the end

well i figured when i got home that i'd have the time, energy, and desire to write a long, meaningful final post, sort of like clark's opening post. i was wrong. time i do have, but energy and desire, not a bit. the time change hit me pretty hard. i'm basically passing out around 10:00 pm, which is good for work i guess but cuts out the amount of time i have to write the only kind of post that would do this blog justice. one that would stand the test of time and make you laugh and cry.

so i'm not going to do that. instead, i'm just gonna say, this is it, the end, nothing more is coming, even from clark or durrell, neither of whom i'm sure still exist. anyway, i went to this cool little web site (http://www.texone.org/tree) that turns url's into trees, and made one for this blog. a fitting last picture, i think.

tada! i hope you all enjoyed the blog as much as i enjoyed using it to forget that i was in china while writing. let me know if you want to see any pictures.

always forgetting those titles

vietnam is a dangerous place. while i have survived the motorbike rides around hanoi, i have fallen victim to quite a number of lesser injuries. first of all, duc's dog bit me in the hand. then, i got a nice series of razor cuts down my forearm from a barnacle-covered rope while swimming. and finally today i realized after walking around for 20 minutes that the source of discomfort in my foot was a piece of glass that had punctured my sandal and was steadily slicing open the ball of my foot.

but all that has not put a damper on my time in vietnam. duc and i rolled out to halong bay on monday morning, and got there just in time for the rainy weather to clear, which is how it has stayed since then. halong city is a junky, expensive place, but we got to stay in the nicest hotel in town for free because duc's dad knows the owner. i think that maybe we were the only people staying there. i also had my first american breakfast since beijing.

the next day we took a boat tour of halong bay. the bay is quite spectacular. it looks like the scenery from guilin and yangshuo (see spring break update) but plopped in the middle of the sea. we rented out a boat with two people from france (waaay more tourists from france here than anywhere else), and tooled around with a stop at a semi-nice beach. we were planning to catch a high-speed boat to cat ba island, but ended up taking a whole other tour of the bay en route to cat ba because there are actually no passenger boats that run the route. anyway, cat ba was quite an amazing place, with the nicest beaches i've ever seen. the only glimpse of the interior of the island i got was on the back of a motorbike during a hair-raising high-speed flight from the southern tip to the northern tip (about 30 km). the interior is quite beatiful as well, and reminds me of a sort of smaller version of kauai.

the last two days in hanoi have been quite interesting as well. friday morning we attended the engagement party of one of duc's cousins (he has close to 7 million cousins i think). it is sort of hard to explain what went on, but was similar in a way to the chinese wedding i went to, just not quite as over the top (apparently vietnamese weddings are). there was a lot to do with the groom's family asking for permission to marry the bride and bringing gifts and stuff. i was also introduced by the bride's family as a guest of honor, which would have had more of an effect if i hadn't been the guest of honor for everything i ever attended in china. also, tonight (saturday) we went out to eat snake. it was at a restaurant in a small village outside of hanoi that specializes in raising and cooking snakes. the entire meal was made of snake, but the coolest part was when duc and i took shots of vodka that had been mixed with snake blood and contained a snake heart (about the size of a jellybean). then we also did shots made from the snake's gall bladder. most hardcore shot ever.

so my time in vietnam, and asia, is rapidly winding down. i fly out of vietnam on monday morning, stay overnight in shanghai, then fly home. so, unless something terribly interesting happens in the meantime, this will probably be my last post from asia. but never fear, dear readers, as i will be sure to do another picture post and maybe wrap things up. who knows, maybe clark will grace us with his deep post-writing skills for a final post. but i wouldn't count on it.

for all you doubters out there, duc hasn't actually been pulling our leg this entire time. he does speak vietnamese.

maybe it's just because i've been in china for so long, but vietnam seems quite a bit different than its communist neighbor to the north. first of all, the government doesn't have the desire, the will, and/or the money to construct the sort of huge, ridiculous infrastructure projects that china has, nor is it in favor of tearing down large portions of the city to build bigger roads and buildings. the result? hanoi feels like a relatively small city. the streets are narrow and lined with trees and the buildings are generally only three or four stories at most. the effects of the french colonization period are overwhelming, from the european architecture to the cafe culture (both of which i appreciate).

duc's family lives in two stories of an apartment building on the edges of the diplomatic district in hanoi. the place is pretty nice, not as nice as the new chinese apartments, but it has a certain character of its own. duc and his parents live with his grandmother, some other guy who has some relation to them (uncle?), and a dog that barks at me all the time.

one unique characteristic of vietnam is the incredible amounts of motorbikes. there are barely any cars, but hordes of motorcyles. i have to admit, they are pretty fun to ride around on. duc and i took one out today to see the sites, which included several musuems, the old quarter, a dvd store, and some other places i'm too lazy to write about right now. i always read in articles in vietnam how frightening it is to cross the street. i have no idea what that's about. it's about the same as in china, except in china they have cars instead of motorbikes, which should be feared much more.

what else are we planning for my stay here? we're gonna head out to ha long bay and cat ba island, then come back to go to duc's cousin's engagement party (we'll see how that compares to the chinese wedding i went to). stay tuned for more updates.

something clever to be changed later

so my stay in hong kong has just about wrapped up, and all i have to show for it is a new pair of sunglasses and a bad sunburn. but that's not quite fair. hong kong is easily my favorite city so far. besides the ridiculously hot and humid weather (i hear vietnam is worse), i think hong kong is perhaps the easiest city to be a tourist in. all the public transportation is easy to use, and they put up these signs all throughout the city with maps that tell clueless people like me how to find, say, the museum of art. also, everything is in english. i find you really learn to miss that in china. finally, you can get anything you want in hong kong, provided you're willing to pay for it, including indian fast-food, dental floss, and suncreen that doesn't unnaturally whiten your skin. i quite imagine that it is what shanghai will be like in another five or ten years.

oh, also, hong kong has style. china doesn't.

i'm not sure much interesting happened between kunming and hongkong. the train ride was actually quite nice, and included a brand new stretch with quite beautiful scenery. there was a whole group of women on the train going to some cosmetics conference in guangzhou. i couldn't quite figure out what their jobs were; it seemed like sort of an amco-type scam where they sign up to sell beauty products to their friends. anyway, they all ended up trying to sell stuff to each other and trying out eachother's make-up. the poor guy on the bottom bunk kept rolling his eyes at me the entire trip.

i didn't see any of guangzhou. i managed to get off the train and take the subway to the other train station where i got a local express train to shenzhen. shenzhen is china's most ridiculous city. (i might have previously given that award to lanzhou, which i now deem china's suckiest city). anyway, the train station is right next to the border, which is just overflowing with people from hong kong coming over to buy cheap crap and salesmen trying relentlessly to sell you cheap crap. the architecture is as bad as beijing's, but with even more sense of there being no rhyme or reason. beggars assault you at every turn, and everything is damn expensive as well. it's basically what happens when a bunch of rich people build a city with no rules. it sucks.

i'm up bright and early tomorrow to catch my flight to vietnam. hopefully all goes well on that front. i will update you all then.

p.s. i can actually read the blog here in hong kong, the first time since my very first post. i just want to say for the record that 1. even though i told you i couldn't read the comments i'm disapointed by the lack of them, and 2. durrell's scrolling picture thing looks horrible. good thing i couldn't see it in china or i would have kicked him off the blog.

gettin' it done

my brash decision making got the job the done. although it was pouring rain when i got out to the gorge, it stopped right away, and the entire hike the next day was dry, and even hot and sunny at parts. my only complaint were some clouds that perpetually sat on top of the mountains, making it hard to tell how tall they actually were. however, tiger leaping gorge easily has some of the most incredibly scenery in china. as the sign by the entrance says, it is "the most famous gorge in the world." i guess that's true, if you forget about the grand canyon and all three of the three gorges.

i met up with these three english guys about my age on the bus ride out there, and ended up doing the hike with one of them. the other two were hilarious, however. it was like half a day of a personal monty python performance. as with most conversations with foreigners in china, ours quickly turned how much we missed our food at home. i found out that, regardless of how much we like to make fun of english food in the states, they love it in england. below is one of my favorite quotes from the evening.

"scones have become a bit posh lately, haven't they? oh, but i still love a good scone!"

unfortunately, dave and ed became a bit enamored with the output of the six-foot high marijuana plants that were grewing behind the guesthouse, and didn't quite make our six a.m. departure the next morning.

it's been quite a long time since i've rapped at your all, and i sort of forget what has transpired in the meantime. i guess the last time i wrote a real post i was in kunming, to where i have just returned after a ten hour-long, quite horrible, sleeper bus ride. dali was a fun place, and i ended up actually spending five nights there, much more than i expected. i found this really cool guest house up in the hill behind the city and spent a few nights there reading all their issues of national geographic. i've found that since being in china i've really grown fond of that particular publication. i especially like their articles about a particular zip-code at the end of each issue.

but that is neither here nor there. my next stop before the gorge was lijiang, which was quite, well, crappy. the old city is a cute little place, but it feels like disneyland. in fact, lijiang had the weirdest collection of western tourists i've seen in china. there were, of course, a large number of young backpackers, but also a huge number of families with young children. i even saw an enormous group of rather obnoxious american middle-school kids.

actually the western backpackers in yunnan have been almost as interesting as yunnan itself. there are very few american backpackers at all, but hordes of israelis. apparently, they all go travel the world after their military service. also there are quite a few britians. but i am easily the youngest of any of the backpackers i've met. it seems that people don't really travel much while in college or university. they all just wait until they are terribly bored with their first job out of college, then quit and travel the world.

this post is a landmark: it is the last post that will be made in china proper. i have my ticket to guangzhou (damn expensive), from where i'll take a train to shenzhen, cross the border on foot, and then take the light rail into hong kong central. then i fly out on the 22nd to vietnam to meet the man-with-the-plan, duc. i'm damn excited to get out of here.

until then.

the doldrums

nobody ever told me that it rains a lot in yunnan during the summer. and i mean a lot. it's been raining for the past six days. such a toerrent has really put a damper on my plans for hiking tiger leaping gorge, as the trail is extradinarily dangerous when it's raining, and they close the gates anyways. though it did just stop raining today. if the weather holds i'll be good to go for tomorrow. actually, screw it, i'm gonna run up there right now and stay at the trailhead if i have to.

wish me luck.

halftime

well, i figured out why kunming seemed like such an neat and nice and orderly city. it's because it is currently hosting the second annual GMS (greater mekong subregion) summit, an economic oriented meeting of the six countries through which the mekong river passes. in the true spirit of mayor giuliani in new york, the city of kunming swept up all the undesirable elements and flooded the streets with police officers. what's ironic is that all of the six countries in attendance are the home of totalitarian regimes (myanmar, laos, vietnam, thailand, and cambodia). so those attending the meeting are probably apraising china as an effictive police state as much as a developed economic power.

but that's enough chat for now, as i bring you what you have all been waiting for: pictures! in the interest of time, i've just captioned each with the location, so if you want to know more about a particular one, send me an e-mail and/or seek me out when i get home. i'll be happy to explain.

drum tower, xian

e'min ta, turpan

turpan

cross-desert highway, taklamakan desert

sunday market, hotan

id kah mosque, kashgar

karakoram highway

khyrgyz yurt, lake karakul

mogao caves, dunhuang

mingsha sand dunes, dunhuang

labrang monastery, xiahe

golden summit, emei shan

elephant bathing pool, emei shan

giant panda breeding research base, chengdu

kunming

oppressed on independence day

i don't really have any clever way to start this blog post so i'll just get down to it. i am now in kunming, the capital of yunnan pronvince, which is, in turn, the hotbed of backpacker travel in china. for whatever first impressions are worth, everything in this city is the best in china. the hostel is awesome, the streets are big and green and clean, even this internet bar totally kicks ass. my one complaint: there's no expat magazine, which is making finding a fourth of july party somewhat difficult. i may just end up setting off fireworks with some other americans i met and getting arrested, which, considering that my passport is currently at the vietnam embassy, might end up being a big problem.

the triumverate broke up in chengdu. tyler went off to shanghai to meet his family and clark split to head to yangshuo. neither are nearly as hardcore as me.

for our last week together, we went to emei shan and the grand buddha at leshan. emei shan was a pretty incredible place, though hot and humid as hell. it is a sacred buddhist mountain that was much larger than we thought. the lonely planet says you can hike from the bottom to the top in three days comfortably, which is total crap. we actually ran into durrell on the mountain, and he managed to do the above, but hiking 11 hour days.

anyway, there are a bunch of temples on the mountain, which aren't that interesting, but the scenary is quite cool, with a lot of tall peaks, sub-tropical vegetation, and a perpetual mist that makes everything seem mysteriously chinese. there are also a lot of monkeys, many of which are evil. there is one "monkey fun-zone" which employs about 100 people to protect the tourists from monkey attacks. i felt like i was in jurassic park at that point, except with monkeys instead of velociraptors.

afterwards we went to leshan to see the world's biggest buddha. it was big. there's nothing more to say about it.

back in chendu we ran into jeff, who you may remember from such earlier posts as "china grande" and "they may be very small, but there are a lot of them". we also went to see the pandas at their ultra-special research base in chengdu (which resembles a standard american zoo). it turns out that the panda habitat has (mostly naturally) declined in such a way that it seperates most groups of pandas, leading to inbreeding and the destruction of the panda's gene pool. most can't even procreate on their own. basically, without humans around, pandas would probably be extinct. also in chengdu i ate some full-strength chengdu hot pot (which made me cry) and saw a chinese punk band that was actually good.

that is all. the next post will have pictures, i promise.

and now we play the waiting game

lanzhou is where dreams of great trips through china come to die. xiahe is where those dreams are reborn.

but first, an explanation of a small change in plans. we decided to cut out the fat of the xinjiang section of our trip, and so arrived in dunhuang about a week ahead of schedule. so that week has since been transferred down south to the land of very spicy food: sichuan. so all you out there tracking my trip on your wall-sized map of china please take note.

lanzhou might be the crappiest city in china. it's down in this valley along the yellow river, surrounded by these huge cliffs. but since the city has exploded in size much like everywhere else in china, it has stretched to about 20 miles long and only a mile wide. also, the drivers of the public buses seem to earn a commission or something, because all the conductors lean out the windows and try to convince people to ride the bus. it's also hot and polluted here.

but we managed to escape three days ago to xiahe, in gansu province, which is probably the best place in china (like anyone could ever know that). the small town is located in a river valley in the mountains that step up to the tibetan plateau (the tibetan plateau, and tibetan people, actually stretch far outside the boundaries of "tibet"). the monestary is the size of a small town, and is the second most important pilgramage point for tibetan buddhists outside of lhasa. the town is full of monks dressed in red robes talking on cell phones, eating out with friends, going to play basketball, etc. we took a tour of the monestary and got to see huge murals made out of yak butter, the monestary's medical school, and the grand hall, which was full of monks meditating (at least the older ones; the younger ones were more content to talk and point at the foreigners on the tour).

we also hiked up one of the mountains that rise up out of the river valley where we kept running into prayer flags tied up in trees and the remains of previous buddhist rites and ceremonies. after we got to the top, we had to run halfway down the mountain again because these five-minute thunderstorms kept rolling through. other highlights: seeing a bunch of monks having tibetan buddhist band practice down by the river, eating yak youghurt, rocking out to phil collins in the hotel restaurant last night, and meeting a monk who wanted to know how many pictures of the dalai lama we had (zero).

right now we're killing time waiting for our train to chengdu, where we might meet up with jeff of beijing and shanghai fame. we're not exactly sure what we're gonna do there, but seeing giant pandas is high on my priority list.

"look out! he's got a uyghur knife!"

dunhuang seems like a place that promotes blog posts. we rolled into town (and back into china proper) this morning into what must be a pretty substantial desert dust storm. there is no one out on the streets, the sky is brown, and my mouth tastes like dirt. so going out into the desert seems like a bad idea right now. the main draw of dunhuang is the ancient buddhist art in some nearby caves, and we're planning to go check those out tomorrow.

the karakoram highway was pretty amazing, and lake karakul itself was also nice, but nothing particularly special. we stayed with a family of khyrgiz people who make up most of the population up there and stayed in their yurt for two nights. i got pretty sick the first night up until we got back to kashgar, so unfortunately i wasn't able to go out hiking. but clark and tyler did, so they can tell you all about it. the lake itself is at about 3600 meters, which is almost 12,000 feet. so not the highest i've ever been, but enough to knock the wind out of you that's for sure.

on the road up there is this crazy place called sand mountain, which is right when the road levels off at the top of the mountains. at that point the river the road follows spreads out into this enormous wet plateau, and on the other side are these sand dunes that tower probably another few thousand feet up these icy mountains. it's like nothing i've ever seen. so i made sure to take some pictures.

back in kashgar we hit up the sunday market, which, i will have to agree with durrell, was a little overrated. it's a great place to do some tourist shopping, but doesn't even compare to hotan's market in terms of crazy central asian market fervor. funny story: we bought a few decorated uyghur (WEE-grrr) knives and then discovered while trying to get on the train that we weren't allowed to carry knives that big. but luckily we bothered the police enough that they let us stuff them in the bottom of our packs. luckily nobody on the train was attacked with a uyghur knife that trip, or we might have been in trouble.

not-so-funny story: we were split up in our hotel in kashgar, and i stayed with these two scottish guys. the first time i ran into them later that afternoon back in our room, i discovered that they had a substantial amount of money stolen from their packs. at first they understandbly suspected me, but i convinced them otherwise and we established that it was probably someone who worked there, etc. whatever. that's why i carry all my money on me, lock up my valuables, and don't leave more than a thousand english pounds in my backpack, even when i'm not staying in a dorm room.

so after two nights on the train we're in dunhuang, waiting for the weather to clear.

Summer Travels

Well it has been a while since my last post, and I am sorry that I have let you loyal fans down. But, after having a great semester in Hangzhou, I am no on my summer trip across western and southwestern China. Last week was the start of my trip and it included travels around xinjiang. I went to 4 cities. Urumqi, Turpan, Korla, and Kasgahar. Out of all the cities I must say I like Turpan the best and Kasghar was just ok. I have to say the Sunday market is way overrated. While, right now I am in Dunhuang getting ready to explore the Famous Buddha caves here and then I am off to the desert for some surfing on sand dunes. If I have time later I will tell you all about it. Well I am out, 100.

i'm dreaming of a pastrami sandwich

muktar of turpan is the craftiest devil this side of baghdad. he immediately sized us up for what we were and then took us down. we went with him up the turpan grape valley, which was a pretty cool place, considering it was in the middle of that blazing desert basin. they dig these underground tunnel systems all through the mountains down to the ground water, then run them together down into the valley, where they grow a bunch of grapes.

anyway, muktar drops us off at the top, where we go in and find the suckiest part of the valley. we tell him that we want to walk to the bottom, which was beyond the scope of our original 100 yuan agreement. so tyler strikes this ridiculous deal with him: if we make it to the bottom in an hour and a half, we pay 130 total, if not, we pay 150. well needless to say, muktar was more clever than a barrell full of jackrabbits. as soon as that hour and a half pulled around he tore as up the valley to find us. once he found us, he tapped his watch and said, "i waited an hour and a half at the bottom for you." sullen and beaten, we rode in silence back into town. but we have to hand it to muktar, he's smarter than a bunch of foreign college students.

a lot has happened since i last wrote. we spent two nights in turpan, relaxing at these beer company sponsered fun squares at night. we were in urumqi for a day, then did a 22-hour bus ride across the taklamakan desert (second biggest in the world) to dusty hotan. in hotan we check out the large sunday market, which should pale in comparasion to kashgar's. then we headed over to yarkand, which sucks a lot, before arriving in kashgar today. much has happened, and more than i can/want to write here. highlights include: seeing every single part of a goat being sold on the street in hotan, climbing around the ruins of an ancient city called gaochang, and seeing a bunch of little chinese/uiygur kids doing coregraphed minority dances under a mao statue in people's square.

what lies ahead? first off, tomorrow we head up the karakoram highway, which enters pakistan, to check out the extreme mountain scenary (we stay on the chinese side, of course). then we get back in time to hit the kashgar sunday market, which is the biggest and best in all of asia. afterwards, it's off to the mountains in northern xinjiang. way far ahead includes tibetan monestary towns and possibly chengdu before heading down to yunnan.

thanks for reading.

"YANG ROU!"

we made it as far as turpan at least. we just arrived at the second lowest place in the world early this morning, and have been walking around the town a bit since. it just got about too hot to handle, which isn't bad considering that it is now 10:45 (beijing time) in the morning, or 8:45 am by any standard notion of time. we arranged with a cab driver named "muktar" to take us to some places tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.

according to tyler, a anthropology major and our resident expert on chinese minorities (he studied it for his one-on-one, though what he came away with was that all the minorities in china like to sing, dance, and love their chinese masters) xinjiang is made up mostly of hui and uigyers (that's almost definitely spelled wrong), both muslim minorities. we wandering into a market to get something to eat, and asked some guy what was in the pastry things he was making. he shouted "meat!" after we asked what kind of meat, he seemed to swell up and with a sweep of his arm shouted "lamb meat!" i guess it was more ridiculous if you were there, though the things tasted pretty damn good.

how has the trip been so far, you ask? just fine, i say. xian was actually a pretty efficient and cool city as far as i'm concerned. we saw the terra-cotta warriors, wandered around the muslim quarter and the city mosque, walked along the walls, and saw the forest of steles musuem, which is a collection of stone tablet-books. they also have a really well-developed sex industry, at least around our hotel.

our train ride from xian to turpan was pretty amazing, with a drastic change of scenary from cultivated planes, to what looked like northern nevada, to the biggest flat piece of earth i've ever seen. also, apparently none of the trains to xinjiang have air conditioning, which made for a lot of laying around being lazy. not like there's anything else to do on a train for 36 hours.

that's it. sorry no pictures this time around. maybe later.

reload

so this it folks. one part of my time in china ends and another begins. our graduation ceremony was this morning, and the language pledge ended, whereupon i discovered that our resident director has an incredible southern drawl. besides a speech by the representative of the university's international institute that included overt references to our studying in china helping develop china's economy, the ceremony was actually pretty nice, with an excellent dvd/video/picture slide show thing that documented our semester.

and what a semester it's been! as you can tell, clark, my co-author of this blog, was attacked and killed by a rare chinese land shark shortly after our arrival in china. this prevented him from ever making a blog post. a few weeks ago we also lost durrell during a trip to shanghai. last we saw of him, he was driving off in a cab with some french girl and a brick of opium the size of a mini-fridge. china weeds out the week, and only the strong can survive to sit in internet bars and post to some rarely-read blog. but on a more serious note, we all had an absolute blast this semester, and it's an experience that will affect us for the rest of our lives. i couldn't have been luckier than to be able to come to china this semester and make the friends i did. i'd just like to send out a big, official thank you to my mom and dad, whose seemingly bottomless pockets when it comes to my education and endless love and support made it all possible.

so what's up next for your fearless author? well i'll tell you. tyler and i are skipping town tomorrow and heading to xian for a night, then off to xinjiang, where the women flock like the salmon of capastrano, or so i've heard. in fact, if you mention any place in china, chinese people will tell you that the women there are very beatiful, except in hangzhou, where west lake eclipses all. after xinjiang, tyler and i are going to skit around the edges of tibet, down in sichuan where we split up and i venture into yunnan all by myself. afterwards, i'm off to hong kong for a few days, then i'm flying down to vietnam to meet everybody's favorite communist duc! then i'm back home on august 2nd. whew!

what does that mean for you, gentle readers? sporadic updates, no gaurentees about pictures until i get to kunming around the 4th of July, but some wild and crazy stories nevertheless. so stay tuned, and send me some e-mails to keep me entertained while waiting for buses and trains in dusty desert outposts. also, if you want anything from kashgar, the craziest market town in the world, let me know and i'll think about it.

yours, etc. BEN

p.s. here are some pictures of our last ping-pong class where we held a tournament. the first is me devestated after coming in dead last, and the second is our class (with our coach on the right) after clark directed us to look "really happy."

totally bullshit

so the trip to shanghai on saturday was good for a number of reasons. first of all, i headed into one of the rich expat enclaves to drop of my luggage at a friend's house. the place is like american suburbia dropped right into china. kids biking down the streets, moms taking their dogs for a walk... very strange. next i headed to a propaganda poster museum, which is located in the basement of some random housing development. they had some wild stuff, with the one saying that the chinese people support the american blacks in their struggle for civil rights being my favorite. then i went to the shanghai museum, which is, by all accounts, a fine museum of ancient chinese history.

the best part however, was when i was sitting outside the museum waiting to meet up with clark and luke. after being accosted by some chinese students wanted to practice their english, a man with his wife sat down next to me and started talking to me in english as well. this was sort of strange, because he looked rather old, and people that old don't normally speak english, or are willing to use it to talk to people. but then i noticed that he wasn't really that old, he clearly just looked older than he was, and his english was perfect.

he apparently attended the shanghai foreign languages school in the early eighties, then in 1985, after something to do with connections to a japanese journalist and a chinese democratic activist (who is now penciled out of chinese history), he was arrested as a political dissident and held for 11 years. now, he can't get a job anywhere because he has effectively been blacklisted in chinese society.

for the rest of our conversation, he effectively railed on all aspects of chinese society, including the economic reforms, local elections, the press, and education, all of which he called "totally bullshit." i feel like i was really lucky to meet this guy. it's so easy to forget, sitting in the ultra-clean people's square in shanghai surrounded by foreign tourists and ultra-modern skyscrapers, how backwards and utterly screwed up the chinese political system still is. i feel like all of us have been lulled by how fun it is to live here in china, and we forget that the communist party's control has graver consequences than just hilariously stupid english-language newspapers.

clark and luke also ran into a guy in people's square who was drawing portraits. even though he was clearly very poor, his english was very good. he said he read the english newspaper everyday and clearly made up his own mind about what he learned everyday. it seems that the most free- and forward-thinking members of chinese society are either crushed by the government or are the poor and powerless. meanwhile, those getting an education are by and large brainwashed losers, wasting their time playing online games in this dump of an internet bar. i hope i'm just being overly pessimistic about my chinese counterparts.

in shanghai the eye of sauron is always watching:

sometimes i just want to know what time it is.

no more classes. yay.

this afternoon we took our final class trip out get our feet washed. as wierd as that sounds, there are feet washing places everywhere in hangzhou. basically, they wash your feet in some soapy mixture, then give you a foot/leg massage and a back massage. i sustained minor injuries during the back portion, which required the application of two band-aids in a cross like you see in the cartoons. the girl giving the massage said it was on account of my bad skin and the other employees in the room recommended that i exercise more, like tyler, so this sort of thing doesn't happen again. they sort of lost me on that last point.

another interesting point came when i looked at my watch and all the girls giving the massages thought i was extremely bored. we tried to explain to them that i just wanted to know what time it was, and they responded by saying, "oh, so what you mean is that you're bored."

i'm off to shanghai for the day tomorrow, maybe longer. studying for finals is for losers.

on your left...

i've written a lot since being here about the trips i've been on and some of the more unique things i've done, but i figured that with less than two weeks left in hangzhou, i should probably write a post about our campus, as it is where i spend the vast majority of my time here. so here we go.

the place is called Zhejian University of Technology, and it is the best state school in zhejiang province. it's located quite a bit away from the downtown tourist area, but is still within the city center. the campus is fully contained with two gates, north (back) and south (front). here is a picture of part of the campus from the top of the new classroom building. our dorm is one of the buildings to the left.

here is a picture of the classroom building where we have pretty much all of our classes.

below is one of the lanes on campus, with student's bikes lined up on the left. our dorm has a bike parking area on the first floor, but most have covered parking spaces across from the entrance to the dorm.

here are two pictures of the school's track. the second picture has the fairly new pool building on the left and the other athletic building on the right.

right across from the north gate is an area we generally refer to as "hou men" or back gate. it's basically a collection of really small restaurants, fruit stands, and internet bars that serve the student population. since we spend almost all of our time there at night, i took pictures of it at night. huzzah!

when you write the title last, you always forget to write it

this weekend we had our last program organized outing to a mountain village area in western zhejiang province. the entire thing was somewhat dubious in purpose, and i think that lin laoshi, our program director, was just bored and wanted to take his daughter on a trip. needless to say, attendance was low.

so into the mountains we went. the first stop were two factories, one which made popular-but-very-difficult-to-eat nuts, and another which made a combination of brake pads and rubber powder from scrap shoe soles. here is a picture of discarded shoes waiting to be turned into a fine black powder.

both places only operate at night, because, in an effort to save scarce electricity in the mountain regions, the government lowers electricity prices at night. and before i thought that the textile factories operated all day! although these factories were privately owned, they are part of a government program to give people jobs or something. i'll be honest, i didn't quite understand that part.

afterwards we trucked off to one of our teacher's family's home, where we were treated to an awesome lunch. the regular food served at homes in china is not really all that different from what you get in restaurants, except that the flavors are a little more bland and they don't just use the choice cuts of meat in the meat dishes, but rather the entire chicken.

i'm gonna go off on a tangent here and talk about something i haven't discussed yet: MSG. chinese food is infamous in the u.s. for using the stuff, which purportedly makes the flavors much stronger, though people complain that it makes them sick and so many restaurants advertise not using it. not so in china! as i've learned in my cooking class, they put the stuff in everything. in jiaozi (dumpling) restaurants, they even put it out in the table to mix with your soy sauce and vinegar. i've come to agree with the chinese on this point. not only has there not been any proof that the stuff makes you sick, but MSG does actually make the food taste better.

anyway, we drove off to another village, where it seems like the entire town turned out for our arrival. we were then shown around by the town's mayor type person and the secretary of the local branch of the communist party. on sunday they were going to have local elections for something or other, which would have been really cool to see, but unfortunately we were not sticking around for that long. another interesting note: about 60 percent of the town had the same last name of xie, so i think we just found your family, ann! and also, the town was currently experimenting with ways to clean up the environment around them, and so they built trash cans and told people to stop dumping all their garbage in the river. what a good idea!

afterwards we went to a resevoir, where we had to fish for our own dinner. it was pretty boring, except when luke almost got killed my a fish hook and tyler and justin went for a huckleberry finn-type boat ride on the resevoir. the fish was good.

and that is all.

Jamie, Pauley Was Just Visiting. You Didn’t Have Do Him Like That.

So in the past three days, ZUT has been the stage for two tragic deaths, one that happened this last weekend and one that happened this morning. Today started like all my regular Tuesday mornings. I forced my self to get out of bed and threw on my head phones and slowly, real slowly, made my way to my Chinese Business Language class. Upon entry, I was greeted by my teacher and Clark, the only two in the class at the time and they were talking some nonsense about how today we were going to be having a visitor. It some inside joke between them that I didn’t quite understand, but soon with some tragedy would later find out. So as I sit down and prepare to get ready for class like a good student. Jamie enters the classroom and they start talking the same nonsense to them, about how we are having a visitor in class. So finally class starts, and I am like damn its hot today, and I ask to turn on the air-conditioner. Then, next something happens that I don’t quite understand. I turn on the air-conditioner for everyone, and like 6 seconds after I do this, Jamie turns on the overhead fan. Can someone please tell me why, someone would need to turn the overhead fan on full blast if I already turned on the air-conditioner. Because I just don’t get. But, anyway as soon as Jamie turns on the overhead fan, the guest that Clark and my teacher were talking about to come out. The guest they were talking about was this beautiful green and yellow bird, the looked like a parrot or something cool like that. But as soon as the Bird came flying out Jamie starts to freak out and instead of think rationally she starts running around the classroom screaming. What she should have been doing was turning off the fan that was now on full blast. I mean really who gets scared of a bird. But anyway the bird starts flying around the room scared with no place to land and keeps getting closer and closer to the fan. I run over to the fan switch to turn off the fan. Because Jamie was just to scared to do something simple like that or something. But because the fan switch was some tricky Chinese switch, I could not turn the fan off in time. By the time the fan finally got turned off it was too late. The bird had flown straight into the fan blade and was sent like a missile across the room. I am not sure if it killed but upon hitting the fan feathers were sent flying. And the bird bounced pretty hard off the wall and it hit the floor with a thud. I didn’t see the body but I heard there was also a little blood. But however, there was still a slight chance this bird could have still been alive. But the chance was pretty much thrown out the wind when Clark decided to pick up the bird’s limp body, wrap it in a plastic bag, and throw it out of the six-story window. So if the fan blade, the wall, the floor, and lack of oxygen didn’t kill it, I am pretty sure the fall from the six-story window killed it. Rewinding a little bit, after the bird hit the fan Jamie was a little upset, so I made sure that she knew that she might not have killed the bird, and that it was Clark throwing it out the window that actually killed it. But she didn’t seem to believe and was real gloomy all class. So to cheer her up we would give example sentences about how she killed the bird. The best part of class was when we had to do a short 表演 （Biao Yan, Skit）. And the topic of our表演 was that I was trying to get a job at an insurance company for pet birds. We did the表演 in tribute to the bird and to cheer Jamie up. Lucky for Jamie, it was only Clark and I in class today, otherwise she would have really been made fun of. But to give this story some hope, at the break when we looked out the window to see if the bird was still there. We could not see the body, so maybe it was just playing dead and got up and flew away.

So remember if a bird is in your classroom don’t start the fan unless, you want some chicken nuggets.

On another note, Last night I taught my room to sing an Usher song, Simple Things. And today, I am going back to his English class to help him singing it. I will be sure not let you know how it goes when I get back.

Getting Jiggy With It

I don’t know if people still say that, I haven't been in The States in a while, but Friday night is the most fun I have had in Hangzhou in a long time. The started off with us going to a restaurant called, 外婆家 （Wai Po Jia, which means Grandma’s Kitchen）. It reminded me of one of those posh upscale restaurants in downtown Seattle. They only difference between外婆家 and one of those posh upscale restaurants in downtown Seattle is that this restaurant happened to be in China and filled with what seemed to be millions of Chinese people. Apparently, it is one of the most popular restaurants in Hangzhou. It is probably the best restaurant that I have been to since I have been in China for about three reasons. One, it is by far the cleanest restaurant I have been to since I have been here, much cleaner than the restaurants behind the school (pictures of them coming soon). Two, the food was really good, maybe not the best food I have had but still good. And three it was cheap. How Cheap? Cheap as hell. I give very few recommendations in this blog, but if you are ever in Hangzhou you should definitely eat at this place.

After dinner, because our stomachs were full it was time to do the Kanye West workout plan. We all got right and hit up the club. The club we went to is called Casablanca, and it was crackin’. Since, I have been here I have not been able to find a bar that plays hip hop music. So a few months I gave up on the idea and stopped going to the bars. But last week this magazine was delivered to our rooms with all the hot things to do in Hangzhou. So, we all decided to go to Casablanca, to see what that be like. And this was one of the rare times that we actually got to get some of the Chinese roommates to go with us. So that made it a little more crackin. Because my roommate and his friend came out with us, I decided to treat them to some American drinks that taste much better than that rocket fuel they drink called Bai Jiu. I bought them some Long Island Ice Teas. They didn’t believe me when I said there was alcohol in it. When your used to drink Bai Jui, everything else taste like Cool Aid. I really lost my train of thought right now. So let’s go back to the beginning. The club was crackin’. And here is why, one, we got the Chinese roommates to go out with and teaching them to dance to hip hop music is hella fun. Especially, because they don’t have that much rhythm, it is kinda like trying to teach Clark to dance or something. Actually, no, no it isn’t they all had much more rhythm than Clark. Two, their was actually other people in the club that knew how to dance. I was like what, and there was actually a random Chinese girl in the club that knew how to dance, working her body like a snake. Another reason why it was cracking, was probably because I was getting right on shots of Bacardi. Bacardi always makes the party a little bit more fun. And the other reason why the club was crackin’, I forgot, probably because of the Bacardi shots, alcohol does that to you sometimes.

Saturday morning started off great because I was supposed to catch a bus at 8 am. But because on Friday night coming home late from bar, I set my alarm clock for 6pm instead of 6am, I ended up missing my bus and sleeping through Saturday morning. But it was still a great morning filled with drunken sleep. Even though, my Saturday morning was a good one, my Saturday afternoon didn’t start off so great. I woke up at about 1 pm to find one of my friends in my room bored, wanting to go out. So after taking a shower and getting dressed we were on our way to go out and have fun. On our way to the bus stop, saw a group of people standing in front of the cafeteria, around police tape. Because a group of people and police tap arouses one’s curiosity, we decided to get a closer look and find out what happened. Once we pushed our way to the front we come to see a big pool of blood in front of the stairs leading to the second floor cafeteria. So, I just thought that some one slipped on banana and fell down the stairs. But I was way off, I come to find out that an hour or two earlier some guy stabbed his girlfriend to death. I never thought that this kind of thing would happen here on this college campus. Seeing something like that brought me back to earth and made me realize that I need to be more cautious while I am here. But other than that, the day went well. That night my friend Ye Zhu took my roommate, me, and my roommate’s original roommates out to dinner, we all got to meet Ye Zhu’s girlfriend. And that was Saturday.

And today is Sunday, and the most that I have done today is write this blog. I need to go out and do something besides this, so I am out.

Oh, and can someone please tell Clark that eggplant flavored condoms isn’t as good of an idea as it sounds?