Lei Nuo

Cambodia pictures, round 2

2010-07-06T14:12:00.001-04:00

Our second and final installment of Cambodia pictures:

Cambodia 2

Cambodia Photos, Part 1

2010-07-06T02:38:00.001-04:00

Here is the first of 2 installments of Cambodia photos:

Cambodia 1

Vietnam in pictures.

2010-07-05T11:06:00.002-04:00

Here is the first installment of pictures from our trip. This gallery covers all of our time in Vietnam:

Vietnam Pictures

Pork to go

2010-06-16T09:42:00.000-04:00

I couldnt get a better picture while running in flip flops after this
bike. There are 2 dead pigs on the back of the rider's seat.

Pork to go

2010-06-16T09:36:00.000-04:00

I couldnt get a better picture while running in flip flops after this
bike. That's a dead pug on the back of the rider's seat.

Bonk

2010-06-16T09:31:00.000-04:00

I had Daria watch my head while I took this. I think you should direct
your attention to the sidewalks, which are full of pits, rather than
search the skies or falling fruit.

Boston Inn, Sihannoukeville

2010-06-16T09:29:00.000-04:00

I didn't stop to ask. Maybe they're expats? But I'm surprised they
went with the Pats and not the Red Sox 'B'.

Scooter diaries pics

2010-06-10T11:16:00.000-04:00

Here are the pictures that didn't show up in the scooter diaries post.

Sent from my iPhone

Daria biking through the south gate of Angkor Thom

2010-06-10T10:45:00.000-04:00

Bayon

2010-06-10T10:44:00.000-04:00

Angkor Wat is only one of dozens of tenples on a main site that
stretches over more than 100 square kilometers. Angkor also covers
other farther flung temples in the same region.

The temple below is Bayon, with giant faces carved into the towers.

Monks collecting alms

2010-06-10T10:32:00.000-04:00

As in Thailand, all men are expected to be monks at some point in
their lives. Most do it after school but before a career or marriage.
Many are only monks for a couple of weeks, though it varies widely.

Every morning they leave their temples barefoot and carrying pots.
They collect food donations as they walk the streets, and they live at
least in part on what they collect. When you donate, they chant a
prayer with you.

Diesel flavored Fanta

2010-06-10T10:29:00.000-04:00

This is an informal Cambodian gas station. You pour the bottles
through the funnel into your gas tank. I don't know which colors are
which, but one is diesel and another is unleaded.

We've been in Cambodia how long?

2010-06-10T10:26:00.000-04:00

We crossed the border to Cambodia about a week ago. We've been so busy
that I've been horribly behind in my journal and posting here.

The border crossing was interesting. Cambodia has a huge corruption
problem, and we ran into it immediately. The cost of a one-month
tourist visa is $20. The police officer at the border asked us for
$25. We objected that the price should be $20, and he came back with
$23. We were haggling with a government official on the size of the
bribe he should receive. We said that we only wanted to come in for 3
weeks, and would only pay $20 for that, since we weren't using the
full visa. He relented pretty quickly, and we paid no markup, but it
was pretty brazen for a guy who stamps his name and police number
(presumably his own...) into our passport, along with the price of the
visa. I wonder if the officials who check visas as you leave the
country get a good laugh at the most extreme visa price inflation. The
officer also wouldn't accept the first $20 bill I offered him- someone
had written a number on the corner of it, and though it was fresh out
of a US ATM, it wasn't pristine enough for him.

We also had to pay $1 for a health inspection certificate. We filled
out a form saying that we were in good health and didn't have any
symptoms like fever or a cough (does anyone ever admit to it, even if
they do?). We then got a form with a stamp certifying our health. The
form suggested we share the certification with our doctors for their
records. I'll be sure to do that- it might be diagnostically useful.

As we left the border post, the difference in road conditions between
the Vietnamese side and the Cambodian side was extreme. In Vietnam the
road was paved and flat. In Cambodia the bus's shocks were bottoming
out with every pothole and bump. The road was dusty red dirt, and
lined with shacks.

The shacks are raised on stilts to avoid flooding in their living
areas. The cows grazing in the brown fields were skeletal. Beneath the
raised houses are large clay urns for rain water storage, though I
don't know whether it's because there are no water mains there or
whether water is too expensive. Parts of this country are desperately
poor.

Another difference from Vietnam was the huge number of wats and
temples here. They're built in a Thai style, with peaked roofs and
edge ornamentation. Most of the practicing temples in the country were
destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, so many of these have been built in the
past 20 or so years. Cambodia is either much more Buddhist than
Vietnam, or its brand of communism is less atheist and more openly
religious. Cambodia is actually a kingdom and not a communist state,
though as in Thailand the king is more symbolic, and the Cambodian
People's Party is dominant.

We saw dozens of the CPP signs on our ride from the border to Phnom
Penh. They were displayed on a wide range of buildings, and at first
we thought those were the local party offices, some in shacks and
others in mansions and temples. Now we think they're more like
election signs, just voicing party support. There were also signs for
FUNCIPEC, the royalist party, but far fewer.

Life changes as you enter Phnom Penh. There is a higher ratio of cars
to motorbikes in Cambodia than in Vietnam, but this is especially
clear in the capital. In Saigon and Hanoi there were often hundreds of
motorbikes at an intersection and not a car in sight. In Phnom Penh it
might almost be an even split. Most of the cars are Toyotas and
Lexuses, and many of them have huge decals on the sides with the brand
logo- imagine a Lexus SUV with the word Lexus occupying the entirety
of the front corner panel and both side doors. I guess they're proud
of their cars. I don't know where all the money to buy them is coming
from, but surely some of it is from visa scam kickbacks...

Sent from my iPhone

Scooter Diaries doesn't have the same ring

2010-05-31T08:20:00.000-04:00

I drove a motorbike for the first time yesterday. It was probably my 5th time on one ever, and driving it was sort of a trial by fire.

I had a false start in Dalat- I planned to rent a semi-automatic bike (gear shifters, right foot brake), but I couldn't get it to go into gear with the directions of our hotelier. In retrospect, I probably wasn't giving it enough gas as I shifted from neutral to first, especially since I was starting it on a hill.

Here in Phu Quoc, renting an automatic bike (no shifters, brakes on the handlebars- a scooter) costs $5.25 a day, paid in cash up front. If you can drive it away from the person renting it out, you can drive it anywhere, so the logic goes.

I acknowledge that riding a scooter isn't the same challenge as a motorcycle. That said, my first 30 yards of riding went up a steep hill, over rocks that almost bottomed out the shocks, and finally up a steep hill with dust and gravel.

The bikes come with the fuel gauge on empty, so I had a low-speed warmup as I cruised around looking for a gas station. Then, with Daria on back, we headed into the hills, bound for Bai Thom beach.

The roads in town are wide and paved. There are stoplights and signs. As you leave town, the paved surface gives way to a red dirt track, but at least the track was smooth.

The road got steadily worse as we went. Most of the road was under construction, so there were dump trucks and steamrollers and various earth movers. While getting around the machinery was nerve-wracking, we went slow, and so did everyone else. Despite the relative lack of traffic laws here, since everyone rides motorcycles, it's probably safer than in the US for bikers.

I tipped the bike once, deep in the hills. The road was worst where there were muddy portions with ruts dug by trucks and construction equipment. I was probably going 5mph down a hill, trying to ride in a rut, when I hit a patch of mud several inches deep and the front tire slid it from under me. Daria was fine. I had a very minor scrape on my knee, and was pretty muddy, but only my pride was really hurt.

I didn't put much gas in when we set out, since I had no clue what I was doing. So up in the hills we were running out of gas. There aren't gas stations in the boonies, but most convenience stores have plasic bottles of gas on a little wooden cart out front. So, after some confusion regarding the price, a kid poured gas through a filters funnel into my tank, holding his dripping popsicle out of the way of the pour.

We eventually made it to Bai Thom beach, we think. We made it to a beach in Bai Thom, at least. We parked the scooter under a palm tree within view of the water, and waded around. It wasn't the most scenic of beaches (we'd picked it more or less at at random), but we had it to ourselves, save for a couple of fishermen.

When we made it back I was a much better motorbike rider. I handled the mud much better in my rematch, and the worst we suffered was sunburns on the tops of our legs and the back of our necks from the ride. There was one confusing spot where a dumptruck working on one side of the mud had blocked off our side with its pile of dirt. I stopped, confused, trying to figure out where to go. The dumptruck driver laughed at us from his cab, and pointed to a less tall pile of dirt. Up and over it we went- doing as the natives do.

This is a good paved road.

This is a good unpaved road. Sadly, we have no pictures of the badly torn up roads- we were too busy riding.

Bai Thom Beach? A beach in Bai Thom.

Condiments done right

2010-05-30T11:47:00.000-04:00

Direct marketing, Vietnam-style

2010-05-30T11:46:00.000-04:00

Decorations? We have some ornaments...

2010-05-30T11:44:00.000-04:00

Regarding decorations and foreigners, this hole in the wall beer place
in Saigon is the exception. Packed with Westerners, but the paint is
chipping and they still had up Xmas ornaments. We went back 3 nights
in a row for cheap beer and squid kebabs, an saw a lot of the same
faces.

Sunset drinks on Phu Quoc Island

2010-05-30T11:40:00.000-04:00

Decorating for foreigners

2010-05-26T00:48:00.000-04:00

We were the only westerners at this open-air restaurant (beer garden?) in Nha Trang.

We've observed a difference in atmosphere between establishments that cater to, and attract, Westerners, and those that seem to target and attract Vietnamese. Western-oriented restaurants, even those that serve only Vietnamese food, tend to have warmer lighting and more attention paid to things like paintings and table fittings than those focused on a Vietnamese clientele.

This beer garden had bare fluorescent bulbs, tiny plastic chairs and tables, and the only nod to decoration was that the corrugated metal walls had a bamboo sort of pattern painted on them. I think this appearance scares off foreigners.

When we were on Cat Ba Island, we ate at a restaurant named Bamboo, recommended in the Lonely Planet. The place was warmly lit, had table cloths, and was decorated with stained bamboo shoots. Next door was Huang Y, also in the Lonely Planet, but its tables were bare metal, the walls were pale blue, and the lights were compact fluorescents hanging from electrical wire. Bamboo was packed with foreigners, Huang Y was empty.

The next day we ate at Huang Y. The prices were lower, the food was as good or better than Bamboo's. There was no reason we could think of to eat at Bamboo over Huang Y, save the atmosphere.

It made us note our predispositions to a certain kind of decor, and I think we've gotten better at avoiding it. It's led us to gems like the place in Nha Trang. I'm glad to have places like this to ourselves, but for the sake of their proprietors, I hope they understand why Westerners make the decisions they do, and know how to change if they want our business. Fancy lighting doesn't seem to indicate a good spot, but it does seem to predict where the tourist dollars go.

Dogs dig banh mi

2010-05-25T06:57:00.000-04:00

Nha Trang

2010-05-23T09:33:00.000-04:00

We decided to stop here for a day on our way to Dalat, instead of
spending 18 hours straight on the bus. I think it was a good call.

Bia hoi

2010-05-23T09:30:00.000-04:00

Bia hoi is 'fresh beer', brewed daily. Light and crisp. Perfect in
100+ degree heat.

Forgetting the Champa

2010-05-23T09:26:00.000-04:00

My Son was the religious center of the Champa kingdom in Vietnam. The
temples there are located in the hills, now remote, south of Danang
and Hoi An.

The Champa were Hindu, and the architecture is adorned with statues of
Shiva and Ganesh, as well as the occasional prominent linga. The
temples themselves are windowless,
and built with fitted bricks (no mortar used).

When the site was rediscovered by the French (one assumes the locals
knew all about it), they set about to restore the temples. The only
problem was that the technology for fitting the bricks together had
been lost.

It's amazing to me that something like happens. Is it so much better
to use mortar that everyone who fitted bricks together simply stopped?
One can almost imagine the mortar manufacturers as a sort of mafia-
your building didn't receive their 'protection' if you didn't use
mortar. Maybe it was just much easier and cheaper to use mortar, but
you'd think the luxury market would stick around.

Additionally, the older bricks maintain their red color, while the
newer ones are blackened by humidity and mold and weather. The guide
at the site said it was because of the protective coating applied to
the original bricks by the Champa- a layer of pine sap and other goop.
I have a hard time believing that this protective coat is still there
on the bricks.

Regardless of the cause of technological devolution and mechanisms of
color protection, you can tell the difference between the original and
restored portions of the ruins by whether the bricks use mortar and
whether they look old or new- the better looking sections are the old
ones.

The Vietcong used the site as a weapons cache and communications
center during the US occupation. I don't know if it was because of the
remoteness of the temples, or their setting in the hills, or because
they thought the temples were inviolate by the US military. Nixon
ordered the temples carpet bombed to flush out the VC. Apocryphally,
when the B52s couldn't finish the job, he sent in helicopters with
rockets. Given the depth of the craters and their proximity to the
structures, it's a surprise anything survived.

Now My Son is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and some people compare it
to Angkor or Borobudur. As an ancient seat of religion the comparison
holds, but in scale and breathtaking vistas probably not so much- I'll
let you know when I see Angkor in a few weeks.

Daria picks her dress for prom

2010-05-20T05:36:00.001-04:00

2 pineapples, peeled, 75 cents

2010-05-20T02:26:00.000-04:00

Formatting

2010-05-19T12:14:00.000-04:00

Some combination of blogger, typing my post on an iPhone notepad, and
publishing the post via email seems to have resulted in weird
formatting. Sorry about that- I'll try to fix it when I'm on an actual
computer.

Sent from my iPhone

Sea kayaking Lan Ha Bay

2010-05-19T11:59:00.003-04:00

This is right before I flipped my kayak and went into the drink with Daria's camera. I was completely fine in the kayak out of the bay with big ocean waves. Trying to fix Daria's rudder in a calm cove, however, was more than I was up for. Camera status is uncertain- we're giving it more time to dry. I'd say long odds for a recovery, though...

Cat Ba Town harbor

2010-05-19T11:54:00.000-04:00

View from our hotel.

Hanoi Hustle

2010-05-19T11:52:00.001-04:00

We were beginning to get frustrated with the death by a thousand
cuts that is the Hanoi hustle. Tonight was better, though.

Most times, a shopkeeper or taxi driver isn't out to fleece you, just
make an extra little bit here or there. One vegetarian restaurant we
went to follows the Chinese model of offering you wet wipes before
your meal, but charging you if you use them. You can opt out by not
opening the packs, which is what I always did in China, but my guard
wasn't up here. Total cost was like 10 cents, but it was the
principle. The same restaurant also charged for our un-ordered peanut
appetIzer- 25 cents.

Sometimes the hustle is more of a highway robbery (alley robbery might
be more appropriate for Hanoi.) A cab we took from the Hanoi bus
station to the train station obviously had a rigged meter. The thing
was ticking like mad, much faster than in other rides. The driver was
running on empty, and stopped to get gas without pausing the meter. I
yelled at him a bit, and resolved to myself not to pay for the fare
from that wait, but it was pretty fast and ended up being about a
nickel. The trip ended up costing more than twice as much as a trip
of a similar length and time a couple of days before- 112,000 dong
this time, or almost $6. For perspective, one combination bus-bus-boat-
bus ticket to get from an island 200km out of Hanoi back into the city
was $9. I was pissed about the cabby, but it was raining and we were
trying to catch a train and I justified it by saying that the
difference between a fair price and what he was asking wasn't very
large in U.S. terms. I tried to pay with a 100,000 bill and a 20,000
bill, expecting 8,000 back, and he tried to give me a 2,000 bill back
in change, shorting me 6,000, claiming he didn't have any more change.
I grabbed my 20,000 bill back, gave him about 4,000 or so I had in
small bills, and explained that I wouldn't pay more unless he had
change. He continued to claim he didn't, so I walked away with him
yelling at me.

The amounts of money I'm talking about are tiny. It's the principle-
feeling constantly under siege and like somebody's mark. I hate losing
these exchanges because I dislike thinking that they're smiling to
themselves about that little extra they just made. It's even worse if
they think they got away with it without my noticing. I don't like
feeling like a chump.

The bus we took today from Danang to Hoi An is supposed to cost 10,000
dong. When we got on, they asked for 50,000. I pointed out that the
side of the bus listed the price at 10,000, but the old lady taking
money pointed at our backpacks and arms (skin?) and said "Not for
you." At least she was being honest. We ended up not taking her bus,
but still paid 30,000 on the next one. Victory is getting taken for
less than you might have otherwise, I suppose.

Addendum: Vietnam isn't all like this. For none of my previous visit
did I feel so much like a target. Today, in Hoi An, we ate at a
vegetarian restaurant where we were the only foreigners. The
proprietor's young daughter was assigned to serve us because she spoke
a bit of English (more than I speak Vietnamese...). She was sweet and
helpful, explaining things and tolerating my pidgin Vietnamese. We
paid local prices (they were so low they couldn't be anything else)
despite the lack of clear price labels and the obvious opportunity for
markup. The food was fantastic. We left smiling, and would have been
happy to have paid more- we'll go back for sure.

Addendum part 2: I have to be careful not to wave off everyone who
says hello to us on the street with a "no thank you". Sometimes they
just want to say hello. Smiling at people in Vietnam gets a smile back
far more often than it ever would in the U.S. I should even try to
smile more at the people on the street trying to sell us things.

Sent from my iPhone

Meter maids

2010-05-15T21:31:00.001-04:00

Don't fuck with 'em in Vietnam.

War trophies at the Army Museum

2010-05-15T21:28:00.001-04:00

Museums are very interactive in Vietnam- if touching isn't encouraged,
it's sure not discouraged. We kept our grubby fingers off the
paintings at the fine arts museum, though.

Hanoi

2010-05-13T23:43:00.001-04:00

In Hanoi, dodging motorcycycles.

Hipstamatic jet plane

2010-05-12T12:30:00.001-04:00

Hanoi Tomorrow

2010-05-11T11:27:00.000-04:00

Airline chaos is my only worry. Will my backpack still have straps
when it arrives at the luggage claim in Vietnam? Will United charge
us for checked bags, even though they're only flying us 1 leg of our 3
leg journey? Will we have to check in again through security again in
DC, even though we only have a 2 hour layover?

I'm no so much worried about traveling in a country where I don't know
anyone and don't speak the language. It's unfortunate that airline
customer service and security and the like have gotten so bad that my
perception is that the flight will be scarier than the rest of the trip.

I hope I remembered to pack socks.

Test post from iPhone

2010-05-04T14:48:00.000-04:00

Second Tour

2010-05-04T13:59:00.002-04:00

Leaving for Hanoi in 8 days. Stay tuned.

Mighty Mekong

2008-01-09T03:58:00.000-05:00

I woke up on 1/8 early to go on a day tour of the Mekong Delta. I finally got a Vietnamese breakfast sandwich- a baguette with a fried egg, cucumber, tomato, cilantro, and chilli sauce. I love the French-Asia fusion stuff.

I slept on the bus to Cai Be, where we got on a 20-seat motor boat and started to cruise. The water was opaque, choppy, and brown, and covered with vegetation that the river had ripped from the shores. In places the river seemed more like a lake, the shores barely visible in the distance, but soon we turned into an offshoot off the river's main course. In slowly became narrower and more shallow. Villagers in groups fished by standing the the water with a huge net rigged with plastic bottles for flotation, manually gathering the thing up. The process took 10 people 10 minutes, and in the end netted only 2 small fish.

We got off the boat to visit a candy-making factory. They pressed coconut juice from the meat, recycling the pulp as fertilizer. The juice was boiled down to a caramel on a fire fueled by rice husks and nut shells, then mixed with chocolate and poured into hand-made wooden channels to cool and harden. Apparently they also use banana leaf and durian as flavorings, and do plain coconut candy, but the chocolate is for the foreigners, who prefer it. Besides the woman stirring the coconut caramel, there were 3 women at the candy-manufacturing table. One woman pulled strips of hardened candy out of the channels, cutting them with a giant cleaver. Another wrapped them in rice paper, apparently necessary in the humidity, and the 3rd wrapped the rice paper and candy in wax paper.

At another part of the factory (which, by the way, was a thatched, open-air hut, if a large one) they made a sort of rice crispy treat. They mixed rice into hot black sand in a cauldron, which popped the rice into puffed crisps. A sieve above the cauldron received the mix from below, letting the sand fall back in and leaving the rest to be transferred to another sieve a few feet away. This separated the husks, which fell into a pile on the floor which would fuel the fire under the cauldron. The puffed rice was then bagged and sent to the next station, where it was mixed with sugar syrup and stirred in a pot. It was then poured onto a greased sheet, maybe 8'x4', and rolled out and cut into cubes by two men with heavy steel rollers, cleavers, and a straight edge. I tried the finished blocks, but as a bit of a rice crispy treat snob, I found them lacking the certain je ne sais quoi imparted by bottled marshmallow fluff and sticks of butter.

They made other candies there, as well as distilling disappointingly uninteresting banana and jackfruit liquor, but I didn't see any of that in progress. The still was very simple, and I wondered afterwards how much methanol I got in my liquor samples. They also hawked tourist crap of all kinds there- low quality silk goods, the same paintings you see everywhere here, tea leaves, even carved wooden pigs (seriously, what the fuck). My big gripe about the place was how touristy it was, but I guess I wouldn't have seen the cool, primitive, assembly-line candy making otherwise.

We left the factory and moved farther up the river. The river narrowed and became too shallow for our boat to continue- it kept jarring as the propeller hit the mud bottom. It was low tide, and the mighty Mekong had been reduced to a sliver lined by swathes of mud. We switched to 4-person canoes, narrow and low, piloted by a guy standing at the back with two paddles. Actually, mine was piloted by a guy, but the other 3 were old-Vietnamese-lady-powered. Mamma-san-powered, if you will. These boats were uncovered, of course, and the mid-day sun was brutal. I was fine, and got to only for the second time use the sunblock I'd bought, but I felt sorry for the drivers working in the heat.

The muddy banks were crawling with amphibians, invisible, either because of their native color or a mud layer, until they moved in quick bursts. The water was perfectly calm except for bubbles rising to the surface all around, I assume from decomposing plant matter releasing CO2. UNder the calm surface, the clouds of mud looked like crumpled silk, motionless until broken by an oar, when the silk vanished in a puff of smoke. It was quiet and I found myself thinking about the spirituality of the river, bringing flooding death and rotting end, at the same time the genesis of the green surrounding us, and enough rice to feed millions upon millions. It was hard to picture navy boats interdicting sampans running guns.

Eventually the channel became more of a puddle, and not even the low-draft canoes could continue much farther. The pilot began to pole us, then jumped out and pushed, finally inserting a peg and shoving on that for the last little bit. We stopped for lunch and to wait for the tide to come back, pooling a tip for our poor pilot, at $2.50 probably his day's wages over again, as we left.

Lunch was boring and touristy, but afterwards the restuarant let us borrow bikes to explore. I separated from the group and got lost on dirt paths. I dodged motorbikes, then, as the path got smaller, only dogs and chickens. The path had tiny, arching stone bridges over the canals. I passed graves and temples; open, airy houses strung with hammocks; and children playing in the dirt.

I don't know whether I've mentioned this before, but many of the graves here are above-ground. On the train through the countryside, passing rice paddies, the fields were like a flooded lake. Rising a few feet above the lake would be an island with the house, sorrounded by a club of vegetation. Farther out into the fields would be a smaller island with stone boxes and grave tablets. The farmers work on the family land in constant sight of their ancestors, a clear look at rural culture here. Land profiteering, buying and selling and moving for a profit, doesn't exist. You don't own the land in Vietnam, at least culturally, you're simply its caretaker for your children. Without land you're not only a vagrant, you've literally and figuratively lost sight of your ancestors. I think that's part of what kept the villagers in place through napalm and search and destroy teams and chemical defoliants.

Anyway, I got lost on the back roads, and kept my tour group waiting for 15 minutes while I found my way back. Thankfully one of the other passengers reminded the guide I was missing, or the guy would have left without me. The tide was back in, and our motor boat had come up to meet us. I felt bad for keeping people waiting, but if I hadn't I would have missed out on the back roads that only I saw, and ended up being my favorite part of the day. So I told them I was sorry, but I lied.

DMZ - Densely Militarized Zone

2008-01-09T03:18:00.000-05:00

The Vietnamese DMZ runs south of the Ben Hai River, the dividing line set up when the Geneva Convention of 1954 pulled out the French troops and provisionally established 2 Vietnams until a general election to be held in 1956. The election was never held, and villages that were once in the middle of Vietnam found themselves instead in the middle of the Vietnam war.

I went on a tour of the DMZ out of nearby Hue. You can get a motorcycle driver, often ARVN (South Vietnam's regular army soldiers) vets, to give you a personalized tour of the area, but I paid $10 for my group thing instead of $60 for a day on a motorcycle covering 300+ km.

The Ben Hai River was bridged, and split down the middle as North and South territory. Each side set up flagpoles, competing to build the tallest. The South kept trying to repaint their side of the bridge, and the North kept trying to match the color (there was only 1 Vietnam in their eyes). Each side set up batteries of loudspeakers, blaring their propaganda increasingly loudly to the other side. The US settled the competition in 1967 when an F5 sank the bridge into the river.

South of Ben Hai is the 5km thick stretch of the DMZ. It's rice paddies now, a flat plain hill-less to almost the horizon. During the war it was defoliated and shelled daily, one shell or bomb for every square meter of the 5km by 50km region. The villagers didn't run away, though, instead digging tunnels and hiding out. They knew that if they left, the VC (South Vietnamese communist guerrillas) would be unable to receive supplies from the NVA (North Vietnamese Army, the regulars). The Ho Chi Minh Trails originally ran straight through Vietnam, through this region, with local guides escorting cadres and troops and supplies from the North in the middle of the night. The US had indisputable control of Vietnam during the day, when there were only harrassing attacks, but at night they mostly had to hole up in their firebases, and that's when the Vietnamese took the offensive.

I learned why the US had troops and launched bombing raids in Laos and Cambodia. As the US tightened control of the DMZ, bombing it to uninhabitability and lining it with razor wire and minefields, the HCM Trails had to move around it, skirting out into Laos and then back into the country further South. The US special forces teams and bomber missions were there when they thought they'd detected the trails. Interestingly, while the US bombed the North, it never really sent troops there, as it would mean declaring war. I'm sure there were black ops, as in Laos and Cambodia, but it was small scale. But anyway, the US command, probably rightly, thought that if they could cut off the supply trails from the North they'd win the war. The McNamara Line was under construction, extending the razor wire and mine boundary to include motion sensors and fire bases, trying to isolate the South from the North. The project was never finished, though, and the trails never shut down. It's interesting to me, though, where VC supplies came from. Before 67 or 68, when Chhiense AK-47s and artillery were rolling in, they were scrounging for material, building home-made guns. They used tins from discarded US rations to make grenades and mines, unexploded shells were disassembled for explosives. The waste created by the US juggernaut was turned against it. It sounds to me like this was realized, and there was a 'bash, burn, and bury' policy instated for all waste, but that it wasn't followed very closely. I think this was a huge failure on the part of the US. The troops weren't convinced of the importance of not leaving Coke cans for the enemy, and so they left them one day only to have them thrown back filled with explosives and shrapnel the next. US intelligence should have, if they didn't, set up a display with captured VC weapons and bombs, showing the GIs exactly how what they discarded could be used to kill them.

We went to the Dakrong Bridge over the Han River, another one-time dividing line. South of the DMZ on Route 9, the Rockpile is one of the many hills emerging from the plains, this one particularly tall and named by the marines who saw it stripped of all vegetation. They set up an observation post on top, calling in air and artillery strikes and looking for activity. When I visited the vegetation was back. It's amazing how this country seems alive again. Dioxins from the Agent Orange are still in the ecosystem, and will be for ages. Unexploded mines and shells still kill people. Vets still walk around (or don't walk) crippled. But the countryside looks almost unscathed. I didn't see the craters the guide pointed out until I knew what I was looking for. They're deep and round, but covered in foliage, with clumps of bamboo growing out of the bottom. The amount of life in the tropics never ceases to amaze me, it's a creeping hand that, without constant human intervention, would clench the region into a tightly curled fist of jungle in just a matter of years.

We drove past the Lang Vay special forces base, invisible unless it's pointed out. There a group of Green Berets and the indigenous fighters they trained were assaulted by NVA regulars. It shocked the US at the time, especially troops in the region, because of the tactics. Bangalore Torpedoes took out the defensive wall, the advancing troops had tanks, and they sprayed the bunkers with flamethrowers. It was an incident where the US were fighting the tactics they had trained against, well-equipped warfare in open combat, but it came as a surprise. The special forces in Vietnam, as I hear about them, amaze me more and more. 14 of the 24 survived the assault. Many of the troops they were training were killed, but despite being outgunned and outnumbered they still inflicted tons of damage on their attackers and many managed to get away.

One last thing to talk about. When the Lang Vay troops escaped, they made it to nearby Khe Sanh. The Khe Sanh Combat Base is on a plateau overlooking Laos, the DMZ, and the central highlands. It had an airstrip capable of landing C130s, but didn't do that much in order to prevent their loss. The Dispatches book I read talks about it a lot, as the author was there during the US buildup. Before the Tet Offensive, Vietnamese troops used Khe Sanh as a diversion. US command, up to President Johnson, who had a relief model of Khe Sanh in his office, were afraid of a defeat there like the French suffered in Dien Bien Phu. They poured more and more troops in, up to 6000 at the height, and were ready with support from all over the country in case the surrounding troops turned the situation into an actual siege. Lots of US planes were lost in the region, shot down by Chinese-madee rockets or mortared just after landing on the airstrip. The author of Dispatches describes how, on landing, you had to immediately run for trenches and cover to avoid the shelling, and how the Seabees there spent most of their time repairing the strip and clearing the remains of destroyed aircraft from the runway.

Khe Sanh has a museum now. There's a guestbook that I read cover to cover (at least the English entries). Most of those entries were from US vets or their families, which were very moving, but alternated with general anti-American diatribes. I've met a lot of foreigners in my travels, and no one has ever gone off on America to me like they did in that book. I guess it's easier to pour it out on unresponding paper than to someone's face.

Hoi An to Hue

2008-01-09T02:55:00.000-05:00

Before leaving Hoi An I met a girl from Boston. We hung out in bars, the cheap ones with the $0.25 draft beers, and chatted a lot. It was nice talking to someone from Boston, but she was very career focused. It got annoying talking about jobs and school and real world things like taxes and insurance. Sheesh. I also find I'm getting really sick of running the 'just met while traveling in SE Asia' script. How long have you been traveling? Where are you from? Where have you been? How much longer do you have? Where's next? What do you do back home? I've met some great people and had interesting conversations, but the introductions wear me down, and I'm sick of talking about why I dislike China and why I'm no longer working at the UN. Actually, I don't like bringing up the UN at all. It always gets a "Really? Wow!" response, and it always feels like I'm bragging. The only time I don't mind is when someone asks me whether I'm teaching English in China. It's the same thing with school. If someone asks me where I went to school I always answer Boston, and only MIT if they follow up. But saying I work in China always leads to the next question.

I collected all of my clothing before leaving Hoi An. Of the 10 shirts, jacket, and pair of shoes I bought, the only thing I was really unhappy with was the tux shirt. I may do another one in China. I had a hard time explaining stud eyelets to them, the collar isn't as stiff as I'd like, and the fabric I picked sort of makes it look like a curtain. Since that last part was my fault, I paid for the thing, but I'll probably never wear it. I don't know whether I mentioned before, but for one of the more casual button-up shirts I ordered I picked a blue and orange striped fabric, and for some bizarre reason they made the stripes horizontal instead of vertical. I tried it on, and it looked ok. I had half a mind to make them re-do it, but I thought that maybe it'd grow on me, and all of my shirts are vertically striped, so I kept it.

I took a bus to Hue. I paid $4 for the 3 hour trip, which turned out to be almost twice as much as I could have paid.

I could talk a lot about Hue, but I'll keep it short. My hotel on the first night was a too-expensive $9. Its redeeming feature was the fact that it was on the 5th floor, a one floor walkup from the elevator to the 4th. Next to my room, one of 2 on the floor, was a ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to a skylight that opened up. At night I took a little bottle of Vodka Hanoi up and sat perched on the edge of the window, looking down on the city.

Hue was the site of some of the fiercest fighting in the war, which I didn't know until I left the city and started reading a book called Dispatches. It's the old imperial capital, and the ancient part of the city is surrounded by a citadel with towering, meters-thick walls that go on for 10km. During the Tet Offensive, NVA regulars took the city and flew their flag over the citadel for weeks before the US could retake it. It was street to street combat with incredible losses, said to be one marine for every meter captured.

In the battle, and in a previous Viet Minh-French battle a decade or more earlier, the city took heavy damage from air strikes and shelling. The Thai Hoa Palace, Vietnam's equivalent of the Forbidden City, is mostly leveled to a foundation covered in grass, despite the hesitance of the US military to target it. What's left has been restored and reworked, and out front flies a huge Vietnamese flag. It's interesting for me to compare Vietnam's palace with the Forbidden City. The two-story gate here looks tiny in comparison to Tiananmen. The courtyards in China in which the emperor could review his mandarins and troops would hold armies, while the courtyard here would fit into a soccer stadium. Instead of 27 steps, split by a huge tablet carved with dragons, leading up to the Chinese throne, there are 3 unornamented steps here. It's fairly obvious where the power in the region was during the imperial days.

Town of food and tailors

2008-01-01T06:20:00.000-05:00

My bus to Quy Nhon was a 3rd-world experience. There was no 1PM bus, as I'd been informed there was, and the 3PM bus seemed to be full. The lady at the ticket window advised me to stick around to see if a seat opened up, which I did until about 2:30, but by then everyone had arrived and claimed their tickets. My 1PM deperture became a 4PM departure, so I killed time in a nearby pagoda that was much more peaceful than the bus terminal.

My bus's driver thought he was Schumacher. He cut aggressive paths through curves, leaving passengers hanging on to the armrests. The 1A highway, Vietnam's major North-South route connection HCMC and Hanoi, is one lane each way and involves passing lumbering dumptrucks on blind curves on tortuous coastal mountain roads. In some spots the road is perfectly paved, in others the ground under the asphalt seems to have sunken away, leaving unmarked pits requiring evasive action. Pedestrians and motorbikes hurry across the road in the dark.

The one nice part of the trip came at night. It was raining and dark as we raced past a bay. There were lights out on the water that I at first thought must be a bridge, but as we got clser I realized they were boats with batteries of fluorescent lights hanging off the sides, presumably to draw squid to the surface. One island was surrounded by hundreds of these boats, an eery sort of fairy necklace or halo of ghost boats. They seemed other-worldly and beautiful in the distance, but I imagine that closer-in they would be cold, wet, and miserable.

In Quy Nhon the motorbike taxis chased the bus through the station gate. One driver hopped off his bike and kept trying to pull open the locked sliding door. Because the bus (actually a Sprinter) had power locks, they wouldn't open as he pulled on the handle. In disgust I skipped the motorbike taxi again, instead opting to hike my gear 4km up the beach through town.

It was a Friday night, and as I walked I was passed by gangs of teenagers on identical motorbikes. They cruised slowly up and down the streets, 2 or 3 to most bikes, but there was the occasional lone wolf who'd from time to time stand up on his scooter and rev the little 50cc motor for all it was worth. They were a ridiculous spectacle circling back and forth, especially as frustrated cars and trucks laid into their horns, trying to pass the band. Gaggle? The bikers would eventually ease into a single lane to let people pass, but they'd take their sweet damned time about it.

Quy Nhon was quiet. It's a beach town, but the weather wasn't any good during my two days there, so I checked out the temples and churches and spent hours wandering the streets. I hung out with some backpackers at the hostel- drinking beers on the beach or in the lobby. We also hired a boat to take us to an island in the bay. There's a statue of a Vietnamese hero pointing defiantly towards China, apparently telling the invaders to go back where they came from. There used to be an abandoned US tank that emerged from the surf at low tide, but unfortunately the city government recently had it moved. I tried to run along the beach, but the town's fishing industry ensured that there weren't too many litter-free stretches nearby the hostel.

I opted to take the train from Quy Nhon to Hoi An, in hopes of getting some sleep and maybe not dying. The trip is actually from Dieu Tri, 13km from Quy Nhon, to Danang, 30km from Hoi An. I got a seat rather than a sleeper, planning on relying on the tray table as a pillow and saving some money, but I got one of the 2 seats in the whole train car that didn't have a seat in front of it for a tray table. I didn't get much sleep.

It was raining in Danang when I arrived at 5:40AM, and in the last moments of darkness. As I walked out of the train station I overheard a couple of foreigners say that they were going to Hoi An, so I latched onto them. They turned out to have been traveling for 7 months, and had picked up a nifty trick. They had met a tour group bound for Hoi An while in the sleeper cars, and they planned to hitch a ride on the group's bus if there was room. There was, and the driver decided on the arbitrary price of 50,000 dong ($3), which I assume went straight into his pocket and not the tour company's account. I had been prepared to pay up to 100,000 for a motorcycle taxi, but that wold have been a cold and wet 30km. My other option was a public bus, but that required hiking to the Danang bus station and then from the Hoi An station into town. This tour group's bus was fast, cheap, and convenient, and by myself I never would have thought of it quickly enough to hitch a ride before they left.

I spent an hour wandering town and asking about hotel roooms, but it was still only 7AM and rooms were either too expensive or the staff didn't yet know whether there'd be check-outs. I'd resigned myself to paying $15 for the first night and moving the next day, so I went back to a cheaper hotel to reserve a room for the next day. When I got there the receptionist told me that they did in fact have one $5 dorm bed, which she didn't tell me about the first time. I snapped it up. I heard a lot of people asking about rooms to no avail, so it's fortunate I was there early.

I went to breakfast with some people from the dorm room. Dennis, a heavily pierced and tattooed preschool teacher from Holland, Takeo from Japan, whose English wasn't very good, and Sarah from Melbourne. Sarah turns out to be half Thai and half Iranian, a combination that apparently produces very beautiful people. We ate noodle soup and crispy rice pancakes at a morning market, surrounded by Vietnamese buying produce and meat. Then we got coffee at plastic tables under an umbrella by the river. It may have been the best cup of coffee of my life. They have a plastic bottle filled with concentrated black coffee goop which they dilute with hot water and serve. It sounds unappealing, but it was amazingly good.

We split up at that point, and I spent most of the morning going to tailors. My first stop was a cobbler that had Converse All Star high tops out front. The draw was the fact that the Converse logo was stitched by hand, which was completely awesome and ridiculous. I talked to the store owner, and for $13 I designed my own Converses. They're red, lined with a a red and white stripe pattern, with an identical tongue. I spent a while looking at fabrics before I picked one of the more modest tailors to copy a shirt I had with me- my pink and white striped Gap shirt that fits me so well. I had it done in pink, white linen, and white with blue and orange pinstripes. 3 shirts made to order for $30, in less than 24 hours. Today I went to get 4 more shirts made, at a different place with more fabric. I got another copy of the same shirt, this time actually making the waist a little narrower, plus 3 shirts with French cuffs that they fitted me for. I even had them dye cotton to match a color I requested for one of the shirts. The total for those 4 shirts was $48. Today I passed a corduroy jacket on the street that caught my eye. They'd run out of the fabric color they'd used in the display model, so I took the one off the rack and had them alter it for me. So, in total, 7 button-up shirts, 1 jacket, and 1 pair of shoes, all made to order and fitted, for $116.

I said that in addition to being full of tailors this town was foodie heaven, but I'll wait until I've had my cooking class to elaborate on that, especially as I'm sick of typing.

News from the soon-to-be-not-home front

2007-12-29T04:42:00.000-05:00

The below is from Imagethief's China blog this week. I'm glad I'm not there.

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.

Leaving town on the Reunifcation Express

2007-12-28T00:06:00.000-05:00

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.

Christmas in Saigon

2007-12-24T06:57:00.000-05:00

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.

Good Morning, Vietnam

2007-12-22T06:13:00.000-05:00

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.

Pandas and jackhammers

2007-12-03T02:37:00.001-05:00

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

2007-12-03T02:12:00.000-05:00

From James Fallows's (Atlantic Monthly writer) blog:

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.

Visitors from the land past the setting sun

2007-12-02T09:54:00.000-05:00

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.

Living the dream

2007-11-30T23:38:00.001-05:00

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.

It sure looks like the world is ending.

2007-11-16T00:25:00.000-05:00

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.

Rules of the Road, Beijing Style

2007-11-13T03:56:00.000-05:00

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.

Who IS that masked laowai?

2007-11-13T03:54:00.000-05:00

Mask Week is a not-a-protest being organized by some guys on the That's Beijing forums.

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').

Buy Prada, support the Motherland!

2007-11-12T08:10:00.000-05:00

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!"

I wonder whether I can hold my breath for 2 more months.

2007-11-07T08:29:00.000-05:00

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:

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.

I can't see the ground 14 floors down.

2007-11-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

This is from one of my favorite China bloggers, Imagethief:

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.

Bald.

2007-11-04T21:29:00.000-05:00

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.

The first pillar is filial piety.

2007-11-04T21:10:00.001-05:00

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.

Toothless sabercat.

2007-10-25T13:33:00.000-04:00

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.

In fact, the road to hell.

2007-10-24T11:54:00.000-04:00

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.

Evolutionary laws in language

2007-10-18T04:33:00.000-04:00

From a press release from MIT:

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

2007-10-18T04:07:00.000-04:00

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).

Counterfeit $2.64 bills

2007-10-18T03:57:00.000-04:00

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.

Extinguishing the light at the end of the tunnel

2007-10-16T01:57:00.000-04:00

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.

Catching up with life

2007-10-11T04:44:00.000-04:00

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.

Disappearing CIA agents and kicks to the head

2007-09-25T14:57:00.000-04:00

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.

High wattage

2007-09-25T10:21:00.000-04:00

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.

Meditation on a rainy Sunday

2007-09-25T06:19:00.000-04:00

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.

Landing in the land of Thailand

2007-09-24T08:48:00.000-04:00

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.

River crabs

2007-09-11T23:58:00.001-04:00

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:

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

2007-09-11T05:03:00.000-04:00

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.)

Convictions for Sale

2007-09-11T03:58:00.000-04:00

An article in the NYT and the IHT today discusses American investment in Chinese companies developing sophisticated surveillance equipment. Because the companies do their technology development in China they're exempt from US export controls, but they're still welcome to take funding from US investors and hedge funds. So, with a $110 million loan from the Citadel group, a Chinese company called China Security and Surveillance Technology is buying up all of its competitors, celebrating each acquisition with a banquet for potential acquisitions and public officials. From the article.

“When they come, they hear central government officials endorsing us, they hear bankers endorsing us or supporting us, it gives us credibility,” Mr. Yap said. “It’s a lot of drinking, it’s like a wedding banquet.”

While that's a very Chinese way of doing business, the idea of one company buying out all of its competition with money it receives from the US, all the while cozying up to the Chinese government and in effect bribing its remaining competitors, is sickening and scary. In fact the Minister of Public Security is now director of the company, meaning the number of degrees of separation between the US investors and the Chinese government is frighteningly small. China just passed a law restricting monopolies, and The China Daily recently condemned monopolies as bad for the nation, calling them the major obstacle in the promotion of social interests. I don't know the full story behind this company, but a government minister is in control, the company is consolidating the industry, the competition's bosses are being wined and dined, and unrestricted money is flowing in from Wall Street.

The equipment China Security and Surveillance Technology develops is ostensibly for public safety and crime reduction. Surveillance companies in China point out that the UK has a more sophisticated and extensive camera network already in place, and Manhattan is setting up a similar system, so they argue that we're in no location to criticize. Representative Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argues that surveillance in China is not the same as surveillance in the West, as China is a one-party state with little to check its actions. Mr. Lantos also plans to investigate “the cooperation of American companies in the Chinese police state.”

I don't like China's government, and I don't like its restrictions on its people, but I'm simply appalled by the idea of Americans directly supporting its worst characteristics. Institutions like the NYT are good at getting attention, though, for example when the UAE wanted to buy a controlling interest in our ports. Hopefully I'm not the only member of the American public who feels this way, and the attention will lead to support for Mr. Lantos and his investigation.

Lost In Translation - A movie about a boy and his dog.

2007-09-08T12:51:00.000-04:00

I was going through some of my flatmate's pirated DVDs and found some gems.

On the back of Munich they've included DVD extras for Skeleton Key, which I'd never heard of.

The Chinese synopsis of Cinderella Man is accurate, but the English is taken off of a review by some random movie goer

Photos from Scot

2007-09-08T12:48:00.000-04:00

Scot crashed on my couch for a couple of nights before flying back to the US to re-up his visa, eat Ana's, and spend September in Boston, the lucky dog. We took the opportunity to trade some of the photos we'd taken when I first got to Beijing. Here are some of his.

I've never wanted a briefcase before.

2007-09-07T03:58:00.000-04:00

I just had my second meeting in as many days. I spent 2 unproductive weeks trying to to line up meetings and make things happen. Now things have finally started falling into place, but maybe a bit faster than I'd like.

09/06

I had a meeting at the Beijing Pharma and Biotech Center, a biotech promotion group funded by Beijing. The meeting was at 2PM, and their office is about 25km from work, so I knew I had to leave at 1 at the latest. I had some preparation work to do, but I also had a morning meeting with a UN coworker to deal with.

The coworker was trying to get me to help rewrite our Country Service Framework, the description of our activities in China. I had helped on an earlier draft, and it turns out I inadvertently changed UN policy by combining our listed 'priority' and 'goal' in our development and aid framework language. It turns out that the priority was China's and the goal was our own, so for about a week our goals matched China's phrasing. They're similar; it's not like I was devoting the UN to a new socialist countryside or anything. Anyway, besides finding out I accidentally set policy, this conversation took forever. We realized after an hour of discussion that the only tasks I'd actually been given so far were 2 copy/paste operations. I wanted to leave, to get ready for my afternoon meeting, but our talk dragged on and on. She realized it, too, but we've got scheduling problems coming up and had to finish outlining the work. She left for a quick talk with our boss, I scrambled to organize my notes for my meeting, then we got back together to talk some more. I ended up with a real assignment, one involving a working brain and plenty of writing, but I spent my whole morning getting it.

I raced downstairs to a cab and across town, writing notes on the ride. I got out somewhere near the address I'd been given and walked across a medical school campus, complete with beautiful bridges and Chinese eaves, stopping to ask a security guard directions. I was a bit confused about where to turn, but I stumbled on the place, a much bigger office than I'd imagined. That part of town is much less vertical than others, and the office had a big parking lot of its own and an open field on the other side. It wasn't what I'd imagined.

So I sat down with 'Alice' from public affairs, who was translating, and Hong from research, and ended up talking to them for 3 hours. I knew the meeting was running long, but I didn't realize to what degree until I'd left. They gave me some decent information, but since it was mostly translated I didn't get much in the way of quotes. The most exciting part for me was 2 books they had, both reports in Chinese on the local industry and full of statistics. I photocopied the cover and title pages of the books so that I could find them later; they may be the only way to get some damn numbers around here. Hong was very interested in biotech elsewhere in the world, a topic on which I'm now fairly knowledgeable, so I gave them some stats I'd gathered and promised to email them a few reports, in addition to my own when it was done, then we took a picture and I left.

I took a bus to meet Scot nearby at Zhongguancun, the computer and electronics district, where he'd been shopping. I wandered around a bit to check out the huge cell phone and MP3 player selection, but only ended up buying some blank DVDs and an iPod wall charger ($3!). At this point I'm seriously considering these external hard drives with card readers that they have around here. I'd just buy the case and put my own laptop drive in it, I think, rather than trust whatever discount drive they're pushing. The kind of cases I like are light, have batteries built in so you can use them on the road without a wall plug, and have a slot to load a CF card. A setup like this, maybe $100 for a hard drive and $25 for the enclosure, would give me almost unrestricted space for digital pictures while I'm traveling. I just ordered a second 2GB compact flash card for Thailand, so the drive isn't urgent, but I'm seriously thinking about it for the future.

Afterward our getting our geek fix we met Matt and Ben, 2 MIT grads from my year who just moved to Beijing to start work. We had a hot pot dinner in Wudaokou, yet another Beijing district I hadn't seen before. Haidian and Wudaokou are where most of the universities are, so they have a young feeling. Microsoft, Google, and a lot of other tech companies are there, too. After dinner we had some beer on the street and chatted for a bit, then I said goodbye to Scot before his visa run back to the States and rushed off to catch the train home. I only made it part way before the system shut down for the night (I couldn't make a connecting train), so I had to take a cab part of the way.

I got home right before midnight, thankfully, or the elevator would have been off and I would have had to climb up to my apartment. I'm getting sick of the damn Cinderella routine.

09/07

I met Alessandro at the office at 8, and his driver took us to our meeting at the National Center for Biotech Development. Alessandro normally pays this Chinese guy to drive his wife around during the day and leave the car back at the office afterwards. It's cheaper than buying another car, a local guy gets a pretty sweet job, and his wife doesn't have to learn to drive, so I guess it's good all around.

\We had about 5 minutes with the center's director, then he left us with a staffer to answer the rest of our questions. The staffer was polite and nice, he just didn't really know what I want to find out or he doesn't want to tell me. Honestly, I think they don't know. One thing I want is a list of biotech companies in China. He thought they had such a thing in each individual department of their center, and it could maybe be compiled. These guys work in a building together, have a focus on biotech, and rely on their contacts to get anything done, but they don't have a master address book. It's not incompetence, I don't think, just this Chinese attitude wherein you don't coordinate between departments.

Then, as I'm writing this, I get an email from the staffer thanking us for the meeting and 'reminding' me that I have to submit my report to him for approval of any reference to their center before publication. I haven't responded yet, but if a guy in the US asked me for editorial approval after the fact I'd probably laugh at him. I doubt it'll be an issue; I don't think I got anything interesting enough to make it into the report.

A rooster this is not.

2007-09-04T00:35:00.000-04:00

It's interesting to me which sounds wake me up in the morning. At No. 6 it could be a passing truck on Memorial Dr., or the football coach yelling into his megaphone, or the grounds staff mowing a lawn. Maybe it was someone upstairs playing music too loudly, or a snowplow beeping in reverse as its blade scraped pavement. Sometimes it was my neighbor's alarm clock, screeching ceaselessly and incessantly for the past 23 minutes. Sometimes it was my own alarm clock, reminding me that if I hit snooze again I'd never make it to class. There was a panoply of sounds, each unpleasant in its own way.

Not so, China. There is but one morning reveille- the joyous sound of Progress. Construction wakes me every morning at ungodly hours, and on the bad days it doesn't stop until well after dark. There is no break for holidays, no rest on the sabbath, only endless building. It's not just up and out and bigger, in my building it involves gutting the place and redoing every wall, window, door, and floor.

I think the Chinese have admitted defeat. The truly rich have moved away from the construction, the poor are the ones who run it, and the middle classes have surrendered to and been subjugated by the dust and the jackhammers and the drills.

---

It's been pointed out that my practice article's paragraphs are too long (true); that there aren't enough quotes (that's because I didn't interview anyone); that I use acres, square miles, and kilometers at different points; and that the 30 year estimate is awfully precise to be used without an approximation word. I only went to MIT, and you want consistency of units and error bars? Picky.

I LIKE saying, "Mr. Xiaoyuan". I think the Economist gets the title thing right, and saying, "Mr. Bush" gives it that pleasant invective feel without being too obvious.

I also noticed that I assumed that Yu Xiaoyuan's surname was Xiaoyuan because that's how it was written on an English language site, but upon further thought I'm almost certain it's Yu. We have an interesting way of addressing that problem at the UN, or maybe it's in all business in China. We write the last name in all caps, so you sign your email LEI Nuo, or John SMITH. It's like that on my business card, too.

My defensiveness aside, thanks for comments from those who gave them, and feel free to make your own if you haven't.

Shared experiences.

2007-09-03T03:58:00.000-04:00

8/31

On Friday the UNIDO director general came through the office. Our Chinese office manager decided that this was an important event, and came by my office to make sure I'd stay until 6:30 to join the staff meeting and photo op. I agreed with them that that was a good idea, and wondered why they'd waited until a few hours beforehand to give me a heads up. Whatever, the only thing I would have done differently is wear a tie. The director seemed to be a nice guy, definitely a politician, but I hope my colleagues will excuse me if I wasn't too impressed by his rank. I looked up his CV out of curiosity, and what immediately struck me is how he went from assistant professor at U. Michigan Dearborn to Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone. That's some kind of a promotion.

I went home around 8 and relaxed for a bit, but I didn't have long before I was supposed to meet Linda and her boyfriend at a bar. They're leaving China soon, and I just wanted an excuse to go out. I didn't get around to eating dinner, usually a bad idea before hitting bars, but drinking coffee all day had messed with my appetite. I changed clothes, decided against the bike lights because I didn't want to carry them all evening, and set off, showing up at the Rickshaw a while before they did. While I was sitting alone in a lawn chair in the courtyard, drinking my expensive Tsingtao, I was invited to join a couple of girls and a guy at a table nearby.

Have I mentioned how much I love this phenomenon? In my experience, friends either have shared interests or shared experiences. These are the bonds that hold people together, and the best friends have plenty of both. In a place like China, expats all have a common shared experience before they even meet. If nothing else, you're guaranteed to be able to talk about China, and that makes starting conversations relatively easy. Of course talking about China with everyone gets old after a while, but the potential is there. Think about it- people in a NYC subway would never talk with strangers, but the instant there's a power outage, boom, there's a shared experience and people emerge from their bubbles. In line at the airport? I bet you're silent unless the line's brutally long or your flight's delayed, when the shared suffering gives you something in common. There are exceptions, but the rule works fairly well. It's one of the reasons I was such a fan of drinking shots of liquor in college (Hi, mom!) If you drink a beer nearby someone you don't know then it's a just couple of people having a beer, but inviting them to gather in a circle, coming up with a toast, grimacing about the burn of the liquor all produces a weird camaraderie that lingers beyond the act of drinking. And no, it's not just the additional intoxication brought on by the booze.

Anyway, so I join these 3 at their table. One's a heavily-tattooed, 30-something American guy living for years in Indonesia on his savings, claiming to spend $8 a month on rent. Another's a Canadian girl working for a security publication in Beijing with aspirations of holding public office back home in Toronto. The third's a Greek/Italian girl whose line of work I missed. Linda and her boyfriend come, other people join the original 3, and after a hanging out for a while we go our separate ways. I got the Greek girl's cellphone number, and I'll likely see her again, by coincidence if not on purpose. Such is the small world of the Beijing expat ghetto. This happened all evening- meeting and chatting with new people, being asked directions by strangers (and me accidently telling them the wrong street), being offered pot disguised as Marlboros by the Libyans who don't speak English, Chinese, or Spanish but welcome me at the open seat at their table. No thanks, I don't like the idea of Chinese jail, but it was nice of them to ask.

09/01-02

It was a quiet weekend. I didn't get in until 5AM after seeing Linda and her boyfriend off on Friday, and I didn't get up until 2:30 on Saturday. I watched a lot of movies, read some books, and did some research on freelance writing for science publications. The article below is one of my reject ideas, something I wanted to write about that didn't really fit into the science category. It feels strange not citing sources, but I guess I should try to get used to that. I'm also not very good at this style of writing, I don't think, so I'll try to get some more practice in before I start sending things off for real.

Writing headlines is harder than writing post titles.

2007-09-03T02:48:00.000-04:00

With the 2008 Olympics fast approaching, and China’s ambitiously green Beijing still invisible through the smog, the government is exploring radical options to ensure that the environment doesn’t spoil their pageant.

The city recently tested a partial ban on private cars, taking an estimated one million vehicles off the road for 4 days. Beijing’s streets were noticeably less gridlocked, but the success of the experiment in clearing the air is questionable. On August 20th, the final day of the ban, the city’s air pollution level remained unchanged. Yu Xiaoyuan, environmental director of the Beijing Olympic Organizing committee, declared the experiment a success: “If we had not had the traffic controls we could not have maintained this level because the temperature and humidity were very high. So we can see the restrictions worked.” Despite Mr. Xiaoyuan’s enthusiasm, at the time of writing, air quality data for August 20th was unavailable on China’s State Environmental Protection Administration website, the only day this year without statistics provided.

A ban on cars is only one of the drastic measures under consideration. China has ramped up its weather control program in order to prevent Beijing’s frequent summer downpours from disrupting the event, and perhaps to use nighttime showers to clear the air of dust and pollutants. The government has trained and recruited over 37,000 peasants to operate Mao-era artillery, firing exploding shells of silver iodide into clouds to accelerate their growth and induce rain. The weather controllers hope to intercept any cloud formations heading towards the city, dumping any rain safely out of sight of the Olympic dignitaries and press.

These experiments are nothing new- party bosses have long addressed symptoms of environmental problems rather than their cause.

Mao proposed in 1958 to connect the flood-prone Yangtze with the silt-choked Yellow River. In Mao’s vision, currently under construction, man-made channels stretch 1200 km to bring water to the parched North. However, environmentalists, including the State Environmental Protection Agency, doubt the plan’s potential. They propose water conservation as the solution to shortages in northern China, blaming artificially low water prices that encourage waste and make conservation technologies less economical. Environmentalists are also concerned that the plan could dry up the Yangtze River in 30 years.

The aridity of the North is a significant problem for China. Overgrazing, drought, and deforestation expand the Gobi desert by 950 square miles a year, and have led to sandstorms that reach Tokyo and are detectable even in the United States. China is responding by planting the Great Green Wall, a network of tree belts covering 9 million acres, to act as a windbreak and eventually to reclaim the desert. While hopes are high that this wall, the largest ecological project in history, will be a success, China continues to cut down 25 million trees a year for chopsticks alone.

The future aside, addressing the symptoms of environmental problems may be just the short-term fix that Olympic planners need. If a car ban and weather control are insufficient, China is reserving the option of pushing the big red button- shutting down all industry in Beijing. However, even bringing the city to a screeching halt may not work. For years Beijing has been coercing its heavy industry to relocate, but factories have settled nearby in the welcoming Hebei province, where summer wind conditions blow their pollution right back over Beijing.

This puts China’s government in the unenviable position of deciding between wielding their enormous influence and paralyzing the country’s industrial heartland or allowing Olympic athletes to arrive in Beijing wearing the activated charcoal masks issued by many teams. With the amount of international credibility China has staked on the games, it seems likely that some sort of shutdown will occur. What remains to be seen is how an increasingly liberalized Chinese market will react to command economy restrictions on a scale not used in years.

Dr. Lei Nuo, I presume.

2007-08-29T08:52:00.001-04:00

I was thinking about something my father said to me while we were jogging in Maine. He was exhorting me to get a PhD, and said that he was tired of correcting people who called him 'doctor', either covering their bases or simply assuming as much. Well, I'd been called doctor before on various research trips and at different meetings, but it's extremely widespread here. I've gotten two emails today alone with the Dr. title, and Alessandro's gotten one as well. I don't think that's a good enough reason to spend five years working on a PhD, but I can certainly imagine it becoming embarrassing or tiring after a while.

If my posts had fewer subjects it'd be easier to come up with clever titles.

2007-08-29T02:50:00.000-04:00

8/24

Night out at 5:19

I decided that I should go out to a bar. I was sick of sitting around watching TV and eager to try to meet people, and I'd seen on the thatsbeijing forum that a member was performing at a place nearby called 5:19, so I decided to check it out.

5:19 was quiet. There was the forum member playing guitar and singing rather competently, plus maybe 10 other people on the first floor. There were others upstairs on the roof, but I didn't know that yet. So I ordered a drink, much to my regret turning down the Bombay Sapphire in favor of the dramatically cheaper Gordon's Dry in my gin and tonic. I chatted with a few of the guys sitting around on some couches. They turned out to be Americans working in construction on the new US embassy, and were all pretty drunk. The conversation was much as you'd expect a chat with drunk construction workers to be, revolving around booze, women, and sports. I politely declined their invitation to go next door to dance with the Filipina girls, explaining with a straight face that I was waiting for a friend.

I chatted with the bartender and owner, Dave from Canada, who was running the business in his retirement. I asked him why he'd stayed in China after his decade-long contract with the mining company was up and after his wife divorced him, and he answered that he couldn't imagine readjusting to civilization.

I met the musician, who I'd previously chatted with in the online forum, and we went upstairs to the roof to hang out with some others. There he introduced me to an older guy from Montana working on the communications infrastructure for the Olympics.

I took the opportunity to ask how he felt about potential protests, which was apparently a red-button issue. It ended up a 3-hour, heated debate about freedoms, respect, and the 'greatest stage ever set on earth'. I thought for a while he was drunk, but it later turned out he was a recovering alcoholic and he'd been drinking tonic water. Anyway, we had radically different points of view. In the young and naive corner, I supported protest and free speech and the ability and obligation of individuals to change the world. He had a much more jaded attitude about the potential for change, and he also believed that the Olympics shouldn't be interrupted by dissent. His arguments weren't very good, but one that held up for me was that public protest would inevitably disrupt some poor athlete's proudest moment. He also had this weird belief that Olympics were about hope for the Chinese people, and that protesting would somehow betray that hope. I personally think that most Chinese see the Olympics more as an opportunity to make a quick buck by whatever means they can than they do a source of hope or pride. Anyway, he argued on the grounds that protesting against injustices in China during thr Olympics was somehow taking away hope from the Chinese people, which was just weird. By this point the bar had closed, which I didn't think they did in Beijing, and we were standing outside the front door debating. He finally misquoted Ben Franklin at me, saying, "He who sacrifices hope for security gets neither." (What?) When of course it's, "He who sacrifices LIBERTY for security deserves neither." So when I pointed his error out to him, trying hard not to jump up and down in glee that he made my point for me, we agreed to disagree and I went home for the night. I didn't meet anyone my age and I didn't meet any girls, but at least I got out of the house.

8/25

On Saturday I met my language exchange partner for the second time, this time at a Starbucks in Guomao halfway between our places. We haven't been very diligent about studying, to say the least. As much as I loathe Starbucks, it was nice to overpay for a giant coffee; I had no idea how much I'd miss the drink. So we chatted for a few hours, asking questions and taking notes. I managed to drop my pocket PC with my electronic dictionary off of the table and down 2 flights of stairs, but it survived intact, probably thanks to the heavy metal case that I've hated lugging around.

Bike repairs (Or, "No, no. Night time is when I fill the hole with water")

It was getting dark when I got back to the subway station where I'd left my bike. I had already put on my helmet and flashing lights and started riding down the street when I realized that my rear tire was flat. Fortunately, China has bicycle repair 'shops' on just about every corner They're really just 3-wheeled carts with supplies and a grease-covered older guy sitting on a stool, but they work. I remembered that only a moment ago I'd seen one across the street from where my bike was parked. Then, as I got off my bike and turned around, something clicked- those bastards flattened my tire. Furious, but trying to act cool, I walked my bike over to the cart and asked to use his pump, hoping they'd just let the air out. So I pumped up my tube and stood around for a minute poking at the tire. It was leaking, so I asked the guy how much it'd be to change the tube. He wanted 40RMB, but I talked him down to 25RMB ($3.50 for parts and labor), plus I get to keep the dead tube, which I'll throw away to prevent him from pawning it off on someone who doesn't know a new one from a patch job. When he took the tire off I checked it for anything along the inside which could re-puncture the tube. Assuming he's competent, he should have done that himself if he didn't know how the tube was damaged. He had a water bowl, so I pumped the tube up and slowly ran the length of it through the water until I found the leak, an invisible line of holes along the seam. It could have been a slightly split seam or it could have been someone with a needle poking my tire a few times. Who knows, but after he put my wheel back on I waited for a few minutes to make sure all was kosher before I paid him and left. I don't know if he actually did kill my tube, but everyone here I've mentioned the incident to thinks he did.

8/27-28

On Monday and Tuesday I got little done at work, or so it always seems to feel. I'm calling and emailing a bunch of people in the government and research institutions, trying to get information and set up meetings. I finally managed to schedule one with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science on Wednesday, but other than that I mostly got passed around from person to person and played phone and email tag.

Alessandro, one of UNIDO's permanent staff, has been really helpful about suggesting names and sending emails out through his account with his name on them, so that's been encouraging. We also have fun chats during the day on everything from his part-time job at the opera during college, where he chatted with Pavarotti and had to carry around large, 'dead' sopranos on stage; to articles in the Economist; to hiking and climbing. He's much older than I am, has a wife and a kid, but it's cool to have someone at work to interact with on a social level.

This week I was also tasked with writing the copy for the new UNIDO China brochure. I don't mind doing some of this kind of work for the people here; it makes me feel like I'm pulling my weight and it keeps them happy.

Exercise, plus what do do with my time

The evenings have been slow and long since my 1 month membership for yoga expired. I would have re-upped it, but I'll leave for Thailand before the full month and it seemed expensive to waste that time. As a result I'm going home earlier and still not doing much when I get there. I've been thinking about getting back into martial arts, so I've been shopping around. I found a well-regarded jiu jitsu school down in SOHO, about 15 minutes from work by bike, which I'll probably check out, but I realized that since I'm in China I should probably take advantage of it by learning something local. I've been asking around about taiji and kung fu teachers, but they're elusive. Most of the best teachers seem to be old guys who teach in parks, just not in the parks near me. They also charge lesson by lesson, payable in cash, and aren't cheap. So I'm looking, but I don't know if it's a practical idea.

The other fitness thing I've recently stumbled on is this yoga retreat outside of the city. It's not cheap, but neither is it too expensive- on the order of $100 for a weekend with food, transportation, accommodation, and classes included. It sounds fun, but the most amazing part is the setting; one location is an old Buddhist temple, another has property around a crumbling stretch of the Great Wall. It seems great, assuming I can handle that big a dose of hippie-ness in a weekend.

8/29

My first work meeting with a 'local expert'

After much debate I ended up wearing my suit to my meeting at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. I seriously wonder what people think when they see me walking around wearing a jacket, tie, and eyebrow piercing. I sort of like the contradiction, and I guess I'll settle for it if I can't dye my hair fun colors. No one in China dresses up; it's like casual Friday meets the Caribbean, with short-sleeve button up shirts all around for the elite businessmen and officials and track pants and polo shirts for the rest. It's sort of a shame that a country with such a cool sartorial tradition has settled on the lowest common denominator of Western dress. Even during the Cultural Revolution, although the clothing was uniform, it was unique and interesting.

I got up at 6:30 to make it to my meeting by 9, biking to work to collect my notes and drop off my computer, then catching a cab to Haidian, some 15km away, during rush hour. I got to read papers and jot notes during the ride through the morning traffic, so I understand the appeal of chauffeurs for people with money and stressful jobs. The taxi driver didn't know exactly where to go, but we managed to navigate there successfully, marking the occasion as the first time the Chinese GPS software on my pocket PC has been useful, and even then it wasn't while hooked up to the GPS. The campus of the institute, along with the rest of China, was gutted by construction, so I hiked in dress shoes over piles of dirt and under tin roofs until I found the right building.

The man I was meeting with, a Prof. Huang, had come downstairs to meet me when I called him to tell him I was nearby. We shook hands and headed up to his office. After the business card swap ritual we got down to business, but as an aside, how are you supposed to take the card you're accepting with 2 hands while simultaneously offer your own the same way? I assume you take turns, but who offers first? The actual trade ended up a weird tangle, but I don't think he cared. He spent a couple of years at Cornell, studying abroad as everyone here seems to do, so was probably lower key about some things than he could have been.

Prof. Huang is the head of biotech research at the institute, a scientist, not a suit. He was wearing a tie, however, so I just took my jacket off and the clothing thing worked out after all. I started by telling him about my research and my goals, and then we dove right into my list of questions. Unfortunately this whole exchange was in English. His wasn't great, but he knew the relevant vocabulary, so it went better than it would have if I'd tried to come up with Chinese for 'cultivars' or 'herbicide'. I ended up with some good notes, a powerpoint presentation with stats, and an introduction to a guy at the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy whose papers I've read, so all in all it was productive.

When I got back to work I took my taxi receipts to the administrative assistant to figure out how to get reimbursed. She asked me to write my name and the purpose of the taxi trip on the receipt. "Just write, 'meeting'," she said. So I did, she added up the total for the 2 receipts on her calculator, asked if I could break a hundred, and handed me cash on the spot. How cool is that? In a country filled with red tape, in an organization known for bureaucracy, I got my taxi receipts refunded from petty cash out of a drawer in the assistant's desk.

The Bermuda Triangle moved south.

2007-08-22T01:13:00.001-04:00

So I don't follow Venezuela news very closely, just the latest craziness from Chavez.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AFP): President Hugo Chavez Sunday announced that Venezuela's official time will be put ahead by half an hour starting January 1, and its first-ever offshore oil rig will start pumping before the year is out.

I wondered what the justification would be. Maybe something about conforming to time zones set up by capitalist, imperialist countries while Venezuela straddled two of them? Maybe something about a compromise, single time zone for the whole country to help bring it together?

"Its about the metabolic effect, where the human brain is conditioned by sunlight," Chavez said in a rambling, seven hour discussion on his radio show "Alo, Presidente"

When I was there the television appearances would last a few hours, which was bad enough as it interrupted any TV you might want to watch that evening, but SEVEN HOURS? That's a whole workday. He's extended his own regime indefinitely and consolidated all federal power into his hands in the name of democracy. How does the guy have time to govern a country that he single-handedly controls? I feel like the power grabbing can be explained by a hunger for influence that I can sympathize with, and seems more normal, less diseased, than the thought process that makes him believe his countrymen want to listen to him talk for 7 hours in a day. He realizes that his biggest supporters are the country's poorest citizens and probably have to, you know, work, right? But I guess with the new 6-hour maximum workday they'll have more time to spend listening to him and less to waste on diversifying and strengthening the national economy in preparation for the inevitable oil decline.

What do duck, military history, and bars have in common?

2007-08-22T00:50:00.000-04:00

08/16

Thursday I went to yoga, went home and showered, then biked downtown to meet up with Scot and Catlin for dinner. An girl from MIT came along, and a guy from Harvard met us halfway through our meal, which was my first Peking duck in Peking. It was good, but not as spectacular as I'd hoped. I'll have to try a couple more places. The rest of the meal was pretty standard, but since it was more expensive than the places I tend to eat there was less (maybe no?) MSG and less oil. So it was fun, but sort of sad, as it was my goodbye to Catlin before she went back home. So stay in touch, Catlin.

08/17

Friday night I stayed in. I thought about going to see BT perform at a club literally across the street from my apartment, but I decided against going alone and paying more than I could afford, and I don't listen to his stuff much these days, anyway. So I watched DVDs. I should have studied Chinese, but I'm weak-willed. My (rather pathetic) excuse has been that I don't have a desk lamp and that it's too hard on my eyes to do it in the poor overhead lighting at night. Well, I'm buying a desk lamp today.

08/18

Jack, my flatmate's boyfriend who's sharing the apartment with me right now while Xie Fan is in Hong Kong dealing with a death in his family, invited me to go to the Temple of Heaven. I was tempted to tag along and get some Chinese practice in, but I'm trying to save these big, dramatic touristy things for when Adri or Daria (or anyone else that buys a ticket, hint to you all) come. That, plus the fact that it's the PLA's 80th anniversary and I was told I could see China's new J-10 fighter at the Military History Museum (they spoke lies) led me to turn him down and go to the museum on my own.

On my way to the subway I finally found the military surplus store I was looking for. They have some stuff there, but not the hat I'm looking for or exactly the right jacket. I really want to find navy or gray Cultural-Revolution gear.

I also took some street pictures as I biked. One illustrates the superfluous crossing guards (8 at an intersection, albeit a very large intersection, 3 visible in the photo.) Another is a sea of umbrellas on a sunny day like I discussed when I talked about combat walking. Some are construction photos, particularly of the cool new CCTV towers that are being built at an angle, eventually to be connected on top with an 'L' shape.

In the subway I noticed that there was a battery of monitors over the platform. I thought that it was a weird place for security monitors, but on closer inspection I realized that they showed every subway train door and were meant to be visible to the train conductor so he could control door closing. I thought it was neat.

I posted pictures from the museum, but other than that there's not much to say. It was absolutely crazy packed with people. I didn't understand enough of what was written on most of the signs to learn much Chinese military history, but the exhibits went back to the very beginning of the nationalist movement to the 2007 PLA anniversary with a tank simulator, updated uniforms (which look much like the US's, to much scandal), and lots of video displays that can only be described as recruiting material. Another observation is that the gift shop is on the 4th floor, way out of the way. Not only do you not have to go through it on the way out, but to get there you have to climb an awful lot of stairs to get from the 3rd to 4th floor. It was jammed with people anyway, so I guess it's not a problem.

On my way home I got a message from Scot, so we met up at the subway stop for dinner and beer. After that we started walking north up to Sanlitun, near where I work and live, to meet an MIT guy and to go to some bars. The hike is a few miles, but we broke it up with a short side-trip to Wal-Mart. I've been meaning to make the pilgrimage since I'd arrived, and I finally got my chance. It's a lot like what you'd expect from a Wal-Mart, only in Chinese. The one glaring difference I noticed was that checkout lines were short and really densely packed. We bought a durian (big spiky fruit with the strongest smell you can imagine) and cheated by having the employees cut it up for us, then continued on our hike north. I had the durian in my backpack sealed in 3 plastic bags, but it was still pretty strong.

We met Ben, the MIT guy who was in China teaching this summer, in Sanlitun, but the bars weren't really very full at 10pm. We went to Butterfly, one of the few bars I've found in Beijing that I like, mostly for its prices, and had a couple of drinks. We asked if we could eat our durian, and were surprised when they said yes. So we cracked it out. The flavor wasn't as strong as you'd expect from the smell, and was actually pleasant, but the texture was strange and soft. The waiters came by almost immediately and asked us to put it away.

We checked out Alfa, which was a fairly quiet lounge with high prices, and Nanjie, which wasn't really hopping either, but had outdoor seating next to a field and looked like it might be fun some other time. Bar Blue, winner of best in Beijing last year, seemed classy, but also wasn't packed and was way more than I wanted to pay.

So we sat at outdoor tables at Pure Girl Bar and played a drinking game with chopsticks while we people-watched. Besides lots of couples making out there were a few drunk drivers coming down the alley. One guy crashed his motorcycle about 10 feet from us. I jumped up and ran over with a couple of other people while I watched others jump up and run away- that made me feel good. The driver was a black guy with bleached hair, a sleeveless shirt, lots of bling, sunglasses on after midnight, and of course no helmet. He was ok, but he took the entire side panel off of his Honda rice rocket and destroyed one of the bar's signs. After making sure he was unhurt and wasn't about to ride off I sat back down and watched him pick at his bike and try to gather some dignity. I'd say he's an ambassador's son. I guess that because Chinese companies are loathe to hire blacks and as a result there aren't many around. The racism means that most of the blacks here, based on my observations, are with embassies or are students. Students can't buy motorcycles in China and don't tend to look that wealthy, and I guess that African embassy workers might not be that rich, either.

I went home at 3 or so, enjoyed climbing the 14 flights to the apartment, and went to sleep.

Chinese tiger

2007-08-20T04:25:00.000-04:00

I read an article on the Economist and went to the Chinese Military History museum (pics), both of which were sort of scary.

From the Economist article:

"On paper at least, China's gains have been impressive. Even into the 1990s China had little more than a conscript army of ill-educated peasants using equipment based largely on obsolete Soviet designs of the 1950s and outdated cold-war (or even guerrilla-war) doctrine. Now the emphasis has shifted from ground troops to the navy and air force, which would spearhead any attack on Taiwan. China has bought 12 Russian Kilo-class diesel attack submarines. The newest of these are equipped with supersonic Sizzler cruise missiles that America's carriers, many analysts believe, would find hard to stop."

If someone hits an aircraft carrier with a cruise missile a LOT of people are going to die. I mean thousands of people. The last time someone killed that many Americans at once was 9/11, and I'm pretty sure it was World War II before that.

To protect its carriers he US relies largely on ships like the Arleigh-Burke class guided-missile destroyer I visited last year. These have missiles and cannons like the white-bubble phalanx CIWS (close-in weapons system) to shoot down incoming cruise missiles. The CIWS on the Arleigh-Burkes fire 4500 rounds a minute and has all sorts of fancy, automated tracking that make it theoretically capable of destroying an incoming Sizzler, but according to wikipedia the phalanx system has never been credited with an interception. Also don't forget that China recently managed to surface one of its diesel attack subs within a few miles of the USS Kitty Hawk without being detected beforehand.

China's also probably becoming a nuclear threat:

During the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995-96, America could be reasonably sure that, even if war did break out (few seriously thought it would), it could cope with any threat from China's nuclear arsenal. China's handful of strategic missiles capable of hitting mainland America were based in silos, whose positions the Americans most probably knew. Launch preparations would take so long that the Americans would have plenty of time to knock them out. China has been working hard to remedy this. It is deploying six road-mobile , solid-fuelled (which means quick to launch) intercontinental DF-31s and is believed to be developing DF-31As with a longer range that could hit anywhere in America (see map below), as well as submarine-launched (so more concealable) JL-2s that could threaten much of America too.

Ok, so it's not so likely that the US and China will duke it out in a conventional war or a nuclear exchange. But how would the US react if China shot down some of our satellites or jammed our internet? What will we do when we catch China stealing military secrets off of our unsecure networks? A military strike isn't proportional, but I don't know that there's any other action that would work as a deterrent. I think it's really important that China be reliant on the rest of the world, because the more self-sufficient it gets the better able it would be to shut down its borders or weather trade sanctions and embargoes. Here's what the Economist says about asymmetric warfare:

The PLA knows its weaknesses. It has few illusions that China can compete head-on with the Americans militarily. The Soviet Union's determination to do so is widely seen in China as the cause of its collapse. Instead China emphasises weaponry and doctrine that could be used to defeat a far more powerful enemy using “asymmetric capabilities”.

The idea is to exploit America's perceived weak points such as its dependence on satellites and information networks. China's successful (if messy and diplomatically damaging) destruction in January of one of its own ageing satellites with a rocket was clearly intended as a demonstration of such power. Some analysts believe Chinese people with state backing have been trying to hack into Pentagon computers. Richard Lawless, a Pentagon official, recently said China had developed a “very sophisticated” ability to attack American computer and internet systems.

I seriously hope US spies have gotten better. Given this reading I also feel slightly better about Japan changing its constitution to allow a formal military. While China might be the new giant it'll be nice to have some allies in the area.

I'm productive, I swear.

2007-08-16T03:43:00.000-04:00

I don't talk about work much, partly because I feel like I haven't gotten much done. I haven't really, but yesterday I sent out a draft of my global biotech trends paper to my bosses and they seem to be happy with my progress so far. I figured I'd post a couple of the papers I've written here in case anyone is interested.

Global Trends in Biotechnology - This is sort of an outline of what my final report will look like. I have all sorts of data to add to the descriptions here, and I'm probably going to spend much of my remaining time here collecting more.

Memo to UNIDO China staff about how biotech fits into the UNIDO mandate - This might be a more interesting read. I try to explain science to economists and accountants, so maybe you'll learn a thing or two about ethanol or GM crops or something.

Today I formulated a list of questions to send to the Ministry of Science and Technology. The idea is that I'll be able to set up a meeting with an official and get a bunch of statistics and data from them, or at least backing to conduct a survey of Chinese biotech firms.

Beach weekend

2007-08-16T03:25:00.000-04:00

Pictures from the weekend.

08/10

I left work at 1 to meet up with Xie Fan and a bunch of his friends to drive out to Nandaihe for a weekend at the beach. Nandaihe is really close to Shanhaiguan, where I went to the Great Wall, but I wanted to go on this trip with Chinese speakers as a way to get some practice in. I think that worked to some extent, but I'm a much more boring person when I'm a bit shy about the language and can't be funny and witty.

I took notes of key words while there (thanks, Nate), thinking I'd remember what I'd cared about so I could write when I get back. I do remember, but I mostly don't care anymore. So I'm just going to move through some of them in a list and get this recorded.

-The car I rode in was a BMW 523, which doesn't exist outside of China. It's apparently slightly longer than some other BMW 5 series. I know his car was manufactured in China, but I'm a little bit disappointed if that's what a $60,000 car is like in the US. It was comfortable, and it seemed fast enough, but it wasn't actually very luxurious or how I'd choose to spend that much money.

-People on the highway are psychotic. Passing happens on all sides, people weave in and out of traffic, cars shoot by in the breakdown lane. From the People's Daily:

"It was a little ironic as the overall number of vehicles in China is far smaller than that in Western countries, while the death rate from road accidents is much higher," said an academic surnamed Wang who was quoted in the China Youth Daily.

"According to our research, the death toll and death rate per 10,000 automobiles here is eight times more than that in America," he said.

The most important factor was still the negligence of drivers. Statistics showed that last year some 78.5 per cent of the deaths, about 86,000 people, were caused by improper driving.

Last week when we went hiking I saw a truck (lorry, not pickup) in reverse on the highway, backing up to get onto the exit it had missed. Craziness.

-I got a sample of little emperor treatment of children. When I got into the car the driver's daughter was asleep in the passenger seat, and when she stirred she decided to recline the seat as far as it would go and push it all the way back. This kid is short enough that her feet don't touch the ground, but she has her seat pressed into the knees of the guy next to me. When she woke up we listened to the same song on repeat for the last hour of the drive, while she sang along (shouted, really), out of key. Well, key implies there was a melody, but I think she mostly hit the same note.

When we arrived I had my most expensive dinner so far in China. It was ok, but definitely not as good as Pure Lotus and I was sort of bummed about the total being so high. It was really only $11, but I hadn't planned on my weekend getting so expensive so fast. I tried jellyfish, which was disgusting and expensive, so I don't think I'll do that again. The mouth feel is just too strange and it's very bland.

After dinner we walked along the beach. There's sort of a carnival setup, with ATVs for rent to drive on the sand, minibikes and golfcarts to drive along the streets, amusement park games, etc. There were a couple of hot air balloons that went up in the distance, but they were lashed to the ground, so I'm not sure how much fun that would have been. I didn't get a picture of the cool lighthouse out in the haze, but here's a link. There was a group of performers that carried people around in a circle in sedan chairs, shaking them up and down along with the music played by a band. Apparently it's a traditional form of conveyance in weddings, here done for fun. There were also a bunch of candles in the shape of a heart over by a wall on the beach. Amazingly they stayed lit in the wind, and the people in our group stood around the fire and drank beer for a bit while making fun of the heart's absent creator.

08/11

We had lunch, which was cheaper than the night before, but still expensive, then went to the beach. The beach was crowded and heavily commercialized. We only paid to rent umbrellas and chairs, but people around us paid for motorboat rides or to have their pictures taken and such. I would have just sat in the sand and the sun, but I didn't want to be the one person opting out of paying their share of the rental, so the weekend expenses went up again. I waded out into the ocean a bit, but it was too crowded and I'm not a big swimmer, so I went back and sat down until we rented a volleyball (the only reasonably priced beach expense I saw there) and played for a bit. My only other comment about the place is the huge number of speedos worn. At least the Chinese don't have much body hair, but most of the wearers were overweight.

Oh, and I keep seeing people with these circular marks on their backs, so I asked one of the girls I was with what they were. She said that they're marks from a traditional Chinese medicine treatment in which glass cups are placed on your back and then paper is burnt in them. So the marks are burns, apparently good for what ails you. The cups suck out the bad stuff. Or something.

After the beach we went to a fish market in town. I told the organizer of this evening's cookout back at the guesthouse that I didn't want any seafood, that I wasn't used to the local stuff and was afraid I'd get sick if I kept eating it. So I spent a few RMB and bought some steamed buns and said I'd eat some of the vegetables they bought. I actually just didn't want to pony up the cash for another big, expensive dinner, but I think everyone bought my excuse.

Dinner was huge and lasted for a few hours as the guesthouse staff kept bringing out more dishes made from the food we'd bought for them to prepare. I had a bunch of the vegetables. Some were good, one was just strange: it was cabbage in a suanla (sour-spicy) sauce that seemed to have been flavored with baijiu, Chinese rice liquor. I tried it, but the floral. fruity baijiu flavor is off-putting. To be polite (and because I was hungry) I also tried some of the seafood that was forced on me. Some of the fish was great, the oysters were good, the shrimp weren't.

08/12

We had a simple lunch avoiding seafood, which was nice. Again, not cheap, but I was going to make it through the weekend with a few RMB left in my wallet after all. We ate at a place along a much nicer beach than the first. There were fewer people, fewer hawkers, and bigger waves. There were also these wooden boardwalks that led out to platforms maybe 40 feet into the water, with a sort of deck and seating. Some men stood on them and fished, I sat on the railing and let the waves hitting the platform splash me. As a wave came into shore it'd shoot up through the slats between the planks one-by-one, which for some reason didn't get old.

After some beach time we headed home, entertained (as we'd been all weekend while driving) by that same damn song on repeat. When the girl fell asleep and the dad/driver changed the track I breathed a huge sigh of relief, but then I realized that the CD was 18 tracks with different arrangements of the same 2 songs. God.

It was a good trip, if expensive.

God said, 'I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?'

2007-08-10T01:06:00.000-04:00

It's been another relatively quiet week so far. Work, yoga, movies, and books, mostly.

08/08

I met Qin Yang, a girl I'd been talking with online, for a language exchange session. I'd never done the whole language exchange thing, but I thought it might be a good way to meet people and to practice some Chinese.

She lives way out on the Batong light rail line, and it took about an hour to get there from my office. That might be annoying to do on a regular basis, but this was my first time in the area. It's sort of the suburbs. There are still huge apartment complexes and it feels urban, there's just maybe more green and definitely more mosquitos.

We wandered around the campus of her college a bit. It's a gated area, maybe a quarter of the size of MIT, but complete with its own shopping and restaurants. Despite the fact that the college is on summer vacation right now there were a lot of students studying in the classrooms we walked by, so we ended up sitting in a pagoda/gazebo thing and chatting there. We read articles from magazines, mostly. I happened to have an Economist from the office and she brought a sort of Chinese Newsweek magazine. Her English is substantially better than my Chinese, and I struggled through my reading whereas it didn't take her very long to figure out the article she looked at. After the reading we chatted some and got dinner, switching between English and Chinese pretty freely.

I guess it was a good experience; I certainly had fun. I just don't know whether this is an efficient way to learn a language. I suppose it's better than what I've been doing.

Fan Xie (my apartment mate) reminded me of an invitation to go to the beach with him and some of his friends this weekend. I hesitated. I'm not big on beaches, and I always worry about spending money. Then I realized that I was being silly, and that it'd be stupid to pass up an opportunity to hang out and get some real Chinese practice in. It seems like work, though, and it was tempting to sit around and read or watch movies and not exert myself to study Chinese. I almost did it this weekend.

I spend a lot of my time here tired. I think it's partly heat, partly pollution, partly sitting at a computer all day, and partly having to think to do things like buy lunch. I just need to commit to suffering through some more learning and it'll get easier, I'm sure.

Fan Xie had told me earlier that a friend of his was staying at the apartment for a while, and as part of the discussion of who was coming on the beach trip he mentioned that his boyfriend would be there. "Oh, by the way, I'm gay." It was funny how off-hand it was. I guess he told me because it was that or hide the fact that they were sleeping together. Whatever. Doesn't bother me, of course, and I'd sort of guessed, but it was a funny exchange.

A Remembrance of Things Past, and almost as long.

2007-08-07T00:31:00.000-04:00

Sorry for these epic, week-spanning posts. I'll try to write more regularly and in smaller chunks.

7/31?

Beijing weather

I think I wrote this on Tuesday, but I didn't get around to posting it. Of course it's raining again as I write now.

"I'm in the middle of the most dramatic storm I've ever seen, and that includes tennis ball-sized hail hitting Oak Ridge. Lighting flashes every couple of seconds and thunder rolls and crashes ceaselessly. The wind is whistling in the windows, and I didn't think to close the one opened a crack to dry laundry until the clothes on the line had been completely soaked through. The rain hitting the ground 14 floors down sounds like a river.

Strange city, Beijing. Tomorrow will be hazy and hot, I bet."

We had several nights of miserable weather. I was caught out in it one evening, coming back from a window shopping/exploring trip. I was completely soaked through, biking through puddles several inches deep. The water that's on the ground is filthy, of course, but the stuff falling from the sky leaves crusty deposits when it dries, so it can't be much better.

8/1?

Shopping in Xidan

I think I went window shopping on Wednesday. I went to an area called Xidan, on the southwest corner of downtown whereas I live somewhat northeast of the downtown area. The trek over probably took an hour. I had to get to the subway, take it and a transfer for 30 minutes, and then make my way to the surface.

The first mall I went to was maybe 7 levels tall, almost all underground. It seemed to sell mostly clothing, but there were some stalls selling mixed junk and an electronics store that was filled with empty shelves. I bought some blank DVDs by the disk to backup my hard drive and keep some of the many movies I've been downloading, but that was it. I asked the price on a few items, like a thin black tie that had a small gold crown at the tip, but the $8 quote scared me off. I was starving, so I found the food court. I ate at a pretty standard 'homestyle' restaurant, picking through my stir-fried chicken and cucumber as I looked down at the ice skating rink on the level below. There were little kids skating around in helmets under the eyes of staffers, slightly older kids being coached individually on hockey skills and figure skating, and a couple of young couples just skating in circles and holding hands. I remember having more observations at the time, but the only thing that sticks with me is the idea that the figure skating girls and the hockey boy were all awfully young to be training in a sport so specifically. After eating I wandered the mall a bit more, running across a Nightmare Before Christmas store. I checked it out, and it was actually an entire store selling Nightmare movie paraphernalia. Strange that a market for that exists, but sorta cool.

I went to a department store next, which was just as horrible as the one I visited when I bought my harmonica (which is, by the way, sitting inactive because of a faulty 7 hole draw. I guess that's what I get for spending $5 on a harmonica). Everything was shiny, new, and probably more expensive than it'd be in the US. I exited quickly.

The next place I stopped was probably the mall I'd heard about. It was jam-packed with people and vendors on the ground floor, and seemed more like a market than an American-style mall. I found a piercing stall and tried to find a shorter barbell for my eyebrow, but the owner didn't have any the right size. He was, however, piercing a Chinese guy's ear without wearing gloves or probably taking much else in the way of precautions. Oh, I had washed my cellphone in my pants earlier in the week, disabling it, so I had been using my Fan Xie's old phone with my SIM card. The battery was about to die and he'd lost the charger, so that was one of my missions for the day. I found the charger I needed and got the store down to a near-reasonable price, then caved and bought the damn thing for $4 when I could have gotten it for $3. I have limited patience for that kind of haggling, but I guess I should just accept that I'm poor, too, and it's a fact of life here and be ruthless. I climbed the stairs to some of the upper levels where they focused on clothes. I found a tie identical to the one I'd seen before for half the price. As I walked away the lady called after me that she'd give it to me for $3, which was tempting. The only things I was really looking for were military surplus clothing and come counterfeit Converses, but the mall started closing before I found what I wanted. I'll go back later, I'm sure, but not before checking out some markets closer to home.

It was drizzling and dark when I left the mall, and by the time I got out of the subway it was storming. Fortunately I'd anticipated this and brought my waterproof camping bag in addition to my backpack, so all of the electronics and my wallet went into it and then in the backpack before I biked through the rain and puddles, fortunately helmeted and lighted. I had to stop at the office to pick up my laptop before going home. I wrapped grocery bags around the laptop case and stuck it in my backpack, then squished my way back out into the black and wet.

8/3

On Friday went to yoga in the middle of the day so that I'd be able to go out soon after work. That meant arriving at the office early enough that no one commented when I left for the class. After work I went home and changed, killed a bit of time, then headed out to Mao Livehouse for the Ramones tribute. I misjudged the time it'd take to ride a bus at 6PM on a Friday (which was an excruciating experience I'll try not to repeat), and so didn't really have a chance to get dinner beforehand as I'd planned. So I bought some Oreos and ate them instead, hoping the sugar would get me through.

Ramones tribute

There was a small crowd outside of the venue. I paid my 40RMB cover, a bit of a gamble, and wandered in. The interior is simple. There's a bar and some tables, a foosball setup, plus a staircase that leads to an upstairs lounge area. When I say lounge I mean there were a couple of couches; this place was not fancy. I went into the room with the stage, which was beginning to fill up, and hung around to people watch. Most of the crowd were fairly normal looking Chinese my age. There were a few Chinese wearing the punk uniform, and there were a handful of Westerners punked out to varying degrees. My only gesture to the evening was to wear my red boots instead of sneakers, a decision that I'd be grateful for later.

The first band was ok, but the crowd wasn't really into it. The second band was ok, too, but the place had been filling up and was starting to get excited. Both of these bands seemed to be suffering from superfluous members, like a keyboardist or an extra guitarist.

The third band, The K, was great, and by then the crowd was wired. So when the band started into a fast ska riff the already hopping (literally) crowd up front started moshing. I was right in the middle of it, and as I've mentioned before I'm bigger than most around me. The only people there who were larger were other Westerners, so as we bounced off of each other and shoving people around I gave better than I got. The previous band, incidentally, had thrown bananas out into the crowd, some of which had remained on the floor, adding an interesting variation to the mosh pit. One thing that's always amazed me in my limited experience with wailing on people at shows is how strong a camaraderie it produces. Afterwards you chat with the neighbors who you'd been standing silently next to before you started shoving them into each other. If someone falls there are instantly hands reaching to pull them up and people circle around them for protection. Someone lost a cellphone and one of the moshers spent the next 10 minutes going person to person until he found its owner. There's a code and there's etiquette and what some people might see as violence seems to create a weird community.

(Incidentally, while looking for more info on The K, I found a post online on a guy's blog that said: "One sign that the band was a hit was that a lot of crazy moshing was going on in the middle of the hall near the stage, as drunken young men, both Chinese and foreign, got caught up in a whirlpool of energy that had collected there." This amuses me because I think there might have been one drunk guy in the whole group. Ah well, I guess. The same guy expressed his doubts that the Ramones were punk, so what does he know. Also? The person who was probably moshing most enthusiastically was a five-foot-nothing asian girl. Drunken young men my ass.)

The fourth band wasn't really punk and I didn't care for them at all, so I wandered out to the bar section and had a drink, giving my exploding eardrums a quick break. I went back in time to see the 5th band, SKO, start. They were obviously popular; the crowd was out of control, but I didn't like them as much. I actually bailed about halfway through their set, before the headliners started, after maybe 3 hours at the show. I'd soaked my shirt through with sweat, my lungs were exploding, and my ears hurt. It took me a while to realize that the lung thing was probably caused by dancing in a room filled with smoke. So I started walking, trying to find a bus stop that was still in service that had a night line running closer to my place. I finally gave up and caught a cab so that I'd make it back before the elevators shut down for the evening, which I did, but only after running from the cab and even then only barely.

8/4
Slow day. Woke up late, went to my neighborhood Korean place to feed my spicy beef soup addiction. Went home, watched movies, and read Ilium. I was planning on going to sleep around 10 to wake up early on Sunday, but because of my book that ended up being closer to 2.

8/5

I woke up after a few hours, at 5:30, to meet people to go hiking. We were meeting at work at 7, but I wanted to get breakfast and pack some lunch before then, so I budgeted extra time. As I'd been told, but hadn't really seen before, in the mornings a lot of restaurants convert to breakfast places.

Fighting for change

I found one nearby and ordered a basket of dumplings and a bowl of rice porridge, plus one the fried dough sticks I saw people around me eating but hadn't tried. I did this without a menu, because they didn't have one, and all in Chinese. That's relevant because after I ordered another basket of dumplings to pack for my lunch and asked for the bill the waitress silently held up fingers. Because I'm foolish I haven't yet learned the Chinese method of finger counting and using hands to indicate numbers, which is radically different from our own and involves fists and making crosses and such. So, again in Chinese, I ask her to say the number. I think she says 7RMB, so I give her a 10. Then she says that it isn't enough, and says 12. I assume I'd misheard before because she'd muttered, and I give her 22 to make the change easier. 12 is a bit steep, but whatever. She walks off, and I sit there waiting. I see her doing other things, smiling oddly, not bringing me my change, so I call her and say that I've given her 22, not 12. She still doesn't bring any change, so I grab my bag and walk to the front of the restaurant where she's hanging out with other employees. I say that I'd given her 22RMB and I ask for the difference. She reaches into a box and gives me 2RMB, smiling at me. I'm standing with the employees, and I loudly list everything I'd just eaten, saying that it definitely wasn't 20RMB in total. The little old lady making dumplings, probably the manager, repeats my order, saying that adds up to 9.5 and tells the waitress to give me my change. I think to myself that 9.5 is almost exactly what I'd expected to pay, and hold out my hand to the waitress. She still doesn't do anything, smiling this whole time, and after a moment one of the other waitresses reaches into the box and gives me the rest of my money.

Ok. If I were a fresh off the boat newbie speaking loudly with a phrasebook I can see trying to rip me off for a few yuan. But I ordered in Chinese without a menu, so I'm not clueless and I'm not new, and when she tried to scam me I confronted her. Wouldn't the correct response be, "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you gave me 12, my mistake?" Even then she would have been up 2.5RMB over the actual cost of my meal and I would have walked away happy at getting my change. But instead she just gave me her stupid grin as I made a scene and eventually got shot down by her boss and lost her 'tip'. I'm not quite sure how losing face works, but I'm hoping getting confronted and defeated by a laowai in front of your coworkers counts. Idiot.

I got to work and Alessandro, a UNIDO employee who'd just come back from a month's leave in Italy, was late. Hedda came, and she brought along another Norwegian from a different UN group. We went up to the office and had coffee as we waited, which was more funny than anything else, as Alessandro had asked me on Saturday whether the early meeting time would mean I was uninterested. Alessandro showed up 30 minutes later and we went down to meet him. He was driving his Land Cruiser, and his black lab Bookie was in the back, so we loaded up and headed out.

We drove maybe 40 miles out of Beijing to a place called Miyun. The Great Wall runs nearby, but we were just there to hike along the river. It was nice to get out of the city and listen to running water and insects instead of cars. The rocks looked raw and young, and vegetation grew green over everything. The haze here smelled like plants instead of city, and the effect of mist on mountains is much more interesting than it is on buildings.

Pictures of the walk.. I also updated the construction section on the pics page. I'll try to figure out a way to date my most recent changes so the new pictures can be found at a glance.

Meditation, movies, and meandering. Ok, so meandering's a stretch.

2007-07-30T02:05:00.000-04:00

This weekend was quiet.

7/26
On Thursday I went out to dinner with Fan Xie (Bobby, my flatmate, but I think Bobby is a silly name and am going to try to stop using it) and a couple of his friends. The friends showed up at our apartment before he did, by about 45 minutes, and we couldn't reach Fan on his cell. So I met these people, a husband and wife that arrived separately, and chatted for a while. The husband works in advertisement directing TV spots and the wife does PR. As far as I can tell they're the classic upwardly-mobile young Beijingers. They drive a car (Nissan Bluebird) and 'own' a house (which I think means that they have a 99 year lease from the Chinese government, which is as close as you can get here), they're educated and in their mid-20s, and they seem pretty liberal. We went out to eat at a hot pot place nearby, then to meet a couple of their other friends at the Black Sun near my house. The evening was good, despite my $3 bottle of Guinness that was mostly disappointing. It was my first night out with all Chinese speakers, so I struggled to keep up with the language, often failing. I need to be doing a lot more of that or I'm never going to get any good.

7/27
After work I went to yoga and watched DVDs. It was a pretty quiet night. I accomplished my goal of going to yoga 5 times this week.

7/28

Pictures of today's wanderings, plus last week at Panjiayuan. I also started 2 new albums, one for random photos I take and the other documenting Beijing construction. I'll try to keep adding to them.

Workers started tearing down a wall right outside my window at about 7AM. I managed to stay in bed until about 12, but I'm sure those hours of sleep were completely unproductive, as every few minutes they'd start cutting through some rebar or sledge-hammering something solid and my whole bed would shake.

It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was a little bit clearer than normal, so I decided to go sightseeing. Because things close pretty early I booked it out the door as soon as I could. I took a couple of buses over to Dongcheng and my first stop, the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower (Gulou and Zhonglou). They're maybe 50m tall, and in the past were used to tell time. While I was there the guys in the Drum Tower played the drums to mark the hour, but other than the fact that they're cool old buildings with decent views of the hutong area around them there wasn't much to see.

After the towers I got porridge and pot stickers at a small restaurant nearby. I didn't realize how close the towers were to another place I'd been already. Mentally linking these different, distinct areas I'd visited was neat; I like it when cities start to click into place. I walked to the next place I was going to visit, on the way passing Mao Livehouse. I'd never heard of it, but the exterior was rusty bolts and sheet metal and white stenciled writing, so I noted the name and looked it up when I got home. It turns out it's a new bar/music venue that's well regarded. They're doing a Ramones tribute on Friday by local bands that I think I'll try to go to.

My next stop was going to be the Lama Temple, but they closed soon and they wouldn't give me a student discount, so I walked across the street to the Imperial College (Guozijian) and its attached Confucian temple (Kong Miao). The Imperial College was China's premier university for about 600 years, and is where the emperor would give an annual address to the elites on Confucian values. The Confucian temple houses a forest of 190 stela on which are carved the 13 classics of Confucianism. The main hall was closed for construction, which doesn't surprise me.

When the tourist sites closed I found a bus that took me straight home from the Imperial College. I was going to try to meet up with Scot and Catlin, but the logistics didn't work out and I ended up hanging out and watching more movies.

7/29

Reading, yoga, and movies. It was a relaxing weekend, but next week I'm going to a bar even if I have to go alone.

Less than objective cultural observations

2007-07-29T02:02:00.000-04:00

I've been making a list of things I wanted to write about at some point, and I suppose there's no better option than to just go through it.

Superfluous employees

I've been amazed at some of the jobs that people hold in China. Besides the full-time driver, guard, and cleaning person at my work, most of whom put in a couple of hours a day and then chat and check their stock prices for hours, China seems to be about half populated with people holding make-work jobs.

Some examples:

-The crossing guards at every corner of every major intersection that are universally ignored as they wave their red flags around.

-The guy who's paid to stand at the bus stop and wave to the bus drivers telling them that there are people to get on their particular bus, despite the fact that all buses stop at all of their stops without exception.

-Almost every non-family business has a guard or six. Grocery stores, cell phone shops, book stores, the seediest of apartment buildings, large restaurants, etc. Here's a free suggestion to the grocery stores: make the guards man a register and do something about your interminable checkout lines.

-Most apartment buildings, including Scot and Catlin's and my own, which are far from elegant, have elevator attendants. My elevator attendant is a nice girl, but she works 12 hour days 6 days a week and doesn't really seem to do much besides take up space in the elevator. We can't push the button for our own floor? I understand that maybe the idea is to increase elevator efficiency, but maybe they should just start using the usually-deactivated second elevator instead.

-There are the 4 person construction crews where 3 guys are watching 1 work, but I guess those are pretty universal. They manage to do it here even without unions, though- a tribute to Chinese innovation.

-Waiters don't give you a menu and walk away to let you think, they stand there while you look through it and wait for you to order. That's taken me a while to get used to; I had been rushing to order because I felt bad about them standing, pad and pencil in hand, waiting for me to slowly parse the Chinese. You can say, "Oh, let me look at it first and come back", but that only buys you maybe 30 seconds. I've gotten over feeling bad, though; if they weren't waiting for me they'd be standing in a clump with several other idle waiters.

-That's another thing, there are these groups of people just standing around. The businesses simply over-employ people. People are cheap, and I guess having lots of employees makes you look successful or up-scale. I went to one mall, admittedly selling only designer brands, that had service desks absolutely everywhere, and three, count them three, dedicated, traditionally clothed, beautiful greeter/bowers at every entrance. You know how cosmetics sections in the states have a lot of people standing and waiting to sell you expensive soap? Now imagine each one of them having a partner.

Things I do in Beijing that I didn't do in the US

I read one of those "You know you're..." lists for expats in Beijing, and it of course listed a number of things that were applicable. Some examples:

-Going on umbrella bashing missions on sunny days. Women here are very particular about their skin. I'm not sure if it's the traditional view that pale is beautiful or a more modern skin disease phobia, but you regularly see women with full skin protection. They'll ride around on bikes wearing face shields; reflective, skin-tight arm covers, wide brimmed hats, and long pants. I'll try to get a picture at some point, because it's really a sight. Anyway, the umbrellas come out en masse on sunny days, often for both men and women, and people seem oblivious to the fact that they're wielding them like weapons as they make their way through a packed sidewalk. I was originally polite, but I've started just batting them away when they come near my face, and because of my 'imposing' western height that's pretty often.

-On the similar lines, there's what I've termed Combat Walking, also referred to as 'sidewalks at rush hour'. The comment on the list I read was, "In NYC people are seen as objects best avoided, in Beijing they're seen as objects best nudged out of the way." Also, I've concluded that if you want to hold your place in line (mob) you'd better be prepared to throw some elbows, and I mean that literally. Well, not literally hurl elbows, but project them forcefully.

-I glare at people a lot now. Street hawkers don't bug you as much if you're scowling. I've gotta get better at switching it off when I realize that the person staring at me is an attractive girl, maybe crack a smile or wink or something charming and disarming. As it is I've been automatically locking on my death stare before my brain processes.

-Along similar lines, I now often ignore people who talk to me without the slightest bit of remorse. "Herro, sir! Rickshaw sir!" or, "Herro, sir! Happy hour!" don't get any response as I walk on and stare straight ahead. One 'happy hour' guy actually jumped in front of me, for which he got my now-practised Combat Walking shoulder. On the other hand if someone random on the street smiles, waves, and says hello I'll return the greeting (in Chinese). But I'll also keep walking deliberately and quickly to avoid becoming someone's English practice dummy. I've started lying about my english ability. I like using, "Il ne sprechen pas russke?" with a southern accent.

-Drinking at lunchtime. I just have a bottle of beer, but I swear that some of these guys with stacks of bottles are going to leave the restaurant and get into their cabs for the rest of their shift.

Some of these sound like criticisms of China, and I guess some of them are. I go into these things trying to be open minded and non-judgmental, but on some counts I don't see how they can possibly be 'good' cultural traits. I don't really mind Combat Walking, it's just different and deserved comment, I thought. And I guess I don't have a better option than these make-work jobs. They're the result of a free market which I believe in, so barring any radical changes in Chinese industry or population restructuring they're here to stay and probably belong. I understand that people want to practice English, and that doesn't bother me, I just don't want to be their victim. The grasping hawkers, on the other hand, seriously piss me off. People who respond to me in English when I speak to them in Chinese also bother me, but to a much lesser extent. They're both connected to me being white, but the militancy and sense of entitlement from the hawkers gets to me.

I have more cultural quirks to write about, including some rather complimentary observations, but I'll save them for another post.

The laowai riding the road bike in a shirt, tie, and helmet probably looks weird.

2007-07-25T23:11:00.000-04:00

7/25
So I committed to going bike shopping after work. I'd been trying to find a second-hand store, but the best I'd managed was a few battered old bikes at the new places. I went to one store that sold all high-end mountain bikes, either imports of international brands or counterfeits, but I decided to keep looking. Electric bikes are definitely the thing, and it seems that not pedaling them at all and sitting side-saddle is the accepted mode. Bonus points if you talk on your cell phone or smoke a cigarette.

I was really going to buy a Beijing clunker, a nice, new, $25 Flying Pigeon or Red Flag cruiser bike, but after testing a couple I couldn't get used to sitting back that high and the position of my hands; it was too easy to oversteer and I felt off balance. The Flying Pigeon seemed indestructible; instead of cables for the brakes it had solid metal bars. The frame was big, thick steel tubing that weighed a ton. Gears? Who needs them? I tried a 'Giant' (Taiwanese ripoff of the US brand) cruiser that was ok for 450RMB ($55) new, and I was about to pick that one up when I saw the Battle.

I'll post pictures soon, but it's great. I got it new, plus a 'free' lock (apparently they took pity on my bargaining skills) for $70. It's a 15 speed road bike (with indexed gears!), probably much nicer than my beloved, antique Raleigh I left in Boston. The Battle isn't super light, but it handles well and feels like what I think a bike should. My gears have been leaving the locals in the dust. I don't think the mopeds 3-wheeled motorcycle taxis like being passed by a biker. I don't have a helmet yet, which is making me uncomfortable in the crazy traffic, and I didn't bring my lights with me, which made me just as invisible as every other biker on the road on the ride home. Tomorrow I'll go to the 'Giant' outlet near my work; they have a wider selection of helmets than the place I went today, which had exactly one. Not one model, one helmet. I'm also going to buy a second lock, and maybe keep my bike on my floor of the building rather than the bike lot outside.

In which literary style is abandoned with the idea that a bad post is better than none

2007-07-24T03:19:00.000-04:00

7/16
I played poker at the Syrian embassy. We played some of the more complicated games I can imagine, one of which had a full 10 rounds of betting, involved buying cards to replace those in your hand, and was high-low. We were playing limit games, which made bluffing impractical, so I tried to stick to hands with high probabilities of winning.

The embassy itself was pretty nice. China has a deal in which they give a reciprocal amount of property to countries for their embassies, so if Syria gives China an acre they get that in return. We played in the dining hall, where there were crystal chandeliers and leather couches and lots of marble.

Besides a couple of my coworkers, one of whom knew the Syrian ambassador's son and so was our in, there were a couple of Syrian embassy people (including the son), a coworker's mom, and another coworker's boyfriend. I only made about 20% profit on my buy in (which amounts to $14.40 on $12), partly due to one disastrous hand which I played perfectly, if I do say so myself, except for the losing bit. I think I'll end up going back soon.

7/17-7/19
I finally got more project guidance from Sergio in Vienna, so after meeting with Mr. Ajmal, the UNIDO representative here, I started to work on that. It's a very big project, I think. I've gone from not having anything to do to having so much on my plate I don't know where to begin. I made a list of things I know I want to look at and began with items on it at random. Hopefully that'll give me some momentum.

7/20
Linda's last day at the UNIDO office, so now I'm the youngest person here.

I was adopted for the evening by Rose, now the only person in the office close to my age, and her roommates. I met them at their place, about a 5 minute walk door to door from mine, and we caught a cab.

We went to Rickshaw for dinner, which is a hub of expats. They serve wings and quesadillas and draft beer, all for a hefty markup. It was fun, but I was glad when we left for the next place, which happened to be the other Black Sun.

This Black sun is much more of a dive bar, which is cool, but the gin and tonic I had was weak and not very good. The place was packed, also all with expats, but instead of seats and tables everyone was standing around mingling, and the group spilled out into the street, which was more interesting. It was a going away party for one of Rose's friends, but I wasn't the only random there. My cocktail conversations get more interesting after a few drinks. After my gin and tonic I started going to the convenience store next door to buy bottles of beer. At a bar, a western-sized bottle of Tsingtao might be 10-15RMB, but at the convenience stores a 600mL bottle is usually 2-3. My first beer was 3, but after that I told the shop owner that I'd be back for many more and would only be paying 2 a bottle, which actually worked. I found out he was charging other people 4 a bottle, so I became the beer runner.

I've gotten a little better at flirting with people in bars, but I missed years of practice in college that I now have to make up for.

7/21
Chinese beer gives me a nasty hangover. God knows what they put in the stuff, or fail to filter out.

I went out with my apartment mate to a late lunch at a Korean place nearby. I originally objected to the Korean idea, as I'd done barbecue for lunch twice during the week, but it turned out to be fantastic. We ordered fried rice and stir-fried potato strips with peppers, but the highlight of the meal was a spicy beef soup that I never would have ordered on my own, not being much of a soup person. The broth was rich and the beef was very tender, and the whole thing was so spicy that the back of my head started sweating. In China you commonly mix rice into your bowl of soup, which worked perfectly in this case to tame some of the capsaicin. I think I'll go back to this place frequently, especially as it gets colder. The restaurant itself is as simple as they get, there's free barley tea, it's nearby, and they have the soup.

After lunch I bought my first pirated DVDs on the street- Letters From Iwo Jima and a Zhang Yimou film, The Road Home. I spent the rest of the day watching them and finishing reading Confederacy of Dunces. I planned on going to sleep early and waking up to be a tourist on Sunday.

7/22
I woke up early, but when I looked out the window it was too hazy to go sightseeing, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. Unfortunately, since the tourist site and my lead on used bikes were close together that also meant delaying my bike purchase.

I woke up later and went to Panjiayuan, Beijing's huge open-air market selling just about everything antiqueish and craftsy that you can imagine. I didn't buy anything, just wandered for a couple of hours. I'll probably go back at some point later in the year and buy myself a statue or some paintings; they had some similar to paintings I'd liked at 798.

More about 798

2007-07-18T04:19:00.000-04:00

(From an email to my brother. This is more here as a journal entry for me than for anyone else, but feel free to read about it)

Well, I'm not sure where the line to non-representational is. There was a gallery of one guy trying to paint the universe. They were brightly-colored splatter paintings and looked to me sort of like clouds with angels (sort of wispy shapes, not actual angel shapes) falling out of them. I didn't think they were particularly interesting.

The one installation piece I saw, besides this one gallery that had a bunch of props from a performance artist set up as a bedroom and such, sort of reminded me of the Dan Flavin exhibit at the LACMA. It was big, empty rooms with sort of metal arches of diminishing size (looks like mmmmm with the first peak tall and the last peak short) arranged in different ways. Some of them were really simple, like a pair of arches in the corner.

Well, I guess depending on what's included in 'installation pieces' there was some other stuff. There was a hole in the floor of one of the galleries, maybe a 6 foot square in one corner of the room, that was about 4 feet deep and had old, rusty metal tracks running in parallel. There were a couple of big mirrors set up to reflect each other and the tracks on the ground in geometrical patterns. The artist's exhibit was all about reflections, big Warholesque screens on lexan or some kind of plastic sheet. Somewhere in each piece there was a line drawn, and across that line was a reflection of the other side. Anyway, I thought that it was neat that the artist had seen the hole and incorporated it into the exhibit in a way that matched up with the pieces on the wall.

There were a TON of propaganda and Cultural Revolution era images. I expected a lot, but almost every exhibit was influenced by them. I'm going to try to go to an army surplus store soon to buy myself a new hat and a jacket. Only the construction workers wear them, I guess they either haven't become trendy here yet or the trend's already over.

Beijing: city of art, restaurants, and copycat bars

2007-07-17T23:32:00.001-04:00

7/13

After work I went to a restaurant called Pure Lotus with Matt, Ru Shen, and Spring. This place is run by Buddhist Monks, and is pretty much out of control. There's no meat or alcohol on the menu, which mainly consists of items like "Red crane perches next to pond". Presentation and service are a big deal; the experience is supposed to be tranquil and encourage meditation. Some of the serving bowls are carved out of big chunks of wood, and our chopsticks seemed to be made by hand out of bamboo. The food was excellent. We got seaweed wrapped rolls of walnut, cucumber, mango, and sauce which combined to produce a vaguely Japanese, but unique, flavor. We got a clay pot of tofu prepared in different ways to imitate meat. The pot was over a flame, and the food simmered in hot oils and spices at the table while we ate. There were steamed vegetables in a light sauce wrapped in lotus leaf, curry vegetables, radish and some unidentifiable cucumber-like vegetable, barley stuffed dumplings, pumpkin soup, pickled apples, lichee served over dry ice, and fruit/vegetable juice. We'd heard that this place was expensive, and as we ordered we avoided the highest-priced items, and we got out for about 75RMB each, or maybe $10. It was by far the most expensive meal I've had in China, but also the best. Anyone who comes to visit me is going to be used as an excuse to go back. Here are some pictures.

After dinner we went to the Black Sun bar, across the street from my apartment, to see some of Spring's friends play music, but it turns out that there are two different Black Sun bars in Beijing. "Where are you?" "Black Sun. You?" "Black Sun." "Wait, where?" So we went next door to Souks, which has a Middle Eastern theme. They have shisha pipes, like almost every bar in Beijing following what seems to be a new trend, but they fit in here. We chatted with a random guy from MIT working on his PhD in economics at Tsinghua, and with the Reuter's reporters, who bought us a round of shots.

7/14
I went to the 798 art district on Saturday. It's a sort of neighborhood of art galleries all housed in an old munitions factory complex. The place has a dilapidated look, but they've been renovating some of the interiors to art-chic standards. One of the galleries still had the old, broken concrete floor covered in mud, though, so it's pretty varied. There's definitely no air conditioning, and the glass was shattered in some of skylight windows above the paintings in one gallery. I only made it to maybe 50% of the galleries, and they seem to rotate exhibits every month or so, so I'll have to keep going back.

There were a number of paintings I really liked.

There's a third, similar one I can't find copies of anywhere, but it's by a different artist. It's a fishtank on an ornate table, with aircraft carriers floating in it, a sub underwater, and one broken carrier that had sunken to the bottom. There was a squad of bombers flying overhead, bombing the table, fishtank, and the boats.

There were a lot of others in other styles that were good, but something about the real/toy military hardware in the living room appealed to me... I remember dragging my model battleships over the carpet at the Dayton Rd. house and building Lego armadas to duke it out.

This guy at the Pata gallery, Liu Chunhai, had some cool stuff. He's influenced a lot by old propaganda posters. I like the painting of the girl holding her jacket. She's wearing the communist uniform, but underneath it she's got a sort of bright hoodie with a tree, sort of a rebellion against conformity. When I read Wild Swans it struck me how significant some small bit of individuality, like brightly colored hair ties, was to young people growing up in a collectivist society, and this painting made me thing about that. The colors aren't very good on any of these online images, of course. I wish I had enough money to actually buy art... Some of this work is really neat, but I don't have $5k to drop on a big oil painting.

I must have left my invading army at home.

2007-07-11T03:56:00.001-04:00

Ok, if I don't try to catch up now I'm never going to be able to.

Here are some pictures from Shanhaiguan and from Ghost Street last week.

7/8

So The Johnson City people and I woke up at 7 to head out to Laolongtou, Old Dragon Head, where the Great Wall comes out of the sea. We talked to a cab driver before realizing that we could pay half as much if we took the sanlunche, the 3-wheeled motorcycle taxis with covered seating areas in the back. The drive was interesting; we tried to get the two cycles to race and they obliged us to some extent. There's a strange coexistence of bicycles, pedestrians, motorcycles, cars, and buses on the roads in China. In the US I feel like car drivers get very frustrated by bicyclists on the road. Maybe because here they're more ubiquitous that doesn't seem to happen. Horns are constantly honking, but I don't think I've seen anyone get angry, besides that one cab driver who took us to Sanlitun. There's a sort of acceptance of delays and illogical, selfish behavior from those around you. It's actually a fairly sane way of approaching chaos.

The sanlunche dropped us off at the beach, rolling right up to the sand, and we started wandering. The wall runs right next to the beach for a ways before cutting out to shore, and we could see the famous pagoda-like guard tower in the distance. The beach was filled with people, tourists (all Chinese) and hawkers. There were motorboat rides, horse rides, God knows what else. There were also people fishing, clamming, and gathering seawood. Because the quantities involved were so small I assume they were for personal use. We had one tout start following us around. It's hard not to acknowledge that I speak some Chinese, so when people follow me I avoid eye contact and act frosty, giving one-word answers as much as possible. He never did really leave, despite my asking him to, so he probably wasted an hour and a half following us as we walked. I split up from the others (and the tout) and climbed up the embankment to the wooded area next to the wall to wander around a bit. It was barb-wired; the other side of the wall is a museum type site and they don't want people going over the top, despite the fact that I could have climbed from a couple of spots where the dirt came right up to the edge of the wall.

We met up with Scot and Catlin and decided to try to go around the wall as much as we could, but on the advice of Lonely Planet we declined to pay the $7 entrance fee to the museum. So we had breakfast of baozi, a lamb intestine soup that we mostly picked around, and soy milk. We decided to head from there to Jiao Shan, the first peak that the wall climbs, maybe 5 kilometers from town. So we started to ask cab drivers about the fare. Everyone's running a scam in China. The first cab driver wanted to sell us tickets in advance, and put me on the phone with his buddy. I guess the buddy was supposed to convince me that this was on the level, that he really worked with the official ticket sellers, but he was speaking to me in Russian, so it's hard to know. So we told the cab driver that we just wanted a ride, that we wanted to buy tickets at the site, and he quoted us 100RMB ($12.50) as his cab driver friends watched. I laughed, rather loudly, told him he was talking nonsense, and started walking away. He called out that he meant for two cars, but we kept going. I hope he lost some face. We passed this pond area with a giant crocodile statue, but what caught our attention was the two kids in human-sized hamster balls rolling around on the pond's surface. They zip them in, then inflate the ball using a vacuum tube. Tethers are attached to the balls, allowing them to be reigned in by the operators on shore. It looked like fun. We ended up asking a cop for directions; he told us we could take a bus to Jiao Shan, so we caught the bus and went to the end of the line, which wasn't actually all the way. So we then caught cabs for 8 each, bringing the transportation grand total to 22RMB. 100RMB my ass, and I've only been here a week.

So we bought the student tickets into the park, which were like 20 or 30RMB, and started climbing. The wall was restored pretty heavily, so who knows how authentic it was, but it felt neat walking up. It was very steep in places, sometimes ramped and sometimes in stairs of varying extremes of rise and run. Along the way were people selling things, of course; cool cast bronze lions that had open mouths and acted as garbage cans; and sheep munching grass on the slope up to the wall. After climbing a ways there started to be guard towers every so often. Nowadays they act as bottlenecks; you have to climb up and down ladders one at a time to get to the other side. The ladders had cages to prevent you from falling backwards, I guess, so for those of us wearing backpacks they were pretty irritating. Actually they were probably irritating for everyone... No one likes to wait in line (mob) for old Chinese grandmothers and young children to climb a ladder. As we went farther up, the wall crumbled more and more. Most of the other tourists (again, almost all Chinese) climbed stairs down to take the side path that had switchbacks and so wasn't nearly as steep. We powered on up the wall itself. At one point there was no way to go farther without climbing over a vertical wall, so that we did. After the barrier the stones were looser and there weren't any guard rails. We climbed until we hit a steel wall with the big 'No Entrance' in 4 languages, where we rested a bit, but after we saw a couple of people farther up we grabbed hold of the support beams and swung around the sign to continue to climb to the first summit. The view was only ok. It was really hazy, but you could see the wall snaking down to the bottom, dotted with towers along the way. It was a better experience of the wall than I'd gotten earlier in the day, and it left me hungry for more, maybe the Simatai segment (a world heritage site, but 100 miles from anything and so still not too touristy) or far out west in the desert where the wall crumbles into dust. I'd really like to hike the length of the wall, camping along the way, but I don't think that's in my immediate future.

Scot and Catlin had bailed a ways before the top (they had all of their camping gear in backpacks and had a harder time getting up), so we hurried down to meet them. The 3 of us had a train to catch, and we all wanted lunch. So I washed up a bit in the public restroom and we started negotiating with taxi drivers again. Almost everyone we asked wanted to charge a flat rate of 15RMB per cab to the train station, but we finally found one cab that agreed to use the meter and a little while another who offered to take us for 10. We all got lunch, typical family style, at a place near the train station. None of the dishes were great, but they were all ok. I had agreed to help one of the Johnson City kids try to get a ticket on our train (he needed to get back to Beijing), so I did that while Scot and Catlin shopped for snacks. We got him a ticket and hung out at the station eating dried squid and peaches. Our train was delayed, so Scot and I went back out for more dried seafood and fruit. When we got back and got in line we were told our train had already left, despite the fact that the sign over the gate still had our train number with the delayed departure time. So we ended up on a slower, more expensive, and later train, getting back at 10PM instead of 6 and paying an extra 15RMB each. Ah well. So I bought one of those folding train seats for $2 and we just hung out and waited.

The train ride back was long. We chatted up fellow passengers again, including one college English major who couldn't put together sentences or pronounce words. There was a group of very rich, spoiled Beijing kids playing the Chinese equivalent of Mafia, which was sort of fun to watch. We took turns sitting again, but this train was more crowded and there was more competition for the temporarily opened seats. So it was a long trip, and we were very tired by the time we rolled into Beijing at 10. When we left the station I was amazed to see so many people sleeping in the plaza. I assume some were waiting for trains, but others seemed to be homeless and trying to blend into the crowd. Maybe safety in numbers? Catlin and Scot raced off to try to meet up late with a couchsurfer they were supposed to host that night, the Johnson City kid caught his subway and I caught mine to as close to home as I could get before grabbing a cab. Public transport's pretty good in Beijing, but much spottier late at night.

7/9

Worked. Well, sort of. I'm not really being very productive right now. I'll get there. I met up with Patrick Rhine for dinner, who I hadn't seen in about a decade. We talked about life in general and walked around Ghost Street a bit, which was fun.

7/10

I had decided to get a harmonica, and after a lot of research online I'd tracked down a big music store on the other end of town. So after work I caught a bus to the subway and headed West. It was rush hour and the public transportation was packed; that made everything more interesting. I'd never been in the area around Jishuitan, so just walking around was fun. At first I stopped at a department store trying to find brown socks, but after looking around a bit I was put off by the astronomical prices (probably a fair bit higher than the States for things like clothes irons and pillowcases, which I was actively looking for, and ties, which I always look at idly. So I ditched the department store. The first of two addresses I'd found online was vacant, and I started to get worried that the trip was in vain, but I passed a small music store and went in to ask about harmonicas. They had 2 types, both big and Chinese style and not what I was looking for, so I kept walking towards my second address. Then, as I walked, all of a sudden every store on either side was music stores, maybe 20-30 at least. Some had all violins, others had these big, horizontal harp instruments, others had traditional Chinese flutes, some had electric guitars... everything you can imagine. I checked 3 stores, finding harmonicas at each one, before finally buying a 10 hole diatonic in C for $5. I probably could have bargained, but I didn't.

After that I was on a roll. I bought a lightbulb to replace the one that burnt out in my room, bought the wrong fluorescent tube to replace the one in the bathroom that was dim, found pillowcases, got a voltage converter, had lunch/dinner of tofu in sauce over rice, bought a couple of baozi and an eggplant pancake for later, found a honey-peach popsicle to eat as I walked... it was a shopping frenzy. I probably spent $22 in all; the only thing I couldn't find was some damn brown socks. So I went home, did apartment maintenance like cleaning my AC filters, replacing bulbs, and dusting surfaces (I wake up with a sneeze every morning, I've never had anything resembling allergies before and I'm on a campaign no minimize it). Then I sat down and found some youtube videos with harmonica lessons and started to play. I sort of wish that I'd bought a bluesier B flat harmonica at the same time since they were cheap, but ah well. I had planned on studying some Chinese and going to bed early, but neither of those things happened.

These days I spend a lot of time eating.

2007-07-09T11:05:00.000-04:00

7/5

Thursday night I went home after work, showered, then headed right back out the door to meet people at Guijie, or Ghost Street. The area is famous for its food, everything from high-end restaurants to people frying things on the street. There are some specialties, like spicy crayfish, and the whole place is lit up with red lanterns. I met Linda from work, who I'd invited, and then we joined up with Scot, Catlin, and a number of people they'd invited from couchsurfing.com. There was Ru Shyan, who's a visual arts major working for the Chinese Olympic Committee and helped with the torch; Spring, a sophomore from Harvard doing... something; Matt, engineering major from Cornell working for GE; Bill Bowles, who quit his job and is traveling the world with a video camera and a satellite modem keeping a video blog; and Aaron, a Chinese national who works as an editor for the People's Daily. In a huge coincidence, we all (minus Aaron) had ties to Massachusetts. Catlin's from Wellesley, Scot and I from MIT, Matt had gone to high school there, Spring and Linda were from Harvard (and knew each other, but didn't know the other was going to be around), Ru Shyan's from Wheaton, and I can't remember Bill went to... Amherst, maybe? But it was strange to pick a sample of westerners in Beijing and come up with all MA types.

We picked a big hot pot place. They have two kinds of broth to cook in, sort of like fondue. One was garlickly and almost like a chicken broth, the other was oily and spicy. We ordered trays of raw lamb, beef, bok choy, spinach, mushrooms, etc. and started cooking. The hard part is to either hold the thing you're cooking in a boiling pot filled with flavor-adding... chunks, or to drop it and try to find it and fish it out later. The other difficulty was trying to fit cups, plates, trays of food, bottles of beer, etc. all on a table with a big hole in the middle for cooking. Dinner was great, and I had fun talking with the others; there were a lot of shared interests, but fairly different backgrounds.

Afterwards we started walking. We found some good hutongr, Beijing's narrow, winding alleys, filled with courtyard houses and small businesses. We bought popsicles (yogurt flavored for me again... I'll branch out soon) and explored the area in the dark. I don't know how safe I would have felt doing it alone, at least carrying valuables, but we were rolling like 10 deep, so it wasn't an issue. We bought a couple of bottles of beer to drink as we walked, one of the few liberties I feel like the Chinese can enjoy that we in the land of the free are denied.

I had broken my nail clippers, so when we found what looked like a closet with the contents of Wal-Mart jammed in I asked and managed to buy some for 40 cents. How, you may ask, did I break my nail clippers? I broke them trying to trim my beard. Sort of. See, the beard trimmer I brought was new, specially bought from Kohls for the extravagant price of $15, chosen for its portability. It has these different attachments for trimming different lengths, as such devices do, but I seem to have left certain parts necessary for their use back at home. So I decided I'd just whittle the large attachment, which I could use, down to size. Rather than hack at the outside, which would have meant pushing the jagged bit against my face, I cut the underside where the attachment locks into another plastic bit on the trimmer. This process took, over the course of 3 days, at least 2 hours, a different nail clippers, 2 different steak knives (ineffective), a pair of scissors (absolutely useless), and finally a box cutter I bought at a 7-11 on Ghost Street. The box cutter did the trick, resulting in an intricate sort of terraced piece of plastic, and now I've finally trimmed my beard. Of course, the charger for the damn thing is 110 volts, so I still need to buy a voltage converter, but I've saved myself from buying a new trimmer.

Anyway. Nail clippers at the closet Wal-Mart, then since the buses had stopped for the night I caught a cab home.

7/6

Friday I skipped work. I wasn't feeling in peak form, maybe in part because of the food the night before, but I think it was mostly the result of a long week and not really having felt rested in a while. So I slept until noon, then I woke up and went out to find some lunch. I went to a Chinese fast-food place near my apartment, which was probably the first truly bad meal I've had here, then I got some corn flavored yogurt at the grocery store to wash it down. Corn flavored yogurt's very tasty, and fits well into my campaign to try to eat the weird stuff. I bought some fairly expensive grapes on the way home, which a few days later as I write this are mostly uneaten. I should get on that.

I studied some Chinese, watched Lord of War, and hung out a bit waiting for Scot and Catlin to come over. They got lost trying to get there, so I went downstairs and walked a couple blocks to meet them. We got dinner at a restaurant near where I'd had lunch, the highlight of which was the catfish soup. The wisdom of eating bottom-feeders while in China is questionable, but I think that I'm probably going to poison myself to some extent no matter what I do, and we didn't really think about it until after we'd ordered.

We went back to my place and had some beer and baijiu, but at that point everyone was exhausted. We had decided to go to Shanhaiguan on Saturday to see the spot where the Great Wall comes out of the sea, so we were trying to arrange that trip on my slow and feeble pirated internet while endeavoring to not falling asleep. Well, Scot passed out sitting on the floor and leaning forward with his head on my couch, Catlin and I wrestled with the intertubes. At the end we didn't really have a plan, we just knew we were meeting at the train station at noon. Bobby, my flatmate, came back just as we were finishing and told us that they'd shut down the elevators for the night, which was unwelcome news. Apparently they do that at a certain hour, which I wasn't aware of. Since it's a little bit hard to get to the street from my apartment I walked Scot and Catlin down the 14 flights of plaster-covered and crumbling stairs (currently undergoing renovation), then, of course, had to climb back up the 14 flights. There are no floor numbers, so I tried to count as I went. It didn't work very well, so starting on maybe the 11th floor I was leaving the staircase to try to find apartment numbers on the doors. Most apartments aren't numbered, either, so that was a bit hard.

Anyway, I made it back, showered, and crashed. Showering is rough right now because the fluorescent tube in the bathroom is dying and not so much a light as a dim. It's a weird shape and we haven't found a replacement yet. So I've been showering and shaving with my bike headlamp sitting on the shelf for a little bit of extra light. I've been showering a lot, too, since it's hot and humid and I walk around in dress clothes all day. Because of the weekend trip I still don't have a bike. I have to get on that, too.

7/7

on Saturday I got up at maybe 9:30 to get to the bank for cash to pay some of my rent before I left town. I'm still finding my way around the neighborhood, so the errand took maybe an hour of walking around looking for a bank and getting back. I packed, then caught the subway to the Beijing train station. Scot and Catlin got off the same train from a different car, so we met up immediately and went to find tickets. There are about 5 different places to buy tickets, depending on where you're going, but after some searching we found our counter. Fortunately Scot had checked the railway website to get our train's number, otherwise we might have been in trouble. Tickets to Shanhaiguan on the T11 (T for Tebie kuai, or extra fast) were 47RMB, or about 6 dollars. They were standing tickets, though. To get a seat you generally have to buy in advance. We had time to kill, so we found lunch in the alley next to the station: a big bowl of noodles with meat and hot peppers.

We made it to our gate, running to make the departure time, but it turned out that the train was delayed and we ended up sitting around for about an hour. The train station is massive and crawling with people. There's nowhere near enough seating, so we sort of found a corner and squatted to avoid sitting on the filthy floor. I checked out the bookstore (Esquire in Chinese and a magazine about Chinese military hardware), saw the huge internet bar, and tried unsuccessfully to find a deck of playing cards for sale.

When we finally got onto the train it wasn't too full; we had plenty of room to stand. When people get up to use the restrooms and such the standing people sit down to rest their legs for a moment. We chatted with some other passengers and as a result ended up sitting maybe a quarter of the time. The main problem with standing is squeezing to the side to let people pass, and people do pass. They go to the area between the cars to smoke, they use the squat toilet restrooms that empty onto the tracks, they wander around, who knows, but there are constantly people coming and going. The train workers come through with carts of as wide as the aisle, which are hard to dodge, they bring brooms and sweep up trash on the floor, they adjust baggage on the overhead bins, and they sometimes checked tickets. A few standing passengers had tiny collapsible seats that they'd unfold and sit on in the aisles, which after a while seemed like a great idea.

It took probably 3 hours to get to Shanhaiguan. We left the station to look around and were immediately set upon by hordes of touts trying to get us to take cabs or go to certain hotels or eat at the touristy restaurants. We remembered to go back into the station to buy our return tickets, and when we got out we heard, "Look, white people!' and were approached by the only other caucasians around, who didn't speak Chinese. It turns out, believe it or not, that they were from Johnson City, Tennessee. Small world, folks. So we took taxis with them to go check out the cheap Lida hostel we'd read about in the Lonely Planet. In Beijing they use a meter to determine your cab fare. In Shanhaiguan we negotiated a price with the cabdrivers ahead of time. The base flag drop price in Beijing is 10RMB, we did the trip to the hostel for 5 per cab. Small town living, I guess. The hostel had acceptable beds for $2.50 each, so the 5 Johnson City folks and I got two triple rooms. Catlin and Scot had brought camping supplies and were going to try to camp on the Wall. I didn't have camping gear, but I was game for roughing it with them until it started to rain just as we arrived at the hotel.

After dropping off bags we all headed out to get food nearby. Scot and Catlin and I have gotten into the habit of checking menus before sitting down at restaurants. We have a couple of criteria, a sort of basket or index like you'd assemble to measure cost of living or inflation. Our basket includes Gongbao Jiding (Kungpao chicken), eggplant strips, and a 600ml bottle of local beer. I'd like those 3 items to be under 30RMB combined, or about $3.75. So we turned down a couple of restaurants (one proprietor scoffed, "But where are you going to eat?" when we told her it was too expensive) before finding an acceptable place. We ordered a few dishes off of the menu, then Scot and I headed over to the seafood chill chest to point out things we'd like but didn't know the name for. So we ended up with mediocre squid, strange sea cucumber (which we're glad we tried but probably won't get again), and exceptionally good scallops in addition to our land-based food. Restaurants also don't seem to like to bring you rice early, the philosophy here being that you eat the good stuff before filling up on rice at the end, so we've also had to ask them to bring the rice early so that we get to eat it with our food. I haven't decided whether I should try to get used to the Chinese way or keep my portable America in this situation. I don't think it's a particularly important philosophy, as no one's really thought the rice request strange, so I might keep eating it throughout the meal. I talk about food a lot, sorry.

After dinner Catlin and Scot headed off towards the coast to find a spot to hide and camp, which we presume is illegal. The Johnson City people and I bought some beer at a corner store and, since the rain had stopped, decided to try to get on top of the wall somewhere in town just to hang out and drink. We got distracted, however, walking by a park where they were playing music and there were a ton of people dancing. There were also these multicolor lights in rows across the plaza, changing colors and blinking. It looked sort of like a runway. We decided to walk across their dance floor and check it out. We were immediately approached by a couple of people who wanted to dance with use, and then once we got through the crowd and sat down on some benches we were still attracting attention. I had a bottle opener, but I decided to be social and approach a couple of older people nearby and ask to borrow theirs. I chatted with them for a bit, then tried to make my apologies and rejoin the group, but they suggested I bring the others over instead. So I did, and after a few minutes the 6 of us were surrounded by maybe 30 Chinese all trying to talk to us. I was the only one who spoke both Chinese and English (besides on 16 year old kid who claimed to be 28 and spoke a bit), so I ended up running around and translating. The rockstar effect is apparently pretty common in China, but since I live in Beijing, I'm dressed like I'm not a tourist, I probably walk around scowling, and I'm not blond I haven't really gotten any of it, yet. So it was fun for a while, and my sense of humor does apparently translate, at least to some extent, but I can't imagine living like that. I think I might really like to try to live somewhere farther west at some point, so I might have to learn to deal with it. We bailed after a bit to make it back to the hostel before they closed the doors for the night, and just hung out in the room for a bit.

Ok, so the next day was much more exciting, but I'm really sick of typing right now and I'll leave it to post sometime tomorrow.

World in pictures

2007-07-04T22:46:00.000-04:00

I haven't really been doing much, just sort of settling into the apartment and to work. I've watched 2 movies the last couple of evenings: Wang Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love and Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern. I need English subtitles to get through them, but I think they're probably helping my Chinese at least a little bit. I wanted to try to watch some unsubtitled Chinese TV, but I can't seem to get the TV to work and my flatmate has been getting home late. Hopefully I'll get a bike this weekend and be able to get home before 7 or so.

Now that I'm beginning to get into a routine, the next priority on my list is learning some Chinese. I figure watching TV or movies can teach me to a certain extent, and I've been sorta fried after work each day, so it's been relaxing. I'm starting a campaign to learn words for food so that I have some clue what's in my dumplings. I might try to find a semi-formal language exchange partner or something.

I'm mainly posting now to put up a few pictures. I actually haven't taken too many yet. Maybe I'll get out this weekend and have some more adventures. Anyway, here are some from LA and others from Beijing.

Wearing a shirt and tie to work does NOT make me a grown up.

2007-07-03T03:53:00.000-04:00

What have I been doing? Hell if I know, but it seems like I've been here a lot more than 4 days.

7/1

On Sunday Scot and Catlin and I went to the Zuzhi Park. We didn't really know what to expect, it was just a beautiful day following a day of torrential downpour. The rain got rid of some of the smog, which is nice, but I think the rain itself is pretty insidious. When my clothing from Saturday dried it had these white mineral-like deposits on it, and I don't really care to know what they were But Sunday was gorgeous and we were up early after our 8PM bedtime the previous night. We skipped the Great Wall because it was supposed to get really hot and we ruled out the Summer Palace because it takes an hour and a half to get to, so we picked a random park with a museum near it and went. When we got there we wandered around bamboo gardens for a little bit and went for a boat ride in a pond filled with lotuses, lilies, and dragonflies.

We left when we got hungry and the heat started to get to us and walked across the street to a really casual restaurant. When I say casual I mean there were guys sitting at a table shirtless and others ashing their cigarettes on the floor We got real kung pao chicken (gongbaojiding), which is nothing like its American bastardization, and green beans with hot peppers and bits of meat. Most of the meals I've had here are family style, with everyone eating off of plates in the middle, or at least moving food off of them onto individual rice bowls. After lunch we got yogurt and green tea flavored popsicles next door to the restaurant and sat in the shade on a wall by the river while we planned our next move. (As I read that sentence it sounds very picturesque, but the river is stagnant and filled with algal blooms and it runs parallel to a 10 lane road maybe 100 yards away. It was still nice, but let's be clear that this was a very urban river.)

We decided to go to an art museum behind the park, so we started walking. We tried to get off of the main road and out of the sun, so we took a shortcut through some back roads. That was the end of the art museum plan, because soon we were lost and having loads of fun exploring residential streets and commercial alleys. There were, among hundreds of other vendors, people selling street food like melon slices on sticks or rows of quail eggs fried in little compartments that line them up on sticks (which I'll forever think of as quailsicles). There was a pet dealer with bunnies in cages no bigger than the animal itself and turtles trying to crawl up the sides of rice bowls. I'm pretty sure that was a prostitute that smiled and waved at me and not an actual nail stylist, but I'm not sure. We felt (and were) very conspicuous carrying around high end cameras and wearing relatively nice clothing, but the only place I think we were really unwelcome was one side street where an old shirtless lady smoking a long pipe wordlessly waved us off. That was the first alley we tried to turn onto, so I'm glad we tried again or we would have missed an adventure.

We eventually made it back to the subway to meet up with a second group of 3 MISTI students who were in town for a couple of days. We were going to a dumpling place near Tian'anmen, so I got my first glimpse of the square as we walked over.

Also, now that I'm thinking about it, the car market here is pretty strange. There's one brand, which I'm pretty sure is called Honde and rips of Honda models, with a logo that looks like a Star Trek communicator. Buick's are very popular and seem to be an upper-middle range car. Nissan's are higher end, and have great names like Bluebird and Sunny. The upper reaches of the market seem to be dominated by Audi. I see 10 black Audi A6s for every BMW or Mercedes, so I think that someone at Audi bribed a government official a while back or something, and once the government started using them they became the car to have for business types. I had been told that Beijing is decreasingly a bike city, and I think that's probably true, but they're still everywhere in swarms.

Anyway, Tian'anmen. It was big. There's a huge street running out front. Those were my first impressions. Scot and Catlin and I met up with the other 3, we had dinner at the jiaozi place, then wandered back through the gardens to the square. By that point it was dark and they'd lit the buildings up with little bulbs around the trim, giving the whole place a sort or circus or Broadway feel. That and the CCTV cameras that bristled off the lamp posts were my second round of impressions. We didn't stay for long; after a bit of walking and a lot of waving we finally got cabs to take us to Sanlitun, a bar district.

I was exhausted at that point, but we got a couple of drinks at a place off a side street called Butterfly. It ended up being less than half the price of the main drag joints even though it was only 100 yards away. Despite the fact that at that point my head hurt too much from the sun and dehydration and the long day to deal with haggling I was determined to try some baijiu (Chinese liquor), so Scot handled the negotiation and we drank out of the bottle on the side of the street while we waited for a cab. I did end up chatting with the cabbie, who confirmed that drinking on the street is completely legal, which is cool to find out. We got back and went to sleep. Well, we were about to go to sleep when Scot remembered he'd thrown out the air conditioning filters in the morning, thinking they were disposable, so he went downstairs to dig through the trash for them, then we went to sleep.

7/2

I started work. Catlin and Scot and I got rice porridge, wonton soup, and soy milk for breakfast, then we went our separate ways. I took a cab to work, or at least most of the way. My directions weren't very good, so I still ended up walking like 15 minutes after the cabbie dropped me off. I toured the office, scored zero in the introduction lightning round, then got set up at a desk. I don't think I'm staying in this office very long or I'd post a picture. I didn't do any real or interesting work, just some background reading. It turns out there are some younger people here in the office, at least for now. There's a Harvard sophomore here for the month, a Korean Kennedy School girl here for a fellowship, and a girl who just finished her master's who I think is employed full time. The four of us plus Dimitri, one of the younger UNIDO officials, went out to lunch on the corner, so I got to chat with them a bit. Mercifully, there's a coffee machine in the office. I hate desk jobs; I think I'll probably have a 6 cup a day habit by the end of this.

I took the bus back to Scot and Catlin's after work. Well, actually I took two buses to a corner 10 minutes from their place over the course of about an hour, but I wanted to try out the bus system. It was crowded and hard to navigate, but I think once I figure out some routes I'll take them more often. The fare for each of the buses was 12 cents, and I might have even been able to get a transfer or something that I didn't know about.

Scot and Catlin's Chinese flatmates cooked dinner, which was very tasty, then I packed my bags and moved to my new apartment. I don't really feel like talking about the place now, so I'll put that in a later post. For now I'll just say that it's on Chaoyang Gongyuan Xilu, the Chinese equivalent of Central Park West.

Marco Polo

2007-07-02T04:21:00.001-04:00

(Written starting on 6/30. I don't feel like going through and editing for style or grammar right now, and I wanted to get something up from China, so here's a start)

I'm in Beijing right now at my friend Scot's apartment. He's generously putting me up for a couple of nights while I look for my own place. I only found out afterwards that he has a roommate, his friend Catlin, who I'd never met, who's been generous and enthusiastic about me being here. They're in the bed, I'm on the couch, and last night a couple of the MISTI China people from one team crashed on the floor. The MISTI crew had bad luck with illness and getting all of their luggage stolen and such, so I get the sense that they're licking their wounds for a couple of days before heading off to their next city for teaching.

6/28

The flight over here was uneventful. Mike gave me a ride to the airport after a 5AM Civilization session. Traffic going the other way was crazy, but not too bad heading west to LAX. They have metro stations between the two sides of the highway, with a lane to pull over and drop people off. I wonder how much use they get. I was stunned by the line of people waiting at the United ticket counter at LAX, but it actually moved along at a decent clip. I was worried about the weight of my bags, which combined was exactly 100 pounds on the way to LA, but I'd redistributed it and figured one of the bags was probably over the max of 50 and the other under. The guy at the ticket counter didn't even bother to put my big duffel bag entirely on the scale, so it came up as thirty odd pounds and he slapped the sticker on it. That saved me from shifting things or carrying more on with me, so that was nice.

Going through security, one of the TSA staff yelled, "Code bravo!", which was then shouted by the rest of the screeners in unison. Everything shut down and they made all of the passengers freeze. I was next to the security control station, so I got to hear descriptions come in over the radio: "5 foot 9, caucasian, brown hair blue eyes, no warrant." Then we had to wait at our gate for maybe 15 minutes because a woman on the previous flight had a heart attack. They had paramedics come to take her off, and we finally started boarding. I was a bit nervous because I only had an hour to make my connection at SFO, but when we were airborne the captain said we'd only be about 10 minutes late, which was reassuring. However, as we started to land the pilot came onto the intercom and said that the entire SFO airport had been put on hold for 30 minutes, so we flew in circles over Santa Cruz. I didn't worry this time because the attendants said that since the whole airport was on hold they'd delay the outgoing flights. Of course when we did touch down I saw on the monitors that my flight was boarding, so I got to sprint a little bit. I was the last person they let onto the bus between terminals ("Pleasse? I have to make my connection to China.") and the last onto the elevator up to the international terminal, so by virtue of sheer luck I made my flight, and my luggage even made it along with me.

6/29

In Beijing I got cash at an ATM at the airport (which seems to have only cost me 50 cents on a $200 withdrawal) and caught a cab downtown to Guomao. I followed the guidebook and suggestions from forums and made sure to get an official cab from the official queue, but I still got ripped off. I didn't feel like arguing with the cabbie over $10 when all of my luggage was in his trunk, so I accepted the fact that I'd been used and got out at the subway stop where I'd asked to be dropped. I had spoken with Scot about meeting him nearby, so after lugging all of my stuff the wrong way down the street through thick crowds and over broken pavement in the sweltering heat and humidity I finally got my bearings and made it to the spot where I was supposed to wait for them. I didn't get up the nerve to ask a random stranger walking by to use their cell phone to say that I'd arrived early (I would have, but no one stopped in front of the building to smoke a cigarette or anything, they all just hurried by), so I just waited. The guard at the building didn't seem to happy that I was hanging out there, but he accepted that I was meeting a friend. He just wouldn't let me sit down.

After half an hour Catlin came and introduced herself, then rescued me from the heat and we caught a cab to their apartment. I showered and changed, then we met Scot at his job in the Soho district. We met up with the 3 MISTI students to get dinner at a Muslim style restaurant, which was my first exposure to real Chinese food. It was pretty good, and definitely more spicy than I was planning on. Scot and Catlin and I were thinking about going to a bar afterwards, but by the time we'd finished with dinner and seen the others on their way I was exhausted and we just went back to their place to sleep.

6/30

On Saturday morning we all woke up early (as in before 7), in part because their room gets a lot sunglight. We all sat around poking at our computers for a bit, then met up with the same 3 people for breakfast. We got steamed buns stuffed with meat, rice porridge, and soy milk all around in a little place just down the street from the apartment, with the bill for 6 people coming out to $2.80. While Catlin and I waited for Scot to chat with the MISTI kids (he's the student organizer for their program) I decided I needed caffeine and so we went to the Starbucks across the street. I don't go to Starbucks in the US, but the dearth of available coffee shops drove me into its insidious embrace. One small coffee? $1.50.

We all met back up at the apartment, and after the MIT-China folks worked out some logistics for their next stop we all went to Wangfujing, a shopping area near Tian'anmen, to buy cell phones and cell phone accessories and such. After much haggling in broken Chinese I managed to get my dream phone, a monochrome brick with almost no functions beyond an alarm, a phone book, and a phone. If the battery life is good I'll be in love. So it's of course difficult to haggle for a phone. There's the phone itself (which I got them down to $46 from $62), the SIM card, and the card you buy to put minutes on the phone. We probably drove them nuts, a bunch of us there trying to get the best price we could and understand what we were buying, all of which was conducted in deficient Chinese. Scot's pretty good, so he sort of had the rest of our backs as we talked.

I split up with them after getting my cell phone, taking the subway up to Dongzhimen to meet a prospective flatmate. It had been drizzling, but at this point it started pouring down rain, so between that and not knowing which direction was east I caught a cab. Fan Xie (Bobby) seems pretty cool. He speaks pretty good English, which is a blessing and a curse, and we have a lot in common along the lines of social preferences. He's also really into art, which is something I hope to take advantage of in my explorations of the city. We had a beer in his living room and I checked out the place, then I told him I'd get back to him and left to meet back up with Scot and Catlin for dinner, which was leftovers from Friday night in their kitchen. We'd already eaten the messy noodle leftovers while walking down the street, so that left chunks of chicken and potato, some eggplant, and flatbread. They also don't have any silverware or chopsticks yet, so I ate with a measuring spoon. We decided to go out to a bar after failing the previous night, but we were all tired so Catlin suggested we take a quick nap. So at 8ish we fell asleep. I woke up at 2AM and took out my contacts and brushed my teeth, then went back to bed. We were all up at 6:30 or 7, feeling pretty sheepish and old.

Under the bridge

2007-06-25T00:46:00.000-04:00

I'm in LA now. My brother and I have been wandering around town for the past couple of days.

6/21

On Thursday night when I arrived we got sushi in Little Tokyo and walked around the civic center district. The area is apparently undergoing a rebirth, and the best evidence of that I saw was the heavy LAPD presence and some shiny new buildings like the Disney theater. A lot of the old hotels have been gutted and are being remodeled as apartments, and money seems to be pouring in. I had my new camera shipped to Mike's place, so I was playing with it as we walked. Most of the pictures didn't turn out very well (I hadn't figured out to change the ISO settings to shoot at night), but it was fun. When we went back to his place, we passed over the LA river and saw a rubble sorting facility. The air inside was filled with dust lit by flood lights, and pieces of heavy machinery were plucking tattered bits of plastic and broken stone from a big pile and moving them to smaller ones. There were people standing along a conveyor belt sorting things by hand. They also had guys spraying misters over the heaps to try to control the dust, and these huge sheets were dangling from the ceiling, supposedly to keep some of the floating particles contained. It was really surreal at first glance, so we walked back over after parking at Mikes (it was only 2 blocks away) and watched for a while.

6/22

On Friday I went for a run. Mike's apartment is in a warehouse in an industrial part of town (in case the heavy machinery didn't give it away), and for some reason I decided that running around the area was a good idea. Of course I went around noon, so the sun directly overhead meant everything was bleached and white and there was no shade to hide in. I knew that the temperature might be an issue, but when I left it was under 80 and I didn't really take relentless, brutal sunshine into account. Running around near a highway was new for me, and not very pleasant, but I'm glad I did it. I saw a lot of wholesalers and factories at work, loading trucks and operating machines and such. An awful lot of these buildings seem to be open to the street, so I peeked in as I went. I had mapped out my route online, but at some point 8th St. enters a giant factory complex with barbed wire and 'No Trespassing' signs. I want to know how big a company you have to be (or as my brother said, how long you have to have been there) before you get a portion of 8th street inside your facility. As far as I know the road resumes as normal when you leave the other side of their fence, but I didn't check it out.

After my run Mike and I went to lunch at a Vietnamese place that he knew of. The food was good and the noodles were cold, which was perfect in the heat. We ate outside (actually cooler than the inside), and the neighbor's cat spent the meal trying to climb my leg and swat bits of food off of the table. It should have been annoying, but the cat seemed smart and was very pretty, so it got away with being a sort of charming nuisance. There were also these guys in purple shirts who I'd started to notice during my run. They're some sort of public safety types, maybe city-funded rent-a-cops or something. They're unarmed, but they have radios and badges and ride around on bikes. I assume their job is to tell the Skid Row types to move along. Anyway, I had mentioned them to my brother, who didn't know what their job was, and then over lunch we saw a lanky white guy in full pimp regalia getting right up in one's face and yelling, "Fuck you!" repeatedly and with varying inflection. He ran off after shouting a few times. Then, later in the meal, a guy walking down the sidewalk carrying some sort of protest sign with only the words "Skid Row" visible yelled something about the "God damned purple-shirted pixies". Thankless job, I guess. There were two guys sitting at the table next to us. At one point I overheard one say, "So, have you read the script yet?" Only in LA, people.

When we finished lunch and got back to where we'd parked the car it was gone. A street sign, which of course we hadn't seen, prohibited parking from 3-7. My brother wanted to walk home and deal with it from there, but I convinced him to wander around to try to find the tow company's number on a sign. We didn't find it, and he went into a store to ask if they knew. The lady didn't, but she wondered why we hadn't asked the parking enforcement car that was visible through the window around the corner, where we'd just come from. It hadn't been there a moment ago, of course, but Mike sprinted out to catch it. He got a card from them with a phone number, then his call led to an address, and we started hiking. It was maybe a 20 minute walk away, which wasn't too bad, but combined with the rest of my day outside I ended up with a sunburn. Retrieving the car meant Mike had to pay a $100 towing fee and a $50 'administration fee', or rather LA's cut of the spoils. To add to the injury there was a $70 ticket on the windshield. The funny thing is that we had almost parked in a lot across the street from the meter for a $4 flat rate, and by the time we had put an hour's worth of quarters in the meter at a quarter per 10 minutes we barely would have saved anything. I'm usually pretty obsessive about checking signs, and my brother says he's the same, but our being lax this time cost him a ton of money.

6/23

On Saturday we went to the Getty Museum and drove around Mulholland Drive. I don't have much to say about either, but not because they weren't really cool. The Getty is on a hill and feels very distant from the city around it and the highway below. The art was great and the museum grounds were lush and green. There was a nice breeze and the sound of the fountains made you feel like you were out by a stream somewhere. Mulholland was twisty and peppered with unfathomably big houses and expensive cars, but it was sort of hard to see in the dark. We ended up getting off of it accidently before we'd seen the best of the lights, so hopefully we'll go back.

It's not broken, it's got added character

2007-06-19T16:34:00.000-04:00

6/16

Driving from Maryland to Tennessee I saw a lot of deer: 4 dead (including one baby) and 2 alive (soon to be dead? I mean deer that hang out around a highway probably aren't long for this world.) After seeing all of the bodies I thought about what I'd do if I saw one.

"Ok. You see a deer. First establish which way it's going, then gently swerve in the opposite direction while tapping the brakes. You don't have ABS, remember to tap. Should I honk the horn or not? Fuck. The deer has started to turn around and run where you're now inevitably going. Car is about to hit the deer. Will your direction of motion keep you on the road? Good. Close your eyes until any sound of breaking glass is over. Open eyes and look around cracks and blood. Continue to apply brakes. Don't oversteer."

When my dad and I drove to Maine last week we'd just read an article about someone hitting a moose and dying, so of course that's what we worried about the whole time. I wasn't worried about other cars (which maybe I should have been, since Maine has a huge drunk-driving rate and it was late at night) but I was nervous about a moose.

After I stopped in Bristol for a break my car wouldn't start. It didn't turn over or anything, the lights just sort of dimmed, so it was obviously a starter motor problem. I tried to push start it, but failed miserably. I had to try to roll it backwards because of the hill available to me. Actually it was just a shallow incline, but when you're trying to push a car it seems important. I was sort of amazed how easy it actually was to move my car around. Anyway, it's hard to push start a car in reverse because of the gearing; you'd need a lot of speed. In the end I had to get someone to turn the key while I crawled under the car and whacked the starter motor with a socket wrench. It came to life immediately, so I guess that's good.

My car has acquired a great list of quirks.

-It has 3 doors: driver, passenger, and trunk. The left trunk hinge is broken, so when you open the trunk you have to actually hold it open or it'll close at a 45 degree angle and probably break the other hinge. I sometimes use an ice scraper to prop it open. When you close the trunk you sort of have to guide it down. The driver side door lock has recently decided not to unlock from the outside when you turn the key, so the only way into my car is by opening the passenger side door and reaching across to unlock the driver's side from the inside.

-I backed into a firepit in Acadia and killed my muffler, so now the car sounds like a Harley when you're accelerating. I figure people pay good money for that, so I should start a business. $100 and I'll customize your exhaust. I'll call it Firepit Mods and no one will be the wiser. Well, unless they look under the car and realize that their exhaust is now wired to the muffler.

-My tape deck, used to hook up my iPod and so of fundamental import, is broken. You have to give it a good, hard whack on the side in order to get the gears to click into place. That always amuses the passengers, especially when they don't get the whack right and I have to show them how to do it.

-Now my starter motor is officially on the fritz after this second time it hasn't started (the first was in Maine in March). I get to look forward to push starting it or banging on the starter motor a lot, I think.

-My windshield wiper arm springs are rusted out and so the arms don't push against the windshield very hard, so unless there's a lot of rain the wipers don't work well.

-The paint, once red, has faded to a matte pinkish color. When it's wet the color's pretty nice, but on a hot, sunny day it looks pretty ridiculous.

-It crunches when you downshift into 3rd gear. The synchros are sort of shot, and to keep it from being truly awful you have to ever so gently ease it down into gear, and even then it's uncomfortable.

I love my car, and I think all of the quirks actually make me more attached to it. Despite the flaws, the thing was doing 90 coming in on I-81 without an issue. It hugs the road, it sips gas, the brakes are... I don't know. Something positive that brakes can be described as doing. The brakes give you pause. They put a stop to doubts. The brakes work... maybe that's enough.

Roadtripping, eventually

2007-06-15T14:35:00.000-04:00

6/14

So right now I'm sitting at my grandmother's house killing time. I was supposed to have been on the road right now, but my car's in the shop. I took it in yesterday to get the oil changed, and as we were picking it the mechanic told my dad and me that a CV joint was shot, that the boot had cracked and all of the grease was gone. He recommended getting it replaced, of course. The grease in part keeps it cool, and if it kept running hot it could cause the whole wheel to pop off. Or something. My own knowledge, my dad's experience, and just now my uncle all say that it's much more likely to run (poorly) forever without catastrophic failure. But my dad's paranoid, and mechanic said it'd be an hour and a half, so we had him do it. I said I'd come by in the morning to pick it up. Expected cost, $60-70 for the CV joint, 1.5 hours labor?

I got a call late last night saying that the CV joint was somehow fused to the wheel bearing, and he wanted me to call him back in the morning to tell him whether he should blowtorch them apart. I called at 8:30 (I had to get up at 8:30... Ugh.) and told him to do it. Added cost, ~$30 for the wheel bearing.

He called at 11:30 and said that the CV joint he'd ordered didn't fit and he'd asked for another. I called at 2:40 and he said it'd be half an hour, so I went by at 3:20. My car's still up on the lift without a wheel. Ugh. Turns out the replacement didn't work either, so the original CV joint, which had been rebuilt, was on its way back. That was maybe an hour ago, and I'm waiting to see how much longer it takes and how much it costs. Then I have to put air in my damn tires and power steering fluid in the reservoir, after that hopefully I'll be able to get on the road.

6/15

I'm at a Panera in Maryland now, waiting for Marshall to get off work and commute over here to meet up. I hate Panera, but they have couches, AC, and free wifi, so I guess I'll let them live when the revolution comes.

I finally got the car back at around 6 yesterday. After wiping down the steering wheel and the shifter (the mechanic had driven the thing around while wearing oily gloves) I took it for a test run around town and out onto the highway, taking sharp turns and driving fast and such. This was during rush hour, so the reality is that it took 30 minutes, 20 of which were spent waiting to exit the highway. I'm not quite sure what the idea of my test run was. I guess that if anything failed I'd be close to home and family with cars, but in the event of my wheel bearing or CV joint blowing out I'd probably lose control (and the wheel) and kill people. Not that the idea didn't appeal to me after sitting in stop and go traffic in Burlington, but at heart I truly am a peaceful man. Honest. I just curse a lot. And like guns. No, fuck it, I'm lying.

So I packed the car as quickly as possible, raced my grandmother through her obligatory last-minute photos (seriously, you've spent all week with me and taken photos in Maine and at graduation, how important are a few photos outside of the house?), and sped off. I had to stop to put air in my tires and get gas, which because I was late was a serious drag, but it turned into a minor blessing by the fact that I'd left my suit carrier at the house and my mother brought it downtown to me. Had I been on the highway I'd have had to turn around, and that would have sucked.

Leaving later than planned wasn't fun, but most of the traffic was gone, so I made great time. I was cruising at about 80mph at some point maybe 20 miles after leaving, and I noticed that my hood was starting to pop up and was shaking in the wind. I pulled over (which I've never actually had to do on a highway before) and closed it. Turns out the mechanic hadn't shut it properly, the bastard. I had these wonderful images of my hood popping up and blinding me, or maybe it'd rip off entirely at high speed and I'd be driving with an exposed engine compartment.
This wasn't actually that dramatic, but getting up to speed in the shoulder and back into traffic was interesting. I mean, my grandmother's car has a turbocharger, I think it's only fair that I should have one, too. Speaking of driving my grandmother's car, that's what I've been doing lately. So slowing down at the tollbooth with the music on loud I completely forget that I'm driving a manual and ignore the clutch. I stalled the thing right in front of the toll collector, who must have been laughing at the confused look on my face.

I hit about 30 minutes worth of traffic on 95 just outside of New York. Last time I went into NYC I took Merrit Parkway on the advice of someone stuck in traffic on 95 up ahead. It's a really beautiful 2 lane highway with lots of hills and curves, and the bridges that pass overhead are all unique and made of stone. I think what makes it fun to drive, though, is the fact that there are trees on either side, overhanging the road. If I ever make the Boston-NYC commute again I'm definitely going to take it, 95's just a huge drag.

New York was brief. I didn't find parking until like 11:30, and that was only after I'd given up on finding the correct side parking for Friday morning and had resigned myself to waking up at 8 to leave. The New Yorkers went to bed early, so I didn't actually get to do much more than say hi. Ah well.

The drive to Maryland was uneventful, but I was shocked that between the NJ turnpike toll, the George Washington Memorial Bridge toll, the Delaware toll, and a toll in Maryland I hit $13.85 in about 50 miles. Apparently in NJ it's illegal to have self-serve gas stations, too. Gas was still 20 cents cheaper than in Boston, even with the attendant, but full service stations make me uncomfortable.

May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead.

2007-04-23T21:19:00.000-04:00

I was trying to come up with a way to talk about the weekend before last without it coming off as drunken debauchery, but I don’t think that’s really possible.

Wednesday

Mik’s birthday. We sat around on the second floor and drank beer. It would have been an unremarkable evening, but at some point we transitioned into the sort of old school No. 6 conversation we haven’t had in a while. It’s not really significant what we talked about, it’s more the depth to which we analyzed and debated things. We derived, for example, the conditions for negative population growth given rates of adoption by gay parents and an imaginary fraction of adopted children 'going gay'. Sapo, Anton, and I lasted until after sunrise, then went to sleep. I skipped all of my classes. Oops.

Thursday

On Thursday night I went to the gym for a couple of hours. I was feeling energetic, so I figured I might as well take advantage of the situation and do something productive. The plan was to go home afterwards and study Chinese. My motives, obviously, were pure and noble. I got back from the gym, a little bit wobbly from 2 hours of picking up heavy things and putting them down again, and as I walked into my hall Anton, Sapo, and Mik informed me that we were going to the Thirsty Ear (the grad student pub just down the street) for karaoke night. Thirsty Thursdays have been a tradition for us for a long time, so I’m not really sure why I thought this one would be any different. I guess usually we send out an email to the list sometime in the afternoon declaring that we’re parched or dehydrated, and that’s taken as a statement of intent. We didn’t do that this time, so I naively thought I’d be doing homework.

The Thirsty is under a grad student dorm. You go down some stairs and into a side door and you’re in. There are no signs; it's all very speakeasy. The Thirsty's appeal lies in the facts that it’s less than a five minute walk door to door, that we know half of the people there, at least in passing, that you can show up in anything from preppy chic to your pajamas, and that a pitcher is $7. The karaoke is incidental, and we don’t usually take advantage of the opportunity until we’re several pitchers in.

On Thursday we closed the place. That’s not uncommon for us, but when I say we closed it I mean that very literally. We bargained with the bartender to give us a couple of free pitchers well after last call in exchange for stacking the chairs and moving the tables to the sides. When we got back to the house we continued to drink, and an inspired someone had the idea that we should go streaking across the soccer field next to the house. The plan appealed to me very much. Streaking seemed like classic collegiate buffoonery that I should at least be able to cross off of the list. So before we could think about it too much we were running downstairs and out the door, removing clothes as we went. Unfortunately my compatriots are not fellow countrymen, and they started bitching about maybe losing their visas if caught. I tried to convince them that it wouldn’t happen, but in the end we settled for running across the field in boxers and boots. Anton and I knocked on the windows of the dorm on the other side, surprising a few people, and then we ran back. The rest of the evening was spent watching scenes from Top Gun and debating which song was the theme. It’s not, as we originally suspected, Danger Zone. I’ve always felt that the iconic song from the movie was Take My Breath Away. Went to bed during sunrise number 2.

Friday

(Most of this is sort of a list. I think I’m writing it too long after the fact to really get into the storytelling, so you get a recitation of events.)

Went on a liquor run and a grocery store run for supplies for Saturday’s Founder’s party, then came back and sat around drinking. I didn’t feel like joining the crowd going to see Fast Times, the local cover 80s cover band whose shows we frequent, so I sat on my bed with Adri and Lizzie drinking and reading old letters written by Sixers in the 40s. Lizzie was working on her speech for Founder’s Day, so she was trying to come up with ways the house had changed. Some of the letters were pretty cool; one written in 1962 or 63 was talking about the formation of the Peace Corps, and all of the problems they thought faced the then-new organization.

The crowd at the bar had met up with the New York Sixers who’d come up for the weekend, so when they came back after closing time a party immediately started downstairs. My evening gets pretty fuzzy from then on, but I know it involved streaking across the field (for real this time) with Anton and Dimitrios. As we started running, having just abandoned our clothes at the fence around the field, I turned to Anton and said, “You know, when we come back those clothes aren’t going to be there.” We made it to the dorm across the field and back, and sure enough we were conspicuously naked and our stuff was gone. As we hunted around the house for our clothes there were an awful lot of cameras and flashes, so I guess running for public office some day is out of the question. I wore a piece of paper and Anton had on a shower curtain until someone took pity on us and gave us our pants back.

More drinking ensued. Sunrise number 3. Sleep.

Saturday

I started my day by making homemade sour mix, which is really simple and tastes awesome. I ran some last minute errands to set up for the Founder’s party, organized the bar, and started mixing drinks. I learned how to make a pretty good Manhattan and an excellent Cosmo, two drinks I’d never served before. It’s a lot more fun to bartend when you have a stocked bar and people want cocktails. The stuff I serve at our open parties is all plastic-handle dreck with coke or juice in a red Solo cup. Even using real glass makes a difference. Whatever… I guess I shouldn’t worry about serving the 17 year olds with fake IDs shitty drinks, they don’t know any better, anyway.

Dinner was prepared by Kenji and was nice, but other than that I spent most of my evening making drinks rather than consuming them. My drinking goal for the evening (yes, I sometimes have those) was to expand my horizons, so I drank gin and tonics until I didn’t hate them quite so much anymore. I’ve found that the secret is a squeeze of lime and drinking it all while it’s still really, really cold.

The night was made a bit weird by a visit by an asshole, powertripping MIT cop and some intra-house conflict. Rui and Conor nearly got into a fight when Rui got pissed off at him for stealing his cigarettes and started shoving him. Conor doesn’t smoke; he was just fucking around. Also, Conor’s a pretty competent judo practitioner (judoist? It should be), and in his defense he didn’t break Rui, he was just sort of keeping him away. Hashem and Evros were fighting about something, too, but I don’t really know what. There are a lot of people living here who don’t like each other, but it almost never results in real anger and certainly not violence. This was also weird because these aren’t people who don’t like each other, they usually get along fine. I’d say that there was something in their drinks, but I probably mixed them. So I’ll blame the food instead.

I went to bed before sunrise. I also got up and went for a run on Sunday, which surprises me.

Anyway, that was my weekend.