Die Neue Beijing

Visible on many drives through Beijing, be they by bus or by V12 (yeah. ...yeah), in addition to the polylingual displays of the "One World, One Dream" slogan, is another- I first saw it in German. "Jeder ist die Gastgeber, alle bauen die neue Beijing auf". Each of us is the host- everyone builds the New Beijing- and that is what is happening. The face of Beijing is changing every day that we are here- has been changing for months, years, in preparation. The street vendors (for the most part) have been swept away somewhere. There are topiaries and intricate flower arrangements on every corner, by every major attraction. Fantastic buildings rise- are still rising as I type- into the sky that has never held them. The Olympic torch stands on a graceful steel cage, a bird's nest, that will forever represent Beijing to the world, long after the flame is put out. New subways opened days before the games. The rest of the country whispers- Shao Bo's cousin scoffs- "They're going to Beijing? That's not China." Indeed, it's like nothing we've seen elsewhere- neither the futuristic modernity of Hong Kong nor the slow rhythms of Old China, but something shifting, distinct from each, in limbo between. Neon glows at night on glass and on stone.
A woman at Yangshuo (a Filipina, teaching english) said she had intended to spend 14 days in HK but had to leave after 4- "Too expensive," she tells her companion. This isn't the China she knows and loves. "This is the New China," her friend replies. This is the direction that all of China is heading. And here we sit, in a wang ba (net cafe) in the New Beijing. The question- is it permanent? Does Beijing recoil once the international spotlight withdraws, retreat to old ways? Forge on to new? Forget her identity all together? Who was she, who is she, and who will she become?

Pant-Seats

So we're currently in Beijing (hanging out at some random internet bar with Shao Bo [who, I might add, is awesome for letting us stay with him]) watching it all go down. We left Xi'an the day after arriving (unfortunate, since I think it's my favorite city so far) and showed up here on the morning of the 8th. The attempt to get out of Xi'an was pretty hilarious, since only having one day to see the outrageous amount of preserved history and culture in the city is not anything approaching a reasonable amount of time. Waking up in the morning and storing our bags in the luggage room at the hostel we stayed in (which is a really nice place by the way; the beds are fantastic, air conditioned, and really cheap), we headed out to the center of town to see the old Qing Bell and Drum Towers, where we showed up just in time for a musical performance at each one. Inside each there was a sort of history of bell and drums exhibit, respectively, with no original bells nor drums. After that we wandered into the Muslim Quarter of the city (Xi'an's one terminus of the Silk Road and a pretty big center for Chinese Hui [who are fascintating- the whole Muslim Quarter is full of mosques and halal butchers and women in hijabs and guys in white skullcaps] people) in order to find food and the Great Mosque. We found the food (this crazy mutton and noodle soup that has flat bread [I've developed a theory- wherever Islam goes, flat bread follows] crumbled into it, which was delicious), and some tiny terra cotta warriors and some paintings, but could never quite find the mosque, which is apparently pretty subtle for something called the Great Mosque. So giving up on that, we took the wrong bus in an attempt to get to the train station and find another bus, but it gave us the opportunity to walk along the old city walls (Xi'an's one of the few Chinese cities that didn't dynamite theirs) and moat, which are separated by this neat park thing full of pomegranates that were always just out of reach. So eventually we walked to the train station and got on a bus to go see the Terra Cotta Warriors. At this point, our train was leaving in about 4 hours. Also at this point, we thought we had a pretty good handle on being able to make said train. Turns out one of those two assumptions was wrong. The warriors are pretty neat, the detail and level of preservation is spectacular, especially when you consider that they're 2200 years old. Unfortunately, they're surrounded by this outrageously large tourist trap filled with stores of every variety from restaurants and convenience stores to jade carvers and animal pelts. It took an unreasonable amount of time to actually find the entrance to the warriors in the jungle of commercialism, exacerbated by the fact that we've become used to immediately dismissing anyone trying to get our attention as trying to sell us something. After all that, we only had like half an hour to actually see the warriors (too bad since there's like 14000 of them unearthed so far) and had to rush back to catch our train. The bus back ended up taking half an hour longer than the bus there, leaving us with forty minutes to get to the other side of Xi'an from the station, pick up our bags, come back to the station, and get on the train. In rush hour traffic. Exciting. So we got on the local bus that goes past the hostel and off we went... into gridlock traffic. By the time we got there, we had about fifteen minutes until the train left, and decided to find a cab (something that we hadn't done up to this point on the trip due to pride and generally not needing them). As it turns out, all the cabs were full, except for this one guy who pulled up on this silly motor tricycle thing and offered to take us to the station for like sixty kuai. Ripoff. Unfortunately, having very little choice, with the train leaving in ten minutes at this point, we gave him forty and off we went. The ride was quite an adventure, and the guy followed through with his promise to get us there in ten minutes, by cutting between traffic, running bicyclists out of the bike lane, and even going the wrong way down a street for a while. It was worth the forty yuan. So once at the train station, with seconds to spare, we had to wait in line. Well, there goes that. We got into the station and noted that the train wasn't there. Luckily, white people in this country, especially those who speak Chinese, are treated very kindly by all and sundry. So the station attendants were very sympathetic, and found that there were free seats of the variety we'd bought on the next train out, which turned out to be the super-elite express train, which ended up being about two hours faster and for some reason, 8 yuan cheaper. Beyond that, they even let us into the first class departure lounge, which held more white people than we'd seen since leaving New York. All's well that ends well, I guess. The train ride was interesting, almost everyone on it was a foreigner. We met a couple of neat people though, including a Beijing resident who is an exchange student at a high school in Minnesota and gave us food (freaking everyone here gives us food) and the beds were the best we'd slept in except for the Xi'an hostel. The ride was too short, though, forcing us to get up at like seven in the morning (blasphemy!) and fend for ourselves in the mean streets of Beijing (since it seems I left my Lonely Planet guidebook, far and away the most useful piece of literature I've ever laid hands on, somewhere in the Xi'an station in the rush to not-make our train). The first thing one notices coming into Beijing is the smog. It's ridiculous. Everything you've heard about it can't begin to prepare you for the outrageously low air quality in Beijing. Some studies estimate a day in Beijing is the equivalent to smoking seventy cigarettes, and it looks like it too. The day we came in (which wasn't a bad day, apparently), one couldn't see to the next block for all the pollution. The moon doesn't show up at night, and staring at the sun during the day is downright comfortable. That being said, the next thing that struck me was that there are a number of very nice aspects of the city. The architecture is a neat mix of the traditional Chinese and the monumental Soviet, and everything appears to be made deliberately as large as possible. The city has purportedly cleaned up a lot for its debut this summer, and street vendors are nowhere to be found, swarms of old ladies wander the streets picking up stray pieces of trash, and the traffic is pleasant by Chinese standards. Beds of flowers and shrubberies are ubiquitous and well-maintained, the public buildings and transportation are spotless (and more often than not still under construction), and the city is just generally pretty pleasant to be in. The third and final glaringly obvious feature of Beijing was the one that gave us a bit of trouble. So the plan was to go meet Shao-Bo under Chairman Mao's picture in Tian'anmen square. Turns out the Chinese government isn't too keen on letting people wander around its most recognizable landmark on opening day of the Olympics. Probably should have seen that one coming. We got off the bus from the train station with our giant backpacks and, as we attempted to walk towards the square, were continually cut off by an ever-expanding line of police tape and Red Guard. That's the third thing I was talking about, by the way. Security. Columns of paramilitary Red Guard (these guys: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_l18DO4BvsG8/R6Z4oM9jqeI/AAAAAAAADrs/V1AvUfPpW_k/3217455.jpg) and riot police march down the streets in droves, with a couple of one or the other standing at every conceivable entrance to anything. The portable traffic barrier business must be having a field day, because vast swathes of road are restricted and sometimes blocked in what often seems a largely arbitrary manner, and every fifth vehicle on the road belongs to the police. So having neither Shao Bo's phone number nor address, we were a tad miffed to find the People's Liberation Army standing between us and our designated meeting point. Undeterred, we started off down a random street in hopes of finding the internet and thereby maybe facebook and thereby maybe Shao Bo's phone number. We eventually happened upon a Kodak print shop who let us use their internet, and after figuring out how to circumvent an apparent block on facebook, found not his phone number, but rather his Beijing address. Being clever people, we found a taxi (our first, by the way) who knew where said address was, and after stopping the car a number of times to ask directions of the Olympic volunteers who camp out on every street corner, the cabbie got us there. New problem. We've found the building, but everyone in Beijing lives in rather large, rather dingy apartment buildings. We don't have a room number. So we ask the elevator attendent (they still have those here, and apparently you're not allowed to use the elevator without her) if she knows a Mr. Li. Stupid question, in retrospect. We talked for a while, describing Shao-Bo in as specific terms as our vocabulary allows, struggling with these awful Northern accents (our teacher's Taiwanese and thus sounds very much unlike the standard Beijinger) and attracting a small crowd, until eventually, someone in charge brought me down to the apartment office, which had been converted into some sort of Olympic volunteer command center (much like the rest of the city). She looked through the list of residents and eventually did find a Mr. Li with a son named Shao-Bo, who lives on the 18th floor. Score. A couple of phone calls and a bottle of water that I tried my best to refuse later, Mr. (excuse me, Dr.) Li himself showed up and informed us that Shao Bo had gone looking for us at the train station at about five that morning (sorry about that, Shao) but would be coming back presently. Meanwhile, he would personally escort us to the station to meet Shao Bo and move into the extra apartment that some friend had temporarily donated for our purposes (first touch of bu hao yisi [embarassment at another's generosity], a theme of the week) and then we'd go to lunch at some fancy restaurant (strike two). So that having passed, the three Americans sort of just wandered around the neighborhood until it was time to go eat again (quite a shock, given that up to this point we'd been subsisting on about one and a half meals a day, and now we've eaten two gigantic meals in one day [the second was at this crazy buffet place where there's a grill in the middle of your table and you grill a bunch of largely unidentifiable pieces of animals right at your spot!]) Afterwards, we wandered off down the streets to try to go catch the excitement of the opening ceremonies with our own eyes. We eventually succeeded, finding a large group of Beijingers crowded around a similarly large TV in an electronics store window, so we sat down to watch and cheered with the crowd, just seeing the fireworks over the tops of the trees interposing between our spot and the Bird's Nest, as the main olympic stadium is called. Deciding to skip the calling out of each country (which, we correctly predicted, took forever) we set off to go find a better place to see the final fireworks of the ceremony which would ensue once they'd introduced all the teams. After a few dozen minutes looking for a good spot, we wandered into some random hospital and perched ourselves in the fourth floor windows of the maternity ward. So after an eternity of waiting and occassionally calling Chengwei (who is also in Beijing and who I have recently learned is a Bakerite, is not in fact a year above me and never in fact dated Chris Choi) to ask what was going on in the stadium, the fireworks lit up. I suppose they must have been pretty impressive fireworks, but at the distance the arrayed might of the Chinese Empire kept us at, they were nothing too special (in any case, the fireworks in wee little Amery, Wisconsin beat their pants off since Amery allows you to be about fifty yards from the launch point) and after the hubbub the Red Guard sent us home. Thus ended day one in what is currently in my opinion, the world's most exciting city.

in which i type deliriously for a few minutes then shower and sleep

we're at a hostel in xi'an, after a (get this) 26 hour train ride from Guilin. intense. where did i leave off?
we did our English corner thing, and it was a blast. i got a table full of 20-30-somethings, and we talked about everything from media blockade and the post-WW2 american attitude to changing gender roles in a home situation to why white people don't like to eat fish heads ("but the head is delicious!") i made fast friends with a few of my students, and some email addresses were exchanged. everyone kept saying that if i come back, i would be a "very popular teacher", largely because i do not have the inscrutable British accent carried by most of the volunteers (I told the students that I couldn't understand the Brits, either- which sadly is often true), and also because i'm so darn "ke'ai" (cute) and smile a lot. (halfway through, 3 of the women lean in and conspiratorially whisper- "do you have boyfriend? we think he must be very lucky.") it was a good conversation- the first time i'd really gotten to sit down with anyone in China and discuss their home and mine. (most of my interaction has been "hello! hello! 4 yuan! hello!") after we finally disbanded (an hour late because we were having fun) i listened to jorgen's table, where another volunteer was waving a black market copy of Wild Swans and trying to argue political history in a country where his "facts" are not accepted as such, which was both fascinating (to see the disparity of information) and embarrassing (the guy talked as if he were addressing fluent children rather than intelligent but linguistically limited young adults, with a rather smug aura of "bringing enlightenment" or something... it irritated me).
we left yangshuo the next day. i tried to leave a texas bandana for one of my students, but the head teacher didn't know her (She'd only been enrolled a week). we hit a bus for Guilin (approx. 2 hours), bought tickets to xi'an (leaving at 6 pm), and had 5 hours to kill. we rode the number 100 bus (open topped double decker) arbitrarily around the city (1.20 yuan) to take in the lay of the land. on the return route we stopped at an arbitrary pagoda tower and waterway, which turned out to be a park (10 yuan admission), seemingly a night hotspot but open during the day. we wandered through pagoda style buildings and bridges, and i followed the sound of what turned out to be a saxaphone playing something incredibly chromatic. we were invited in to a building when jorgen tried to take a picture through a window, and wound up having a long conversation with a shandong university music teacher (i forget the instrument, but it's the chinese equivalent of a pipe or clarinet kind of thing) who was playing sax (his english name was Dave Panda, but he spoke no english). as a result, i got to play a nearby guqin (kind of like a koto- long plucked strings over a box) and a sort of hammered dulcimer. we had a broken conversation (showed him how to pronounce some jazz standard titles) then continued on our way. got back to the station and lined up for the train (stampeding is common here- a few people move to line up and everybody rushes into place, 30 minutes early). we talked to a man and his tiny daughter who was learning english in school- "how do you do? i am so-so", who mentioned when we asked that the train was 26 hours, which perturbed us slightly (we'd been expecting to arrive morningish).

the train ride was hilarious. we had standing room only tickets, but were given two leftover seats (presumably because we stood out, also because we were going all the way to xi'an, unlike most of the standers). we sat by some nice people- i pulled out my embroidery floss to make a knotted bracelet and immediately was the focus of attention for like 6 women on the train. we talked to one old and one middle aged women in chinese, and i started to show one of them how to make the bracelet (she picked out floss colors and started, but was forced to move back when the guard came around to check tickets). a young stylish woman from Changsha (the 3 AM train stop) swooped in and took her place, and we talked to her for a long time with another man from closer to xi'an. the first woman eventually wound up with the bracelet i made (she was asleep when i finished, so i gave it to the older woman, who passed it on), which was good. the young lady made me a little Chinese knotted thing with a large stone bead on the end (she had a bag of them in her purse). later a young girl and her mother came over and finished a bracelet i'd started. the two of them and the father were on the train for most of the ride, down to the last two hours out of xi'an. most of the people we met were very patient with our lack of language skills, and found all sorts of creative ways to ask and explain things. everybody shared everything they had with us and with one another- we were given apples, asian pears, lychee gel candy, chewing gun, weird chinese sausage spam-equivalent, swiss cake rolls, water, and something resembling a madeleine over the course of the ride, which was good, because the alternative was the overpriced dining cart making occasional rounds through the train. we made friends with some of the officials (one women, whom we initially thought was threatening to kick us off the train because we wouldn't buy small plastic stools before we had seats, really liked the knotted bracelets we were making and gave jorgen a chinese name that turns out to be a cheap beer brand.
made friends with a xi'an local in the last hour or so- a 19 year old boy whose family is in guilin but he lives and works in xi'an. he likes linkin park and gave us bad info about the bus schedule, but was generally nice. we stood in line for an hour to buy tickets out (we wanted real seats this time)- we'll be headed to beijing to arrive on friday, so we'll see the terra cotta warriors tomorrow.
the xi'an train station was pretty seedy, but the city is beautiful at night- the city walls are still intact, and lit pagodas blossom from the tops. there is neon here, but not to the slick modernity of HK or Shanghai- the city has a vibrant feel. all through the second half of the train ride we passed the yellow silt mountains, the peaked doors bored into the rock where people still live- very deeply a Silk Road city. we didn't check into our hostel until 11:30, then went in search of food- steamed corn and a bag of mini- baozi of indeterminate filling.
i could spend a long time here. i think after tomorrow I will hope to come back for longer. people we've talked to have mixed opinions of xi'an- the musician in the park hates it. one of my students loves it. we'll see.

Thoughts that didn't merit their own posts

-I used a Chinese toilet for the first time. It was horrific and degrading.
-I wish people here believed in napkins.
-Yangshuo is beautiful. Sunburns less so.
-I've never been so popular before. Unfortunately, all my new friends try to sell me things and stop being nice to me when I decline. :(
-If being white in this country is ever no longer an immediate mark signal for 'special' treatment, I might like to live here.
-From now on, all my vacations must involve climbing something.
-Beer fish. Highly overrated.
-Beer beer. Less so.
-Hongshao niurou. Check. Jiaozi. Check. Suanlatang. Still waiting.
-China. Full of cute girls. 90% of which are trying to sell me stuff I don't want.
-Let me know if anyone wants presents!

the last 48 hours have been intense, in the best way possible (mostly). after getting back into the swing of speaking basic chinese,what do we do? promptly throw ourselves into the heart of Canton,where not only does no one speak english, but also no mandarin. we've decided that the best thing either of us brought was jorgen's Lonely Planet China travel guide, without which (we felt at the time) we might still be in Guangzhou. (yes, mom, I had more than a t-shirt to wear out with jorgen's relatives) We checked out of the "guesthouse" at Chungking Mansions early Friday morning (I didn't get stopped by a single person trying to sell me a rolex to or from the bakery by myself) and took trains to Shenzhen,which meant passing through immigration and customs into Mainland China. the tone of everything immediately changed- silent, sober (though helpful) guards are everywhere in green uniforms. government officials at desks have little "please rate my service" machines with buttons labeled "satisfactory, average, unsatisfactory", only visible to the "user", as it were. money is mechanically counted 3 times before currency exchange is possible. tiny slips of official paper were everywhere. from Shenzhen we hopped on a 2 hour bus to Guangzhou. the countryside is fascinating- rice paddies next to apartments next to factory smokestacks. we watched a Stephen Chow movie (the star of Kung Fu Hustle, an extremely tongue-in-cheek comedy) on the bus, peripherally, in between bouts of weird advertisements and travel displays. we were the only non-chinese on the bus, which was a broader trend for most of the next two days.

it's interesting- i've never truly been an alien, anywhere- i have been a stand-out tourist with a pack on my back, a gringa in mexico,an american in germany, but never anywhere were my presence was so totally unexpected that it illicited pointed stares. (if this is getting printed and distributed, i'll spare my grandparents the storyof how long it took to find the long-distance bus station, but promise we were safe and reasonably clever). in guangzhou we were deeply unexpected- foreigners do not ride the bus. (for that matter, white foreigners do not even ride the train, or if they do, they have advanced tickets and a guide to show them how to get there.) our train from Guangzhou to Guilin was overnight, and we were left with 6 hours to kill in the heart of downtown. we wandered and found a noodle house, where we set down our packs- i ordered in Mandarin and we sat happily eating at a table right in front of the noodle maker, who was fascinating to watch. we eventually went back to the bus station to wait (after the trouble we went to find the station, we were still expecting something to go wrong with the tickets and wanted plenty of time to be sure we were on the right bus out), and in the waiting room were a sight to see- some people merely double took, others looked back 4 or 5 times, other just stared openly, often for the entirety of the time we were near.

the fun part was the guy who came up to us and bemusedly asked why we were here- we wound up talking to him in chinese and english for about 10 minutes, which particularly caused a stir (they speak putonghua?!) with the purchase of some Mixed Congee in a can, and some mini sun-cake-like things, we were off to Guilin. The sleeper bus was merely large seats that leaned back halfway, but was more than adequate.

I do have to say that we stopped at one of themost desolate places I could ever imagine- a semi-abandoned restroom(cesuo), in the dark, no visible surrounds through the fog, a single trench with open walls over- the sense of rural decay hanging heavy, red plastic bags blowing in the parking lot or pasted to the group. the rural buildings are interesting- most of them look like they've been stacked together out of room-sized concrete blocks.

how can i describe the morning? chinese mountains are distinctive-bell curves, sharp graceful peaks, thoroughly blanketed in feathery green. i've taken dozens of pictures (in fact i need to change batteries to keep taking photos, now). but the sunrise- for the first time i was deeply thankful for insomniac tendencies. watching the ghostly spindles of foreign trees in the bus's headlights as they flew by- to stare out the window as the first sun soaks into the hanging mist, and realize suddenly that there are shadows outside- huge,monstrous-

as predawn brightens, these will become the gravity-defying hills of thousands of years of landscape paintings, sweeping and rolling- but in this first nearly imperceptible glow, in the wavering darkness, they belong to the poets- these are creatures- these are the tigers stretching, the birds still curled to roost, the bony necks of dragons rising, as they wake.

how do i tell you the details? the country that wakes up, in the fields, in the city. the ribbons of cloud that still hung suspended like rivers beneath the peaks in the breaking dawn (rainy and misty). the waterways that opened beneath us and closed again before i could capture the image. the yellow dogs of all sizes that the bus drivers, manic as they may be, still carefully, tenderly, avoid. the water buffalo walking up the downtown street with owner behind, the tiny strings of mini flags bearing the olympics logo in a town where no one cares, the painted butterfly carved into the mountainside. the way the old man carrying two bundles on either side of a pole looks at our bus as it passes before him. we took a cross section in 4 dimensions- time and space. the dog will continue on his path. the buffalo will plow a field. the paddies will grow and prosper, or do less well than their toiling farmers hope. the mountains will remain, to inspire a thousand more.

we got to guilin, were we took the number 3 bus all through to city to the Reed Flute Caves- as jorgen put it, "like carlsbad, but destroyed"- the formations are filled with colored lighting, many stalactites are broken, hand oil stops any new growth on anything within reach. a bit disappointed, we sat in a pavilion, where we were approached by a man offering us a ride on a zhupai (zhufa in the north- a narrow bamboo raft) for 10 yuan. the man spoke some english,and we talked in both languages happily. it was a short-ish lift back to the bus stop, but he let us take over the poling, which was a lotof fun. (in retrospect, this was probably a Tom Sawyer - whitewash situation, but we were happy with it).

we got back on the bus (despite the many attempts to usher us into a taxi). i talked to a senior couple whom we gave our seats to when they boarded- they were very nice and interested in our travels, and were patient and encouraging with our mandarin (they spoke no english).when we got back, we ate an a guilin restaurant and set out to find a boat to Yangshuo down the Li river- according to the tour book, Y325 per person even if we got the chinese language tour- including a lunch we didnt want and a ticket back to guilin that we didn't need. an hour, some random offers, and a bit of successful bartering later, we were on our way through the utterly rural backwater countryside in a Ba-se (bus- but it was a van) filled with locals with a guide who was taking us to a small motor fishing boat, which would take us to yangshuo for 160/person. after ascertaining that we weren't being conned, it was a neat trip- even during the half hour in which the bus stopped, we made friends with a couple by keeping their little girl quiet and laughing when she was starting to cry (she was really cute).

the boat was awesome- a tiny sketchy thing, but we had it to ourselves, and got to sit outside on the prow for most of the ride-way better view than anything we would have had on any of the ferries we saw. another group (containing, gasp, a white guy?!) was on a similar boat, and when we all disembarked they invited us along with them on their bus to yangshuo- a german man married to a cantonese woman, with her sister and two nephews. got to use my german. they were fantastically nice and helpful- they gave us taro root and tiny sweet potatoes- and wanted to drop us off at our hostel but the driver didn't know where it was. eventually they talked to two motorcycle taxis, who took us to the school (after accidentally taking us to a different one) for 5 yuan each. which, by the way, was terrifying- we didn't know which way to lean with heavy packs, never mind the driving. but all is well, and we'll be staying here for a few nights-english lessons on monday and tuesday. more later while i'm here, i'm sure.

Chaos Theory

Today I learned that life consists mostly of a largely random set of coincidences, and to ascribe any real emotional significance to could-have-beens or predicted outcomes when, in fact, the end result of any one decision is nearly impossible to predict is kind of silly.
For example: today at about noon we were wandering down the Li river waterfront in Guilin contemplating getting to Yangshuo. Suddenly, some Chinese women accosted us wanting to know if we're interested in a boat ride to Yangshuo for only 400 yuan. We declined, finding 400 to be pretty pricey. A few minutes later, we ran into another Chinese lady who wanted to sell us a 400 RMB boat ride. We asked for 300, and she got a sort of concerned look on her face. She called someone on her cell phone and said she couldn't go any lower than 360. We asked for 320 and she acquiesed. So apparently 320 RMB doesn't get you the whole way from Guilin to Yangshuo. So she put us on a little boat that brought us across the river to where the long-distance buses sit around waiting for business. Getting off the boat, I dunked my foot in the river and got laughed at by some kids a few meters away. No matter. Soldiering on, we reached the bus that was to take us... somewhere. As soon as we three (myself, Christine, and our random Chinese lady) got on, a few other people piled in without explanation. That's cool, we thought, they're probably not here to provide extra manpower for beating us and taking our cash. After driving for a while, we reached some random town where we were told to get out. Alright, cool so far, I hope we don't get raped. So after waiting for a while and conversing with our guide, another bus showed up and we piled on. This one, unlike the other Chinese buses we'd been on so far was stuffed full not only with people, but also a variety of agricultural products. So we rode that one for quite a while across dusty roads between rice paddies, musk oxen, corn plots, and fish ponds until we arrived at this outrageous traffic jam, a freaking forest of tour buses all spilling out Chinese people. Apparently this particular spot in Guangxi had been named a 'AAAA' scenic site by some committee of some kind or another. So we sat around in our bus for a while playing with a stranger's baby next to us, while the denizens of the bus grew gradually more and more flustered. We didn't, cause as we realized yesterday, even spending six hours waiting for bus is a blast cause we're doing it in China. We did get a bit worried when our guide left the bus for about 20 minutes with no explanation, causing us to speculate that perhaps this is the part where we get robbed and left for dead. But no, just as the knot of buses began to move and we really started to panic, there was our guide again, still without explanation. After leaving the AAAA tourist site, we continued onward to our first port of call, a sleepy fishing village with some fantastic classic Chinese architecture and magnificent views of the Li River's trademark mountains. There our guide put us on a flimsy-looking steel-hulled boat with some other guy and his bowl of rice at the helm. It was here that she finally asked for her money, and I was sort of saddened to find out that she wasn't coming with us anymore after the three-odd hours we had spent with her (ni gen women bu lai ma? keshi wo xihuan ni...). So we paid, said our goodbyes, and off we went. The driver was a fun one and went at some pretty impressive speeds, especially over the wakes of the much larger boats on the river, and let us sit on the prow of the boat for most of the ride. So as we headed down the river, what did we run into but another boat of the same make with (gasp!) a white person on it! This was the first white person we'd seen in quite a while, and probably the same for him, so we waved at and took pictures of each other and the boats stayed pretty close for the duration of the trip. After a pleasant hour or so on the river, it was time to get off, and our driver deposited us on some random rocky shore where he claimed we could find a bus. He drove off, leaving us a little lost, given that there was nothing nearby, when, out of nowhere, appeared our white guy, who happened to land in the same place at the same time! Turns out he and his Chinese wife are visiting from their home in Germany with the wife's sister and children. So seeing as we had interacted from afar earlier, and three of the four languages Christine and I have between us are understood by the group, they invited us to hop onto their motor-taxi type thing (a rickety contraption that the driver barrels over the pockmarked and narrow roads [I swear he was aiming for the potholes] with one hand on the wheel, one on the gear shift, and god knows what on his cell phone, which he was talking into the whole time) and go to... wherever it was they were going with them. So we accepted, seeing no other viable alternatives, and when we got off, much to the relief of my blood pressure, discovered that we were still not, in fact in Yangshuo. After discussing with Christine the fact that we had no idea where on God's green earth we were, our awesome German-Chinese family overheard and offered us a ride to Yangshuo in their chartered van. Hot. So eventually, over chatting with the family and eating boiled sweet potatoes and yutou, we reached Yangshruo, where quite a conniption erupted over how exactly to find Zhuoyue (the english college we're supposed to be teaching at). Christine and I being loathe to accept charity and having accepted an outrageous amount of it so far (plus some taro root), tried to protest, but continuing the oh-my-god-I'm-going-to-die theme of the day, the family plopped us onto a pair of motorcycle taxis who claimed to know the way, and off we went to the Xilun English School! We consulted our information once more when we got there, and finally got to the real Zhuoyue, who have graciously offered us free internet while we wait for Gary to show up to let us know if we also get a place to stay.
Now, the point of that story is to find how many places in my day in which a very slight change of circumstances could have led to a completely different and largely unpredictable set of results. Do I feel particularly attached to the sequence of events that transpired today? Not really, beyond their ability to be a pretty good story (though I think most anything that might have happened would have been a pretty good story, especially if we had really gotten lost), because while the end result of today was indeed what I planned it to be, the specific methods of doing so were so completely out of my hands that I can't possibly claim credit for having any sort of foresight in the situation. Do I worry about what might have happened? Also no, what's done is done, and we've got to work with the situation at hand rather than extrapolate too far into the future because, to put it in the terms of chaos theory, the equation diverges so wildly that to put any meaning to a prediction of a possible outcome is meaningless. So, try not to dwell on the past because you can't do anything about it, and don't worry too far ahead in the future, because you also effectively can't do anything about it. Take life one step at a time and live in the moment and I think you'll find it becomes a lot more enjoyable.

Written last night (I'm drunk again, though, so it still applies):

Wow. First night in Asia and already I am decidely unsober. Chalk that one up to a pair of expatriate relatives who left the States well before the drinking age became 21 and who are willing to pay HK 100 (about 18 bucks) for a liter of locally brewed Stella Artois. So, needless to say, China's pretty great so far. TGhe plane ride from Newark was the longest, and yet easily the best I've ever been on. The route goes upward through the Canadian arctic, skirts the coast of Greenland, passes withing 100 Km of the North Pole, descends through the blasted tundra and vast evergreen forests of Siberia, and finally whizzes above the dunes of Mongolia and the urban wasteland of modern China to an exciting just-over-the-water landing in Hong Kong. But more on Greenland. Wow. That rocky barren stretch of land, overflowing in the most literal sense with glaciation, is possibly the coolest (haha, get it?) landscape I've ever seen. In spite of the flight attendant heckling me to stop causing glare on the other passengers' video screens (for some reason we spend the whole flight in a darkened cabin with all the window shades down [saving fuel for heating, maybe?] ). Screw that, I say, there's a world out there beyond Friends reruns, and it's a great deal more exciting. So anyway, Greenland is magnificent. As we approached, I began to see little blotches of white in the blue-black distance of the ocean that at first appeared much like small clouds. As we approached closer, however, it became apparent that they were, in fact, honest-to-god icebergs. Too cool. So the frequency of icebergs picked up as we approached the shore (even at 35 thousand feet, their details were readily apparent, they seem like they'd be a ton of fun to climb on), until eventually we came upon the source of the icebergs. Why the Viking explorers named it Greenland I have no idea, since even in the perpetual sun of the Arctic summer, it's nothing but the dead brown of the rocks that jut out of the ocean and the pure bright white of glacial ice. Greenland starts off as rocky crags rising out of the ocean depths, and after a short dark stretch of coast, the land becomes more and more enshrouded by ice. The only exceptions to this rule are the areas where the coastal elevation is slightly lower, causing the ice to pour forth into the Atlantic like a river frozen in time. There are ripples, waves and patterns of flow, just like a liquid river, though significantly altered in temporal perpetuity. These features persist until they reach the edge of the glacier, where they eventually fall off to begin their new life as icebergs. I didn't actually witness this process, regrettably. Moving further inland, thbe brown snowless peaks become less and less frequent, until eventually, the land is a blank, faceless white, disrupsted only by the dune-like features of windblown snow and the occasional pool of glacial meltwater (which, by the way, have the absolute best color of sparkling azure I've ever seen in undyed water [sorry Disneyland, you lose]). Conclusion: I like Greenland. A thought: I really want to invent an extreme sport that consists of putting on a drysuit and air tank and ruding the tunnels the glacial melt lakes make on their way to the sea.
So, the rest of the plane ride wasn't as good. I finished a book and got a couple hundred pages into another (Danila, it's called The Singularity is Near, and it's your assignment in exchange for my having read Ishmael. I'll give it to you when I'm done) and slept a bit. Skipping ahead, we landed in Hong Kong with only a minor amount of skidding on the runway (it was pretty exciting). Customs was lightning fast and we arrived at the Kowloon train station at around 20:30. Next up was the adventure of finding our (super sketchy) lodging for the night. So having taken some airport lady's advice and riding the shuttle from the Kowloon station to the Tsim Sha Tsui region of Kowloon, we found ourselves on a bustling city street surrounded by jewelry shops and hawkers who, seeing that we were newcomers, tried their best to sell us what they could. Eventually, using the excellent map in my guidebook, we found the building in which we're staying: the world-famous Chungking Mansions, which is an absolutely anarchic mash-up of budget (read: really cheap) hotels, curry shops, money changers, and immigrants. It's kind of sketch. I love it, though. When we arrived, we wandered around trying to shake off the Pakistani guys doing their best to lure us to whichever hostel was paying them, until we finally found the one we were heading for. As we didn't have reservations, they didn't have room. No matter, though, we just went to the one next door (this place is full of them), and it's a pretty nice room. So once we got settled, I called Dee and Celso (said expatriate relatives, who live quite close to the Mansions [for some reason, districts here aren't divided economically, and our super-sketchy building is right next to the nicest hotel in Hong Kong]) and they invited us out to a nearby restaurant for drinks. So we talked and had a jolly good time, and were pretty overwhelmed by the amount of money they were willing to spend on us, and eventually said goodbye and wandered back to the Mansions at about 23:30, where we promptly fell asleep (after writing the first portion of this post, of course) after our first, busy, 36-hour day.