought a prayer card and wrote the names of everyone I could think of who's traveling soon, the idea being that the horse god Quan Cong is supposed to protect people on journeys. You hang the prayer card on a spiral of incense several feet tall, then the attendant holds the spiral up while you light it at the bottom with a candle. The attendant uses a hooked pole to hang the spiral from cords that cross the ceiling, along with dozens of other spirals. Then you rub the horse statue, ring the bell around its neck, drop some more money into the box, and you've purchased travel insurance from the gods. Gongs were ringing quietly from the next room when I touched the horse, so I figure we're safe in our journeys. Or we're all going to die, one of the two.
This evening I went back to the coffee shop where I've been getting my morning cappuccino (oddly cheaper than their black coffee, thus the extravagance). They have a small theater on their 3rd floor where they screen movies. They show a combination of Vietnam-themed classics and new releases. I came for I Am Legend, which they seemed to already have the pirated DVD screener version for. There's couch seating, the movie's free (not even a mandatory purchase), the room is air conditioned, there's a call button on your table for service, and the video and sound were pretty good, even if they were a bit out of synch with each other by the end. I Am Legend was pretty good, but getting to watch it like that was cooler.
So I haven't decided what I'm doing for xmas eve and day. If there seems like there's going to be a good party, I might stay out late tonight. Otherwise I'll go to bed early to get to the Chinese embassy to collect my passport first thing. I'm either leaving for Nha Trang tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow evening, depending on how cooperative the ticketing people are and what happens tonight. I wouldn't mind sleeping part of the day on a train, then spending xmas evening partying at a bar on the beach. Saigon's cool enough, but I'm ready for a change of scenery.
I've been eating great food, but describing it without being able to include pictures seems silly. But it's good. More about it later.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Good Morning, Vietnam
I wanted a break from the museums and hiking, and I'm still recovering from last night's excesses at a bar, so I figured I'd sit down and talk about what I've been doing. I'm just going to copy things straight from my journal.
12/19/07
I'm sitting at gate 50 at the Beijing airport. Because, I suppose, my flight to Saigon has a stop in Nanning, China, we've been exiled to this single-gate area. There's a restroom, but that's it- no food, no water, nothing. Apparently I was supposed to be able to figure out to come here based on my boarding pass, but I tried to go through customs and was sent back from whence I came with a shaky explanation that what I was looking for was "S–Channel", which of course with the accent and the utter lack of inherent meaning in the phrase, was completely unintelligible to me. But I'm here in my purgatory, awaiting a chance to sit in an even more cramped China Air flight. A number of the Shanghainese folk sitting near me got trays of food as part of their flight to Shanghai, so I got the treat of listening to them smack their way through their meal. Now they're belching loudly. I'm so ready to be out of this country.
12/20/07
I’m sitting in the Jade Emperor Pagoda right now. It’s immediately off a busy street, but as soon as you step through the gate it’s noticeably calmer.
Last night at SGN airport was an adventure. First, the immigration guy gave me a hard time because I hadn’t indicated where I’d be staying in Vietnam on my form. It took some negotiation before he let me in without the address of a hotel. Then, once out of the customs area, I was shocked to find that there were no ATMs at the terminal. I had also screwed up the time change in my planning, making staying at the airport until morning 2-hours on hard chairs less appealing. I figured I’d get a cabbie to take me to a bank in town, but when I offered them the rate suggested in the Lonely Planet they told me that I should take the bus. I finally walked down the street to the domestic terminal, an open-air deal, and found a single ATM. Armed with Vietnam Dong, I managed to convince a cabbie to accept them instead of the requested US dollars, and to only overcharge me 30%.
I’m now at Tapiocup, a bubble tea joint. The Jade Emperor Pagoda was most interesting to me as an oasis in the city. In terms of architecture and content it doesn’t really stand up to Chinese temples in China. So after a few minutes sitting, then looking around, I moved on to the Ho Chi Minh City History Museum. It, along with most everything else right now, is closed for the afternoon siesta, so I’m killing time here.
So, back to last night, the taxi dropped me off on Pham Ngu Lao street, the backpacker ghetto. Every guesthouse in the Lonely Planet had its gate closed for the night when I got there at 3AM, and many of the other places were closed or full up. So I wandered seedy alleys for a while, carrying my bags, passport, cash, bank card, and an ATM statement that rather shockingly listed my remaining available balance of 62 million Dong. Target, much? I finally found a guesthouse with an 8-dollar room and took it. The room was on the main backpacker drag, on the 4th floor, and while the guesthouses were closed, the bars and noodle stalls were in full, noisy swing until the morning traffic sounds took over. I didn’t get to sleep until 6, but I blame my fucked-up sleep schedule more than the street sounds.
I got up at 9, showered, paid, and went out with my stuff to find a wherever I was going to spend the night. I went to the places in the Lonely Planet, but they were either fully-booked or quoting $15 a night (again, in dollars). I finally settled on one for $12 a night, probably not worth the savings for the quality drop, but I was in a hurry to get to the Chinese embassy before the visa office closed. This place, the Yellow House Hotel, had $5 a night dorm beds, which I would have gladly taken had there been a locker for my backpack during the day. Ah well.
I’m back in the room now. After bubble tea and the end of the siesta I went to the history museum. I have little interest in pottery and metal-age artifacts, but it was still worth the $1 entrance fee. One thing that struck me reading the descriptions was just how much of Vietnamese history has been spent fighting off aggressors with imperial aspirations- the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Siamese, the Mongols, the French, and finally the US. I didn’t realize, though I’m certain I’ve read about it, just how ridiculous our involvement here was. I mean, one can argue about the efficacy of containment, and even the logic of the doctrine, but I didn’t realize just how undemocratic our anti-communist actions had been. The North-South division was supposed to be a temporary of the Geneva peace accord that ended French occupation. There were supposed to have been nation-wide elections, but the US killed them because our man Diem was going to lose to Ho Chi Minh. Not to mention the parceling out of land that succeeded WW2, when the Japanese in Vietnam surrendered to the British in the South and the Kuomintang in the North, but certainly not to the Vietnamese.
12/21/07
Last night I forgot to mention the visa business. I took a ‘xe om’ to the embassy. ‘Xe om’ is literally ‘motorcycle hug’. I think. It seems to be a convenient was to travel if you’re alone. That was the first time I’ve ridden on a motorcycle, as far as I can remember. It was also my first time in Saigon traffic during the day, so the experience was pretty much terrifying. It’s possible, though I’m not certain, that the Vietnamese use their horns more than the Chinese, but I’ve yet to see Vietnamese at a stop light laying into them.
At the Chinese embassy the forms were easy. We spoke a combination of Chinese and English (I can never remember the word for ‘visa’ in Chinese, though I know how to write it). The only strange thing was that they don’t take RMB or Vietnamese Dong, only USD, so I’ll have to change some before collecting my passport on xmas morning.
So now I’m at Fanny’s, an ice cream place with a street-side brick patio, having just finished my tiny scoop of cinnamon ice cream. Earlier I went to the Ben Thanh market where I bought [gifts redacted so as to remain a surprise]. I went to the HCM City Fine Arts Museum, which is in a beautiful, yellow, colonial building with impressively tiled floors. The art wasn’t very interesting, with the exception of some propaganda pieces, but the setting was nice. I did like one painting of “Uncle Ho with the hill people”. Ho Chi Minh was literally twice the height of anyone else in the painting. Mao’s height is often exaggerated in the Chinese equivalents, but he’s infrequently a giant on that scale. I’ve also been asking around about engraved zippo lighters. They say “Vietnam”, a location, and a date (e.g., Danang 68-69). The back has a bit of platoon wisdom, like “When the power of love is stronger than the love of power the world will know peace”, and some have a metal unit seal glued on. I bought 2 of them when I found a street stall that quoted $3 up front, whereas most quotes had been $10. I’ll probably find a couple more that have a good combination of seal, wisdom, and a recognizable location. I don’t know who they’ll be gifts for, but I’ll figure it out. I also skipped the Lonely Planet recommendations for lunch and just stopped at a random street stall for a grilled pork chop over rice, a bowl of soup with an unidentifiable green vegetable, and an iced tea. I ordered by pointing and paid by holding up fingers, but if they overcharged me it was still only $1.50, under the $2 I’d figured.
I’m at the War Remnants Museum right now. Outside is an assortment of US military hardware, inside photos, text, and infantry weapons. I started by looking at the anti-personnel mines, which are gruesome enough. The next section was on Agent Orange and dioxin poisoning and its teratogenic and mutagenic effects. It showed photos both of American servicemen victims and Vietnamese victims, and quoted a call for the US government to morally and monetarily compensate Vietnamese poisoned, as they did with US veterans by apologizing and giving a payout. At this point I was thinking about how insane it was to dump tons of chemicals we didn’t understand all over a country, but I suppose science has always advanced through experiments in killing. It was when I got to the photos and descriptions of torture and murder that I really started to be bothered. Looking at deformed babies and fetuses in jars of formaldehyde is creepy, but I can at least rationalize the actions that led to them with ignorance. How a man who’d become senator, Bob Kerrey, had led a SEAL time gutted children and slit the throats of old people in bed, that I couldn’t understand. But most chilling, I think, were a series of photos of terrified people, women, children, and the elderly, and the descriptions by the journalist photographers of how they’d heard the shots of the M16s as they’d walked away, right after taking the pictures. Knowing that you were looking at someone defenseless, in the last moments before their life was needlessly ended by Americans looking them right in their eyes, was disturbing. I don’t know whether there is an order to visit the exhibits, and I don’t know whether I followed it, as the museum is undergoing renovations. The last thing I saw, though, was the beginning of the US Declaration of Independence. After all the images I looked at, seeing that shook me up the most. The number of tourists smiling their way through the exhibits wasn’t far off.
12/19/07
I'm sitting at gate 50 at the Beijing airport. Because, I suppose, my flight to Saigon has a stop in Nanning, China, we've been exiled to this single-gate area. There's a restroom, but that's it- no food, no water, nothing. Apparently I was supposed to be able to figure out to come here based on my boarding pass, but I tried to go through customs and was sent back from whence I came with a shaky explanation that what I was looking for was "S–Channel", which of course with the accent and the utter lack of inherent meaning in the phrase, was completely unintelligible to me. But I'm here in my purgatory, awaiting a chance to sit in an even more cramped China Air flight. A number of the Shanghainese folk sitting near me got trays of food as part of their flight to Shanghai, so I got the treat of listening to them smack their way through their meal. Now they're belching loudly. I'm so ready to be out of this country.
12/20/07
I’m sitting in the Jade Emperor Pagoda right now. It’s immediately off a busy street, but as soon as you step through the gate it’s noticeably calmer.
Last night at SGN airport was an adventure. First, the immigration guy gave me a hard time because I hadn’t indicated where I’d be staying in Vietnam on my form. It took some negotiation before he let me in without the address of a hotel. Then, once out of the customs area, I was shocked to find that there were no ATMs at the terminal. I had also screwed up the time change in my planning, making staying at the airport until morning 2-hours on hard chairs less appealing. I figured I’d get a cabbie to take me to a bank in town, but when I offered them the rate suggested in the Lonely Planet they told me that I should take the bus. I finally walked down the street to the domestic terminal, an open-air deal, and found a single ATM. Armed with Vietnam Dong, I managed to convince a cabbie to accept them instead of the requested US dollars, and to only overcharge me 30%.
I’m now at Tapiocup, a bubble tea joint. The Jade Emperor Pagoda was most interesting to me as an oasis in the city. In terms of architecture and content it doesn’t really stand up to Chinese temples in China. So after a few minutes sitting, then looking around, I moved on to the Ho Chi Minh City History Museum. It, along with most everything else right now, is closed for the afternoon siesta, so I’m killing time here.
So, back to last night, the taxi dropped me off on Pham Ngu Lao street, the backpacker ghetto. Every guesthouse in the Lonely Planet had its gate closed for the night when I got there at 3AM, and many of the other places were closed or full up. So I wandered seedy alleys for a while, carrying my bags, passport, cash, bank card, and an ATM statement that rather shockingly listed my remaining available balance of 62 million Dong. Target, much? I finally found a guesthouse with an 8-dollar room and took it. The room was on the main backpacker drag, on the 4th floor, and while the guesthouses were closed, the bars and noodle stalls were in full, noisy swing until the morning traffic sounds took over. I didn’t get to sleep until 6, but I blame my fucked-up sleep schedule more than the street sounds.
I got up at 9, showered, paid, and went out with my stuff to find a wherever I was going to spend the night. I went to the places in the Lonely Planet, but they were either fully-booked or quoting $15 a night (again, in dollars). I finally settled on one for $12 a night, probably not worth the savings for the quality drop, but I was in a hurry to get to the Chinese embassy before the visa office closed. This place, the Yellow House Hotel, had $5 a night dorm beds, which I would have gladly taken had there been a locker for my backpack during the day. Ah well.
I’m back in the room now. After bubble tea and the end of the siesta I went to the history museum. I have little interest in pottery and metal-age artifacts, but it was still worth the $1 entrance fee. One thing that struck me reading the descriptions was just how much of Vietnamese history has been spent fighting off aggressors with imperial aspirations- the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Siamese, the Mongols, the French, and finally the US. I didn’t realize, though I’m certain I’ve read about it, just how ridiculous our involvement here was. I mean, one can argue about the efficacy of containment, and even the logic of the doctrine, but I didn’t realize just how undemocratic our anti-communist actions had been. The North-South division was supposed to be a temporary of the Geneva peace accord that ended French occupation. There were supposed to have been nation-wide elections, but the US killed them because our man Diem was going to lose to Ho Chi Minh. Not to mention the parceling out of land that succeeded WW2, when the Japanese in Vietnam surrendered to the British in the South and the Kuomintang in the North, but certainly not to the Vietnamese.
12/21/07
Last night I forgot to mention the visa business. I took a ‘xe om’ to the embassy. ‘Xe om’ is literally ‘motorcycle hug’. I think. It seems to be a convenient was to travel if you’re alone. That was the first time I’ve ridden on a motorcycle, as far as I can remember. It was also my first time in Saigon traffic during the day, so the experience was pretty much terrifying. It’s possible, though I’m not certain, that the Vietnamese use their horns more than the Chinese, but I’ve yet to see Vietnamese at a stop light laying into them.
At the Chinese embassy the forms were easy. We spoke a combination of Chinese and English (I can never remember the word for ‘visa’ in Chinese, though I know how to write it). The only strange thing was that they don’t take RMB or Vietnamese Dong, only USD, so I’ll have to change some before collecting my passport on xmas morning.
So now I’m at Fanny’s, an ice cream place with a street-side brick patio, having just finished my tiny scoop of cinnamon ice cream. Earlier I went to the Ben Thanh market where I bought [gifts redacted so as to remain a surprise]. I went to the HCM City Fine Arts Museum, which is in a beautiful, yellow, colonial building with impressively tiled floors. The art wasn’t very interesting, with the exception of some propaganda pieces, but the setting was nice. I did like one painting of “Uncle Ho with the hill people”. Ho Chi Minh was literally twice the height of anyone else in the painting. Mao’s height is often exaggerated in the Chinese equivalents, but he’s infrequently a giant on that scale. I’ve also been asking around about engraved zippo lighters. They say “Vietnam”, a location, and a date (e.g., Danang 68-69). The back has a bit of platoon wisdom, like “When the power of love is stronger than the love of power the world will know peace”, and some have a metal unit seal glued on. I bought 2 of them when I found a street stall that quoted $3 up front, whereas most quotes had been $10. I’ll probably find a couple more that have a good combination of seal, wisdom, and a recognizable location. I don’t know who they’ll be gifts for, but I’ll figure it out. I also skipped the Lonely Planet recommendations for lunch and just stopped at a random street stall for a grilled pork chop over rice, a bowl of soup with an unidentifiable green vegetable, and an iced tea. I ordered by pointing and paid by holding up fingers, but if they overcharged me it was still only $1.50, under the $2 I’d figured.
I’m at the War Remnants Museum right now. Outside is an assortment of US military hardware, inside photos, text, and infantry weapons. I started by looking at the anti-personnel mines, which are gruesome enough. The next section was on Agent Orange and dioxin poisoning and its teratogenic and mutagenic effects. It showed photos both of American servicemen victims and Vietnamese victims, and quoted a call for the US government to morally and monetarily compensate Vietnamese poisoned, as they did with US veterans by apologizing and giving a payout. At this point I was thinking about how insane it was to dump tons of chemicals we didn’t understand all over a country, but I suppose science has always advanced through experiments in killing. It was when I got to the photos and descriptions of torture and murder that I really started to be bothered. Looking at deformed babies and fetuses in jars of formaldehyde is creepy, but I can at least rationalize the actions that led to them with ignorance. How a man who’d become senator, Bob Kerrey, had led a SEAL time gutted children and slit the throats of old people in bed, that I couldn’t understand. But most chilling, I think, were a series of photos of terrified people, women, children, and the elderly, and the descriptions by the journalist photographers of how they’d heard the shots of the M16s as they’d walked away, right after taking the pictures. Knowing that you were looking at someone defenseless, in the last moments before their life was needlessly ended by Americans looking them right in their eyes, was disturbing. I don’t know whether there is an order to visit the exhibits, and I don’t know whether I followed it, as the museum is undergoing renovations. The last thing I saw, though, was the beginning of the US Declaration of Independence. After all the images I looked at, seeing that shook me up the most. The number of tourists smiling their way through the exhibits wasn’t far off.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Pandas and jackhammers
I don't have much to say about this, but I thought it was interesting.
The city of Beijing just opened an elevated tunnel. The goal is to ease traffic that snarls up as cars try to move between the West second and third ring road. This sounds perfectly normal, and much like the bypass any other city might build.
The difference is that this tunnel passes over the Beijing City Zoo, and it's supposedly soundproofed to protect the animals. I haven't been to the zoo. Scot hasn't been to this one, either, but he says that zoos in China are the most appalling he's seen. This particular zoo is home to China's premier panda exhibit, however, so I hope that the high profile keeps them honest. I'm curious whether the efforts to soundproof the tunnel will pay off, but I wonder more about what the animals went through while they were building the damn thing.
"The" way vs. "A" way
From James Fallows's (Atlantic Monthly writer) blog:
My coworker James lives in one of the fancy expat apartments near my place. He pays about 10x as much for his rent, and the apartment IS much nicer than mine. He says he likes renting there, but he'd hate to own it. The power outlet covers are on at slight angles, the hardwood floor isn't sealed, the faucets wobble, etc. Whoever actually bought the apartment (presumably prepaid for it) got a seriously sub-standard construction job, in what's one of the nicer places in the city. I don't know how much of it's a lack of pride in one's work and how much of it's the fact that it was built by untrained migrant laborers.
This is not a scientific comparison, but when i saw one scene I remembered another.
This is the recent scene: yesterday afternoon, Naha airport, Okinawa, Japan. Line crew gassing up a Cirrus SR22:
Details to notice below: crew identically dressed in company uniform; complete safety gear -- hardhats, reflective chest straps with procedural checklist clipped on, puffy protective cuff to shield the plane's wing from damage. It's hard to see in the picture, but even the boots are part of the uniform: black, with red laces, and company logos on the back. Impossible to see in the picture: the coordinated shout and semi-bow toward the plane when the fueling was done.
Now, the scene I remembered and mentioned last year: Refueling the same kind of plane in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province, China.
With usual caveats against sweeping generalization, what this made me think was: Japan is all about the way of doing things. Practice, ritual, perfectionism, as much fanatical attention to the process as to the result. China is all about finding a way to do things. Improvisation, little interest in rules, putting up with whatever is necessary to attain the result.
(Yeah yeah yeah, there are exceptions: perfectionist operations in China, loosey-goosey ones in Japan. Still.)
At the moment, I am feeling positive toward both approaches. The emphasis on the right way of doing things is re-surprising on each encounter with Japan. And the determination to do things in China, no matter what, commands respect, despite the obvious complications and problems it creates.
But when it comes to refueling the plane....
My coworker James lives in one of the fancy expat apartments near my place. He pays about 10x as much for his rent, and the apartment IS much nicer than mine. He says he likes renting there, but he'd hate to own it. The power outlet covers are on at slight angles, the hardwood floor isn't sealed, the faucets wobble, etc. Whoever actually bought the apartment (presumably prepaid for it) got a seriously sub-standard construction job, in what's one of the nicer places in the city. I don't know how much of it's a lack of pride in one's work and how much of it's the fact that it was built by untrained migrant laborers.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Visitors from the land past the setting sun
Daria and Christian visited recently. Daria was here to see me, and Christian was in town trying to renew his visa. We crammed into the apartment for a few days, and got some good touristing in. I've let too much time pass to get into detailing what all we did, but I posted pictures.
There's the new Strangeness page, a page for our trip to the 798 Art District in a vacated weapons factory, two separate pages for stuff Daria and I saw, and one for when Daria and Christian were both around.
There's the new Strangeness page, a page for our trip to the 798 Art District in a vacated weapons factory, two separate pages for stuff Daria and I saw, and one for when Daria and Christian were both around.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Living the dream
It's taken me a while, but I've increasingly come to a simple conclusion- I hate China. I'm willing to accept that I may just hate Beijing, since in reality I haven't spent much time in other parts of the country, but I definitely hate something.
Let me start with the Beijing-specific.
Who builds a megacity, a seat of power over an exploding (I'll not say booming) economy, here? It's perched on the edge of the world's biggest desert. It's not at the mouth of a navigable river, or on a strategic port. It's far enough North that the winters are brutal, made worse by the complete lack of moisture to retain heat at night. It's in a valley that traps pollution, so when the sky isn't sleet-grey it's tinged with the browns and yellows of poisons.
The accent in Beijing is jarring. Spoken Chinese can hardly be described as a beautiful language, at least to our Western sensibilities, but even in China the Beijing accent is considered the worst. Imagine, if you will, taxi drivers who are incapable of understanding "Park the car in Harvard Yard", and need the proper accent applied to the sentence for a glimmer of recognition to flutter in their alcohol-shot eyes. Beijing-hua is best spoken with a nasal whine, with a liberal application of Rs to the ends of words.
There is disturbing poverty within a literal stone's-throw of the Great Hall of the People. I'll post pictures of the slums South of Tiananmen soon, but they're truly decrepit. This a block from the black-tinted windows of the black Audis with black government plates.
I live in a rich neighborhood, surrounded by expats and the wealthiest Chinese. Not 30 minutes ago I was in Jenny Lou's, a grocery store that caters to foreigners with its imported goods. The faceless and absent Mrs. Lou is a despicable bitch, however, and would gladly gut your children for an extra dollar's profit. Nevertheless, the place has a monopoly on Triscuits and Macaroni, so we foreign devils pay our king's ransom and smile as she twists the knife. I did not, you'll note, restrictively refer to myself and my foreign colleagues as 'capitalist running dogs' or 'capitalist roaders'. I think it should be clear why. I can understand why foreigners, far from home, would fork over wads of cash for longed-for luxuries. I cannot, however, understand why Chinese locals will pay the same obscene markups for vegetables, fruit, and meats that are no different from those at the Chinese grocer down the street. Watching the Chinese couple in front of me pay $150 for a grocery bill (an astronomic sum nearly equal to a month's salary for your average white-collar Beijing worker), I saw no other option but to dump my loose change into the cups of the beggars outside the store.
The spitting. I have no way of describing it for those of you who haven't visited. There are 3 sounds I'm unable to escape: construction, horns, and HAAAGHH. It's not polite spitting, it's lung-clearing, projectile expulsions. Sometimes a gentleman in a suit will stop on the sidewalk, plug one nostril with a finger, close his mouth, and exhale sharply.
If you're not dodging phlegm, you're dodging cigarette butts (still lit), taxi bumpers, and bicyclists on cell phones.
Beer is expensive and disgusting. Daria and I had drinks at my coworker James's place last weekend, and I felt great the next morning. I'd gotten used to Chinese hangovers, caused by impure alcohol with all its formaldehyde and God knows what. Drinking imported Western liquor, even in quantities, is healthy by comparison. Tsingtao has almost no flavor, no bubbles, no color, and no alcohol. Besides a mild, soapy aftertaste, what's the point? I'm simply unable to drink Chinese liquor. Some pansy-ass Chinese gentleman informed me it was because Western men weren't 'used to' such strong alcohol (the Chinese is more like 'capable of being used to'). I responded by pulling out a hip flask of scotch and inviting him to try what Western men drank. That's another thing- the cultural elitism. China is great, grand, and flawless. I understand that they're restricted in their exposure to media, but the logical disconnect between wanting to be like us and thinking that they're already far superior to us is sort of mind-boggling.
Environmental bombardment. The air hurts, the people make me sick, the noise is penetrating. When I went to Thailand, what amazed me the most was the skies. I'd honestly forgotten that sky was so blue and that clouds were so fluffy. Isn't that depressing?
I go on about the little things that I hate about living here, and it really is little things that build up to make it intolerable, but the worst is that I don't know what's good about this place- I just can't find it. The food can be good. There are occasionally things that are cool, like the red stars on granite, but then I realize that they're cool because they're symbols for things that are blessedly-absent at home.
I've had fun on some of the days when I've been a tourist. There are breathtakingly beautiful buildings and parks here, you just have to seek them out. The problem is that they're not integrated into the city. It's not like Central Park, or the Common, where you just walk through as you get out of the subway on your way to work. To get into the Summer Palace, or even pedestrian Chaoyang Park, you have to pay an entry fee and fight through the throngs of tourists. There is great beauty here, but it's all labeled as such and priced accordingly.
All of this, plus a lack of job satisfaction, an absence of good friends, and steadily declining weight (and health?) combine to make me strongly consider moving back home in the spring. I'm still weighing options, and I think I've found a good English teaching gig here, but I don't know whether the investment of time and mental health will pay off in terms of Chinese learned and resulting career benefits. As much as I was eager to get out of Boston, I think about it rather fondly from here. So besides looking at teaching jobs here I'm looking at lab positions in NYC, Boston, and San Francisco. I don't know how I'll make the eventual decision.
Let me start with the Beijing-specific.
Who builds a megacity, a seat of power over an exploding (I'll not say booming) economy, here? It's perched on the edge of the world's biggest desert. It's not at the mouth of a navigable river, or on a strategic port. It's far enough North that the winters are brutal, made worse by the complete lack of moisture to retain heat at night. It's in a valley that traps pollution, so when the sky isn't sleet-grey it's tinged with the browns and yellows of poisons.
The accent in Beijing is jarring. Spoken Chinese can hardly be described as a beautiful language, at least to our Western sensibilities, but even in China the Beijing accent is considered the worst. Imagine, if you will, taxi drivers who are incapable of understanding "Park the car in Harvard Yard", and need the proper accent applied to the sentence for a glimmer of recognition to flutter in their alcohol-shot eyes. Beijing-hua is best spoken with a nasal whine, with a liberal application of Rs to the ends of words.
There is disturbing poverty within a literal stone's-throw of the Great Hall of the People. I'll post pictures of the slums South of Tiananmen soon, but they're truly decrepit. This a block from the black-tinted windows of the black Audis with black government plates.
I live in a rich neighborhood, surrounded by expats and the wealthiest Chinese. Not 30 minutes ago I was in Jenny Lou's, a grocery store that caters to foreigners with its imported goods. The faceless and absent Mrs. Lou is a despicable bitch, however, and would gladly gut your children for an extra dollar's profit. Nevertheless, the place has a monopoly on Triscuits and Macaroni, so we foreign devils pay our king's ransom and smile as she twists the knife. I did not, you'll note, restrictively refer to myself and my foreign colleagues as 'capitalist running dogs' or 'capitalist roaders'. I think it should be clear why. I can understand why foreigners, far from home, would fork over wads of cash for longed-for luxuries. I cannot, however, understand why Chinese locals will pay the same obscene markups for vegetables, fruit, and meats that are no different from those at the Chinese grocer down the street. Watching the Chinese couple in front of me pay $150 for a grocery bill (an astronomic sum nearly equal to a month's salary for your average white-collar Beijing worker), I saw no other option but to dump my loose change into the cups of the beggars outside the store.
The spitting. I have no way of describing it for those of you who haven't visited. There are 3 sounds I'm unable to escape: construction, horns, and HAAAGHH. It's not polite spitting, it's lung-clearing, projectile expulsions. Sometimes a gentleman in a suit will stop on the sidewalk, plug one nostril with a finger, close his mouth, and exhale sharply.
If you're not dodging phlegm, you're dodging cigarette butts (still lit), taxi bumpers, and bicyclists on cell phones.
Beer is expensive and disgusting. Daria and I had drinks at my coworker James's place last weekend, and I felt great the next morning. I'd gotten used to Chinese hangovers, caused by impure alcohol with all its formaldehyde and God knows what. Drinking imported Western liquor, even in quantities, is healthy by comparison. Tsingtao has almost no flavor, no bubbles, no color, and no alcohol. Besides a mild, soapy aftertaste, what's the point? I'm simply unable to drink Chinese liquor. Some pansy-ass Chinese gentleman informed me it was because Western men weren't 'used to' such strong alcohol (the Chinese is more like 'capable of being used to'). I responded by pulling out a hip flask of scotch and inviting him to try what Western men drank. That's another thing- the cultural elitism. China is great, grand, and flawless. I understand that they're restricted in their exposure to media, but the logical disconnect between wanting to be like us and thinking that they're already far superior to us is sort of mind-boggling.
Environmental bombardment. The air hurts, the people make me sick, the noise is penetrating. When I went to Thailand, what amazed me the most was the skies. I'd honestly forgotten that sky was so blue and that clouds were so fluffy. Isn't that depressing?
I go on about the little things that I hate about living here, and it really is little things that build up to make it intolerable, but the worst is that I don't know what's good about this place- I just can't find it. The food can be good. There are occasionally things that are cool, like the red stars on granite, but then I realize that they're cool because they're symbols for things that are blessedly-absent at home.
I've had fun on some of the days when I've been a tourist. There are breathtakingly beautiful buildings and parks here, you just have to seek them out. The problem is that they're not integrated into the city. It's not like Central Park, or the Common, where you just walk through as you get out of the subway on your way to work. To get into the Summer Palace, or even pedestrian Chaoyang Park, you have to pay an entry fee and fight through the throngs of tourists. There is great beauty here, but it's all labeled as such and priced accordingly.
All of this, plus a lack of job satisfaction, an absence of good friends, and steadily declining weight (and health?) combine to make me strongly consider moving back home in the spring. I'm still weighing options, and I think I've found a good English teaching gig here, but I don't know whether the investment of time and mental health will pay off in terms of Chinese learned and resulting career benefits. As much as I was eager to get out of Boston, I think about it rather fondly from here. So besides looking at teaching jobs here I'm looking at lab positions in NYC, Boston, and San Francisco. I don't know how I'll make the eventual decision.
Friday, November 16, 2007
It sure looks like the world is ending.
This Global Incident Map is pretty amazing, but what's actually shocking to me is how closely it resembles CNN or Fox News or any other media source.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Rules of the Road, Beijing Style
Unfortunately, none of the material in this post is mine. I found and edited the Rules of the Road, and I received the diagrams and descriptions in an email from a friend. No one seems to know where they originated from.
Rules of the Road, Beijing
1. Me First
2. Impeding the progress of others is equivalent to making progress yourself
5. (for taxis): Road rules can be violated at will, except when (a) there is a police vehicle in the vicinity; or (b) the passenger suggests violating a rule, at which point rules must be followed
6. The vehicle traveling straight on an unimpeded roadway never has the right-of-way
7. If ever in doubt about what to do in a driving situation, refer to rule #1
To introduce you to the intricacies of Beijing driving, I will start with a relatively simple concept: the left turn.
STEP 1:
We see here a typical intersection. The light has just turned green for the east-west streets, and car [A], an enormous black Lexus with pitch black windows, wants to make a left turn into the southbound lanes. Pedestrians wait on each corner. (For purposes of this demonstration, we'll assume no one is running the north-south red light, and no one is jaywalking - a rather large assumption.)
STEP 2:
To make a left turn, it is VITAL that [A] cut off all eastbound traffic as soon as possible. The first few brave or foolish legitimate pedestrians step off the curb; this is of no concern. [A] makes his move.
STEP 3:
NO! Too slow! [A] has managed to partially block [B], a brand new purple and yellow Hyundai taxi, but [A] has only achieved what Beijing drivers would consider a 'weak' blocking position.
STEP 4:
In this detail, we can see why: [A] has only inserted his left bumper and cannot move forward without contact. [B], on the other hand, is in the dominant position - by putting his wheel hard to the right and flooring it, he can fully block [A].
STEP 5:
[B] proceeds to swerve right, cutting off [C], a tiny red Peugeot with a gold plastic dragon hood ornament, spoiler and assorted knobs glued on. Since [B] is just accelerating, and [C] is now decelerating, this has created a low-density 'dead space' in the intersection. [D], a strange blue tricycle dumptruck carrying what appear to be 40 of the world's oldest propane tanks, sees this and makes a move.
STEP 6:
DENIED! [E], an old red taxi with its name sloppily stenciled in white on its doors, has boldly cut across two lanes of traffic, behind [D], and then swerved right, driving [D] into an extremely weak position behind [A]. Meanwhile, [B] and [C] are still fighting for position, with [C] muscling his way into the crosswalk. The only thing between [E] and a successful left turn is a few lawful pedestrians. [E] steps on the gas...
STEP 7:
...and is cut off by [F], an elderly man pedaling his tricycle verrrryyy slooooowwwly with a 15-foot-diameter sphere of empty plastic cooking oil bottles bungee-corded haphazardly to the cargo area. He was part of the lawful pedestrians, but seeing the stalled traffic, decided to cut diagonally across the intersection. Not only has [F] blocked [E], he is headed straight at [B], giving [C] the edge he needs.
STEP 8:
[B] concedes to [C], who drives in the crosswalk behind [F] and blocks [E]. Meanwhile, [G], a herd of about 20 bicycles, mopeds, pedestrians and wheelbarrows, sensing weakness in the eastbound lane and seeing that much of the westbound traffic is blocked behind [D], breaks north against the light. [F] pedals doggedly onward at about 2 miles per hour, his face like chiseled marble.
STEP 9:
Now things get interesting. [C] has broken free and, as the first vehicle to get where he was going, wins. [E] makes a move to block [B] but, like [A] at the start of the left turn, only gains a 'weak' block. [A] has cleverly let [F] pass and guns into a crowd of [G], which both moves [A] forward and drives some [G] stragglers into the path of [D], clearing [A]'s flanks. Little now stands between [A] and a strong second-place finish.
STEP 10:
Except for public bus [H], one of those double buses with the accordion-thing connector. [H] has been screaming unnoticed along the eastbound sidewalk and now careens dangerously into a U-turn. This doesn't appear to concern the 112 people packed inside and pressed against the windows (although that could be due to a lack of oxygen.) [H] completely blocks both [A] and [D]. On the other side of the intersection, [B] has swerved into the lawful pedestrians (who aren't important enough to warrant a letter) and has gained position on [E].
[E] has forgotten the face of his father: He was so focused on his battle with [B] that he lost sight of the ultimate goal and is now hopelessly out of position.
This clears the path for dark horse [I], a blue Buick Lacrosse, to cut all the way across behind [H] and become the second vehicle to get where he was going (and the first to complete a left turn), since [F] has changed his mind again and is now gradually drifting north into the southbound lanes. But everyone better hurry, because the light is about to change...
STEP 11:
STEP 12:
And we're ready to start over.
Below, some real pictures of Chinese traffic:
edit: It's the small things in the story that make it art, in my mind- The old man on the bike with a face like chiseled marble, the Audi gunning it into pedestrians, the tiny tiny red Peugeot with a gold plastic dragon hood ornament, spoiler and assorted knobs. The author zeroed in on some great stereotypes.
Rules of the Road, Beijing
1. Me First
2. Impeding the progress of others is equivalent to making progress yourself
5. (for taxis): Road rules can be violated at will, except when (a) there is a police vehicle in the vicinity; or (b) the passenger suggests violating a rule, at which point rules must be followed
6. The vehicle traveling straight on an unimpeded roadway never has the right-of-way
7. If ever in doubt about what to do in a driving situation, refer to rule #1
To introduce you to the intricacies of Beijing driving, I will start with a relatively simple concept: the left turn.
STEP 1:
We see here a typical intersection. The light has just turned green for the east-west streets, and car [A], an enormous black Lexus with pitch black windows, wants to make a left turn into the southbound lanes. Pedestrians wait on each corner. (For purposes of this demonstration, we'll assume no one is running the north-south red light, and no one is jaywalking - a rather large assumption.)
STEP 2:
To make a left turn, it is VITAL that [A] cut off all eastbound traffic as soon as possible. The first few brave or foolish legitimate pedestrians step off the curb; this is of no concern. [A] makes his move.
STEP 3:
NO! Too slow! [A] has managed to partially block [B], a brand new purple and yellow Hyundai taxi, but [A] has only achieved what Beijing drivers would consider a 'weak' blocking position.
STEP 4:
In this detail, we can see why: [A] has only inserted his left bumper and cannot move forward without contact. [B], on the other hand, is in the dominant position - by putting his wheel hard to the right and flooring it, he can fully block [A].
STEP 5:
[B] proceeds to swerve right, cutting off [C], a tiny red Peugeot with a gold plastic dragon hood ornament, spoiler and assorted knobs glued on. Since [B] is just accelerating, and [C] is now decelerating, this has created a low-density 'dead space' in the intersection. [D], a strange blue tricycle dumptruck carrying what appear to be 40 of the world's oldest propane tanks, sees this and makes a move.
STEP 6:
DENIED! [E], an old red taxi with its name sloppily stenciled in white on its doors, has boldly cut across two lanes of traffic, behind [D], and then swerved right, driving [D] into an extremely weak position behind [A]. Meanwhile, [B] and [C] are still fighting for position, with [C] muscling his way into the crosswalk. The only thing between [E] and a successful left turn is a few lawful pedestrians. [E] steps on the gas...
STEP 7:
...and is cut off by [F], an elderly man pedaling his tricycle verrrryyy slooooowwwly with a 15-foot-diameter sphere of empty plastic cooking oil bottles bungee-corded haphazardly to the cargo area. He was part of the lawful pedestrians, but seeing the stalled traffic, decided to cut diagonally across the intersection. Not only has [F] blocked [E], he is headed straight at [B], giving [C] the edge he needs.
STEP 8:
[B] concedes to [C], who drives in the crosswalk behind [F] and blocks [E]. Meanwhile, [G], a herd of about 20 bicycles, mopeds, pedestrians and wheelbarrows, sensing weakness in the eastbound lane and seeing that much of the westbound traffic is blocked behind [D], breaks north against the light. [F] pedals doggedly onward at about 2 miles per hour, his face like chiseled marble.
STEP 9:
Now things get interesting. [C] has broken free and, as the first vehicle to get where he was going, wins. [E] makes a move to block [B] but, like [A] at the start of the left turn, only gains a 'weak' block. [A] has cleverly let [F] pass and guns into a crowd of [G], which both moves [A] forward and drives some [G] stragglers into the path of [D], clearing [A]'s flanks. Little now stands between [A] and a strong second-place finish.
STEP 10:
Except for public bus [H], one of those double buses with the accordion-thing connector. [H] has been screaming unnoticed along the eastbound sidewalk and now careens dangerously into a U-turn. This doesn't appear to concern the 112 people packed inside and pressed against the windows (although that could be due to a lack of oxygen.) [H] completely blocks both [A] and [D]. On the other side of the intersection, [B] has swerved into the lawful pedestrians (who aren't important enough to warrant a letter) and has gained position on [E].
[E] has forgotten the face of his father: He was so focused on his battle with [B] that he lost sight of the ultimate goal and is now hopelessly out of position.
This clears the path for dark horse [I], a blue Buick Lacrosse, to cut all the way across behind [H] and become the second vehicle to get where he was going (and the first to complete a left turn), since [F] has changed his mind again and is now gradually drifting north into the southbound lanes. But everyone better hurry, because the light is about to change...
STEP 11:
STEP 12:
And we're ready to start over.
Below, some real pictures of Chinese traffic:
edit: It's the small things in the story that make it art, in my mind- The old man on the bike with a face like chiseled marble, the Audi gunning it into pedestrians, the tiny tiny red Peugeot with a gold plastic dragon hood ornament, spoiler and assorted knobs. The author zeroed in on some great stereotypes.
Who IS that masked laowai?
Mask Week is a not-a-protest being organized by some guys on the That's Beijing forums.
I, for one, will be wearing a cheap, ineffective paper mask, starting on 11/17 ('yao yao yao qi', which also means 'want want want air').
The idea is simple.
1. Buy a mask. (The best one possible to protect you from air pollutants) Still, simple cloth masks, although not very effective can still raise awareness. You can buy them cheaply in local pharmacies, supermarkets and so on.
2. From the time you wake up on the 17th to the time you go to bed on the 24th wear a mask whenever you go outside. Just live your daily life but when you step out the door, wear a mask. (Yes we realize that indoor air pollution is more dangerous because it is concentrated but this is aiming at outdoor air pollution.)
...
Mask Week's goal is to promote dialogue about air pollution's dangers and its consequences. For many people who have grown up with air pollution, having gray skies and smog is "just the way it is." Many say they are used to it and others simply say there is nothing that can be done. Meanwhile, babies are being born defective, cancer is rising, and people are dying prematurely because of at least in part from air pollution. Mask Week is to get people moving. To stop people from accepting air pollution as the way things have to be. Talking to others is an important first step to change. And this is what Mask Week seeks to do. Get people talking about solutions so that more and more people can live happy and healthy lives.
I, for one, will be wearing a cheap, ineffective paper mask, starting on 11/17 ('yao yao yao qi', which also means 'want want want air').
Monday, November 12, 2007
Buy Prada, support the Motherland!
The whole video is an interesting look at Xinjiang, China's western-most, largest, and maybe most resource-rich province. I knew that China had been sending ethnic Han workers out to the province's cities to 'dilute' the Muslim influence and try to bring the population more into line with the rest of the country, and this documentary touches on the issue.
My favorite part, though, is the swearing-in ceremony of new Communist Party members in the last minute or so. They swear to fight for communism with all their might, at the same time wearing imported clothing in Western styles.
Also, while looking for work today, I found a middle school searching for a business teacher. "Remember, kids. China's a communist country. Buy Prada, support the motherland!"
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
I wonder whether I can hold my breath for 2 more months.
According to SEPA, the Chinese government environmental agency, today's Air Pollution Index is 253, a 4B rating.
Let's see what the good folk at SEPA have to say about such a rating:
Let's look over at our friends at the US EPA. They calculate API on the same 0-500 scale as SEPA. What do they have to say about a 253 score?
Now, while the scale used is the same, it's normalized differently. 100 is set as the baseline, acceptable level of a pollutant. It took some digging to try to match these scales, since standards are recorded in different units and different time scales in different places. I settled on the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for EPA data, and Environmental Air Quality Standard (GB3095-1996) (word document, in Chinese) for SEPA. Here's my comparison:
Ozone:
EPA used to use a 1-hour averaging measurement, with the normal level set at 0.235mg/m3. In 2005 the EPA revoked the 1-hour measurement in favor of a more meaningful 8-hour average, and lowered the acceptable level to 0.176mg/m3 averaged over the 8 hours.
SEPA uses a 1-hour averaging measurement, with the normal level set at .2mg/m3. So while their standard is lower then the EPA's old 1-hour standard, it's generally considered an inadequate measure.
Particulate Matter (PM):
The EPA measures two kinds of particulates, PM10 and PM2.5. PM10 is 10 microns across or less, and PM2.5 is 2.5 microns across or less. Allowable levels are .15mg/m3 and .035mg/m3 respectively.
SEPA also measures PM10, and has an identical allowable level, but does not measure PM2.5.
PM10 is about 1/4 the diameter of a grain of salt. It's small dust, basically. It gets into your lungs and inflames them, clogging things up. You cough and hack, but my impression is that your body flushes it out. PM2.5 is considered more dangerous- it goes into your blood stream, relatively unfiltered by your respiratory tract. So while the PM10 standards are the same here, PM2.5 is ignored in China.
Carbon monoxide (CO):
Carbon monoxide affects the respiratory, cardiovascular, and central nervous systems. The EPA allows 40mg/m3 an hour, and SEPA only allows 10mg/m3 an hour. This seems like a much more stringent standard, but more on that later.
NO2 and SO2-
This is harder to compare. EPA uses an annual average of .1mg/m3 for NOx, all nitrous oxides, and SEPA uses a .12mg/m3 limit of NO2 per day. So the timeframe is different, as are the exact pollutants allowed. It's normal for the hour number to be higher than the day which is higher than the year, the idea being that your body can take a quick shock more than prolonged exposure.
Similarly, SEPA uses .15mg/m3 a day for SO2, where the EPA uses .364mg/m3 a day for SOx. This to me seems to be the one category where SEPA's standards are stricter.
Conclusions-
The allowable levels seem to be slightly lower for pollutants in China. Here's the kicker, though: While SEPA has these standards, their monitoring center only measures SO2, NO2, and PM. So their stricter CO standards don't seem to factor in, and apparently neither does their O3 limit. This seems significant to me. Only as I was walking into my apartment today did I identify the smell- ozone. So after a bunch more reading, including the formulas for pollution index calculation, I still don't know how comparable the numbers are. Let's stretch and say they correlate perfectly, and read what the EPA has to say about a pollution index of 253:
In other words, hold your breaths. I'm looking forward to moving somewhere the sun isn't a red disk in a sleet-grey sky.
Let's see what the good folk at SEPA have to say about such a rating:
4B, 251-300, Moderate-heavy polluted. The symptoms of the cardiac and lung disease patients aggravate remarkably, and the exercise endurance drop lower. The healthy crowds popularly appear some symptoms. The aged, cardiac and lung disease patients should stay indoors and reduce physical activities.
Let's look over at our friends at the US EPA. They calculate API on the same 0-500 scale as SEPA. What do they have to say about a 253 score?
Now, while the scale used is the same, it's normalized differently. 100 is set as the baseline, acceptable level of a pollutant. It took some digging to try to match these scales, since standards are recorded in different units and different time scales in different places. I settled on the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for EPA data, and Environmental Air Quality Standard (GB3095-1996) (word document, in Chinese) for SEPA. Here's my comparison:
Ozone:
EPA used to use a 1-hour averaging measurement, with the normal level set at 0.235mg/m3. In 2005 the EPA revoked the 1-hour measurement in favor of a more meaningful 8-hour average, and lowered the acceptable level to 0.176mg/m3 averaged over the 8 hours.
SEPA uses a 1-hour averaging measurement, with the normal level set at .2mg/m3. So while their standard is lower then the EPA's old 1-hour standard, it's generally considered an inadequate measure.
Particulate Matter (PM):
The EPA measures two kinds of particulates, PM10 and PM2.5. PM10 is 10 microns across or less, and PM2.5 is 2.5 microns across or less. Allowable levels are .15mg/m3 and .035mg/m3 respectively.
SEPA also measures PM10, and has an identical allowable level, but does not measure PM2.5.
PM10 is about 1/4 the diameter of a grain of salt. It's small dust, basically. It gets into your lungs and inflames them, clogging things up. You cough and hack, but my impression is that your body flushes it out. PM2.5 is considered more dangerous- it goes into your blood stream, relatively unfiltered by your respiratory tract. So while the PM10 standards are the same here, PM2.5 is ignored in China.
Carbon monoxide (CO):
Carbon monoxide affects the respiratory, cardiovascular, and central nervous systems. The EPA allows 40mg/m3 an hour, and SEPA only allows 10mg/m3 an hour. This seems like a much more stringent standard, but more on that later.
NO2 and SO2-
This is harder to compare. EPA uses an annual average of .1mg/m3 for NOx, all nitrous oxides, and SEPA uses a .12mg/m3 limit of NO2 per day. So the timeframe is different, as are the exact pollutants allowed. It's normal for the hour number to be higher than the day which is higher than the year, the idea being that your body can take a quick shock more than prolonged exposure.
Similarly, SEPA uses .15mg/m3 a day for SO2, where the EPA uses .364mg/m3 a day for SOx. This to me seems to be the one category where SEPA's standards are stricter.
Conclusions-
The allowable levels seem to be slightly lower for pollutants in China. Here's the kicker, though: While SEPA has these standards, their monitoring center only measures SO2, NO2, and PM. So their stricter CO standards don't seem to factor in, and apparently neither does their O3 limit. This seems significant to me. Only as I was walking into my apartment today did I identify the smell- ozone. So after a bunch more reading, including the formulas for pollution index calculation, I still don't know how comparable the numbers are. Let's stretch and say they correlate perfectly, and read what the EPA has to say about a pollution index of 253:
Very Unhealthy 201-300 Health alert: everyone may experience more serious health effects.
Particulate Matter: People with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children should avoid all physical activity outdoors. Everyone else should avoid prolonged or heavy exertion.
Ozone: Active children and adults, and people with respiratory disease, such as asthma, should avoid all outdoor exertion; everyone else, especially children, should limit outdoor exertion.
In other words, hold your breaths. I'm looking forward to moving somewhere the sun isn't a red disk in a sleet-grey sky.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
I can't see the ground 14 floors down.
This is from one of my favorite China bloggers, Imagethief:
From my own perspective (literally, as I can see that spot from my window) I imagine this will be quite an eyesore. Chaoyang Park, and the neighboring embassy district, are the one wooded, green part of town for a fair distance. I've joked about this before, but I'll do it again. Chaoyang Park is the largest park in Asia (I mistakenly told my dad the world.) I live on Chaoyang Park West Road. Central Park West in NYC is abbreviated CPW. I live on Beijing's CPW. This is relevant now as a comparison. Can you imagine the uproar if all of the New Yorkers who paid top dollar for a park view apartment were going to get to look at a huge, garishly-lit, carnival ride instead of their sanity-preserving trees? And believe me, it will be garishly lit.
Proving that there is no idea so unoriginal that it can't be rejuvenated by making it bigger, Beijing has announced plans for a colossal Ferris wheel. This, it is claimed, will be larger than both the famous London Eye (destroyed by the Fantastic Four in a recent movie, I recall) and the Singapore Flyer, which Imagethief has often fantasized seeing break free from its moorings and roll across the straits to Batam.
From 208 meters above Chaoyang Park you are guaranteed a spectacular view of, well, Chaoyang Park. But to tantalize you, the China Daily has included this 3D rendering of the proposed wheel of joy pictured before a suspiciously clear sky:
In fact, it's so suspiciously clear that I did a little digging, and sure enough, have found this other, well hidden rendering that depicts the wheel in actual Beijing conditions:
Fun!
From my own perspective (literally, as I can see that spot from my window) I imagine this will be quite an eyesore. Chaoyang Park, and the neighboring embassy district, are the one wooded, green part of town for a fair distance. I've joked about this before, but I'll do it again. Chaoyang Park is the largest park in Asia (I mistakenly told my dad the world.) I live on Chaoyang Park West Road. Central Park West in NYC is abbreviated CPW. I live on Beijing's CPW. This is relevant now as a comparison. Can you imagine the uproar if all of the New Yorkers who paid top dollar for a park view apartment were going to get to look at a huge, garishly-lit, carnival ride instead of their sanity-preserving trees? And believe me, it will be garishly lit.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Bald.
I'm bald again.
I recently caught myself judging photos of me by whether my thinning hair was evident. Contrary to popular opinion, my hairline has in fact not receded since high school, but it's definitely thinner on top. So, completely disregarding seasonality, I've shaved my head. I didn't really like the 1/4" thing I'd done in the past, so now it's as short as my electric razor will make it. I haven't decided what to do with the beard yet. I know I'm keeping it in some form. I don't think it's so bad as is, but I might transition to something closer to a goatee.
I don't mind thinking about my appearance. I like being in shape, I like clothing, and I like tattoos and my piercings, no matter how inconvenient the eyebrow is with jiu jitsu. What I don't want is my thoughts about my appearance to come from an attitude of apprehension or disappointment or insecurity. My concern was especially useless because of the relative inevitability of losing my hair. I guess I'd rather be bald by choice than by inaction, and let my appearance reflect conscious decisions.
I recently caught myself judging photos of me by whether my thinning hair was evident. Contrary to popular opinion, my hairline has in fact not receded since high school, but it's definitely thinner on top. So, completely disregarding seasonality, I've shaved my head. I didn't really like the 1/4" thing I'd done in the past, so now it's as short as my electric razor will make it. I haven't decided what to do with the beard yet. I know I'm keeping it in some form. I don't think it's so bad as is, but I might transition to something closer to a goatee.
I don't mind thinking about my appearance. I like being in shape, I like clothing, and I like tattoos and my piercings, no matter how inconvenient the eyebrow is with jiu jitsu. What I don't want is my thoughts about my appearance to come from an attitude of apprehension or disappointment or insecurity. My concern was especially useless because of the relative inevitability of losing my hair. I guess I'd rather be bald by choice than by inaction, and let my appearance reflect conscious decisions.
The first pillar is filial piety.
10/29
Pictures from the weekend.
My dad visited this weekend. He was in China for a conference in Shanghai, and arranged a side trip to Beijing to meet with a potential collaborator at Tsinghua, then stayed around for a couple of days. He brought me a whole shopping list worth of stuff, like my sweet new sleeping bag and a mini tripod that might actually work with my front-heavy camera.
We did some of the requisite tourist stuff, including a Forbidden City visit and a trip to the Great Wall. The Forbidden City is big enough that I can go back a couple more times before I think I'll have seen it all and be sick of it. We ended up going to the Mutianyu section of the Wall, one I hadn't been to yet, and that turned out great. There were more people there than at Simatai, and it was more restored, but there was still plenty of vertical movement and it seemed a bit exotic. The trees were settling into their fall colors, and there was even snow in the shade and on the peaks from the previous night's pollution-clearing precipitation. I was afraid the wall might be slick, or that it'd start raining once we got there, but the weather stayed clear enough that you could just make out downtown Beijing some 60km away, probably the farthest I've been able to see in the area.
Daria is coming over Thanksgiving, and she's probably my last visitor before I finish my UN gig. That's likely a good thing, since there's a lot of work left to do and not many weeks to fit it into. I have a meeting tomorrow with a guy from the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy, and I'm trying to set up meetings with some biotech companies in town, both local and international. I need to start writing more soon, I think, since writing works well to bring into focus what I know and what I don't. It's also a process I enjoy, and when I have a something down on paper I feel like I'm making progress, a feeling that's been elusive for a while.
I'm still not sure what I'm doing next. There's definitely a trip to Vietnam coming up, probably from about December 20 (when my visa expires) until around the 10th, when my brother Mike is tentatively coming to visit. After that I may hang in Beijing for a bit if I end up renting my apartment for another month, then probably touring some of Western and Southern China, as far into the boonies as I can get. My friend Scot is helping me look for English teaching work through his extensive network of contacts in-country, and I'm shopping around online, too. I could get a job tomorrow, it seems, so the point of this exercise is to find the best job in the most attractive location- likely the lower Himalayas in Yunnan province or in the plains leading to Tibet in Qinghai province. I'll write more as I figure it out.
Pictures from the weekend.
My dad visited this weekend. He was in China for a conference in Shanghai, and arranged a side trip to Beijing to meet with a potential collaborator at Tsinghua, then stayed around for a couple of days. He brought me a whole shopping list worth of stuff, like my sweet new sleeping bag and a mini tripod that might actually work with my front-heavy camera.
We did some of the requisite tourist stuff, including a Forbidden City visit and a trip to the Great Wall. The Forbidden City is big enough that I can go back a couple more times before I think I'll have seen it all and be sick of it. We ended up going to the Mutianyu section of the Wall, one I hadn't been to yet, and that turned out great. There were more people there than at Simatai, and it was more restored, but there was still plenty of vertical movement and it seemed a bit exotic. The trees were settling into their fall colors, and there was even snow in the shade and on the peaks from the previous night's pollution-clearing precipitation. I was afraid the wall might be slick, or that it'd start raining once we got there, but the weather stayed clear enough that you could just make out downtown Beijing some 60km away, probably the farthest I've been able to see in the area.
Daria is coming over Thanksgiving, and she's probably my last visitor before I finish my UN gig. That's likely a good thing, since there's a lot of work left to do and not many weeks to fit it into. I have a meeting tomorrow with a guy from the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy, and I'm trying to set up meetings with some biotech companies in town, both local and international. I need to start writing more soon, I think, since writing works well to bring into focus what I know and what I don't. It's also a process I enjoy, and when I have a something down on paper I feel like I'm making progress, a feeling that's been elusive for a while.
I'm still not sure what I'm doing next. There's definitely a trip to Vietnam coming up, probably from about December 20 (when my visa expires) until around the 10th, when my brother Mike is tentatively coming to visit. After that I may hang in Beijing for a bit if I end up renting my apartment for another month, then probably touring some of Western and Southern China, as far into the boonies as I can get. My friend Scot is helping me look for English teaching work through his extensive network of contacts in-country, and I'm shopping around online, too. I could get a job tomorrow, it seems, so the point of this exercise is to find the best job in the most attractive location- likely the lower Himalayas in Yunnan province or in the plains leading to Tibet in Qinghai province. I'll write more as I figure it out.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Toothless sabercat.
It's United Nations Day. Did you remember to send your loved ones a strongly worded letter?
A day or so late, but ah well.
A day or so late, but ah well.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
In fact, the road to hell.
There are jackhammers going outside my apartment.
It's midnight.
Seriously, people, this is not the road to the future.
edit: I had originally written, "road to civilization", but I think that's inaccurate.
It's midnight.
Seriously, people, this is not the road to the future.
edit: I had originally written, "road to civilization", but I think that's inaccurate.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Evolutionary laws in language
From a press release from MIT:
----
It's interesting to me that the selection that occurs here for for simplicity. In nature, natural selection in higher organisms tends towards more complex beings. Those that have extra genes and an efficient way of controlling them do pretty well. The energy expended in copying the genes when cells divide is the only wastage, but when the gene is needed it turns on and saves the day. In simpler organisms, like E. coli, the process of replicating that DNA is the most energy intensive thing the organism will ever do, and there's a tendency towards brevity of genomic information.
Language is one of modern humans' most fundamental, energy intensive endeavors. We talk all of the time, and write and read when we're not talking. We tend towards simplicity of language because it's easier, it takes less work. Txt msg spk makes sense for someone with more information to convey and process than time or intelligence to do so. So as our language evolves it cuts out the extra steps, the extra rules, the extra genes, tending towards homogeneity rather than diversity. In nature, this only works in quickly multiplying, highly mutable life forms- organisms that die quickly in the best of situations and whose offspring may be very different from themselves. If you're a species like a mammal and you're non-diverse then you're extremely vulnerable to shocks.
I'm not sure whether a language can be vulnerable to environmental changes- there's no such thing as a temperature spike or a food shortage in literature. Maybe a simple language is a language that is more quickly taken up by others, and a virus analogy would be better. A successful virus, or parasite of any kind, often doesn't harm its host in an evident way. It piggybacks on the organism's processes, but might not drain enough energy to do real harm. These viruses multiply easily and spread from host to host without burning their homes down. Maybe a successful language is one that infects a host without putting undue demands on its system.
Predicting the future of the past tense
Mathematicians apply evolutionary models to language
October 15, 2007
Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by MIT and Harvard University mathematicians who've invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years.
The team, which reported their findings in the Oct. 11 issue of Nature, conceives of linguistic development as an essentially evolutionary scheme. Just as genes and organisms undergo natural selection, words--specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an "-ed" ending in the past tense--are subject to powerful pressure to "regularize" as the language develops.
"Mathematical analysis of this linguistic evolution reveals that irregular verb conjugations behave in an extremely regular way - one that can yield predictions and insights into the future stages of a verb's evolutionary trajectory," says Erez Lieberman, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "We measured something no one really thought could be measured, and got a striking and beautiful result."
"We're really on the front lines of developing the mathematical tools to study evolutionary dynamics," says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a graduate student at Harvard Medical School. "Before, language was considered too messy and difficult a system for mathematical study, but now we're able to successfully quantify an aspect of how language changes and develops."
Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues built upon previous study of seven competing rules for verb conjugation in Old English, six of which have gradually faded from use over time. They found that the one surviving rule, which adds an "-ed" suffix to simple past and past-participle forms, contributes to the evolutionary decay of irregular English verbs according to a specific mathematical function: It regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.
In other words, a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast.
To develop this formula, the researchers tracked the status of 177 irregular verbs in Old English through linguistic changes in Middle English and then modern English. Of these 177 verbs that were irregular 1,200 years ago, 145 stayed irregular in Middle English and just 98 remain irregular today, following the regularization over the centuries of such verbs as help, laugh, reach, walk, and work.
The group computed the "half-lives" of the surviving irregular verbs to predict how long they will take to regularize. The most common ones, such as "be" and "think," have such long half-lives (38,800 years and 14,400 years, respectively) that they will effectively never become regular. Irregular verbs with lower frequencies of use--such as "shrive" and "smite," with half-lives of 300 and 700 years, respectively - are much more likely to succumb to regularization.
They project that the next word to regularize will likely be "wed."
"Now may be your last chance to be a 'newly wed'," they quip in the Nature paper. "The married couples of the future can only hope for 'wedded' bliss."
Extant irregular verbs represent the vestiges of long-abandoned rules of conjugation; new verbs entering English, such as "google," are universally regular. Although fewer than 3 percent of modern English verbs are irregular, this number includes the 10 most common verbs: be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, and get. The researchers expect that some 15 of the 98 modern irregular verbs they studied--although likely none of these top 10--will regularize in the next 500 years.
Their Nature paper makes a quantitative, astonishingly precise description of something linguists have suspected for a long time: The most frequently used irregular verbs are repeated so often that they are unlikely to ever go extinct.
"Irregular verbs are fossils that reveal how linguistic rules, and perhaps social rules, are born and die," Michel says.
"If you apply the right mathematical structure to your data, you find that the math also organizes your thinking about the entire process," says Lieberman, whose unorthodox projects as a graduate student have ranged from genomics to bioastronautics. "The data hasn't changed, but suddenly you're able to make powerful predictions about the future."
Lieberman and Michel's co-authors on the Nature paper are from Harvard. The work was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
----
It's interesting to me that the selection that occurs here for for simplicity. In nature, natural selection in higher organisms tends towards more complex beings. Those that have extra genes and an efficient way of controlling them do pretty well. The energy expended in copying the genes when cells divide is the only wastage, but when the gene is needed it turns on and saves the day. In simpler organisms, like E. coli, the process of replicating that DNA is the most energy intensive thing the organism will ever do, and there's a tendency towards brevity of genomic information.
Language is one of modern humans' most fundamental, energy intensive endeavors. We talk all of the time, and write and read when we're not talking. We tend towards simplicity of language because it's easier, it takes less work. Txt msg spk makes sense for someone with more information to convey and process than time or intelligence to do so. So as our language evolves it cuts out the extra steps, the extra rules, the extra genes, tending towards homogeneity rather than diversity. In nature, this only works in quickly multiplying, highly mutable life forms- organisms that die quickly in the best of situations and whose offspring may be very different from themselves. If you're a species like a mammal and you're non-diverse then you're extremely vulnerable to shocks.
I'm not sure whether a language can be vulnerable to environmental changes- there's no such thing as a temperature spike or a food shortage in literature. Maybe a simple language is a language that is more quickly taken up by others, and a virus analogy would be better. A successful virus, or parasite of any kind, often doesn't harm its host in an evident way. It piggybacks on the organism's processes, but might not drain enough energy to do real harm. These viruses multiply easily and spread from host to host without burning their homes down. Maybe a successful language is one that infects a host without putting undue demands on its system.
Extinguishing the light at the end of the tunnel, 2
From an email from my father:
I had actually just read your post about the subway fare reduction and crowding. Sounds frustrating. Of course, if they want to get people out of the cars, they should leave subway fares alone, and charge a fee for cars to enter the city. This city-wide congestion pricing was successfully pioneered in London, which currently has a 8-pound/day fee.
Vehicles license plates are monitored by camera- there are no tollbooths, tickets or tokens. Payment made at various stores throughout the city is "self-enforced," but non-payment within 48 hours leads to a 150-pound charge.
You probably heard of this, but the details and success measures are interesting.
Alternatively, they could follow your suggestion but have "First Class" subway cars rather than a universal far increase (this is akin to a high-speed toll lane on the highway, now being implemented in some US cities).
I had actually just read your post about the subway fare reduction and crowding. Sounds frustrating. Of course, if they want to get people out of the cars, they should leave subway fares alone, and charge a fee for cars to enter the city. This city-wide congestion pricing was successfully pioneered in London, which currently has a 8-pound/day fee.
Vehicles license plates are monitored by camera- there are no tollbooths, tickets or tokens. Payment made at various stores throughout the city is "self-enforced," but non-payment within 48 hours leads to a 150-pound charge.
You probably heard of this, but the details and success measures are interesting.
Alternatively, they could follow your suggestion but have "First Class" subway cars rather than a universal far increase (this is akin to a high-speed toll lane on the highway, now being implemented in some US cities).
Counterfeit $2.64 bills
When I tried to pay for my lunch on Saturday, the restaurant I frequent wouldn't take the 20RMB ($2.64) note I handed them. Actually, I didn't even finish handing the bill over before they rejected it; it was a pretty obvious counterfeit. I had gotten the bill the night before while out at a fancy lounge. The lounge has two girls sitting at a desk with a UV lamp and a bright visible spectrum lamp checking incoming bills, so it's not really possible that the money I was given in change came from the till by accident. Somewhere between the till and my hands the fake 20 had to have been switched in and the real one pocketed, so that means it was probably the waitress. It was dark and I was drinking, and I don't usually check bills under 50RMB anyway, even though they apparently even make fake 5RMB notes. Fortunately I had enough coins and small bills at the restaurant to pay for lunch, otherwise I would have had to go to a bank and come back. They know me there, so it probably would have been fine, but it was irritating.
I've decided to keep the counterfeit note rather than to try to just spend it. The typical attitude towards a fake bill here is one of annoyance. It's not usually a real loss, you just have to keep trying to pass it until someone takes it, then it's their problem.
I had hoped to write something here about statistics on counterfeiting in China versus the rest of the world, but no one seems to have the numbers. There are reports in newspapers of huge sting operations seizing millions of dollars worth of fake Chinese currency, but that's all released by the Chinese government in official Chinese government-owned newspapers, and there doesn't seem to be anything recently. The general consensus on the street is that with the rise of cheap printing technology, counterfeiting is worse here than ever.
I've decided to keep the counterfeit note rather than to try to just spend it. The typical attitude towards a fake bill here is one of annoyance. It's not usually a real loss, you just have to keep trying to pass it until someone takes it, then it's their problem.
I had hoped to write something here about statistics on counterfeiting in China versus the rest of the world, but no one seems to have the numbers. There are reports in newspapers of huge sting operations seizing millions of dollars worth of fake Chinese currency, but that's all released by the Chinese government in official Chinese government-owned newspapers, and there doesn't seem to be anything recently. The general consensus on the street is that with the rise of cheap printing technology, counterfeiting is worse here than ever.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Extinguishing the light at the end of the tunnel
Last week, after returning to Beijing from my vacation (chronicled here in pictures, but perhaps never to be typed up in the blog), I was ecstatic to discover that in addition to opening a new subway line, the price of tickets had actually been lowered, from 3RMB to 2. I was gleeful, to say the least.
My glee was poorly thought out, as such emotions tend to be. In addition to the new line servicing its own area, it brought a huge increase to the number of people transferring to and riding the 2 existing lines. A China Daily article quotes city officials who say that the passenger volume has increased by 46% since the opening of the new line, "an immediate positive impact." Of course this increase in passenger load has made morning commutes almost unbearable, and even Sunday afternoon rides unpalatable.
The city announced earlier in the year that it will bring 264 new subway cars into service and cut waiting times for every line in order to make public transit more comfortable and appealing. They also seem to recognize that more lines are needed to make the subway a good choice for most commuters. They plan 4 more lines by 2010, bringing the total to 7, and a total of 19 lines covering 560 km by 2020, making the network the largest in the world. Of course, reducing the fare by 33% means reducing their revenues by nearly the same amount, costing the government an estimated $130 million a year on top of existing subsidies.
Meanwhile, as long as the experience underground is miserable and crowded, more people will be driven towards the great Chinese dream of the decade- car ownership. People who can afford a car are not going to be won over by a 1RMB price decrease. Cars are partly status symbols, but they're also (delusionally) perceived as convenient and comfortable compared to other forms of transportation in the city. To paraphrase a poster in a Beijing expat message board commenting on the price drop, the city won't persuade a single driver to switch over, they lost a third of their revenue, and they made the subway a living hell. Brilliant.
I'm also going to steal a potential solution from that same forum thread and expand on it a little. Don't decrease the fare, increase it. Make it 10RMB a ride, a 400% increase from the new price, and a luxury experience. Provide a hot cup of soy milk and a fried dough stick in the morning, an evening paper on the way home, and make the ride comfortable. If they want to reduce pollution and improve traffic they need to bring rich people down out of their cars, not take poor people off of their bikes and out of the buses. It shouldn't be too hard a sell. Drivers sit in traffic that's getting worse by the day. Surely reading a newspaper in an air conditioned, well-appointed subway carriage as they're whisked to work is a better solution. The poor people were doing fine with their buses and their bikes until the cars arrived and tangled up traffic. A huge price increase doesn't seem to be helping the poor people, but I think in the grand scheme it is.
My glee was poorly thought out, as such emotions tend to be. In addition to the new line servicing its own area, it brought a huge increase to the number of people transferring to and riding the 2 existing lines. A China Daily article quotes city officials who say that the passenger volume has increased by 46% since the opening of the new line, "an immediate positive impact." Of course this increase in passenger load has made morning commutes almost unbearable, and even Sunday afternoon rides unpalatable.
The city announced earlier in the year that it will bring 264 new subway cars into service and cut waiting times for every line in order to make public transit more comfortable and appealing. They also seem to recognize that more lines are needed to make the subway a good choice for most commuters. They plan 4 more lines by 2010, bringing the total to 7, and a total of 19 lines covering 560 km by 2020, making the network the largest in the world. Of course, reducing the fare by 33% means reducing their revenues by nearly the same amount, costing the government an estimated $130 million a year on top of existing subsidies.
Meanwhile, as long as the experience underground is miserable and crowded, more people will be driven towards the great Chinese dream of the decade- car ownership. People who can afford a car are not going to be won over by a 1RMB price decrease. Cars are partly status symbols, but they're also (delusionally) perceived as convenient and comfortable compared to other forms of transportation in the city. To paraphrase a poster in a Beijing expat message board commenting on the price drop, the city won't persuade a single driver to switch over, they lost a third of their revenue, and they made the subway a living hell. Brilliant.
I'm also going to steal a potential solution from that same forum thread and expand on it a little. Don't decrease the fare, increase it. Make it 10RMB a ride, a 400% increase from the new price, and a luxury experience. Provide a hot cup of soy milk and a fried dough stick in the morning, an evening paper on the way home, and make the ride comfortable. If they want to reduce pollution and improve traffic they need to bring rich people down out of their cars, not take poor people off of their bikes and out of the buses. It shouldn't be too hard a sell. Drivers sit in traffic that's getting worse by the day. Surely reading a newspaper in an air conditioned, well-appointed subway carriage as they're whisked to work is a better solution. The poor people were doing fine with their buses and their bikes until the cars arrived and tangled up traffic. A huge price increase doesn't seem to be helping the poor people, but I think in the grand scheme it is.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Catching up with life
Well, I never got around to typing up the rest of my Thailand trip. I threw all of my remaining pictures from the vacation together on the new photo page, here, so you can check them out.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Disappearing CIA agents and kicks to the head
Photoblog link
09/18/07
I started my day by going to see Jim Thompson's house. He was an OSS/CIA operative during World War II who fell in love with Thailand during his posting here, and returned to the country after the war was over. He became interested in the Thai silk, an unknown product at the time. He promoted the silk by bringing samples to New York and Paris, creating interest in fashion circles there earning huge profits by exporting it. His home is actually a compound of several traditional teak wood Thai stilt houses he had disassembled and transported to Bangkok. He preserved most of the style and observed traditions like moving in on an astrologically favorable date, but he added western comforts like electric lighting and a table and chairs to eat at.
Jim Thompson disappeared while on vacation in Myanmar in the 60s. He went on a walk and never returned. No one knows exactly what happened, but theories include being eaten by wild animals or being hit by a truck driver who panicked and disposed of the body.
Things I learned on my tour of the house:
-Chopping off a Buddhas hands and head is believed to cancel their protective powers.
-Thai houses typically had their front door facing the canals, which served as streets.
-A Thai pastime involved placing mice in small mazes built to resemble houses. Bets were placed on which mouse would emerge first.
After the house I went back to the hotel, taking a pass on the expensive silk products available at the gift shop. Dad was napping. After he woke up we got free drinks at the hotel lounge before rushing out to Lumphini Stadium to see muay thai fights. We took a taxi, but it quickly became stuck in traffic, so we hoofed it to the subway and then to the stadium. We heard the stadium before we saw it- crowds cheering and shouting.
The touts at the entrance fell on us quickly, and got oddly angry that we didn't want to talk to them. One woman asked dad why I wasn't listening to her as I was walking away trying to scout out the entrances. Due to a miscommunication between us at the hotel it turned out that neither of us had enough money to buy the tickets that turned out to be twice as expensive as the Lonely Planet had said, so we turned around and walked (ran) back to the ATM at the subway stop, not noticing a couple of ATMs along the way. When we got back another tout approached us. The first has offered to take us inside to show us seats, this one was trying to tell us about the fights. I bought tickets at the official window as he was talking to us, which made him pretty angry. He snatched away the 'free' fight sheet he'd handed me, snarling something about how other people wouldn't care about us like he did. Whatever. It turns out the fight schedule was free at the door and there was no assigned seating, so I don't understand what their business model was.
The fights were obviously in progress when we got in, but we were far from the last to arrive. The biggest fighters weighed 136 pounds. Some of them looked 15 to me, but dad said he'd heard the announcer say that the minimum age was 18. The announcer was marvelous. Between her accent, the bad sound system, and the crowd noise we caught maybe one word in ten.
We tried a few different vantage points for the best view, finally giving up on our front-row (of the 3rd class section) bleacher seats for a spot 20 feet closer leaning on a railing. That 20 feet gave a much stronger sense of immediacy to the fights, and it also brought us closer to the densely-packed Thais betting and cheering.
Before each match the fighters dance around wearing spiritually protective arm and head bands. The dance also seems to be a stretch and warm up. They pray, and then they sit on chairs in shallow metal trays in their corners as their handlers spray them with water and rub them down.
The 1st round is slow. They feel each other out, but the consistent lack of action, and the fact that the Thais pay zero attention to the 1st round suggests that there may be some inviolable tradition about the 1st round being slow. The 2nd round starts fast and hard. After the fighters clinch, the ref sometimes leaves them to knee each other (the arms are too locked up), but sometimes breaks them apart. We couldn't figure out how the decision was made, but my guess is that it involves the way the arms are positioned. After the ref splits the fighters there's no lull as they feel each other out again, they lunge right back at each other. Muay thai has more action and seems generally more brutal than western boxing, but there was only one KO in the evening. That fighter took a kick to the head and kept throwing punches, then collapsed after taking a glancing punch. It seems you have to land 2/3 of the blows in the fight to win, so the matches were mostly tied.
09/18/07
I started my day by going to see Jim Thompson's house. He was an OSS/CIA operative during World War II who fell in love with Thailand during his posting here, and returned to the country after the war was over. He became interested in the Thai silk, an unknown product at the time. He promoted the silk by bringing samples to New York and Paris, creating interest in fashion circles there earning huge profits by exporting it. His home is actually a compound of several traditional teak wood Thai stilt houses he had disassembled and transported to Bangkok. He preserved most of the style and observed traditions like moving in on an astrologically favorable date, but he added western comforts like electric lighting and a table and chairs to eat at.
Jim Thompson disappeared while on vacation in Myanmar in the 60s. He went on a walk and never returned. No one knows exactly what happened, but theories include being eaten by wild animals or being hit by a truck driver who panicked and disposed of the body.
Things I learned on my tour of the house:
-Chopping off a Buddhas hands and head is believed to cancel their protective powers.
-Thai houses typically had their front door facing the canals, which served as streets.
-A Thai pastime involved placing mice in small mazes built to resemble houses. Bets were placed on which mouse would emerge first.
After the house I went back to the hotel, taking a pass on the expensive silk products available at the gift shop. Dad was napping. After he woke up we got free drinks at the hotel lounge before rushing out to Lumphini Stadium to see muay thai fights. We took a taxi, but it quickly became stuck in traffic, so we hoofed it to the subway and then to the stadium. We heard the stadium before we saw it- crowds cheering and shouting.
The touts at the entrance fell on us quickly, and got oddly angry that we didn't want to talk to them. One woman asked dad why I wasn't listening to her as I was walking away trying to scout out the entrances. Due to a miscommunication between us at the hotel it turned out that neither of us had enough money to buy the tickets that turned out to be twice as expensive as the Lonely Planet had said, so we turned around and walked (ran) back to the ATM at the subway stop, not noticing a couple of ATMs along the way. When we got back another tout approached us. The first has offered to take us inside to show us seats, this one was trying to tell us about the fights. I bought tickets at the official window as he was talking to us, which made him pretty angry. He snatched away the 'free' fight sheet he'd handed me, snarling something about how other people wouldn't care about us like he did. Whatever. It turns out the fight schedule was free at the door and there was no assigned seating, so I don't understand what their business model was.
The fights were obviously in progress when we got in, but we were far from the last to arrive. The biggest fighters weighed 136 pounds. Some of them looked 15 to me, but dad said he'd heard the announcer say that the minimum age was 18. The announcer was marvelous. Between her accent, the bad sound system, and the crowd noise we caught maybe one word in ten.
We tried a few different vantage points for the best view, finally giving up on our front-row (of the 3rd class section) bleacher seats for a spot 20 feet closer leaning on a railing. That 20 feet gave a much stronger sense of immediacy to the fights, and it also brought us closer to the densely-packed Thais betting and cheering.
Before each match the fighters dance around wearing spiritually protective arm and head bands. The dance also seems to be a stretch and warm up. They pray, and then they sit on chairs in shallow metal trays in their corners as their handlers spray them with water and rub them down.
The 1st round is slow. They feel each other out, but the consistent lack of action, and the fact that the Thais pay zero attention to the 1st round suggests that there may be some inviolable tradition about the 1st round being slow. The 2nd round starts fast and hard. After the fighters clinch, the ref sometimes leaves them to knee each other (the arms are too locked up), but sometimes breaks them apart. We couldn't figure out how the decision was made, but my guess is that it involves the way the arms are positioned. After the ref splits the fighters there's no lull as they feel each other out again, they lunge right back at each other. Muay thai has more action and seems generally more brutal than western boxing, but there was only one KO in the evening. That fighter took a kick to the head and kept throwing punches, then collapsed after taking a glancing punch. It seems you have to land 2/3 of the blows in the fight to win, so the matches were mostly tied.
High wattage
Photoblog link
09/17/07
I found out that I could crash the IEA conference dinner that evening, so I spent the whole day keeping my eyes open for yellow clothing, the theme of the evening. Monday is yellow day in Thailand. The king was born on a Monday some 80 years back, so now every Monday a huge portion of Thais wear yellow clothing. The monarchy is one of the most loved institutions in the country, and hugely respected. Besides the crowds of people wearing yellow, the king's image was sold on amulets and icons right next to images of Buddhas. Religion is the other widely respected institution. Thai men are expected to become monks at least twice in their lives, usually once while children as 10-vow novices, then again maybe after school as full 227 vow monks. I don't really know what the vows entail, so that's probably worth looking into when I get back.
My first stop of the day was the Grand Palace, home of Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha. The emerald Buddha isn't really emerald, just a dark jade, but it's still spectacular. The king no longer lives in the grand palace, but the Wat there is still his personal temple. Every season he changes the solid gold clothing on the Emerald Buddha as part of an elaborate ritual. Again, I don't know how to describe everything that I saw, so I'll let the pictures do most of that. I especially liked the juxtaposition of classical European architecture with traditional Thai design. There was one building that reminded me very much of Versailles with the wood and mirrors and chandeliers, but instead of fleur de lis on the wallpaper there were Buddhas.
I asked a lot of different people to take my pictures. The Chinese lady was surprised that I was talking to her in Mandarin, but the guy I asked in Spanish responded in English. Ah well.
I'm not sure where the tactile boundary is in a place like the Grand Palace. What part is simply a building, something you interact with and touch, and what's considered art? There are mosaics on most of the walls, and some parts were roped off. Does that imply the rest of the mosaics are fair game to handle? Maybe it doesn't matter here. Yesterday the Reclining Buddha's feet were well worn, and I have clear memories of people touching paintings at the 798 district in Beijing.
In one park near the palace I had corn forced into my hands by a couple of different people, the immediately transparent scheme being that I feed the pigeons and then they hit me up for cash. So I resisted for a while, actually tossing the unopened bag of corn back at one girl from 20 feet away so she couldn't hand it back. One pair of guys actually dumped the corn into my hand, saying, “Present. Happy new year.” I walked down the sidewalk without throwing the corn on the ground, being mobbed with pigeons. I eventually dropped the corn, and when they asked me for money I explained to them that since I didn't have anything they'd given me and I didn't want anything from them now they didn't have any leverage, and that they should strive to live by the mantra of 'get the money first'. I'm only exaggerating slightly, and and I'm certain I confused them. As I walked away I smiled, waved, and bade them a happy new year. I've been generally very friendly on this trip, smiling a lot, as the Thais do, but there's only so much haranguing I can take.
After the Grand Palace I tried to find the river and ferry dock to cross to the other side, but I kept getting turned around in the rabbit warren of markets that hugs the shore of the river. I spent a while wandering a market in a more open area selling everything from washing machines to underwear to herbal medicine to new tires for cars. What do they do with the washing machines when it's time to close for the night? I tried to find yellow clothing, but all of the ubiquitous yellow polo shirts with the king's seal seemed to be for women.
I finally found the ferry taking near Wat Rakhang, but when I got to the other side I promptly became lost again. Next trip like this I'm brining a damn compass. Wat Rakhang, when I found it, wasn't visually spectacular, but it was a 'working' wat, with monks' orange robes hanging to dry, locals making offerings, and a small school attached with classes in session.
My next stop was Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn, which has an 82m stupa that looks like something out of Angkor Wat. (Note: I later found out that it's a 'prang', not a stupa. Chedis and stupas are the typical Thai style. A prang is Khmer, and that's why this looked Cambodian to me- it's the same design as Angkor.) Up close to the tower you can see that it's covered in mosaic. There's a fair bit of Chinese porcelain built into the decoration. It turns out that Chinese merchants sailed ships to Siam loaded with broken porcelain as ballast. They dumped it here when they loaded up on whatever they were bringing home, and the porcelain was dragged out of the harbor by the Thais to incorporate into their temples.
After Wat Arun I crossed the river and took the express ferry all the way down the shore to where there's a dock below a skytrain station. I like how you get around in Bangkok- some combination of car/tuk-tuk/motorcycle taxi/bus, skytrain/subway, boat, and walking through alleys.
I got back to the hotel just in time to shower before racing over to the mall next to the hotel to find yellow ties for dad and me to wear to dinner. The meal was a western menu, which was disappointing, but the entertainment was MCed by what I imagine were typical Thai presenters, a guy and a girl who were, for lack of a better word, cute. There was live music and a dance troupe performing a sampling of traditional Thai dance. The 4 women had numerous costume changes. One of the girls, now wearing a tail, paired up with a guy in an ornate, stylize monkey costume (that looked a lot like a demon) to tell the story of a mermaid and a monkey falling in love.
09/17/07
I found out that I could crash the IEA conference dinner that evening, so I spent the whole day keeping my eyes open for yellow clothing, the theme of the evening. Monday is yellow day in Thailand. The king was born on a Monday some 80 years back, so now every Monday a huge portion of Thais wear yellow clothing. The monarchy is one of the most loved institutions in the country, and hugely respected. Besides the crowds of people wearing yellow, the king's image was sold on amulets and icons right next to images of Buddhas. Religion is the other widely respected institution. Thai men are expected to become monks at least twice in their lives, usually once while children as 10-vow novices, then again maybe after school as full 227 vow monks. I don't really know what the vows entail, so that's probably worth looking into when I get back.
My first stop of the day was the Grand Palace, home of Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha. The emerald Buddha isn't really emerald, just a dark jade, but it's still spectacular. The king no longer lives in the grand palace, but the Wat there is still his personal temple. Every season he changes the solid gold clothing on the Emerald Buddha as part of an elaborate ritual. Again, I don't know how to describe everything that I saw, so I'll let the pictures do most of that. I especially liked the juxtaposition of classical European architecture with traditional Thai design. There was one building that reminded me very much of Versailles with the wood and mirrors and chandeliers, but instead of fleur de lis on the wallpaper there were Buddhas.
I asked a lot of different people to take my pictures. The Chinese lady was surprised that I was talking to her in Mandarin, but the guy I asked in Spanish responded in English. Ah well.
I'm not sure where the tactile boundary is in a place like the Grand Palace. What part is simply a building, something you interact with and touch, and what's considered art? There are mosaics on most of the walls, and some parts were roped off. Does that imply the rest of the mosaics are fair game to handle? Maybe it doesn't matter here. Yesterday the Reclining Buddha's feet were well worn, and I have clear memories of people touching paintings at the 798 district in Beijing.
In one park near the palace I had corn forced into my hands by a couple of different people, the immediately transparent scheme being that I feed the pigeons and then they hit me up for cash. So I resisted for a while, actually tossing the unopened bag of corn back at one girl from 20 feet away so she couldn't hand it back. One pair of guys actually dumped the corn into my hand, saying, “Present. Happy new year.” I walked down the sidewalk without throwing the corn on the ground, being mobbed with pigeons. I eventually dropped the corn, and when they asked me for money I explained to them that since I didn't have anything they'd given me and I didn't want anything from them now they didn't have any leverage, and that they should strive to live by the mantra of 'get the money first'. I'm only exaggerating slightly, and and I'm certain I confused them. As I walked away I smiled, waved, and bade them a happy new year. I've been generally very friendly on this trip, smiling a lot, as the Thais do, but there's only so much haranguing I can take.
After the Grand Palace I tried to find the river and ferry dock to cross to the other side, but I kept getting turned around in the rabbit warren of markets that hugs the shore of the river. I spent a while wandering a market in a more open area selling everything from washing machines to underwear to herbal medicine to new tires for cars. What do they do with the washing machines when it's time to close for the night? I tried to find yellow clothing, but all of the ubiquitous yellow polo shirts with the king's seal seemed to be for women.
I finally found the ferry taking near Wat Rakhang, but when I got to the other side I promptly became lost again. Next trip like this I'm brining a damn compass. Wat Rakhang, when I found it, wasn't visually spectacular, but it was a 'working' wat, with monks' orange robes hanging to dry, locals making offerings, and a small school attached with classes in session.
My next stop was Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn, which has an 82m stupa that looks like something out of Angkor Wat. (Note: I later found out that it's a 'prang', not a stupa. Chedis and stupas are the typical Thai style. A prang is Khmer, and that's why this looked Cambodian to me- it's the same design as Angkor.) Up close to the tower you can see that it's covered in mosaic. There's a fair bit of Chinese porcelain built into the decoration. It turns out that Chinese merchants sailed ships to Siam loaded with broken porcelain as ballast. They dumped it here when they loaded up on whatever they were bringing home, and the porcelain was dragged out of the harbor by the Thais to incorporate into their temples.
After Wat Arun I crossed the river and took the express ferry all the way down the shore to where there's a dock below a skytrain station. I like how you get around in Bangkok- some combination of car/tuk-tuk/motorcycle taxi/bus, skytrain/subway, boat, and walking through alleys.
I got back to the hotel just in time to shower before racing over to the mall next to the hotel to find yellow ties for dad and me to wear to dinner. The meal was a western menu, which was disappointing, but the entertainment was MCed by what I imagine were typical Thai presenters, a guy and a girl who were, for lack of a better word, cute. There was live music and a dance troupe performing a sampling of traditional Thai dance. The 4 women had numerous costume changes. One of the girls, now wearing a tail, paired up with a guy in an ornate, stylize monkey costume (that looked a lot like a demon) to tell the story of a mermaid and a monkey falling in love.
Meditation on a rainy Sunday
Today's photoblog link
09/16/07
After breakfast, a lavish buffet with Western and Thai dishes, we went to the Red Cross snake farm to see a snake handling, feeding, and milking demonstration. The slide show was interesting and informative, and the presenter was good except for an accent that led to gems like 'lespilatoly fairule'. The presentation itself was fun. We sat in bleachers under a canopy as it poured down rain outside. The handlers seemed very unconcerned about their safety around cobras, pythons, and vipers, despite the presenter's comment that every handler at the hospital had at one point been bitten. His own story involved a Siamese cobra and a paralyzed, necrotic finger that was saved by grafting a big chunk of tissue from his forearm. The cobras struck a lot while we were there, but didn't hit anything.
It was still raining after the presentation, but less, so we decided to push on to our next destination- Wat Pho. We took the subway to near a river dock, but by then the rain had started again in earnest so we holed up in coffee shop. Oh, the subway. It uses a different system from the skytrain, meaning to transfer between the two you need to buy tickets twice. The skytrain uses a paper card with a magnetic strip, the subway uses a small, black, plastic token with an embedded RFID chip. The subway itself was modern, had AC, and was nearly empty, which seemed stranger. Maybe it was a Sunday afternoon thing. Also of interest, there was a cop checking bags at the entrance to the subway, but not hard enough that I couldn't had carried, say, 10kg of high explosives on with me.
After sitting with our coffee for a while, dad reading the guidebooks and me catching up on journal writing, the rain eased off again and we pushed on. We got a bit lost, but a Thai guy stopped and tried to point us toward the boats. He gave up, but another Thai guy came over. He was friendly, spoke good English, and gave us some story about being a schoolteacher. He said that the boats weren't running because of the rain, and that Wat Pho was closed for a holiday. For some reason my father, who's read the same scam advisories I have, bought the story and was trying to get info on this guy's recommended Wat as I was trying to get us out of there without explicitly saying that he was full of shit. I finally pulled my dad away (“I want to explore this neighborhood”) and waved off the tuk-tuk driver who was conveniently standing by. When I outlined the characteristics of the guy's scam my dad felt suitably foolish, and we both got a good laugh out of it.
We couldn't find the dock. We walked through back alleys and poor neighborhoods trying to find the place, but none of the alleys were on our map and we didn't even have the sun to navigate by. We were approached by another Thai guy who suggested a different Wat, but in the end he gave us good directions, and it was unclear how he might have profited from the situation, so I guess he was probably on the level. We finally found the dock and waited for our boat.
On the boat, the orange line of the Chao Phraya express ferry, they tore our tickets in intricate ways that made us afraid to hold the damn things for fear of invalidating them by some subtle fold. The river itself was opaque brown and fast-flowing, carrying patches of floating vegetation as it moved. There were ferries like ours, long-tail river taxi boats with outboard motors driving long propeller shafts, and one gargantuan barge carrying an indeterminate cargo. On the way we passed a combination of river-front slums, gleaming white luxury apartment towers, the naval headquarters, and the imposing Wat Arun.
We got off the boat right at Wat Pho. I don't have much to say about the place that can't be better conveyed in pictures. We took off our shoes and entered a side temple, kneeling on a plastic Winnie the Pooh mat in front of an 800 year old golden Buddha. The main Reclining Buddha was huge. Again, the pictures tell the story better, except for having to fight small crowds to actually take them, and this was a rainy Sunday in the low season. The Reclining Buddha's toes were inlaid with a gorgeous mother of pearl depiction of other Buddhas, but were rubbed down right next to a 'do not touch' sign.
After Wat Pho we quickly hit the amulet market outside of nearby Wat Mahathat before heading in. We were there for meditation classes, and at 6PM we sat down with a Buddhist monk and 3 other Americans. He gave us a primer on meditation theory, most of it fairly vague to my unenlightened mind, but my dad, who's read some texts on meditation, understood some of the subtleties. One idea the monk had that was new to me was the idea of moving a hand slowly up and down with your breath in order to help you focus. He also suggested banishing wandering thoughts by identifying them and repeating them 3 times, for example, 'pain, pain, pain” or, “noise, noise, noise”. After the primer we practiced walking meditation, in which you focus on the soles of your feet, then seated meditation, where you focus on your abdomen. The seated meditation lasted until 8, over an hour, and got pretty excruciating. That was by far the longest I've ever tried to sit still and not think.
09/16/07
After breakfast, a lavish buffet with Western and Thai dishes, we went to the Red Cross snake farm to see a snake handling, feeding, and milking demonstration. The slide show was interesting and informative, and the presenter was good except for an accent that led to gems like 'lespilatoly fairule'. The presentation itself was fun. We sat in bleachers under a canopy as it poured down rain outside. The handlers seemed very unconcerned about their safety around cobras, pythons, and vipers, despite the presenter's comment that every handler at the hospital had at one point been bitten. His own story involved a Siamese cobra and a paralyzed, necrotic finger that was saved by grafting a big chunk of tissue from his forearm. The cobras struck a lot while we were there, but didn't hit anything.
It was still raining after the presentation, but less, so we decided to push on to our next destination- Wat Pho. We took the subway to near a river dock, but by then the rain had started again in earnest so we holed up in coffee shop. Oh, the subway. It uses a different system from the skytrain, meaning to transfer between the two you need to buy tickets twice. The skytrain uses a paper card with a magnetic strip, the subway uses a small, black, plastic token with an embedded RFID chip. The subway itself was modern, had AC, and was nearly empty, which seemed stranger. Maybe it was a Sunday afternoon thing. Also of interest, there was a cop checking bags at the entrance to the subway, but not hard enough that I couldn't had carried, say, 10kg of high explosives on with me.
After sitting with our coffee for a while, dad reading the guidebooks and me catching up on journal writing, the rain eased off again and we pushed on. We got a bit lost, but a Thai guy stopped and tried to point us toward the boats. He gave up, but another Thai guy came over. He was friendly, spoke good English, and gave us some story about being a schoolteacher. He said that the boats weren't running because of the rain, and that Wat Pho was closed for a holiday. For some reason my father, who's read the same scam advisories I have, bought the story and was trying to get info on this guy's recommended Wat as I was trying to get us out of there without explicitly saying that he was full of shit. I finally pulled my dad away (“I want to explore this neighborhood”) and waved off the tuk-tuk driver who was conveniently standing by. When I outlined the characteristics of the guy's scam my dad felt suitably foolish, and we both got a good laugh out of it.
We couldn't find the dock. We walked through back alleys and poor neighborhoods trying to find the place, but none of the alleys were on our map and we didn't even have the sun to navigate by. We were approached by another Thai guy who suggested a different Wat, but in the end he gave us good directions, and it was unclear how he might have profited from the situation, so I guess he was probably on the level. We finally found the dock and waited for our boat.
On the boat, the orange line of the Chao Phraya express ferry, they tore our tickets in intricate ways that made us afraid to hold the damn things for fear of invalidating them by some subtle fold. The river itself was opaque brown and fast-flowing, carrying patches of floating vegetation as it moved. There were ferries like ours, long-tail river taxi boats with outboard motors driving long propeller shafts, and one gargantuan barge carrying an indeterminate cargo. On the way we passed a combination of river-front slums, gleaming white luxury apartment towers, the naval headquarters, and the imposing Wat Arun.
We got off the boat right at Wat Pho. I don't have much to say about the place that can't be better conveyed in pictures. We took off our shoes and entered a side temple, kneeling on a plastic Winnie the Pooh mat in front of an 800 year old golden Buddha. The main Reclining Buddha was huge. Again, the pictures tell the story better, except for having to fight small crowds to actually take them, and this was a rainy Sunday in the low season. The Reclining Buddha's toes were inlaid with a gorgeous mother of pearl depiction of other Buddhas, but were rubbed down right next to a 'do not touch' sign.
After Wat Pho we quickly hit the amulet market outside of nearby Wat Mahathat before heading in. We were there for meditation classes, and at 6PM we sat down with a Buddhist monk and 3 other Americans. He gave us a primer on meditation theory, most of it fairly vague to my unenlightened mind, but my dad, who's read some texts on meditation, understood some of the subtleties. One idea the monk had that was new to me was the idea of moving a hand slowly up and down with your breath in order to help you focus. He also suggested banishing wandering thoughts by identifying them and repeating them 3 times, for example, 'pain, pain, pain” or, “noise, noise, noise”. After the primer we practiced walking meditation, in which you focus on the soles of your feet, then seated meditation, where you focus on your abdomen. The seated meditation lasted until 8, over an hour, and got pretty excruciating. That was by far the longest I've ever tried to sit still and not think.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Landing in the land of Thailand
This is a partial transcription of my handwritten journal for my trip to Thailand, September 2007. Note: I'm posting the same text with accompanying photos on my domain here. I'll continue to post the text of these entries on this blog as I type it, but I think it'll be more fun to read with the photos.
09/14/07
Flying into Bangkok, I was amazed by how far I could see lights. There doesn't seem to be the Dongbei haze cutting off visibility after a couple of miles. Right now I'm holed up in a corner of the airport behind some palm trees, thinking about getting some sleep before I head through customs and find a cab downtown.
I'm less prepared for this international trip than I've been for any previous. I don't even have a guide book until dad arrives with the Lonely Planet, only some phrase lists I printed off of the internet and the names in the Thai alphabet of a couple of tourist sites I got from Wikipedia. Escalators and moving walkways in the airport go forward on the left side. Do they drive on the left side of the road here? (Note: Yes, they do, and it's more confusing than I thought it'd be.)
(Written the next day)
I ended up sleeping at BKK for a couple of hours before going through customs. I tried to lie on the ground behind some palm trees, but the stone floor was sucking the heat right out of my body, so I ended up across some chairs.
I decided to take the public transportation into town, so after wandering and reading signs 2 or 3 times over I figured out that I had to take a shuttle to the bus station. At the station I got on bus 552, paid the bus attendant after I figured out he wanted to know where I was going, and was off. Again, I was amazed by how clear and blue the sky was. I guess I'd gotten used to the haze. I listened to what other passengers told the attendant and I noted someone with the same stop as me to follow out of the bus. I got off at On Nut, the terminal stop of one of the Skytrain routes (Bangkok's elevated rail system). I figured out how to get change for the ticket machines by asking an attendant. You tell them your stop and they give you the fewest coins necessary to buy the ticket, the rest comes back as bills. The fare varies with distance, and at 35 baht my long ride was 6-7 times as expensive as a bus, so I guess the locals enjoying the fast, air-conditioned ride were of the privileged set. I got out at the Siam Square stop, probably at about 8AM, and wandered around the still-shuttered shopping district. (As an aside, my total cost from airport to hotel was 67 baht on public transit. My dad's cost later that day was 1400 baht for a BMW limo.)
It was hot, maybe mid 80s, and humid when I stumbled our Pathumwan Princess Hotel. It's a 30-story tower abutting the MBK shopping center. I went in, unsure of whether I'd be able to check into my room so early, but they let me in right away. I think the nicest hotels I've ever been to have been on my dad's business trips, with the possible exception of the Westin Dragonara in Malta, where I myself shelled out $200+ a night for a couple nights. The Princess has several restaurants, a huge pool, a spa, a gym, a running track, and a cold 'check-in drink' handed to you in the lobby. In addition to a concierge it has a limo desk, a tour desk, a business center, and a lounge for corporate guests (including me, ha!). The view from our room on the 17th floor was spectacular. There's a university nearby with the traditional red-peaked Thai roofs. The towers in the distance have architectural twists that make them distinctively Thai: a gold pyramid on top, a gold Buddha's crown coat of arms on the side, minarets, etc.
After oversleeping from my nap, I caught the skytrain to Chatuchak market. Most of the 'new' Bangkok, the parts I've seen so far, have been very rich. I've seen beggars in the streets, but only a few hovels. One of the shacks seemed to cling to the side of a building right next to a clean, shiny skytrain station.
Chatuchak market sells everything- used and new Converse shoes and jeans, silk bed covers, wood carvings, music, books, household consumables, food, electronics. Everything. One thing I immediately noticed was the large number of Thais shopping there, not just tourists. The place smelled of pleasant things rather than slime and waste, a pleasant change from Chinese markets. I bought red shoelaces to go with the black Converse hightops I've been trying to find for ages and was convinced I'd get here, but as in China the shoe sizes available top out well below my far-from-freakish 11.5 feet. I got my first hit of Thai food at the market- red curry over a bowl of rice, which would have been great but for the bones, coconut milk, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, a styrofoam container of lo mein-like noodles, and a bowl of spring rolls. I also had a weird green popsicle out of a steel drum that somehow keeps them frozen. On the way out of the market I stumbled on a separate market selling produce, where I bought excellent caramel-sesame cashews that would last us the rest of the trip.
I went back to sleep when I got back to the hotel, waking up when my dad arrived at the room to chat a bit before we called it a night.
09/14/07
Flying into Bangkok, I was amazed by how far I could see lights. There doesn't seem to be the Dongbei haze cutting off visibility after a couple of miles. Right now I'm holed up in a corner of the airport behind some palm trees, thinking about getting some sleep before I head through customs and find a cab downtown.
I'm less prepared for this international trip than I've been for any previous. I don't even have a guide book until dad arrives with the Lonely Planet, only some phrase lists I printed off of the internet and the names in the Thai alphabet of a couple of tourist sites I got from Wikipedia. Escalators and moving walkways in the airport go forward on the left side. Do they drive on the left side of the road here? (Note: Yes, they do, and it's more confusing than I thought it'd be.)
(Written the next day)
I ended up sleeping at BKK for a couple of hours before going through customs. I tried to lie on the ground behind some palm trees, but the stone floor was sucking the heat right out of my body, so I ended up across some chairs.
I decided to take the public transportation into town, so after wandering and reading signs 2 or 3 times over I figured out that I had to take a shuttle to the bus station. At the station I got on bus 552, paid the bus attendant after I figured out he wanted to know where I was going, and was off. Again, I was amazed by how clear and blue the sky was. I guess I'd gotten used to the haze. I listened to what other passengers told the attendant and I noted someone with the same stop as me to follow out of the bus. I got off at On Nut, the terminal stop of one of the Skytrain routes (Bangkok's elevated rail system). I figured out how to get change for the ticket machines by asking an attendant. You tell them your stop and they give you the fewest coins necessary to buy the ticket, the rest comes back as bills. The fare varies with distance, and at 35 baht my long ride was 6-7 times as expensive as a bus, so I guess the locals enjoying the fast, air-conditioned ride were of the privileged set. I got out at the Siam Square stop, probably at about 8AM, and wandered around the still-shuttered shopping district. (As an aside, my total cost from airport to hotel was 67 baht on public transit. My dad's cost later that day was 1400 baht for a BMW limo.)
It was hot, maybe mid 80s, and humid when I stumbled our Pathumwan Princess Hotel. It's a 30-story tower abutting the MBK shopping center. I went in, unsure of whether I'd be able to check into my room so early, but they let me in right away. I think the nicest hotels I've ever been to have been on my dad's business trips, with the possible exception of the Westin Dragonara in Malta, where I myself shelled out $200+ a night for a couple nights. The Princess has several restaurants, a huge pool, a spa, a gym, a running track, and a cold 'check-in drink' handed to you in the lobby. In addition to a concierge it has a limo desk, a tour desk, a business center, and a lounge for corporate guests (including me, ha!). The view from our room on the 17th floor was spectacular. There's a university nearby with the traditional red-peaked Thai roofs. The towers in the distance have architectural twists that make them distinctively Thai: a gold pyramid on top, a gold Buddha's crown coat of arms on the side, minarets, etc.
After oversleeping from my nap, I caught the skytrain to Chatuchak market. Most of the 'new' Bangkok, the parts I've seen so far, have been very rich. I've seen beggars in the streets, but only a few hovels. One of the shacks seemed to cling to the side of a building right next to a clean, shiny skytrain station.
Chatuchak market sells everything- used and new Converse shoes and jeans, silk bed covers, wood carvings, music, books, household consumables, food, electronics. Everything. One thing I immediately noticed was the large number of Thais shopping there, not just tourists. The place smelled of pleasant things rather than slime and waste, a pleasant change from Chinese markets. I bought red shoelaces to go with the black Converse hightops I've been trying to find for ages and was convinced I'd get here, but as in China the shoe sizes available top out well below my far-from-freakish 11.5 feet. I got my first hit of Thai food at the market- red curry over a bowl of rice, which would have been great but for the bones, coconut milk, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, a styrofoam container of lo mein-like noodles, and a bowl of spring rolls. I also had a weird green popsicle out of a steel drum that somehow keeps them frozen. On the way out of the market I stumbled on a separate market selling produce, where I bought excellent caramel-sesame cashews that would last us the rest of the trip.
I went back to sleep when I got back to the hotel, waking up when my dad arrived at the room to chat a bit before we called it a night.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
River crabs
I'm blatantly stealing this post from imagethief, a highly regarded China blogger I read. He links to Rebecca MacKinnon's blog and quotes this:
Imagethief also notes that Chinese is an excellent language for puns.
In China these days, if your website gets blocked, your blog-hosting service takes down a politically edgy post you wrote, or your ISP deletes your site completely, you say: "I've been harmonized." The word for harmony, harmonized, or harmonious (all the same word in Chinese) is pronounced "he xie" in Chinese and is written like this: 和谐. For those without Chinese fonts on their browser.
However, there's a slight problem, which is that since this phrase is so often used sarcastically on Chinese blogs and forums, it has been flagged as a sensitive keyword by many of the blog and forum hosting platforms, increasing the chances that a post using this phrase could itself get "harmonized." So bloggers and chatroom denizens have switched the characters to another phrase, 河蟹, also pronounced "he xie" (with slightly different tonation) which means "river crab".
Thus, when bloggers seem to be writing nonsensically about "river crab," they're actually talking about censorship.
Imagethief also notes that Chinese is an excellent language for puns.
Saturday In the Park
09/07
I was absolutely determined to go out on Friday rather than watch more DVDs, but didn't really have firm plans with anyone, so I ended up sitting alone at the Rickshaw for a while. I chatted briefly with strangers, but I wasn't nearly as successful at insinuating myself into a group as I had been the previous week. I think I probably have to be more forward; relying on situations to present themselves is silly and boring. Later in the evening, Randy, formerly of Harvard, and his friends joined me. We all ran into another group we knew and decided to bar hop together. So I met some new people, some of whom I'm meeting tonight to play poker, and successfully avoided another movie night. I went home late and slept in.
09/08
When I woke up it was still way too early to just sit around in the apartment. Because it was unusually clear and sunny I decided to finally go check out some of the nearby parks. Chaoyang Park, the huge one across from my apartment, was sort of unimpressive, at least the parts I saw. I pretended I didn't hear the gate guard yelling after me as I biked past. I thought she wanted money, but it turns out bikes are banned. She didn't run after me, though, and it wasn't until I was on my way out that I figured out what she'd wanted. The Beijing Pop Festival was going on, so I stood on the opposite side of the lake and listened a bit, but I was eager to find something more scenic.
The next stop was Hong Lingjin (Red Scarf) Park, by way of an interesting street. One side of the road was crumbling and filthy. The stores all sold construction supplies: racks of steel piping, bags of concrete, wire, simple metal tricycles for transportation. This is your destination if you need to run a labor-intensive, low-tech, somewhat shoddy building project. The other side of the road has the Park Avenue apartments, gleaming new towers on manicured, gated grounds. I imagine the side of the building with views towards the park is substantially more expensive than the side overlooking the slums. I tried to take a picture to capture the contrast, but it didn't work very well. I ended up stitching 2 together using photoshop. Had I known how easy the stitching process was I would have taken the pictures with that in mind and gotten a much better shot. Next time. In fact, I think I'm going to try to get some skyline shots in Beijing using stitching, and maybe play around with making the seams invisible.
The park itself was surprisingly nice considering the 4th Ring Road, one of the 5 concentric highways in Beijing, cuts right through the park and over its lake. But the gardens were pleasant and the trees and the bridges were elegant and very much fit my China archetype. The park was also filled with art. There were steel sculptures illustrating Chinese legends, painted mobiles hanging from trees, huge rocks split in half revealing foot-long 'fossils' of insects, and even garbage cans shaped like- well, something anthropomorphic.
I've noticed is that there's no graffiti around town, at least not the spray painted kind. I don't know if they clean it up quickly, if a severe punishment deters artists and vandals, or whether it's just that I live around a snooty expat neighborhood and a neighborhood probably too poor to afford paint. There is, however, extensive use of spray stencils. The otherwise beautiful bridges in the park had at least 4 'No fishing' signs each, and the walls around the park repeated that message and others. I guess the extensive use of sprayed behavioral dictums are a vestige of the Cultural Revolution. If the spray-painted signs aren't enough there are plenty of more western sign boards. I particularly like the warning not to swim in the water translated into English; I can't imagine anyone from a western country even considering a dip in the green, soupy lake. The locals seem not to be bothered by the idea of eating the fish that they catch in brazen violation of the many signs. My view is that if the water's so green you can't see a millimeter below the surface there's probably too much nitrogen in it, and one has to wonder, especially in a city of 17 million, what exactly happens to the nitrogen from human waste?
Here are the pictures from the park. You have to scroll down, I'm afraid, because iWeb messes up my old links if I put the new pictures on top and it doesn't let me use HTML anchors to send you to the bottom. It's lame, and I'll try to figure out a workaround soon. (Edit: I sort of fixed it. Still gimpy, but it'll work for now.)
I was absolutely determined to go out on Friday rather than watch more DVDs, but didn't really have firm plans with anyone, so I ended up sitting alone at the Rickshaw for a while. I chatted briefly with strangers, but I wasn't nearly as successful at insinuating myself into a group as I had been the previous week. I think I probably have to be more forward; relying on situations to present themselves is silly and boring. Later in the evening, Randy, formerly of Harvard, and his friends joined me. We all ran into another group we knew and decided to bar hop together. So I met some new people, some of whom I'm meeting tonight to play poker, and successfully avoided another movie night. I went home late and slept in.
09/08
When I woke up it was still way too early to just sit around in the apartment. Because it was unusually clear and sunny I decided to finally go check out some of the nearby parks. Chaoyang Park, the huge one across from my apartment, was sort of unimpressive, at least the parts I saw. I pretended I didn't hear the gate guard yelling after me as I biked past. I thought she wanted money, but it turns out bikes are banned. She didn't run after me, though, and it wasn't until I was on my way out that I figured out what she'd wanted. The Beijing Pop Festival was going on, so I stood on the opposite side of the lake and listened a bit, but I was eager to find something more scenic.
The next stop was Hong Lingjin (Red Scarf) Park, by way of an interesting street. One side of the road was crumbling and filthy. The stores all sold construction supplies: racks of steel piping, bags of concrete, wire, simple metal tricycles for transportation. This is your destination if you need to run a labor-intensive, low-tech, somewhat shoddy building project. The other side of the road has the Park Avenue apartments, gleaming new towers on manicured, gated grounds. I imagine the side of the building with views towards the park is substantially more expensive than the side overlooking the slums. I tried to take a picture to capture the contrast, but it didn't work very well. I ended up stitching 2 together using photoshop. Had I known how easy the stitching process was I would have taken the pictures with that in mind and gotten a much better shot. Next time. In fact, I think I'm going to try to get some skyline shots in Beijing using stitching, and maybe play around with making the seams invisible.
The park itself was surprisingly nice considering the 4th Ring Road, one of the 5 concentric highways in Beijing, cuts right through the park and over its lake. But the gardens were pleasant and the trees and the bridges were elegant and very much fit my China archetype. The park was also filled with art. There were steel sculptures illustrating Chinese legends, painted mobiles hanging from trees, huge rocks split in half revealing foot-long 'fossils' of insects, and even garbage cans shaped like- well, something anthropomorphic.
I've noticed is that there's no graffiti around town, at least not the spray painted kind. I don't know if they clean it up quickly, if a severe punishment deters artists and vandals, or whether it's just that I live around a snooty expat neighborhood and a neighborhood probably too poor to afford paint. There is, however, extensive use of spray stencils. The otherwise beautiful bridges in the park had at least 4 'No fishing' signs each, and the walls around the park repeated that message and others. I guess the extensive use of sprayed behavioral dictums are a vestige of the Cultural Revolution. If the spray-painted signs aren't enough there are plenty of more western sign boards. I particularly like the warning not to swim in the water translated into English; I can't imagine anyone from a western country even considering a dip in the green, soupy lake. The locals seem not to be bothered by the idea of eating the fish that they catch in brazen violation of the many signs. My view is that if the water's so green you can't see a millimeter below the surface there's probably too much nitrogen in it, and one has to wonder, especially in a city of 17 million, what exactly happens to the nitrogen from human waste?
Here are the pictures from the park. You have to scroll down, I'm afraid, because iWeb messes up my old links if I put the new pictures on top and it doesn't let me use HTML anchors to send you to the bottom. It's lame, and I'll try to figure out a workaround soon. (Edit: I sort of fixed it. Still gimpy, but it'll work for now.)
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