2 Old Visa Trips Before Leaving China

Post by New Clark

Forewarning: this is a long one. You might wanna get some popcorn.

Well, true to my intentions, New Clark has successfully replaced the absence of Clark by creating an absence of New Clark. Is there really a difference? Probably not. Regardless, I feel like sharing a bit about the last few visa runs and getting in as much blogging as possible since I'll soon be leaving China, and in the by-laws of the blog, it says only one Clark can blog per continent, so when I return to America, I'll have to relegate my blogging abilities to, "Classic Clark".

After my nearly disastrous encounter with the Visa police on that trip to Korea, I decided to play it safe for the next one, read my departure date correctly, and leave China on the my visa expired at the latest. After those uncharacteristically intelligent decisions on my part, I decided to try to go to Mongolia and see if it was all that Durrell had built it up to be, i.e. being sold into sexual slavery. I briefed myself with Durrell's blog, asked his advice, and then consulted our common MCIA friend for the real, accurately spelled, intel.

Just for clarification from Durrell's post, if you're going to purchase the tickets for the bus to Mongolia, not at the station but at a governmental building associated with Mongolia, it's the Consulate that you want to go to and not the Embassy. The military guard outside the embassy would not talk to me or answer any of my question (as if I could actually speak Chinese to him). Regardless of this initial mishap, I was able to find the consulate, purchase a bus ticket, and travel in the taxi to the bus station in southern Beijing. I don't have anything much to add to Durrell's description of the taxi ride, the location of the bus stop, and the bus ride up to Mongolia. I will say that while I was blessed with good weather, my luck did not hold out for traveling with either another foreigner or a group of Mongolian students.

As someone who has never officially studied Chinese, but now knows enough to get around and make it seem like I can actually speak it, I often get told by people who did study that, "this person can speak good English," or, "yeah, it should be no problem with the Chinese you can speak". It's probably better if those statements are taken with a very large grain of salt. I don't recommend trying to do this trip to Mongolia unless you speak Chinese fluently, or know Mongolian fluently. It just doesn't work quite as well. Sure you can get across, but you'll probably be paying extra, and people will pretend that they can't speak Chinese if you are trying to and not succeeding. Also, try to get a Chinese driver to drive you in his jeep across the border. The Mongolian ones, who are friends of the people who try to load you in a taxi right out of the bus, dawdle around all day will try to take more money than initially bargained on to cross the border. Needless to say, I left feeling like I had been fleeced, but I still got across the border safely for another two month stint in Mainland China.

However, I do feel like I've had unnecessarily bad luck when it comes to border crossings/renewal of my visa. On this particular trip to Mongolia, I was pulled aside when I was trying to leave China, owing only to the fact that I carried a passport from the U.S.. After being interrogated by the officials as to my reasons for wanting to cross (sightseeing....for an hour), and what I was doing in china (...freeloading, since I'm not supposed to be working?) I was reluctantly allowed to leave Mainland China and enter Mongolia. There were no questions upon trying to enter Mongolia, or to leave Mongolia and re-enter China. I figured that the reason they wanted to stop me from leaving was purely in the interests the man wanting to practice his English, not because I was looking shifty and could be carrying illicit contraband out of China. I came to this conclusion because even though they asked to look in my backpack, they didn't even shift stuff around and I've gotten frisked more times on my way to the bathroom than I did in that customs office.

I managed to cross safely, and then return earlier than expected into Beijing, which was due to a crazy driver who pulled us into the station around 1:30 am, which was about 5 hours ahead of schedule. But, as I have not posted in a while, this post is backdated and can now be followed up by my second visa trip to Korea. Initially, it was not supposed to be a trip to Korea, but a trip to Hong Kong, this however had to get scrapped as everything planned about the trip to Hong Kong went wrong.

I had found these really cheap tickets to Shenzhen, which is the city located right outside HK. You can fly there much cheaper than directly to HK, and take a bus from the Airport to the border for about 40 yuan and 30 minutes of travel. My flight was to leave Beijing at 8:20pm, stopover at Wuhan for the night, then continue to Shenzhen the next morning. I had also booked a similar stopover at Wuhan flight from Shenzhen back to Beijing without the overnight part. Unfortunately for me, I managed to miss my flight out of Beijing by about 5 - 10 minutes since they stop checking people in 30 minutes before takeoff. Entirely my fault. I book a second flight, this time direct, to Shenzhen from Beijing, but it leaves the next morning. I head home to crash and wake up early for it. While I make it on time for my flight's scheduled departure, it gets delayed due to heavy air traffic at Beijing International. When I arrive in Shenzhen, I have just enough time to take the bus across the border and get back to the airport to catch my original flight back to Beijing as long as nothing goes wrong.

This time I was pulled aside at the customs station due to the fact that I was one day over my allowed period of stay in China, which was on the intentional side. Poor choice when trying to cross customs at the border, as I've now learned. They didn't let me leave China, and instead made me wait for an official to talk to me. It took enough time getting someone who could explain that if I still wanted to cross I would have to sign some document, creating a permanent record on my passport that I had overstayed my welcome, or that I would have to go back to Beijing and sign some document at the immigration public security bureau. Even with the official saying that going back to Beijing would result in no penalty, it certainly still sounded like exactly the same thing. By now, I had wasted so much time in trying to cross that if I did not leave the immigration border immediately, I would miss my flight back to Beijing. Having already missed one flight, and being tired and frustrated with an official who spoke great English but seemed like a real duffer, I chose to get back onto the bus and catch my flight back to Beijing. Luckily, I was able to check in just before the check-in gates closed for my flight.

The flight from Shenzhen back to Wuhan went as scheduled. However, my flight leaving Wuhan was delayed by 4 hours, again due to congested air traffic around Beijing. The airline drove a bunch of us to a hotel, then expected us to pay for it. I decided instead to chill around the hotel and get some local food, and talk to some local Wuhanites. Whatever portion of the city we were in, it was pretty grubby and full of female pimps trying to get coin out of the foreigners. In Beijing, the people selling don't follow you around for several minutes trying to haggle prices, and so I was a little shocked and amused when this happened no less than 4 times to me. Actually leaving on my flight around 1:30 in the morning, I didn't get into Beijing until around 2:30 am, at which point none of the trains were running. Since I didn't want to shell out for a taxi, I chose instead to sleep at the airport.

My next plan of action was to sleep on my options, and see if I could get a black market visa to replace the one I was currently carrying. This didn't really pan out in the manner I wanted, and so I purchased another ticket to Korea (being my standard fallback position after my last serious mishap). Here again, at the airport, they didn't question my 3 day overstayed welcome, and I was allowed to pass through customs unhindered. Finally, with things going my way, I depart and arrive on time to Korea, sleep in the airport, and return to Beijing in the morning.

Lesson learned. If you need to cross the border and you're over by a day or two, don't be an American, and don't try it anywhere except at the airport.

Plant Update and Name Changes

Post by New Clark.

As of today onwards, Ben's plant is now going to be called, "Little Ben". It takes after its namesake well in that it is taller than Durrell's plant, Jesus (pronounced with Spanish phonetics).

Little Ben has been left in my care for the time subsequent Ben's departure from China and until I also return to the States. In the aftermath of the dropping of leaves event which will be blamed on the mild locational change from Ben's old apartment to his new apartment, Little Ben has made surprising and substantial growth. The most astonishing thing is that it seems that it is growing even better having left the 朝内北小街 area just inside the second ring, and moved out to just outside the third ring in the 朝阳公园西门 area that Durrell lives.

After many discussions of why this dramatic change has occurred, I've come this one conclusion. Solidarity.

I wanted include some pictures of the tenacious trees, but I'm not going to that. Ben will just have to use his imagination till he's surprised when he actually sees his plant again, and I'll leave the photo posting to the professional.

stuffing ourselves with donkey meat

last weekend we took a trip out to distant chegongzhuangwai to sample some highly recommended donkey meat. the meat was cold and came on these big plates mixed with slightly hot green peppers. you then poured a mixture of vinegar and garlic over the meat, and put them in these flaky pastry things. it was good, and we ate a lot.

shanji and durrell enjoying the donkey meat

a chart explaining why donkey meat is better than beef, lamb and pork in terms of water, protein, fat and ash (?) content

brewing beer: my career advantage

as some of you may or may not know, i've returned stateside, replaced by new clark. you may also know that i'm a significantly better blogger from outside china.

this move means trying to kick-start a job search in the worst economy we'll see for generations. nice work, old clark. but i'm doing my darnedest to put my best foot forward, which includes tinkering with the old resume.

i've always struggled with the "additional" line at the bottom of the resume (reading, jogging, harry potter, etc.) what is its real purpose? what should you include? what shouldn't you include? what does the decision to include this line, at all, say about you, the job seeker? does your career ever reach a point where you outgrow the "additional" line? does your career ever reach a point where you outgrow the resume? (sec. treas. here i come!)

once in a previous job, a resume came across my desk that listed the job-seeker as a "van morrison enthusiast." this caught my eye, no doubt, and i thankfully had the chance to interview the candidate. the guy got the job and turned out to be really cool -- deserving of his self-ascribed epithet -- but i think it could have gone either way, honestly. i was simply intrigued. i also interpreted this to be a potentially cautionary tale: if you claim to be a "van morrison enthusiast," you better be a van morrison enthusiast. i would not, for example, want to sit across the table from an interviewer who thinks they are, in fact, more van morrison enthusiast than i. so how far can you actually push the "additional" line?

another problem i constantly fear is that i'm hobby-less. i'm a very interesting guy, don't get me wrong -- i just don't lend well to established "hobbies" (e.g. blogging or rooting for professional sports teams.) there's nothing wrong with this, i swear!

so after much deliberation (clearly) i left several of the painfully generic elements in my additional line untouched ("traveling, snowboarding"), but decided to spice it up some with... beer brewing.

it has been an enormous hit. after months of wondering if people actually even made it that far on my resume, i've received comment after comment about my experiences in brewing. and the fact that i did this in china makes it even that much more noteworthy -- which is standard for pretty much any ex-pat activity and/or activities performed by ex-pats.

why is this?

are there more closet brewers out there than i originally assumed? is beer brewing still a form of connoisseurship that you can discuss in broad daylight without pretension? (...tentative use of connoisseur there... which is a pretentious word in itself.)

do i care? not really -- just so long as the positive comments about my resume's "additional" line keep coming. so for all the unemployed out there, i highly recommend making a mash this weekend. you'll thank me.

The Worstest Word You Can Say in a Movie in China

Recently, New Clark, Golze, my roommate, and I went to see Iron Man 2, taking advantage of half price Tuesdays. And for some reason, they kept censoring a word. At first I could not tell what the word was, I just assumed it might be a certain word. But I was like, why the hell would they censor that word, the Cold War ended at least 10 years ago, who is going to care about that word. But it kept happening, they kept censoring the word. I mean why would Russia care that they are the bad guys in the movie and is it really that hard to tell that Mickey Rourke is using a bad Russian accent. Do you need to keep censoring the word Russia/Russian. There are enough Russians in Beijing to know that Russians are super villains. I mean Chocolate is infamous in Beijing. I could understand censoring Swaziland or even Nauru, but why Russia. Come on! China and Russia broke up like 20 years ago, it's okay to say her name again. Get over it.

asian baseball tour 2009/2010: japan!

last weekend i took a quick trip back to japan to see my friends steve and caitlyn before they move back to states and also complete a quad-fecta of baseball in asia. as fans of the blog know, i've seen professional games in china, korea and taiwan, and so i wanted to tick off japan while i still had a free place to stay there. durrell was originally going to join but visa issues grounded him in beijing.

fukuoka's yahoo! japan dome

the game was great, and felt the most like a professional, big league game of the four countries. the soft bank hawks (fukuoka, the home team, yay!) beat the chiba marines (hiss!) in a very exciting game that included a number of home runs and one spectacular collision about five meters in front of home plate. the hawks' runner clobbered the catcher, who had only just caught the ball, sending the ball flying. the runner lay on the ground for a second, climbed up and stumbled a few steps to home before collapsing on the plate. the catcher stayed down for a while.

one interesting tradition took place in lieu of the seventh inning stretch. in the middle of the seventh inning (or after the seventh inning, i don't remember) everybody in the crowd blew up these rather phallic-shaped balloons, sang a song together, then released them into the air. a little plastic whistle was attached to the end of each balloon so that they all buzzed terrifically when let go. they also all fell on everybody's heads after. this was repeated after the end of the game as well, but with white balloons instead of yellow. i guess white stands for victory.

getting ready to blow!

weeeeee!

all in all a good time. i think of all the games i saw, the korean game was the most fun, because it had the best balance between major league professionalism and local quirkiness in the form of gimbop, giant beers and dried squid. japan felt a bit too clean and professional (the stadium was called the Yahoo! Japan Dome, for instance). the two chinese games were a blast but the enjoyment was mostly fuelled by friends and alcohol, as opposed to the quality of the game itself. taiwan was quiet and peaceful but not very exciting. now that i think about it, each of these games are pretty representative of my experiences in their host countries. maybe i should write a story about it. i'm sure i could get the nytimes to publish that crap.

A Sighting, a Polling, and Disbelief

Post by New Clark

A while back, I happened to witness the amazing event of a Chinese fire-drill in China. I was shocked, and since I was riding my bicycle and lacked a camera, I missed out on obtaining factual support to my claim of this sighting. However, seeing this event was not what surprised me the most.

I later notified my ex-pat compatriots about my fantastic find. I found it unfortunate that I got three different reactions to this information.

"You saw a Chinese fire-drill? That's awesome! We used to do those all the time when I was a kid and we probably made all the other cars wonder what the hell we were doing." – Response by a Coloradoan

"You saw a Chinese fire-drill? What is that? I've never heard of such a thing. Is that like a regular fire-drill but in China?" – Response by a Seattleite

"Cool, I haven't seen one of those yet. Where did you see it?" – Response by a Californian

Since, of the accurate polling of the three people I told, one actively practiced Chinese fire-drills, one knew what they were, and one had no idea what it was, I thought it might be prudent to inform people what a Chinese fire-drill is.

It's where you get out of your car at a red light, run around it and then get back in your car. Why do the Chinese do this? I'm not entirely sure; I'm still working on why their popcorn is sugary and not salty. It sure tastes good though.

yes, but will my hands be so fter?

note to self: when advertising hand cream called "la mer" in a massive mall display, make sure you put a big enough space between the two words.

quick plug for wang wen

i went to see a great dalian band called wang wen (惘闻) play last night. i saw them play when i first got here in 2008, in fact i think the first live concert i saw in china. this time they were promoting their new album L&R and put on a great show again. hopefully someday they'll get a chance to do a US tour like local beijing bands carsick cars and hedgehog did a couple months ago. if so, i highly recommend you check them out. in the meantime, you can check out their myspace page here. just watch out for the sexual predators.

qingming in shanghai

this weekend was qingming jie, or tomb sweeping festival, in china. even though it's apparently only a han chinese traditional holiday the whole country gets a three day weekend. i took the chance to make what has become a once a year trek to shanghai to visit friends. based on how many people were out and about at the newly restored bund on monday, there didn't seem to be a lot of tomb sweeping going on.

i won't bore you with a detailed play by play because nothing much happened. but while throwing an elbow at some chick that was in my way on the escalator when i got back to beijing, i realised it was sort of a bizarre experience, even though i had a great time. the entire thing (brunches, easter party, picnic in a park, beirut games) could have taken place in the US. for example, on monday evening before flying back to beijing i had a giant (delicious) burrito at this restaurant packed with laowai getting drunk on margaritas. i'm having a hard time believing that anywhere you can get decent mexican food counts as china. in beijing all we have is saddle cantina, where the tortillas taste like the pancakes they use with peking duck.

anyway, too much has been written about the differences between beijing and shanghai so i won't rehash that here. i will write about the bund, which just reopened to great fanfare after two years of construction. i hadn't been there for five years, and it pretty much looks the same to me, though shanghaiiers insist otherwise. i will say there are a lot more buildings over in pudong, including the glorious giant bottle opener, an apt dedication to laowai living.

on another note, the shanghai metro is expanding at a ridiculously rapid rate as they get ready for the 2010 expo to open next month. the trains and stations, especially on the new lines, are all really nice, with fancy flat screen displays and google maps-type consoles you can use to look at the area around the station. once after brunch at a popular art gallery slash cafe area, we walked out to the street right in front of a brand new metro station that my friend didn't even know existed. meanwhile, the beijing subway is burning to the ground.

hsccwrt podcast episode 2: katja k and the bald beaver blast

wherein: durrell hits the big time; part of the show is performed via semaphore; ben picks the wrong xinjiang restaurant; amy and mathias write a new theme song; sand gets in places it shouldn't; durrell finds out what's really under castro's beard; and google directs all mainland china traffic directly to this blog. or does it? listen to the show to find out!

episode 2: http://hsccwrt.podbean.com/mf/web/4jbbqj/20100321Episode2-FullEpisode.mp3
podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/podcastHSCCWRT

springtime for ben (and durrell and new clark)

it's not spring in beijing without a dust storm, and today we got our first of the season. a nice yellow glow early in the morning with blowing wind and a thick film of dust over everything. i think the current weather on my phone puts it best:

a good day to sit around, eat and watch dvds, which, let's be honest, i was going to do anyway.

Love is Tough in China.

Post by New-Clark.

The Woes of Tough Love in China.

I don't usually go to clubs often, but since coming to Beijing I've
been going out a fair amount. So not unexpectedly, I have been having
some new experiences.

I went for my first time to Mix the other night, which is out by
Worker's Stadium. Mix seems to be a club that is directed more towards
the Beijing locals and not the foreigners who converge on places at
Sanlitun, or at least it does to me. Regardless, the night that I went
there I was one of the few westerners in the place.

My MCIA friend (the same one as Durrell's) who has been mentioned in
one of the blogs already (I leave it up to you to find the right
posting to rediscover the origin of MCIA terminology), and I started
the night drinking at Salude in Nanluguoxiang. Since it was during the
Spring Festival, as the clock rolled over midnight we went out and got
our honorary jiaozi (dumplings) on the 5th day of the new year so our
ears would not fall off our heads.

After this we went over to Mix. Like I mentioned before, Mix is a club
and it was pretty full. So at one point, I'm out on the dance floor
and I see two girls walk/dance past me. One of them smiles and waves
at me, and so I make my way over and start dancing with her. After
some time, she leaves but her friend jumps right in and takes her
place. Now, this second girl had been sort of dancing with another guy
but it didn't seem like it was anything permanent.

After at least 2 to 3 minutes, the guy that she had left flat out
starts pushing me across the dance floor. I mean pushing. His arms
were outstretched, he was leaning forward, he was putting his back
into it, and you get the idea. He may have been saying something in
Chinese to me, but first of all since I don't speak Chinese I would
have no idea what he said. Secondly, it was so loud in there that I
wouldn't have understood if he spoke English, plus they say, "Actions
speak louder than words".

As he starts trying to win the gold for the foreigner push, several
thoughts go through my head:

1. I'm a little drunk, I don't believe this is happening.
2. Holy shit! I still don't believe this is happening!
3. I don't think I can really fight back since I'm the only westerner
in a sea of Asians and I don't want to get on the wrong side of them
when I can't speak Chinese.

I'll admit, I think my voice cracked once as I tried to yell, "What do
you think you're doing!," but only once. After being pushed across
almost the entire dance floor, the rest of the crowd must have
realized what was happening, and actually stepped in to my rescue.
They pulled the guy off of me and then we communicated in the silent
but universal language of hand gestures.

And where, you might ask, was my MCIA friend during this entire
encounter? He was over in a different room at their table after
sending me off into the masses. Truthfully though, he did send me with
his friends to bring trouble to the dance floor, but how was I
supposed to go and find a Chinese girlfriend if I always stay around
guys? After all, it is apparently the best way to learn Chinese (as
I've been told by many Chinese nationals). I mean finding a Chinese
girlfriend, not getting into the middle of the tough love in China.

introducing the hsccwrt official podcast

so i know everybody has been waiting with bated breath for my previously alluded to new initiative. i am therefore happy to announce the unveiling of the official how to succeed in communist china without really trying podcast! much like the blog, the podcast will be recorded on a semi-regular basis. also similar to the blog, topics will range from a bit of this to a bit of that, but in the grand scheme of things it's really about nothing, so if you are expecting to learn something, you should probably look elsewhere. in fact, this podcast will likely make you stupider. all new episodes will be posted here on the blog, but for those will a bit more interweb know-how you can pick up the rss feed here or search for us in itunes at "how to succeed in communist china."

attached is the first introductory episode, within which we discuss stolen bikes and over-attentive waitresses, i try to kill durrell and we perform a short musical interpretation of the marco polo bridge incident. note that we are still trying to work out some technical kinks, so you'll have the crank the volume up on this first podcast (11 is the recommended level). also we plan to tighten up the editing in future podcasts, so most won't be so long and rambling.

as a final note, for those reading through rss (namely, conor), we are going to kick the feed over to feedburner, so you can subscribe to that new feed here. i don't know if this will actually discontinue the old one but maybe, so you might as well update your subscription.

enjoy the show!

http://hsccwrt.podbean.com/mf/feed/k5tdhh/20100311Introduction.mp3

dalian again

last week i went to dalian on business, being the big important businessMAN that i am. once again i found it a lovely place, though quite a bit colder than last time. dalian is definitely a modern city, not hyperfuturistic like tokyo but i think comparable to some of the smaller cities i passed through in taiwan. besides some horrid parking issues traffic moves pretty well, there's not all that much construction anymore and the streets are clean. i think two factors help here (urban geography geek alert!): 1) the city is quite small both in terms of population and physical geography, which has allowed it to concentrate development into a relatively small area; and 2) the heavy influence of russian, european and japanese occupation on the city's design in terms of things like hub-and-spoke road layout, narrow streets with buildings right up on the sidewalk and a streetcar system makes it seem more modern to my western-oriented mind.

my activity this time mostly involved walking around shopping malls and business parks. exciting stuff, i know. but i did come across a great bar that i wholeheartedly recommend to anyone in dalian. it's called brooklyn, and any sort of google search will find it for you. it had actually been recommended to me by a former english teacher from dalian that i had met more than a year ago in beijing. luckily i saved her e-mail and the it was still around. it's probably the most happening place in the city. say hi to wayne for me if you go there.

as i final image, i leave you with the image below, which i snapped of the tv in my well-appointed hotel room. they were playing a dvd rip of avatar in german and streaming it to all the rooms in the hotel. this is a little shameless, even for china. i mean, at least put it on full screen so you can't really tell it's playing from somebody's computer!

just sad, really

Greetings to the Good People of Weesp

Recently, it has come to the Golzer's attention that we have a large readership from the previously uninhabited peat bog of Weesp. As everyone knows, Weesp is famous for: Weesper Mop cookies, Weesper porcelain, Defense Line, Nieuwstraat 41, a circular fort, three windmills, a goldfish named Mr. Tafelzuur, Roozenboom and Draaierschans, being 3k from the end of the Amsterdam metro, coining the term Weesper Wobber (a person that enjoys cookies. A wobber is a cookie in the land of Weesp. e.g. Cookie monster is a weesper wobber), and NOW for being our number one viewers from Europe. I would like to thank Bart Horseling and the good people of the best previously uninhabited peat bog for tuning in, we are able to do this because we are supported by viewers like you. And as they say in the land of Weesp, "Vechtstreek Uitermeer Advocaat Muiden Naarden" (May your dike be filled with cheese and tulips).

Gulags!? in China!?

Post by New-Clark (refer to Durrell's post about brewing and hooking)

 

Guide to Avoiding the Chinese Gulags

 

For those of you who have gotten a visa for China, perhaps you've pondered at times what would happen if you inadvertently overstayed your welcome. If you haven't yet, you're probably doing it right now. I myself wondered this while I was overstaying my welcome, and realized that I wouldn't really enjoy being incarcerated in a Chinese Gulag (if such things exist outside of Russia).

 

I woke up groggily on a Wednesday morning around 11 am or so Beijing time. First thing I did was check my phone text messages. I had unknowingly made the correct decision to silence my phone while I was sleeping, and so I didn't accidentally answer the phone during this morning. The first message was from Joy and read:

 

"The police are looking for you, are you ok?"

 

I immediately got worried and tried to determine what I could have possibly done to draw attention to myself. I quickly find out that I had misread the departure date on my temporary residence registration form. Instead of mmddyyyy it is yyyymmdd, crazy non-uniformity of date designations (that's my explanation and I'm sticking to it).

 

I follow advice to not answer the phone, not answer the door, and get the hell out of China. I schedule a flight for that evening to Seoul, Korea, and have the tickets scheduled to be delivered to my apartment around 4:30 pm.

 

Around 4, there is a knock on the door. I have my roommate Will answer the door since it could be my tickets, but it turns out to be the police...looking for me. Thankfully they forgo the search of the apartment, Will plays off like he's his brother (since he was unregistered at the time), and I get my tickets literally 5 minutes after the police depart.

 

Upon leaving China through Beijing International, no mention of my longer than allotted stay is made, and I safely board the plane and leave for Korea. My return flight is about 17 hours after I arrive, just long enough to catch some Z's in the airport, and determine that the Korean language sounds way more foreign than Chinese does.

 

When I get back to China, I go to the police department to reregister. This is about how the conversation went:

 

Police Officer: "Oh, I've been looking for you"

Ignorantly: "Oh? You have? I didn't know"

Inquisitively: "Yes, I stopped by your apartment and your roommate said that you left"

Innocently: "Ah, well yeah I left for Korea"

Trap #1: "I called your phone several times, why didn't you pick up?"

Honestly: "I left for Korea…Why would I bring my Chinese phone to Korea?"

Failed: "Oh, you're right. What were you doing in Korea?"

Convincingly: "Sightseeing"

Trap #2: "Do you speak Korean?"

In the Clear: "No, but I don't speak Chinese either"

 

And that is how I avoided being stuck in a Chinese Gulag. So, moral of the story: don't answer your phone if you don't know the number, it could be the cops. Or just someone you forgot to put into your phonebook.

philippines spring break 2010! wooooo!

some will remember spring break 2009, when durrell and i zipped all over japan by high-speed rail. that was great fun, but it was also pretty cold, so this year i decided to head somewhere warmer. thus: spring break philippines 2010! (click through any of the pictures for the full album)

wooo! spring break! wooo!

in fact, i was looking at a globe earlier today in a property management office in an office building in dalian and i figured out that on boracay i was actually the furthest south i've ever been. but i'm getting ahead of myself. after a polite invitation, persistent nagging and then pretending like i couldn't care less whether she joined or not (my less-than-successful approach to women in general), i convinced (my new roommate) joy to join as well. most people just go to the beach at boracay when they go to the philippines on chinese spring break, but i decided to buck that trend because i'm a rebel and i can only spend so long getting sunburned after 15 minutes in the sun. so instead i did some aggressive googling and, inspired by spring break 2005 (wooo!), eventually settled on a place called batad.

sunrise over batad

so the trip is divided into two parts: batad and boracay, with a short bop around manila at the beginning. i won't say much about manila because it is remarkable only because of its sheer geographic enormity and the fact that it is so unremarkable. killing time before our overnight bus to banaue, joy and i found a pleasantly quiet world war ii memorial and a museum with a series of dioramas depicting philippine history the only nice parts of our day. so after dinner in one of the affluent suburbs, we caught a taxi back into the city for our 10:30 pm bus departure. the bus ride was quite nice compared to those in china except for one thing: it was air conditioned to arctic temperatures. it was like the polar express on there. the temp in manila was a nice 80 degrees even that late at night, but you had people in jackets, woolen hats and wrapped in blankets getting on the bus. but we made it, and daresay even got some sleep.

banaue

after an early morning arrival in banaue, a busy mountain town that is actually the seat of the unesco world heritage rice terraces, we set off by foot for the village of batad, guided only by vague directions i had read on the internet and an explanation from the tourist information booth. you can only get to batad by walking, though you can hire a jeep or motor-trike to take you most of the way there. unfortunately i misunderstood the directions, and what we expected to take a little over an hour took a little over three. but the scenery was beautiful, the sun was hot and we got some serious street cred from the locals that i guess were not used to seeing foreigners hump it all the way out to the village. but one thing we ended up having in batad was lots of time, so it turned out not to matter. we got there by lunch and were blown away by some seriously impressive scenery. after getting settled in a guest house we strolled across the rice terraces and out to a nearby waterfall where we swam in the cold water. we repeated the same the next day, spiced up by the arrival at our guesthouse of four wildly entertaining israelis, two of whom actually had the same itinerary as us for the rest of the trip. the next two days we did two more hikes, both somewhat unexpectedly at 10+ miles, which made us eager to get some serious r&r down on boracay. (for anybody that comes here googling "batad hiking" here is a pretty reliable rundown of a hike we did: http://www.waypoints.ph/detail_gen.html?wpt=banawe).

the view from our guesthouse

having a good time in the philippines!

mugging in front of the local swimming hole

hiking scenery

after an much more unpleasant overnight bus down to manila (this time the a/c was joined by the bus driver blasting lady gaga on his cell phone), we caught an early flight down to caticlan, a short boat ride over to boracay island and a motor-trike ride to our guesthouse. we were impressively on the beach by 9:30 am, where essentially we stayed put for the rest of our time in the philippines. the beach at boracay is quite nice, hopefully as you can see in my lovely pictures, though some say it doesn't compare to thailand. i've never been to a thai beach but i would say it's about the same as the one i hung out at in taiwan and not as good as the beaches in hawaii. but on boracay they serve you 1 dollar mai tais to your beach chair and happy hour starts at 2 pm. they also have all you can eat buffets on the beach at night with fresh clams and oysters. (by the way, israelis talk a big game when it comes to eating but i think any american jew could easily eat one under the table.) and everybody speaks excellent english. it's a vacation spot that's hard to beat, for sure.

beach on boracay

boracay sunset

as a final note a lot of people asked me about filipino food, since you never see any filipino restaurants around. well there's a reason: filipino food is totally unremarkable. it's kind of like an asian version of spanish food, with some american influence (fried chicken). so lots of garlic rice with fried eggs, chicken/pork and vegetables. good, but nothing that would bring out the suburbanites or yuppies back in the states. the mark of any successful ethnic food, i think.

filipino food

How to Survive a Trip to Erlian

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My first suggestion is make sure not to go to Erlian in the winter and if you can't make sure of that make for damn sure that you don't go when it is snowing. My trip to Erlian took about 72 hours when it should have taken 36. Just a quick note, this blog post is for those trying to cross the border to quickly get out of the country to re-up those annoying 60 or 90 day tourist visas. In theory, this can be an effective and cheap way to go, unless mother nature drops a mild snow storm in your way that Chinese drivers don't know how to negate, although they make the drive frequently. So here is the 25 hour way the trip is supposed to go, by the way this is coming from Beijing.

1. Go to the South Bum Frakk Beijing (I think the area is called Mu Xu Yuan, but have no idea. You know it when you see the blocks of abandoned department stores) and purchase a bus to ticket to Erlian for about 180 yuan. I left around 5pm on Sunday. (I bought my ticket from the Mongolian Embassy and they gave me a ride to the station that is part of the reason why I don't know where I was. From the Mongolian Embassy the ticket cost 230)

2. The bus ride should take about 12 hours and you should get in around 5am. However, if you are an idiot like me. You chose to go to Erlian on the day that it is going to snow mildly, albeit stick to the rode and have to literally wait in track for 10 hours without moving an inch. Until the next morning, when for some reason the trucks that were backing everyone up, decide to pull over to the side of the rode and let everyone pass. Spending an extra 10 hours on the bus not moving doesn't sound bad but it was awful because you are stuck in this tiny bed that is barely wider than my body and definitely not as long as my body. I am 5'9" so if you are taller than me, good luck, you are in for a rough ride. The bed can't be adjusted so you are forced to pretty much lay down the whole time or slouched bent over in your bed because the bus roof is not far away. Also, what made the car ride uncomfortable was you had to fit your feet in these little tiny cubby wholes that squish your feet. The bus was definitely not designed for the American beef cake. A tip of advice, I would take the top bunk, because you don't Chinese people spitting down on you, or dropping food or cigarette buts on you or if you are really unlucky having some kid wet the bed above you. I was on the top by the way. While on the bus I got to observe some interesting interactions with Chinese parents and their kids. I don't know why this happened but for some reason on my way to see a man about a horse, I saw a Chinese mom give a couple of good backhands to her kid, she looked like she was pretty good at ping pong. And at another time, I heard a Chinese mom calling her Child stupid. Both incidents reminded me of the good old days.

3. Once you get in at 5am, you can go to the bus station and wait or you can go to a hotel and stay in a common 3 bed room for 10 to 20 yuan. However, for me I got in at 5pm the next. Meaning I spent a full 24 hours on the bus, double the time. So my schedule was all frakked up, goodbye 25 hour trip hello eternity. Lucky for me, when I got a ride from the Mongolian Embassy to the bus station there were some Mongolians students riding with me. I did not really talk to them in the car ride to the car ride to the bus station or on the bus ride, and by really I mean not at all. But after I got of the bus to Erlian, I must have looked like I was dazed and confused, probably because I was and they jumped to my rescue. Because as you know when, when you get off the bus in any Chinese city, the first thing that happens is you get accosted by Chinese people to try to take you to a hotel or give you a ride or scam you or steal your organs or sell you for sex. As I am somewhat pretty, I was very worried about the latter and was happy to be rescued. The students asked me where I was going in broken English. And I was like Mongolia. (I know what you are asking yourself right now. How did you know they were students if you didn't speak with them. Well, it just so happens that I knew about how to get to Erlian by bus from my Mongolian CIA friend. And he was the one who arranged my trip from the Mongolian Embassy. And as I was riding in the car to the bus station, he texts me and says they look like good Mongolian students, you should hang out with them. Turns out he was right). So once, I tell them I want to go to Mongolia they jam me in this truck car thing. The truck car thing is the size of a smart car and some how we jam, seven people into it, needless to say there was a lot of doubling up and getting to know one another. Another note, since this is close to the border of Mongolia, they are speaking Mongolian the whole time, so I have no clue what is going on and when I jump in the car with them, I have no idea where I am going either. It never occurred for me to ask, when it occurred but I thought it might seem rude, so I just went a long for the ride. After a brief stop at a bank and a really shady place where it looked like for sure I was going to be sold into sexual slavery (thankfully, for what I can only assume was said because it was said in Mongolian, the Mongolians were like "hell nah, we ain't stayin here, you best to take us to another place), finally we ended up at a nice little hotel where it only looked like I might lose a kidney. The Mongolian students ended up being really cool. I went out to dinner with them and they ended up treating me to Mongolian food. At dinner we ended up drinking Mongolian milk tea which was salty, pale, and warm. They told me it was good to warm you up, because it was freezing cold outside. And I ate this fried rice dish with lamb, carrots and cummerbunds that was amazing and we all shared what can be best described as 肉饼. I found out four of the Mongolians were English students and one other was a computer science major and another was just a girlfriend. They had been traveling across China from New Delhi to go home to UB (UB because I don't know how to spell it and I don't want to google it, UB is the capitol). Of the four English students one was female and she dominated the conversation telling me about themselves, her boyfriend is the one whole rescued me and threw me in the car with them. They ended up treating me to dinner. So I decided to return their kindness with a few bottles of 啤酒. We went back to the English students room and watched a couple of performances from the Grammy Awards (Jayz and Black Eyed Peas) and I guess I looked bored or something because they decided to show me Mongolian hip hop music which is a lot like gangsta rap but in Mongolian. I thought I was watching the Mongolian version of N.W.A. and Usher. After while, I went back to my room with the computer science major and the girlfriend and watched How I Met Your Mother with them until I feel a sleep. I didn't bring my computer by the way. I ended up waking up in the middle of the night listening to my ipod until 8am when it was time for me to figure out how to cross the border to Mongolia. Side note, the Stuff You Should Know podcast entertaining and informative, it got me throw my 24 hour bus ride and waking up in the middle of the night.

4. After checking out of the hotel, I rushed over to the bus station to catch a bus to across the border. Cabs to travel short distances around the city are about 5 yuan and they don't turn on the meter, also from the one cabbie I talked to I gathered that all Erlian cabbie's think Obama is bad because he talks to the Dali Lama (that word guaranteed censorship) and sold guns to Taiwan, and that America should have only one party and not two. I could not get him to tell me which party the one should be. Anyway, I rushed to bus station to discover there is only one bus leaving for Zamyn Uud and it is at 1:30pm and the last bus for Beijing is at 4:30pm. So I am beginning to flip my Santa Claus at this moment and freak out. There is no way I am staying another night in Erlian and I really don't want to get stuck in Zamyn Uud. But I buy a ticket anyway for 40 yuan and text my MCIA friend for a solution and he suggest going to the central market to hop a ride with jeeps the cross the border for what he says 150 yuan max. So I hope in the a text and he tells me he has a friend that can take me across for 100 yuan. So I am uber excited at this point because I just might not get stuck in Erlian another night.

5. The what I am going to call the Jeep Marauder tells me that he can take me across for 150 yuan and I am like nah 120 and he was like okay fine and he tells me that he has another American that he is taking too. I am like whatever, but we have to leave now. And he is like okay we will leave now. So I am getting in the car and say hello to the American and the first thing the American tells is that this guy is a trickster and he has been waiting for like an hour to cross. So after 30 minutes of me and the American telling him to lets go already. He finally has gathered enough people to make the trip worthwhile for him and has jammed us tight like sardines in the back seat and the trunk.

6. The border crossing is pretty uneventful, people are jumping out the car left and right some keeping going on to Zamyn Uud with US so don't, new people come in the jeep and each border check point, the driver is jumping out and giving gifts and bribes left and right. All I know is that process of going from the Chinese to the Mongolian check points goes off well with out me being sold in to sexual slavery, as you can tell is something I was really worried about the whole trip.

7. Once across to the Mongolian side, the American and I have to wait in the car for two hours while the driver handles his shady business and gathers more people for the ride back. Luckily, the American was their with me or I probably would have been very annoyed. But having someone to talk about the ridiculousness with makes the time go by a lot faster and makes for pretty interesting observations. I have only been to the US Mexican border once and that was Tijuana, but I never really thought about it until the American pointed it out (he is from Houston, a very large border city. Well, at least I think it is with all that urban sprawl it is just a matter of time if it isn't) to but Erlian and Zamyn Uud look like the US Mexican border and even the US Canadian border to some extent. The US being Erlian in both cases.

8. After gathering enough people, we cross the border again, more bribes and gifts are driver. The driver has to collect half our fare to help pay it. And I notice for half he only collects 50 yuan from me, things are coming up Milhouse.  

9. The driver drops us off at the bus station in Erlian. And I pay him 50 yuan and he doesn't say a word, Ka-Ching!

10. By this time it is 12pm and I hopeful that I can catch the 2pm bus back to Beijing, so I turned in the ticket I previously bought and try to get a ticket back for the 2pm bus, unfortunately it is sold out. But luckily they still have tickets for 4:30 which ends up being sold out by the time I get on. The ticket cost 200 yuan.

11. I ended spending the rest of the time walking around city and eating lunch with the American. At lunch we have this style of egg plant I have never tried. I don't know if I had said this in the blog before, but the egg plant cooked style in China is the best egg plant cooked style in the world, its fact I read in the CIA world fact book. Anyway the style is called 啤酒茄子, it is the best egg plant cooked style I have ever had. The food in Erlian is kind of expensive a dish of 锅爆肉 cost 35 yuan and wasn't nearly as good as my favorite Chinese restaurant's 锅爆肉 (more on that in a future blog), even the Qingdao's (beer) were a whopping 4yuan. The place was breaking the bank on my food budget.

12. The bus back to Beijing was much better. The cubby wholes for the feet where larger, actually built for real size people and beds were longer. If you are really fat and really tall you still would not have enjoyed this bus ride. But as I am just fat and average, it was fine. The only set back on the journey was when the bus driver got lost, but luckily the American was up front with him and had google maps on his phone. I got back to Beijing around 4:30am Wednesday. I felts so happy to see the three big humps of Xizhimen, I almost cried. But I was super sad when I realized the bus driver was driving us back to South Bum Frakk Beijing. I finally made it home around 5am for a nice shower, which I probably shouldn't say but it was my first shower since Sunday morning and the first time I brushed my teeth since then too. It was probably the least hygienic 72 hours of my whole life. If you saw the communal hotel bathroom I was staying in you would not have taken a shower either and probably would have peed outside. The bus station bathroom was much cleaner than the hotels.

Tips: If you try to get on a modern bus and get a top bunk in the back, because they are the best, and if you can't do that get just get a top bunk. Don't get a top bunk in the back on an older bus because then you are basically sharing one bed with everyone in the back. If you are tall you might want to get a top bunk in the very front.

Another tip if you can, travel with someone, preferably Mongolian, it will help a lot. And if you can't do that find some Mongolian students to hang out with. I think navigating the city might be hard if you don't speak Chinese or Mongolian. Very hard.

Another tip, eat the 啤酒茄子and the Mongolian food. But don't get diarrhea, if you do, you are not going to have a good time.

Another tip, know a MCIA agent that you can text for advice or at least someone who has been there.

Last tip, try to get a Jeep Marauder that already has people lined up to go that way you can leave quicker and you don't get scammed. Before I met up with the American he tried to go with these Mongolians guys that just took him to a gas station told him to pay for gas, drove him back to his original destination and then siphoned off the gas.

Shout outs: Thank you MCIA agent for helping me to navigate through this situation, I probably would have been sold in to sexual slavery without your help. And this post is for New Clark, hopefully I can save you a little money when you have to hide from the police again. 

Oh and this is not Golze posting, its me. 

plant update, and more

i just got back from a week in the philippines. it was a great trip, excellent weather, blah blah i'll put up a post on it soon with lots of pictures. in the meantime here is a picture of my plant, which has hit upon some hard times after moving to the new apartment. those that follow the blog, however, will remember about how my plant almost died before bouncing back with a vengeance. therefore, i remain optimistic, as long as turner didn't kill the thing while i was away on vacation.

besides the philippine post i am pleased to announce that durrell and i are working on a couple of ambitious initiatives for the blog. and by a couple, i mean one. but it should bring our blog up to 2008 standards, so i do hope you all stick around for the unveiling in a couple weeks.

and finally, i just want to say that the posting reach-around method that durrell is using seems to label every post as by me. though i imagine it's clear who's who at this point, i just want to throw that out there.