excitement, adventure, and really wild things

Indian food

2011-06-30T04:24:00.000-07:00

Note: I am back in New York. My laptop broke a while ago so I am catching up on blogging now that I'm back. Plenty of stories and craziness to share in the coming weeks. This post I did largely write before I left India but did not publish until now.

I have not said much about food in India. I suppose there have been more than sufficient distractions such that food has taken a back seat.

I have always liked Indian food since I started eating it back in college. I was excited for the food here and it has been good, and in some cases great, but I admit that the hygienic concerns have kept me from really going hogwild.

In fact, let me say a word about hygiene. Traditionally in India and in many other Asian countries, the left hand is viewed as unclean because it is the hand that is used to clean oneself in the bathroom. By this I mean you use your left hand and water to wipe your ass clean after you're done. I add that detail since just telling the story people seemed to be confused as to what I mean by "clean oneself." So, when eating food with your hands, as is often done in India, you will use your right hand to tear off pieces of bread, scoop up some whatever, and shovel it into your mouth. Also, as I have done a few times here, rice and curry or whatever will also be eaten with the right hand. The left hand remains largely inactive during meals, though it is used to occasionally hold silverware or manipulate plates or cups. The idea is that it wouldn't touch the food.

Now the funny part about that is, that the left hand is traditionally unclean, but zero attention seems to be paid to which hand is *actually* clean. Now people will actually wash their hands before they eat it seems pretty regularly, but as far as I can tell that is not a concern among the food preparers. I see guys reach in with a bare hand, pick up a samosa, put it on a plate, hold it there with their thumb while they squeeze sauce onto the plate, then hand it to the customer, and then use the same hand to collect their money and give them change. Vada pav are also assembled by hands. Basically everything that happens to your food before it gets to you happens with bare hands. The same hands that handle money, shake hands with buddies, or scratch their asses. Now I'm not a super squeamish guy. I don't carry around a little bottle of hand sanitizer with me everywhere but I think this is the opposite extreme here. It did make me laugh though as I saw what people do with their hands in India without washing them as I thought of people in New York breaking out a small bottle of hand sanitizer in every restaurant because they might've touched the subway pole that day.

Maybe in the US we've gone overboard with trying to avoid the transmission of germs, but when I see kids sitting on the floor of the train with their hands touching the floors, hands that are not gonna be washed anytime soon, I can't help but feel a little concerned.

Anyway, such as it is, I was very aware of food preparation in a way here that never bothered me or even occurred to me in China. In China I eat 70% street food I'd say, and this last trip I didn't get sick once. For what it is worth, in China they tend not to eat with hands too often, so maybe that's part of why it concerned me less. So that aside, I have since eaten a bunch of street food here in India and mostly ate in small cafeteria style restaurants. My stomach has been a little upset the last few days, but nothing catastrophic so far (fingers crossed).

Some things I have eaten here that I have had in my life before include varieties of dosa including my favorite, the rava dosa. This was always tasty and similar to good dosas I have had in the US. Vada Pav, which is the mumbai street sandwich made of a potato patty on bread with varying sauces. Also very good. I had street samosas yesterday for the first time which were very delicious. I have had some rice pulao with alu mattar and chana masala. I have had dal fry several times. I have had a few mixed vegetable curries and a few thalis as well. I had a vegetable biriyani which was the best I have ever tasted. I had a few new dishes too which defy description a little but I will try. One notable dish was Thalapith which was this sort of bread pancake made out of "pulses" and serves with some sort of tomato-ey sauce. I had sev puri, sort of like bhel puri. That was one of the only raw things I ate which concerned me a little but I survived. I had this really interesting dish called panki which is some sort of chickpea flour cooked in banana leaves I think, and then you can take the cooked flour/bready result and use it to scoop up this spicy green chutney. I had a great street food veg kebab roll. Oh, I had this thing called a frankie which turned out to not be a hot dog but instead was potatoes and onions rolled up inside of bread and cooked up on a griddle. I've had a few good meals here, though I think the really stand-out items were the new things I have never seen in the US before. The other things were perfectly good and sometimes great, but I don't feel as if I can't get food of similar quality in NYC or elsewhere in the US. There were a few meals I ate at Shweta's house which were noteworthy, although it is difficult for me to describe all the dishes. Those meals all a home-cooked touch which none of the restaurant meals could really touch. It has inspired me to take a real run at Indian cooking when I get back home.

I was thinking about the insistence of people that the street versions of things are always superior or that there is no way a dish outside of the native country would ever be as good as the one there. I was wondering if this has something to do with the cooking surface, such that whatever the hell is stuck on the pan or the grill or at the bottom of the sauce containers is the magic sauce. This made me think of Steve Martin who said that people always assume it's difficult to eat well on the road, but for him it was never really a problem "because I love animal lips...I do...I guess rat feces is about one of my favorite things. I do enjoy it." I imagine rat feces is the mystery ingredient in many a street delicacy. Maybe Anthony Bourdain knows.

Matheran

2011-06-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 4:45am this morning and walked to the station formerly known as Victoria Terminus, now known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or CST more often. I met Mulchand the Couchsurfer and we caught the 5:19 train to Neral, about 2.5 hours away from Mumbai. This is a local train, same as every other train I have ridden in India. Seats are somewhere between a NYC subway and Amtrak I guess, though neither really fits the bill. As we got farther out, various others joined our group. This was not actually a Couchsurfer outing, but rather an outing of a Mumbai photography group of which Mulchand is a member. They choose various places of interest and head out there on a weekend to take pictures all day. Today's target was the Matheran Hill Station.

A hill station is a village on a hill that makes some kind of weekend getaway for the nearby urban residents. In the case of Mumbai, Matheran is a popular spot to get out and most important up where the temperature is much more pleasant than the usual thick, humidity that is hanging over the city this time of year. In US terms I'd say the city is typically in the 90s and humid whereas up in the hills it was probably 75 or something without quite as much humidity, though it did pour several times during our visit, though not so much that it wasn't nice to see for a while or that it was actually disruptive to the visit. It just means you find something to stand under for 10-20 minutes til it returns to a light drizzle or disappears. You typically end up standing under a tarp or if you're lucky a larger restaurant or shop type structure, huddled together with a large group of other people, and in today's case, dogs, horses, and lots of monkeys. For Indian folks the monkeys are not really a big deal, but seeing loose monkeys everywhere is a new thing for this city slicker and I think I will never get used to them just walking or sitting right next to me like a dog.

Anyway, the hill station has a sort of (very muddy) main road filled with hotels, restaurants, food stalls, little carnival games like knocking over bottles or shooting balloons out with a rifle, souvenir shops, and guys asking if you want a horse to take you to the viewing points. There are various rocky and muddy paths through the woods that take you to these view points which vary from half a kilometer to maybe 3 kilometers away. I visited quite a few and as I wandered through the woods, I often found myself alone. It is an amazing contrast to daily life in Mumbai that's for sure. Probably partially because of the rain and partially because we arrived so early, there weren't too many people about though every group of Indian people was extremely excited to see me. I saw one non-Indian person today. All the other tourists with whom I spoke were from Mumbai. Most stare initially, with very little exception. Sometimes I'd break the stare with a "HEY HOW ARE YOU GUYS I'M A PERSON IT'S OKAY YOU CAN TALK TO ME!" or something like that, which usually elicited laughs and handshakes and occasionally instigated conversation. Sometimes people wouldn't want to converse, they'd just want to take my picture. Sometimes one member from a group of young guys would want to take their picture with me. Sometimes they'd all want to take turns taking pictures with me. One guy wanted pictures of me with his kids, and then once just by myself. That was my least favorite. I felt kind of like a zoo exhibit. Eventually I put on my iPod as I walked which didn't really deter anybody from asking for pictures, but at least I had nice background music as I walked around.

Also, every guy with a horse asked if I want a ride. No matter where I was, no matter which direction I was heading, no matter if they had seen me before, and no matter if they had seen me turn down 3 guys with horses in the last 10 seconds. In a way you have to admire the persistence. They also don't take no for an answer, although I have found that responding no in Hindi seems to do a bit better. So far, for everyone who has wanted something from me or wanted me to buy something, saying something in Hindi makes them give up or go away immediately. This only reinforces that I have to learn more. I asked a few questions of various friends on the train and took a few notes. I also bought a Hindi phrasebook that I started perusing. The main problem is that I haven't heard the language very much and it takes some time and exposure to get the sound of it into my head. That said, I started learning basic sentences and the grammar of simple sentence structure while on the train to Matheran, and then got to immediately use a bunch of it in various conversations. Very, very simple stuff of course, but surprising enough at least once to elicit applause and high fives from a young group of guys who were really excited to converse with me.

Overall it was a nice day including the travel on the train which I still like a lot and in this case provided some very green countryside scenery on the way out. We also had a nice shared taxi ride up the mountain to the hill station with six people in a minivan that was close to death and almost didn't make it several times. The guy really had to swing wide on the curves and restart the van several times. I was pretty sure we'd end up walking eventually but we made it in the end. There is also a "toy train" which goes up the hill very, very slowly and apparently provides very nice views but it takes 2.5 hours as opposed to about 20 minutes in the shared taxi, so we didn't do that. I have heard of other trains like that at other hill stations including a very famous one at Darjeeling. Under other circumstances I'd like to give that a try. At Matheran we split up as most of the group wanted to move very slowly and take tons of pictures and I prefer to walk at my own pace. We'd agreed on a lunch meeting spot so I went off and wandered my way finding various panoramic views and readying myself for a career as an angry and involuntary model.

The train station at which we arrived felt more rural and the small street adjacent to the station was filled with food vendors. Everybody got vada pav upon our arrival, which is a potato sandwich with various chutneys and one of my favorite things to eat in Indian cuisine which is famous and originates in Mumbai, but I elected not to get one from the street guy for two reasons. One reason is that it was like 7:30am or something. The other is that I made a deal with myself that I would be as careful as possible for my first week here with regards to what I eat from the street such as to try and reduce the likelihood of getting ill during what is only a two week visit. If it was my plan to stay in India for months then I'd follow the common advice and just eat everything and get sick in the first week just to get it over with, but I'd like to be a little cautious with my time since I don't have that much of it. I had one thing that was genuinely street food, but mostly I have eaten in restaurants which are by no means universally safe, but I have steered clear of raw things and anything with potentially unclean water which is usually what does people in. I had a few raw things and survived and apart from some gurgles the past few days, my stomach continues to at least not prevent me from going to the hill station today. That said, I'm glad I have at least some Immodium and Pepto Bismol with me. I think it's more likely that has to do with eating Indian food every meal for the last week, plus a little more beer than usual, rather than having eaten anything dirty or something like that.

I have eaten a lot of very good food since I have been here. Now that I'm heading into my second week, I will probably allow myself to be a little more adventurous. Not that I want to get sick or anything, but there are one or two things I really want to try from the street so I will be as cautious as possible but I don't want to miss them on this first visit to India. This Monday I will relocate to a different neighborhood farther north called Bandra which everybody tells me is a really cool and interesting place. I'd like a change of scenery as I think I have explored this neighborhood pretty thoroughly and would like something completely different for the last 5 nights I have to spend here in Mumbai. A week from today I will have arrived in Israel to which I am looking forward. Like all my traveling experiences, this has been an interesting trip, but I'm a little tired and ready to be in a place where I don't have to have my guard up quite so much.

I still have a week in Mumbai and a bunch of interesting plans yet. Tomorrow morning I'm attending this Chinese class which I think will be really interesting. I'll probably see Shweta and Shrestha in the evening in Colaba where I probably won't hang out all that much after tomorrow night, although I have at least one other reason to come down here for a dinner next Tuesday also related to China and Chinese. Other than that, it'll be hanging out in Bandra and doing some exploring of nearby neighborhoods. Also for those who have asked, I have indeed taken pictures though I haven't uploaded any yet. I will do all that when I get home. For now you're stuck with this overflow of words.

About a week so far in Mumbai

2011-06-23T02:09:00.001-07:00

I've tried to figure out what it is about this place that I specifically find to be so overwhelmingly intense.

I think the honking is a big factor. Rarely do let's say 3-5 seconds go by that I do not hear a car honk. Usually it is a chorus of honks. I've tried to listen to them as music instead. When they are off in the distance or when I'm indoors and they are not quite so loud, it's manageable, but often walking in the street that's not the case. Normally they are so loud as to make you want to cover your ears. I'm one of those people who covers their ears when an ambulance or something goes by. I know too many people from music school with ringing in their ears, and having had that for a day or two after loud concerts, I definitely don't want it for the rest of my life. That said, you can't really prepare yourself for it here, such that I would worry that if I stayed here for months or a year or something, it'd only be a matter of time before I'd have hearing damage. I wonder how many people already do.

So the honking makes up some huge bulk of the noise. Of course there is the engine and people noise as well which contributes. There are also the smells. Car or bus exhaust, pollution, stagnant water, garbage, unknown smells of human origin. Those are the bad ones. There are some good ones too, like the incense that a lot of vendors burn to keep flies away from their food. Then occasionally there's the food and spices, but I find it usually gets drowned out by the other smells.

The constant staring doesn't help anything. You'd think after China I'd be used to it, but I guess not being able to shock them out of it by speaking the local language doesn't help. Also, people do tout things quite a lot, most commonly little tourist souvenirs, toy drums, bootleg dvds, or knockoff merchandise, even more so in this neighborhood or near anything remotely touristy, though since I walk without a backpack or anything and I have gotten better at ignoring them completely, they often don't bother approaching me anymore, so that's been better the last few days.

Maybe most of all, here in India like in China, personal space doesn't really exist the same way. So people are constantly passing right near you, standing practically on top of you, bumping into you, touching you, spitting right next to you, shoving and pushing into each other to get in and out of places, passing directly in front of you if you're waiting for something or standing on line, and whatever other kind of offense you can imagine. At the restaurant waiters or customers are always putting their hands on the table or the chair as they pass by to support themselves. They also tend to stack things up on unused parts of the table like extra menus or whatever. Since you're often (at the budget places anyway) sitting at a table with people you don't know, this is hardly a surprise.

Did I mention about the guy sitting in front of me on the train? We were sitting knee to knee on a train, shoved between people. This guy first goes digging into his nose past the second knuckle, no shame at all. Flips the findings onto the floor in what is supposed to be a subtle gesture I think, then pulls out a handkerchief/rag. A lot of Indian men carry these around to wipe sweat off of their faces during the day. This guy is a business man by the way in a nice enough business shirt, tucked in, gold watch, etc. So it's probably 100 degrees on the train, and this guy goes and sticks his rag into his armpits one by one, taking a good 5-10 seconds to soak everything up, then takes the rag out, folds it once, and wipes off his face. I'll let that sink in. The guy next to him had a pack of some kind of tube-like chips. He bites the plastic to open it, then spits out the plastic and it lands on the guy in front of him. Neither react. When he's done, he throws the plastic out the window. There are very few garbage cans around the city in general. They most often are found near a food stall of some kind, but most of the time people just throw their trash on the ground. I guess this is similar to a lot of countries I've visited in Asia, and of course we have assholes who do this in the States too.

Anyway, that's a smattering of things which occurred to me. As far as my activities go...

Sunday I took a local train by myself up to Kandivali East where Shweta lives, then walked a few minutes to the local bus station and took a local bus out to her area, about 15 minutes away from there. I think not speaking the language is part of what makes everything feel so different to me than China. I've just become used to being able to communicate comfortable. Of course there are differences, but at least part of what makes it feel so exotic is not being able to communicate effectively and thus feeling myself to be even more of an outsider. Shweta's suburb was much quieter once I got away from the train/bus station area. You can walk through the streets without encountering much traffic, although there are people walking around of course. There was a giant field where lots of young folks were playing cricket. We went up to her place and her Mom cooked me a delicious home-cooked Indian lunch. We sat and talked for a long time both before and after. For those who don't know, Shweta and her Mom and I met through Couchsurfing. They came to New York almost 5 years ago exactly and stayed with me just before my own long trip to China. Now 5 years later I'm sitting with them on the floor eating lunch in suburban Mumbai. Incidentally, I've eaten certain Indian foods with my hands, but pretty much always bread or dosa which I then used to scoop up whatever. This was the first time I ate rice with my hands. It's one thing to fold up some bread and scoop, but I felt like each time I made an attempt with the rice and dal (lentils) mixture, I ended up getting more and more on my face. I was proud of the attempt regardless. For the curious, the meal was roasted papad which she cooked directly on the gas burner of the stovetop, a delicious cabbage dish that I wish I could get in NYC, roti, rice, dal, and then a bunch of other items at least one of which was a spinach dish of some kind and the others I am not sure. All around delicious to be sure.

Shweta and her friend Shrestha then took me for a walk around the area to a nearby temple where I could stare at fish or be stared at like a fish, whichever I preferred. I chose both. Next came an auto-rickshaw ride to the mall, which provided an opportunity to see something insanely out of place. The mall was basically a western-style mall with lots of upscale shops, all clean and new, the only real difference being more vegetarian food in the food court. Subway had some kind of potato patty sandwich which looked kinda good, though I don't think I'd be brave enough to just have raw lettuce & tomato on a sandwich here no matter where it came from. Also the separate security booth for women to be wanded over with a metal detector is something you don't see in the states. In fact, I think most malls still don't make every customer pass through metal detectors. We reserve that mostly for our public schools. We walked around the mall, really only stopping so I could try to play the drumming game in the arcade which turned out to be all Japanese music anyway. Shweta and Shrestha played a game of air hockey. Oh yes, I also played whack a mole, the basketball game where the hoop is too small, and some other game where I hit things. I had to use up the credit I was forced to buy to play the Japanese drumming game in the first place. After the mall, we wandered next door to an upscale supermarket. This was kind of like a Walmart I think. Downstairs was all food, kind of like a big Walmart or any supermarket I suppose. They had a huge selection of produce and interesting products, both imported and domestic. It reminded me a lot of Whole Foods actually. Upstairs was kind of like K-Mart. They had bikes, appliances, computers, dishware, and basically everything else you can imagine.

After this, I headed back on the local train to South Mumbai where I am staying. That train trip is something like an hour but it goes fast since there is so much to look at on the way. I have since taken the train a few times, though that day was really my first. You can hang out of the train like in the movies. I haven't ridden it during rush hour, though I did arrive back in the south around the time the rush hour was beginning such that there were large throngs of people waiting at the Churchgate station trying to hop onto the train before it stopped moving such to secure themselves seats before the train stopped and everybody had a chance to get on. This is apparently common practice and to get on and off effectively, you pretty much have to do it before the train stops moving. I was proud of my dismount in which I didn't knock anybody over or fall over myself. Apparently when things get really busy people are known to ride on top of the trains, but I haven't seen this yet though I would love too. The ones I have ridden on are electric, so I'm not sure riding on top near the cables is a great idea, but I'd still like to see. The trains here are apparently safer than they were. When you arrive at an outlying station, there are now walls preventing people (sort of) from walking in every direction across the tracks to get where they want to go. I did see a lot of people going through fences and doing this anyway, but apparently not too many years ago, this was all just open and it was quite common for people to get hit by trains when crossing the tracks. Several friends from Mumbai have told me they have seen people hit and seen bodies laying next to the tracks after being hit. I know people jump in front of the NYC subway on purpose once in a while, or have a seizure like that one guy, but seeing bodies lined up next to train tracks is pretty freakin' intense. So at least some newer safety measures have since been introduced making it necessary to duck under a broken fence to get hit by a train instead.

So that's only the end of my second day in Mumbai. I have often said "never a dull moment" but in Mumbai there seriously is *never* a dull moment. Even laying on the bed in my hotel room I can hear tons of yelling and noise and honking coming from the street just outside. As I type this, I'm in a friend's office which is blissfully quiet. It's on a side street and the office is in an interior part of the building away from the street noise. It's actually an amazing difference.

So a few other highlights as long as I have access to this computer for a bit...

I went to a CS meetup on one night and met about 15 or so local Couchsurfers. Mostly men as I have heard the Mumbai CS group can be a little prone to guys trying to pick up girls which is too bad. There was one girl from Poland who came with her travel-buddy from Scotland. He had been in the European equivalent of the Peace Corps and lived in rural Rwanda for 2.5 years. That was quite a story. He spoke the local language quite well apparently and I think that must be one of the most awesome things to bust out on the presumably rare occasions you run into people from Rwanda. I asked him if he had, and on the trip even he had found a few African folks who happened to be from Rwanda and when he approached them and spoke their native language, well you can imagine it must have been mind-blowing for them. I mean, how many non-Rwandans in the world even know that language? Very cool. Another Indian guy lived in Madagascar and then Tanzania for two years each. He had gone initially to work on a documentary I think to promote tourism in Madagascar which had been finished relatively quickly, but then he stayed and "just had a ball of a time" for the rest of his stay. There were a few other non-Indians. One guy was from France who came over and said something like, "I heard you have spent some time in China" or something like that so we got to talking about it and turns out he lived in Wuhan for two years so I immediately responded in Chinese, "So you can speak Chinese then?" And I think we were both equally surprised and happy to find someone else with whom to practice. He is now living in Mumbai working I think on automobile design of some kind and has been here for about three months.

So that discussion of China spread to the guy next to me who is Indian who is studying Mandarin and has just began. He works with an organization in India run by a Chinese girl and an Indian girl who had previously lived in China. I ended up meeting up with that guy last night and with his friend who are both in the Chinese class, and helped them since I'm a bit farther along in my own study. They put me on the phone with the Indian girl who co-runs the school and on Sunday I'm going to drop by and sit in on the class then join them for dinner next week. I love doing stuff like that and everybody I have talked about here has been really nice. The original student who I met at the CS meetup is named Mulchand and he invited me to dinner after our Chinese chat. We went to a great place which I never would've guessed exist as it was very run-down looking from the outside and inside as well actually, but after emerging on the 7th floor or so which was actually the roof, we came out into a beautiful covered rooftop filled with cabana-type structures, comfortable chairs and couches, nice lighting, sand on the floors, and in general the sort of place I might expect to find in Miami or something. From there we enjoyed a beautiful view of the southern Mumbai coastline and one of the more delicious meals I have had on this trip which consisted of the best vegetable biryani I have ever had and something called a papadam roll which defies description but is basically some sort of mashed and spiced vegetables inside a rolled and slightly soft papad. Also for dessert we ordered something called Jelabi. I may be spelling that wrong. I ordinarily can't enjoy Indian desserts as they contain dairy, but this was just a sweet sugary sort of candy consistency which I will have to work hard to hunt down in the US upon my return.

Mulchand also invited me to join his photography group on a trip to a nearby "hill station" which is a small town in the countryside called Matheran. That trip starts tomorrow by catching a 5:45am train several hours southwest of the city. I really want to go and it is my plan not to miss it, though my stomach has been gurgling a little but I will try not to let that stop me. The train is only a few hours so it's not that big of a deal and I really want to see some of the countryside before I leave since 95% of my time is being spent in Mumbai on this visit. I don't mind that by the way since I am enjoying getting to know this city pretty well and seeing a lot more than the tourist neighborhood of Colaba, but it'd be nice to see a little taste of the country life to whet my appetite for a future trip.

A future trip to India by the way will be *just* India. I think part of why I'm tired is cause I broke the rule and went to too many countries in one trip. I'm extra glad I bailed on Burma on this trip cause I never would've had any energy left for this. So next time, only India and definitely learn Hindi before I go. I have been going to China repeatedly and I just forgot what it is like to not be able to communicate. It really does make a huge difference to me. Some people don't mind pointing and gesturing as necessary and not being able to talk freely to locals, but it means a lot to me. They do speak English here to some degree, but at least several times a day there are people I want to speak to more than I can. I am going to remember that lesson before I go traveling again.

As usual, much more to come...

First day in Mumbai

2011-06-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

After my crazy cab ride, I was pretty hungry. My flight from Singapore involved a stop in Kuala Lumpur. On the first flight, they had a meal for me. The second flight they forgot. I guess you get what you pay for flying Air Asia. They are famous for low prices and that's about it, although the meal on the first flight was decent actually. Some kind of vegetable biryani I recall. Anyway, I arrived and was sent down the street. I just found out I went to a place that was much more of a hole in the wall than the one they tried to send me to. They said "Mahesh Lunch Home" but I ended up at "Modern Lunch." I didn't make the right right. I sat down in the non a/c part initially, but the owner spoke English and came over and told me I might want to move into the a/c section because it was very crowded that night and I might get "pissed off." I thought that was pretty funny. I ordered Dal Fry and roti which seemed safe. Everything came out really hot, tasted good, and I didn't get a stomach ache or anything. In fact (fingers crossed) my stomach is still okay after 5 nights in Mumbai.

I was exhausted and crashed, then woke up at some ungodly hour, maybe 6am let's say. It was a three hour time difference so I had a big of jetlag. Now I'm back to my waking up at 8 or 9 schedule which is typical for traveling, especially without internet or a computer. So I woke up on Saturday morning, my first full day in Mumbai, and went out for a walk. I didn't have a map or anything at that point, so they sent me over to this place I have been many times since called Marine Drive which is a long avenue that runs along a stretch of Mumbai coast. Early in the morning it was fairly quiet. Various people walked themselves or their pets, jogged, or sat on the wall and looked out at the water. Walking through the streets of course I experienced similar shock to the night previous at my surroundings. I have since adjusted somewhat, but the unrelenting noise and movement, the shock of small children and their families living on the pavement, the aging colonial buildings side by side with makeshift stalls and old apartment buildings. It's a lot to take in. Along the marine drive, there are mostly large concrete blocks between the wall and the water, though as one walks north nearing Chowpatty beach, there is some sand. The sand is unfortunately completely covered with trash and debris, though up by the actual beach it's a bit better. I later learned on Sunday nights that everybody in Mumbai goes to the Marine Drive and Chowpatty beach to hang out and eat. Sunday night was *insanely* crowded there. It's a long stretch of road and it was completely packed that night. But that comes later.

Saturday afternoon I met up with Shweta, my Couchsurfer friend of 5+ years who lives in Mumbai. We met when she and her mother came to travel in the US for several months some years ago. We walked around Colaba which is apparently the touristy and foreigner-friendly neighborhood. I'm staying in a place called Fort which is nearby but not quite in Colaba. Colaba also has a bunch of "cool" places that young Indians like to hang out. We walked by Leopolds, a foreigner friendly bar that was famous for being among the locations damaged in the terrorist attacks a few years ago. We also walked past and through the Taj hotel, which is the really famous one that had the gunmen inside during the same attacks. The Taj is right next to the Gateway of India, a giant Arc du Triomph style monument by the water. Eventually we settled into Cafe Mondegar, which is another western-friendly cafe in Colaba. We drank a few bottles of Kingfisher which is the popular local beer here and listened to American music surrounded by young Indians and maybe 40% travelers and/or expats. They played "Maniac" from the movie Flashdance I remember. After that, we went up to meet Shweta's friend who is living in Mumbai for a few months but previously lived in Bangalore and is originally from Gujarat, a different but relatively nearby province. We met him at the (brace yourself) Hard Rock Cafe in Mumbai which is one of a not huge number of "cool" places to hang out in this town. I have only been in a few Hard Rock Cafes before. Of course the reputation in the states is a little different, but here, it was the happening place to be. It is not in Colaba either, it is maybe 6-7 train stops a way. The train rides here are epic, but I'll describe that later. So the Hard Rock Cafe. Surprisingly not that expensive even by local standards. These places always have a quick show of security too, like a barely functional or observed metal detector and some people with metal detecting wands. Certainly it is harder to get in to places if you're not a foreigner I'm sure. The waiter at the Hard Rock was very excited to suggest lots of things we might want to try including various promotions and memberships and things. He kept returning to suggest new things. That is until it was time for the staff's big dance number which consisted of maybe 20 male employees all standing up on a counter in the middle of the bar in a long row, and doing a choreographed dance to "YMCA" I kid you not. I have a video of this. It barely seemed obligatory too, they loved doing it and everybody loved singing along. So my first night in Mumbai quickly took a turn for the surreal.

For a change of pace, after the Hard Rock we took a cab down to Colaba. Despite being the foreigner-friendly neighborhood, that's a very relative term. It's not like you walk around and see malls and brand names that look anything like anything you'd recognize in the west. There are a few upscale landmarks and nice hotels scattered among the area, but other than that it's not all that different and lots of Indians hang out there. Maybe in the tourist season it's more filled with foreigners, or so I have heard, but for the most part I didn't see too many down there and it is actually very popular with Indian tourists as well from other parts of India. Maybe they go to see the tourists from non-Indian countries. I do seem to get stared at more down there than up here or elsewhere, though that's not saying much since I'm still a pretty popular tourist attraction in my neighborhood. It's not like China where they take pictures of you semi-surreptitiously, but they take long, long ganders and repeated second and third looks. Guys tap their friends on the shoulder and point to me. It gets old, but I guess that's just part of being in a place like this. Even in my hotel they stare at me. I ride up the elevator with someone who works here and they just stare at me until I say "Hi!" and then they do the Indian head wobble thing. It's friendly or curious but there is no smiling until you acknowledge it so it still feels aggressive or irritating at times.

Before I talk about the local bar where we ended up which was great, I am reminded of this story a guy told me last night. He lived in Madagascar for two years, then Tanzania for two more. He said he loved it. Specifically I think he said he had "a ball of a time" in both cases. Then he said people are incredibly happy in those countries. He gestured around to the busy street on which we were standing and said, "how many smiles do you see?" and I had already noticed that not many Indian people smiled just walking around. He said in Africa, he said you'd have to look to find one who wasn't. I thought that was really interesting. I'm not sure that you can judge how happy people are just by their facial expressions walking down the street, but who knows, maybe you can, and this guy was Indian so he'd probably know better than I would.

So anyway, we went to this bar called Gokul. This is Saturday night and the street is a packed and crowded side street with a bunch of sort-of street food stalls but that are actually "restaurants." Apparently one is a very famous place to eat. We walk in through the thick crowd and I follow Shweta upstairs. The upstairs room is filled with small tables packed into a low-ceiling'd and smoke-filled room and loaded with people. We sandwich ourselves into a booth and order what are apparently among the cheapest drinks to be had certainly in Colaba. There is no music which I thought was interesting, though by this time it was already around midnight so the noise of the crowd was more than enough for the small space. It was probably the raucous and completely local crowd along with the smoke and slightly sketchy feel to the whole thing that made it so entertaining. Apparently at the end of the night they usher you out of a back entrance specifically to avoid confrontations with cops hunting for payoffs.

This leads me to our short walk along the water at around 2am after our evening of drinking. We sat by the water along with many other groups and gradually security from a nearby hotel would come and push the groups farther and farther down the water, presumably to avoid disturbing hotel guests, but eventually some cops rolled up and started to specifically hassle the three of us. The conversations were all in Marathi which is the local langage, but the crux of it was basically what the hell were Shweta and her friend doing hanging out with an American guy and how could they possibly know an American guy. It was also apparently suggested that she might be up to no good for hanging out with a foreigner and/or for hanging out with a couple of guys late at night. Apparently it is quite common for cops to approach people in this way, harass them for a while looking for payoffs. He ultimately held onto my passport while he interrogated them for a while, although I just stood there unable to participate since it was all in Marathi. Ultimately I guess he figured out we weren't going to give him any money so he just gave me my passport and told us to get out of there. It was kind of a frustrating if fascinating encounter for me. It's amazing to me that this sort of thing is commonplace, but that's of course just because I live in the US where though there are probably corrupt police but not who I encounter in my life at least. I suppose some people would say that's just cause I'm white, and who knows, that's probably true, but the fact that the police would regularly shake down people for money is pretty extreme I think even in the US. Maybe in the states black people might get pulled over more often or even harassed, and I wouldn't belittle that, but it is different than cops every day making people pay $20 for being potentially morally corrupt. Apparently the government has even had policies to close down bars here for corrupting youth.

So that was my first day in Mumbai pretty much.

So, we hung out at the Hard Rock Cafe. At one

I have arrived in India

2011-06-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

I have an incredible amount I want to say, but my laptop backlight died so I'm a little stuck at the moment without my own computer. There is a public computer at the hotel at which I'm staying in Mumbai, but it's not ideal. I will try to set a little down.

The subject line of this post should really be "holy shit" cause that's kind of how I have felt since arriving in India. I realize I only wrote once about Singapore, and I do have various interesting things I could say about Singapore and the week I spent there. It's a cool city, good food, interesting people, certain interesting qualities to the culture, but really the last three days in India have been among the most incredibly intense travel experiences of my life. Maybe I felt that way about my first week in China, but India is really it's own thing, completely unique and different than anywhere else I have ever been, and I have only been here for 36 hours in Mumbai, nowhere else in the country. Probably many of the people who spent months and months traveling here would say I haven't seen the "real" India which is an expression I hate for anybody to use about any country. It's just as bad as saying I "did" that country like they have seen all there is to see just because they made the round of tourist attractions. I am sure there is more to India, but there is a lot to Mumbai too.

Anyway, I took this cab on Friday night (which turns out to be a really busy night here) from the airport to my hotel in southern Mumbai. I got in this cab, a non a/c Fiat probably from the 70s that looked like it was on it's 14th out of 9 lives. The driver spoke about 3 words of English, but we figured out the destination or at least direction. Leaving the "parking lot" of cabs it already began.

The first thing that begins to overwhelm is the number of people and the number of vehicles. Constant movement and traffic of both in the streets, on the sidewalks, and in every direction. No lanes or anything like that of course. People walking on the sides of the streets, cabs and motorcycle rickshaws dodging and swerving in every direction to try to get ahead, often coming within inches of vehicles and people. Constant honking of horns, drivers yelling ahead at other drivers. We did that for about two minutes, then pulled into a "gas station." On the right, pumps that sort of resemble a gas station, on the left, something that resembles some kind of bamboo structure supporting some kind of tarp under which are several "pumps" which look more like the skeleton that is probably underneath a normal gas pump. It looked more like a bunch of guys dug holes to tap into a gas line without permission. It seemed that was for the cabs and rickshaws only, though I do not completely understand why. Lots of joking around, honking, driving around people to get in a more advantageous spot to get gas, coming within an inch of each other's "cars" and honking, and that sort of thing. Also this is around 9 or 10pm at night or so, dark, dusty. I'm the only foreigner in this whole scenario by the way, and since being here I've hardly seen any, so lots of staring everywhere. I'm told this is because it is the monsoon season and therefore not a touristy time, although I have been very lucky with weather and it has barely rained at all since I have been here.

So we get the gas, then immediately pull over again so the driver can buy two pouches of what I am told is tobacco mixed with crushed betel nut. This is being sold out of a tray of sorts by a bunch of guys sitting on the ground near the gas station. Seems to be a popular stop for the cab guys. Betel nut for those who don't know is a nut you chew on which gives you some kind of high or buzz. I haven't tried it yet. It is very popular in Taiwan. Here they have various preparations but the most common I've heard is wrapped in some kind of leaf with a little lime and called Paan. They sometimes put water on the leaf though which may or may not be clean, so I'm saving that for my second week in India when I eat anything. My first week I'm trying to be conservative to gradually scope out what my stomach is capable of. Last night I had raw onions in a dish and survived 24 hours so far without incident, but you always hear stories about any contact with raw veggies or local water ending in disaster. The standard rule is if you can boil, fry, or peel it you're good. So I just aim for hot, though last night I broke the rule for the first time. I figure being a little cautious the first week is good. I eat tons of street food in China without incident, but as I said, India is a different story in every respect.

After the driver got jacked up on betel nut, we drove for maybe an hour through the streets and highways though they are basically the same. I'm told it is 28 kilometers from the airport to the south of Mumbai. Lots of traffic. Similar chaotic scenario. My mouth was hanging open most of the ride. The sidewalk scenery is just chaos. There are very few of what we'd call chains or anything that looks every like a 7-11 or some other recognizable business. No comparable Indian chain though I'm told a few do exist. The streets are just packed with small businesses, food stalls, restaurants, and of course people everywhere. Walking, talking, hanging out, cooking, sleeping, eating, drinking all out on the streets. This was Friday night, but other nights haven't been very different from what I've seen. I wish I could describe this chaos more. I have a video I took of some street scenery today and I'm going to take a few more, cause pictures really don't capture it.

The other thing that had my mouth hanging open was the poverty. I think on Wikipedia I saw these people referred to as pavement dwellers. I saw a few slums, but most of what I have seen are people just sleeping on the streets. And it is not like a homeless guy in New York who curls up in a doorway or something or under a bridge with a sleeping bag. There are people who have tents or things like that, or a tarp under which they sleep, but there are tons of people just laying down in the middle of the sidewalk with nothing. If you saw someone in NYC like that you'd call 911. I heard a disturbing story today about the 911 of India that I will write about later. But anyway, you also see them face down in the train station on the floor. Or on a median strip of a road, sprawled out and people just walk around. Lots of people just sleeping and living completely outside, no homes at all. Women with small babies crawling on the sidewalk in filth, playing with a piece of trash like a plastic bag or something. Children without clothes. This is just on the streets within a few blocks of where I am. I walked through a few side streets and a small "village" which is more like a "slum" I'd say though I guess not technically since they have some kind of an actual house-like structure in which they live, whereas in slums I gather it is mostly plastic and tarps. I am going to visit Dharavi which is one of the biggest slums in the world. Some students from there who still live there run a tour to show you what it is all about. I saw a smaller one today in a suburb but I didn't walk through. Anyway, the number of people just living on the streets with seemingly nothing is incredible. I read that depending on where the line is, 40% of India is living below the "international poverty line" which is less than $2 a day I think. I'm sure there are people who know a lot more about the situation in India, but since being here I have only just started reading more about it. There are a lot of different opinions and a various efforts have gone into combating poverty here but it is obviously an ongoing and complex problem. I'm just trying to describe what I have seen.

I guess I'm going to publish this and just add on stories. I have a lot to write about India but it'll have to be in successive posts. I haven't even gotten to my first meal on Friday night, which I will write about next. Saturday I took a long walk along the water since we're at the coast of the Arabian Sea. I met up with my friend Shweta who is local and spent time in Colaba, the "touristy" neighborhood of Mumbai that is supposed to be filled with foreigners and barely was. We went to several bars including the Hard Rock Cafe which was also mostly locals because it is a "cool" place to hang out here. After that I was in this *really* local bar, then we had a run-in with the cops which is another story. I hung out with another local friend the next day, and today I went out to Shweta's suburb an hour north of here for my first solo ride on a local train and a local bus. There's a lot to say and I will add details and tell all these stories, but it'll have to wait til the next one!

Getting to Singapore

2011-06-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

I set my alarm today for 5am. Exactly 12 hours later, I walked into my hotel room in Singapore.

Upon first awakening, I want back to sleep. To snooze is divine as the old saying goes. I made it out the door of my Hangzhou hostel by 5:30am, proud of myself for allowing extra time (as I always do) for my 8:10am flight. I found a cab and we rode in silence through the completely empty streets and under the gray skies that persisted for much of my visit. Hangzhou does have more green than the other major Chinese cities I've visited, I'll give it that. It's not hard to see why it's a popular escape for Chinese tourists and a romantic getaway for young couples. We passed many trees and parks on the way to the airport, though it isn't quite enough to take away the somewhat bleak look of the city away from the lake, a look shared by many other Chinese cities. There's something that's just too spread out, too big, or too sprawling. Maybe it reminds me of LA too much. Maybe it's that it feels like in order to travel within it, you have to be part of the perpetual (except for at 5am) traffic jams. Maybe it was just the crappy weather.

We arrived at the airport at about 6am. I figured out which counters were servicing check-in for my flight but it turns out, they don't sweat it too much in China and hadn't yet put any personnel there. So the passengers who'd arrived early like I did pretty much sat around til about 6:30 when they started check-in. I figured it was an international flight so maybe best to be on the safe side, but it turns out it was only sort of international. We flew to Fuzhou (capital of Fujian), got off the plane, went through immigration, then got back on the plane and flew to Singapore. The flights were about 1.5 hours and 4 hours respectively. I slept a little on the first but mostly worked on the second. The flights were pretty easy although there was this queasy guy next to me with his girlfriend who kept picking up the barf bag which concerned me. I don't normally get any kind of motion sick on flights although we had experienced a bit of turbulence so I could see where the guy was coming from. That said, there is nothing that makes me sick quicker than having somebody getting sick right next to me. I think it's mostly the sounds they make. An old blog entry from what I'd guess is 2007 recounts a similar anecdote on a minibus in northern Laos, although that one involved many people getting sick and actually throwing up. This one is happily anti-climactic in comparison.

This is a completely meaningless detail. The girl was rubbing her boyfriend's back to soothe him as he considered puking. When she rubbed his back, she repeatedly restarted at the top, like petting a dog or cat. I think most people rub up and down or in circles. Seemed weird to me.

We finally landed around 3pm as I recall. I was starving since there was no vegetarian meal or anything on the flight, so upon spotting Burger King I decided to get fries. I love fries. I experienced my first local Singlish expression when the girl said, "Having here?" I had to ask her to repeat herself cause the first time I wasn't sure what I'd heard. Studying the free tourist map as I ate my fries, I observed the new mix of faces walking in every direction. Singapore they say is about 75% Chinese of varying descent, then a whole bunch of Malay and Indian, then a mix of other countries for the last 3% or something. As I took the subway to the hotel, it was the first time in a while I listened to conversations around me and had absolutely no idea what language was being spoken. I mean, I know what languages are spoken in Singapore mostly, but a lot of the Chinese dialects in common use here as well as Malay, Tagalog, or any Indian languages are pretty much unknown to me. Of course I don't understand them, but I mean I can't even distinguish them. Being on the train and looking around, there were indeed a decent number of apparently Chinese faces, but it really did seem more varied than any other non-American city I can recall being in the recent past. Even in Hong Kong, most of the people you see are Chinese and it is not a close call. This is the first place where multiple minority groups seem reasonably well represented.

So now having been here for an evening and walked around a bit, I've got a very slight sense of the place. First of all, I have spoken almost entirely English. That seems to be what people lead off with and what everybody speaks by default. I have heard other languages of course, but if you go into some store or have any exchange, it's hard to know what the other person might speak besides English so that seems to be the starting point. One guy in a 7-11 spoke particularly brutal Singlish and looked Chinese so I switched to Mandarin which sort of worked, but may have caused more confusion than it helped to clear up. So much for Mandarin practice in Singapore.

The restaurants and shops are wide and varied. Things are pretty modern on the streets. Well, completely modern. In some ways it feels very western in terms of modernity and cleanliness. The city is incredibly clean by the way. Probably because I saw a $300 fine for littering sign. Also $1000 for smoking on the subway and $500 for eating and drinking on the subway. For a lot of things they cane you here. That means they hit you a bunch of times with a thick, rattan cane. There turns out to be a whole article on caning in singapore. It sounds unpleasant and worth avoiding. Interesting, one of the ways you can get caned here is by overstaying your visa. I'm sure a few of us remember that American guy who vandalized a bunch of cars here and got caned. You can get caned for drug us, although importing drugs means the death penalty. I looked it up cause I was curious and the death penalty is carried out here by hanging. So tonight when I was about to cross the street, I waited for the light. Interestingly, a lot of locals waited too. I don't think they cane you for that, but I wasn't 100% sure and I figured I'm not in such a big rush that I care to find out. Back to how modern the city is, I have seen fast food chains everywhere from many countries, including a lot of Burger Kings, a KFC, and a Long John Silver's of all things. Lots of Asian snacks in fancy storefronts, and then lots of more cafeteria and casual style places. Obviously there are a billion shops and shopping malls.

I took a walk for dinner and found myself in nearby little India without aiming for it. The city is fairly compact and easy to navigate on foot so far, though it's not as small as certain folks seem to think it is. In Little India, there were without exaggeration a half dozen completely vegetarian Indian joints within a few blocks of each other. Many more had signs on the front saying veg and non-veg. It looks like some large number of the vegetarian restaurants here are going to be Indian, but tomorrow I'm going to look into this in greater depth. I got a rava dosa with sambar and a bunch of chutneys for 5 SGD. 1 USD is 1.20 SGD or so depending on where you exchange. I thought it was a pretty good deal. I was the only non-Indian dude in there and the food seemed pretty tasty to me. I went with the crowded rule, and it was pretty much full to the brim. I ate with my hands. I eat dosas with my hands sometimes in the US, but this time I really went for it. Normally I kind of half-ass it with a fork and knife to help along. I figure I'm going to be in Indian soon and that's how they do it, I might as well stop being afraid of getting my hands dirty. For those wondering, yes, there is a place to wash your hands before and after. That said, we will see what happens to my stomach. Singapore is a warm-up for India. I have had astonishing good luck stomach-wise, something I should probably not say, but apart from some Hong Kong gurgles, I survived a month in mainland China without a single incident of any sort. And that's eating street food probably 70% of the time I'd guess. I'm pretty good at sticking to really hot food most of the time which is safer than the alternatives. I'm excited for Singapore's hawkers' markets filled with street snacks. I got a line on a good place to go tomorrow night, hopefully it can live up to China's street food. I love the Indian stuff and will probably eat it here and there in Singapore, but I'd rather try to go to some more unusual places serving Western (if it exists), Malay, Chinese, or really any kind of Asian vegetarian food. Something a little more unusual would be nice, cause for two weeks after this I'm gonna be eating the real deal in Mumbai and I don't want to be sick of it already by the time I show up. I have avoided Indian food pretty much since Hong Kong for that reason, so I don't want to ruin it now.

So anyway, yes, Singapore, amazingly modern but still pretty intense walking down the street surrounded by not just one alien culture but several all at once, and packed into this weirdly surreal modern society reminiscent of the US in many ways and yet with lots of Asia in the mix. Tomorrow I will explore more, though carefully during the day cause when I arrived this afternoon it was really, really hot. That's another thing I'd better prepare for in Mumbai cause I think there it will be similar or even hotter. The evening tonight was fantastic though. I love that warm weather at night, it's my favorite. Now I get to wear my flip-flops all the time for real, along with everybody else who lives here.

I also want to add, all these people told me a week was too long to spend here. I guess I must really be a city guy or something as a few have pointed out to me recently, but how anyone could have trouble killing a week here is beyond me. Much more to come soon.

Oh yes, I'm also glad the internet work and that I can brush my teeth with tap instead of bottled water again.

Some Shanghai, but mostly Hangzhou

2011-06-09T01:41:00.000-07:00

Here are a few paragraphs worth of details about Shanghai. I always forget details. These details are not necessarily going to be interesting for you. They are more for me. Sometimes it is nice to listen to somebody speak in another language even if you don't understand.

My hostel in Shanghai was one of the best in which I have ever stayed. It's called the Rock and Wood Hostel in Changning. It's down an alley off of a more major street called Wuyi Lu. Getting back I usually tell the cab drivers the intersection of Wuyi Lu and Kaixuan Lu.

The nearest subway stop is Zhongshan Gongyuan on line 2. Exit 7 is the one that dumps me closest to where I want to be. On the walk back to the hostel on Kaixuan Lu, there is this Xinjiang bread guy who sells the onion/sesame disks. I probably ate 6 or 7 of them during my stay. Also nearby is the Yan'an Xi Lu subway stop on lines 3 or 4. Walking there is nicer cause it's through a park but it makes the most sense when transferring to line 10 or line 9 which are south of here. In that case, it makes way more sense than going to Zhongshan Gongyuan, not just cause it is closer, but because transferring lines in a Shanghai subway station usually involves a lot of walking.

I spent a lot of time on line 2 which goes to the Jing An Si stop, the Renmin Guangchang stop, the Nanjing Lu stops, and the Lujiazui stops. I got off at all of these stations multiple times. I think I used line 10 the next most commonly, especially Shanxi Nan Lu I think to go to a few different Couchsurfer meetups and also a few different bars. I went to the CS meetups in Lujiazui in Pudong at a place called the O'Yamee Cafe. The Wednesday meetups were at a pub called Kangaroo bar. The Saturday language exchange meetups were near to Shanxi Nan Lu in the garden in front of the Hotel Okura Garden. One time it was rained out and we went to a nearby Starbucks instead. I went to a smattering of other random bars. A horrible, horrible place called Zapatas on Hengshan Lu, then a Ktv place called Shanghai Ge Cheng. Also one night a bar filled with foreigners called I Love Shanghai. Another night a "New York-style" place called the Apartment and a basement / converted bomb shelter with cool tunnels and ambience but very bad ambience and music. I went to that music place the Cotton Club one night which I wrote about I believe, which has the distinction of having the most expensive drinks of any of these places. As I recall the cheapest beer was about 10 USD.

That's probably enough details for now.

I have a few random thoughts to share from the last few days in Hangzhou pretty much beginning with my train ride from Shanghai.

I had to show my passport in order to buy that train ticket by the way, a 45 minute ride on an express to a neighboring city. Apparently it's a newish policy, but still, give me a break. Of course you have to show it to check into any hotel. Who knows how many photocopies of my passport are sitting around in Chinese filing cabinets somewhere. Having my own computer on this trip, I didn't go to internet cafes, but did I mention that in order to visit an internet cafe as a foreigner, one must also show one's passport? I assume Chinese must show their ID though I'm not 100% sure about that.

I forgot about the staring thing. In Hangzhou, kinda started to get to me. Also a lot more hellos here. Not the good kind of hello. The kind where they yell it at you repeatedly. Also the way they don't give a shit about anybody but themselves. I was thinking about this on the train when the girl to my right stretched way out into the aisle and spoke so loudly on the phone that even the older Chinese guy in front of her turned around and shook his head. Not that she noticed or cared. People don't really rebuke each other for behavior. Nobody ever says hey, you should just let me get off the train first and the whole of society will run more smoothly. Or hey, your elbow is in my face. Or hey, jesus fucking christ pay attention to where you're walking. Then, arriving at the Hangzhou train station, I waited on line for a cab. Now let me say, I'm pretty good at not getting agitated by this stuff. I really can laugh it off. That doesn't mean it doesn't continue to amaze me how people will brazenly just push and step in front of each other in any way possible to get ahead in a line, and nobody will actually acknowledge what is going on. If you try to acknowledge it, the response is as if you had spoken an alien language. So yeah, staring, and today, lots of picture taking. That is, people take my picture without acknowledging that I am a human being. I am more like a circus animal or an alien. Or Britney Spears.

While in a cab from the Hangzhou train station to my hotel, I had a business idea. Glamour shots for cab drivers. The pictures they have now look like the worst possible pictures known to man. I was going to say mug shots, but they're much worse than that. I'd say more like the pictures terrorists take of hostages to show that they are still alive. There's an opportunity here. Also, I find it strange that the picture hardly ever looks like the person driving. I'm pretty sure it's not just the western inability to distinguish between Asian people.

I love food on sticks. Specifically, that tofu (dou fu gan) but also the veggies like miscellaneous unnamed greens, lotus root, and almost anything vegetarian on that giant platter of sticks from which one can choose. Of all the food in China, there isn't much that I enjoy as consistently as I enjoy the sticks. I don't know what all that stuff is he puts on. I have been trying to figure out what makes it so magic. I'm sure Joy would interject here that it is the lard. I have asked before and I am confident that is not the case. There are different approaches. The guy here cooks the stuff on a griddle. "Big bean" oil is common here, though I have seen the big beans and I'm not sure what we'd call that. Of course I can't look it up because that would make me an enemy of the state for accessing restricted information on the internet. I can't even look up movie quotes here without a proxy. Yes, IMDB is blocked. Anyway, the spicy stuff that goes on towards the end is the real magic, but it's in an unlabeled container so I haven't been able to ascertain what the brand is or what makes it so magically delicious. In Guizhou it used to be fresh, dried chili. Here it is more of a powdered red chili of some kind. Oh, the guy tonight also threw in a bunch of onions when he cooked everything. Nice touch. These are my last few nights in China so I figured I'd indulge my love of stick food while I still can. They just don't make it like that in the US, at least nowhere I have ever seen.

I saw scorpions on sticks tonight. Also what I would describe as large maggots. Possibly locusts as well. I saw that in Cambodia before and heard of it in China, but this was the first time I actually saw it with my own eyes here. I saw some Chinese folks considering it but none partaking. Did I mention that I met a girl from Guangxi who told me they have an alcohol that is made from ants? Yes, ants. A girl from Yunnan said they have it there too. I asked my security guard friend from Anhui about it but he didn't believe me. It is for drinking and/or medicinal purposes apparently. I think by medicinal, my friend meant you can rub it on wounds to sterilize them. So that's handy.

The street food near where I'm staying is kind of sterilized in a way. All the stands look the same. I'm not sure but it seems like they all have the same corporate owner or something. In most real markets, I think the individuals own and operate their stand. Here there were multiple stands selling the same thing. It reminded me vaguely of the street fairs in NYC which have the same exact stands every time and every block or two, in case you realize a block later that you actually would like to eat a mozzarepa.

Every time I buy popcorn here, I am excited cause I like popcorn, and then I take the first bite and remember that it is sweet here. Edible sweet, but still sweet. I cannot seem to preserve that memory in my brain. I used to think it was because they put sugar on it, but it is actually a totally different looking popcorn kernel which must be inherently (and unfortunately for me) sweet. Sometimes peanuts are sweet too. Even the ones that you buy in the shell. That was a new one on me, though at least the salty ones exist too. I can't tell the difference from the packaging, but at least sometimes I get lucky.

The first day in Hangzhou it rained. I was out in defiance of the weather, but it was not good-mood-inducing. The second day was vastly superior. Sunny and hot, and I met up with a Couchsurfer for a long bike ride up into the hills around Hangzhou. We passed several villages and places where the famous local Longjing tea is grown. I have to go drink some tonight cause I still haven't since I've been here. I've gotten used to saying no thank you. I forgot that I actually would like to drink some of that tea, even if it is a touristy thing to do. Hard to know what a fair price is, I have to research that a bit. Anyway, beautiful bike ride although a very hot day. It was probably over 90 most of the time. Me and Tom from New Zealand who lives in Hangzhou and previously Harbin rode for maybe 3-5 hours and eventually stepped into a Taiwanese place I found on Dianping, the Chinese Yelp, so I could have a decent meal. Lunch had been Burger King. Tom has been here for a while and likes fast food. I had fries. Burger King in Hangzhou does not support the veggie burger. The waiter was extremely excited about us being there. He had a notebook filled with English phrases he was trying to learn as well as an English version of his life story. It said he was from a poor family in Jiangxi and his mother died when he was two months old. There were a bunch of things in there about life being hard but carrying on. I don't think he stopped smiling the entire time we were there. He asked us to sign his book. In two months, he'd accumulated about 30 small notes from foreigners who'd been in the restaurant. He said in last year's notebook he had over 500. I thought it was noteworthy and interesting that he had no fear about speaking English and making mistakes and was very anxious to speak, practice and improve. Pretty impressive actually. He was also helpful in making sure my food showed up without meat in it. Pretty good too.

Today I walked the circumference of West Lake, the famous tourist attraction everybody comes here to see. From what I can tell it is that and the tea, plus a smattering of gardens, pagodas, and temples. It's reputed to be a very naturally beautiful city and indeed is quite green in comparison with most other Chinese cities I have visited. Today was 92 degrees if the weather channel is to be believed and was quite sunny until 3 seconds before I walked in the door of my hostel when the skies opened the fuck up and it poured ridiculously for the last 10-15 minutes or so. Now it's petering off a tiny bit or maybe it just seems that way cause it was like a faucet had been turned on when it first started. Either way, impressive timing on my part. I was out walking from about 9:30am until 4 or so. It took quite a while to circumnavigate the lake, though I also stopped to check out the Leifang Pagoda which had a nice view of the lake, plus a vegetarian restaurant I stumbled upon which despite mediocre reviews on Dianping, I found to be decent enough.

I saw a lot of people empty their nostrils today. Possibly more than I have ever seen in one day in my life. I will not go into more detail. Around the lake, 80% of women carry umbrellas to protect their delicate complexions from the sun, lest they get a tan and people mistake them for low-class. They also often wear long sleeves, long pants, or if they wear short sleeves they have these arm covers from their wrists to their elbows. I guess to be fair, I'd rather use an umbrella than sunscreen. I also saw a lot of guys holding their girlfriends' purses. Also holding the umbrellas over the girlfriends while they walk. Also wearing pink shirts. What is up with the guys and the pink shirts? I know that's not exactly new, but I have seen it more here than ever before. I'm told Hangzhou is a popular romantic getaway for young Chinese couples. There certainly seem to be plenty here, although last night within the immediate vicinity of my hotel room, I heard two separate couples arguing and the girls crying. Sobbing even. Also whining like children. I'm not sure what that means, but hopefully I don't have to pay extra for it.

Tomorrow flying to Singapore. I could've stayed in Shanghai longer, but I'm about ready to get out of Hangzhou. There are no friendly, single guests with whom to socialize at this hostel and not much of a Couchsurfing scene with which to join up. Singapore should be better in that respect. Also, transportation is kind of difficult here. The city is large and spread out with no subway. They have this pretty cool system for renting bikes with a card you can get and then use to just grab bikes and go, but it seems like it's all better for people who live here. People who are tourists stick to the "old city" and pedestrian shopping areas plus the lake, which is nice, but I think it's enough. I'm ready for functional mass transportation again and actually variety of food. Also some company would be nice.

I will probably have more realizations and thoughts to add about China later, but there are probably too many words in this one already.

Practical matters in Shanghai

2011-06-04T06:51:00.001-07:00

For the purposes of my discussing costs I have experienced in Shanghai, 1 USD is about 6.5 RMB right now.

Getting around I use the Shanghai metro. I will never get used to calling it the metro. Here, a subway is a tunnel that goes under big streets so you can not wait for the light. Down there you will often find some kind of miniature shopping mall, in case you remembered you wanted to buy a new wardrobe or collection of moisturizers while you're on your way to wherever the hell you were going. I remember in Taiwan and cities in China that aren't Shanghai, there'd also be women down there pulling hairs out of other womens' faces with two strings. But anyway, the metro has 10 lines here I think so far. I have probably ridden on about half of them, maybe more at this point. I was buying single-ride tickets for 3-5 RMB originally, though after a few days I bought a metro card which here is a contactless RFID card like most cities in Asia. This means guys just put their wallets on the thing and women just put their whole purse on it instead of hunting for it to swipe it like in NYC. Also, they don't run into the swipe-too-fast or swipe-too-slow problems we have. I wonder if NYC will switch to something like this eventually. They have been experimenting with "Blink" and things like that where you charge your credit card directly for years but that doesn't seem to be catching on. Also, when your metro card here runs low, you recharge it, and you just continue recharging it indefinitely. I suppose this is similar to NYC's metro cards though ours experience wear and tear and eventually stop working which is why I often end up getting new monthly cards and discarding the old ones. But I digest. This is an obscure Family Guy reference, not a mistake. So the metro card is a 20 RMB deposit which apparently you can get back, then you charge it up with whatever you want. The maximum cost of any individual ride in Shanghai seems to be 5 or 6 RMB. Prices vary depending on how far you're going. I don't think you can use the card yet in stores the way you can use it in HK at 7-11 and McDonalds and so on. Still pretty good system though, and pretty cheap.

On the downside, the last train is pretty much at 10:30pm. Definitely before 11pm. This is a disaster of course. Since I don't know the bus system really, I end up taking cabs instead. The distances are pretty much too far to walk depending on where you live I suppose. So far the longest cab ride I have taken was 25 RMB which I estimate in NYC would've costed about 20 USD for a comparable distance. Most cab rides tend to be about 15 RMB during the day and less than 20 RMB at night. So cabs are pretty cheap compared to New York.

Foodwise, I probably most often buy water which is 1-2 RMB a bottle depending on the brand. They have more expensive brands like Evian if you want too which vary depending on where you buy them, but I think are still often less than $1 USD if you buy them in a convenience store. A bottle of tea or soda is something like 3-4 RMB. Those 24 hours convenience stores are everywhere pretty much. This is true in most cities I've visited in China, not just Shanghai. As far as meals go, I have been eating most often at small, informal places in my neighborhood which is called Changning. Most vegetarian dishes are less than 20 RMB. Maybe meat dishes are similar, maybe 20something but I'm not sure cause I don't look that much. Last night I got a tofu dish, a vegetable dish, white rice, and a sprite for 35 RMB. This is probably the most expensive meal I have eaten in this neighborhood. There is a fried noodle place up the ride where I can get a huge container of tofu, vegetables, and fried noodles for about 10 RMB. Depending on how much Chinese you speak, the price fluctuates. A friend from the hostel paid 20 RMB for a chicken dish. Another time we went together and it was 15 RMB. My friend the hostel security guard believes we are still being ripped off. He said my tofu noodles should be 7 or 8 RMB at most. I explained to him that we'll never get those prices as foreigners and honestly I'm not going to haggle with these guys over 30 cents. He didn't really get that and thinks it is all about the bottom line. Maybe he's right. My other favorite meal in the neighborhood is tofu or veggies on sticks, which costs 1 RMB per stick. I usually get 3-6 depending on how hungry I am. My local breakfast is congee with two vegetable buns for 3.8 RMB. There's also this guy that sells stuffed breads which I mentioned in a previous post and I usually spend 2-5 RMB there for a bag of stuff. Moving onward, things get more expensive in restaurants. Actual westerner-friendly restaurants I mean. Then things end up being more like 80-100 RMB per person. Tonight I had a meal with 12 people which costed 40 RMB per person. I have walked past restaurants that charge upwards of 200 RMB per person, and like NYC if you really want to, you can spend as much as you want in the really fancy restaurants that I won't be visiting. I'm sure there are many 1000+ RMB per person meals to be had here without lots of effort, the local equivalents of Daniel or Jean Georges or whatever fancy restaurant you know the name of in NYC. Obviously I don't know that many.

Bars are another story. At the hostel, a beer costs about 10 RMB. In the convenience stores, it costs about 5 RMB. At one bar I visited, the cheapest beer was a Tsingtao for 25 RMB. At the next, it was 45 RMB. And then at one more still, the cheapest was 60 RMB. That's like $9 USD for a beer. They go higher of course. This is where we start to see the crazy Shanghai rich people prices showing up I suppose. I saw a couple order a bottle of champagne for 1000 RMB. My friend from Anhui told me there is a pack of cigarettes that costs 2000 RMB a pack. That's not a typo. That's $300 USD for a pack of cigarettes. He said it's for high rollers (and presumably corrupt government officials) and like many things here, it's about status. It's why people drive ridiculously expensive cars and wear expensive suits and jewelry. A girl I met from Sweden says that she has seen people order two bottles of champagne, one to drink and one to spill down the sink just to show that they can afford to throw money away. This sounds hard to believe, but I liked the story so I'm including it. That girl is staying at the hostel here and returning from a trip to Beijing she developed a high fever and a stomach problem. Made me nervous a little cause I don't want to get sick, but the doctor said it was likely food poisoning. So that was good news.

I don't know a lot about apartment costs here. One girl I met lives in a one-bedroom with a living room in Pudong which costs 1900 RMB. She said the same apartment in Puxi would cost over 3000 RMB. I'm not too familiar with Pudong really. The business center of Shanghai is there, but I think a lot of is residential. She is quite far away from the financial area. Puxi has residential neighborhoods but is the center of nightlife, restaurants and that sort of thing. There is a lot of colonial influence in the neighborhoods which make for very pretty tree-lined streets with interesting architecture. I know somebody else who lives in a 4-bedroom place in Puxi for 25,000 RMB. I gather that place is larger and nicer in some relatively new apartment building, but I'm only going off of a description, I didn't see any of these places with my own eyes. Clearly prices run the gamut but it seems as if it's more than possible to get a decent place to yourself here within an arms throw of the cool areas via subway for less than it would cost for something comparable anywhere in New York. Maybe that seems obvious, but although I was sure the average costs of living in Shanghai or Hong Kong would be cheaper than in NYC, I wasn't too sure about apartments. For buying apartments I'm really not sure. There are probably a bunch of incredibly boring and speculative blogs you could find about that specifically. I'll leave that to them for the moment.

Only two more nights in Shanghai. Monday I'm going to Hangzhou to which I'm looking forward. It's supposed to be a quiet and attractive city the main feature of which is this beautiful lake everybody raves about. I think mainly it is supposed to be a relaxing alternative to its busy neighbor. I may go tomorrow to buy the ticket as I hear they can sell out quickly, but there are apparently quite a few express trains per day and it's only 45 minutes so I can't imagine it is that big of a deal. Basically all my travel details are handled now including hostel/hotel bookings all the way through to Israel. Hard to believe the China part of the trip is almost over. I think my Chinese has probably improved despite the large number of English conversations I've had here. There are just too many foreigners in Shanghai to avoid speaking English entirely. I still managed to have a lot of Chinese conversations anyway and hopefully in Hangzhou and maybe in Singapore I can have some more. I also started using an input method on my phone which allows me to very easily look up Chinese characters I don't know. This has been tremendously useful and I'm quite pleased about it. It enables me to learn from signs, newspapers and books in a way that I couldn't really effectively learn new words before. I think it will help a great deal from now on.

Now I am going to drink a beer. It's saturday night and it's raining.

My nose

2011-05-27T19:28:00.001-07:00

I was taking a walk in the People's Square. Every Chinese city has a People's Square. It's a square for the people. I was accosted several times by groups of Chinese tourists looking to practice some English. The first group was really just two girls from Xian. They were visiting a family member in Shanghai. They were friendly and invited me to drink gong fu tea with them. I declined mainly because it reminded me of a come-drink-tea-with-us scam which it almost certainly was not, but I also wanted to continue walking. I did chat with them in English/Chinese for a little while. The second group was comprised of three people, also from Xian. They were students living in Shanghai for some unclear period of time. They started with a "hello, how are you?" but then moved immediately to "Do you speak Chinese?" That conversation was challenging. The one guy who wanted to do most of the talking was difficult to understand due to a very strong accent, although others later told me that the Xian accent isn't particularly hard to understand and it may have just been this particular guy's background or way of speaking. He mentioned to me that my nose was enormous, for which I thanked him. Apparently this is not necessarily an insult in China, though it sure feels like one. He also caught a look at the freckles on my arm and then held my arm and studied it like an ancient artifact. He spoke at some length about the reasons I might have freckles which as far as I could tell had something to do with water, roots of plans, and something I ate in my childhood. This is probably not correct though it as close as I will ever get to knowing what the hell he was talking about.

I guess I haven't written here since Monday. The internet really drives me nuts here. It's so inconsistent. This is the first time I have tried to do work here, which is probably why I have felt it more than previous visits. I never traveled with a laptop before and now I have one and often during the day I will do several hours of work, though lately I have taken to working offline to the degree possible since there is no other real choice. For most things I need to do, I had anticipated this to a degree so I can still get quite a lot done, but it is still inconvenient in ways I hadn't anticipated. I can't even reliably reach my home server which hosts various important things to which I need access.

The weather has been reasonably nice again. It hasn't been raining at least. It is in the 60s in the mornings, and the 70s during the day. I have gone out to several Couchsurfing events. There was one at a bar in a district called Luwan which was nice. The bar was kind of a dive not unlike one might find in NYC. I haven't been in many of those. Some guests in the hostel are here long term. They go out many nights to various bars around Shanghai. I haven't gone out with them really as they tend towards the swankier, pretentious places which sound even worse than the one place like that I visited. The Shanghai New Rich apparently frequent these joints, although I would at least find that interesting to see since it is novel. One girl I met, an expat from Germany living here for a while, told me that many foreigners come here to "celebrate their wealth." I think that's a good way to describe what I have seen. Also many foreign man seem to be making their way through the Chinese girls without much regard for anything but their own pleasure. The women seem to allow this since a foreign boyfriend represents a status symbol and a chance to permamently increase one's status through marriage, moving to the west, or something like that. These are things Chinese girls have said to me by the way, not entirely my own theories.

I like Shanghai overall. It's an attractive city and it is clean in a way that other cities are in China. There are neighborhoods that exist here which exist in no other city. Some are very high-end, comprised of Lamborghini and Maserati dealerships and every trendy brand of clothing or handbag one can imagine. Others are a fusion of European and Chinese architecture with small cafes and tree-lined streets. As I discovered this week, there are also many poor neighborhoods filled with tiny homes stuffed with several generations of a family, clothes hanging in every direction, people washing their hair in a communal area in the street, and long rows of street vendors filled with people and motorcycles. These places are every bit as China as any other city I have visited, in contrast to the common assertion I hear that Shanghai is not China. That may be partly true, but I didn't have to go far to find the real thing. I read that there are 9 million immigrant workers here and apparently plenty more of those tiny and non-rich neighborhoods are Shanghai natives as well. I'm sure going farther out of the city it is easy to find more of that. Many of the local districts I discovered were one street away from a busy tourist block. The instant change from trendy malls and tourists to food on sticks and no foreigners is incredible.

I did a few touristy things this week. After the rain cleared up, I went out to capitalize on the sun while it was still out. I went and visited Jing'An temple, originally built in 200something AD, though relocated in 12something to its current location. Impressive, but temples sort of blur after you've seen a few dozen of them. That day like many was accompanied by lots of city walking and exploration, in that case with an American girl I met at the hostel. The next day I started out with a Danish girl and an Irish girl I'd met at the hostel. We first visited the Yu Garden, one of those beautiful imperial era gardens built by some wealthy government official. Bridges traverse ponds filled with goldfish too fat to swim and meticulously decorated temples and pagodas fill the place. Next door to that garden is the "old city" of Shanghai for which I had hopes, but the presence of Dairy Queen should give some idea of what the place was really like. All the buildings are constructed in ancient styles, but it is way too packed with tourist shops and kiosks to give even the tiniest semblance of atmosphere. It was really just one more orgy of commerce, though in this case at least a lot of food was there was well. The street food market we found later well outside the "old city" was vastly superior though. After the garden and old city, we wandered. We walked through one of the aforementioned local neighborhoods encountering no foreigners. We eventually made it to the river and walked north along the Bund, taking in the ridiculous spectacle of insane skyscrapers and modern construction that comprise the skyline east of the Huang Pu river. Shanghai is divided into two parts really, west of the river which is Puxi and east of the river which is Pudong. The view from Puxi to Pudong of all the skyscrapers is usually what you see in the magazines when they show you a picture of Shanghai. You can tell by the presence of the Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower, the building that looks kind of like a spaceship from a movie in the 50s when they decided to go with the rocket ship look as opposed to the flying saucer look.

I did make it to another vegetarian restaurant the other day which was quite good. That meal I passed with six Couchsurfers. I think I was still the only vegetarian which made for a lot of indifference and complaining about the food and vegetarian food in general. These people all volunteered for the meal, but I think both of my vegetarian meals have been with non-vegetarians who don't particularly care for vegetarian food. I'd like to find some people with whom I can dine who actually appreciate the meals instead of tolerate them. It's not like the food is bad, it's just that they love meat and want to make sure I know that what I'm eating is a sad excuse for food and not possibly comparable to the delicious taste of an animal that was probably killed in a way so horrible that they wouldn't want to watch for a few seconds let alone the duration of the animals miserable life. This reminds me, Mark Zuckerberg was in a news article I briefly managed to read in which he described his new annual challenge that he apparently sets for himself each year. I happen to like that idea by the way. Last year he learned Chinese, or at least began to study it. Once Youtube works again I'll have to go find a video of him speaking it and see how he did with a few hours of study each day for one year. Sticking to something regularly makes a difference. It was always said when I was learning to read music that practicing 10 minutes a day is better than 4 hours every few weeks. Anyway, his new challenge is not eating any meat from an animal he has not killed himself. So he killed a chicken and a pig so far I think. And he also boiled a live lobster himself. The last part sounds pretty awful, but at least I give him credit for the idea of taking responsibility for what you are eating and being aware of what actually went into the meal on your plate. I doubt most of the self-professed meat lovers would ever do such a thing. Sure there are a few hunters, but they are not the ones bitching to me about what's wrong with my diet.

Well, it'd be easy to write more but that seems like enough tangents for one day. Besides, who knows how long my window will be open for me to publish this. Today, headed to language exchange again. The weather is a bit better this week, so I will stay longer I think. Last week was good but drizzly and the meeting was outdoors. Not a great combination. Various plans for the upcoming week. June 6th heading to Hangzhou, June 10th flying to Singapore. Still need to book a hostel in Singapore actually, though I booked something in downtown Mumbai so at least that is ready to go. The hostel booking sites don't work normally, they require some kind of tunnel or proxy which doesn't always work, so I'm kind of at the mercy of the government when it comes to booking accommodation. Makes perfect sense, don't you think?

Beginning a new week in Shanghai

2011-05-23T20:50:00.000-07:00

So much happens, it's hard to document.

I just ate my standard Chinese breakfast which has been two vegetable buns and congee with pickled veggies. It costs 3.8 RMB which I think is a pretty good deal. That's 58 cents USD. I think I have had that breakfast or some variation thereof from that place since I found it. I have ventured out to new nearby places for lunch several times. I haven't gotten the crazy potato/vegetable stuffed bread lately, though I might be due for a return. This week I will start to go to vegetarian restaurants a little more. Up until now I have had several restaurant meals but often with people who do not want to eat vegetarian food.

One such meal was with my CS friend Jacqueline and 4 of her friends. They are all expats living in Shanghai, two Japanese and 2 American, plus Jacqueline who is English. They have all been living in China for years. We ate Xibo food, an ethnic minority from Xinjiang province. The food is meat heavy but the veggies and tofu I got were good. The restaurant was completely full of expats. There were a few Chinese but no tables without foreigners, and in fact most tables were entirely foreigners. Prices were also foreigner-friendly. They got even more foreigner-friendly at the Cotton Club, a bar/lounge we walked to after dinner. It had kind of a smoky nightclub feel with a stage. There were three musical acts. The first was a girl from LA singing songs and playing guitar. The second was pretty much a blues band made up of I think all expats, maybe a few guys who were sort of local or born outside of China. The third was a guy from Texas being the frontman for the blues band and playing mostly Stevie Ray Vaughan covers. All the guys looked to be in their late 30s or 40s from what I could tell. Most of the musicians were pretty good. The prices in the bar were what I'd call exorbitant. A beer was the equivalent of $9-10 USD. There was no cheap option. I think a glass of fountain soda was about $7. A can was $8 or more. People seemed to happily pay it. The Texas guy and some of the band members had brought an entourage who loudly encouraged them. A few of the women got up to dance. The bar felt like a cross between a club in New York due to ambience and prices but the band reminded me more of a random Florida blues band. Their first instrumental jam was enjoyable, but it sort of went downhill from there. Like I said though, most of the musicians were decent. The singing varied. What can I say, I'm a tough critic. Also, the expat scene kind of weirded me out in ways I've yet to figure out how to describe.

Another day, I met Yasmine, her boyfriend, and her brother at the tailors' market. That place is a giant building of at least 3 floors, probably more, filled to the brim with tailors' stalls where one can buy pretty much any manner of clothing. More than that though, it specializes in custom clothing. You can go, get measured, and they will make customized suits, shirts, pants, whatever you want. They have magazines with pictures of stylish celebrities and you can point to the suits you like, choose fabrics, then come back in a few days and they will have made the suit for you from scratch. You can go through several fittings to get things just right. If memory serves, a man's suit will cost something like 450 RMB which is like $70 USD. That's for the pants and jacket. It seems like with a little bit of knowledge and effort, it'd be possible to get a whole lot of suits and fancy clothing for a lot less than it would be to buy in the US. As my guide book pointed out (and I agree) this place is "overrun" with foreigners shopping for deals, though there were plenty of locals too.

After the tailors' market expedition, they decided they wanted to go to the driving range and hit golf balls. They kept calling it the "shooting" range which I explained is something else. So I went along, having never been to a driving range in my life. Having the first one be in China seemed like a good idea. This place was pretty much filled with Chinese guys, some with ridiculous outfits and apparently expensive gear. I didn't realize that modern driving ranges have cameras that record your swing so you can review it after each shot. That's pretty cool actually. I hit a few balls. I got one to roll past the 100 yard mark, that was probably my best. Having tried it, I'd actually do it again, though it seems to me it would take about a billion years to get good enough to be consistent.

It rained and was chilly for a few days. I didn't really enjoy that, though it did make me less annoyed to be carrying around a sweater which I'd not worn since New York. I applauded my foresight actually. Way to rewrite history. Today the sun is out and I am really happy about that. Last night I met a few new friends in the hostel and today I think one will join me for a walk. I was thinking of hitting up a tourist site in Shanghai in the old city. The Old City itself sounds nice, and there is an ancient imperial garden or something that sounds worth the visit as well. I have also begun to arrange some meetups with other Couchsurfers. A lot more has probably happened, but I will continue to document my experiences as I retain them. Also, if anyone has questions about Shanghai or China, drop me an email and I will be happy to try and answer them to the best of my ability.

Getting started eating in Shanghai

2011-05-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

I have had three of the best meals I have had on this trip in the last 24 hours. Two of them were from the same place, and all three were within a few minutes of my hostel. Meals is probably overstating it. More like things I have eaten.

The second things were some kind of stuffed bread. One stuffed with vegetables. The other stuffed with potatos and vegetables. They were both kind of spicy. The first and third I got from this other place for yesterday's and today's breakfast. Yesterday was congee with some kind of pickled veggies and some red bean steamed buns to go with it. Today he had vegetable buns instead, with chopped green veggies and I think small pieces of tofu inside. Today's breakfast was 6 yuan. Yesterday's was 3.5 I think. I think the bread thingies were also like 3-5, I don't remember. So let's say those 3 meals costed about 2 USD. Oh, I forgot, there was one more meal...

Last night coming back from a Couchsurfing meetup with two guys from the hostel, we searched for food nearby and found this pretty crowded noodle place in the same cluster of places where I'd bought my stuffed bread for lunch. It was sufficiently packed with people so we took a closer look. They had pre-assembled plates of items to be stir-fried right there in a wok sitting atop a giant flame, and four bowls of noodles to choose from. I chose a plate of what is called dou fu gan, a dried tofu which is quite firm, which she stir-fried with veggies and noodles. My friend got chicken. They normally use pig lard or pork when they stir fry I think, but I requested they leave that out. We took it to go and ate at the hostel down the block. Very delicious, I was surprised by how good it was. That meal broke the bank at 10 yuan, or about $1.50 USD. Even though Shanghai has this reputation for being expensive, and surely I have been in a few bars now where beer and drink prices are basically the same as NYC, it is clear that there are also plenty of places that are not like that. It all depends where you want to hang out. I will probably go to more actual vegetarian restaurants next week where I'm sure I will spend more on meals, but as opposed to back in New York where I don't even eat breakfast very often, I feel like if I could get a couple of steamed buns or congee there as easily as I do here, I might look forward to it the way I do here. I know some will say I can get those things in Chinatown, but it's not the same for a number of reasons. First of all there are tons of places literally a few hundred feet from where I stay here. Secondly everything is pretty much ready, fresh, and I think tastes better than anything I've had like this in NYC. Finally, it's ridiculously cheap.

I met a bunch of interesting people at this hostel, but for now I will only say that it is clearly possible to travel to an incredible number of places, or to travel across the world for a long period of time, and not learn anything at all. They're not all like that, but I see it a lot. I'm glad I waited until I was older to travel. Sometimes I have thought how nice it'd be to have started in my early-mid 20s like a lot of these guys, but I feel like I never could've possibly appreciated the way I do now or had the patience to see it at the pace I do.

Getting started in Shanghai

2011-05-18T22:33:00.001-07:00

Maybe I had decided to like Shanghai before I got here. I at least has positive expectations. Even though I haven't seen all that much of the city, I like it here. There is some element, some sense of detail, some little international flair in the architecture, something that reminds me of Hong Kong, and probably many other things that have made me really enjoy my time here so far.

I arrived Tuesday evening at Hongqiao airport, the domestic one without the Maglev technology demonstration train that I was kind of curious to see. It was still large and pretty clean. I kind of compare everything to Hong Kong in terms of cleanliness and efficiency. Not much can keep up, but still, the process of getting from airport via subway and feet to my hostel was easy. The hostel is large and really clean with nice indoor and outdoor communal areas. I'm sitting on a small patio in front of my own room in a lounge chair with various plans and landscaping nearby.

I had dinner with Yasmine the first night at a Vietnamese restaurant in one of Shanghai's ten billion malls. We stuck to English mostly. It's weird to speak Chinese with her since we always spoke English in New York. Back then she spoke Cantonese but no Mandarin. Now she speaks Mandarin well after two years of living here and having a Chinese boyfriend. That said, last night we went out again, this time with four of her friends who are all Chinese and we spoke Chinese for the whole meal. Perhaps that will eventually not merit mentioning but for now I make note of all my Chinese conversations since they make me happy.

I posted on Couchsurfing that night to seek out people with whom to go to vegetarian restaurants and people with whom to trade English for Mandarin. I received various responses but one was particularly interesting. A girl with whom I had almost met via CS during her trip to NYC in 2007 wrote to me. We had not managed to meet then due to her time constraints but we had added each other on MSN and then forgotten how we knew each other. Yesterday she wrote me and said, "Now I know who you are!" and we recalled the whole story. We ended up meeting for lunch and she took me to a lovely Japanese-run vegetarian cafe on a beautiful, quaint street with this sort of old-style and foreigner-influenced architecture. We ended up speaking at length with the owner who was incredibly friendly and insisted on giving us all this food to try. Then we took a short walk around the neighborhood and parted ways before I walked back about 30 minutes through the city to my hotel. I need to do more walks like that but actually my time has been reasonably filled since arriving. I suppose all of this happened yesterday though somehow it feels like longer.

Since being here I also had a good conversation with an American at the hostel who lived in Hangzhou and teaches there who was visiting Shanghai for the weekend. I also met another guest here, also American, who has been living in Asia in different locations for years including Taiwan and Korea. He teaches as well. After dinner last night with Yasmine and her friends at an extremely non-vegetarian restaurant, I met up with Couchsurfers at this insane bar called Zapatas in a nightlife district of Shanghai. It was packed with everyone I'd like to avoid being in Shanghai. That probably sounds elitist but hey, it's just not my scene. Large groups of foreigners who don't seem to be connected with Chinese culture at all and groups of Chinese people who think they are cool. Maybe I'm generalizing and maybe that is local culture, but the music was loud and horrible and the scene out of the sort of bar I'd never want to visit in New York. That said, they had an outdoor area which was better and the Couchsurfers I'd come to meet turned out to be very nice. We ended up eventually going to a karaoke place which was a lot like the one I visited in Taiwan a long time ago. Here, those places are like hotels. You arrive and go to a front desk where you check in and they escort you to your room on any number of floors. The places are gigantic. You pay a flat rate for the room for the night I believe, but it was hard to be sure since none of the local Couchsurfers would let us pay for anything despite fervent efforts. It ended up being four local Chinese, one guy and three girls, two Australian guys in Shanghai for the summer, one guy from Switzerland here for a few months and me.

Other interesting conversations include two women who are friends of the owners of the hostel who work down the block and were hanging out in the common area. Also an interesting conversation with the security guard last night who asked me if there are black people in the US and how come people who are from the US don't all look the same. He also asked how long different people live. The people who work at the hostel are nice, I speak with them in Chinese. Last night at karaoke I spoke with the girls in Chinese mostly, though a few of them clearly wanted to practice English so I did what I could to help. I have received several emails from people interested in language exchange which I will try to respond to today. The internet is very erratic which is frustrating. It's probably a reason I'd find it tough to live here long-term. I think Taiwan or HK seem more likely choices at the moment. That said, Shanghai is probably the most western-friendly and yet culturally-interesting city I have visited in China. I'm sure this is no surprise to anyone who has been here though despite all the time I have spent in China previously, this is still on my second full day in Shanghai.

Anyway, I have a ton of research and work to do on vegetarian restaurants which I'm going to try to do today. I had congee and a red bean bun for breakfast from a place down the street. The guy at the hostel pointed me in the right direction when I asked where I could get something other than the English and American breakfasts they offer here. The guys at the congee place asked if I'm staying at the hostel and I said yes. They said they see all these foreigners all the time but none of them speak Chinese, so they were very impressed and complimentary. This is the style of course but I appreciate the encouragement even though my Chinese has a long way to go. I'm working pretty hard at it here, speaking constantly whenever possible and looking up and writing down new words as much as I can. But about the restaurants, there is this pretty great website called dianping.com which is a Chinese restaurant guide someone turned me on to. They have an Android app too which I installed, but everything is entirely in Chinese. That's not going to stop me from integrating it into MTS in the next few days and using their content to monitor the existence of vegetarian restaurants throughout China. I will play with that today as well. Also later tonight there is a CS meetup in Pudong, the giant financial center of Shanghai which I haven't laid eyes on yet. That's the place with that crazy tower and all those skyscrapers you often see in the news when they show pictures of Shanghai. I wanted to check out the view but didn't make it there yesterday. Tonight before the meetup I'm going to try to go over to the Bund which is the promenade by the water in Puxi, the west side of the river where I am staying. Then if possible I will try to take some kind of ferry of which I think there are many over to Pudong and work my way towards wherever that cafe is where they meet. Couchsurfing has been very useful for meeting locals on all of my travels and here is no different.

I originally booked 6 days in Shanghai. I have since extended to 10 and may extend further. I like being in one place. I like getting to know a city better and not having to move so often. I like this hostel and neighborhood. I like not having to pack my backpack every 3 days to relocate to some new place. I like the people I've met so far and I seem to have no shortage of things to do here.

more Guangzhou

2011-05-16T10:43:00.001-07:00

I boiled water to brush my teeth. Some people think that's overkill, but I am not one of those people. Considering that there was just a scandal in China where some company was using chemicals or bleach or something horrifying to change pork so that it looks like beef and then selling it to people, I don't think taking a few extra precautions with the water is unreasonable.

I'd also like to add that mosquitos seem to be extraordinarily patient. Also, certain breeds seem to have the ability to teleport short distances.

I have seen 4 public urinations so far I think. Three were children under the guidance of a parent. One was in the Hong Kong train station on the way to Guangzhou with a parent holding an empty bag from Ichiban for the kid to piss in. Just now I saw a kid pissing into a plant next to the entrance of my hotel in Guangzhou, again at the direction of a parent. Last night I saw a cab driver pulled over to piss on the side of the road, facing traffic.

I have passed my time in Guangzhou counting offenses against humanity, but also visiting with some friends, some friends of friends, some parents of friends, eating at vegetarian restaurants, and acclimating to things I'd forgotten about. In the three or so years since I was last here, it is incredible how much the city has changed and is continuing to change. There are whole new neighborhoods filled with enormous skyscrapers that were not here last time I was, as well as many new subway lines that completely did not exist. It makes me wonder a little why the Second Ave subway is taking so long and why the new WTC is going to take another two years to build. The economic progress made here is impressive. That said, watching how people behave towards each other can be a little depressing, though I suppose that's true in the US too.

Today I went to a vegetarian restaurant called Loving Hut for lunch. There are many locations of this restaurant, over 100 world-wide. The restaurants are presided over by Supreme Master Ching Hai, a woman who is a spiritual teacher of sorts with about 20k followers according to Wikipedia. At a lot of the restaurants, there are televisions playing propaganda about her recommended method for reaching enlightenment. On one hand, I'm glad there are more vegetarian and vegan restaurants in the world. On the other, the glassy-eyed look of the servers in most of those restaurants I've visited gives me the creeps. Also, the tea tasted funny and now I am experiencing an uncontrollable urge to apply for a job there.

After lunch I met up with a CSer friend I'd met in New York. We went to Yuexiu park, probably the only tourist thing I have done really in Guangzhou or possibly on the whole trip. I showed her some of the Taiji moves I have learned to the bemused stares of passersby. People still stare at me kind of a lot, more than I remember. I wonder if I just got used to that last time.

As nice as some of the new Guangzhou is, particularly last night walking around the new "Central Park of Guangzhou" (the way Carrie put it), I'm ready to move on to Shanghai and Hangzhou. Those are both cities to which I have never been, about which I have heard much, and that I am interested to explore for myself. So far on the trip I have only been in places that although I like, I have already been, and I think I am craving for some new locales. I fly to Shanghai tomorrow afternoon and I booked an actual hostel which not only sounds comfortable, but where I hope to find a nice common area where I can socialize more easily. I also have several friends in Shanghai who I'm looking forward to seeing. In Hong Kong hostels there is no space for a common area and in Guangzhou I stayed at Carrie's empty flat for two nights and a random hotel in Tianhe for the second two just cause it was cheap and in a convenient location to where I needed to be.

The last night in Guangzhou involved Indian food, some beer, and a couple of nice long walks in what has actually been slightly wet but very comfortable weather about which I really can't complain. I just took a shower and there was nothing between 30 and 1000 degrees. At least the shower was clean which I think I might prefer to reliable hot water. I can learn to enjoy 1000 degree showers if necessary.

Anyway, 24 hours I'll be in Shanghai for the first time. More then.

in Guangzhou

2011-05-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

So far I cannot reach Facebook, Blogspot, the primary Google.com, and many other Google sites like Google Reader and Google Language Tools which I often use to translate Chinese. I used an SSH tunnel for 10 minutes through my home machine to access those sites, and now I can't reach that either. I thought it may have just been a crappy internet connection but I connected through another machine and the home machine is still up. This means my home machine was accessible and then blocked. I am not sure how this could be unless they are blocking it because of SSH traffic or something like that. If that is the case, then that's freakin' nuts. Although I experienced this years ago when I was here and I read articles about it periodically, the reality of experiencing it firsthand is still shocking.

I'm in Guangzhou for 4 nights. Yesterday I came on the train from Hong Kong. I talked the whole way with this guy from New Zealand. Nice guy. We talked about Flight of the Conchords a lot. I wonder if New Zealanders are tired of hearing that, but he didn't seem to mind. I guess it makes a change from Lord of the Rings and "Oh, I hear New Zealand is really beautiful." I have been speaking a decent amount of Chinese. I suppose I won't know til a month has passed whether improvement is occurring. I have some new words in my arsenal for the moment at least.

Went to the CS meetup in Guangzhou last night with Carrie and her boyfriend Nick. Smallish group, maybe 20 or so. Talked to a few interesting folks. The cafe where they hold it is in the neighborhood Tian He where I stayed last time I was here. I don't think the cafe was here at that time though Guangzhou has seemingly changed a lot in the 3 years since my last visit. I was pretty hungry after a day of traveling which should've been easy but turned a bit more difficult after a couple of wrong numbers, some difficult Chinese conversations, a long wait at the bank to exchange money while innumerable forms were stamped, and about an hour and a half of me trying and failing to get 3g working on my new Chinese SIM card. It works now thankfully and ultimately I made it to Carrie's old apartment where I am staying. She lives elsewhere now and this apartment is still owned by her parents and therefore vacant. The neighborhod is what I would call "authentic." Anyway, being hungry I was concerned about lack of options at the cafe but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was owned by a former New Yorker and there was red lentil hummus on the menu. Total score. I've been eating quite a lot of Chinese food and was aching for some variation.

Worth mentioning also was my second CS meetup in HK on Thursday night before leaving. They have a nice group there and a pretty big meetup in a cool and somewhat hidden bar in an otherwise chaotic and drunk-foreigner-filled neighborhood. My last few days in HK I also quite successfully met up with various CSers for nice vegetarian meals. I could've stayed longer in HK actually. I find it to be a pretty comfortable city with enough international influence to feel diverse. It also runs amazingly well. I noticed that especially in the last 24 hours in Guangzhou where the subway was built by the same people but just lacks the little details. In Hong Kong the subway you want always seems to be across the tracks when you get off your train. Everything is immaculate. The Octopus cards are just incredible and easy and fast. It is at least slightly embarassing how much better the HK subway is than ours in NYC, although we still run 24 hours which trumps cleanliness. Also, the walkways always seem to put people in the right place so that the sheer volume of traffic never seems to overwhelm. Maybe the people play some role here. In New York when people try to get on the train before people get off, it always annoys me. In China, they have really taken that to the next level. There is virtually no pretense of creating space for the people to debark. Just two masses trying to mush their way past each other. I wonder about the thought processes of the groups involved but I don't suppose I'll ever know.

I wonder if other people talk to the mosquitos when hunting them in a room in some other country. Now it's still early, but last night I was up a few times in the middle of the night trying to track mosquitos somewhere in this room with a towel or some other killing implement. Little bastards.

There were a few other things I'd made a note to write about when the opportunity next arose. I think the main one was that a few nights before leaving HK, I'd been hit on by a prostitute. This happens somewhat regularly in bars in Hong Kong but what was unusual about this occasion was that I was in 7-11 at the time, looking at the Chinese stomach medication. She initially asked if I needed help choosing medicine before asking where I was staying. So rarely do you find a doctor these days willing to make housecalls.

I hope I like Shanghai cause I'd like to stay still for a while an settle in. I moved hotels 3 times in Hong Kong and I'm only in Guangzhou for 4 days. It all feels like too much uprooting for a short period. The hostel I booked in Shanghai for the first 6 days got impossibly good reviews, is in a good neighborhood, and is very reasonably-priced. If it is as good as it sounds, hopefully I will just feel like extending and stay there for a while. Hangzhou is near to Shanghai and is by all accounts a beautiful and relaxing city which also sounds like an appealing place to pass time. I'm still deciding on Beijing. On one hand I'd like to see what has become of it since I have not been since before the Olympics. On the other hand, maybe just too much to deal with. These decisions will be made later. That's when all the best decisions are made.

Advertising

2011-05-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

I met some guy at the CS meetup on Thursday who claimed to make $1500-2000 a month just from his travel blog. I don't know much about what he does beyond write about his travels or how he promotes it, although he had a lot to say about SEO and other buzzwordy sorts of things. He asked me how I'm monetizing my own site and expressed shock at the "number of pages" I have on More Than Salad and that I was not yet making enough money to cover my travels around the world. He did have an interesting story involving leaving home at a young age and traveling non-stop for years. He lives in Thailand now, originally from Ireland, and had various adventures of all sorts living in loads of interesting countries. He was with another CSer who was an American living in Korea and they were passing through Hong Kong en route to Macau for a vacation of sorts though I didn't manage to get the whole story before pulled away into some other strange tale of adventure such as one often runs into at Couchsurfing meetups.

Last night I met up with two Couchsurfers and two of one of their friends for a vegetarian meal. I have begun to organize more vigorously vegetarian gatherings, specifically lunch and dinner at a different restaurant each day until I leave. It took me a while to settle into Hong Kong and get sufficiently over jetlag and so on to be able to effectively gather people, but now I have figured out that the best way to do it is just to post a time and place and people will either show up or not and not to bother trying to come up with a time and place that actually works for everyone. In last night's case, originally only person had confirmed and as I was walking to the restaurant to meet that person, they had texted me and bailed.

As an aside let me say that I have a SIM card in HK for the first time that supports data/internet access and it has been awesome. I have this new More Than Salad app for my phone which enables me to see a map in real-time of all vegetarian restaurants in proximity to my current location. I'm releasing on the Android market soon, maybe this week actually. I also can look things up instantly which is important for all the research I'm doing and useful for travel as well of course. Finally and most importantly, I installed Skype on my Android phone and was able to use it to call my mother for Mother's day for free, from Hong Kong. I think the quality is better than a normal phone call, it's free, and I can use it basically the same as my normal phone. A lot of people seem less amazed by that than I am.

So as I was saying, the person was busy at work and bailed, but we renegotiated a later time during which 3 more people texted me and were interested, and I ended up spending an hour in the park doing Tai Chi before meeting up and all of us enjoying an interesting vegetarian meal at a restaurant in Kowloon called Gaia, a sort of modernish Chinese/Buddhist vegetarian place inside of a mall.

I didn't have anything really focused to add here about what I'm doing and I've sort of digressed, but the actual real point was that in an experiment in monetization, I have added the hideous ad block you see at the top of this entry. I figure it is not too obtrusive and certainly can't hurt. Since there is now quite a lot of content in this blog, people seem to find their way to it randomly and who knows what useful or trivial thing they might uncover. Maybe I should add more pictures though...

HK more

2011-05-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

People in HK and I suppose in China too do not walk on the grass. In parks, there are paths, and everybody stays on the path. There aren't actually fences or anything to prevent one from going on the grass, but everybody is content to remain on the path anyway. One Chinese friend tells me this is because if people were to walk on the grass, it would quickly erode since it could not handle the sheer volume of people who would be walking on it. You know how people go an lie on the grass in Central Park? Don't have that anywhere as far as I can tell. I will keep looking.

I'm in Hong Kong. I slept almost 8 hours last night which is a record. My friend Carrie from Guangzhou was here from Saturday til Sunday night. I forced her to eat vegetarian food, we were up on a roof garden on Hong Kong island drinking a beer, and we went to Lamma Island for a walk yesterday. After the debacle of the previous hostel giving away my room, I dug up another room not too far away in a sort of newish area adjacent to Mong Kok which may or may not be considered part of it, called Tai Kok Tsui. Very local from what I can tell. Carrie and I had breakfast (well she ate and I watched) at a very simple hole-in-the-wall breakfast joint on the street nearby, but the food was more Hong Kong style than traditional Cantonese from what I can tell cause they had things like toast and cheese instead of more traditional Chinese fare. It reminded me of this old place called the Rainbow Cafe in Chinatown which had similar Hong Kong style cuisine which mixes Chinese with Western. Oh yeah, she also had spam which I learned how to say in Chinese and translates as the optimistic "lunch meat." So I'd found this place where Carrie stayed for one night and I stayed one additional night to avoid moving yet again which I will do today instead. I found a place back in Tsim Sha Tsui which is affordable and will be down there for the 4 more nights of decided to spend in HK. It is indeed more expensive here than it was 3 years ago and I'm ready to move on to Shanghai so I can actually speak more Chinese and also get more bang for my buck.

The plan is to go Friday to Guangzhou by train, spend the weekend there, then on Tuesday I booked a flight to Shanghai as well as a place to stay there for about a week. I have several old friends in Shanghai and I have never been to the city, so I'm excited for the visit there. I'm booked through the 23rd of May and haven't decided where I'd go next. It depends how much I enjoy Shanghai I suppose. The nearby city of Hangzhou is a strong possibility for at least a few days. Suzhou is also very close and possibly a day trip from what I have heard. From what I understand it is a city filled with canals and other traditional-style homes and so on, but that may also mean that it is pretty much just for tourists. As for other possibilities, still considering Beijing though I think next I must look into how I'm going to get to Singapore where I must definitely arrive by around June 10-12 or so and from where I will pick up my already-booked flight to Mumbai on June 17th. Between my last booked day in Shanghai and then, there are about 2.5-3 weeks. It sounds like a lot, but I'm trying to pace myself and not go to too many places. Moving around too much can quickly get tiring. I'm looking forward to Shanghai where I will stay in the same place for one week and can focus on work and seeing my friends without the additional hassle of moving places every few days. I will try to do something similar for the rest of the trip whenever possible.

And so things take shape.

A few days in

2011-05-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

I moved to Mong Kok. I'm not sure why. I was here once and I remember it being local and interesting. It is also utter chaos. Hong Kong is supposed to have this incredibly high population density, one of the highest in the world, and I don't have much trouble believing that, but in most parts of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon in which I have spent time, I never felt it to be substantially more crowded than New York or any other place I've been. Tonight, which happens to be Friday which may or may not provide an extra kick to the size of the crowds, I really felt on the verge of being overwhelmed. It's the kind of crowd where when you get to a big intersection, there's the crowd on your side and the crowd on the other side, getting bigger and bigger as you all wait for the light to turn, which in Hong Kong involves a series of beeps not unlike a patient on a hospital show going into cardiac arrest, and then these two enormous swimming pools filled with people just sort of charge each other like a battle with cellphones and shopping bags instead of broadswords, though I would have found use for the latter.

The crowds are not only enormous here creating a steady stream of traffic on the sidewalk into one must merge swiftly and decisively, but people pay zero attention to what's going on around them. I was thinking about this as I saw people stop walking in the middle of the sidewalk to pursue their cellphone conversation more intently, or turn around backwards to stop and talk to their friend behind them, or any number of comparable behaviors. People don't become aware of it either unless verbally notified. They seem genuinely oblivious. People are also constantly moving in and out of streams of people, pushing, jostling, getting directly in front of you if you're on line. I think this must have to do with growing up in a place with this many people and just getting used to having no personal space ever. On the New York subway once a while during rush hour you are shoved a little too closet to someone for comfort, but even if the train is relatively empty in Hong Kong, people will just stand what I find to be uncomfortably close, though I think I realized over the course of the last few days that it is ridiculous to get upset when somebody is freelancing the sidewalk in front of me, zigzagging in any direction for no particularly apparent reason, preventing me from moving forward. If I got upset every time somebody did something that shows they are completely unaware of me or my desire to share the sidewalk with them, I'd probably get to see the inside of a Hong Kong psyche ward, which would make for a good blog entry I bet.

We in the US of course have a massive consumerist culture, but here, it just feels more. More of everything. I saw a woman today wearing a shirt that said "Get Rich and Spend Money" in huge letters on the front. She was maybe 40ish. It didn't seem to be an ironic statement, but who knows. I passed a store called "Trendy Bear." On my way to vegetarian shenanigans this evening, I walked through a shopping district that reminded me of the feeding frenzy described by Robert Shaw in Jaws. I guess we have all of this too, but here it feels like there is an intensity to the spending and desire to acquire that we either don't have in the US or I don't notice as I do here. I also walked down a street similar to 5th Ave filled with fancy brand names likes Gucci and Prada and they actually have lines to wait and get into department stores. Long lines in which people stand and wait. I saw a Lamborghini on that street too.

So all of this said, there are some crazy things they pull off here which I have no idea how we could ever accomplish. The subway stations here as I said years ago, are immaculate. Not only are they incredibly clean and well-designed, including labeled exits telling you what significant streets and landmarks a given exit will dump you at, but also tons of shops and things to buy down in the elaborate subway stations. Of course you have your 7-11 or what-have-you, but today I passed this shop which really summed it up, which was a really nice bakery with fancy desserts. It's all clean and bright and crisp, the polar opposite of the NY subways which although I love for running 24 hours, look like the world has gone up and the only thing left are rats and garbage. Alright, I give a few stations credit for making effort with sculptures (like the cool little men at the 8th Ave L train) or the tiled murals you see around, but still, can you imagine there being a confectionary or a shop selling electronics in a New York subway station? It's not like there are even many cops around in the stations. Also, they have tons of staff down there including people cleaning on a regularly basis. Also, yesterday I saw a freakin' ipad, sort of embedded in this wall unit, along with several other terminals which have free internet. Nobody had cracked the screen or written obscenities on it. So although there is this constant, unending explosion of people, somehow they all have some large degree of respect for the city and for the laws. Either that or they know if you try to steal the iPad you spend the rest of your life in Mongolia mining raw materials for the new high-speed rail between Beijing and Shanghai.

Anyway, beyond social observations, I went to the park in Kowloon again at 5am to do taiji with the senior citizens. It's pretty atmospheric. I did a bunch of work in the morning hours, eventually went out in the afternoon for a while with my friend Mafa who is originally from Beijing and doesn't speak much English, so I had a chance to speak Chinese which in Hong Kong is somewhat uncommon. I later moved to this hostel only to find out that they actually pay attention to the arrival time you specify without thinking on the online reservation from and that if you do not arrive within two hours of it, they will in fact give away your room to the next person to wander in off the street. So I showed up and they had no room. They were pretty nice about it, and ultimately decided they'd give me a 4-bed room for the price of my original room, which was thoughtful of them, and as it turns out the room is actually quite nice and clean. I would actually stay at this hostel again despite the difficulty with the reservation. They did in fact say that in their emails, I just didn't look carefully because I'd never encountered a policy like that. Apparently they have a lot of no-shows which is why they do it. So after moving, I was tempted to fall asleep but I fought it and went out to some Japanese vegetarian place that's new in the hurricane of commerce that is this neighborhood. Now I am back and it's 10:30pm and I'm proud of myself for making it this far without napping today. I plan to sleep well tonight and hopefully later than 5am so I can be on my way past the jetlag.

More to come. Probably a lot more.

Return to Hong Kong

2011-05-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't been here in over 3 years I think. I am too jetlagged to write in a lucid manner, but here are a few things I wrote down on the plane:

- A/C power on the plane is awesome. I have had my laptop plugged in this entire time and due to foresight on my part, have been doing all of this work on my website while offline. For those wondering I have a local development environment on my netbook, which actually has a really long-lasting battery, but completely unlimited time is always better cause the battery ain't gonna last 16 freakin' hours which is how long this flight is.

- People are disgusting. I don't understand why public toilet seats have to be completely soaked with others' urine. In the airport and on the plane. I mean, if you're a guy who is standing or a girl who is hovering (or some combination thereof) then lift up the seat. Use your foot, I know, I don't want to touch it either. Your shoe is already touching the ground so it's the same difference. When I leave a public bathroom whether I sat or stood, it doesn't look like a garden sprinkler went off in there.

- Babies should be banned on planes, or airlines should have non-baby flights. That said, congratulations on reproducing, you seem to be doing a bang-up job.

- 16 hours is pretty long.

- Those inflatable neck-hugging headrests? You look ridiculous when you walk around the plane with one on.

- Cathay Pacific's in-flight entertainment system television and movie selection is ridiculous. They had many seasons of maybe 20 American shows, plus maybe 50+ movies including new ones in the theater and old, random ones like Tron and 12 Angry Men. That said, they could not give me a bottle of water, though I thought it was funny when she offered two glasses instead.

I left New York at 3pm, on time. Arrived in Hong Kong 7am EST, 7pm local time in HK. Maybe we landed an hour earlier than that actually. Apparently we saved some time due to wind of some kind. All airport logistics on both ends were simple. No lines, no waiting, pretty easy. Upon arrival I took the Airport Express in Hong Kong into the city, a train that is so fast and for which buying fare is so trivial that it is embarrassing we do not have anything remotely comparable in New York. I bought a new Octopus Card, which is an RFID based card that you can use for pretty much all transportation plus in convenience stores and fast food stores. Another thing we don't have. In fact, tons of things make our systems look antiquated.

I forgot how crazy the city was. when I got out to walk from the train station to the subway, it was very humid and the car and human traffic was a little overwhelming. It was nice to see the scenery of downtown Kowloon again. I forced myself to stay awake until about 10:30pm and then fell asleep, making it until 5am which I considered pretty good under the circumstances. When I finally got up, I went to Kowloon Park nearby and jogged. I was actually far from alone, there were a decent number of people out there at 5:30-6 or whatever it was. Also several large groups of old people doing exercises, calisthenics, kung fu and tai ji. They all seem to be in pretty good shape. I did my own taiji in the vicinity. It seems to be that some people stick with the group and follow along, others just sort of are off doing their own thing. The park is pretty full with people doing that. It's quite empty on the sidewalks on that hour by contrast.

I got my cell phone working with a local sim card which is not really noteworthy, but this is the first time I got prepaid data service on my phone. Now i actually have internet on my phone which is as fast or faster than the network I use at home. This enabled me to fire up the brand new soon-to-be-released More Than Salad android app which is working like a charm. I went to a few restaurants but tomorrow I will work in earnest on the Hong Kong section of the site. I did manage to have one great meal at Branto Vegetarian Club, one of my favorite Indian restaurants in the world.

I took a nap this afternoon for about 3-4 hours I guess from which I just woke up. Now I'm going to go to a Couchsurfing meetup in Lan Kuai Fong, the first I've been to in HK. Apparently 40 people rsvp'd. I met a few CSers last time I was in Hong Kong, but there definitely weren't gatherings like that back then, so I'm looking forward to checking it out and socializing a bit, even though my body is all kinds of out of whack. This will also be my first visit on Hong Kong Island in a while since I pretty much stuck to Kowloon. It was pretty foggy today so I'll probably just take the subway though it is tempting to take the Star Ferry across the harbor instead just for the view of the skyline.

Much more to come, hopefully in a less stream-of-consciousness fashion.

Dusting off the travel blog

2011-03-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

I have the vague stirrings of a plan. I bought a ticket from NYC to HK on 4/26, one-way. That much is certain.

I also will arrive somehow in Israel around July 1st, give or take a few days. That much is also a given, for I shall attend my cousin's wedding somewhere in Israel on 7/14, and prior to that spend a few weeks in Israel with my family.

This leaves me almost exactly 2 months between Hong Kong and Israel. I plan to spend time in China working on speaking better Chinese, visiting friends, and visiting vegetarian restaurants. I will definitely spend a while in China, let's say a month minimum.

The next part is all tentative, but I figure I will fly to Myanmar and spend 10 days being a tourist there. I've wanted to visit for years. I can fly in from Kunming, China or Bangkok, Thailand. I'm not sure which I will choose yet. When I leave Myanmar, I will fly out to Singapore and spend a few days there. I've never been before, but I have a few people I know there and there are something like 100 completely vegetarian restaurants which is pretty ridiculous and I'm curious. From Singapore, there are reasonably cheap flights to Mumbai where I plan to spend time with another friend, eat incredible Indian food, take a few days trips not too far into the countryside but just to get a basic flavor for the province, probably take antibiotics, and then take my leave to either Israel or more likely Amman, Jordan because my initial research revealed tickets from Mumbai to Amman for $400 and tickets from Mumbai to Israel for $1300. Not exactly a tough choice as the overland route from Amman to Israel is very easy and cheap compared to 3 times the cost of the flight and I am already familiar with it besides from my recent trip in the region. Also, I know a good place with cheap, all-you-can-eat falafel in Amman.

I will be buying tickets and considering alternative itineraries soon. More to come including some nice pictures of all of my More Than Salad promotional materials, soon to be disseminated throughout Asia.

Getting naked at the airport

2010-11-12T07:20:00.001-08:00

My experience and insight into airport security is far from thorough, but I thought it worth expounding on my first experience passing through airport security featuring the new full-body scanners that have been so talked about in the media.

For those who haven't heard, the TSA in the US has begun to deploy a new type of scanner at airports which takes a full x-ray style picture through the clothes, allowing them to see if you're carrying any weapons and what you look like naked. Various objections have been posed to the dick-size checker, not the least of which is the obvious lack of desire to having the crack team of high caliber individuals working at airport security seeing everyone naked. Early on, there were some assurances that no images could be kept or printed, but those were quickly dispelled when airline security at Heathrow asked an Indian celebrity to autograph his naked x-ray image, and later when some airport security workers took a picture of a co-worker in the machine during a test and then ridiculed the size of his genitals, leading him to attack them. Additionally, there are some health concerns, though depending on what you read the radiation dose is supposed to be "low" compared to medical x-rays and in general that the machine is said to be harmless. Another common theme is that this is the final straw in the already overwrought procedures to which we subject ourselves for the dubious gain in security and that we have to put our foot down. Recently a pilot working for a major airline in the US declined to go through the new machine himself and the results of his refusal are still being shaken out, though for the moment he is suspended from flying.

In response to this anticipated dissent, the TSA has said that the new scanner is optional and that if a passenger chooses, they may instead receive a pat-down, which has apparently also been upgraded. There have been a few articles about children being fondled and women and men both being excessively groped, including a journalist reporting that his pat-down was so friendly that he wanted a cigarette afterwards, but so far the procedure to the best of my knowledge has been deemed absolutely necessary for the safety of our airports and therefore continues, though today was my first direct experience with these new tools of the aiport security trade.

I am at the gate in SFO having just passed through one of these newly enhanced security checkpoints, though not with the result I expected. I saw the new scanners as I approach security, though not all of them seemed to be fully operational yet. One of them clearly was and people were being herded through it, though side by side with a metal detector. One line was being directed through the standard metal detector and the other side through the full-body scanner. I was put in the line approaching the new scanner and as I approached, I decided that I would try the pat-down first if given the option, since the full-body scanner doesn't feel quite right to me. I'm not exactly certain which part of it bothers me most, but I think fundamentally much of what is done in the airports is random and unintelligent and generally does not make us safer. I fundamentally would rather our security operate like Israel's, but that's another story.

Anyhoo, I approached and told the guy I don't want to go through the new scanner, and he said "they're both the same." They are not both the same. I removed my shoes of course, as we all do since one guy tried to set his on fire on a plane however many years ago, and then I also removed my sweater at the request of aforementioned high caliber individual. Expecting to be patted down somehow due to my refusal to go through the scanner, he instead pointed me through the metal detector through which I passed, after which I collected my things and proceeded on my way. No pat-down. I guess they are still just testing out the methodology and the sort of half-assedness of the whole process reinforced my belief, as I suppose happens everytime I pass through airport security, that nobody in a position of authority has any idea what they are doing.

Finishing up in Israel

2010-10-06T05:36:00.001-07:00

When we arrived in Aqaba, my enthusiasm for bargaining was at an all-time low. We found ourselves at the bus station in the downtown area, and a few guys came up to us to ask where we wanted to go. After minimal haggling, we got a ride to the hotel and Hussein, the gentleman who took us there gave us his card so that if we wanted a ride to the border the next day, we could call him, since he claimed the hotel charged an outrageous amount for that ride, and he was correct. Upon arrival at the hotel, I inquired and did in fact learn that the rates Hussein requested were reasonable, so the next morning, after one more dip in the pool, we called him up and he came to pick us up with his brother in their tricked out taxi with the Hello Kitty seat belts.

Passing through the land border between Aqaba and Eilat involves a lot of showing your passport and a lot of going where they tell you to go. You answer questions about why the hell you were in Jordan, and in my case, they dump your bag out on a table. They are very courteous throughout. Interestingly, they flip through any thick book you have with you, in my case, a Hebrew-English dictionary. I saw this at multiple security checks and had never really seen it before. Apparently people are smuggling weapons in dictionaries.

On the other side we cabbed it to Eldan, the Israeli car rental company, who utterly failed to have some record of my reservation, but had cars anyway so while children ran amok in the office and I prayed for death, she found us another car and we were on our way. Incidentally, all cars it would seem in Israel have a small keypad near the emergency brake where you enter a security code before starting the car. The car will not start without the correct security code. I have never seen this before, and yet in Israel, every car seems to have one.

We passed through Eilat swiftly, or as swiftly as the insane traffic would allow. What little I saw of it looked like Orlando. Overfed tourists ran wild in impossibly dorky looking clothes, large fanny packs hanging in every direction, criss-crossed by violent sunburns. The 20 minutes we spent getting to the highway were more than enough. Quickly thereafter, the desert highway 90 opened up and we spent something like two hours driving straight through desert scenery that looked more or less like the American Southwest, though smaller scale. That day, after a falafel stop at Ein Bokek, we visited Masada, the mountaintop fortress where a bunch of Jewish Zealots holed up against a Roman siege, ultimately killing themselves to avoid capture. Since killing oneself is bad in the eyes of Judaism, they came up with a brilliant idea. They drew lots, and then one guy killed everyone and then himself, so only one person would have to commit the mortal sin of killing himself, which is apparently worse than killing others. I had thought this story was a bit mythologized, but as it turns out, they actually found the lots that they used to draw names, so I guess the story is true after all. The ruins of Masada (which was at one time a summer home for Herod) were kind of underwhelming after seeing the Roman ruins at Jerash or wandering around an ancient city as well-preserved and grandiose as Petra, but the setting on top of a mountain and the views in every direction are pretty impressive.

We slept in a nearby guest house filled with vacationing Israeli tourists where once again children ran amok. There seems to be a correlation between religiousness and inability or lack of desire to teach one's children manners. Throughout my time in Israel, and in fact on many other occasions in my life interacting with religious Jewish families, it seems the children are free to make as much noise and disturb as many people around them as they like. The adults don't seem particularly cognizant of this themselves, and in fact they often share (unsurprisingly) the same lack of consideration for those around them that they are passing on to their children. This is hardly exclusively a religious issue or an Israeli issue, but I saw it so often that I had to mention it.

We woke up at the crack of dawn and drove to Ein Gedi, the second of two public beaches from which the Dead Sea is accessible. Floating in the Dead Sea is one of those things you "have to" do when visiting Israel, or so I am told. I wasn't sure quite what to expect, despite the numerous descriptions and images I'd seen of people floating in the super-salty water. The water is greasy as is often reported, and sure enough, no effort is required to keep your body afloat. As has also been reported, even a little water in one's mouth does not taste good. Aimee got more of a mouthful than I did, and for that I am very grateful cause I got the tiniest drop in my mouth by accident and my entire face got sucked into itself like a black hole.

We continued our drive north on the same road, arriving at Beit She'an an hour or so later, passing en route the border crossing and desert bus stop where I'd waited two blog posts previously after failing to cross the border into Jordan at Allenby. As we rolled into what I hoped was the Beit She'an park where we were told we'd find Roman ruins that make one gasp aloud, Aimee realized she had probably left her phone at the guest house near Masada, or possibly just lost it outright. Panic ensued, and the women at the ticket booth was nice enough to allow us to use her laptop so that Aimee could notify a friend to shut off her phone until we attempted to resolve the issue, which we never did. In the meantime, I walked towards a cafe 20 feet from where we sat, and as I neared a short wall of the outdoor cafe where we sat, I realized that just beyond the wall lay the city we had come to see, and although I did not gasp, I did say "Holy shit." Upon walking around, it was enjoyable, though unlike ruins in Jordan, in Israel they put ramps and banisters and lighting rigs and other structures to prevent you from walking all over the ruins and to light them up at night so they can charge you for another ticket, which I understand, but it really disrupts the ambience in my opinion and makes it impossible to forget for a moment that you are at a tourist site. At Jerash for instance, it was pretty easy to look around and think for a moment what this place must've been like 2000 years ago when it was an actual functioning Roman city. At Beit She'an, you'd be more likely to think, I wonder what time the the "Sound & Light" show starts and what band they got to play here tonight.

The next stop may as well have been the Twilight Zone. We drove first past Lake Tiberius, an enormous lake in Northern Israel. At the southern end, we encountered several campsites packed with tents, barbecues, and people I wouldn't want to spend ten minutes around let alone a weekend. Why come to an incredibly beautiful lake like that, and then sandwich yourself into a tiny area with 100 other drunk assholes? I can't imagine there would be a moment of silence at that campsite the entire time, and yet countless people flock there on their long weekends and holidays. Apparently there are numerous other choices of location, but the few campsites we passed on our way were all packed and littered with garbage and empty drink containers. As we turned West, things became increasingly hilly and green and we angled our way up and up to Amirim, a vegetarian community that interested me greatly and that's where things got weird.

We pulled into Amirim and spotted a sign that said "the restaurant." Not knowing much about how the place worked or how many restaurants there were, we went into the restaurant and after encountering a reasonably friendly woman who spoke English very well, we sat down, flipped through a menu which I was happy to see had many vegan options, and had what was ultimately a very enjoyable meal in a really pretty and welcoming old house. The woman as it turns out runs the only Kosher restaurant in Amirim, since as in much of Israel outside of Jerusalem, people are largely secular. This woman was not so much. She asked if I was of the Jewish faith. Those were her words. Without going into too many specifics, we spent a few hours in Amirim. It was quiet, the roads were small, and the setting was beautiful. That being said, each person we encountered was weirder than the next. We met people who'd been living there their whole lives and never left. We found maybe a half-dozen restaurants, though often they were in peoples' homes and although there were signs, places were closed, or people inside ignored us. A few times, people were outwardly friendly or welcoming, but mostly people seemed surprised to see us. We talked to one woman who ran a bakery who was friendly who told us that it's a requirement of living in Amirim to be vegetarian, though owners do rent out to people who are not. In the late afternoon a strong wind began to blow through and we took our leaves gratefully. Although it was a beautiful place, I was demoralized to find so many strange and unfriendly people there. One of the weirdest made a remark about how weird vegans are, since most of the places there are vegetarian. So much for it being a place where people can come and see that vegetarians and vegans are normal people.

A few hours here, a few hours there, and before you know it we're back in Jerusalem spending one last day in the old city, which was Aimee's first and only day there. I finally made it to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where I watched swarms of Christians take turns kissing and touching various things that supposedly came into contact with Jesus in some capacity. Sometimes they touch artifacts and close their eyes while the Jesus juice flows through them. Other times, they rub the artifact, then rub their hands on their face which is the scientifically proven way to transfer Jesus's ectoplasmic residue into your own body. The mob quickly overwhelmed me plus something I ate, and I spent the end of my trip largely in the bathroom. Three weeks of Egyptian food including falafel on the street and yet it's in Israel I finally get struck down.

Jordan

2010-09-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

I probably should've done more research before taking a bus from the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem to the Allenby Bridge border crossing to Jordan. It turns out that they won't let you through the Israeli security checkpoint there unless you have a Jordanian passport or a Jordanian visa already in your passport. I had neither. They laughed at me and told me I should've done more research. So much for relying on the advice of the information booth at the bus station. I waited for an hour at the bus station in the middle of the desert with large lizards for the next bus to arrive and carry me north to a different border crossing where they issue the visas on the Jordanian side. From there, it was 39 Jordanian Dinar to get me to Amman, a ride which took about an hour and a half. Incidentally, 1 JD is about $1.40 USD. Jordan is not a cheap place to be.

We rode through the Jordan Valley, villages and farms en route to the big city where many people live who can't afford to live in Amman. The cab driver spoke English well and was amused by my Arabic as I tried to discern what differences exist between the Jordanian and Egyptian versions. Most of the things I learned in Egypt still applied with a few changes in pronunciation and a few changes in vocabulary. I was impressed at how friendly the driver was, especially when he stopped and treated me to tea even though I warned him I had no money left after the border crossing and cab ride, which was true. I had converted all of my remaining Israeli shekels into JD leaving me only a few Israeli coins. Throughout my stay in Jordan, I maintained a mental state of lack of trust and disbelief that anyone would actually do anything just to be nice, something which I acquired in Egypt. Overall people in Jordan were nice and didn't try to rip me off the way they did in Egypt, though when the cab driver dropped me off and I went upstairs to check into the hotel I'd pre-booked, the receptionist told me she was on the phone with the cab driver who was trying to arrange a commission for himself for taking me to the hotel. I guess he didn't quite understand that I'd booked the hotel in advance and that he couldn't claim credit for depositing me there. This is a common modus operandi in both Egypt and Jordan. If you don't have a hotel and a cab driver takes you to a hotel, he tries to get a commission from the hotel for bringing you. Conversely, if you arrange a tour with a cab driver outside the hotel, often the hotel will somehow try to get a commission on the tour. They basically work hard to take money out of each other's pockets.

I enjoyed my hotel in Amman immensely. Upon arriving I met a slew of travelers, the way it is supposed to be and yet was not in Egypt. Five of us went out to dinner together within an hour of my arrival. A woman from France and a man from Portugal who were in town for a conference on human rights, an American who'd lived in Syria for two years studying Arabic and had been turned away at the border on this return trip to visit friends, thus dumping him in Jordan (with all of his luggage lost to boot), his Palestinian friend who told stories of climbing the wall between the West Bank and Jerusalem to visit his brother who lived there, and Anne from Germany who had been spending 2 months working on a farm in Israel and then traveling through both Israel and Jordan. Anne and I would make friends and spend the next few days together. Later on in my stay in Amman, I also met an Iraqi fellow who lived in Fallujah who had quite a few stories of his own, involving missiles flying past where he sleeps. He was upset because he was paying double the price for the same hotel room as other guests, because as it turns out, Jordanians do not like Iraqi people and also believe them to be very wealthy, so because of his accent and passport he was having a rough time of his stay in Amman where he was hoping to arrange papers so that he could travel to Canada and work there as an engineer, his trade in Iraq.

I traveled the first day from Amman to Jerash with Anne, joining with an American guy we'd met at the bus station who was also heading that way. He'd been studying Arabic in Cairo for about a year which was helpful to us as we attempted to find the right bus. Jerash is a Roman city north of Amman, which is quite well-preserved. On the bus, things were very quiet though the three non-locals talked amongst ourselves freely until the very Muslim gentleman next to me wrote on his notebook that he'd just come from the night duty and would like to sleep. The American thought the guy was being difficult, since in Egypt people are very loud on buses, but I thought the guy next to me was probably correct since nobody else on the bus was talking really. Ultimately it worked out, and I chatted for a few minutes with the Muslim guy who told me I should read the Quran because it has all the answers. I was polite. My companions and I subsequently wandered the ancient ruins of Jerash and found our way to a Lebanese restaurant in the actual city of Jerash where we had a nice meal, refraining from ordering the delicacy of the house which was bull testicles. They claimed it best to wash them down with a glass of white wine. Though I have never heard of this particular pairing before, I am hardly a connoisseur of testicles on the order of my friend Ben for instance.

My old friend Aimee arrived in Amman later that day to spend the next 10 days with me traveling. Our first day was spent wandering the city of Amman, described by most travelers as unremarkable. I understand why people would say that, but to wander for a day was enjoyable. The most obvious landmark is a giant Roman Amphitheater which was quite well preserved, though the grayish and overcast weather (the first not sunny day on my trip) made the city seem excessively drab for most of our day. We wandered through the rest of the city, the downtown of which shares some character with Cairo but is overall cleaner and less chaotic. We also found our way to more modern parts of the city where expatriates and the wealthier folks dwell where we spotted a Gap, a Starbucks, and even a Carvel. There was no harassment from random folks, people were not overtly surprised to see us, the prices on the menus were fixed and I never had to bargain for a bottle of water or anything besides a cab ride. The city also has a feel of being under construction and of new clashing with old. We walked through one modern outdoor mall but walk down one side street and there was a crumbling apartment building with an unpaved parking lot. Oh yes, I also saw a Carvel of all things in that shopping center.

As the sunset approached, we took a cab to the Citadel, a high point overlooking the downtown area. Things got interesting as one side of the sky turned an unearthly orange as we stood looking out at the valleys and hills making up the city. In Amman the homes are built up the sides of steep hills and are tightly packed together, which creates a dramatic appearance even when there isn't a giant orange cloud of indeterminate composition hovering over the city. As it turns out, we got to experience either a dust or sand storm, depending on who is explaining it. The cloud settled onto the city as we walked down the mountain from the Citadel and people walked through the streets covering their mouths with their hands, with masks (way to be prepared) or with the cloth that many men use to cover their heads. It was an eerie way to see the city as dust was illuminated by every headlight and street lamp. Had it lasted longer I probably would've minded, but for a few hours it was a pretty interesting cap to my 3 nights in Amman. A few hours later it had dissipated and a group of us found our way to Hashim, the same restaurant I ate in all 3 nights of my stay in Amman, an outdoor cafe where you can essentially get all the falafel and hummus one could possibly eat for a few JD. The waiters come around with large bowls filled with falafel and deposit them on pieces of paper on your table and you eat with your hands. It's in an alcove off a main street and every time I was there, it was full, and apparently runs 24 hours as well.

The last night in the hostel, I ran into a Taiwanese guy also looking to head down to Petra and we decided to share the cost of a slow drive with a few stops on the Kings Highway, the older and more scenic of Jordan's two major roads running between Amman and Aqaba. Though the trip amounted to a lot of drive-by scenery with photo opportunities, I was glad we got to see a cross-section of the country if only briefly, and it gave me some clues as to what other things I might do differently when I one day return to Jordan. We visited Madaba, a city of beautiful mosaics, two large nature reserves, Dana and Wadi Mujib, and one large desert castle called Kerak, finally arriving in Wadi Musa in the early afternoon, where we'd be handed off to a second driver who would aggressively try to convince us to enlist his services for our stay at Petra, as would just about every other person we'd meet for the next 2 days. It's a touristy place, so one can't be too surprised really. That second driver would reappear at our hotel periodically to see if we'd decided to take him up on his offer. He assured us it was the high season, which it is, and therefore it was necessary to confirm immediately, which it was not. Many people were clearly available to take us wherever the hell we wanted to go, and the prices only went down the more often they asked if we were interested and the more often we declined.

Aimee and I arrived at the gate of Petra that evening at around 8pm and waited for Petra By Night to begin. The crowd swelled to at least several hundred, and once they started allowing people through the gate, I followed the advice I'd read and we let the anxious masses move forward without us, walking at a snail's place until it was just us and a few individuals and couples walking pretty much alone along the Bab Al Siq, a dirt road that leads to the Siq itself, a steep canyon cut out of red stone leading into the ancient city of Petra itself. For this night tour, they light the entire path with candles and people who work there periodically walk up and down the path shushing people as we cover the 3 or 4 kilometer stone path into the site. Despite the large volume of people ahead of us, we walked for the most part alone and undisturbed admiring the dramatic, moonlit canyon until we finally rounded a corner and I caught my first glimpse of the famous Treasury which many people would recognize from the 3rd Indiana Jones movie, and in the square in front of it we found maybe 200 candles in paper bags surrounded by a ring of tourists all sitting remarkably quietly except for the occasional digital click and whir of a camera or odd cellphone ringing. A few people insisted on sharing their undoubtedly insightful observations with their friends despite the repeated shushes of the crowd wranglers. As we arrived, a brief show began with a few Bedouin musicians taking turns playing pieces first on a Bedouin instrument called the Rababa, a bowed instrument made of wood, covered with goatskin, and with a bow and a string made of horse hair, and then a flute. The crowd listened in reasonably respectful silence. The camera flashes didn't do much to preserve the ambience, though the lead Bedouin had a good sense of humor about it and on the count of 3, suggested everyone point their cameras at the Treasury and take a picture at the same time, which created an amusing and seizure-inducing strobe effect.

The plan was to sleep in a bit the next day before heading to Petra for the day, but that plan was disrupted by a clanging fire alarm at some ungodly hour which didn't show signs of shutting off anytime soon. We slept anyway. Later I found out that the night-watchman had decided he didn't really believe the smoke detectors did anything. The whole thing in his view was an elaborate scam. To be on the safe side, he decided to test it out with his cigarette lighter. I am not making this up. He held his lighter under the smoke alarm and set off the fire alarm system for several hours, at around 7:30am in the morning, in a hotel.

We got up and headed to the site. For the next 12 hours or so, we wandered around the ancient city of Petra. We approached the Treasury through the Siq by day, a completely different experience since the dark red and orange stone and the contours of the canyon and ancient Nabatean irrigation systems were now all clearly visible. The Treasury is even bigger than it looks in pictures. I envied Aimee who in her haste to come on the trip did not research and saw the Treasury for the first time without ever really having seen a picture of it. It must have been a lot like the experience of the Swiss explorer who "discovered" Petra by tricking a bunch of Bedouins into leading him there, having no idea what he was about to see. Within Petra, there is one main road along which you wander, and up on the hills to the left or right you pass a large amphitheater and various tombs carved into the sides of what they always refer to as "the living rock" though I do not know why. It's pretty impressive. At your leisure, you can choose which things you'd like to inspect more closely, often necessitating a hike of varying length, or if you are a wildly overfed tourist, a donkey ride of varying price. Aimee and I wandered the main road but headed for a more distant site first on the advice of some other folks we'd met earlier who suggested a few ways to avoid crowds. We hiked up what I'd guess were between 750-1000 miles of steps, though possibly less, to reach the Monastery, a building similar to the Treasury though a bit less grandiose and dramatic and certainly harder to reach. Way up on that mountain, there were several vantage points though really the scenery from just about anywhere was quite overwhelming. At the "End of the World" viewpoint, we sat overlooking the Arabian desert and drinking Bedouin tea with 3 folks waiting for the tour groups to resume after lunch and come inspect their Bedouin silver stand. There are plenty of stands throughout the site, some with drinks and Pringles, others with jewelry and Bedouin daggers, and still more with whatever tourist knick-knacks you can imagine. Children also wander the site trying to sell postcards, though at no time was any of this more overwhelming that in is in any Egyptian tourist site I visited during the first 3 weeks of my trip.

Later, after our return from the Monastery, we had paused at a drink stand ("Happy hour all day!") and we were drinking the best bottle of water I have ever tasted, when the man running the stand suggested we could check out the "High Point of Sacrifice" only 30 minutes up the hill behind us. In Jordan estimates of time and distance were not very reliable in general. Up we went passing absolutely incredible scenery including the "renaissance tomb" and the "tomb of the roman soldier" and other sites that were not even marked on the primary map they hand out to most tourists. Petra is so filled with amazing stuff that much of it is beyond the reach of those who don't stay for more than a day, or in the case of some tour groups who arrived from Israel, a few hours. The rocks took on an even more surreal appearance as we wound our way through canyons and stone steps eventually arriving at a high vantage point over the entire site. Besides the amazing scenery, we were pretty much alone besides the very occasional traveler or Bedouin local we'd encounter en route to or from the caves in the site in which many of them still live. Anne told me when she visited Petra, she'd made friends with a Bedouin fellow and actually stayed a few nights inside of Petra, sleeping in her sleeping bag just outside the cave where her friend lives.

Petra was really the reason I came to Jordan in the first place and in no way did it not meet my expectations. I read about the history of the Nabateans, the people who built it and about whom much is still unknown. They had constructed sophisticated systems to save water from the very rare rainstorms which enabled them to build this giant functioning city in the middle of the desert. Having accomplished this goal, and having spent many weeks traveling, I decided it was time to change the pace for the final night in Jordan and we landed at the Radisson hotel in Aqaba. Less than an hour later I was having a drink at a bar in a swimming pool. A well-deserved drink I thought.

I recalled having met a young English couple in Amman at our hotel who were walking like they were 150 years old, but it turns out they had just spent the day in Petra doing exactly what we'd done the day before. We were not quite as worn down as they, but the hectic schedule of the weeks previous did make me appreciate the luxury all the more, as well as the shower door, cause in most of the hotels on this trips and in many budget hotels besides, they're not too big on shower doors or curtains. The owner of our hotel in Wadi Musa was genuinely puzzled that someone had left a negative review of his hotel because there was no curtain separating the shower from the rest of the bathroom. I've come to accept this as normal in most budget hotels, and in fact in many places, the bathroom and shower are the same room. In Wadi Musa there actually was a division of space, but I suppose they figured that so little water is going to come out of the shower head, that not much could possibly end up all over the bathroom. Incidentally, the shower head is also a bonus, since the hotel in Amman didn't have one of those either. It was pretty much like taking a shower in a 6 foot tall kitchen sink. Actually it was more like 5 feet, so I had to duck in order to actually get under the faucet. Point being, when I found myself later back under the gun of a real shower being blown back and pinned against the glass as if being blasted by a fire hose, I was thankful.

About a week in Israel

2010-09-19T10:51:00.001-07:00

In the movies, the people who talk to god or to whom god speaks are usually in the insane asylum scenes. Here, they run the whole show. Alright, maybe not the whole show, but they do a lot better than a padded room.

I was told that in Israel, Haifa is a city of work, Tel Aviv is a city of play, and Jerusalem is a city of prayer. That does seem to be the case. I spent the majority of this first week of Israel in Jerusalem and religion is much more visible here than it was in Tel Aviv. I see the ultra-orthodox Jews everywhere, black hats and all, as well as the less orthodox who stick to yarmulkes and the occasional tzitzit hanging out from their otherwise modern clothing. Also ever-present are the soldiers, most of whom look incredibly young to me to be toting around assault rifles wherever they go. I have seen that before so I am used to it, but I had dinner one night with two Austrian tourists who did a double-take when three soldiers with rifles sat down next to us to eat their falafel sandwiches.

Once in a while you see a soldier with earlocks who looks Haredi. Haredi is a word I hadn't really heard much until the last year or two of my life. For those who don't know, it refers to the most orthodox Jews. The word is a Hebrew translation of "orthodox" and apparently it is understood to mean "one who trembles in fear of god." These are the Jewish people who in New York I would've usually called Hassidic, which turns out to be a subset of Haredi belief depending on who you ask. A real look at the Haredi culture here and around the world is probably beyond the scope of this blog, or at least this blog entry, but I can share at least two anecdotes my cousin Sonia shared with me.

The Haredi apparently don't have to work or go into the army here. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they do not. This upsets some of the non-Haredi, religious or otherwise. So my cousin was in line at the gas station waiting for a pump to be free while the Haredi guy in front of her decided that he didn't like the job the gas station attendant had done cleaning his windshield. He was taking his time arguing with the guy that he should have done a better job while people waited in line to fill up their cars and go to work. So Sonia yells out the window that the guy should move so she can go to work and pay taxes so he can get his check at the end of the month which all non-working Haredi get so they can ostensibly spend their days studying the Torah and otherwise fulfilling their religious duty, which apparently many of them don't even do. So the guy turns red and gets out of the way and then motions for her to pull over after she's filled up, which she does, and they have a discussion in which he says he's offended by what she said, and she said well it's true, and you should get a job and work like the rest of us. He eventually says that she's taught him something and that he's gonna go home and get a job. She offers him her number so he can call her and let her know when that happens. He declines.

On the other side, another time she was at the bus station and saw a soldier who had earlocks and said she was surprised to see him cause there aren't so many Haredi who would go into the army. He said he decided to do it cause he thought it was right. As a result, his family disowned him for no longer being Haredi. They sat Shivah for him, meaning they mourned for seven days as if he were dead. Now he no longer has contact with his family. Apparently there are several organizations to help people in this situation, and he was in touch with one of them, though Sonia again offered her phone number to the guy if he should want to come for a holiday or the sabbath or something like this. What is the mentality of a person who would disown their own child for something like this? I will never understand it in my entire life.

By the way, the crazy people who talk to god aren't just Jewish, there are plenty of others all living within the city limits here, but that's hardly news. Let's move on to other things.

I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial museum which was needless to say a very heavy thing to see, but of course also very important. It's a really well put-together exhibit with tons of information, displays, pictures, videos, and artifacts that takes you from before the war until the present day. If anybody should find themselves in Israel, it's something you have to see. I spent a lot of time there and even with as much as I have learned about the Holocaust over the course of my life, there were several new things I didn't know. I'm going to write about two horrible things I learned, which if you don't want to read you can skip the next paragraph.

In the videos there were survivors telling parts of their stories. The two main "oh my god" moments that stood out were children, often infants being ripped out of their mothers' arms, thrown into pits, and blown up with hand grenades. The other was a story of a man who stood next to his uncle on a pile of dead bodies in a mass grave, blindfolded, as they were about to be executed. His uncle heard the order about to be given and started to sing a Jewish prayer loudly called Shemah Yisrael before the gunfire rang out. The survivor telling the story was a kid when this happened, and he fell down on top of the bodies where he laid for an unknown period of time, apparently uninjured. Finally when the noise had stopped, he started to move. A hand grabbed his ankle. It was another kid who was somehow uninjured. They had missed them. They laid in the pile of dead bodies until they somehow were able to escape, though the video didn't let them explain where they'd gone immediately after escaping the pit. There were multiple stories of people who survived a firing squad like this. Can you imagine living your entire life with a memory like this?

Alright, so you get the idea of Yad Vashem. I went to the Israel Museum later. I saw fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. FYI, when you walk in the main Dead Sea Scroll museum, there is a dramatically placed display in the center of the room in which a scroll wraps around the entire display. This is not real, it is a reproduction. The guard even thinks it's real, or at least felt like telling me it was, but it is obviously not when you look closely. If you go off to the sides however, there are many real fragments of the scrolls in secondary displays. Also in the museum, there is an incredible archeological exhibit of various things dug up in this neighborhood. I don't think I was anything that was less than 2000 years old. In fact there were many artifacts between 4000 and 6000 years old, and they look practically new. It is amazing how many items like this there were, and how well-preserved or at least cleaned-up they are. Two other amazing things in the museum were the Jewish Art and Culture section, and within that section, I particularly enjoyed the section on Hebrew Manuscripts. There was a video showing the intricate process necessary to write the Hebrew Calligraphy, then to create dyes and inks to color letters, then to attach gold sheets and hand-paint additional ornaments on each page and letter. Here is one of the books I saw.

I spent a few days walking around modern Jerusalem, which is filled with clean streets, shops, restaurants, and an interesting pedestrian friendly nightlife district. I also wandered through various residential neighborhoods. Ohel Moshe is one of the first neighborhoods people moved into when they moved out of the walls of the Old City. En Karen is a former Arab Village, and when all the Arabs left during the war in 1948, other people moved in and now it is an exclusive and expensive community filled with a few restaurants, galleries, and many churches. There is also a monastery and Russian Church there hanging over the whole community which sits on hillsides right within view of Yad Vashem. In my travels around Jerusalem's more modern neighborhoods, I also stopped in and paid a visit to every vegetarian restaurant in the city. I met a woman from Calcutta who runs one of the two vegetarian Indian restaurants here. She has been living in Israel for a long time and decided there was a lack of Indian vegetarian food. Her restaurant and one other vegetarian place are right in the middle of the Mahane Yehuda market, a wonderful market of fruits, vegetables, bakeries, and places selling all other kinds of foodstuffs which are spread out for you to see. Fresh spices, juices, and yarmulkes among other toys and knick-knacks are also available. The market was fantastically clean and a joy to walk around. If I lived in Jerusalem, I'd shop at this market regularly. All the produce here in general seems to be incredibly fresh and the locals often talk about how much better it tastes than elsewhere. Maybe the secret to superior hummus and falafel is not the recipe, but the ingredients.

I spent two nights in Tel Aviv. I stayed at my cousin Avishay's place in a suburban part of Tel Aviv. We had dinner with my cousin Yoav and several of his friends to celebrate his wife Karen's birthday. The restaurant was outside of Tel Aviv in a mall looking out at the Mediterranean Sea. After dinner, I walked with Avishay and his girlfriend by the water and we studies the numerous yachts and fancy houses down by the port. The next day I visited almost every vegetarian restaurant in Tel Aviv, first stopping at Buddha Burger, a must-visit according to an Israeli friend, and then following the trail through the entire downtown area. That evening I met with my friend Mona, a Couchsurfer and Tel Aviv resident who assures me that if I were to one day live in Israel for any length of time, I could not stay anywhere but Tel Aviv since it is the New York of Israel, and she is probably right. I saw almost none of the religious influences that are everywhere in Jerusalem. Mona ferried me around on the back of her scooter, the first time I've ridden on the back of one since maybe Cambodia or Taiwan. There is something about the breeze as you ride through the city with nothing between you and and instant death but the skill of the driver who was in Nascar in a previous life and the ridiculous helmet you've been forced to wear of which I will never get tired. We went to a bar which I will consider "The Room" of Tel Aviv and another with chairs and tables on the impossibly fine sand maybe 50 feet away from the water. She also walked me around and pointed out all of the old buildings which were being turned into new buildings and sold or rented for outrageous prices. That being said, her apartment was much larger and the price much less outrageous than anything you'd find in New York, and that's in what seemed to me to be a very convenient and nice neighborhood in which to live. So when I come back to Israel, I'm probably living in Tel Aviv, though I will visit Jerusalem on the weekend, at least, after Shabbos is over.

Incidentally, the weekend here is not Saturday and Sunday. They work on Sunday. They have Friday and Saturday off. So Thursday really is the new Friday in Israel. Also interesting, they turned the clocks back here last week. The reason they do this is because of the Yom Kippur fast. If they did not turn the clock back, then apparently even though the fast is 25 hours no matter what, you wouldn't really get to sleep for one of those hours. So you are fasting for the same amount of time, but you are sleeping for an extra hour. Or something. This has apparently been going on for a while, but they argue about how retarded it is every year I am told.

So now I'm back in Jerusalem. I had a restful Shabbos and Yom Kippur. I went to Shul on Friday night for Kol Nidrei, but that was enough for me and I slept in on Saturday. Those last two sentences probably make no sense to my non-Jewish friends. Today I went into the city and explored one of the neighborhoods I talked about above. I also met some Couchsurfers unintentionally while visiting the Supreme Court and the Knesset, two places I hadn't really planned to visit but turned out to be really interesting. I caught English tours at both places and learned quite a bit about the Judicial and Legislative systems here. Then with the two German folks I met, we walked around a bit and I got to be a tour guide in a city I've only been in for a week, but hey, it's been a busy week. Now I'm back and tomorrow morning I'm going to Jordan, cause in this entire week nobody has tried to rip me off and that situation needs to be remedied immediately.

Welcome to Israel

2010-09-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

Well, I kind of want to begin with the dozens of plastic-gun-wielding Arab kids pointing them at me and shouting and throwing rocks at each other if not quite at me while yelling what are definitely not words of greeting, but I suppose first I should say something about my departure from Egypt.

Hm, I hung out with that couple from Hong Kong, spoke a lot of Chinese, went to another giant temple covered with ancient hieroglyphics, this time on an island, and this time which had been moved from an area flooded due to the creation of a giant energy-providing dam along with the rest of Nubia. In fact a lot of temple sites in the south have been completely relocated brick by brick and put back together in some new place due to the flooding caused by the dam. It sounds impressive enough, but when you see the size of these places it is even more so.

After Philae Temple which necessitated vigorous bargaining for what would ultimately be an unfair ferry price anyway (I tried to let the Chinese handle that, they're used to it) we returned to the mainland and I may have taken a nap before meeting up with the couple again (Fifi and Qi, actually the 2nd Fifi from HK I have met, go figure) and we went to the Movenpick hotel on another island to watch the sunset. I frankly would've stayed in my hotel room at this point to just avoid contact with anymore hassle until I left Aswan, but it sounded nice and I felt I should fight my urge to withdraw. It ended up being this gorgeous 5-star hotel with an empty cafe overlooking the entire city where I had my first beer in Egypt. It's not so easy to come across beer in a Muslim country as it turns out. So I sipped my Egyptian beer and ate peanuts and smoked indoors while we watched the sun set, then returned and it was my turn to share something of my Egyptian knowledge with these guys who had more or less avoided Egyptian food during their stay. They told me they had KFC for lunch actually. So I took them to the koshary place I'd found the night before and they both loved it, though probably not as much as I did.

The next day I did very little. I didn't go see any temples or sites or anything. I just relaxed. The details of my trip from Aswan to Tel Aviv are kind of uninteresting. The highlights are the Egypt Air guys at the airport initially telling me they had never seen a paper ticket before (non e-ticket) and almost not letting me on the plane to Cairo. Then I enjoyed getting fucked over one last time by a cab driver from the airport to the nice hotel I booked for my last night in Egypt. I splurged and stayed in a Radisson for $90 USD which was worth every goddamn penny. I had the hottest shower in history, actually was able to clean 3 weeks of Egypt off of my feet, and slept in a bed made of pillows although only for something like 5.5 hours. I also had a mixed drink which made the bed even better. As I recall they brought me a glass with ice and vodka in it, and then a can of Sprite on the side.

I arrived in Tel Aviv on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year for the heathen among you and for my friends who forgot or pretend to have forgotten everything they learned in Hebrew school (you know who you are). The airport was so clean and everybody I talked to was so professional. The security was hardcore as expected, though I attribute the ease with which I passed through to my fantastic shower the night before. I answered about 6 questions at the immigration desk where my passport was stamped (without filling out that stupid piece of paper which they have done away with in Israel) and then about a dozen more questions upon emerging into baggage check. We should totally profile people in the US. Israeli security is so much more ridiculous and efficient than ours, it's just embarrassing. Today we were pulling into an underground parking lot in a mall and the guy comes to the window and just says hello or something just to hear our accents and see where we're from before he lets us pass.

Anyway, so arrive in Israel, shared taxi with confused and lost German girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown plus a half-dozen others in which I end up lucky enough to be the first stop. I have spent the nights at my cousin Yitzchak's house and since it was Rosh Hashanah followed by the Sabbath, I didn't go out, I just stayed in the house, spent time with my cousins, slept, and was fed an unbelievable amount of food. They live in a neighborhood in the suburbs of Jerusalem called Ramot, of which it turns out there are several. It's not gated, but it reminds me of a gated community. There isn't much car traffic on the streets, most people walk, and there are some alleys and staircases leading between the streets which are quite scenic. It also turns out that in much of Jerusalem there is a building code that the exterior of buildings must be natural stone with which this whole neighborhood complies, so even though it is not that old, it feels like what I expect from Israel.

My first foray into the city was with Yitzchak and Sonia at night. They took me to a newly constructed outdoor shopping center also with beautiful facades covered in stone, though in this case truly old facades which had been meticulously numbered and taken apart, then rebuilt to turn what was apparently a former slum into a wealthy shopping center with upscale stores and cafes which was filled with people young and old and I'm told is so every night. This neighborhood is called Mamila and is adjacent to the old city of Jerusalem. We could see the city walls from the cafe in which we ate that night, but besides sticking our head in briefly, I wouldn't see the old city in earnest until this morning.

Sonia took me to another mall to pick up a sim card for my phone and then dropped me off at the Jaffe Gate of the old city. For the first 5 hours or so I wandered more or less aimlessly. The old city of Jerusalem is divided into four "quarters" more or less. The Christian, Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim quarters. The whole old city takes up about a square kilometer I believe, though I'm making that up and too lazy to check it. Maybe when I read the correct figure in my guidebook I'll come back here and edit it. The entire old city reeks of history. Here's the wall from the 2nd temple, here's the place where the virgin Mary was born, here's the place where Jesus was crucified, this is where Mohammed ascended to the heavens, etc. I didn't go in many places since for my first day I just wanted to walk around and get a feel for the place.

I will give the most limited possible impressions. The Jewish Quarter is incredibly clean and looks new, even though it is ancient. Apparently a lot of money was put into restoring it. The Armenian Quarter is also quite nice. These areas are contiguous by the way, there is no actual division, you just walk and things sort of overlap. There are some main streets many of which are filled with active markets, and then side streets which can be stairways, tunnels, and other twisting and turning paths. The Christian Quarter was filled with more tour groups than other places it seemed, though I suppose I saw quite a few near the Western Wall in the Jewish Quarter. It seemed to be populated almost entirely by churches rather than people, though each quarter had its share of residential streets away from the market-streets (Souks) filled with souvenir shops and restaurants. The shops vary in what they sell depending on your proximity to a particular tourist attraction. Some are shops of artisans selling jewelry, ceramics, rugs, metal or woodwork, paintings. Others sell trinkets like Egyptian shops, toys, clothes, especially plastic guns in the Muslim quarter. Near churches rosaries and other related religious items are popular. The markets in the Muslim quarter reminded me a lot of the markets in Egypt. They are very busy, and seemed to be populated entirely by Arab and Muslim communities. They feel more chaotic to me than the other souqs, but this could be my perception.

Finally, wandering through the residential streets of the Muslim Quarter of old Jerusalem and more or less alone, a little kid yelled at me in Arabic twice. I asked later what it meant and somebody told me "Finish" but I'm pretty sure it was "Get the hell out of here." No harm was necessarily done, but then later I started to feel like there might be a pattern when kids started pointing their plastic guns at me and firing repeatedly. They didn't actually shoot any of the plastic pellets at me which it seemed were in short supply, but it was still disconcerting. I saw this quite often. Also, I would say 90% of the Arab kids I saw had toy guns. I wonder how the soldiers and security (of which there are many) deal with it since the guns kind of look real in many cases. I saw kids with handguns, shotguns, and ak-47s. The kids in those neighborhoods call out to tourists and harass them a bit. This doesn't happen in the other quarters as far as I saw, nor did I see any non-Arab kids with toy guns. I felt unwelcome in the residential streets of the Muslim Quarter. Later I was walking in another area before I had learned to just stay clear of these streets and the kids were having a toy gun battle while simultaneously throwing rocks at each other, and not pebbles. Then one kid broke a huge rock in front of me into pieces and was picking up the pieces to continue throwing to the far end of this narrow pedestrian street as I tried to get through between them. They did not stop as I walked and though they didn't throw them at me, the whole thing just felt volatile. In all my time in Egypt, I never saw anything like this nor did I feel this sort of tension.

All this being said, I feel I should say I had a few nice interactions with Arab shopkeepers, a few in a restaurant and another at a cafe. I spoke Arabic with a few people who were nice. Also after walking the streets, I walked around half of the city on the ramparts of the old walls, which is a beautiful walk and extremely peaceful. When rounding the corner of the city in the Muslim Quarter, there were some kids trying to pull their friend up onto the ramparts through a very narrow shaft in the stone and he was pretty stuck and they asked me to help, so I helped lift the kid up through and we all laughed and they said thank you and it was like a normal interaction with kids, but that was the only one where kids didn't try to intimidate me or something like this.

After walking up on the walls, I hiked to the top of a hill called the Mountain of Olives beyond an enormous Jewish cemetery and watched the sun set over Jerusalem. I met an Austrian girl and her mother who told me they were nervous about walking down alone because some Arab kids with a donkey had been aggressively asking them for money and when her mother declined, one of the kids had hit her mother and the girl had hit the kid back and sent them running. I offered to walk down with them and we ended up walking a bit and then eating dinner together. She was a very interesting girl, a doctor from Austria but living in Germany and with some pretty amazing travel tales of her own of which I was at times envious, though in particular I was impressed that she had worked 6 weeks with an NGO in the slums of Manila. I have always felt a particular respect for those who go to practice medicine in the parts of the world where people suffer horribly and have no money. It's one thing to give money to help people like those, but it's another thing entirely when you can go and make a difference with your own hands and the knowledge you have.

So there it is more or less, my first few days in Jerusalem. By the end of the day I had put some of the negative experiences in the Muslim quarter behind me and had begun to sort of develop a picture of what the old city is all about. This is only a very small piece of Jerusalem and an even smaller piece of the whole of Israel, so tomorrow I will begin at the Yad Vashem holocaust museum and probably visit the Dead Sea Scrolls among other interesting items at the Israel Museum before heading to the modern downtown area of Jerusalem to contrast today's adventures. My cousin Yitzchak told me that Haifa is a city of work, Tel Aviv is a city of play, and Jerusalem is a city of prayer. The backdrop of religion is indeed everywhere here, despite the obvious presence of many secular Jews, but I think as I spend more time here I will begin to piece it all together.

I told my cousin Yitzchak and his daughter Shira about my experiences in the Muslim quarter today and they both said the same thing: "Welcome to Israel."

Luxor, Aswan

2010-09-07T04:03:00.000-07:00

The internet is not what one would call reliable in southern Egypt, which is probably just as well, but I should probably write something about the last several days before it turns into a novel.

I might as well write this in a stream of consciousness style since I have dozens of disparate notes about noteworthy events in the last few days.

I flew from Cairo to Luxor for $55 usd. The train ride was something like 12+ hours for about $20, or $50 for a sleeper car, so I preferred to save the time. I had the nicest cab driver ever on the way to the airport who not only gave me a fair price, but with whom I had a great and genuinely pleasant conversation half in arabic and half in english after which he said something super nice about being really happy to meet me. Interactions such as these are worth mentioning since they are rare.

I met a Malaysian guy in the airport on his way to Eritrea for work. We spoke Chinese. I thought he had an insanely high voice until I met this Japanese guy at my current hotel who sounds like Michael Jackson in his prime. Which reminds me, a shopkeeper I spoke with last night went out of his way to bring up Michael Jackson and the anniversary of his death, almost in the same sentence as 9/11. Also, in the Egypt Air office in Aswan they were playing Michael Jackson's greatest hits, but I was the only one singing along to "Say, say, say." The new terminal at Cairo airport was really clean, and really empty, though my flight was pretty full.

Arriving in Luxor was comical. Upon leaving the airport, the cab drivers and hotel hustlers descend upon you like vultures. One guy suggested 200 English pounds for a ride to town. The fair price for foreigners is 50 Egyptian Pounds, which is about 18 USD. This is about a 15 minute ride mind you. So I listened to outrageous prices for a few minutes, then gave up and called my Couchsurfer friend Paola who runs a hotel in town and sent her husband to come pick me up for free. Paola is a Colombian woman who moved to Luxor, married an Egyptian guy, and now runs his hotel with him. She was super nice to me, gave me great prices on the room and on the tours I did, and I was really glad I stayed there. It ended up being 3 nights.

Luxor was actually not as brutal in terms of hassling as I had been led to believe. Maybe because I was prepared for the worst, it didn't bother me as much, but while there I felt more relaxed and able to fend off aggressive salesmen than I did in any other city I have been in, including Aswan. A little bit of Arabic was all it took and I got rid of them pretty easily. Luxor is much smaller than Cairo or Alexandria. It's kind of a dusty town with a big bazaar running through the middle of it. Maybe it's the heat and maybe it's Ramadan, but even walking through the bazaar wasn't that bad. Sure, every 10 feet somebody would say "hey buddy hey buddy hey buddy hello hello hello excuse me where you from america! very good! obama!" or something like this, but they at least don't follow you down the street. I would say only 1 out of 10 follow you down the street. That being said, along the water in Luxor they are pretty hardcore. These guys are all trying to sell boat rides. Everybody pretty much approaches you like they're your friend and want to know you. They shake your hand and hold on so you can't get away. They engage you in some conversation using between 1 and 3 facts they know about your country. For some reason when talking to Americans, they always say "Alaska!" or "I have friend in California!" or things like this. There must be some kind of tout phrasebook, which incidentally is something I would actually spend money on unlike the rest of the crap they are selling.

So the first day in Luxor I went on a tour with 14 other people in a van to see the Valley of Kings, Hatshepshut's temple, and the Valley of Queens. Uploading pictures will have to wait, the internet connections here barely load the websites. I met a bunch of interesting people on that trip, but my favorite was the Chinese girl from Sichuan who is traveling for 2 years by herself. She had just come from 3 weeks in Sudan, and before that was in southern and eastern Africa by herself as well. I think she's been on the road for close to a year already. I met a nice Indian couple from England who also were well over a year and had been all around the world. Another Chinese couple were taking a break from working in the Sudan and had come up to Southern Egypt for a bit. The tomb sites are in the hillsides, and you pretty much descend into tombs of varying depth where you can bas-reliefs and carvings and occasionally sarcophagi. The reliefs are sometimes very colorful and though it was short and we only went in a few tombs, it was 1000 degrees so nobody minded and overall it was a nice tour that spared me the hassle of arguing about prices. They do position the souvenir bazaar area by the exit so you have to walk through, but as I said before, in Luxor it just wasn't that hard to breeze through.

The next day I woke up at 4:45am, was picked up at the hotel, taken to a boat where I had tea waiting for the other guests to arrive, crossed the Nile on the boat, was taken by van to a landing site where I watched a bunch of guys inflate a hot air balloon, which I then got into and flew up over Luxor. This was probably one of the highlights of my trip and I'm really glad I did it. You get beautiful views of the tomb sites and temples, of the Nile, and of the east and west banks of Luxor, the latter of which is filled with farming villages and fields of mostly sugarcane and bananas. In the distance are mountains and desert. That night, Paola invited me to her in-laws house on the west bank for iftar, and I sat in a room with the men while she sat in another room with the women, and we ate on the floor with our hands while the mosquitos ate mostly me. Paola's husband has 10 brothers so it was mostly them with whom I sat. There were children running everywhere and a lot of women in the other room. I was told by one of the kids that 20+ people live in the house, and that everyone in the village is related to each other, though how that works I don't know. It was certainly authentic, although I frankly felt a little uncomfortable not being able to communicate well and being the one infidel, though they were all very nice.

A number of people will ask me if I am Muslim in general. These are usually random people on the street, or shopkeepers. It is usually the question after where are you from and what is your name. I always feel weird saying no since I don't know what they then think. Like, oh, you're not Muslim, I guess you're going to hell so good luck with that or whatever.

This is weird. So there is apparently a sex "industry" in Luxor which I read about in my book, but it is not foreign men and local women, it is older foreign women and young local men. Had I not read about it, I wouldn't have noticed, but I did in fact see a bunch of older homely women running around with 20something men. Apparently the men get the women to buy them things til the money runs out, it's not exactly a prostitution type situation though apparently that exists too.

There are no garbage cans in Luxor at all. I don't think I saw a single one. In Cairo at least they have a few token receptacles lying around that nobody uses, but in Luxor they don't even bother. I seriously had to carry trash around with me until I get back to the hotel.

I don't recall if I mentioned it, but there is apparently an Egyptian law that every driver must honk at least 6 times for every 20 feet they drive. I probably get it more since every taxi driver will repeatedly honk and slow down and drive alongside me and yell 5 times if I want a taxi in the opposite direction that I'm going, even if I'm not looking or making eye contact or have already gestured twice that I'm not interested or said in both English and Arabic, "No thank you, I'm walking, I don't want a taxi." But it's not just me, a guy will be driving down the road with no traffic and no people in the way or anything and he will honk 3-4 times for fun. I am not exaggeration. If anything I am understating.

During the day, people pretty much just lay around. I talked to Paola about living in Egypt and at that particular moment she was dealing with an employee problem and explained to me that the aspiration of Egyptian men is to smoke, drink tea, and sleep and that they are used to living in the desert so there is dust and dirt everywhere and they don't mind living in it. She said this creates a lot of problems getting them to work in a hotel for tourists who expect a slightly higher level of cleanliness since she will ask someone who works for her to clean something, and he will say he did, but there is grime and filth everywhere that he just can't see. As I was paying my bill, there was a shouting match about how said employee had been sleeping on the couch in the lobby with his feet up and smoking. She seemed to me on the edge of losing it, and I don't blame her, I've been here for 2 weeks and I'm losing it, she's been here for 2 years.

This also reminded me of another place I was where there were many insects and cockroaches and nobody seemed to mind or notice even. I remember an old Mario Joyner routine where he talked about visiting relatives in the ghetto and how there would be cockroaches falling from the ceiling and landing on you and everyone that lived there just didn't even seem to notice. That being said, the biggest insect I have seen was still the scarab I saw in the desert which although large, was very slow moving and didn't concern me overly. Although come to think of it, Joey the American couchsurfer in Cairo showed me a picture of an enormous spider they have in Jordan, so maybe I shouldn't jinx anything.

So anyway, Luxor's last day was spent visiting Karnak, a ridiculously enormous temple complex that was in use for 1300 years and constantly modified and added on to by many different kings. The Great Hypostyle Hall was my favorite room, filled with dozens of enormous columns each inscribed with large reliefs and heiroglypics. The scale of the room was overwhelming and I'd actually put this on par with the pyramids as far as amazing Egyptian monuments to see when visiting this place.

My last night in Luxor I made my way to a restaurant I'd read about and had a snack the day before, and upon arriving I spotted a couple who I'd seen the night before so I suggested we sit together and we ended up eating dinner together and then going up on the roof of their hotel adjacent to the restaurant to drink tea and smoke sheesha. The roof terraces I have seen in several hotels provide a fantastic escape from the chaos below and I was glad to have run into these guys since due to summer and Ramadan I still have encountered surprisingly few travelers when not on tours. These guys were from London and I think they had the right idea. They spent a few days in Cairo and Luxor, then they were heading straight to Hurghada, a beach resort where they will spend the next days. I would have never thought 10 days on a beach would be desirable until I tried to travel independently in Egypt.

So now I'm in Aswan. I arrived last night and while taking a walk along the Corniche during iftar and enjoying the quiet streets without any touts, 3 guys outside of what I later learned was an officer's club asked me for a cigarette, and then took the pack from me. Then they asked me for money. I said no money and give me back my cigarettes, which they eventually did though not before they took 5 for themselves. I was upset by this since up until now people might hassle, but this is the first time someone actually took something from me without asking. There were no cops around cause of iftar, and I didn't find out until later that I could've gone in and talked to the officer in charge and probably sort it out. It was kind of a bummer and really the final straw for me. Although Aswan is scenic and they have a nice market street which is less hassle and cleaner than Luxor's, people still call out to me and try to sell me tours on boats or spices or whatever over and over. I have pretty much run out of patience for it. At least after dealing with those guys, I was walking back and told a shopkeeper about it and he was really nice about it and when I told him I wanted to get food before I did anything else, he recommended a good place around the corner where after having what will probably be my last koshary in Egypt, I felt better. I then went back around the corner and sat with that guy for about a half an hour who didn't try to sell me anything, just asked about the US and we talked about our lives. His name was George.

Today I arranged a cheap ride to the ferry terminal through the hotel so I can visit Philae Temple, supposedly one of the nicer sites to see. Somehow in the next 24 hours I will try to find a low-hassle way to take a Felucca (traditional Egyptian boat) ride on the Nile so I can do that before I leave, but then tomorrow night I bought a plane ticket straight to Tel Aviv (well, a connection in Cairo) but I'm really done here and excited to go back to a place where I don't have to haggle over what is a fair price for a bottle of water (hint, it's less than 20 egyptian pounds) and where I can walk down the street without having people try to guess my nationality and shake my hand every 30 seconds. I will spend the next 10 days or so in Israel I think though doing what I have no idea, since I haven't read any of the book yet. After that I will go to Jordan to meet my old friend Aimee Fraulo who is flying into Amman on the 20th and we will go from there down to Petra and travel around a bit. I suspect until she arrives I will spend most of my time in Jerusalem, a city I'd like to stay in for a while and get to know well and which I anticipate enjoying a lot. I am also looking forward to restaurants being open during the day since Ramadan has made lunch a challenge for the last few weeks, though that will be over in a few days so Israel or Jordan should be equally easy.

I met a couple from Hong Kong, I'm meeting them in an hour to go to Philae. Tonight I may have to get koshary again at the same place just so I can get my fill until I manage to find it in New York.

the Desert

2010-09-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

I will begin at the beginning.

I decided to go to Bahariya Oasis from Cairo. So I needed to take a bus. It was unclear from my travel sources which bus station in Cairo I needed. So I took a bus station tour of Cairo before making it to the El-Mouneeb bus station in the borough of Giza, which is to Cairo as the Bronx is to New York. Also, for the rest of the story when I say an Arabic name you should say it aloud and try to imagine yourself telling a non-english-speaking cab driver.

So anyway, Turgoman bus station (Mahattit Turgoman), El-Azar bus station, and finaly El-mouneeb. I end up on a desert-bound minibus with a dozen Egyptian people staring at me the whole time. They stare here a lot actually, especially kids. So it's about a 4-5 hour ride from Cairo to Bawiti, the "capitol" of Bahariya Oasis. We stop on the way at a "rest stop." So I went to Burger King and got a veggie burger and fries. No, not really. It was actually a bombed out husk of a building in the middle of the desert with a bunch of snacks and drinks, but no doors, no windows, and nobody behind the counter. Everybody from the bus headed into the mosque to have their mid-day prayer. After maybe 10-15 we reboard the bus and the driver decides to pop in his favorite CD. He fast-forwards to his favorite track, muslim hymn/affirmation #whatever, and then continues to select tracks for the next hour or so at high volume while the passengers who aren't sleeping bang their heads to the beat. I think I have some video footage of this moment.

We finally arrive and I am picked up by the errand boy of the Old Oasis Hotel who took me up to the hotel. The grounds of the hotel were surprisingly beautiful. I spent the rest of the day sitting among the palm groves and marveling at how fantastically quiet and peaceful this place was compared to Cairo. I arranged a trip into the desert and that evening helped aforementioned errand boy make a website to help him promote himself as a tourguide in the area. I am not going to post the website cause the dude totally ripped me off, but that was more or less resolved later and not worth getting into for now until I write a separate entry specifically about scams and rip-offs in Egypt.

Anyway, the next day I walked around the town/village a bit. It was early and the paths between crumbling buildings are small so the only traffic was the occasional donkey. It's a scenic town although it still suffers from the unfortunate lack of care of people with regard to garbage in the street.

The real adventure starts in the afternoon. I ride over to another house where the driver who will take me/us into the desert lives with his korean wife. Here I meet the other people who will come along on the trip, all of whom arrived that morning from Cairo. I was the only one who slept in Bahariya that evening. In fact, I'm pretty confident that I was the only tourist in Bahariya the night before. So the Korean lady makes me a "vegetarian" lunch which was actually pretty good. Some kind of noodlish creation in soup, but I did not get sick so perhaps the soup was really vegetarian after all. We get to know each other a bit and then we make one more stop to pick up a few more people, and here is the scene:

There's me. Then Alex is a girl from Korea traveling for about a year around the world. A Korean couple who chartered their own separate vehicle but who camped with us at the same site. Two Japanese folks who had met that day, a guy named Max who had lived in Taiwan for 5 years and spoke Chinese really well. He was on a long trip too, something like 5 months. Then a Japanese girl the details of whose trip I did not retain. Finally Ray and Giulianna who both live in Madrid, though she is originally from Peru. We made friends quick and set out into the desert where we stopped at various places over the next few hours to take photographs and explore scenic spots eventually making our way to the White Desert around sunset to make camp and eat dinner. It was already mostly dark by the time we arrived in the White Desert, so we sat and ate dinner as the stars came out around us. As some of you know, I'm not much of a camper, but once we'd finished eating dinner and talking, people dragged their thin mattresses to wherever they liked and the lights on the van went off and it was just us under the stars and I must say, it was pretty incredible. I laid awake for a while just enjoying the view and checking once in a while to see if any of the desert foxes were anywhere near me. They are kind of all over there and though harmless, they are not really afraid of people since it seems like every trip out there feeds them. When I woke up in the morning, there were tracks a few inches from my head, but I guess better that than a scarab on my face, like the one I found the next day in the sand that although also probably not dangerous, is not something with which I wish to be better friends.

I woke at dawn to the sun rising over the strange mushroom-shaped rock formations in the White Desert which look not unlike a road-runner cartoon. We walked around the desert for a while as the sun slowly came up and the temperature began to increase. On the drive back we stopped first at the "Crystal Mountain" area which looked less like the wizard's castle in Conan the Destroyer than I'd hoped, but is in fact an area with tons of large pieces of quartz littered everywhere which was actually pretty interesting to walk around a bit. Lastly, we stopped at a sand dune which was less impressive than the Great Sand Sea I'd hoped to visit given more time, but was memorable since they brought along what look like snowboards so we could sandboard down the dune. It's a good thing there is no video of me doing that because Deb would probably laugh herself to death if she saw. I would've stayed longer to perfect my technique but it was getting pretty darned hot at that point so we bailed back to Bahariya.

Originally it was my intention to do the full desert circuit of oases and make my way to Luxor that way. I had explored an off-road option to an oasis called Dhakla which sounded like an amazing trip, but the prices being asked were very high and as it turns out the combination of summer and Ramadan does not make for an easy time of traveling in the hot desert. Most people I was told don't really even want to work. People who are fasting for Ramadan don't drink water, so going out in the desert isn't high on their list of priorities. Also, given the utter lack of travelers, I'd have nobody to share costs with me. This also made the prospect less than appealing. I decided to cut my losses and be happy with my two days in the desert which were fantastic, and head back to Cairo and down to Luxor the traditional route, saving the desert circuit for a non-summer, non-Ramadan trip.

So I went back to Zamalek in Cairo. I'm flying to Luxor tomorrow one-way for $55. The sleeper car on the train was comparably expensive and though the daytime ride was only $20 or so, it was 12 hours or something and this seemed more appealing. I did some research this time and found two budget hotels in Luxor and Aswan about which I am cautiously optimistic. There are some significant sites down in southern Egypt that I do want to see before I leave, specifically Karnak and Abu Simbel, and a number of other interesting things to do so I am hoping with the knowledge I have accumulated so far I will be able to avoid the hassles and focus on the good things.

In general, all of the sites, history, culture, museums, and other assorted experiences have been great here. It is anything related to hotels or tours or people wanting to sell you things that is difficult and wearing. I now have a much better idea of what I'm dealing with and I think I know how more effectively to book tours, something I had no previous experience doing since in China and southeast Asia I primarily traveled independently and had little use for organized tours. This is the first place I have been where a tour helps insulate you from the torrent of scam artists looking to part you from your money.

A few other random thoughts about the last few days:

The oases are notorious for mosquitos. The first night I spent some time trying to kill the ones in my room before I went to bed in the hopes that I'd do better overnight. We can say that I fought valiantly, but for every head that I chopped off, three more regrew. Aloe vera works wonders on mosquito bites though, I must say.

I noticed religion much more in Bahariya. Not that I haven't noticed it almost constantly in Cairo, but whereas in the big cities I saw women not dressed conservatively, in the desert I felt like every woman I saw was almost entirely or entirely covered up. Also, in Bahariya, I was sitting in the hotel relaxing in the evening and the call to prayer came which in a place like Bahariya is something everyone answers. So then I sat in the courtyard while some sort of sermon was given over a loundspeaker. Of course I didn't understand it, but it sounded seriously fire & brimstone to me. Another interesting religious experience which I enjoyed was being on the bus from Bahariya to Cairo when the sunset, at which point everybody breaks out food to break the fast and passed around dates. It was pretty festive.

Sleeping in the desert was my favorite thing from the trip so far. I was minorly concerned when our 4x4 broke down for 10 minutes, but we're not so far out that there isn't cell service so it's not like we were in real danger. It just feels like it wouldn't take much to die in the desert. But the stars and the camping and the people I met, that was all the best thing I have done since being here.

The only thing I'd want to come back to Egypt to do is a real desert safari where I could spend a week or two in the desert. There are some amazing sites out there that just aren't reachable at this time of the year or any time really unless you have a whole bunch of money to put into it, and doing it alone wouldn't be as fun as doing it with a bunch of people. Also splitting the cost would really be necessary. Besides the real desert way out in the south and west of the country, I wouldn't come back to Egypt. I have had so many difficulties as an independent traveler here and so many people have been dishonest and tried to take advantage of me that it outweighs the amazing sites I have seen. It is a shame the Egyptian government doesn't make more of an effort to crack down on the thousands upon thousands of people who I think are ultimately damaging the tourist industry, but apparently the mindset is hey, we've got the pyramids, they're gonna come no matter what, probably only once, so we have to get what we can while they are here. So now I'm going to Luxor, supposedly the worst of all in terms of tourist hassles. I found a hostel to stay at run by a Spanish couchsurfer who I hope will be straight with me.

Until I leave Egypt, I will have to follow the advice I'd give to others which is to try and find places to stay that are through personal recommendations, try to hook up with Couchsurfers as much as possible who will take care of you and be honest with you, try to shop around for tours and get many prices before you do any of them. Especially ask other tourists what they paid for tours. Finally and most unfortunately, don't trust what anybody says at face value if they work in the hotels or are tour guides. Every person who has been my "friend" has tried to take or taken more money from me than is fair. To be sure, there have been a few nice people, but they are far outweighed by the hordes. If anybody was going to come here, I'd say book everything in advance so you are completely insulated and don't have to deal with any money hassles while you're here, unless you have thicker skin than I do.

So, tomorrow off to Luxor, Aswan, and Abu Simbel. Apparently the boat from Hurghada no longer runs, so I will probably have to catch a puddle jumper to Sharm el Sheikh and a bus to Dahab, my final stop in Egypt which I hope will be the relaxed beach-front backpacker destination it is purported to be before I escape to Israel or Jordan.

More Cairo with a side of Alexandria

2010-08-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

My legs have been really sore the last few days. I think it might've been from descending into those tombs at Dahshur and Saqqara. Today is a bit better.

Like me, most of the cars here seem on the verge of falling apart. I think if one were to fall completely apart like the Bluesmobile at the end of the Blues Brothers, nobody would be surprised, and in fact would probably just continue driving as if nothing had happened. Same thing if the car split completely in half, they would just drive on the front wheels with the back dragging and making sparks.

I saw two "accidents" so far. In a traffic circle, I saw two cars sideswipe each other. They did in fact stop briefly and yell at each other in Arabic for about 20 seconds, before waving it off and continuing driving. The second was also in a traffic circle where I heard screeching tires and then saw a car cream a guy on a bicycle. He went down and a crowd gathered, but the crowd quickly picked him up (is that a good idea?) and dragged him to the sidewalk where the discussion could proceed unimpeded by 50 cars trying to drive past everyone. He was limping but beyond that seemed functional.

I spent yesterday in Alexandria, a city on the north coast named after Alexander the Great who decreed it constructed but actually died before he ever went back there to hang out. It apparently stretches about 20km along the coast of the Mediterranean and only goes inland about 8km inland, so it is a true coastal city. The proximity to the water means that a nice breeze blows through and makes the heat slightly less oppressive and brutal than it is in Cairo. It is also a quieter city, and I would say that I preferred it to Cairo certainly although it still suffers from the same disrepair and disregard on the part of the locals just like Cairo though in the local areas outside of downtown it seemed a bit better.

On the positive side, I visited the relatively newly constructed Library of Alexandria which was probably the coolest library I have ever seen. The exterior architecture and design is as impressive as the giant reading room which spans something like a dozen levels with a giant sloping windowed ceiling. It's quite a place to behold and definitely the coolest, modern thing I have seen in Egypt and probably will see.

In Alex I also walked along the Corniche, a many kilometer seafront along the Mediterranean which has fewer shops and markets than one might expect, which instead tend to congregate one or two streets inland. I also visited Montazzah, a former king's palace within a huge gardened complex spanning many acres, now occupied by mostly gardens but also containing a few high-end hotels, a casino, some restaurants, and the old palace which I think was at one point the President's residence but now no longer is.

As I walked back from Montazzah towards the train station, I walked along the coast passing many restaurant and beaches on which hundreds of tables with chairs and umbrellas were set up. It was dark by then and there were hundreds of people outside and all around eating their iftar meal to break the fast. I am told things are generally open quite late in Egypt, but the post-Ramadan flurry of activity and socializing lasting until 4am is actually one of the more interesting and enjoyable things I have experienced here.

Ahmed, my first Couchsurfing friend picked me up in Alexandria where he was visiting his family for the weekend, and we drove to the Citadel at the west end of the Corniche, a giant fort on the sea which was distinctly different than the Citadel in Cairo. Much smaller, much more sparse and plain design since I think it was mostly designed to be for defense and not a living quarters for royalty as was the Citadel in Cairo. We then attempted to drive to visit a tomb, but driving in Egypt and finding your way just about anywhere is not too easy, so although I got a nice driving tour of Alexandria, we never quite made it there. At several times Ahmed stopped to request directions of passerbys and this always had a certain comical quality to it in my eyes. Egyptians often speak loudly and quickly with a lot of body language and after the guy gave directions, he reached his hand in the car and patted Ahmed on the shoulder to say, you can do it man, go for it. It seemed to me like asking a stranger for directions on the street in NYC and then high-fiving.

I have seen or done few other interesting or amusing things.

The night before I went to Alexandria I met up with Couchsurfers in Zamalek, an Egyptian woman and her American husband who has been leaving in Cairo for 7 years. These were more or less the first non-muslims with whom I have hung out since being here, so it provided an interesting insight into some of the other people who live here in Cairo although it still seems to me a very small number (based on my limited experience) compared with the overwhelmingly majority Muslim community everywhere. They had a crazy cat which I enjoyed watching a lot, then they had two of the smallest kittens I have ever seen who they rescued off the street apparently parentless and were feeding with an eye dropper. They must've been only days old. They are both vegan (Couchsurfers, not the kittens) and cooked me an absolutely wonderful meal for which I am going to have to acquire names and recipes, but one of the dishes was a potato-like vegetable in some sort of green vegetable-pesto like sauce, which we ate over rice. This is apparently an Egyptian dish, not an outright invention on their part. Also there were a sort of fried dumpling filled with hummus, and another kind of fried dumpling for dessert filled with fruit and possibly nuts or dates and with a sweet dipping sauce. They also made a mountain of babaganoush and zucchini stuffed with tomato sauce and rice. We had a great conversation and I am going to try to see them again tonight before I leave for the desert tomorrow morning. I was exhausted after dinner so I didn't stick around too long, only long enough to participate with them in their Ramadan tradition of watching "The Biggest Loser."

Random interactions:

The cab driver on the way to the train station yesterday morning was excited that I was American and put me on the phone with his son who said to me, "How can I go to America?"

I met a Coptic Christian guy who also wants to go to the states. He told me many Egyptian people apply for the green card lottery since even if you want to go on a student visa, they expect you to have a certain amount of money in your bank account and that amount of money is very hard to earn here.

I had fuul (Fava beans) with tahini for breakfast finally.

Ramadan is everywhere for another week or two and although people are apparently tolerant of foreigners not fasting, I still feel awkward smoking and drinking water on the street during the day, and many Egyptian restaurants are closed. Nobody really seems to care, but it still feels like I am being stared at (I am, but not for that) and judged. That being said I have met a variety of people who are not fasting or who are at least smoking during the day even if they are. In Alexandria I passed a few cafes filled with smoking guys some of whom even appeared to be drinking tea. There are non-Muslims here to be sure, but even those who tell me they are not good Muslims who go to pray 5 times a day still fast. I suppose it is comparable to Jews who fast on Yom Kippur or go to synagogue on the high holidays but don't do anything else the rest of the year.

Yesterday I took the train back from Alex at around 9pm, on the same train as Ahmed and Chalid returning from their weekend visiting their families. The weekend here is Friday and Saturday and they work on Sunday again. It turns out by the way that you can smoke between cars on Egyptian trains. I rode 1st class going to Alex and 2nd class returning. These are both virtually the same. The seats are assigned and both are basically like any Amtrak train in the US except for the whole smoking thing. I wouldn't have known that actually, but I napped for about 30 minutes before Ahmed found me and woke me up to say hello and asked if I wanted to join him and Chalid for a cigarette, so I walked with them and we stood in between the cars for the rest of the trip since they both chain-smoke when they are not fasting. I did see a few 3rd class cars parked in the station when buying tickets and whatnot. These look more like New York subway car seating, though the seats are wood, the windows do not have glass in them, they are just open, and there is no A/C. They were hosing one of the cars down when I passed by. So I arrived back in Cairo exhausted and fell asleep around 1, not waking up til 11, which qualifies as my longest and probably best night of sleep since being here. I have generally not been sleeping well, mostly attributed to jetlag, often waking up at 5 or 6am and going out immediately, then napping in the afternoon. That being said, I feel pretty good today. I was originally going to the dessert today, but the buses tend to leave only in the early morning and late afternoon since traveling during the sweltering heat of mid-day is obviously not desirable. I also have yet to make a reservation at a hotel in Bahariya Oasis, my refactored next destination, so I will make all those arrangements today and probably leave first thing tomorrow morning. Tonight my main goal is to smoke sheesha, basically a hookah, a cultural experience in Egypt I have yet to try.

I am told apple is the way to go.

Update: I could not post this for a few hours since the internet was down, so I went out and took a walk in Zamalek and bought a few things at the grocery store. Then I spent a while trying to contact a hotel in Bahariya. It was amazing how few of them pick up the phone. I imagined it looking a lot like when Luke and Ben returned to his home to check on his foster parents only to discover smoldering skeletons in the desert, except with a ringing telephone. I finally was called back by a guy at one of the hotels and made a reservation, so I'm definitely going to Bahariya Oasis tomorrow (about where I plan to explore the options of visiting places like "the Black Mountain" and the "White Desert."

only 7000 years?

2010-08-26T22:57:00.000-07:00

There sure is a lot of history here. I went yesterday with a guide to Saqqara and Dahshur, two pyramid sites a bit farther south. I hired a guide to join me who was a trained archaologist. Here is a summary of some things I learned:

THe period of Egyptian history with which we concerned ourselves stretched from 3200 BC to 2161 BC, about 1000 years. This period comprises what the guide called the Archaic period and the Old Kingdom.

During the Archaic period there were two dynasties, the 1st and 2nd, ruled by 7 and 8 different kings respectively. Apparently, generally dynasties lasted about 120-130 years on average throughout Egyptian history, with various exceptions. During the Archaic period, there were no pyramids built. Instead, they built what are called mastabas, a flat-topped tomb that looks like the base of a pyramid only. That's how they did things until 2680 BC when the Old Kingdom period begins.

The Old Kingdom contains 4 dynasties, which are the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th. During the 3rd dynasty, a guy named Imhotep came up with the bright idea of putting several smaller steps on top of a mastaba, thus inventing the first stepped pyramid and paving the way towards the pyramids we all recognize. So there is a chance it may have not been aliens after all. Unfortunately for Imhotep, he didn't live to see his designs perfected. During the 4th dynasty, some early attempts were made to build flat-sided pyramids resulting in a bunch of weird angles including something called "the bent pyramid" at Dahshur, which rises up at a 55 degree angle and then cuts in at a shallower angle of 43 degrees since they detected some cracks and thought the thing might collapse. Later during the 4th dynasty the Red Pyramid at Dahshur was built also under the rulership of Senefru, which if I remember correctly was indeed the first flat-sided pyramid paving the way for the famous pyramids at Giza, including the most famous one which was built by Khufu, the son of Senefru.

So to sum up, I saw some mastabas, the first stepped pyramid, a few early attempts at flat-sided pyramids, and then the first flat-sided pyramids. All of this stuff is within maybe an hour's drive of Cairo. A lot of tourist groups include Saqqara, the site of the stepped pyramids, but most ignore Dahshur, and really at both sites I was pretty much on my own. There were a few other cabs or cars with people there, but no buses or anything whereas at Giza, there were parking lots filled with buses, although still probably far fewer than there are during the high season.

Oh yes, in Dahshur and at the "pile of sand" pyramid at Saqqara, it is possible to climb down a long shaft into the tomb itself which is pretty much empty but still kind of amazing and terrifying. I'm not really claustrophobic, but even I felt it a little climbing down what I counted to be 140 steps which aren't really steps, but metal bars on an angled floor to help you from sliding down to your doom. Mind you this is hunched over to about half of your normal height. It is at least a little scary, and it must've been even moreso if you were the guy discovering it and heading down there with a lantern or something.

So there's the condensed Egyptian history lesson.

Some other interesting things that happened:

Went to the Citadel, a giant fortress in Cairo comprised of palaces and mosques mostly. It's barely a few hundred years old, but still a very significant structure that somewhat dominates the skyline of Cairo. Lots of interesting architecture mostly and embarrassing tourist behavior. I ran into a few nice travelers there from Brazil and London respectively, we ended up spending the next few hours together exploring the Islamic Quarter of Cairo until the wife of the pair decided it was time to shop for rugs. We did manage to pass through some very local markets en route which reminded me a lot of open-air markets in China. Lots of vegetables, spices, and animals in cages. I've seen that a lot, but I had never seen rabbits before in a food market. Mmmm, rabbit burger.

I met up with a few Couchsurfers a few nights ago. One of them is the Egyptian alter-ego of Antonio from Deathalizer. They even kind of look similar and have similar mannerisms, are both guitar players with similar musical taste, and many other things. It was kind of eerie. He and his friend Chalid took me first for the iftar break-fast meal at a crowded restaurant called Gad where I'd wanted to eat previously but was too intimidated cause of a giant crowd of post-fasting people who seemed to be rioting in the restaurant when I first arrived. Going together was better. We sat there for an hour and a half before we ate though, because it is a popular place to break the fast apparently so you have to sit there and save your table. You order whenever and then by the time 6:30pm hits, the food is on all the tables and people dig in. There were a few hundred hungry muslims there, and one white dude. After dinner they took me over to Khan al Khailily, a busy market in the Islamic Quarter which was also packed at night. We walked through a few beautiful mosques and former mosques as well as generally old and ancient streets. I received slightly less attention though 2 people said to me separately "How can I take your money?"

I relocated from downtown to Zamalek, a neighborhood popular with foreigners and ex-pats on an island in the middle of Cairo's stretch of the Nile. It's much quieter and more relaxed than downtown, and I'm glad I decided to move to experience another part of the city for a few days. Things here are a bit more expensive, but after 5 days downtown I was beginning to go a little nuts. This is my last day here and I was thinking of visiting the medieval Coptic Christian neighborhood to see a few things there before heading to Alexandria tomorrow. I think I'm ready to get out of Cairo and see what else is going on in Egypt.

Remind me to tell you about getting ripped-off in Egypt next time.

Awkward...

2010-08-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

It turns out that on the Cairo metro there are cars specifically for women. It also turns out that although they may be labeled, they do not have an English label that jumps out at the person about to get on for the first time. The women on those cars will allow an errant male passenger a moment to take a look around and notice they are the only male on the car before looking at each other and giggling knowingly while said passenger briefly panics and then shamefully resigns himself towards keeping a distance from all parties until the next stop when he can frantically change cars and pretend none of this ever happened. This information is provided as a public service announcement to any intrepid male travelers who may find themselves in a similar situation one day.

Some people I have met:

Mohammed was a student who timidly accosted me as I was contemplating crossing 10 lanes of moving traffic with no streetlight and asked if he could practice his English with me. This happened quite often in China and I always enjoy these sorts of interactions, so I happily obliged. He was studying Economics at the American University of Cairo which I'm told is a very highly-regarded and exclusive school and he did in fact speak English quite well if a bit shyly, especially given that he had only been taking English classes there for 3 months.

Yousef was one of many touts in Midan Talat al-Harb, a large square relatively close to my hotel in downtown Cairo central to many budget hotels and therefore a popular place to approach foreigners for all purposes. We chatted amicably for a while as I had decided to indulge all who approached me with a smile and my best Arabic banter. He was actually an interesting guy who grow up in Saqqara village, a village adjacent to one of the more significant groups of Pyramids just south of the most famous Giza site. He showed me pictures on his cellphone of his home village before asking me to come into his family's perfume shop to receive his business card. I politely declined with an explanation of lack of desire to disrespect or offend him which has seemed to work on all the people I have met lately and we shook hands and parted ways. His family also owns a hostel and a cotton shop.

Achmed was just down the street from Yousef and wasn't a tout in the same way. He was just a guy who stands out on the street outside of a clothing store and yells at passer-bys, primarily Egyptian, about what clothing and what great deals can be found inside. He looked at me and said "CLOSES!" "CLOSES!" so I stopped and told him "Clothes?" "Clothes." He repeated. Then he said "T-shirts?" ... "T-shirts." ... "Jeanies?" "Jeans!" After this he decided he wanted to shake my hand and we spoke for a few minutes and he laughed when after he said "Nice to meet you" I responded in kind in Arabic.

There was another Bedouin guy outside of a perfume shop near the museum who wanted to chat for a while with the ultimate goal of getting me into his shop, but when it became clear that I would not go inside, he remained extremely sociable nonetheless. I would say the lesson I have learned is that the best way I can react to the numerous people approaching me to sell me something is to be friendly, to speak Arabic so they think I am at least not too-foolish of a tourist, and to not take it personally and not let them get to me. This may sound obvious but when people approach you every few minutes, it's hard not to get frustrated as I learned my first day at Giza and I am determined to not be rude and to not ignore someone who wants to shake my hand. Yesterday I would say it worked well for me and I did not feel exhausted by the attention as I did the previous day.

I also met the manager of the American University of Cairo bookstore which is a large English-language bookstore near the University's campus. He was born in Cuba, grew up in Miami, and spent the last 4 years living here in Cairo. He said one of the things he loves about it is the opportunity for travel, which I understand, since so many interesting places are with an arm's throw and a cheap ticket from here. He said that he thinks he gets along well here because Cubans and Egyptians are similar people, which I thought was really interesting. He also gave me a lot of good advice about Cairo in general, not the least of which was enlightening me to the existence of a popular local dish which is a sandwich filled with french fries. Let me repeat that. There is a popular dish here which is a sandwich filled with french fries.

I will not write too much about the food for now. I did have an amazing sandwich last night which was Falafel, here called Taamiya but basically the same deal, and in the Alexandria style which has chilis all over it or in it. I have also eaten Koshary three times which is another national dish consisting of rice, lentils, two kinds of pasta, tomato sauce, hot sauce, and fried onions. My meals have always costed approximately $1 USD.

Yesterday I took a break from the sun for a chunk of the day and visited the Egyptian Musuem of Antiquities. It looks like the sort of place Indiana Jones might work. Imagine if the Egyptian section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the entire size of the Met. Then imagine there was basically no air-condioning and 3 light bulbs. It's not really as big as the Met, but the number of items in it is staggering. Apparently they have way more in the basement and it has sat there in crates for so long that it has sunk into the ground and they actually had to excavate in the basement of the museum to get at everything. There were a lot of cool things in there, but one thing that blew me away was on the floor filled with King Tutankhamun's treasures. Imagine a bedroom made entirely of gold and ornately inscribed on all sides. Now imagine four of them, each slightly smaller than the previous, and that they fit inside each other like Russian dolls. They had each room in a glass case adjacent to the other. I guess Tutankhamun figured being buried in one gold room was for suckers.

Anyway, off to the Citadel of Salah al-din and meeting a Couchsurfer tonight for Iftar, the fast-breaking meal at 6:30pm. I gotta get going. It's almost 8am.

I am in Cairo

2010-08-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

I have only been here for just over 24 hours, but I feel like I have aged a year. I'm sure that's part jetlag and part that I haven't traveled like this recently, but most of it is because Cairo is a pretty intense and overwhelming place.

A few impressions of how so:

1) First, the cars. I thought I'd seen it all with crazy driving, but they've really taken it to the next level. No real use of lanes or signals. No speed limits. NO TRAFFIC LIGHTS. I think I have seen two lights since I've been here, but even at huge intersections, it's primarily a yellow blinker. Forget about pedestrians, you cross into moving traffic. I had to take a video to try and capture it with all the horns going and the ancient and decrepit vehicles. It's unlike anything I have really seen, even in Southeast Asia. I read a great line in a guidebook that the government has tried to put in streetlights here but they have yet to acquire "credibility" with the locals.

2) It's insanely crowded. There are about 18 million people living here apparently. I think most of them are on the sidewalks near my hotel.

3) It's hot. Like, Africa hot. Literally. That said, thanks to jetlag i was out at 5am this morning and it's extremely mild and pleasant with a light breeze. The evenings are also reasonably comfortable too.

4) I'm here during Ramadan, so a majority of people are fasting during the day. This doesn't mean I can't eat, but it does mean food is harder to get. What's most amazing though is that those fasting don't drink water during the day, which is just unimaginable to me though they claim you get used to it.

5) It's not a clean city by any stretch. Garbage cans are kind of hard to come by and there is definitely a mentality of throwing trash on the street without thinking twice, no matter what it is. Also, no street cleaning of any sort that I've seen. There was quite a lot of trash floating on the banks of the Nile as well.

6) Brutal homelessness. On the one hand, I didn't see that much of it, but on the other hand, I saw one women wearing the full muslim dress that I would call a burkha which may or may not be accurate, but she was sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the packs of tissues she sells, more or less covered in black flies. I tried to tell if she was breathing, but the nearby people seemed unconcerned so I guess she's a regular. Incidentally, I read that 1/3rd of the homes in Cairo don't have running water and some don't even have sewage.

7) Scams are a little overwhelming, though isolated to specific areas. At certain squares, people approach and want to talk and pretend to be your friend, and then try to sell you something or take you to their shop to buy something and so on. By the Pyramids of course where I went today, this was at its most brutal. Even getting there, there are people directing you not to the entrance you are looking for, but to some store or other street. Once inside the gate, there are people who approach every few minutes and try to give you a "gift" which then you will have to pay them for, or they start a tour without asking and then ask you for money at the end, or try to give you a ride on a camel. Apparently it is not uncommon that they offer you a camel ride for $1 into the desert, then charge you an exorbitant sum to return. I did not find out if that would happen to me, but I was offered a camel ride for $1. A bit more about all this later.

So those are a few basic gripes that come to mind. Here are a few adventures of the last day or so, and a few things I have enjoyed.

1) The Pyramids were indeed incredible. It was every bit as impressive as I thought it would be to stand underneath them and walk around. Getting there was interesting. I walked for a few hours in that direction since it was 5:30am and I don't think the gate opens til 8, and then I ultimately ended up getting a minibus which is certainly among the most insane modes of transport I have experienced. There is a guy driving and a guy who hangs out the door of the moving vehicle yelling the destination at people on the sidewalk repeatedly. They sort of stop when they are picking people up, but just like the bigger buses, the just sort of slow down enough that you can jump on. Thankfully for foreigners, they slow down a bit more than that and it was pretty interesting and insanely cheap. I also experienced the pyramids as a crash course in Arabic, which I started learning on the plane. I found that in general speaking Arabic to all the hustlers dissuaded them from hassling me further and I even managed to be friendly with a bunch of them.

On the way to the Pyramids, I had found the right bus successfully and was on my way when two Japanese people got on with an Egyptian guy who I initially and incorrectly assumed they knew. I went to talk to them to see where they were from and before I realized that he had picked them up to scam them, he said we had to switch to another bus, so I went with them. We took another bus towards the back entrance of the pyramids and then he wanted to go buy a ticket in a special place for a special price, which is when I realized what was going on, so I excused myself and no harm was done. In fact I had wanted to go to the rear entrance anyway since it was reported to me correctly that if you show up there early which I had, you would have the Sphinx pretty much all to yourself, which I did. In general, it was not very crowded at all at the Pyramids, there were times where I was more or less by myself at the base of either of the two larger structures. Did you know that originally the Pyramids at Giza were originally covered with smooth, white limestone?

2) As I am here during Ramadan, at about 6:30pm everyone eats a meal to break their fast. Last night I had this meal with the hotel staff which sounds a lot more formal than it really is. The streets quiet down for an hour while people eat, and then completely fill up with people who socialize and go shopping. People seem to be out for a long time doing this, I'm told up until 4am but with my jetlag I didn't get to see that with my own eyes. The consumerism in general in my neighborhood of downtown Cairo is pretty extreme. It reminds me somewhat of China in that respect, and from what I've been told so far, shopping for things during Ramadan is quite common and several people even related it to Christmas. I have also heard the calls to prayer and seen many people lay mats down on the sidewalk en masse. I haven't been the Islamic Quarter of Cairo yet where I imagine I will see a lot more of that.

3) Men walk arm in arm here the way Chinese women do.

4) One guy approached me on the street just to talk. Another guy at the Pyramids spoke with me for about 30-40 minutes about his life in Egypt. He's bedouin and he invited me to his home for dinner, which I haven't decided if I will do yet. After being approached by 40 people trying to take advantage of me, it was difficult to trust people, but I asked him how much he'd ask me if I came and ate at his house and he seemed to be genuinely taken aback. He said work is separate, this is just hospitality and he wants me to leave Egypt with a better impression. He knows that many foreigners experience these things and wants to give a better impression. He said I should judge people individually, and open my heart but guard my pocket.

5) Another guy approached me in the city and said I cross the street like an Egyptian. I talked to him for a few minutes and he works at a diving school at a resort in Hurghada and seemed to just be friendly, but again, being so overwhelmed by the majority who want to take advantage, it's difficult to trust, but at least we had a nice chat and his intentions seemed innocent.

Alright, probably nobody read this but at least a few things have been documented about this insane 24 hours. Who knows what will happen tomorrow?

Lippstadt, Bielefeld, Cologne, Belgium, London

2008-10-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

Kind of a lot to squeeze in, but let's catch up here.

After seeing Anja, I drove up north to visit my friend Anne in Lippstadt. The driving in Germany was not as interesting as Sicily, the roads are more like the US and the traffic much more civilized. Anne and I met hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge in northern Yunnan, China at the end of last year. We spend a day together in Lijiang and I thought it might be nice to stop by her hometown since I was in the neighborhood. We took a short walk around country roads in her town which is very farm-like, and then after saying hello to her family I bid her farewell to drive to the nearby town of Bielefeld to connect with my old college friend Lance, who I haven't seen for 6 years. He recently relocated from New Jersey to pursue a career in music, and to try out some new territory I think. He also got married, so upon arrival I met his wife and we spent about 24 hours on a high-speed trip down memory lane. We got drunk, listened to old Berklee recordings which are now 10 years old, and played some metal. I had decent Italian food. I saw basically nothing of Bielefeld other than the apartment where Lance now lives, though from what I gather it is an unremarkable town. Lance seemed to enjoy his new home and spoke highly of the music scene there and the openness with which his favored genre of exploding metal is embraced. I plan to return to spend more time hanging out and by then he'll hopefully have some gigs and I'll have some more time. It's good to catch up with old friends, especially in distant lands.

After Bielefeld I was due to return my rental car in Cologne. I spent two nights there and reunited with two Couchsurfer friends, Caro and Manu. They gave me a heroes welcome and it was really great to see them. I forgot how energetic and fun they both are, since it'd been probably a year since I saw them last during their visit to New York when they stayed with me for a while. I had time before seeing them to explore Cologne on foot to a fairly significant extent, to get good middle eastern food and scope out a number of vegetarian restaurants, and to stand in the shadow of the most giant cathedral for some time as well as to climb to the top of it. Then we had beer.

Things accelerated as the trip drew to a close. I took a train from Cologne to Brussels and got a hotel room near the train station. I killed a few hours walking around Brussels, then a quick train to Ghent to meet my friend Ilse for dinner, another CSer I met last year who stayed here in New York with me. The old town in Ghent is really beautiful. I had so little time to spend in Belgium, actually less than 24 hours I think, but it made me think that it might be worth a visit one day so in that sense it was interesting. That being said, Brussels was kind of run down and sketchy in many parts, although the tourist area was pretty of course.

Finally, the last night in London, at Ee Lynn's very tiny apartment in the very interesting neighborhood of Soho which has renewed my faith in London even though it is painfully expensive to do anything there. It's a tough place to visit and I never appreciated Couchsurfing so much until I saw how much dorm beds cost in London and in fact throughout Europe.

I'm glad for everything I saw in Europe, especially the friends with whom I connected and for the family experience in the Ukraine and Germany which was truly beyond anything I could've imagined until I was there. That being said, my next trip will be back to the third world and just about anywhere except Europe. I miss Asia, I'm interested in the middle east, South or Central America, and Africa. That'll come in another post soon after I retroactively sum up the remainder of my 8 month old trip in the Philippines.

from Freiburg

2008-08-06T23:29:00.000-07:00

I am now in Freiburg, Germany at my friend Anja's house. She was my second-ever Couchsurfer about two years ago and we've stayed in touch. I'm staying with her for a few days. I have a few other visits planned to other friends between here and London before I fly home on the 15th.

The last week or so is hard to verbalize. Sarah and I flew to Budapest. We spent a few days in the city and met up with my parents, grandmother, aunt, and her family. Together we took a 7 hour busride into the Ukraine through Slovakia and stayed in a town called Munkachevo for three days. The first full day in Munkachevo we woke up and drove 30 kilometers away to visit first the cemetery where my grandmother's mother and my grandmother's grandmother are buried. Then we visited the village where she and her sisters were born which is called Zarice. After Munkachevo, we drove back to Budapest and flew to Hannover, Germany. Every day in Hannover, we woke up at 7 and had full day of activity which took us to the Bergen Belsen memorial where there is a museum on the site of the former concentration camp where my grandmother and her sisters were prisoners of the nazis for a year. We also visited the displaced-persons camp and the barracks in Celle, Germany where they lived after being liberated, and the synagogue which they more or less created themselves and where my grandmother and one of her sisters were married before immigrating to the US.

That is the basic idea of where I have been. There are a lot of details and I want to write them but I think I'm just not ready yet. This last week has been very intense and I want to write something that does this experience, and the wartime experience of my grandmother and great-aunts justice. It's very important so I'm going to wait a bit until I have a proper amount of time to create it, perhaps before I return, perhaps after, but it will be written soon. In the meantime, I will visit a few friends and explore Germany a bit before landing back in New York. I will be here for a few days, and I think afterwards head to Lichtenfels to visit Yasmine, a friend from New York who recently moved back there to her hometown. I should have more regular access to the internet now so I will try to write some of the amazing stories I have heard soon.

Looking back on Italy

2008-07-28T01:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much internet time on this trip. I'm in Budapest now but haven't done anything yet, so let's see how much I can remember about Italy.

Also almost everywhere we went in Italy was very dirty. New York is admittedly not the cleanest of places, but there is evidence of people cleaning streets and the trash seems to be largely cigarette butts and the occasional other detritus. The problem in Italy seemed far more pervasive. It is a stark contrast to Budapest, where I have been for not even 24 hours, but in our short walk around the city last night in search of vegetarian food I was stunned by how clean it is. There is not so much a cigarette butt on a sidewalk. I suspect this has to do with the fact that as in other cities I have visited that are this clean, there are garbage cans and ashtrays on every corner. I know Bloomberg is against smoking, but it is ridiculous that we cannot manage to have an ashtray built onto the side of a trashcan in New York City. In Hong Kong they charge a sizable fee for throwing a cigarette on the ground, and they provide places for you to put them so people do. I'm convinced this would make a dramatic difference to the face of the city and I wonder how it could be made to happen. I can't imagine it would cost very much comparatively.

My sister and I drove through many places on this journey in Italy. Palermo was a bit scary. Not the sort of place you'd feel safe walking around alone at night. Everything seemed very worn, not just ancient, except of course for the designer clothing every other block between run down and abandoned industrial buildings. For some reason Italians seem to flock to extremely shiny and tight clothing. I'm not the best person to analyze psychology of fashion since I wear t-shirts and jeans all the time, but a dress with attached mirrored tiles all over it? Sequined shoes? Throughout Sicily, people kind of stared at us, and not in the Chinese way it seemed to me where they are just saying, wow, what the hell are you? I understand, I'm really white, I have freckles and red hair. But in Sicily it was very hard to generate a smile. I am told that this is cultural and that it involves a sort-of closed attitude to outsiders, but once you become part of the city it becomes easier to develop friendships and relationships. This is somewhat unusual for places I've visited where if you smile at someone, they smile back. In most of Italy, this wasn't really the case. There were exceptions of course, and we did meet some very nice people. Couchsurfing of course helped. In Siracusa we met one girl who is not Sicilian but lives in Sicily and had granita with her and her friend. Granita I was pleased to discover, is a Sicilian type of sorbet that is happily dairy-free and widely available. Good knowledge to have for the traveling vegan who is having trouble locating soy gelato, which is surprisingly available. Another culinary surprise was that asking for pizza without cheese was not as weird as I thought it would be. In fact, in one restaurant in Calabria, they had only slices, and several varieties premade without cheese. We don't even have that in New York. I was impressed, and starving, and pleased.

On driving in Italy, the people are pretty crazy. Sarah has become fond of saying that my driving has become very Italian. After all, when in Rome...and I actually am in Rome. So, I was told that there is only one rule for driving in Italy which is you are responsible to watch out for things in front of you. If you hit something in front of you, it is your fault. So, no need to worry about signaling, that's a given. You can also feel free to pull out into an intersection as far as you like, or just make the turn without stopping, that's also no problem. Right, left, across multiple lanes of traffic, no worries. Go as fast as you like, there's no cops anyway except on the highway and they go faster than anyone else anyway. These rules apply equally when driving in big cities like Palermo or Rome, or in medieval towns with stone streets the width of the car plus one inch on the side of each mirror. The cars are by the way substantially smaller on average. I saw no SUVs in Italy. Not one. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that gas was about 1.5 euros per liter. So, to translate to American, 1 gallon is 3.785 liters, and 3.785 liters would be 5.6 euros, which would be $8.80 per gallon of gasolio. I'm glad I don't drive on a regular basis. That horrific fact being revealed, our car was some kind of compactish Mercedes A series which got seemingly good mileage on diesel and we didn't have to fill up too much despite figuring out at the end that we drove about 2000 kilometros.

Anyway, we survived. We drove through days of beautiful scenery in Sicily. The middle tended to be agricultural. We would drive through rolling hills of farms and terraces and invariably every few hundred kilometers a town would appear way atop a mountain looking like a medieval fortress. We got the car onto a ferry between Sicily and the mainland. We drove up the east coast of Italy all the way to Amalfi which for the record is beautiful, but so is the entire coast and most of it without the people scrambling for views. We stopped in Caserta, a town north of Napoli, and visited family members of Sarah's most influential piano teacher. They were extremely welcoming. We sat in their kitchen watching them cook an insane meal for us. We then got a tour of the Royal Palace in Caserta, which is one of the most opulent places I've ever visited. We also wandered through Casertavecchia, the ancient medieval town of Caserta which was as atmospheric as any of those small towns we visited and among my favorite places I think.

We finished our Italian voyage in Roma. Having been there a few times already, my only real goal other than letting my sister relax and getting vegetarian food was to see the Colosseum, which for some reason I have missed out on up until now. More notably, we had dinner with two wonderful friends of Sarah's at a traditional restaurant and had a very nice conversation on our last evening, a perfect cap to our adventure in Italy before boarding our plane the following day to Budapest from where I currently write this.

I haven't wandered yet in this town, but our initial impression is positive. It's certainly a very clean city and very pretty to walk by night. Oh yes, and Hungarian may be impossible, but I'll reserve judgment for another 24 hours and until I have a chance to look at a phrasebook.

Europe, Sicily

2008-07-23T01:29:00.000-07:00

I suppose the story of the rest of my Philippines trip will have to wait. I am in Siracusa, Sicily now. This trip is going well, though I have had hardly any computer time so I can't even really write the whole story now. The basic idea is a few days in London, fly to Palermo, a few days there, then rent a car and drive around Sicily and all the way up to Rome via scenic backroads which have in one case now led us into a field of crops. I don't mean they led us into a road surrounded by crops. I mean our car, in the middle of a pile of dirt around which things have been planted. That particular misadventure was an attempt to find the Vulcanetti di Macalube, a strange volcanic landscape in the vicinity of Agrigento. I am with my sister throughout and we've been having a pretty interesting time of it. We drove through maybe a dozen small towns and medieval villages. I navigated our rental car carefully through very small streets with ancient streets, nearly tearing the mirrors off but no actual damage so far. Between the towns the scenic roads wind up and down mountains and through farms. Grapes, oranges, almonds, and other unknown crops grow up and down the occasionally terraced fields around us. Crumbling and abandoned buildings are everywhere, some maybe 200 years old, some 2000. We have been to ruins of temples and theaters and churches built on top of mosques built on top of greek temples. I have eaten lots and lots of pasta but my Italian is now as good as it has ever been. One night we made friends with the owners of a hotel in Erice, a city on top of a mountain in northwestern Sicily. The owner and chef made us possibly the best Italian meal I've ever had, and then again the next day for lunch. In the evening, we sat in a courtyard with all of them drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, and laughing. It was a memorable evening.

So yes, Italy for a while. I will write more about these details when time permits. There is so much more. London was brief, mostly visiting with friends and enjoying London more than in the past thanks to staying with a friend in what I'd describe as a suburb called Leytonstone, which feels more like a town that has only recently been joined to London. Also a bit of a wander around Soho, a neighborhood I really should've known better, has given me a more favorable impression of the city. I'll be back there at the end of this journey for a few days before I fly home and will explore more. A lot of our first visit was resting and overcoming jetlag. So after Italy, I'll be going to Budapest to meet up with my parents and grandmother for a foray into the Ukraine to visit my grandmother's hometown, but I'll leave that story for when it happens, starting around the 30th of July. In the meantime, we're going to go drive circles around Mt Etna, an active volcano not far from here, and then head further up the east coast of Sicily and soon onto mainland Italy. At some point I'll have to learn enough Italian to figure out how we get our rental car onto a ferry. For the immediate future we'll explore Siracusa a bit and try to hook up with a Couchsurfer contact who lives on a farm just outside the city. I will remind myself when I next have a few moments to jot down impressions of Palermo and overall of the culture and people we've met and seen. It has been quite different than I expected in some ways, and exactly as expected in others.

I went to the Philippines

2008-03-07T19:31:00.001-08:00

I didn't write about my trip during my trip. I was distracted. So I'm going to write about it now, about a month later, so at least to some extent the details will be preserved for posterity; at least those which are not permanently emblazoned in my mind.

The whole trip was 3 weeks. I flew from New York (Newark actually) to Hong Kong. It was just about 16 hours non-stop I think, which is I think my longest flight ever. My last few trips to or from Asia have hovered in the 12-15 hour range. Over a certain number of hours, I personally feel it doesn't matter anymore. It's just long and boring. My technique now has been to bring a book that is engaging so I can read the whole thing. That keeps me occupied for some good portion of the trip. In this case, it was the Crocodile and the Crane by Arthur Rosenfeld. It was good, look it up on Amazon.

I spent a few nights in Hong Kong to recover from jetlag before the trip began in earnest, though this was let's say marginally successful. It is a 13 hour time difference, it takes more than two days, but I think I adjusted admirably. After a few days of vegetarian food and visiting with my friend Lilian in Hong Kong, I took the ferry to Macau and checked in for one night at the Venetian Casino. It was gigantic and over-the-top and opulent and all of those things one might expect from a giant casino styled after Venice, Italy. It was at the hotel in Macau that I met up with Carrie, my close friend from Guangzhou whom I met about 1.5 years ago at the beginning of my first trip around China.

We spend a night in Macau largely exploring the casino due to crappy weather, then boarded a plane in the morning for Clark, Philippines. Lots of budget flights apparently dump you in Clark, the former site of a large American air force base and now a hotbed of sex tourism and seedy nightlife. Despite our fearing the worst, we stayed at a lovely hotel called the Oasis which was comfortable. Our arrival in the tropical climate was most welcome after the cloudy and chilly weather I'd found upon arrival in Hong Kong. The entire time we were in the Philippines, it was warm and sunny. I can't really recall anytime that the weather was not great. The evenings tended to be a bit cooler but never so much so that it was uncomfortable in a t-shirt really.

So we stayed in Clark the first night and immediately arranged to be picked up at 5am by a ridiculous 4x4 to drive us 2.5 hours or so to Mount Pinatubo, a giant volcano which last erupted in 1991 killing and hurting a lot of people, but has since become a place where people go to hike, ride motorbikes, and spend time at the beautiful clear lake now found in what I'm prety sure is called the caldera. The latter portion of our ride in the aforementioned 4x4 led us up and down this more or less dry river bed with an awful lot of rocks and bumpy terrain. It was like some of the avenues in New York though slightly moreso. We hiked through this same landscape for the next few hours, eventually inclining upwards towards the caldera. The landscape was not unlike what Frodo and Sam trekking through Mordor in the last Lord of the Rings film. We'd set out so early to avoid the heat, so for most of our hike that was not a problem. Having stepped in the river in my sneakers very early, my wet shoes helped me keep cool much as sticking your leg out of the bottom of the blanket helps regulate one's body temperature at night. So we hiked up, checked out the lake, hiked down, rode all the way back enjoying the scenic countryside and small villages. People are really poor in the Philippines most of the time, it's somewhat distressing, though like most of these third-world locations I've visited, they are amazingly friendly and seemingly pretty darned happy. We spent the rest of the day pretty much ensconced at the hotel, napping, enjoying the pool, and planning our next move. I believe that night we ventured out to Fields Ave, the main stretch of bars in Clark which is filled with absurdly young and aggressive prostitutes, women lined up soliciting men to come into the night clubs, various other bars, creepy old men, and a few restaurants. Much to my delight we found an Arabian restaurant where I managed to get a good meal. My review of Filipino cuisine will wait til later.

So that was pretty much Clark, an incredibly seedy stretch of bars which we managed to almost completely avoid in favor of a beautiful trek up the side of an active volcano and generally enjoying the warm climate and relaxing atmosphere. Next stop is our long busride up to the north to the former Spanish colonial city called Vigan, which I will write about later before I burn out.

the Philippines

2008-01-23T20:58:00.000-08:00

I'm going to the Philippines. I'm leaving tomorrow and flying to Hong Kong first, spending a few nights there, a night in Macau, then Monday meeting a friend and off to Manila we go. I'll be spending 11 nights there and the idea is to spend a bit of time up in the north checking out cultural and historical sites such as the rice terraces of Banaue and the northern Spanish colonial city Vigan, then to venture south on a puddle-jumper and check out the beach island of Malapascua. The Philippines is made up of 7000 islands or so, and it's really famous for it's white sandy beaches and clear blue water. I will be updating my blog as much as I can with my whereabouts along with pictures and tales of vegetarian restaurants and disturbing water closets.

back in NYC, again

2007-10-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

My six week adventure in Asia has concluded and I'm back in New York waking up early and waiting for my brain to adjust to being back on this side of the planet. The trip was great. I probably did more in that shortish time than I should have, but I'm glad I gave the faster pace a try and I did see quite a few things that I had been wanting to see for some time.

Now to settle back in and get cracking again on this website project of mine and the company that does or at least will ostensibly one day surround it. My mind will take some time to catch up, but I will try to post here with any salient reflections on my trip sometime in the next week or two. In the meantime and once again:

photos

24 hours to go

2007-10-14T20:48:00.001-07:00

I'm back in Hong Kong and in less than 24 hours I will be on a plane back to NYC. Since flying back from Yunnan, I spent two nights in Guangzhou, one in Shenzhen, and one in HK. I spent the time pretty much relaxing, seeing a few friends, trying to see a few others and failing, and eating in restaurants I have missed during my 7 month absence from this continent.

I'm glad with the way the trip worked out. It was a bit chaotic to try and do so much in such a short time (4 countries in 6 weeks) but I did manage to see quite a few things I'd been wanting to see for a long time, and all things considered my body held together this time and I so far haven't contracted malaria or anything else horrendous. Hopefully I'm not jinxing it by pointing that out, but at least if something does go wrong from here on I'd be in NYC when it does. Which I guess would mean at least there'd be hummus available for my convalescence.

I have been uploading pictures but for those of you who haven't been checking my flickr site, here is the link:

all of my pictures
all of my travel pictures

From there, the rest should be obvious. I'm looking forward to being in New York again soon and seeing you all. Next update on US soil.

Lijiang and the Tiger Leaping Gorge

2007-10-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Guangzhou as I write this. I had trouble accessing Blogger from Lijiang for whatever reason, so this is the first chance I've had to write in a while.

Lijiang reminded me a lot of Venice if it were a Chinese city. The original town is something like 800 years old or so. There's no cars in the old city and the streets are all stone. The houses and buildings are all old-style and the city is extremely attractive to walk around. There is a new city surrounding the old, but pretty much everything I write about here refers to the old town where most people who visit spend the majority or entirety of their time. So the town is very old-looking, but many of the buildings as it turns out are new construction done in the old style. This doesn't really have an adverse effect in my opinion on the appeal of the place, and I quite enjoyed the time I spent there. There are loads of tourists everywhere and many open-faced shops in which you can buy all manner of knick-knacks and snacks, such as dried yak meat or yak cheese. Tea is a popular product as well, as it is throughout Yunnan province. There are also tons of clothes, many in the style of the local ethnic minority, the Naxi. I learned about an interesting local religion and language called Dongba, the language of which is the only existing pictographic language I believe. It looks a lot like Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I spent a few nights in Lijiang and the day wandering the city often in no particular direction. I hung out a bit with my friend Carrie and her friend Gill who happened to be traveling in that region around the same time so we made it a point to meet up. I ate an awful lot of street food and it was great. I had a bunch of other decent meals including a bunch of unusual Naxi dishes that happened to be vegetarian. One is the ever-present "baba," a flatbread that is found just about everywhere in the area. Another was this strange flat and cold noodle made from beans of some sort and served in a bowl with some oil, veggies, and chilis. All in all, a beautiful town to spend time and a recommended visit in China for anyone thinking of going.

The main thing I missed last time in China that I was anxious to see this time was the Tiger Leaping Gorge, a few hours north of Lijiang. It is so called because it used to be so narrow in one particular part that it is said tigers used to leap across it. I took a 2 hour bus from Lijiang to Qiaotou and met a nice English couple from Brighton on the way, Jamie and Anita, with whom I'd end up spending the next two days hiking. The bus left Lijiang around 8:30am and we made it to Qiaotou around 10:30 or so. We set off on the trail around 11 after a cup of tea and acquisition of some supplies in Qiaotou, and that first day's hike wasn't horribly difficult, but neither was it particularly easy. There are two trails through the gorge, a high and a low path. The low path has recently been turned into a road, so that was out. The high path was the way to go, but that means going up. Lots of up. Also, the altitude was something like 2200 meters at the base and 2700 or so at the highest point. That's 7700 and 8800 feet respectively, so that could explain why we were all breathing a bit heavy and taking rests a bit more periodically than one might expect.

The views were increasingly ridiculously amazing. We walked up a winding dirt path on and on, at first with distant mountain views and through farms where locals were working on their corn fields. There are really colorful flowers everywhere, the landscape is far from bland. As we got higher and higher, we got closer to the gorge itself and walked along the edge, glimpsing the Yangze river far below. I often thought it to be one of the most amazing and beautiful things I've ever seen. Hopefully the pictures will do it some justice. We stopped for lunch at the Naxi Family Guest House. We saw occasional groups of other travelers on the trail, though when hiking it was far from crowded. Everyone keeps their own pace. One group of Israelis passed us at high-speed and we traded positions with another smaller group of 3 Israelis and a Swede regularly. One of those Israeli girls slipped in one of the many giant piles of horse shit dot the trail. Opportunistic locals hang around with their horses waiting for you to give up and shell out some ludicrous amount for a ride and a respite from the never-ending twisting and turning tail upward.

So where was I? Oh yes, lunch and then more walking. We stayed the night at the Tea Horse Guest House which was nice and pretty friendly. We befriended a group of 3 German folks, 2 guys and a girl who had met up with each other in Kunming and had been traveling together. I ended up later sharing a ride back to Lijiang with the girl, Anna, and spending some time together than evening in Lijiang before she went on to Dali and I to Guangzhou. She'd just recently spent 3 weeks in Fuzhou studying acupuncture on a break from her medical studies back in Germany. The other two, Jonathan and Bernard, were apparently unchallenged by the Tiger Leaping Gorge and set out instead towards to the Haba Snow Mountain in search of a greater challenge. They had those hiking poles that look like ski poles, so you know they were serious. So back on that first night, it was me and my English friends, the German, this Swedish guy, and like 20 Israelis. They weren't all together, but they'd ended up all together apparently. We sat at a big communal table and ate and chatted, though we were pretty exhausted and sleeping that night was quite easy. The next day we set out early and the hike was substantially less exhausting as we'd reached the highest point pretty much and it was all downhill from there. The views were no less spectacular and even moreso as we continued along the edge of the gorge, and occasionally winding in and out of some mountainous curve directly adjacent to some large and impressive waterfall across which we'd have to carefully skip stones. The whole thing was beautifully surreal and I'm very happy to have finally made this walk through a place that takes every care from your mind and just fills it instead with marvel.

I decided to stay an extra night after finishing that portion of the hike at Sean's Spring Guest House which is right near where the high road drops back down and reconnects to the low. It had a beautiful view of the sheer cliffs of the gorge and we spent the evening smoking, drinking beer, relaxing, and chatting. That evening it as us 3, the Germans who'd arrived and decided to stay a night there as well, and an older Australian couple that was very friendly. Also in attendance were Sean's cats, the mommy, the daddy, and 3 adorable kittens that would jump on anyone who permitted it. Also, we'd found a giant wild marijuana plant growing in this field and helped ourselves, though my smoking days are pretty much over so I declined. Despite that, it was the first time I'd ever seen one in the wild before and was therefore amusing. It is apparently tolerated in this area as a number of the guesthouses have "happy" pizzas, "happy" pancakes, and other assorted "happy" items on the menu. For a modest fee you can add "happy" to just about anything they serve. Too bad I didn't visit this place in college, I would've appreciated that far more I think.

So the morning after we had to wait around a bit because there was a landslide on the road which had to be cleared before we could take our buses back to our respective destinations. A few meals and walks later and here I am back in Guangzhou for two nights before a quick stop in Shenzhen to visit my friend Grace, and then a night or two in HK before I fly back to NYC on Tuesday. I think I'm ready to come back. These 6 weeks have been fantastic but exhausting. Those early destinations like Beijing and Cambodia seem like eons ago. It's hard to imagine how people keep up a pace like this. I think next time a smaller number of destinations at a slower pace is definitely the way to go. That being said, I'm really happy with how this trip turned out. I hit a few major things I'd been dying to see like the Great Wall, Angkor Wat, and Tiger Leaping Gorge, and really got my feet wet in Southeast Asia finally, something I didn't manage on my first little Asian adventure. I also rounded out my experience in China with a visit to northern Yunnan, something I'd felt was left open-ended and incomplete on my last trip due to that wretched upper-respiratory infection I'd contracted in Kunming.

So all is well, I'm still alive and apparently healthy for the moment, and looking forward to visiting these few cities I know already and the friends I have in them before I hop on my direct flight from HK back to NYC. As usual, it's great to be out here, but it'll be great to be home too. See you all soon.

back in China

2007-10-03T06:05:00.000-07:00

I ultimately figured out why the people in Lao small villages did not understand my request for vegetarian food as rendered in Lao. The phrasebook indicated a particular way to say this, which I was finally able to determine uses a word that they didn't even know. They thought I was requesting some strange foreign food they'd never heard of. Furthermore, the Lao language has a sound which is between B and P. The word for fish is something like "ba." The word for vegetable is something like "pa(k)." So they thought I was saying I don't eat meat or vegetables and then really had no idea what to give me. This explains why they offered only rice initially.

Anyhoo, I'm back in China. I left my hotel in Oudomxai, Laos around 8am or so and made it to the bus station just nearby in search of the first bus to the border. They informed me that there was only one other person so far. What time then? Maybe 10, maybe 11, maybe 12. I see. Guess I'll sit over there then and be stared at like a zoo animal for a few hours. About 11ish enough people had gathered and we were off. Sort of. We stopped a few more times in the vicinity to pick up more people and fill up empty seats. This is like an 8-seat minibus. There's a big argument which as far as I can tell has something to do with the number of people on the bus and the amount each person has been charged. This gets very heated but in what seems to be a sort-of good natured way. It's hard to tell, everybody in Asia likes to yell.

So we hit the road and I was thinking as we go that in the US, there are several factors that determine how long it will take to get somewhere, but if you are going somewhere that is many hours away, seldom is the condition of the road really a factor. More often it is the speed limit on the highway, or how fast your car will go. On the road from Oudomxai to the China border, the situation is different, given that the road is to my estimation 50% unpaved. The parts that are unpaved are not so much dirt as they are lots and lots of rocks and ditches. This means that at times a passenger is bounced 3-4 inches off his seat. Often. I was wondering if that was my spine I felt compressing, or if I'm just getting old. I'm sure somebody will laugh when they read that.

Hours and hours later, we made it to the border of Laos and China. Get off the bus, go through Lao immigration and get my stamp. Then we take a tuk-tuk for like 1-2km between countries and I go through Chinese immigration on the other side uneventfully. A minibus waits to take people to Mengla, the next actual town which is ostensibly 1.5 hours away but takes far longer because we stop and drive in circles in basically every village on the way looking for more people which we eventually find.

I don't think I mentioned this, or perhaps I only did in passing, but on several buses in Laos and on one the other day from Mengla to Jinghong (about 5 hrs) there are small plastic bags available for everyone should they feel carsick. On that last busride, at least 3-4 people were puking for substantial portions of the trip. The amazing thing is nobody even appears to notice or consider it to be out of the ordinary, or asks anyone if they're ok or anything like that. I suppose it's obvious they are not ok, but still. So the woman next to me throws up mightily into the bag, then chucks it out the window and gets another. The willingness of people to throw things out of the window of a moving vehicle in Asia is impressive. Nobody appears to think twice about throwing absolutely anything on the ground. Empty cigarette containers, drink bottles, plastic bags filled with puke, tissues and napkins, etc. Anything goes right out. On that latter ride we were driving through a nature preserve at the time. Not that I particularly wanted to sit next to 15 bags of puke, but c'mon.

So I am thankful that I do not get carsick. We all have our problems I suppose and this is one of which I have been gratefully spared. So I stayed in Mengla for one night which was totally nondescript, then came here to Jinghong which is also a somewhat typical Chinese city. These places from a tourist perspective are generally leaping points into the surrounding villages populated by numerous ethnic minorities for so-called treks. I have to say, I don't know why, but I hate that word and I'm really sick of hearing it. Perhaps it is just because it makes walking sound a lot more grandiose than it should.

I'm not a big fan of walking around and taking pictures of people in these places. It already seems a little too zoo-like that these tourists are wandering through places and not talking to anybody and just kind of looking around and pointing. Perhaps I'm doing exactly the same thing, but I feel like at least I'm making some effort to communicate and connect with the people and learn a bit of the language and to be respectful and aware of the fact that this is their home. To just walk around and take close-up shots of people going about their day without saying much except thank you just seems a bit invasive.

Ok, so those are my random thoughts for the day. I'm in Jinghong now and spending a few nights here before flying to Lijiang on Friday in northern Yunnan. I'll have more to write in the next few days about other random things I've experienced. Hope all are well.

more in Laos

2007-09-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

This could be a long one. So much has happened and I often don't know how to do it justice. Ok, well just for the basics, I spent 5 nights ultimately in Luang Prabang, then I took a bus for around 3-4 hours to Nong Khiaw, spent a night there, took a boat to Muang Khua, spent a night there, then took a bus today to Oudomxai. Tomorrow I will take a bus 3-4 hours to the China border which I will cross on foot, then catch another bus to Mengla, in southern Yunnan province of China.

Now for the good stuff. I just don't even know where to begin. In Nong Khiaw, I stayed in a bungalow. It's a small village along the Nam Ou river. There were a few other foreigners (falang) running around. A lot of folks go to this village then continue an hour upriver to a town called Muang Ngoi which is somewhat of a touristy place in the area, which means they have a few more cafes catering to westerners and a bunch of guesthouses. Both these places are dusty and small. There are chickens everywhere. Baby chickens too.

About animals in Laos, there are dogs and cats running around all over the place. Kittens and puppies are common. I'm guessing spaying isn't exactly a priority. Livestock is common. I see water buffalo a lot. Also something that looks like a water buffalo but is pink. Cows are reasonably common too, often with the typical giant bell around the neck. They are often standing in the middle of the road between cities and the buses honk at them to get out of the way. Chickens and ducks also wander the roads freely. Sometimes it is clear to whom they belong, but in villages they just sort of wander everywhere. Today I saw a small monkey-like creature playing with some girls. It seemed to be a pet as far as I could tell and quite domesticated.

Then we talk about the bugs. I must admit, I'm a bit squeamish bugs. Not phobic or anything, but I don't particularly enjoy them crawling on me and I'd say find it discomforting in proportion to their size. In Nong Khiaw I was sitting at an outdoorsish cafe talking and eating with some people and of course there are all manner of flying insects investigating our edibility. Periodically beetles fall from the heavens or ceiling and land on you. You just sort of get used to removing them, though I never quite got used to the ones falling into my hair. You never think you've gotten them out so I walk around with a permanent afro from raking my fingers through my hair to make sure. I tried to buy a hat in Louang Prabang, mostly for the sun but it would've been handy for this as well, but apparently they don't make heads here as large as mine. Me and the Lao hat girl I spoke with had a laugh over that, trying to squeeze any of her hats onto my orb-like cranium. Failure.

Anyway, I stayed in this bungalow under a mosquito net. There was a squat toilet in a sort-of walled off section of the room. I awoke in the middle of the night to use that, put on my flip-flops, and immediated noticed in my sleep-like haze that clearly something was biting me. A lot. Lights on, glasses on, lots of ants. Apparently the giant spider I subsequently noticed in the bathroom was full and not doing any good. I got them all off but for the next 30-40 minutes in my bed was convinced they were still on me. I looked like a 60s rock star having a bad trip I'm sure. At least the impressively large cockroaches skittered out of the way and left me be. I tucked the mosquito net into the bedframe extra well that night.

You know in the movies, the roosters always crow at key times like dawn. As it turns out this is a lie. Sorry for being such a city slicker and not knowing this, but hey I grew up in the suburbs, what do you expect? As it turns out, it is more like every 10 seconds starting at 3am or so. This is not picturesque either as it is in the movies. It is right outside my window, and it's usually say 50 roosters village-wide trying to outdo each other. I think there are almost as many roosters in Nong Khiaw as people. They panic easy too. They don't attack, but if you come within a few feet of one, sometimes it pretends to ignore you, then all of a sudden flaps its wings and makes a break for no direction in particular. Fortunately, there is something innately comical to me about roosters and chickens so I never felt particularly threatened. It's also weird watching cats and other animals that we in the west consider traditionally domestic associate with livestock. I saw dogs herding goats and things like that, which I suppose is common enough in farm settings but not something I get to see all that often in the east village. Ok in Chinatown maybe it'd be less far-fetched, but not really.

I took a 6 hour boatride from Nong Khiaw up to Muang Khua. Very nice scenery. Similar to my trip down the Lijiang river in China, though the limestone "karst" scenery isn't quite as overwhelming. That said, it is awful green and certainly beautiful in its own right. I rode upriver with Teresa, a girl from Ireland I'd met in Nong Khiaw and with the boat pilot and his wife. We had a few locals with us at various times, some of whom got off at smaller villages en route to Muang Khua and others whom got on for various portions of the journey. Transport is not exactly reliable here. We'd often pass broken down boats and the day before I'd often pass broken down buses and the drivers stop, offer assistance, and offer to take on any stranded passengers.

The notion of a schedule is very loose here. When I arrived at the Luang Prabang bus station that day to go to Nong Khiaw, I had been told there was a 12pm bus. I rolled in and at that time there were only 2 people ready to go, so they told me they'd be waiting for more people. I asked how long. They said, maybe 3, maybe 4pm. Aha. Most transport in Laos works this way. There's some number of buses that go each day, or in some cases every few days, and you just sort of know the general time it might roll by and you can hop on. When I was in Nong Khiaw, I met a girl from Chile who was headed over the Vietnam border. She was told that a bus would come by around 9 heading her way. Sure enough, give or take an hour, the bus rolled past us and she hopped on to the amusement of myself and the packed bus full of locals, all of whom were headed that way. Her destination was 15 hours east or so. Teresa, the Irish girl, told me of a bus ride she'd shared with locals and their livestock, and said there was a goat under her seat that she prayed wouldn't eat her bag. I guess we often prepare for things like rain, but I wonder if the companies making backpacks have considered the need for goat-proof bags. Perhaps there's a fortune to be made.

Last night was one of my favorite nights in Laos. Me and Teresa were looking for food. The first place spoke no English and when I asked them for vegetarian food in Lao, they said they had none. I decided not to pursue it and seek out another place. We found a darkened garage/kitchen nearby and wandered in as they were one of the only places that looked as if they might have food. These are dirt and rock paths in a small village mind you, there's not exactly a lot of options. So I did my best with the Lao I've picked up and my phrasebook. At one point a guy rolled in who spoke a modicum of English, the only guy in town from what I heard who can speak. He learned when he was a monk in Luang Prabang. He helped us confirm and when the dust had cleared, we had a splendid vegetarian meal shared with two Vietnamese guys who come quite often to do some sort of purchasing or trading. The 9-language phrasebook I brought with me was really worth the price of admission. So we sat and talked and smoked and drank Beer Lao with all these people. Across the street there was some kind of domestic dispute which provided the entertainment. In the end, the husband of the cook arrived from a trip to Vietnam and he spoke some Chinese which was just wonderful after struggling to communicate for hours. We did well after that and overall it was just a super evening with a local family and some friends and lots of smiles to go around. I felt very lucky to have stumbled into this tiny little corner of Laos very much by accident.

I'm thinking the electricity is going to go off soon here. Usually in this part of Laos it runs from 6-10pm, so I feel fortunate to have had time to do this much. The last few villages have handed me a candle before I go up to my room. I also want to try to charge my ipod tonight before the power goes out so I can have it on the busride tomorrow to the Chinese border. I totally have more stories and will write more again soon, I think that's enough to digest for now. These adventures aside, NYC is often in my thoughts, especially in leech-infested waters and cockroach-infested bungalows. See you all soon.

Laos

2007-09-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

I have been in Luang Prabang, Laos for a bunch of days. It's hard to know how many because everything I read in the guidebooks about Laos being a slow-moving place is completely true. The pace of life here is so laid-back and mellow, not just for the tourists but for the locals as well. Even the light in my bathroom takes 10-20 seconds to come on. The streets in town often seem empty, most people are relaxing, napping, sitting around, and just basically doing nothing and they seem quite content to do it. I read in one book that this is part of the Lao philosophy and the attitude pervades the country which of course can make it enjoyable for travelers. One book says it's the Lao PDR: "please don't rush." That being said, I met a woman who started a library here and has been living here for 4 years. She has tons of books and is helping people to study, learn English, and basically get more educational resources in their hands. She says that the laid-back approach every traveler loves so much can be a real challenge when actually trying to accomplish something.

So I've wandered the streets. This town is a UNESCO heritage something or other, so it is well-preserved and I think there are all sorts of rules about new development. There are temples everywhere and it is the former capitol of Laos actually which is hard to believe since it is a very sleepy and quiet town, but apparently again that is just how they roll here. There are a lot of foreigners here. It is the number one tourist place to visit in this country. I have been contemplating some trips to the north for apparently beautiful scenery, boatrides on the river, and increasingly less touristed destinations, but I have yet to decide. I spent yesterday at a pretty crazy waterfall about an hour outside of town where I met a whole bunch of other travelers, hiked up a perilous half-hiking-path-half-muddy-river and got small baby leeches in between my toes. There's never a dull moment!

Time for lunch, I will report on my future destination when I've sorted it all out, though I'm definitely heading to China next, just a question of how...

Bangkok

2007-09-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

Well, this sure is one big city. It's a far cry from everything I've seen and done up til now, possibly excepting Beijing though this place feels quite different than the large Chinese cities I've visited. There are lots and lots of westerners here for starters; not only westerners, but foreigners in general. In Beijing they were around, but many locals were still mildly surprised to see me and would look. Here, hardly anybody looks. Bangkok is enormous as is Beijing, though the distances aren't quite as insane here and the city is at least marginally walkable. They have a bunch of interesting mass transit options including a subway, an elevated 'skytrain' which is fancy schmancy and brand new, and like 5 different kinds of buses ranging from cheap with the craziest driver and least reliable vehicles with no doors, to the expensive with a/c and windows and everything. I have taken the two former ones and they're both efficient and clean. I haven't ventured onto the buses because as far as I can tell nobody actually knows where any of them go. At each bus stop there is a list of numbers telling you which buses stop there, and that's it. No list of subsequent or prior stops, no map, not even a final stop or destination on the signs or the buses themselves. Just one lonely number. Anyway, that being said getting around feels easier to me than in Beijing and the traffic though bad at times is nowhere near the insanity level in Beijing.

So the city is huge and feels newer and more western than any large city I've visited in Asia with the possible exception of Hong Kong. There seems to be tons of international business going on and along with that a whole lot of international restaurants, shops, and people. It feels incredibly modern and huge compared to the places I visited in Cambodia where the capitol still pretty much feels like a recovering war zone.

I've wandered around through some different neighborhoods. Some are old and filled with temples and small markets, others are bright and filled with brand new multi-story shopping malls. I've been bouncing around between vegetarian restaurants for meals, there's tons of them here, something like 40 on the list I have. Most of them have been decent though so far nothing truly standout but I still have a few days left.

Oh, in Thailand all of the toilets have these spray guns attached which I have heard referred to as "bun guns." It's kind of like the thing on some sinks you can use to wash dishes, but the pressure on the ones I've seen is a lot like a fire hose. I will refrain from being graphic but figuring out how to best approach its use was an interesting experience which I think in the end I ultimately approved of but have not yet rendered a final judgment.

Now I must sort out my next destination. I'm still trying to figure out where I can from where I'll be able to fly to China afterwards without too much hassle. Things are a little too sketchy in Burma right now and I don't want to have to think about that while I'm traveling there, so I'll save that for another time. For those of you not following in the news, the government raised fuel prices, people protested, the government arrested some people and beat up a bunch of others including monks, then monks are pissed and want an apology among other things, the monks have begun refusing alms from soldiers, the government locked the monks out of temples and monasteries, and in general it's not a good scene right now. I hope things will resolve without too much violence. So as far as my trip goes, I'm thinking something involving Laos but I have to figure out how to get from there to the Yunnan province of China sometime around next weekend and direct flights are a little limited. I'm sure it'll work out soon enough, just need to do a little research.

I'll be in Bangkok for a few more days and next time I will write a bit about the backpacker street here called Khao San Rd filled with fast food, dreadlocks, and tattoos and perhaps by then I will figure out how to articulate why it nauseates me so much.

Off to Bangkok

2007-09-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

In case anyone saw the news and is concerned, I am perfectly alright. There was an airline crash in southern Thailand but it is nowhere near where I will be, and I am flying on a much larger and established airline.

Today I left early in the morning and rode on the back of a motorbike about 60km outside of Siem Reap to a crumbling temple surrounded and pretty much overgrown with jungle. The ride out through the countryside was beautiful. The grass and trees are impossibly green and the air is fresh as long as you're not behind a pickup truck wheezing its last breath, but that didn't happen thankfully once we got out of town. While wandering the temple I was pretty much alone and only spotted a few other tourists at hour intervals. I've come to realize that crowds of people can really ruin my enjoyment of certain places. I also realized it is not so much the crowds themselves and the lack of space as it is the behavior of people. I mean, these are by and large temples but the sheer volume of people as they shout to their friends to take their picture is very distracting and in my opinion inconsiderate, but what do I know? In addition to beautiful fields of green, we also drove through some villages where people clearly don't have electricity or much of anything. We're sharing the road with naked kids and cows and a remarkable array of carts, modified bikes with attached wagons, and of course other motorbikes. Occasionally a pickup truck drives by loaded with people so much that they are practically falling out of the back. It's quite surreal to me.

At the temple it began to rain, and then pour. This created a really dramatic effect as I wandered around climbing on stone walls and through crumbling temple hallways. It let up rather quickly though I sought refuge in a doorway arch for about 25 minutes to wait out the true downpour, mostly because I had no change of clothes and I feared catching a cold on the moto ride home, but things slowed down and stopped so I headed back and met the driver not long thereafter. I figured I was homefree, but then we must have chased down the storm on the way back because the first 25 minutes of the moto ride it poured, or at least it seemed like it did at about 60km per hour. Thankfully the driver had a spare rain jacket so I was spared my cold and soon enough the sun came out for the rest of the ride. It felt wonderful to be riding in the warm weather down this sunny highway through these fields. It was a good morning.

In the afternoon I paid my second visit to Angkor Wat, the largest and most famous of the temples of Angkor. My first visit was pretty much ruined by the aforementioned tourist hordes, so this time the goal was to hit it at a time when I suspected there would be very few people there. As it turns out, in the late afternoon they all bail to go watch the sunrise with their tripods so I'm happy to report it totally worked out and around 5pm or so as the sunset, I was virtually alone at the top of Angkor Wat and it was a vastly improved experience. I was happy to have some time to truly wander and enjoy the place in quiet. It was a truly great goodbye as today was the third day of my Angkor pass and I'm pretty much ready to move on anyway.

Tomorrow I decided to fly to Bangkok rather than go overland, because the ticket is not that expensive and I'd rather not lose a day to the ride. From what I hear it's about 3-4 hours to the border of Thailand from here depending on the mode of transport, then some time at the border doing immigration, then another 4-5 hours again depending. Either way, it's a full day and bound to be horribly draining as opposed to flying which is less than an hour and I'll be there which sounds very appealing. There's plenty of time yet for long bus and train rides with more interesting scenery then what I suspect I'll see between here and there.

I met a woman today who is volunteering for a month teaching kids at a free school for kids who can't afford to go to the public schools, which apparently you have to pay for. She said it is something like 300 riel a day for the public schools... 1000 riel is 25 cents. I have been trying to learn more about the poverty here and I don't want to just pass through as a tourist and forget what I've seen. It is amazing how many children I've seen working or living in not great conditions without access to basic things like healthcare or education. There are a lot of organizations clearly trying to help, but it seems like the resources are really inadequate. Surely every kid should be able to go to school. With the hundreds of billion dollars we spend in a single year on our military budget, surely it can't be that hard to put some of that money to better use? Of course we all know I am a communist liberal hippie, so again, what do I know?

Ok, the mosquitos are officially eating me alive. I just can't bring myself to smother my body with deet just before going to bed. More from Bangkok...

Siem Reap, Cambodia

2007-09-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

Just finished my second day of temple-hopping at Angkor and it was pretty much all that I expected. It's essentially a giant ancient city with dozens of sites spread out over many kilometers. I've been hiring a tuk-tuk for the day to ferry me around for about $15 USD. The most famous site is Angkor Wat. Most of them are varying combinations of gigantic thousand year old ancient temples and occasionally structures with other functions. They are all pretty impressive and it is something to imagine what this must have been like at the height of their civilization. Contrasting that with the general poverty all around me is somewhat disconcerting at times, though people here are very friendly and though I am often offered things to buy or asked for money, everyone usually has a smile to offer, especially when I try to speak the few words of the Khmer language that I have picked up.

Siem Reap is smaller and dustier than Phnom Penh but contrary to what other travelers told me, I find that people here hassle me less for moto and tuk-tuk rides, or perhaps I'm just getting used to it now. In any case I find the city to be somewhat charming though substantially more touristy than the capitol given the swarms of people coming in to visit Angkor. There's quite a lot of western pubs and restaurants and a large collection of upscale hotels but they are extremely out of place against their surroundings. My guesthouse is on a small side street, one side of which is for some reason covered with rocks leaving a small unpaved lane for motorbike and tuk-tuk traffic of which there is not much. There's not much else commercial on this steet, a few cigarette and food stands and people's homes. There are roosters running around and I often hear them in the morning. Once again, I hope the pictures will do the city more justice than the blog.

I'm really tired but I will try to write something more detailed soon. There are so many things I see to write about like unsupervised children everywhere begging, selling things, leading cows wherever one leads cows. I've seen legless or armless groups of musicians playing and trying to sell cds on tourist paths at Angkor, all landmine victims. I met a little girl who knew all the US states and their capitols, and a whole bunch of English, Spanish, Russian, Polish, and like 5 other languages. She wanted me to buy a t-shirt. Her name was Corn. My last day in Phnom Penh I went to the Killing Fields where the Khmer Rouge murdered thousands of people. There is a monument with 8000 skulls and mass graves that have thankfully been emptied but I heard not that long ago there were still bones all over. We saw only a few bones and some teeth. The background of the genocide throughout the country is very difficult to see and I'm sure even harder for so many people here to live with, including the repercussions of having all the countries teachers and intellectuals murdered and having to recover from that.

Anyway, I'm alive and having an interesting and good time and despite the awful history of the last 50 years or so, the people seem hopeful at least and I've met many who are in school at night and driving a moto or tuk-tuk during the day. I'm here for a few more days and then on to Bangkok. More soon...

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

2007-09-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

This is my second full day in Phnom Penh, the capitol city of Cambodia. I arrived on Sunday evening on a flight from Beijing which took about 5 hours total, including a stop for about 40 minutes in Guangzhou to reload on chicken feet. At least that's why I think we stopped. I am a bit overwhelmed so let me see where I can begin.

It's really hot. Like, Africa hot. When I arrived at the hostel the first night my glasses were fogged from the humidity. It is pretty much sunny all the time, though for a few moments the clouds pass and cast blessed shade upon the city. It is the first time in recent memory that it has been so hot that I find myself walking from shade to shade. People stash themselves wherever they can during the day, the small shade of a tree, a lamppost, just about anything. I am drinking water constantly and I think staying hydrated but it is hard to tell when you are sweating all the time.

I don't even really know how to characterize the city. It's really poor and totally chaotic. It's not really a city in which one can walk, not so much because of the distances though the heat is definitely a factor, but most sidewalks are on the destroyed side if they exist. The roads vary. Major ones are paved, but many are not. Buildings also range from new to a more bombed out look. Hopefully the pictures I took will do it some justice but at the moment I still lack the ability to verbalize what I'm seeing. The main form of transport is motorbike. There are a couple of other choices but there aren't really taxis that are cars except for from the airport. There are also tuk-tuks where are kind of like rolling chairs attached to motorbikes. Those are for tourists pretty much. There's occasional variations that are bicycle rickshaws instead of motorbike, but the streets are pretty much clogged with things like that. The traffic is nowhere near as bad as Beijing though the driving style is equally insane. There are minimal traffic lights and people often drive down the wrong side of the road, especially on the motos as they are called.

The hostel is really great. The people are very friendly and they have an amazing menu so food has been no problem at all. They have a lot of vegetarian Cambodian food and a lot of Western food as well including hummus! I couldn't believe that one. It was pretty good too, though I first had two different Cambodian dishes, one of which was a kind of Thai-style curry noodle soup with vegetables and another stir-fry with tofu and curry. The food is similar to Thai but the spices are different in a complicated way that I could not begin to decipher. There is a vegetarian restaurant in town I'd like to try, but the moto drivers have a varying degree of English at their command and my Khmer is still limited to a handful of words like 'hello' and 'thank you.' so giving directions isn't the easiest thing in the world. Anyway, my room is very comfortable. They have rooms with fan and then rooms with air-conditioning, the former which is $8 per night and the latter which is $22 per night I think. I went with the fan which was totally fine the first night, though last night the power went out which I guess happens periodically around here so it got a little steamy. It was still out when I left this morning but hopefully will be fixed by the time I return. Both rooms come with complimentary mosquito net by the way, which I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe I'll get one for my apartment in New York.

Anyway, I'm kind of blown away but adjusting a bit to the hectic and intense nature of it all. I went to a few sights in town, like the Royal Palace and the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum which I'm not going to write about now but suffice to say it was among the most horrifying things I've ever seen, though I'm glad I went. This morning I visited a place called Wat Phnom, a giant Buddhist temple in a park with a large Cambodian crowd milling about and relaxing. There are monkeys hanging out in the park. That's right, monkeys. I also saw an elephant who apparently is there for rides, but he was on break and looking for shade like everyone else.

Last thing to say is that a lot of people are constantly trying to sell things to foreigners or offer them motos, tuk-tuks, rides to the Killing Fields, and other things and it is a bit relentless. You can't really sit still without someone approaching you, at least not for very long. Walking down the streets though I do see many people who just smile and wave and say hello. The vendors seem to be concentrated around tourist spots, though walking down any street I get asked at least 5-10 times per block if I need a ride somewhere. The predominant currency for tourists is USD btw, which I thought was interesting. They do have their own currency, the Riel, but even the Chinese tourists and even Cambodians are buying things in US dollars. This is convenient in a way I suppose, though they don't take coins which means the default price for anything you buy is 1USD and rarely less. Change is paid in Riel.

Anyway, everything is ok and this has been quite an intense dive into Southeast Asia though to an extent I expected it even if I didn't know exactly what it would be like. I'm pretty sure tomorrow I'm going to go to Siem Reap and visit Angkor Wat the next day, or for sunset if I make it in time. I haven't decided on the boat or bus up in that direction, apparently the boat is expensive since it is so touristy and the views aren't all that great anyway. I may be better off just taking a slow boat along some scenic route later on in Myanmar or Laos or something like that. I will as always procrastinate and decide that later.

A really big wall

2007-09-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

The chaos of this city is amazingly functional. Every single person seems as if they are about to fall off their bike or smash it into something, every bus is about to run over a dozen pedestrians who are not only crossing the street in busy traffic but walking directly into it or amidst it. Cars hardly ever signal a lane change and never patiently ride behind someone on the highway, and lanes are basically an imaginary suggestion, hardly a neccesity. Passing somebody through oncoming traffic is the norm, hills and blind curves be damned. I am still learning to just stop looking out the front window of the car, it never does me any good. I was walking down the sidewalk a few nights ago avoiding pedestrians and bicycles and a car pulled up onto the sidewalk and began heading directly towards me. No one except me is ever remotely perturbed by this behavior and in fact usually doesn't seem to notice it. People move just enough to avoid disaster. Buses cut off other vehicles across 3 lanes of traffic and people drive one inch away from hitting them until the bus just moves and the person squeezes by. It's hard to describe though I'd say the lack of fear is simultaneously concerning and inspiring.

So the chaos of Beijing proper aside, I escaped a few days ago and visited the Great Wall of China. I was pretty excited for this as it is one of the few wonder-of-the-world scale attractions I have ever visited and certainly one in a class of its own. There are many sections one can visit from Beijing. The most famous and frequently visited is called Badaling. From what I have heard it is the most heavily reconstructed and renovated section and very little of the original wall remains. Furthermore it is the closest to Beijing and so many tourists choose this since it is easy to get to and transportation tends to be easy enough to arrange. I've heard that there is an astonishingly wide array of tourist services, restaurants, guest houses, t-shirt vendors all over the wall, a starbucks, a cable car so you don't have to walk, etc. I'm sure you can all guess that I did not want to go there. So what did I do?

I left the hostel around 8am or so and took a cab to the long distance bus station in Beijing called Dongzhimen. I met my friend Annie there and we took the 980 bus about 2 hours or so to a city called Miyun, somewhere north of Beijing. We almost made it to the Miyun bus station and the guy told us to get off, so that his friend who was a taxi driver could scam us into a ride to the wall. We declined which did not stop the guy from following us around for 20 minutes. We got onto the next 980 bus shortly thereafter and went the extra 15-20 minutes to the Miyun bus station where we were originally supposed to get off, and from where it turns out that there is no local bus that takes you to the wall so we were left to bargain with these taxi and van drivers to take us the rest of the way. After much haggling they shoved us into a bus with 3 other foreigners trying to do the same thing and we were off. An hour later we made it to the wall. I should add that the hostel I'm staying at does have a round-trip service for 150rmb which will take you to this part of the wall, but we felt (correctly) that this would be way more adventurous and fun.

So we went to the section of the wall called Jinshanling, one of the older and less reconstructed sections that still somehow manages to have a cable car which we felt would definitely be cheating. We hiked up the hill to the actual wall and got our first view of it snaking off into the distance and out of view. The part of the wall near to the drop-off is fairly reconstructed but still quite impressive. Here's where it gets good. We made a left and hiked along the wall for the next 4 hours all the way to the nearest neighboring section called Simatai. The first part was hard. It was probably something like 90 degrees and the sky was clear and blue. Out there the air isn't bad and in every direction off the wall all you can see are green trees and mountains. So the scenery is definitely nice, but then come the stairs. So many stairs. And not like the stairs at home or in the subway station. Sometimes they are little stairs. Sometimes they are really big stairs. Sometimes they are crumbly stairs. Sometimes they used to be stairs but are now big piles of crumbly rocks and dirt with the occasional skittish lizard. But they are relentless. The stairs, not the lizards. So we walked up quite a ways along ancient sections of wall from tower to tower. The further we got, the older things got and thankfully an hour or two in things got a bit easier and the uphills started to be balanced with downhills. I took pictures which I will post after I leave Beijing which will hopefully do the experience more justice than I can with my words, but it was absolutely wonderful. There were many times where we were virtually alone on the wall. It's incredibly quiet, all you can hear is the sound of your footsteps and occasionally of a local you will run into who wants to sell you water at a price that is hard to bargain since they know if you don't buy it you will probably die. They have have the courtesy to freeze the water in advance and let me tell you after hiking all that way, that water tastes mighty good. The inflated price is still under $1USD so it's kinda hard to complain and they told us they didn't have much farmwork to do right now so it seems as if they clearly need the money more than we did.

So the hike took us about 4-5 hours total and was everything I wanted from my Great Wall experience. If anyone is thinking of going that I know, I'd highly recommend the hike or at least visiting a section that is not Badaling to get a bit more of a personal experience without being harassed by vendors the entire time and to see some of the older Ming era sections.

My legs were really sore yesterday and I didn't do much except arrange a few future airline tickets and get them in hand and go out for a few short walks. I mostly hung out with people from the hostel including one visit to a restaurant for dinner. I'm staying one more night in Beijing and will be off to Phnom Penh, Cambodia by plane tomorrow afternoon. A new stamp for my passport!

So far so good

2007-09-05T15:39:00.000-07:00

Though I have never been on the receiving end of a golden shower, I imagine it to be not unlike my first shower at the hostel. I'm hoping that the pressure will improve on my next attempt since it was undoubtedly affected by the heated battle between me and the guy in the stall next door for hot water. I hope you like that Ben, and for the rest of you I'm sorry.

So I've got two full days of wandering Beijing under my belt so far and have had some time to form impressions. First let me say that Beijing is really, really gigantically enormous and there is a shitload of traffic everywhere. I tried to explain "shitload" to a Chinese person the other day by the way but I'm not sure how successful I was. I know how to say "extremely big" but it just didn't feel like it had the same impact and I of course want to choose the word that is most appropriate to my meaning. So it takes a long time to get anywhere in this town because there is also lots and lots of traffic. The roads are enormous and there are constantly 12 lane roads running into other 10 lane roads forming gigantic intersections which are at least slightly terrifying, though the indifference with which locals wander into traffic is awe-inspiring. Furthermore, there are comparable number of bicycles on the street to the number of cars, which are also incredibly brazen in their choice of route. I saw a 700 year old man riding 3 inches in front of a bus at a very leisurely pace and not the least bit fazed by the honking or the shouting of the driver. This or something like it happens every 17 seconds or so. The sidewalks are equally chaotic. It turns out that about 16 million people live in this city, which I learned last night is more than Sweden and Israel. I'm going to have to trust those figures since Wikipedia is blocked by the Chinese government who apparently don't want their populace to have access to these fascinating statistics it would seem.

Another overwhelmingly obvious feature of the city at this time is that it is almost entirely under construction as the efforts to prepare for the Olympics next year continue. There are cranes everywhere and various parts of various sights and attractions are covered in scaffolding. This definitely put a damper on my visit to the Forbidden City, which for those who don't know is the former dwelling of the emperor and now a giant museum. They've actually changed the name on recent maps to the Palace Museum, which in my opinion is not nearly as awesome of a name. In fact, it's not awesome at all. So I went there and it's really big and there's crazy open courtyards and gigantic beautiful structures in ancient Chinese architectural styles. There's also rooms upon rooms of priceless treasures. All of that would seem to be interesting enough, but 3/5ths or so of the place is closed for renovation, and a bunch of the more significant structures are entirely covered in scaffolding. Furtheremore, there are droves of people almost everywhere, predominantly Chinese tourists who were walking through relatively narrow areas with really large umbrellas open to deflect the sun, and paying absolutely no attention to the fact that they were blocking the only path as they pause to take turns taking pictures of each other in front of each Qing dynasty urn. I lasted a few hours and then I bailed, plotting to return someday when construction is complete and when I can bribe some janitor to let me in after closing so I can have the place to myself, like the emperor without the harem. Or with depending on how much more of a bribe that requires.

The first day was saved with a visit to Beihai Park just north of the Forbidden City which relaxed me substantially. It was enjoyable to go back to having more than one foot of personal space around me. I think that's a cultural thing with which the Chinese are more comfortable living in a country with 1.4 billion people or so. Or maybe I'm just a wuss. Anyway, the park was wonderful, then I met a friend at a vegetarian restaurant for lunch near a Confucian Temple. We then wandered through some of the traditional neighborhoods of Beijing complete with preserved old-style architecture. Those are called Hutongs and to say that it was welcome change to the 12 lane highways is a dramatic understatement. Without going into more extraneous detail, my second day was spent at the Emperor's former summer pad, the Summer Palace. This is a wonderful and large park with a mixture of greenery, hills, quiet areas, and large ancient structures which are pleasantly unrestored but generally in quite good condition. This was possibly my favorite sight in Beijing thus far. I then took yet another public bus, my preferred mode of travel despite the traffic (only 1 yuan, about $.13usd) over to the nearby Beijing Botanical Gardens which also had a number of nice spots and which was amazingly empty save handfuls of locals at varying intervals.

In the evenings I've generally been pretty exhausted though last night I managed to stay up past 11 and now I'm at least sleeping through the nights though still waking up early which is fine. I've met zillions of people here, the hostel is possibly one of the favorites in which I've ever stayed for the general ambience, the friendly staff, and the good location in one of the aforementioned traditional neighborhoods. I'd definitely stay here again next time I come to Beijing. Last night I had dinner with my friend from Beijing and her husband and other friends at another vegetarian restaurant which she was nice enough to locate. Both of the restaurants in which I've eaten so far have been really great actually. I should probably appreciate that more since it'll be harder to locate on my next few destinations.

Finally, today is the day I'm going to the Great Wall. I'm pretty excited about that I must say. I'm going to do a 12km hike on the wall itself which I will write about tomorrow if the Mongolians don't get me.

Getting there is half the fun!

2007-09-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

I made it. I'm at the Red Lantern House in Beijing, a friendly hostel with possibly the best common areas I've ever seen. Pictures will follow, I haven't actually dug my camera out of my bag yet but that will happen soon since my next stop is the Forbidden City.

Being majorly jetlagged, I managed to stay awake after the long flight and navigating the buses to the hostel only until about 9pm, then promptly woke up again at about 1am. I stayed awake in the common area for a while hanging out with some rambunctious card players and then a few hours later headed back to bed and got another 4-5 hours, so I'm feeling pretty good right now energy-wise. I also just ate breakfast in a decidedly non-chinese style but that's what you get in these places: corn flakes and orange juice, eggs optional.

I'm staying in a 6 person dorm, 3 bunk beds, but sleeping was no problem apart from the jetlag. Once I actually fell asleep I didn't hear a damned thing. Everyone else was apparently equivalently exhausted. The hostel is large and there seem to be a lot of people here, but it's sufficiently spread out that it doesn't feel crowded. I've met people from China, Spain, Canada, the Netherlands, England, and Israel so far. After I leave in a few minutes, my first stop is to buy a SIM card so I can contact my friend in China and meet up with her. I've been speaking a decent amount of Chinese and I feel like I'm shaking off the rust a little.

Ok, enough typing, time to go out and explore. The weather is beautiful by the way, sunny and about 75 degrees I'd guess, maybe a bit more. So it appears to be an auspicious start...

It's on

2007-09-01T05:30:00.001-07:00

I'm leaving tomorrow. Around noon I'll be flying out of Newark, New Jersey and arriving a short 13.5 hours later in Beijing, China. From then I'll have about 6 weeks to explore a few different places. The main attraction in my mind right now are the Great Wall of China and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Beyond that I just plan to wander the earth. You know, like Caine in Kung Fu.

I have various other destinations in mind, but I won't bother recounting them for the moment since all of that is subject to change, but I will be updating here as on my last adventure should you be curious about where I am.

I'm pretty much all packed and ready now, just going to tidy up and 24 hours from now I'll be on my way.

A brief update

2007-05-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

Well, I live in Chinatown now. I signed a lease for one year and I will live here while I try to build MoreThanSalad into something substantial and awesome.

The next trip is being planned. I'm going to China again, all new places this time. The trip will begin in late August and unlike the previous one, will have a date of return from the outset. I'm estimating 4-6 weeks. The plan, which will be subject to change of course, is to begin in Beijing and see some things in that neighborhood, then to fly to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. I was there before; that's where I got sick and needed to go back to Hong Kong early to deal with a horrid upper respiratory infection. So I won't spend much time there, just hop on a bus or train and make my way to Dali and Lijiang, two cities in Northern Yunnan I really wanted to see last time and just didn't. So I'll be picking up where I left off so to speak. I'll then head overland towards Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, making various stops of interest on the way. Depending on how long it takes me to get that far, I'm going to Xinjiang, the northwestern most province of China. There's just a whole lot of amazing desert, dusty old towns, and old Central Asian and Silk Road history in the region. It's rather crammed together, but not ridiculously so. At least it's all in the same country.

Anyway, that is the next trip I'm planning and when I go I will be writing about it here. Til then...

I am back

2007-03-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

Well, I've postponed updating my blog because I wasn't sure what to say. I'm still not sure. I am back in New York. I spent 5 months traveling in China and it was an amazing experience on many levels. The questions most people ask:

1) How was your trip?

My trip was wonderful, thank you for asking.

2) Is your trip over?

I am back in New York now for a while. I will definitely be traveling again in China, other parts of Asia, and other parts of the world someday in the not-too-distant future.

3) What was the most amazing thing you saw/did ?

It is really hard to answer this question, basically everything I saw and did for the last 5 months was amazing in some way or another. If I have to pick some particularly highlight, try looking at the pictures from Guilin & the Lijiang river and Yangshuo, those were definitely particularly beautiful and memorable days.

4) Why'd you come back? / I didn't know you were coming back so soon.

I didn't really know either. I made most of the decisions on my trip very spontaneously, including this one. Some days I felt tired on my trip and some days I felt like I could go forever. It's nice to be seeing my friends and family and to be back in Manhattan for a while. I feel when I do travel next, I will feel energized and ready rather than perhaps taking it a little for granted having been out there for so long.

5) How's being back?

I feel like I'm living in a dream, but maybe that's just the jetlag.

My old phone number works if anyone wants to reach me who hasn't already. Those of you here, I look forward to connecting with you soon. Those of you there, I'll be back one day.

A haircut

2007-02-12T08:28:00.000-08:00

It was time. Since I left New York I had not gotten a haircut. I thought about it. But that was not doing the trick. I was starting to resemble the lead singer of a 70s funk band. I mean, more than I already normally do.

So let's see, I wander down Tianhe Bei Lu on the way to my school pondering into which Asian hair salon I shall place my fate. There was one block where I'd walked past a Korean and a Japanese place a few times. Inspecting the sign carefully and comprehending very little except an apparently low price for a basic wash & cut, I venture in armed with my prepared mental list of haircut-related words that I'd looked up diligently in my dictionary prior to attempting this little adventure.

So I walk in, and all of this takes place in Chinese of course. Yes, I'd like a haircut. Ok, purple gown/robe thing to wear. Sure, you can tie it for me. Ok, the key to the place where you are putting my backpack and aged flannel shirt so I can retrieve it later. Ah, tying it to the robe, that's interesting. Ok, now we will follow the young lady to the back area where I will lie down on the hard washing table with my head in the sink. I know some of this won't be as exotic to my ladyfriends but it is a far cry from the Sicilian barber shop in the east village where I have been going for the last year or two to get my hair cut. So anyway, this girl washes my hair more thoroughly than it has ever been washed in my life. And yes, I know how to wash my hair. But this is like 10 minutes for the first wash, then rinse. Then another 10 minutes of full scrubbing and massaging of my entire head including sharp kind of pulling motions that feel like she's trying to extract my brain through an imaginary hole in my crainum, or one that she is attempting to create. Then conditioning comes next. Then the massage begins to move off my hair and onto my neck. Then I realize I'm actually getting a full massage. This story does not have a "happy ending" for those of you are wondering. It was a rather enjoyable massage though apart from the fact that my muscles were tremendously resistant to the idea of relaxing at all. Oh, and I was happy because she told me to relax in Chinese early on and I just learned that word two days ago and understood. So quite a while later I am whisked to the barber's chair or the stylist or the hair designer or whatever they are called these days and a slightly gay man with a haircut from the 80s version of Duran Duran does some work on my hair. I mean, I'm not that complicated, it seemed fine to me. Then, they take you back to the headsink area and rinse you out all over again. Then you go back to the chair once more for additional styling and appraisal from the rest of the staff seeing as how not too many foreigners drift into this here salon apparently.

The most amazing part about that whole thing to me was that I was there for something like an hour or more, got like 4 headwashings, a massage, and a haircut and it costs me 40RMB. That would be $5 US dollars. No tip, no additional costs, nothing. To me, that is amazing. It's almost enough to make me not wait another 5 months before my next haircut.

And as a brief related cultural aside, I was buying produce the other day at a supermarket near me. The standard move for vegetables is you put the stuff in bags just like you do in the US, except they have a table at the produce department where you then bring your bags and they weigh them and print the appropriate sticker so by the time you head to the checkout, it is already priced and ready to go. So that's easy enough, but for some reason lemons are the one exception. I put 3 lemons in a bag and brought them to the weigh station and they said no. I do not know why. They are priced and paid for individually despite originating in the produce section. This is one of China's great mysteries.

What am I doing?

2007-02-06T07:50:00.000-08:00

Well, let's see. I walked through Baiyun Park the other day with a group of 5 other people or so. We walked up hills and steps, granted not that taxing, but I felt surprisingly healthy that day and not even particularly sore after walking probably the most hours since my rice terrace hike in Longji way back when. I spent most of the day speaking English and listening to a great deal of Italian and Cantonese. I played Ping Pong a while back too and actually beat a Chinese person, although the rumor is she let me win. I still felt good about the victory.

In my apartment, I did laundry for the first time. As warned by the previous tenant, the spin cycle does not run automatically nor does the water drain. While pressing random buttons to attempt to initiate said spin cycle, I pressed the one that opens the door and spills that water out into the living room instead. So I cleaned my apartment which looks nice now. I'm also getting the hang of washing dishes in the one sink with no hot water in the bathroom/kitchen. My hot plate cooking is progressing, I think I figured out how to simmer now. Saute is going to be the final step to greatness, last time I tried the oil turned awful black awful fast. Despite that setback I have managed to make some soups with noodles and vegetables that have come out decently considering I have no recipes and I am totally winging it. I bought a toaster oven to add a new dimension to my cooking output in this apartment. As a result, now I can include toast with any meal, just watch me. In a more ambitious step, I roasted a head of garlic to mix into my second homebound attempt at hummus which actually came out really good and I had to pat myself on the back for that one. A nearby imported foods store has yielded a bounty of canned beans on top of my refrigerator and increased the methane content of my apartment's atmosphere by unknown and impressive quantities. That is undoubtedly more than any of you wished to know.

I looked through my un-uploaded pictures on my camera and they are mostly food. I should weigh way more. This week I ate at a Turkish restaurant that was pretty good. They had hummus and other vegetably items. I mostly cooked. Sunday after the park I went to a Cantonese restaurant. The vegetables tasted good. I did not sample the snake or the chicken despite it being clear from the cage behind me that the ingredients were very fresh. I ate at a sushi restaurant one night. The vegetable sushi was good. I found Ore-ida fries in the imported foods store. I nearly cried. I haven't made them yet, maybe as part of lunch tomorrow. I have been considering eating fish lately if my stomach didn't improve, but the word from the latest doctor is lab verified, and there is nothing serious wrong with me. No parasites, no bacterial infection, no gestating alien soon to burst from my sternum. I have been diagnosed with something called chronic gastroenteritis. The doctor said it happens to tons of people and is the number one thing he sees in foreigners who come here. He was surprised I didn't have anything sooner. He claimed two weeks prior to my visit to have the same thing himself. So is that good?

Anyway, I've been attempting to be more social venturing out here and there for dinner, drinks, walks and whatnot. I have been studying Chinese on my own and wrote a nifty little program I'm proud of which helps identify new Chinese words derived from characters I already know. It needs some polishing but the idea works. I have been reading a lot. I read Les Miserables, Made in America and Notes from a Small Country both by Bill Bryson, and a novel called Backpack given to me by a friend. I only have one book left about life on the Silk Road around 750AD and then I'll have to go book shopping again or borrow some from somebody. I'll always have my Chinese language books which take a bit longer to go through. I still haven't gone through the Calvin & Hobbes translation of Revenge of the Babysat which I purchased way back in Kunming, though I take it in the bathroom with me every now and then. Apart from reading I've been playing the guitar a lot. I'm really glad I bought that thing. I've been playing along with some songs on the ipod and figuring out old songs I should've figured out a long time ago. I don't know if I'm actually getting any better but I can tune to Drop D other stranger and lower metal tunings really quickly now so that's something. I have also been figuring out Ben Folds's songs and other piano stuff on guitar, so that's kind of a nice change. I'm sure my neighbors' are developing an advanced appreciation of rock & roll anyway, especially around 1am or so.

So all in all, life in Guangzhou. I look out of my windows at the tall apartment buildings and the shopping complexes surrounding my apartment building and think how strange it is that I am actually living in China. I must have gotten used to it somewhat. I no longer pay attention to people staring at me. I'm no longer shocked and amazed by how different things are. I read the Chinese signs best as I can wherever I go but I feel more like I'm in Chinatown than China. It's remarkable the extent to which I've adjusted in such a short time. Hard to believe it is closing in on 5 months since I left New York.

It's late, time for bed. Trying to be on a slightly more sane schedule and not fall into my old 4am NYC nights. Tomorrow is another day.

A new apartment

2007-01-25T01:17:00.001-08:00

Well, I officially have my own apartment in the Tianhe District of Guangzhou. It's a one-bedroom and it is costing me $250USD per month. It is not fancy but neither is anything wrong with it. It is a sublet which I found through a friend of a friend who wanted to get out of her lease early. I signed a handwritten Chinese contract with the landlady probably giving her power of attorney but I have the keys at least and will keep my fingers crossed about getting my security deposit back. The new neighborhood is far more interesting and there are a few internet cafes nearby so I have regular access for the first time in a few weeks really. I have been trying to work on a program idea I had for helping memorize new Chinese characters and eventually I will start to add information to Morethansalad for all these new restaurants I have visited on my journey. There's a few grocery stores nearby and more restaurants so in general it'll be a much more convenient place to dwell for the next few weeks. I technically have the apartment until 3/8 though I don't really know exactly how long I'm going to stay yet. I have classes for another few weeks so after that is over I will see how I feel.

The internet has been kind of hosed since the Taiwan earthquake so reaching websites based outside of Asia has been pretty tough. Hopefully that'll be fixed soon but from what I read it may take until mid-February for them to finish repairs on the underwater cables that were damaged. In the meantime, uploading pictures isn't going to happen, things are way too slow. Anyway, hope everyone out there is well.

I'm still alive

2007-01-18T23:26:00.000-08:00

and living in Guangzhou, sort of. I have a temporary apartment in a 'serviced residence' which means it's like a hotel but with apartments in it where I can live for short lengths of time, in this case about 12 days in total before the sublet I found becomes vacant. That will happen on 1/25. Both of these places are within a stone's throw of the Chinese language school at which I began classes this past Monday. The classes are all in Chinese and it's at least good that I understand most of what the teacher says. Some of my old aversions to classroom study have arisen however, in particular reading vocabulary or sentences in unison with the class. I just feel like I'm in The Wall. That being said, I will probably learn a lot there. I've been working on the vocabulary from the book they gave us and there's a lot of new words in there that are useful, and plenty that are useless as well. I try to prioritize the words I learn so that I spend time and effort memorizing ones I will actually need sometime in the reasonably non-distant future since they're hard enough to remember and brain space is limited. I'm sure someone out there can use that to have a joke at my expense. There are 5 other people in my class at the moment. Four Korean ladies and one girl from Mexico. They all seem to read and write better than me but speak maybe a bit more tentatively at times. They've all been studying for longer and in universities or schools so I guess that makes sense.

Anyway, so I'm living in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou which is the business center as far as I can tell. Lots of skyscrapers, many of unusual and interesting design, wide streets, lots of stores and a few malls. There is a bit of park space here and there surrounding a large nearby stadium so it isn't too urban but it does feel quite a bit at times like midtown New York though I mean that not in a pejorative way. Certainly if there was a Village I'd be living there instead though in this case I figured as close to the school as possible is good since I know myself and avoiding class would be that much easier if I had a long commute. I have been cooking and preparing my own meals again which has been nice after 3 months or so of eating out every single day. Actually now that I think about it, it'll be 4 months very soon since I left New York. I'm going to take the classes for 3 more weeks and I have the sublet until 3/9. Everyone wants to know when I'm coming back and what I'm doing next. I don't even know what I'm doing today. I went to one music store to try to buy a guitar. I figured now that I'm sitting still and not running around on trains if I can hook up a cheap guitar to keep in my apartment it would go a long way towards my peace of mind. The first store I went to only had electrics so I'm going to try another I just found online which perhaps has acoustics. I figured I'd try to get one of those small ones. I saw one in another city in China once for something like $20USD. Doesn't have to be fancy, just needs to make sound. In an unrelated note about how cheap things are, last night I bought a large bottle of water, a pack of like 10 or so oreos, and a pack of cigarettes for $1.50USD. So cheap, and all the food groups represented.

I've been reading more lately ever since going through a novel this guy gave me in Yangshuo. That was The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Then Anne Frank's Diary which I'd never read before. Now I'm reading Made in America by Bill Bryson who everybody seems to love. There is a giant book store with a large English sub-section and many books are reasonably priced, particularly in the 'literature' section so I was thinking about going through a few of those since they're only like $2-3USD each. If only I'd had the same interest back in high school when these books were assigned to us. It only took me 15 years more plus traveling to a country 6000 miles away before I decided to read a few of them.

Alright, I'm off to hit this other store and hopefully they'll have a guitar for me, otherwise I'm going to end up with an Erhu or a Guqin or something more unusual. I wonder if my neighbors would mind if I got a drumset. Take care all of you, see you one day soon.

back in Guangzhou

2007-01-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

I suppose there have been quite a few changes in the last week or so. I'll have to sum up in a stream of consciousness sort of way. I had some really good vegetarian fried chicken at this restaurant in Taipei right near the hostel. My stomach said "no" but the rest of me said "ohhh yeahhh" and thus as they say, it was on. Good dumpling soup too. My last few days in Taipei were generally uneventful. My stomach hadn't been feeling so good and that is an ongoing battle. Most people reading this know I have had chronic digestive problems since sometime in college which run in my family really, so that isn't too new. I'm gradually getting a handle on it but Taiwan in general was not smooth sailing. Could've certainly been worse and I didn't let it slow me down, but I'm hoping some time in one place will help that. I am taking Chinese medicine which is supposed to be good for the gut. The type I bought is apparently a more traditional packaging which consists of a box in which reside 8 yellow orbs which are slightly smaller than golf balls. The yellow orbs are made of wax. What I have been doing to open the sphere is crease it a bit with my fingermail and then squeeze in such a manner as to reveal the inner medicine, which is a smaller ball apparently made of dirt but actually made of herbs of some sort. For the curious, this medicine is called Bao He Wan. I then eat the herbs which don't taste as bad as I expected and I don't mind. Without jinxing it, it definitely seems to be doing something good, or it is a coincidence that things are improving. I'll keep taking it and see what happens. It has been used for thousands of years and according to the doctor in Hong Kong, worst case is that it tastes horrible but if it kills me I'd be the first.

Spent a bit of time in Hong Kong after Taipei, my transitional city between destinations but this time kept it to only 2-3 nights while I contemplated my next move. I had been considering southeast Asia for some time but decided given my gut being not completely functional and being kind of fatigued of moving around constantly for 3 months it would be a good time to stay in one place for a while. I stopped in Shenzhen for a few days, a border town just near Hong Kong and visited my friend Grace there for a few nights before coming here to Guangzhou where I've been for two nights I believe. Today I think I located a language school that I like and tomorrow I hope to locate somewhere I can rent for a monthly fee that will have a kitchen where I could actually prepare my own food again, something I really miss and would probably go a long way to improving my health. Once I settle in somewhere I plan to resume working on my website a little bit. I just want to take some time where waking up doesn't mean some kind of feeling like I need to go out and visit a museum or a park or rent a bike and go to some village or whatever it is. I can just live here for a while and soak in a real Chinese city.

Today I saw a guy walking three monkeys down the street. I was too startled to take out my camera. I made a mental note to identify what kind of primate they actually were later but I haven't done so. It's the kind that has a red butt.

Happy New Year from Taipei

2006-12-31T10:01:00.000-08:00

All my friends and family who read this blog and those who don't as well, I wish you all a very happy new year and hope that the year to come is filled with good things for everyone.

I watched the fireworks tonight fly out of Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world according to many, standing on a downtown street in Taipei surrounded by thousands of people who had come from all over Taiwan and in some cases the world. I headed down there with a large group from the hostel which became somewhat segmented leading up to the fireworks display. It was a fitting crowd with which to spend my first New Years Eve outside the US. Japan, Canada, Korea, Australia, the US and other countries were all represented and so fitting with the company I've been keeping these last few months as I traveled. Although I was not really up for a giant evening drinking, I was happy tonight and did enjoy the company and the fireworks display. As I watched it, I reflected on the things I've done for the last 3 months and I am pretty pleased with all I have seen and experienced. This was a more challenging thing than I anticipated and I have learned a lot. I have also met interesting people and made new friends from all over the world. I feel very fortunate and grateful for having had this chance to travel this way and see just one more piece of this amazing world we live in. Miss you all and will you see one day again soon.

I did not fall into the abyss

2006-12-29T00:42:00.000-08:00

A few have inquired so fear not, I have survived what I believe is my first earthquake without even realizing it was an earthquake at the time. For those of you who didn't know, an earthquake struck off the coast of southern Taiwan I think a few days ago. I heard it was a 7.something on the Richter scale but it wasn't that strong here in Hualien. I was upstairs in my room at the hostel sitting on my bed and there had been some wind that evening so I'd been hearing that quite a bit outside buffeting against the building and then I looked up and it seemed as if the room was shaking quite a bit. I thought at first the building was rocking from the wind somehow but then that seemed impossible. My second guess was that I was having a seizure of some kind and that my head was about to blow off my shoulders like the famous scene in Scanners, but that didn't happen either. It lasted a few seconds and I went downstairs briefly afterwards and was informed that the earth had in fact quaked. Alas, no steaming fissures opened up in the earth into which parked cars fell, horns blaring in their death throes. Neither did buildings collapse. Mostly I was just confused.

I spent the last few days wandering around Hualien visiting various temples and otherwise wandering the streets here. In the evenings I spent some time with three visitors who had arrived not long ago here at the hostel, one American guy at the beginning of a 5 month around-the-world trip and two English folks taking a brief vacation trip to Taiwan before they return to Chiang Mai, Thailand where they are currently living and studying the Thai language as part of a university program back in England in Southeast Asian studies. They'll be spending a year abroad and then returning to England for two more years of study there. They're all nice and we went out to dinner the last few nights, yesterday in particular being our chance to try the Pakistani restaurant here in town which had tasty food though the menu was certainly a bit atypical. The curry was tasty but none of the standard vegetarian items such as chickpeas, lentils, or even potatoes. It was an enjoyable change of pace though. That Pakistani fellow who runs the restaurant has been living here for 14 years. His friend brought him here to Taiwan originally and in fact owns a Pakistani and Indian restaurant in Taipei where I am pretty sure I've eaten. Last night after dinner we ventured into a billiards place and played a few games as the people around us stared, mostly at the white girl and at the white guys not so much.

A word about personal space. I have noticed throughout my travel that the notion of personal space isn't so much observed here. People pass much more closely to each other and touch each other on a regular basis, or so it seems to me. But that's not so much my point. The notion of personal space extends to vehicles as well. Also between vehicles and people. Since vehicles here drive on the sidewalks on a disturbingly regular basis, there is much more occasion for interaction between the two. So quite often I see people come very close to being obliterated by an oncoming or rear-approaching truck and nobody seems to stop and reflect that they almost just died. So far I haven't seen anyone get creamed but it seems like it most only be a matter of time. Bill Hicks talked about the pedestrian-right-of-way law in California. He said I'd like to see them try that in New York. We just step on the gas and turn on the wipers.

Hualien and Taroko Gorge

2006-12-26T01:18:00.000-08:00

It has been an interesting day. I walked 14 miles along a river through a giant gorge with marble cliffs rising hundreds of feet on either side of me. Before I get to that though, let me just say that I think the shower here at the Amigos hostel in Hualien, Taiwan is the most powerful in all of east Asia. I haven't been to all of east Asia yet, but I'm pretty sure this is going to be it. Like most of the showers here it is of the handheld nozzle variety but unlike most which if they were dropped would lay inert on the shower floor, this one if released would violently fly around the room like a firehose or an angry cobra. Also, the spray is insanely wide. It must have a 3 foot diameter at arms length. It's a good thing the showers here are self-contained, because there is no way I would have been able to avoid dousing the entire bathroom including the toilet paper which is a major hostel faux pas of course. The pressure itself is not unlike the black market shower head purchased by Kramer in episode 126 of the hit series Seinfeld entitled "The Shower Head" which was intended for use cleaning elephants at the circus. But I digress.

So Taroko Gorge was pretty impressive. I took a bus from the train station here in Hualien to a town or sort of service area called Tiensiang a ways into the gorge itself. A road runs through the gorge along the river with various divergences onto trails and other explorable areas. Upon reaching Tiensiang I simply walked the whole way back to the park entrance, apparently about 14 miles but it went by very fast and only took about 4 hours. I don't even see how that's possible, maybe it isn't really that far or I just walk fast, but I felt like I was meandering quite a bit. I may return in the next few days to go explore some trails at greater length, I was informed that I probably wouldn't have time to do that and still walk the entire way. The alternatives to walking by the way were tour buses that give you a limited amount of time to linger in any given point of interest and of course an extremely limited view of your surroundings as you go. The weather was wonderful today so that was great, probably mid-60s and a bit of variance depending on whether I was in the sun or not. I feel pretty good, I'm going to try to find a vegetarian restaurant tonight to fill up, last night I had to wing it at a noodle place that worked out fine but was a hearkening back to the "wing it" days of mainland China. I guess I've been spoiled a little bit by the large number of all-vegetarian restaurants I've encountered here in Taiwan. I also a couchsurfing couple I need to call and perhaps I'll hang out with them. I'm thinking right now of staying in Hualien til Saturday and just riding the train back to Taipei then in time for New Years on Sunday night. This is a nice and laid-back place and it'll give me a chance to go back to the gorge and do a few other things of interest in town before heading back.

I have realized that this would be a great place to do a roadtrip but alas I didn't take the time before I left to get an international driver's permit which is alas required here to rent a vehicle. It's just a mail-in application to the AAA but I didn't have time to do it before I left. I will try to get that together before I come back to Taiwan because the coasts are beautiful and filled with things that are virtually unreachable without your own transport. It would be like trying to travel the Pacific Coast Highway in California on public transportation, it just can't really work. Speaking of public transportation, I was the main attraction on the way back to Hualien tonight when a gang of maybe 40 school kids around 10 years old all got on the bus to go home from school. I guess the public bus is the school bus here. They were talking to me and making faces at my accent, though I did ask the kid next to me if the french fries he was eating were good. The answer was yes, they were good.

Besides that, I'm still alive. Hope all are well.

now Kaohsiung

2006-12-23T03:42:00.000-08:00

I'd say so far in about half of the internet cafes in Taiwan smoking is allowed and in others it is not. Also, it seems really common here to have food and drinks available, sometimes with a kitchen. You have to buy at least 30 NTD worth of stuff besides your internet time. One extra way to make money I guess. The rest is the same, 99% of people playing games 24 hours a day and always full.

The second half of my stay in Tainan was pretty fun. I met up with Susan the couchsurfer who turned out to be Buddhist and vegetarian. We had dinner that night and the following night at two good vegetarian restaurants. When we met up near her work she arrived on a motor scooter so I got my first ride on the back of one of those through Tainan. Much better Tainan than Taipei or Kaohsiung, I'll tell you that. It was pretty fun and I'd say that I only had a few moments of close-my-eyes-and-hope-for-the-best. Needless to say I survived. Next stop will be driving one myself, though I think I can't do that just yet, I need an international driver's permit. I'm on it. Anyway, I hung out with Susan and spoke as much Chinese as I could though her English was pretty good so that helped with translation as necessary and also with me being lazy as also necessary. My last day I took a long-ass walk all the way to the town of Anping near to Tainan. There's a lot of old streets out there, a few temples, a large formerly Dutch fort that has been completely replaced except for a few walls, and various other interesting scenery. I'll let the pictures speak on that, which are actually up by the way. I'll put those links at the end.

Kaohsiung may not be for me. It's a big city, the 2nd biggest in Taiwan, and it is more like Taipei than Tainan, but it is substantially dirtier and less interesting based on my limited experience. It is not without its moments and admittedly my initial impression has been marred by the fact that I do not know anyone here and have thus been on my own since arrival sans the occasional meeting with a stranger. On the bright side, I am either really lucky or there are a zillion vegetarian restaurants here. They are all Chinese and Buddhist so far, but I haven't even had to look at all. Within a few blocks of my hotel I found 5 different ones by accident. It's kind of remarkable. The people running them and dining in them seem to be very friendly and have all offered to help me with the menu and otherwise been chatty about where I'm from. Last night at a buffet I met a Taiwanese group, the daughter of whom has been studying in Pittsburgh for a Masters degree. She was just back to visit her family and have a vegetarian hotpot apparently. Anyway, I walked down the Love river which runs through the center of Kaohsiung and then down into interesting but gritty residential and industrial areas near the water. Kaohsiung is a port city and there is a lot of seafront scenery with varying degrees of grunginess. I found my way to a ferry pier which I took over to Qijin island, visiting a long street of seafood snacks with the occasional small temple, a lighthouse up on a hill with a pleasant if smoggy view of Kaohsiung, and Qijin beach with a nice sunset and a strange black sand. I think it is geologic in nature and not pollution or anything before anybody gets grossed out. Later that evening I visited the Liouhe night market and wandered the street watching people and eyeballing snacks though I was too full from my prior feast to participate. There were in fact a few all vegetarian snack stands. Today was spent at Lotus Pond. That's about a 15 minute train ride north of Kaohsiung in Zuoying. It was really beautiful and surprisingly empty considering it is Saturday. I thought it was a really nice place to spend the day and the weather was again beautiful. I think I may have even gotten a bit sunburned. So these excursions out of the heavily urban center of Kaohsiung have been enjoyable but I think after my trip to the Foguangshan monastery tomorrow I'll be plenty ready to move on out of here.

Briefly, I have had many occasions to witness the Chinese tourist picture-taking technique, which consists of locating a thing which can be a famous monument, body of water, other interesting visa, or in some cases a sign indicating you have arrived at the visa, and then taking turns while every person gets a picture of themselves taken in front of that thing. Sometimes people pair up. This is usually a hands-at-the-side or clasped-in-front pose. Occasionally the "peace/victory sign" is involved. As far as I can tell it is proof of having been at the destination. It only becomes inconvenient when obstructing all passing traffic. Additionally, it just seems like just nobody lets anybody else go here. Maybe it is like that in New York too and I just forgot, but I have seen not a single person hold a door for anyone else, or when getting off a bus actually pause and let the person in the row in front of you who has been waiting go. On the street whether on foot or on a scooter or a car, nobody seems that concerned about consideration to their fellow man. Maybe I'm generalizing, but I really haven't seen one single instance and I've seen plenty of cutting off, cutting lines, shoving people to get on trains, total lack of mutual respect. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, but they are still exceptions and apparently not the rule.

Here are pictures from Taipei and Tainan.

Tainan

2006-12-20T01:21:00.000-08:00

I have arrived in Tainan, the 4th largest city in Taiwan and the former capital during imperial times. I had originally intended to go down the east coast of the island first stopping in the area of Taroko Gorge, but due to rain this week in that region I decided to instead head here by train, about a 4 hour ride from Taipei, where I have successfully located the sun. I will hop around a few cities in the south now where the weather is nice and hopefully by the time I am ready to return next week sometime, the weather on the east coast will have cleared up and I can spend time there on the way back to Taipei. I'd like to be back up there for 12/31 so I can do something interesting on New Years Eve, then fly back on 1/3 to Hong Kong.

Tainan is a nice city so far. I arrived late yesterday afternoon. The city has fewer tall buildings and feels more relaxed to me than Taipei. There is still a decent amount of people and vehicle traffic, many shops and restaurants as in Taipei, and overall it does not feel vastly different, just a smaller and more laid-back version of the capital where I've spent my time up until now. There are a zillion temples here, each interesting in its own way. Some Buddhist, Taoist, and even a Confucian Temple. There are also old forts usually 300-400 years old or so, usually built by the Chinese on top of the ruins of old Dutch structures from the time of that occupation. All that usually remains of the Dutch buildings is a wall here or there. Tomorrow I'm going to head to the site of the oldest fort which like most of the Dutch forts isn't really there anymore and has had something built on top of it, but is apparently an interesting historical site nonetheless. This is apparently Taiwan's oldest city and some of the streets do have a more quaint charm than I found in Taipei, though when I return to Taipei after this I still need to walk around the oldest neighborhood there and I'm sure I'll find similar scenery.

The people here have been slightly more curious about me than in Taipei. Up there foreigners are a dime a dozen. You don't see quite as many as in Hong Kong, but locals are largely indifferent. Down here I attract more looks though still nothing like in mainland China. I'm sure there must be some concentration of foreigners here, but I've actually yet to see a white face in the 24 hours I've been in town. I met a Japanese guy in the hostel ($8USD per night) and we went last night to a night market and then an old lit-up street where there was actually not much going on but we walked back through the city which was nice. I did encounter two friendly people almost immediately, one who offered directions simply because I looked lost, another who gave me directions and then found me 5 minutes down the road and offered to take me where I wanted to go on her motorbike. It was pretty amazing, I don't think it would happen in Taipei but who knows. There are many snack places out on the sidewalks as there are in Taipei and various restaurants and shops and pubs sprinkled throughout the city. All the sidewalks are covered as they are in Taipei and they are always unpredictable, sometimes disappearing so you have to walk in the street, sometimes turning into an outdoor seating area for a restaurant, sometimes turning into a kitchen, other times a parking lot. Sometimes several of these things at the same time. Walking around today was great, the sun was out and the weather was beautiful and I mostly wandered through the city from temple to temple and fort to fort, stopping only for a giant bowl of noodles at a vegetarian restaurant. There are a decent number here but nowhere near as dense as Taipei where I'm convinced there must be hundreds of completely vegetarian restaurants. Tonight I'm supposed to meet up with a couchsurfer who lives here for dinner, but she is still at work at the moment so I have found myself in an internet cafe typing this.

My hostel here has a curfew of 12am and then they lock the doors which kind of works out well. I'm not out for super late nights and I'm not sure during the week there are any real super late nights to be had, so being out until around then and going to bed shortly thereafter should work well for getting me back onto a reasonable schedule. With a computer in Joy's apartment I had gone back a little bit towards my New York City night owl ways and today I actually managed to get up and get out at a reasonable hour which I was excited to do anyway both for the nice weather and because it is the first day I have walked around a new city in a new while.

Hope everyone is doing well wherever you all are.

10 days in Taipei

2006-12-14T20:03:00.000-08:00

Apparently the scores to the complete works of Mozart are now available online for free. In related news, the garbage trucks in Taipei play Beethoven's Fur Elise as they drive around. As it turns out, so do the garbage trucks in Iran. Apparently in some countries it is the theme for ice cream delivery rather than garbage pickup.

I saw two live Taiwanese bands the other night at a music club here in Taipei. A club where live music is played is called a "Live House" here, which I mention only because I have encountered the term a lot and had no idea what people were talking about. I thought it referred to some sort of electronic music genre presumably with even more bass drum than any one person can reasonably handle. I jest, I have the utmost respect for those who can mix two different songs together in order to create a smooth transition between them while simultaneously wearing sunglasses. So the first band was quite bad, sort of your average high school quality vaguely rock-like band, but the second band was substantially better, probably moreso than the average rock show I've seen in New York, or let's say at least as good as. Both bands sang in Mandarin and on Wednesday night there were about 30-40 people in the place at least some of who were friends but not bad considering in China they don't even really have venues for that sort of thing outside of Shanghai and Beijing. Apparently there are maybe 5 places or so in Taipei to see live music. I hope I can catch a metal show before I depart, I really need to experience something heavy and screamed in Chinese.

It has been raining here for a few days. We've managed to go out despite that. I went to a karaoke place with Joy yesterday. It's a pretty serious enterprise here. The place we went is across the street from her apartment and the lobby is like a nice hotel with chandeliers and soft chairs and marble floors. You go to the front desk as if you were checking in, then they direct you upstairs where you are led into a private room with a large flatscreen tv, a computer interface to the karaoke machine, large sofa, table, menu for food and drinks, and your own bathroom attached to the room. The entire building can hold 1800 people and places like this are quite commonplace. It would appear they take their karaoke very seriously here though the English song selection was slightly more limited than one finds in New York but of course that's to be expected. First stop today is a giant vegetarian buffet which I'm kind of excited about. I actually have been doing a lot of winging it at local restaurants rather than visiting explicitly vegetarian places just due to circumstances of meeting up with Joy and her friends to hang out, though I have done fine. Every place here is very vegetarian friendly and getting food is no problem. Even at 7-11 they had a rice ball with soy tuna or something inside, which actually tasted disturbingly like tuna and yet somehow was not.

Joy is around through the weekend and currently planned to leave Monday. I believe I'll be transferring back to the hostel for a night or maybe two to organize my trip down to Taroko Gorge which isn't really too big of a deal, I just need to sort out where to stay once I arrive and the best way to actually explore the gorge itself which is decently huge. I'm kind of excited, the scenery on the way down there and in that area is supposed to be extremely beautiful. It's only about a 2-3 hour train ride from Taipei and it is supposed to be a nice ride. I'll probably go down the east coast to the southern tip of the island and then turn around and come back up the west coast. I'll have just about two weeks to do that before coming back and spending New Years in Taipei, my first out of the US. Not exactly sure what I'm doing yet but I'm going to try to watch the fireworks that they shoot out of Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan and actually in the world depending on which test the countries are using that day to decide. Since I am feeling better, I will probably start planning my onward journey soon since I have spent plenty of time in Hong Kong now and don't need to linger there once my return ticket drops me off. I'll probably stay only a night there before moving on to a new country yet again, but where will that be...?

A few days into Taipei

2006-12-07T19:46:00.000-08:00

Things are starting to make a bit more sense. I have navigated many a city in my travels with only a map to guide me and generally it is something I consider myself to be good at, but no city has confounded those efforts the way Taipei did initially. I'm starting to realize a bit better now why that is and find my destinations with a bit less effort. There are in fact names for the streets here, so that is a good starting point, but those streets are often not labeled in a clear and consistent way, so figuring out what street I'm on is an exercise unto itself. Next, streets often have sub-streets called lanes which can be numbered very high, in the case of Joy's apartment, it is on Lane 164 of a street I managed to find. Some addresses such as those I have found for vegetarian restaurants are further numbered with an alley as well, which is presumably a smaller turn off of a lane. The streets themselves are usually numbered with a section, and then of course to add a third dimension to the problem, restaurants and any other destinations will typically be found not on the first floor. In New York and many other cities restaurants will usually be located on the first floor or maybe "upstairs" but generally visible from the street. In Taiwan and in much of China, Japan, and other countries I've visited here, a restaurant may in fact be on the 7th or 10th or 14th floor of a building with perhaps a small sign in the front verifying its existence, or perhaps not. So you end up with addresses like this vegetarian restaurant I wish to visit later: #8, Alley 54, Lane 118, Heping E Rd Section 2, 1st Floor. If you listen carefully you can hear the database design for MoreThanSalad weeping.

So I figured out my way to a few different places now. I spent my two days here walking around and visiting a few major destinations within the city limits, some that I'd already seen but wished to see again and others that were new or for the purpose of getting food somewhere. The major destinations were the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall and Taipei 101, the two buildings that I think most define Taipei for me just for their distinctive look and size. I ventured hither and fro on the subway which is quite efficient although as mentioned before the maps within are not always intuitive but enough sense was made to get where I wanted to go. The first day I was on my own mostly though I met a number of people at the hostel with whom I chatted, primarily in Mandarin as they were largely Taiwanese. There was one Vietnamese fellow who has been studying in Taiwan for under a year and speaks Mandarin really well, such that it is hard to believe how short of a time it has been since he began learning the language. I met a few girls here from Taichung who were working at an electronics exposition at the World Trade Center here and invited me to go check it out, so I went to take a look as it was free. It was absolute and utter chaos. I have been similar things in the US before though perhaps mostly trade shows which are a little different. I know sex sells but there is just something absurd about 5 barely clothed Taiwanese girls doing a fully choreographed dance number right out of a Britney Spears video in the booth of a company selling cellphones and laptops. Microsoft had a scantily clad young lady onstage handing out prizes to eager onlookers while a salesman gave a demonstration of the new version of Windows on a giant projection. Most of the booths with the largest crowds had an attractive and pretty much naked woman shouting into a megaphone attempting to outshout the woman at the booth ten feet away. Millions of people roamed in every direction. I didn't last too long there but it was pretty entertaining and I'm glad I went. The people I met at the hostel who were there work for a company called Jordan English which helps kids learn English. I visited with them briefly but they were kind of busy so I wandered and let them try to find customers which couldn't have been easy since they all had clothes on.

I spent time yesterday walking around with a Canadian-born Chinese girl I met at the hostel who has spent the last 10 months teaching English in Korea. She had 4 days off from class and decided to take a quick trip to Taiwan to make the most of it. We took a walk in the afternoon and ventured out at one point to a river where there was a sort of path on which we could walk for a bit at night which was sort of nice but I have a feeling going back there during the day would be better. Turns out that girl from Canada (Bonnie) uses Couchsurfing too and had made plans already to meet up with a local, so I joined them for dinner at a Japanese restaurant we sort of wandered upon. At first I thought I was going to be hosed but as it seems to be turning out, most restaurants in Taiwan are pretty darned vegetarian friendly. They actually had a completely vegetarian bowl of ramen which is something I usually find hard to get at Japanese restaurants in New York. Great success.

Today I woke up and checked out of the hostel and walked over to Joy's parents' apartment in Taipei where I am currently typing this. I'll be staying here for a while then who knows. Now, to get lunch and buy bananas. They're binding you know.

I am in Taipei

2006-12-05T06:17:00.000-08:00

After two months or so of traveling in China, I have hit a new country. My intention is to spend the next 28 days here in Taiwan, a large chunk in Taipei probably and then some other period of time jumping around to other cities and visiting some of the many scenic parts of the island.

The hostel here is nice and it is for some reason I have yet to ascertain called Taiwanmex and the computer is in Spanish. Everyone who works here as far as I can tell is Taiwanese. The mystery deepens. My Mandarin seems to be coming back though I certainly feel a bit tentative after a few weeks in Hong Kong speaking largely English. Everyone here has been speaking Mandarin all night and my roommate is a Taiwanese guy on a business trip who doesn't speak much English according to him so we spoke only Chinese. I'm sure what little hesitation I feel will fade away swiftly. I did manage to score a vegetarian meal despite being the most confused about a street layout I have been in recent memory. There are all these lanes and sections here, and the real hard part is the streets do not seem to be consistently signposted in any way. Also, and I'm not making this up, in each subway station I visited there are multiple exits and occasional wall-posted maps to indicate where you will be when you leave via a certain exit. Every map I encountered, including those in the same station, was rotated to a different orientation. Sometimes North was up and right, other times it was down and left. Am I what the Governator would call a girly man for not being able to sort out which way I'm supposed to walk to get where the hell I'm trying to go? These problems aside, I found a vegetarian snack stall and ordered myself a cheap bowl of noodles, vegetables, and some sort of vegetarian meat for about $1USD. Nice to be back in a place where that is possible and easy, though I'm sure I could've done it in Hong Kong with a little bit of Cantonese at my disposal or a bit more bravery when it comes to making an ass of myself. I got over that quickly in mainland but I always had my Chinese ability to fall back on as I suppose I do here, so once again, it is ON.

My stay in Hong Kong was enjoyable. I do enjoy that city quite a bit though it is somewhat of a relief to be in Taipei in a way. Being able to speak the language is certainly a big part of it. Here I know that it will always be English or Mandarin and the likelihood of one or the other working is extremely high. In HK a lot of people spoke English and quite a few I encountered spoke Mandarin, but there was always a negotiation in the beginning of a conversation to determine which language I was better off using which always lent a certain apprehension to starting an actual conversation. Also, if I'm speaking English in a Chinese country I feel like a gringo and here it makes me happy to be able to conduct all my transactions more fluently and without forcing the other person to speak my language. Despite that, Hong Kong is a great city and I think in many ways I can call it a favorite in the world. Getting around is so easy, the mass transit system is just beautifully done and incredibly efficient. My last week there I finally purchased the Octopus card which enables the bearer to store money and then use that card to ride all mass transit including the MTR (subway), the buses, the double-decker electric tram, and all of the ferries of which there are many. Also the Airport Express train to and from the airport is covered. Now that's fairly cool, but what's really cool is you can use the Octopus card to purchase things at 7-11, Mcdonalds, and apparently other participating store chains. So you bring your stuff to the counter, the guy or gal rings it up, and you hold your card in front of a reader which beeps and you're done. No signing, no accepting the charges, just done. The card is based on radio frequencies not a magnetic strip, so you just hold it there, no swiping or anything like that. You often will see women holding their purses up to the reader, you don't even need to take it out of the bag or out of your wallet. So mass transit is great, plus you can walk pretty easily wherever you want to go within a particular island anyway. The density of stores, restaurants, shops, and people is all very high so there's rarely an uninteresting block. There are towering skyscrapers with exotic designs and in between them run tiny sidestreets with chaotic markets or larger avenues with designer stores and cafes. It's a tremendous mix of old and new as well as the occasional international influence. I saw restaurants with Indian food, Italian, French, American, lots of vegetarian of different styles of course, and many others. There are fancy places where you can spend hundreds of dollars and there are shops with only one kind of noodle soup for next to nothing.

I'll refrain for the moment from describing Taipei too much as I've just arrived tonight and have yet to really take a decent walk around the city. I was here a few years ago and it'll be interesting to see how my perception of the city has changed having now studied mandarin for a while and traveled in mainland China. My initial reaction has been positive. I'm happy to be somewhere new and on the move again and the streets on which I've strolled so far have all been very active and packed with a kind of activity and chaos that is a bit more unrestrained somehow than what I saw in Hong Kong and more like what I remember from Chinese cities. Also, I had some street food tonight for a snack after my noodle soup which is something in which I did not indulge too much in Hong Kong, perhaps because of the language barrier. Here of course I can ask any questions I like and if I don't understand the response, hey, at least I tried. I did understand in this case and scored a nice stick of grilled tofu which was "a little spicy" but my lips are still mildly numb. That dude is right on my street too. I have a feeling I'll be seeing him again. I wasn't too deterred by the pig blood and I think it was ducks' heads or something that were resting on the same rack of options. I have taken a practical approach to veganism here as I feel I must and I suppose as I always have. The bottom line is I have to eat so as long as I don't actually consume the meat I think my goal is fulfilled. I think it would be next to impossible to travel as I am and be a strict vegan even with complete fluency in the language.

So tomorrow I'll be getting up and exploring the city. The last time I was here was with Joy and her father who pretty much took care of everything and I didn't even have a map to guide me for lack of need. This time I've got a map and I'm sure by the end of tomorrow the city will be marginally less confusing to me than it was tonight. There's about a zillion vegetarian restaurants here so I think eating will pose no major problem. I am uploading some pictures from Kunming and my second stay in HK which should be up soon. Hope all y'all are well.

camp memories

2006-11-27T22:21:00.000-08:00

I went to many summer camps in my youth. The last one I went to before I stopped going entirely was a camp called Bucks Rock, which was described by many as being an artsy-fartsy place. I spent the majority of my time avoiding the numerous activities available to us, though I did manage to make something horrendous and long-forgotten in the "metals" shop and otherwise pass time in the "leather" shop where a number of others also not interested in doing much sat around in a trailer with a very overweight woman whose name I have also long forgotten talking about who knows what. I stayed in a wooden building in a cabin with three other guys, sharing two bunk beds. There were several counselors overseeing our activities or lack thereof. It was generally a very relaxed place and I'd probably enjoy it more now than I ever did then. The most productive thing I did there was spend many hours in what was literally a shed with a piano in it, probably developing my ability to a level at which I could reasonably consider going to music college though at the time that was hardly the goal. Congratulations to myself for using the time semi-effectively. Anyway, one of the counselors was a large black man named Lee who looked like Hootie if he were in the NFL. He was a nice guy and I remember one time when me and my bunkmates were up quite late playing cards far beyond our curfew, he burst into the room angrily and we expected him to scold us and tell us to get into our beds. He said, "Guys, I have only one thing to say to you." Wait for it. "Deal." We applauded I think and ended up playing cards well into the night, a game for which I wish I could remember the rules. The reason I mention the story is one of my most vivid visual recollections of the camp (although I do have quite a few apparently) is of Lee, standing on the second floor of our two-story cabin/house living accomodation and blowing out of his nose the most impressive snot rocket I had and still have ever seen. Perhaps I am romanticizing it, if it is possible to do that to a snot rocket story, but he was 6 feet tall or so and I'm pretty sure it touched the ground before it finished leaving his nose. Is that even possible? The reason I mention this is not specifically to gross everyone reading this out, but up until that time and I think until now, that was the only time I'd ever actually seen anyone do that. Not that magnitude, but just in general. Believe it or not it is something I have never attempted. I can barely blow my nose without getting grossed out. So, the full circle is that this sort of thing I saw on the street in China with an incredible regularity, and of course plenty of times in Yunnan which is why I thought of the whole thing to begin with. This is not stepping off onto the side of the road or into an alley to discretely empty one's nostrils, this is in the middle of a crowded market where are people are eating and shopping for things they do not need. For the sensitive Chinese readers of my blog, I am not telling this story to condemn or criticize everyone in China. I know this is not acceptable behavior necessarily as most of the rude behaviors I described are also not, but it is just a bit more frequent and I have to call attention to it because it is interesting and at least to me, kind of amusing. I admit though, watching so many people do that openly and spit as well does definitely make one wonder if it is part of the reason for the prevalance of all these respiratory ailments. I did hear that for a while the practice of spitting in public was being cracked down on around the time of the avian flu epidemic. Anyway, you can take my anecdote for what it is or is not worth. What can I say, I like to paint pictures.

On a sidenote, I am back in a hostel and it makes me appreciate just how incredible the Sheraton hotel in Kowloon is. I stayed there for two nights at a cost of about $200USD per night and it was far nicer than that money would ever get in New York I think, though I admit I haven't stayed in that many hotels in New York. Also, perhaps the fact that I have stayed in all these budget places for the last two months has increased my appreciation of a giant and soft bed with a thermostat in the room after spending many nights with not much in the way of temperature control while sleeping on large planks of wood with what is basically a towel on it.

My cold is continuing to improve though my stomach is a tad on the fritz, this time because I had a few beers last night. Probably excessively optimistic but I was feeling better and ended up in Lan Kwai Fong again, one of the nightlife areas around here, hanging out with a friend from the hostel so I figured what the hell. Probably overdid it on the falafel too. In any case, tonight things are fine and I just had a chana masala which can't possibly be as good as I think it was. This placed Branto just makes some really impressive Indian food. I wonder if I'd be so enamored had I not just spent 2 months deprived of what is apparently my favorite cuisine. I've said my esteem for Chinese food has been raised considerably on this trip which is true, but Indian remains in a class of its own. The guy I was hanging out with is from Bristol in England and spent 6 months living in India, so he was telling me a bit about the different street foods they have over there. Apparently a samosa can be had for only 2 rupees, at an exchange of rate of apparently 80 rupees to 1 US dollar. That's a whole lot of samosas man.

I bought a ticket to go to Taiwan today, that will be my next stop. If I do not alter the return date at a later time, I will be on the island of Taiwan in various cities from 12/5 until 1/3, through New Years. I return to HK after that and where I'll go after I'm not sure. That's the question isn't it?

Pictures

2006-11-24T21:21:00.000-08:00

So all the pictures except Kunming are up now and I labeled them so you can read witty little comments with each one.

The starting point is here.

You can also get to that by clicking where it says "pictures" on the right of the page.

Everything is going fine in HK. I feel better than I did by far in Kunming though I'm still coughing and sniffling a bit. I'm switching to somewhere new tonight, not sure where yet. Might go to the first place I stayed when I arrived in HK the first time for a few nights. The second place I stayed I liked better but they are full until Monday. I'll definitely be heading there after the weekend. I've been eating well. There's an all-vegetarian Indian place that I really enjoy and I expect they'll be seeing a lot of me to come in the next few weeks. For those of you who haven't read this for a while, there's a longer post below explaining why I'm in Hong Kong and everything else that has happened lately.

back in HK

2006-11-23T22:27:00.000-08:00

I had this great post planned about snot rockets, but that'll have to wait til next time. So I mentioned I believe that I had been coming down with a cold starting around the giant waterfall at Huangguoshu, and that didn't really improve a whole lot and in fact seemed to be getting worse over about a week in Kunming. The first half of the week I'd been going out and doing things, but I'd been getting increasingly tired and not feeling well and the doctor there wasn't really giving me a whole lot of encouraging news, or at least I couldn't understand all that much since she spoke no English and my medical vocabulary in Chinese is kinda limited, so I ended up catching a flight back to Hong Kong to seek out further medical advice. I arrived last night and saw a doctor who told me that I have a bad upper respiratory infection which is viral and was exacerbated by the high altitude and dry climate of Kunming, and now that I'm back at sea level in a warmer more humid climate I should start to feel better in 2-4 days. I had been drinking tons of water in Kunming but always felt dry no matter what. It was great to get off the plane in HK and get hit in the face with some actual humidity. Also, because of the cold and the high altitude together, it had been kind of hard to breath over there which of course had concerned me. It's definitely a whole lot easier here and I already feel better though I still have cold symptoms. I think my deep chesty cough has improved and my nose is running slightly less. This morning I walked out for lunch totally overdressed. It's in the mid-70s here and though the sun isn't out, with the humidity it is very comfortable. Anyway, bottom line is I'm ok and in a few days should be feeling better. The last few days I couldn't really go out and do anything in Kunming without feeling totally exhausted, so I really needed to get better before I do anything else and HK is well known for being the best source of medical help in the region. It's actually interesting being back here now after my 5 weeks or so in the mainland. When I had first arrived in Hong Kong from the US, it seemed so foreign and Chinese to me, but now I see westerners wherever I go and it seems like it could be pretty much another US city compared to all of the places I'd been. When I was on the plane from Kunming to HK (2 hours btw) a Chinese guy struck up a conversation with me. He turned out to be from Toronto and his son works in NYC. He said it looked like I was the only caucasian on the plane. He was right, though I hadn't actually noticed. I told him after 5 or so weeks in China I was used to being the only one.

So I'm staying in a nice hotel in HK for two nights which called a doctor for me, and tomorrow I'll probably switch to the hostel I stayed in when I was here the first time. Although HK was cheap compared to the US, now the prices seem exorbitant after spending all that time in China. I had been increasingly spoiled each place we went. Sofia and I had been spending maybe 10-20RMB on our meals for two people. I just had to spend 20HKD on a bottle of orange juice, though I'm happy I can at least get orange juice again. In the mainland all I could find was Orange Drink. Everything there seemed to be artifically sweetened. I did find a few bottles of real juice in Guangzhou I think, but by and large it was hard to come by real juice. A few of the vegetarian restaurants had stuff that they made out of fresh fruit, but in those middle 3-4 weeks that was hard to come by. I uploaded a lot of pictures finally, though I have to go through and caption them at some point so you know what you're looking at. Feel free to click the pictures link on the right if you can't wait, otherwise hopefully in the next day or so I will get around to labeling them and post a proper link in my next update. I will probably be in HK for a while now and then head to Taiwan soon to meet up with Joy in Taipei. The current goal is to get better. It should be easier to do here, the weather is really nice and I already had Indian food once last night which was absolutely amazing. I'll probably be doing that quite a bit before I leave here for my next destination.