Town of food and tailors

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.

Leaving town on the Reunifcation Express

I'm waiting for my bus to Quy Nhon, so I figured I'd post some journal excerpts.

Xmas eve in Saigon was quiet, so I resolved to try to make it to Nha Trang for Xmas night.

On Xmas morning I slept through my alarm, so when I woke up I was in a bit of a hurry to get things done. I raced to the Chinese embassy by motorcycle taxi, where I collected my passport and visa and paid in US dollars, the only currency they'd accept. You know you've been away from home for a while when your own country's currency looks and feels fake.

After the embassy I stopped at a Vietnamese bakery for a baguette, a pair of egg tarts, and what appeared to be some sort pistachio cake, I'm not sure. I then hurried back to the train booking office to buy a ticket on the Reunification Express to Nha Trang. It's a 7 hour ride, and the soft seat ticket was $10.

I tried to take pictures on the train, but the windows were dusty and they didn't turn out very well. So I wrote down a lot of observations and made some sketches:

The huge expanse of blue sky that I'd hoped to see in Saigon, but did not, is here, complete with fluffy white clouds.

There are legions of trees in rows going back from the train as far as I can see, and they've been continuing for miles. They're each tapped at human height, so I assume they're rubber or something.

There's a kid in an Adidas shirt hip-deep in a rice paddy. Rice paddies are the greenest things I've ever seen. As I observed in Thailand, I think there should be a Crayola color, Paddy Green, and it'd easily be the brightest crayon in the box.

The soil is a rich red color where it's bare of vegetation, but it's not bare very much. There are what seem to be baby banana trees in plantations. The trees are no more than 5 feet tall, but each has a cluster of yellow hanging from them. There are two types of houses here: shacks and porticoed, collonaded shacks. Some trees have brown leaves hanging from their branches and surrounding them on the ground. Winter in Vietnam? In other places the ground is a grey-pink color. I'm not sure if there's a pattern to the soil or what it means. (I later figured out that the brown trees and the grey soil are the result of burning to clear land. There were whole stretches of countryside on fire.)

Banana plantations stretch to the horizon after the hills pass and the ground flattens. The ground gets wavy again. Dotting the rows of banana trees are larger trees, standing like scarecrows or sentinels above the rest. The sentinel trees have fans of spiky leaves. I was already thinking about how tropical flora looked prehistoric, and these trees look like the back and tail of a stegosaurus. (My journal here has a sketch of the tree and a sketch of a stegosaurus).

Hills seem to come out of nowhere. This one is rocky, with patches of black. It's terraced about halfway up one side, but the other side is overgrown with vegetation. (Now there's a sketch of what the shacks look like, on stilts and the slanted metal roof also functioning as the back wall.) We cross a bridge and pass a much more gently rolling hill. This one isn't studded with rocks, and there's a patchwork of crops all the way up. White birds, in pairs, fly above the orchards. This is apparently more banana country than rice.

Actually, I'm not so sure those are bananas. The train slowed down, and now I can see that the yellow clusters are blowing in the wind, which bananas would be too heavy for. I think they may actually be coffee plants, but what do I know? I took a picture of one up close while the train was moving slowly, so I'll look it up later.

(At this point I figured out that there was a dining car with windows that opened, so I spent the hour before sunset hanging out there and taking photos. They also served excellent and cheap food in the car. I got roast chicken over rice, stir-fried bean sprouts, and soup all for $1.30.)

I keep seeing things that make me think about the war. The railroad I'm on was bombed, of course, and so was every bridge in the country, so each one we pass over is new. Every time I see someone missing a limb I wonder whether it happened during the war. Or maybe it was afterwards, as he was plowing his fields and triggered an unexploded shell or mine. Maybe it was just an accident, but it makes me think. On the motorbike today, at a stoplight, I looked over and saw a man with a heavily scarred face, and realized he would have been about 17 or 18 during the war.

And here, now, on this train, I see how beautiful this country is. As in Thailand, the colors seem so intense. Maybe they actually are more intense, something about the sunlight near the equator. But I don't really have words to describe the colors here, so hopefully some of the pictures I took will convey them.

The train arrived in Nha Trang about 2 minutes late, much to the credit of the Vietnamese train system. I actually only knew it was my stop because of the timing- there was no other indication. I decided to hoof it down to the backpacker area from the train station. I had planned to take a motorbike taxi, but they annoyed me as I walked out of the station, so I kept going. It's funny how that works. I'm so anti-tout and anti-heckling that even when I want the service they're offering, I'm still put off by it.

Good Morning, Vietnam

I wanted a break from the museums and hiking, and I'm still recovering from last night's excesses at a bar, so I figured I'd sit down and talk about what I've been doing. I'm just going to copy things straight from my journal.

12/19/07

I'm sitting at gate 50 at the Beijing airport. Because, I suppose, my flight to Saigon has a stop in Nanning, China, we've been exiled to this single-gate area. There's a restroom, but that's it- no food, no water, nothing. Apparently I was supposed to be able to figure out to come here based on my boarding pass, but I tried to go through customs and was sent back from whence I came with a shaky explanation that what I was looking for was "S–Channel", which of course with the accent and the utter lack of inherent meaning in the phrase, was completely unintelligible to me. But I'm here in my purgatory, awaiting a chance to sit in an even more cramped China Air flight. A number of the Shanghainese folk sitting near me got trays of food as part of their flight to Shanghai, so I got the treat of listening to them smack their way through their meal. Now they're belching loudly. I'm so ready to be out of this country.
12/20/07

I’m sitting in the Jade Emperor Pagoda right now. It’s immediately off a busy street, but as soon as you step through the gate it’s noticeably calmer.

Last night at SGN airport was an adventure. First, the immigration guy gave me a hard time because I hadn’t indicated where I’d be staying in Vietnam on my form. It took some negotiation before he let me in without the address of a hotel. Then, once out of the customs area, I was shocked to find that there were no ATMs at the terminal. I had also screwed up the time change in my planning, making staying at the airport until morning 2-hours on hard chairs less appealing. I figured I’d get a cabbie to take me to a bank in town, but when I offered them the rate suggested in the Lonely Planet they told me that I should take the bus. I finally walked down the street to the domestic terminal, an open-air deal, and found a single ATM. Armed with Vietnam Dong, I managed to convince a cabbie to accept them instead of the requested US dollars, and to only overcharge me 30%.

I’m now at Tapiocup, a bubble tea joint. The Jade Emperor Pagoda was most interesting to me as an oasis in the city. In terms of architecture and content it doesn’t really stand up to Chinese temples in China. So after a few minutes sitting, then looking around, I moved on to the Ho Chi Minh City History Museum. It, along with most everything else right now, is closed for the afternoon siesta, so I’m killing time here.
So, back to last night, the taxi dropped me off on Pham Ngu Lao street, the backpacker ghetto. Every guesthouse in the Lonely Planet had its gate closed for the night when I got there at 3AM, and many of the other places were closed or full up. So I wandered seedy alleys for a while, carrying my bags, passport, cash, bank card, and an ATM statement that rather shockingly listed my remaining available balance of 62 million Dong. Target, much? I finally found a guesthouse with an 8-dollar room and took it. The room was on the main backpacker drag, on the 4th floor, and while the guesthouses were closed, the bars and noodle stalls were in full, noisy swing until the morning traffic sounds took over. I didn’t get to sleep until 6, but I blame my fucked-up sleep schedule more than the street sounds.

I got up at 9, showered, paid, and went out with my stuff to find a wherever I was going to spend the night. I went to the places in the Lonely Planet, but they were either fully-booked or quoting $15 a night (again, in dollars). I finally settled on one for $12 a night, probably not worth the savings for the quality drop, but I was in a hurry to get to the Chinese embassy before the visa office closed. This place, the Yellow House Hotel, had $5 a night dorm beds, which I would have gladly taken had there been a locker for my backpack during the day. Ah well.

I’m back in the room now. After bubble tea and the end of the siesta I went to the history museum. I have little interest in pottery and metal-age artifacts, but it was still worth the $1 entrance fee. One thing that struck me reading the descriptions was just how much of Vietnamese history has been spent fighting off aggressors with imperial aspirations- the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Siamese, the Mongols, the French, and finally the US. I didn’t realize, though I’m certain I’ve read about it, just how ridiculous our involvement here was. I mean, one can argue about the efficacy of containment, and even the logic of the doctrine, but I didn’t realize just how undemocratic our anti-communist actions had been. The North-South division was supposed to be a temporary of the Geneva peace accord that ended French occupation. There were supposed to have been nation-wide elections, but the US killed them because our man Diem was going to lose to Ho Chi Minh. Not to mention the parceling out of land that succeeded WW2, when the Japanese in Vietnam surrendered to the British in the South and the Kuomintang in the North, but certainly not to the Vietnamese.

12/21/07

Last night I forgot to mention the visa business. I took a ‘xe om’ to the embassy. ‘Xe om’ is literally ‘motorcycle hug’. I think. It seems to be a convenient was to travel if you’re alone. That was the first time I’ve ridden on a motorcycle, as far as I can remember. It was also my first time in Saigon traffic during the day, so the experience was pretty much terrifying. It’s possible, though I’m not certain, that the Vietnamese use their horns more than the Chinese, but I’ve yet to see Vietnamese at a stop light laying into them.

At the Chinese embassy the forms were easy. We spoke a combination of Chinese and English (I can never remember the word for ‘visa’ in Chinese, though I know how to write it). The only strange thing was that they don’t take RMB or Vietnamese Dong, only USD, so I’ll have to change some before collecting my passport on xmas morning.

So now I’m at Fanny’s, an ice cream place with a street-side brick patio, having just finished my tiny scoop of cinnamon ice cream. Earlier I went to the Ben Thanh market where I bought [gifts redacted so as to remain a surprise]. I went to the HCM City Fine Arts Museum, which is in a beautiful, yellow, colonial building with impressively tiled floors. The art wasn’t very interesting, with the exception of some propaganda pieces, but the setting was nice. I did like one painting of “Uncle Ho with the hill people”. Ho Chi Minh was literally twice the height of anyone else in the painting. Mao’s height is often exaggerated in the Chinese equivalents, but he’s infrequently a giant on that scale. I’ve also been asking around about engraved zippo lighters. They say “Vietnam”, a location, and a date (e.g., Danang 68-69). The back has a bit of platoon wisdom, like “When the power of love is stronger than the love of power the world will know peace”, and some have a metal unit seal glued on. I bought 2 of them when I found a street stall that quoted $3 up front, whereas most quotes had been $10. I’ll probably find a couple more that have a good combination of seal, wisdom, and a recognizable location. I don’t know who they’ll be gifts for, but I’ll figure it out. I also skipped the Lonely Planet recommendations for lunch and just stopped at a random street stall for a grilled pork chop over rice, a bowl of soup with an unidentifiable green vegetable, and an iced tea. I ordered by pointing and paid by holding up fingers, but if they overcharged me it was still only $1.50, under the $2 I’d figured.

I’m at the War Remnants Museum right now. Outside is an assortment of US military hardware, inside photos, text, and infantry weapons. I started by looking at the anti-personnel mines, which are gruesome enough. The next section was on Agent Orange and dioxin poisoning and its teratogenic and mutagenic effects. It showed photos both of American servicemen victims and Vietnamese victims, and quoted a call for the US government to morally and monetarily compensate Vietnamese poisoned, as they did with US veterans by apologizing and giving a payout. At this point I was thinking about how insane it was to dump tons of chemicals we didn’t understand all over a country, but I suppose science has always advanced through experiments in killing. It was when I got to the photos and descriptions of torture and murder that I really started to be bothered. Looking at deformed babies and fetuses in jars of formaldehyde is creepy, but I can at least rationalize the actions that led to them with ignorance. How a man who’d become senator, Bob Kerrey, had led a SEAL time gutted children and slit the throats of old people in bed, that I couldn’t understand. But most chilling, I think, were a series of photos of terrified people, women, children, and the elderly, and the descriptions by the journalist photographers of how they’d heard the shots of the M16s as they’d walked away, right after taking the pictures. Knowing that you were looking at someone defenseless, in the last moments before their life was needlessly ended by Americans looking them right in their eyes, was disturbing. I don’t know whether there is an order to visit the exhibits, and I don’t know whether I followed it, as the museum is undergoing renovations. The last thing I saw, though, was the beginning of the US Declaration of Independence. After all the images I looked at, seeing that shook me up the most. The number of tourists smiling their way through the exhibits wasn’t far off.

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

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.

Beach weekend

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.

A Remembrance of Things Past, and almost as long.

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.

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

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.

Beijing: city of art, restaurants, and copycat bars

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.

These days I spend a lot of time eating.

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.

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

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

(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.