Strange Taste Horsebeans

White Coffee

2011-12-09T05:26:00.000-08:00

Each of Malaysia's three main cultures has a distinct food style which sometimes gets mixed. Kueh Teow is a Chinese rice strip dish that changes into something with a new twist when eaten at an Indian restaurant.

The food in Malaysia is great. So what's to drink? In spite of being a Muslim country alcoholic beverages are readily available. There are all kinds of tasty tropical juice drinks too. But what everyone seems to want in Malaysia is something they call "white coffee". There are several national chains that base their reputation on their white coffee. I tried it, it's nothing special. So, what's white coffee?

White coffee is heavily pedaled in Malaysian supermarkets. So I stood in the aisle and read the ingredients on the label. Essentially it's instant coffee mixed with non dairy creamer and sugar and plenty of chemicals. According to the Wikipedia entry white coffee in Malaysia started as coffee beans roasted in margarine but has deteriorated into what I found in the supermarket.

Malaysia Wrap

2011-12-08T15:58:00.000-08:00

On previous trips to Asia dinner was sometimes a hunk of tofu and some yogurt and fruit from the local supermarket because I couldn't decipher the menu in restaurants or I couldn't stomach the possibility of eating dog or donkey.

I ate in real restaurants in Malaysia. English is something of a bridge language between the races in Malaysia as well as a mark of class and prestige so restaurant menus are in English. The British had a colonial history in Malaysia so it's real English that almost always makes sense to my American eyes and ears. And the food is belt busting great too. There are plenty of Indians so there are Indian restaurants as well as those great Nasi Kandar joints. The Chinese are very big in Malaysia and many of them are Eleanor's Fujian peeps to boot so she quizzed the waiters and ordered for us off the menu.

I'd like to know more about race relations here but two weeks won't be enough. The Chinese are the economic engine where ever in Asia their diaspora has taken them and Malaysia is no exception. Many Chinese seem to live their whole lives in Malaysia apart from the majority Malay. Among their own kind they speak their Chinese dialect at home and among their own and English in business. We were befriended by a Malaysian Chinese woman on the bus to Penang who told us flat out that she spoke Hokkien and English but not the national language of Bahasa Malaysia. A Cantonese man in Penang told us casually over dinner that in his opinion without the Chinese Malaysia would be Iraq.

Many of the Chinese seem to be one flavor or another of Christian, yet another factor that differentiates them from the majority Malay Muslims. Malaysian Indians do much the same although some of them are Muslim. My guess is that the Malay resent the Chinese to this day (and vice versa), in 1969 that resentment was made formal in race riots that officially killed nearly 200. Majority Chinese Singapore was once part of Malaysia but broke away after an earlier series of anti-Chinese race riots.

The Malay feel threatened by the success of the Chinese and the other non Malay ethnic groups in Malaysia. The majority Malay control the government and have made Islam the official state religion. Each day the local English language newspapers are filled with domestic political stories and photos, almost always of Muslim women politicans in their head covering or male Muslim politicians wearing their chosen headgear of a black pillbox hat.

But this isn't Saudi Arabia, you're free to buy pork, wash it down with a beer and then stumble into the street and get hit by a car driven by a woman. Strange to me, the public spaces have been full of the sounds of Christmas, including some very religious Christmas songs and displays that in the States would make the ACLU wail all the way to the Supreme Court.

But there are in your face reminders that Islam is the state religion. In our hotel there was a quran by the bedside. We stayed in a part of town called KLCC. It's an immaculately tidy government created showcase mega-development anchored by very upscale shopping and the Petronas Towers, which represent the state owned oil company. There's a beautiful park in KLCC and inside the park is a mosque which blasts sermons and calls to prayer at daybreak. Many women wear a kind of head and neck covering open balaclava that leaves only the face visible. Women visiting from the Middle East are easy to spot, they dress for Islamic success in a head to toe in a black shroud with only a slit showing to the world for their eyes.

One other ethnic group that I had never heard of before is the Kristang. They seem to be non Malay mutts, a product of Malaysia's European colonial past. Tony Fernandes, head of Air Asia and one of Malaysia's most prominent entrepreneurs is Kristang.

So Malaysia has had a difficult and somewhat bloody multicultural history. What else? People smoke, even in Starbucks. It gets two showers a day, smotheringly equatorial hot. Forget about winter, Kuala Lumpur is less than 250 miles from the equator so the sun is up at 7am and down at 7pm with only slight variations throughout the year.

Penang Eats

2011-12-03T05:15:00.001-08:00

Penang has a great reputation for great eating and I'm finding that it's deserved. One afternoon Eleanor and I went to a Nasi Kandar restaurant on Jalan Penang named Jaya. There's no A/C and no wifi. It's open in the front with no door and it's open 24/7.

Here's what we had for lunch.

One tandoori set meal at 8.50 RM.

One lime water at 1.50 RM

One mango lassi at 3.50 RM

One Nescafe Shake at 2.20 RM

One Roti Chicken Roll at 5 RM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That's 20.70 Malaysian Ringgits for a delicious lunch for two.

In US money that a grand total of $6.61

Here's the bill:

Georgetown, Penang

2011-11-30T04:20:00.001-08:00

Eleanor really can speak Hokkien. Georgetown is supposedly around 40% Chinese and many of them are Hokkien speakers. On the way from the Georgetown bus station we were shown around town by our Hokkien speaking cab driver. I haven't a clue what he said but he supposedly told Eleanor where to eat and what to avoid.

We didn't know how good we had it in Kuala Lumpur. We were staying in a new 5 star hotel in the 5 star part of town and quickly grew used to it. Jet lagged we'd wander each morning in the dark past the Petronas Towers to our roti and mee noodle breakfast at the 24 hour ever hopping Nasi Kandar Pelita, with free wifi!

In comparison Georgetown, especially the old part of the city at first glance appears kind of third worldy, grimy, mildewed and tumble down. The sidewalks are falling apart. Our hotel is a renovated old Chinese shop house brought up to date with solar power, sensor activated compact florescent lighting, in room jacuzzi and much needed and appreciated air conditioning. The furniture has been restored but the wifi is weak, slow and goes out entirely every few hours.

Slowly some of the stronger points of Georgetown have made themselves evident. There is wonderful Indian and Chinese food here. We haven't had a bad meal since arriving, a great meal for 2 can cost $12 US. The city has a British history reflected in some of the street names that the Malaysians haven't wanted to or have been able to change. The capital of Penang state is still called Georgetown and the city that faces it on the mainland is still called Butterworth. Posted streets are still known as Hamilton, Dickens, and Campbell. Our hotel is on Jalan Hutton.

Kuala Lumpur: Want to Get Away?

2011-11-26T00:22:00.000-08:00

Gosh, do I ever. It’s been a rough year for me with a death in the family and all that being an executor of an estate entails. It’s coming up on a the one year anniversary of my Mother’s death and I’ve overseen the distribution of house and property in the way that my Mother wished. Seattle is cold, wet and dark this time of year. Escape beckons.

Kuala Lumpur is more than 8000 miles from Seattle. In flying here I easily lapped myself at more than 30 hours of being awake. But it’s a world away and that’s what I wanted and what I really need. To crawl the streets of a steamy tropical metropolis just north of the equator. To stuff my face with fragrant, creamy durian. To relax when the withering sun saps my strength.

There’s fresh durian (but unlike Thailand there's none in the supermarkets) and I’m also eating durian ice cream. But temps are in the sticky 90’s, the food is great, our hotel has the pool in the middle of their bar which is a great escape from the steamy streets and having the sun rock down out of the sky and beat down on my poor balding head. To hear the Muslim call to prayer as the morning sun lights up the Petronas Towers on the way to our roti breakfast.

Lessons Learned

2010-06-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

Now that I’m safely back at home in North America here are some conclusions and lessons learned:

1. Three weeks of a seat of the pants touring may have been too much of a good thing. What I found adventurous when I was younger and more full of piss and vinegar is now more of a grind. Wandering was more satisfying when I didn’t get sore feet and when I didn’t conk out as easily. But I’m still not ready for a ring through my nose organized tour.

2. Because I arrived in China without maps I had to take the time to find a map in English in each city. That meant seeking out a book store and having Eleanor ask in Mandarin if they carried any city maps in English, a time consuming chore.

3. One nice tool that I had in my travel arsenal was a WiFi equipped cell phone loaded with Fring and Onesuite. When I needed to call customer service to bitch at Orbitz when our hotel in Shenzhen didn’t have our prepaid reservation my 120 minutes of phone frustration to a phone number in Chicago cost me a cool $3. Sprint says that they charge $2.29 per minute (plus taxes and fees) to call home from China so 120 minutes would’ve cost me a frightening $274.80. Fring just reaches down into the contact list of my phone so no editing, no addition and then links you to the SIP provider of your choice. Once I had WiFi I could call any phone number in the US for a cool 2.5 cents per minute.

4. I used Boingo to access WiFi sites in China with mixed results. In Chengdu and Shanghai I was easily able to roam on China Mobile, in Shenzhen only in Starbucks. In Hong Kong outside of Starbucks Boingo was worse than useless. That’s because most of Hong Kong, including MTR stations, is covered by PCCW WiFi. The Boingo app would vibrate and chirp my phone, sometimes every few seconds, to ask me if I wanted to roam on PCCW, only to fail and spit up an error screen. It would then ask that I send the error report back to Boingo. But without access to WiFi, Boingo’s only purpose, that isn’t possible. Then the phone would chirp, vibrate and start the whole annoying process all over again.

*Update* Boingo's customer service folks found this critique of their service almost instantly and as you can see below they requested more information, which I provided. And I never heard from them again. When I first signed up for Boingo I had an annoying problem with their software on my Android phone, it totally disarmed all wifi access on my HTC Hero. The only cure was to wipe the phone and start all over again which I found highly annoying. I called Boingo and they sounded very concerned and requested a detailed trouble report, which I quickly sent to the address that Boingo provided. And I didn't hear from them again until they read the paragraph above and commented below. Result: I cancelled Boingo. Nice idea, poor execution. Concerned sounding customer service is no substitute for actual tech support.

5. This ain’t your Father’s communism. I was hard pressed to find so much as a hammer and sickle in China, in three weeks I spotted just one. Chairman Mao wouldn’t recognize the place. I’m sure that the Chinese Communist Party is firmly in control of the country and would stomp any and all domestic challengers with the full force of the one party state. Security was tight in spots and being behind the Great Firewall is a great pain in the ass. But China seems too busy making money or looking for ways to spend it. Who thought that China would be shopping at Wal-Mart or preoccupied with this kind of cultural revolution on state run TV?

6. I may not go back to China. The cultural gulf is so wide and the language so unintelligible that my ability to understand what I see and hear is stunted and more visits might only give me more jet lag on both ends. At some point I just to have to shrug my shoulders and admit that there’s much I’ll just never understand. But no organized tour could fill these gaps for me.

China’s 2 Richest Cities – Shenzhen & Hong Kong

2010-05-31T06:38:00.001-07:00

For years Shenzhen has been the richest city in on the mainland. It's one of the biggest cities you've never heard of with a population of over 10 million people with a stock exchange, a subway system, parks, luxury hotels. Shenzhen is a factory town, the final assembly point of the iPhone and many other things in your house. The Taiwanese company responsible for iPhone assembly, Foxconn, has 800,00 employees in China, 400,000 of them in Shenzhen alone.

30 years ago Shenzhen had a population of around 20,000. When Deng Xiaoping took over China after Chairman Mao finally shuffled off to that great collective farm in the sky he probably noticed how prosperous communism free Chinese places such as Hong Kong and Taiwan were and wanted to see what would happen if he allowed some of that capitalist evil in a corner of his kingdom. He did this first in Shenzhen and once the special economic zone was established money, factories and jobs poured over the border from higher wage Hong Kong. This transformed Shenzhen from absolutely nothing to a madhouse migrant city and Hong Kong from a city with a manufacturing economy to a city with a mostly service economy.

There's plenty of wealth out where people can see it in Shenzhen in the form of Audis, Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches and even a few Cadillacs. There's a fair amount of luxury cars tooling around on Shenzhen's wide streets with right hand drive and sets of license plates for both Hong Kong SAR and Guangdong province. While Shenzhen might be the richest city on the mainland it's the poor sister to the richest city in all of China, Hong Kong. It's a gigantic Tijuana with Hong Kong SAR playing the role of Asian San Diego. Shenzhen is a city built on hard work and other peoples money and it's paid off for many of the locals and investors. Glitzy wide shopping boulevards slowly dissolve into migrant laborer alley hells.

The women in Hong Kong are the picture of affluent fashion, their less well to do sisters in Shenzhen they seem to make it up as they go along. After I saw the third woman in Shenzhen wearing thick, black Larry King frames without any lenses (I saw one woman stick a finger through the empty lens opening to rub her eye) I knew it wasn’t a one off aberration.

Even with China's one child policy one thing that I've seen all over China are babies and pregnant women and Shenzhen is no exception. But due to the high cost of living babies in Hong Kong are few and far between. By day the familiar bellowing and barking of Chinese dialects on the mainland dissolves across the Hong Kong SAR border into another language. No, not Cantonese, the dialect most spoken in Hong Kong; it's the familiar puck-puck-puck of Pilipino. Hong Kong is packed with Filipinas. Although I'm sure they're out there somewhere it seems most of the male Filipinos are back home in Manila. Filipinas in Hong Kong serve as maids and nannies (as well as ply the world's oldest profession). Just as in Southern California the first words of a rich kid might be in Spanish, in Hong Kong his first words might be in Tagalog.

Unlike anywhere I’ve ever been in China, in Hong Kong you can drink the water straight from the tap. I drank Hong Kong tap and while it might be just a coincidence within 24 hours I had a roaring case of Chairman Mao's revenge. I knew I that eau de tap was graded as fit for human consumption the minute I went to a 7/11. In China 550 ml (roughly a pint) of bottled water can cost under .15 US, in fashionable Hong Kong it's .75 to a $1 US. Hotels in China usually spot their guests 2 bottles of water, in Hong Kong you can get all the water you want straight from the tap.

Hong Kong’s MTR is perhaps the best subway system in the world and riding it is a breeze. The announcements are in 3 languages; Cantonese, Mandarin and British English. Click here and here for samples.

Shanghai – Better City, Better Life

2010-05-27T07:58:00.001-07:00

Better City, Better Life. That's the official phrase of Expo 2010. It's plastered in English all over Shanghai along with their rendition of Gumby which they call Haibao. Haibao appears in neighborhood squares sculpted out of bushes, in both male and female form, unlicensed bootleg stuffed Haibaos are sold by hawkers on the stairways down into subway stations. You can buy a tiny Haibao to hang from your cellphone, blow up Haibaos, all sorts of Haibao shirts, there are Haibaos that wear a Mexican sombrero, Haibaos that play the bagpipes; collect the set! Olympic tchotchkes are for sale at official souvenir stands. The Chinese public has been whipped up into a nationalistic frenzy over Expo 2010 in a similar fashion to their fervor over the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The Chinese government supposedly spent the equivalent of $60 billion US dollars on Expo 2010, rivaling or exceeding what they spent on the 2008 Olympics. Thousands of people and business were uprooted from what is now the Expo site, new subway lines were built and brought in. There are Expo information desks staffed with young English and Chinese speakers wearing white Expo 2010 uniforms set up in subway stations, hotels, airports, shopping malls and street corners. Handles for standees on the Shanghai subway bear the Expo logo. There's an official Expo song by Jackie Chan (who also appears in ads plastered all over China and all over town for frozen dumplings, appliances, Canon and some kind of Chinese herbal hair darkening shampoo for men called Bawang. Is there anything that Jackie Chan won't shill?). Attendance figures are updated the days Expo highlights are transmitted to displays inside Shanghai's subway cars on the Shanghai Metro's TV channel every 15 minutes.

So after the Chinese government unloaded their fat piggy bank on Shanghai what's the Expo like? I found it sterile. Security is tight, tighter than any recent US domestic flight I've taken since 9/11. My possessions were x-rayed and I was fully wanded before my $13 US ticket for evening admission was accepted (a whole day at Expo 2010 costs a steep $23.50 US).

The first thing I saw after passing through the turnstile was the China pavilion. It's a massive, in your face, upside down red pyramid of a structure and very popular with Chinese fair goers. I saw no reason to go inside, it had a giant line snaking around it and I was already inside China. For me being in China is sort of like a visit to a giant China pavilion anyway so why brave the lines to see in miniature what was already before me?

The European and USA pavilions were very popular as well with lines snaking around them. But unlike most of the Chinese visitors to Expo 2010 I can probably go to these places if I want to. For most Chinese today world travel is just a dream. It's a dream that's closer to reality for your average Chinese national than it was 20 years ago and China's rich and well connected does travel internationally but for most of China's 1.3 billion it's out of reach and will remain so for their lifetimes. Expo 2010's expensive day pass will be as close as they come to seeing the cultures of the world.

With that in mind I chose to avoid most of the pavilions and exhibits. But while the throngs of Chinese fair goers had no desire to see one particular pavilion, I did. No waiting! The North Korean pavilion was much smaller and more sparsely attended than the one from South Korea but it was the #1 pavilion on my to do list. For a follower of all things DPRK such as myself who has come as close as a cruise on the Yalu river it might be as close as I come to actually experiencing the closed land of Juche. What's inside? Not much. North Korea must be a pretty boring place. There's a model of the Tower of the Juche Idea in front of a large mural of Pyongyang and a few other cheap statues, artworks and recreation. Any good souvenirs for sale? Kim pins are mandatory for DPRK citizens, maybe I could buy one to go with the one I bought years ago in Dandong? Nope, just some postage stamps and a small gaggle of Chinese Expo fanatics wanting to have their Expo 2010 passports stamped. Whoever was in charge of the placement of the national pavilions either has a sense of humor or once worked in the Bush administration, or both. Yes, Expo 2010 has its very own Axis of Evil section. Right next to the DPRK discount house of dioramas was the pavilion of the Islamic Republic of Iran, howdy nuclear neighbor!

Without the Expo Shanghai is a bustling city of 20 million or 25 million, nobody's really sure. There are many more subway lines than when I was last in Shanghai a few years ago and trains are frequent, cheap and backside to navel SRO any time of the day. The food in restaurants ranges from Chinese and American chain fast food to what to North American eyes is most unusual. A sharply dressed middle class is on the move. The women are sharp dressers who tend to wear more cosmetics, higher heels and show more skin than their poorer and more peasant western sisters in Chengdu. Thanks to the Treaty of Nanking Shanghai has more western influence than perhaps any other Chinese city except for Hong Kong. Some of old Shanghai hasn't fallen to the wrecking ball and the historic Bund along the Huangpu river has just completed an expensive makeover.

As when we took the high speed CRH train to Tianjin I had wanted to take a CRH train for a day trip to a different Chinese city. Nanjing is 2 hours from Shanghai by CRH, other cities are closer. These trains leave from Shanghai's North railway station but unlike Beijing's sedate and organized railway station Shanghai's was a madhouse of peasant migrants with stained decaying teeth bearing huge cheap plaid bundles made out of a shiny cheap tablecloth material full of god knows what along with buckets of bottled water and packages of instant noodles for their long journey on the what the Chinese call “Iron Big Brother” to the provinces. Security was tight as it is at most Chinese transit facilities so we couldn't even investigate buying tickets without waiting on long slowly moving security lines where the peasants got wanded and their bundles x-rayed so we gave up, it was simply too much of gauntlet to run.

Shanghai pictures are here
Panda pictures are here

Chengdu – A 2nd Tier Chinese City

2010-05-27T07:27:00.001-07:00

Beijing and Shanghai have had billions of dollars lavished on them for recent or ongoing international events and their citizens have been taken to charm school to smooth over bad habits such as suicidal driving, Chinglish and loud public spitting. So what about a large Chinese city that isn't on the prosperous coast and that hasn't had the benefits of the international spotlight?

Welcome to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in China's interior. No obvious sophistication here, the start/end route information on the side of the #6 bus route says it all, and in English: “Engine Plant → Sewage Treatment Plant”. Chengdu has only one real internationally known attraction, the Chengdu Panda Base just outside of town. There foreigners and Chinese tourists alike oh and ah over the local and endangered bamboo eating bears with stubby legs and cute coloring. Otherwise Chengdu is a large city deep in the Chinese interior that hasn't had a reason for the central government in Beijing to put it through finishing school. People fire up butts almost everywhere, smoke free sections in local restaurants are unknown. People spit in a very loud public trumpeting exuberant phlegm clearing way that is so common that it has been described by Western expats here as the Chinese National Anthem. It sounds gross and it is too. Going for a walk? Best to forget the sandals. We rode a packed Chengdu city bus and heard a grumpy passenger go off on the driver. She screamed back at him for the entire ride. Chinglish abounds.

There's no subway yet (it's scheduled to open in October) so we took buses and cabs. Traffic is hellish. The cab drivers all drive like Stevie Wonder, in NASCAR, on meth. Which doesn't really differentiate them all that much from other local drivers. Unlike Beijing there are a fair amount of bicycles, pedicabs, mopeds and three wheeled trucks in the traffic mix too. The driver of the cabs we hailed all seem to like weaving in and out of lanes and cutting over double yellow lines to play chicken with oncoming packed city buses. Near misses seem to be the rule and it's a ballet of organized chaos that all the locals, drivers and pedestrians alike, seem to be in on. I don't pity the pedestrians, they're as fearless as the drivers and have more to lose.

For anyone who melts at the sight of a panda Chengdu is the panda Vatican. It's the headwaters of panda, the home office of cute. The pandas live up to their advance billing too, they are cute, they spend their days in captivity on display in open areas surrounded by people clicking camera shutters. The pandas don't have much to do, bamboo is delivered to them and they spend their days either playing with each other, climbing trees or on their backs chomping bamboo. Keepers dressed in blue smocks enter the enclosures when the pandas aren't looking and whisk away the panda poo. Pandas are cute but they're still powerful wild animals and when a panda decides he wants something he gets it. Tourists come from overseas, stay in nice hotels and are bused to and from the panda reserve in plush tourist buses. I imagine that other than the pandas the overseas tourists have very little contact or interactions with the locals. Just to be different Eleanor and I took a cab to the reserve and took public transit back to town. I didn't come all this distance to be isolated, if I want that I can vacation in a guarded camp.

Other than the pandas there's not much going on in Chengdu for someone who has no other reason for being there, doesn't know the place and can't pierce the language barrier. There's upscale shopping, there's middle class shopping with all of the worlds chains, there's Wal-Mart, Carrefour and their Chinese imitators like Ren Ren Le (which has shamelessly appropriated Wal-Mart's trademarked yellow smiley face) and there's shopping for the poor; a gigantic local market near the north railway station which has nearly everything at dollar store prices with dollar store quality. I bought a few Chinglish shirts but this place has everything you wouldn't want: rabbits and gerbils (rodent: it's what's for dinner), baby chicks dyed in dayglo colors that nature never intended for poultry, stuffed animals, cheap shoes, cheaper clothing, and all kinds of knock off cosmetics that fell off the back of a homemade three wheeled truck.

The food in Chengdu is outstanding and cheap and we didn't even try the local hotpot Sichuan province is famous for. Eleanor speaks enough Mandarin to make sure that we didn't order dog or chicken feet or pig blood pudding any other local specialties that might offend our (well, my) tender North American sensibilities. But some of the locals seem to take a little too well to fast food chain restaurants. KFC and McDonald's are very popular along with some Asian chains (like Dicos) and local knock-offs. Eating at these joints is somehow trendy but a burger, fries and a Coke not only is crap, it costs more than a belly plumping local lunch for two at a nice restaurant. A grande drip at Starbucks costs close to $3 US and most locals drink tea but trendy types manage to drink and be seen with the other local beautiful people at Starbucks.

Except for one slightly surly cab driver the locals were great. The folks at the Buddhazen Hotel went out of their way to help us. When we wanted to take the local bus the hotel manager didn't try to talk us out of such folly, he walked us the 3 blocks to the right bus stop. When we were looking for a nice place to go in the evening the manager took us in a cab with his girlfriend to what turned out to be a fast food chain preserve. But without Eleanor and her grade school Mandarin none of this would've happened. When I'm alone in a place like this I'm like a dog with a wallet. I can buy things but, what? I can't read (she can't either), I can't write and I can't say anything that anybody in a position to help me can understand. I can pantomime but unless you're Marcel Marceau that looks stupid. Besides, I long ago got tired of the various kind of gestures I've thought up when I really need the mens room.

More China awaits. Next stop: Shanghai and the World Expo.

Click here for Chengdu pictures.
Click here for panda pictures & video.

Beijing: It’s at the 中of Everything

2010-05-27T07:13:00.001-07:00

Beijing is more colorful, more organized and less Chinglish riddled than I remember. The glow of the lavish Beijing Olympics doesn't stop there, there's much less lusty throat clearing and public sidewalk spit splashing too. For that alone the $50 billion or whatever fortune they spent on the 2008 Olympic games was worth it.
Beijing driving is a bit less aggressive too, it's still dangerous to cross the street but the drivers are a little more Miss Manners and little less Stevie Wonder. As everywhere in China Beijingers still bellow into their cell phones in public places, on the subway, in parks and restaurants; oblivious of those around them. The saving grace for me is that I have no idea what they're yelling about.

We experienced no gruesome amputees sprawled across our path on the sidewalk, people with burned off faces and ears and just one dirty Mom begging with a little screaming infant that might or might not be hers and just a few blind grannies working the always crowded subway cars.

In the run up to the Olympics the government tried to infuse the locals with some manners and in some regards such as spitting they've been moderately successful. The subway now has people standing in front of the doors of subway trains telling the waiting masses to queue up on the sides of the opening doors and to leave the center for people leaving the subway car. This works beautifully and unmonitored on the orderly Taipei Metro but so far there are mixed results in Beijing. Some people queue up on the side but to enter or leave a subway car it's still best to put your head down and pretend that you're an NFL linebacker.

In the past I remember sidewalk vendors and storefronts chock full of pirated DVD's, this time I saw just one lone street DVD vendor. Plastic bags? They're not blowing in Beijing's stiff Gobi desert breeze anymore, the government decreed that stores charge .20Y (around a penny and 1/3 US) if you don't bring your own plastic bag with you to the store.

The central government dictates other behavior as well. What else am I too think when the local police look the other way at jaywalkers, suicidal driving and driving on the sidewalk but bans the use of air conditioners by calendar date and not by temperature?

The Chinese government also decides what people can and can't see on the Internet. This has been a minor pain in the ass for me as some of the pictures I upload to Flickr appear to me to be empty blue boxes. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the logic of the Great Firewall, if I upload 3 pictures of the Beijing subway 2 might be scrubbed while the third comes through unmolested. I can read the NY Times and the Seattle Times but not http://www.publicola.net/. Even though Google left China it functions fairly normally in English but without Blogger or YouTube. There will be no blogging as the Golden Shield Project or Great Firewall has Blogger and YouTube hermetically sealed off from the 1.3 billion people within China's borders. I overcame this on previous trips to China but they seem to have plugged all of the leaks, this Blogger entry had to be uploaded later in the trip on a stopover in Hong Kong.

One positive aspect of a powerful central government is that large building projects get done in a timely fashion, the government simply decides what's best and organizes it unencumbered by lawsuits or the cries of the uprooted people in the way, they suffer for the perceived greater good. People living in the path of an office building, shopping mall or train line are sometimes given a token payment and told to be gone in 30 days. China is currently engaged in a crash program of building high speed train lines connecting its cities.

One of the first to enter service was the Beijing/Tianjin line which covers the 75 miles between the two cities in around 30 minutes at a top speed of 338 kph (observed). That's around 210 miles per hour for us non metric North American types and fast for anyone not used to measuring speed in light years. At first glance this would be wonderful for us in the US but even after having ridden China's high speed rails I'd be against duplicating this in the US. Projects like this would be tied up with lawyers feasting on them in the courts for a generation. China has more than four times the population of the US and they're concentrated predominantly in the eastern half of the country. Imagine a US with more than 4 times the people all stuffed east of the Mississippi river and you'll have an idea of what kind of density is conducive to high speed rail.

Back in Beijing we tried to see Chairman Mao in his glass casket in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Sq. He's open between 8 am and noon Tuesday through Sunday so we joined a seemingly endless line of peasants in cotton shoes and worker cadres with brown and furry teeth but halfway through the fast moving line to the old dictator a Chinese man with white gloves and a megaphone told us in Mandarin and broken English that we could bring nothing in with us. Nothing; no camera, no belt bag with wallet and passport; nothing. Of course they had a budding business of babysitting these things for a fee but I'm not leaving my consumer goodies or passport & wallet with any strangers ever.

So we wandered off to a tourist area just off of Tiananmen Sq selling Chinese tourist tchotchkes. T-shirts, caps, Chinese style blouses, panda refrigerator magnets. Eleanor likes this stuff and she indulged me two tries at seeing Mao without even a whimper of protest so I held my usual disdain for organized tourist activities and shops and did it. This section of Beijing reminded me of any Chinatown in any city I've ever visited except this one was less than a mile from the Forbidden City, even closer to Mao's glass casket and the Vatican of the Chinese People's revolution. It's a strange world indeed.

Pictures of Beijing are here.

Next stop: Chengdu, home office of the Giant Panda.

Is Nothing Sacred?

2009-11-28T11:50:00.001-08:00

I've joined my local YMCA. It's a Pacific Northwest, new agey YMCA which doesn't care whether members are Christian or a same sex couple and they're even open on the Lord's designated day of rest (other local YMCA's are not open on Sunday). There's no mention in person or on the walls of the "C" in YMCA. I wear my MP3 player and I sweat to the oldies with the rest of the overweight guys and hausfraus, doing my part to nullify the “Y” in YMCA.

My local YMCA doesn’t dwell on the “M” in YMCA either. Some genius Dad recently brought in his 4 kids, a boy and 3 little girls into the Men’s locker room. I wanted to peel off my sweaty clothes but I felt modest in front of the little girls, none was probably older than 5 or 6 and all were clothed, including Dad. I held off for awhile while the kids played at a large scale off to my left. Dad saw that I was there and that I was about to pull off my sweaty shorts and reveal my full frontal birthday suit so he called his flock away.

But one little girl had many questions about the scale and sensitive, new age Dad felt he had to give her all the time she needed, even in the Men’s locker room. I had enough and stripped. I was in the right place to be doing that too, if I can’t strip down to my birthday suit to shower and change in the Men’s locker room for fear of offending underage females and being labeled a perv then I might as well wear a burka or just stay home.

My local YMCA has three locker rooms, Men’s, Women's and and one labeled “Family”. Signs posted at the entrance to each explains that boys younger than 5 are permitted entry into the Women’s locker room. But as you can see from the outlines on the picture above the Men’s locker room is very inclusive. Boys, girls and Men and the wheelchair bound are all welcome.

I went to the showers but Dad had already waddled in there with his brood. They were all wearing bathing suits, probably washing up before going into the pool. This Men’s locker room at my YMCA has shower stalls fronted with plastic shower curtains but I came out of my stall wearing nothing but water when I realized that I had forgotten my razor. One little girl stared at full frontal naked me in amazement. One of us didn’t belong in there, can you guess which one?

But it probably doesn’t matter. I’m sure that the day is coming when men will be encouraged, and persuaded by well meaning laws if necessary to refrain from nakedness and being offensive with their mere presence to young girls in the Men’s locker room.

Still More on Phnom Penh & Cambodia

2009-11-08T08:50:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how they deal with their genocidal past in Camrybodia. S21/Tuol Sleng where the Khmer Rouge did their photographing and some of their torturing is something of a tourist attraction. Most of the people I saw visiting inside were foreigners like me but I did see a few locals. All of the people outside were aggressive beggars waiting to pounce on the foreigners leaving.

Pol Pot died of old age a free man and his henchmen are either free men or in the current government. Most of Asia runs on an undercurrent of corruption that would be astonishing by US standards but in Cambodia it's right out there in in the open in such a festering cesspool that even I could smell it. If a citizen attracts the attention of the Cambodian government and speaks out the government will sue them for defamation, and win. If you sue them for defamation they'll sue you back for defamation for having sued them and they'll win.

Another big problem in Cambodia is acid. They supposedly use it in a process on rubber plantations but it has other more social uses. Have a grudge against someone? Just hire some goons, arm them with acid and with just a splash your victim will be taught a lesson they'll never forget (if they live). Stories like this are easy to find:
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009102329141/National-news/acid-attack-appeal-scheduled.html
http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodia.daily/selected_features/acid_laced_vengeance.htm

There's a whole network of charities just for acid attack survivors.

Phnom Penh still suffers from the Khmer Rouge period. Phnom Penh was abandoned for a few years and anyone who knew anything about maintaining it (plumbers, electricians, masons, mechanics, elevator repairmen, traffic engineers and planners, etc) was executed. Today much of Phnom Penh's houses have no electricity, business all keep generators about the size of a small pickup truck out front or out back. The country has no electric grid. The government runs what electricity production and importation (from Thailand & VN) there is and charges at the meter about 4 times what electrical service costs in Thailand & VN but hey, someone has to pay for those $80,000 Lexus SUV's and fenced compounds I saw in Phnom Penh.

I flew to Phnom Penh from Bangkok, Phnom Penh makes Bangkok seem like the city of the future. Bangkok is still a chaotic but loveable mess of a 3rd world city but it has reliable electricity, well stocked stores, modern rail mass transit, even taxis. Phnom Penh, a national capital of 2 million has none of these things, not even so much as a city bus. Gangs of street kids aggressively and persistently beg, in English, to pasty white faced me. I've read that their money goes to glue and gasoline to sniff.

But for a foreigner like me Phnom Penh was memorable fun. Good food, dollar beer, lots to see but I stayed in the part of town where the UN and the do-gooder NGO's live. Parts of Phnom Penh that I saw to and from the airport unfortunately looked like 3rd world hell holes.

In Thailand Mr Gray Gets Play

2009-10-16T04:48:00.001-07:00

Come to Bangkok and you’ll notice it right away, older White guys with much younger partners. To my eye the White guys have a much younger woman Thai woman on their arms but sometimes the older white guy is being accompanied by a much younger Thai man. This situation was much less noticeable in Singapore. So what’s going on here?

Just as the US has different ethnic groups that have been drawn at different times to different areas of the country (such as Blacks leaving the South for the opportunity in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest) the same is true for Thailand. Darker skinned country people are drawn to the wealth, glitter and jobs in Bangkok, leaving the farm, poverty and traditional Thai village life. Thai men get traditional Thai male jobs and women often find their fortunes administering traditional Thai massage, which, depending on the situation may or may not be prostitution. I’ve been approached over and over for “massasse”. I didn’t pursue which propositions were for massage and which were for the world’s oldest profession. But some looked like country girls and some looked like workin’ girls.

So what about the farang men (I suppose it happens but I’ve yet to see an older Thai man with a young white woman on his arm)? They’re often gray haired, bald, bubble bellied and/or gimpy. Back in Europe or Australia he’d be Grandpa and no chance to be in the company of a much younger man or woman, much less live with and sleep with them. Back at home there’d be no play for Mr Gray.

It’s also a great opportunity for the woman to play Thai social leapfrog. Darker skinned northern Isan women seem to be at the lower levels of the Thai social pecking order. Skin color seems to be very important in Thailand, skin whitening and lightening creams are advertised on billboards and in TV commercials that end with a woman finding love only after she finds lighter skin. With an older white man in her life she can dress better, wear cosmetics and have lighter skinned hapa children. It seems to be win/win for everybody. And everybody deserves the chance to be happy.

Phnom Penh – Where Old Camrys Go to Die

2009-10-08T06:48:00.000-07:00

What do you call a country where everything is priced in US dollars, where a beer costs just $1 (.75 during happy hour) but signs in English warn you to not patronize the country’s infamous child sex industry? Here’s a hint, I found it in my hotel room but I’m seeing it all over town:

Cambodia is still recovering from wars involving the United States, its neighbor to the east Vietnam and a civil war which culminated in a genocide that wiped out a generation and targeted anyone with any knowledge (doctors, teachers, engineers) about anything beyond day to day farming and peasantry for death. 2 million Cambodians perished at the hands of their countrymen.

Here's a story that ties obvious corruption and a convicted Russian pedophile in one nasty little package: Pedophile Was Permitted To Leave Prison Why? To go visit one of his many investments,of course.

The present government of Cambodia is a corrupt mess but I’m sure that most Cambodians find that preferable to the genocidal government that it replaced. So Cambodia is a land of dollar beer and no local industry to speak of other than tuk-tuk taxi driving and child prostitution. So why are the streets choked with Lexus cars, motorbikes and tuk-tuks? And why are a majority of the cars I see in Phnom Penh Toyotas and why are the lions share of those Lexus SUV’s and Toyota Land Cruisers and Camrys yet there are no Honda Accords (but plenty of Honda CRV’s)?

But wait, it gets stranger. The Camrys are all American spec with US 2.5 MPH bumpers and I’d bet every last one of them popped out of Toyota’s assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. They look very different from the Thai assembled Camrys I saw in Bangkok and that Toyota sells in most of the world outside of North America. I rode in one from the Phnom Penh airport to my hotel and noticed that the speedo showed MPH, not KPH. Then I started noticing that some of the Camrys on Phnom Penh’s streets carried stickers on their rumps from dealers in places like Miami, FL and Norman, OK. A few had California license plates, one a Colorado tag. I’ve combed through the Internet and other travelers have noticed the dominance of the Camry here but nobody has an explanation why.

My best guess is that these Camrys were indeed built and bought either new or more likely used in America by Cambodians or Cambodian Americans and sent home to the rest of the family. That would also explain the Toyota Tacomas I’m seeing. Outside of North America the Toyota pickup is known as the Hi-Lux and I’ve seen a few of those along with a few other North America only models such as the Toyota Matrix.

I have no explanation for all of the Toyota Land Cruisers I see in Phnom Penh in both Toyota and Lexus dress. Most are late model and the Land Cruiser sells for around $65,000 new in the US, the Lexus variant costs around $76,000. They have big thirsty V-8’s, all of this in a country with next to no economy and no Lexus dealers.

Getting Out of the Tropical Sun

2009-10-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

While out for a stroll in Bangkok this morning I notice a part of the street was covered. See the covered area, right above the blue bus? Refuge for me.

The sun was bright ands broiling, the air was thick and smothering with humidity and diesel exhaust and I was going to walk down that street anyway, I wonder what’s going on under there?
Well, it’s a kind of local market. Not the kind of market I’m used to with a dairy section, frozen vegetables and ice cream. But there was plenty of fresh produce and an abundance of of meat. Chickens and ducks were crammed into cages and were cackling and calling . Live frogs encased together in nets that were as big as soccer balls. Tubs full of squirming eels wriggled in desperation. Catfish were being grabbed and having their heads hacked off with cleavers. Turtles were climbing over each other trying to escape. The sidewalk was slippery with a residue of guts and blood. It was just another day at the market for the locals in the tin shacks who were gathering up the ingredients of their next few meals.

Viva La Revolucion!

2009-10-04T00:43:00.001-07:00

Bangkok seems to have an attraction to Che Guevara. Locals wear the famous Che shirt and there’s no reason that the attraction should be any less in Bangkok than it is back home in Seattle where an expensive clothing store for children at Pike Place Market sells them to well healed high earning revolutionary parents in baby sizes. This stall at the Chatujak Market in Bangkok can fill the reddest of cadre’s Marxist-Leninist needs with posters and T shirts.

But Thailand is a monarchy, Massachusetts born King Bhumibol Adulyadej is currently the world’s longest reigning monarch. The people of Thailand revere their King and the government in Thailand is famously intolerant of dissent on the subject of the King and the royal family. The Internet is routinely searched for any signs of lèse majesté and those who brave or foolhardy enough speak out against the monarchy are hunted down, found and tossed into a prison system so harsh that even the most conservative or senile member of the US Supreme Court would be sure to find it cruel and inhuman.

Here’s what you see if you try and research the subject of the King of Thailand, even in English, from within Thailand:

Here’s the URL that I was delivered to: http://58.97.5.29/court.html It seems that it’s not only the Chicoms that have a Great Firewall

Go East (not so) Young Man

2009-10-03T23:45:00.001-07:00

International travel sounds so easy. Find an overseas destination, land an agreeable airfare and jet for adventure. But oh what a pain in the ass it can be sometimes.
It took around 24 hours from the moment I set out from my house in Seattle until my taxi pulled up at my hotel in the Sukhumvit section of Bangkok. Only 24 hours to traverse 14 time zones. On the other hand it’s quite uneventful, long stretches of sleepless boredom punctuated by an occasional meal, an announcement in Korean from the cockpit (I flew Asiana) or a screaming child. It would help if I could sleep on a plane but for I simply can’t.
I awoke at dawn and hit the soi to see the local street food vendors selling breakfast to the locals:

Wal-Mart Watch: Thou Shalt Not Steal

2009-09-07T11:04:00.001-07:00

In November 2007 I shot a number of picture in China and uploaded them to Flickr. I enjoy visiting Wal*Mart and Carrefour stores in China, they amazing places where I can rub shoulders with regular people. In a remarkable transition these huge Supercenter stores are actually located under the People’s Square of Chinese cities. On the surface are huge statues and murals of Mao and the other heavy hitters of Chinese communism, below is the fruit of consumerism and capitalism. The Chinese people vote with their feet. I posted my picture of the entrance of a Wal*Mart Supercenter under People’s Square in Guiyang, Guizhou Province here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/37118157@N00/2042161021

In August 2008 Walmartwatch.com posted the article Lest Anyone Forget concerning the unionization of the Wal*Mart Supercenter in Guiyang that I had photographed. The author of the piece, Michael Mignano copied and pasted my picture into his article. There’s really no other explanation for this outright theft of clearly copyrighted material.

The Walmart Watch website exhorts the reader “write to congress”, “tell your friends”, “share your story”. You can contact lots of people but you can't contact Walmart Watch. I tried. You can leave them a comment but you have to identify what kind of supporter you are (donor, volunteer, press enquiry) from a drop down box. I demanded that they remove my picture but they've ignored me.

So, who is Walmartwatch? Their "About Us" page doesn't identify them. I had to trace them through their domain registration information: Their domain is registered to:

UFCW INTERNATIONAL UNION

1775 K Street, NW

Washington, DC 20006

Contact them there? Ha! From their domain registration information, here's their email address: Administrative Contact , Technical Contact : UFCW INTERNATIONAL UNION no.valid.email@worldnic.net

So let’s recap; A website that advocates fairness on the behalf of the largest retailer in the United States in an effort to unionize Wal*Mart’s employees steals one of my copyrighted pictures but they hide when I attempt to contact them to request that they remove my pictures. I requested just this on their contact page they’ve ignored me.

Seattle - Sound Transit Light Rail 7/18/2009

2009-07-19T19:37:00.001-07:00

Funding for light rail was first passed by area voters in 1996 and with many missteps it's here, Seattle has now joined every other large west coast American city. The fact that Seattle was alone on the West coast without some kind of light rail rankled local politicians but most everyone I know suffered no rail envy after a trip to San Diego or Sacramento. While the system enters normal service on Monday the gates were thrown open to the public for a weekend of free rides. This picture above was taken on opening day August 17, 2009 at Westlake Station looking toward Convention Place.

Clearly the organizers were preparing for huge crowds on opening day that they didn't get, the picture at right was taken on opening day 7/17/2009 at noon at the Pioneer Square Station. Most of the stations had spaces like this with volunteers milling about and folk musicians strumming away for organizing the crowds that I never saw.

Hybrid buses will share this downtown tunnel with light rail once regular fare box service starts. The buses are free in the tunnel but the rail is not and that’s bound to be confusing. Tickets will have to be purchased in the entrance to the stations and the honor system is to be used.

I’ve ridden rail systems from Chicago to Chongqing and while local Seattle area politicians are pulling muscles slapping themselves on the back with congratulations for having joined the league of big and important cities I say hold on there just a minute.

Where's the information on the existing electronic signs telling me when the next train is due? All but the oldest rail systems (such as New York and Chicago) have the opening to the rail cars alight at the station in a predicted location. That's how it works in Taipei and Singapore and people line up before the train arrives in anticipation of boarding. Cites with a less cooperative ridership such as Hong Kong still have this feature, when I was last in Shanghai their metro was being retrofitted for it.

But fair enough, the local area has light rail now where before we had streets, freeways, cars and an extensive series of buses. I’m a bus commuter and I carry a Puget Pass. I drive perhaps 5000 miles a year and if this new train was convenient I'd take it. It will be if I stay at my present job downtown and wait until 2030. That's right, Sound Transit says that if they keep to their schedule light rail will arrive in the neighborhood to the south of me by 2030. As it stands now light rail is of no use to me. It doesn't go to anywhere I'd want to go. It cost a fortune to build. It won't get any cars off the road but it does make us feel as if we've finally arrived as a big city. Just like having the WTO in Seattle was supposed to.

I’m a regular bus commuter and I carry a Puget Pass. I drive perhaps 5000 miles a year and if this new train was convenient I'd take it. It will be if I stay at my present job downtown and wait until 2030. That's right, Sound Transit says that if they keep to their schedule light rail will arrive in the neighborhood to the south of me by 2030. As it stands now light rail is of no use to me. It doesn't go to anywhere I'd want to go. It cost a fortune to build. It won't get any cars off the road but it does make us feel as if we've finally arrived as a big city. Just like having the WTO in Seattle was supposed to.

Each Sound Transit rail car is made in Japan by:

The Shock of Bangkok

2009-03-03T07:23:00.000-08:00

I was only there for four days but from my lofty tourist perch Singapore is everything that almost all other cities in Asia are not. The tap water is fit to drink, drivers stop for pedestrians, the streets are litter free, and English can be understood most everywhere. The people look confident and dress the part. Bangkok has none of these positive virtues. Thailand is a big country with a Buddhist north and a Muslim south and poor people everywhere who are drawn to their nation’s capital and the result is the chaos of car exhaust, crumbling concrete and beggars with every malady imaginable on display behind their begging bowls and filthy dogs and children.

Everything in many Asian cities looks new and old all at the same time. A new shopping development or freeway overpass may have crumbling concrete or exposed rusty rebar. Buildings get stained by car exhaust and rain. It took time, attention to detail, dedication and money to make Singapore look and functions as well as it does. Cities like Bangkok have more pressing needs. For one thing, Bangkok is succeeds in delivering some basic services to its citizens. OK, the water out of the tap isn't fit for human consumption but the Bangkok Skytrain and MTS subway are much better than their counterparts (well, there is no subway) in Kuala Lumpur. They go where people seem to want to go and connect with each other.

Bangkok seems to have been built without electricity and communication by wire in mind so it's been retrofitted on the fly and on the cheap in the most ugly and utilitarian of ways. The wires run amok like someone tripped and dropped a bowl of ramen. I've also seen this in China where wires are tacked up just about anywhere they'll fit. A city does what it can with what it's got. And then there's Bangkok's infamous traffic. The Skytrain and underground rail has helped but it's still the chaos of pedestrian beware. There are plenty of cops out on the street wearing sunglasses and surgical masks but they just nudge things along.

Agony of de Feet

2009-02-28T06:23:00.000-08:00

I like to walk. Even though I have a desk job I try to walk about 7 or 8 thousand steps per day. But see? On my present trip to Asia I've outdone myself with this new foot pounding total on the left. No wonder I've gotten blisters on this trip and have had to buy a new pair of sandals in Kuala Lumpur. But my feet still feel like numb stumps and the trip isn't over and I have no plans to take a tour bus or to hang out all day in the hotel bar.

See that fellow to the right? He's a reflexologist and for less than $15 US he deeply massaged my feet and legs. He started by putting some of the white lubricant goo in the blue tub onto his fingers and worked on the various part of my feet. First soles, then toes, then legs including my knees. He'd press down deeply into the various parts of my foot flesh and then observe my reaction. If I had no reaction he'd press on to a slightly different region until he got a moan of pain out of me. Then he's tell me in really bad English what corresponding part of my body was having a problem that was being reflected by my feet. The verdict on my health: I walk alot, I spend too much time on the computer, I have a stiff shoulder and neck and a problem with my eyes. So how accurate is his diagnosis? Well, I know that I have a stiff neck and a tight left shoulder and my eye doctor wants to see my for a 2nd round of tests of my possible lack of peripheral vision. But hey, my feet feel better. Well used but better.

I went back the next day for a followup and more massaging. Take a look and listen to me squeal -

Singapore

2009-02-27T05:13:00.000-08:00

English is one of the official languages of Singapore (along with Malay, Tamil, and Chinese). But the only time I hear my mother tongue is when I open my own mouth. Most people in Singapore are ethnic Chinese and speak one of the many Chinese dialects, even the young. Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien, standard Putonghua Mandarin; they’re all spoken in day to day discourse here. Perhaps that explains the gorgeous Singaporean girl I saw wearing a shirt that said, “I’m Looking for Friends with Benefits” (hmm, or maybe not). Just like the shirt I saw on a fat 11 year old boy in Kuala Lumpur that proclaimed in big day-glo letters all the way down his bulbous belly, “I LIKE GIRLS WHO LIKE GIRLS”. Singapore is green, neat and tidy, an Asian oasis from the surrounding third world madhouse. Everything in Singapore has a place. Singapore is clean. Unlike Tokyo that has no litter baskets and no litter, Singapore has litter baskets everywhere and no visible litter.

Cars have a place in Singapore; they’re well regulated, remotely charged and tracked by the government through a scheme called ERP. The price for driving on that particular street changes every few minutes and depends on time of day and load. The little square antennas above the road and at the bottom of the sign track transponders in each vehicle.

So litter is in its place and cars are in their place. Singapore even has a place for drug dealers. The sign on the Singapore side of the border with Malaysia and on my immigration card promises that drug traffickers would be put to death. Under Singaporean law the death penalty for drugs is mandatory, no getting off on a technicality, no hanky dabbing sob stories, not even the final peace of death from lethal injection.

In Singapore the death penalty is administered old school, the prisoner and their families are informed of the execution date 4 days before it is to be carried out and the condemned is hanged by the neck until dead.

So compared to Kuala Lumpur, Manila or Bangkok everything is squeaky clean and supposedly has next to no crime. I see no slums and I’m told that Singapore is so clean that tap water is fit to drink (I drank it several times and the toilet doesn’t have me on a short leash). Singapore has been spared the fate of other Asian cities because it has a strict immigration policy and it’s a city state surrounded by water. Singapore doesn’t have to accommodate and bear the burden of the nearly inexhaustible supply of the migration of the rural poor of a country like the Philippines.

Kuala Lumpur Mass Transit

2009-02-26T03:26:00.000-08:00

When I get a moment I’m going to do some research and discover why the mass transit system in Kuala Lumpur is as disjointed as it is. There are commuter trains, there’s a monorail, there are light rail lines. Sometimes the lines happen to cross paths and while it’s not a free transfer it’s cheap and painless. But other times the lines will come within 2 or 3 blocks of each other and in order to get from one line to another it can be quite a hike up a flight of stairs, across a pedestrian overpass, down a flight of stairs, a 3 block covered walk with the sun beating down on the steel cover and the heat radiating down on commuters and then a flight of stairs up to buy another ticket and another flight of stairs to the next mass transit car. Why is this? Did one hand not know what the other hand was doing? Did some local political warlord demand a payoff for crossing his turf that never came? In some cases huge office buildings were constructed on the northwest side of Kuala Lumpur and either have no train or a line that stops just blocks away. The PetronasTowers cry out for mass transit, a station in the basement as the World Trade Center in NY once had would be ideal. But the train stops a block away across a huge boulevard that teems with traffic and workers stream across dodging traffic to get to their jobs. The monorail terminates a block from KL’s Sentral train station. Would it have been too much to connect them?

Kuala Lumpur - Life Near the Equator

2009-02-23T04:39:00.000-08:00

First a word about life near the equator. Kuala Lumpur is hot. It’s humid too and the heat just rocks down out of the sky. And each afternoon isn’t complete without a tropical downpour. But life near the equator also means that day and night are roughly of equal lengths. The sun sets at 7:30 PM and dawn hasn’t broken until nearly 7:30 AM. It’s a constant that I could get used to. KL is big, it's loud and it's kinda Muslim. Here and there women in black burkas Muslim. Commercials on TV condemning Israeli aggression Muslim. But the supermarkets have booze and canned pork from China and there’s no call to prayer five times a day from the few minarets I’ve seen so I guess Malaysia isn’t strict theocratic Muslim even though Islam is the official Malaysian state religion. Fewer beggars on the street than in Bangkok or in China but there's no doubt that this is the 3rd world. The Dorsett hotel is no great shakes. They want $10 US for an Internet connection and I see no trace yet of the promised free municipal wifi that's supposedly up and running. I walked into our room for the first time and immediately stepped on la cucaracha and heard the toilet leaking. I washed my hands and the sink leaked onto the floor and onto my shoes. This inspired Eleanor into her role of whipping the servants into shape and we got another room quick. The hotel is in what’s known locally as the Golden Triangle. It has gigantic concrete hell of shopping malls with lots of fast food franchises. Papa Johns, Beard Papa, Kenny Rogers Roasters, Carl’s Junior. Had dinner in a Chinese restaurant where one of the dinner candidates was eating a fellow dinner offering that was on his back in their aquarium holding tank. At least I've managed to find and consume the King of Fruits.

A Show of Hands: Hands Tailung

2008-05-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

I went to Hands Tailung in Taipei with high hopes, that it was an outpost of my favorite store Tokyu Hands. Tokyu Hands is something for everyone; lumber, beads, a complete line of high quality hand and power tools, knives, electric toothbrushes, toilets, rice cookers, pens, screws & washers, luggage, seeds, camping supplies; what Tokyu Hands carries in Japan is seemingly endless.

What a disappointing tease Hands Tailung (Google translation) was. Think of Hands Tailung as Tokyu Hands Lite, compared to the several Tokyu Hands stores that I experienced in Tokyo Hands Tailung is half a floor of some Japanese gadgets. It’s a fashion statement for Taipei’s young hip class, not a store to necessarily buy quality and unique products.

So what does Hands Tailung carry? Cosmetics, a few tools, pens, office supplies, clocks with or without built in weather forecasting gauges, camera cases. Lots of relabeled Japanese crap made in China. Mostly things you can buy elsewhere for less.

When I was at Hands Tailung in Taipei's upscale Breeze Center the place was mostly empty.

Taipei: 2 Chinas, Superior System?

2008-05-17T07:21:00.001-07:00

The food and language might be Chinese but there are some distinct mainland Chinese characteristics missing. Where’s the homicidal, almost Braille driving? What about the complete deadly disregard of drivers by pedestrians and of pedestrians by drivers? Also thankfully conspicuous by its absence was the Chinese National anthem, the ominously loud, nauseating, guttural phlegm pre-expectoration sounds that mean take cover and watch your shoes because a mighty spit is coming. The subways I've ridden in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are a Chinese fire drill free for all, when the train stops and the car doors open it’s best to drop your head like a halfback and force your way through an imaginary goalpost to get on or off the subway car. On Taipei’s MRT there are painted lines on the ground on either side of the door openings and people calmly wait for the arrival of the next train. The result is efficiency and order: people leaving the car go straight out while those getting in enter from the sides. There’s very little yelling and bellowing into cell phones as there is on the mainland (Hong Kong too).

Taipei: One China Policy

2008-05-15T21:28:00.000-07:00

The US government may follow the mainland’s one China policy but there’s no such policy here at Strange Taste Horsebeans. I’ve visited Hong Kong and it’s a wonderful orderly yet chaotic contrast to the mainland. Hong Kong prospered while the mainland suffered under communist dictatorship and economic ham handedness. At the time of suffering and deprivation on the mainland it was same people, different system. Now Hong Kong and Macau are considered “Special Administrative Regions”, or SAR’s of China. Or as Beijing now describes the curious situation, “one country, two systems”. But there’s still one more China. While the mainland was ruled by the whims of Mao the Republic of China on Taiwan was ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek, the loser of the long and bloody Chinese civil war and only a slightly lesser despot than Mao. Both Chiang and Mao remain only on having their regal mugs on the face of their country’s money but the division between the People’s Republic and Taiwan remain, the mainland still considers Taiwan as a rebellious province of China, Taiwan sees itself as an independent country (others see it differently, it has official diplomatic relations with only 23 countries). And when China was mired in economic Commie chaos Taiwan blossomed into a first world economy of innovation, creation and comfort. Once again, same people, different system. For me the question is simple: what’s Taiwan like and why is it like that?

Out of the Jungle

2008-05-10T00:57:00.000-07:00

On our 3rd morning staying at the resort on the Ping River we were marooned. The friendly owner had promised to take us into town with her but when we reported for breakfast at 7 AM to be ready for a 9 AM departure we found that she had already gone into town. A taxi would set us back 300 baht each way or around $9.50 US. That is, if we could find a taxi. The accommodations were fine although the owner admitted that the reason she hadn’t picked us up at the airport was because she accidently deleted my email containing our flight information.

When we checked in the owner asked if we had any dietary restrictions and since she was asking I checked “no pork” but each meal arrived containing pork, sometimes in multiple forms such as pork ribs with a side salad garnished with fried pork rinds. Moo! Moo’s the Thai word for pork. So we went back to our cottage, broke out the laptop and booked a room in town and found a way to call a cab. Within a half hour we were gone.

But by the afternoon we were back, in my haste I had left a bag behind. Eleanor did some hard bargaining with a tuk-tuk driver who took us tear-assing through traffic and into the hills and back for only 200 baht to retrieve the bag. Most of Chiang Mai’s foreign visitors seem to be European. I’ve seen and heard more than a few willowy gay German couples with shaved heads around town. Souvenirs seem to be targeted to Europeans as well. Lots of soccer jerseys with European player’s names on the back are for sale along with some snarky and offensive t-shirts. Lots of shirts for sale in Chiang Mai equate George Bush with Adolf Hitler, because if anyone would understand that the deaths of 20 million Russians, 6 million Jews and countless European Frenchmen, Dutch, Englishmen, Czechs, Poles, etc are being repeated on the same scale today at the hands of George Bush it’s Europeans. Pictures of Bush and Hitler with the caption, “Same Shit, Different Asshole”, pictures of Bush with a furher moustache, drawings of Bush as a monkey being blown up by the dynamite in his paw. Picture of a woman’s public region labeled , “Good Bush”, next to a picture of a smiling George Bush labeled, “Bad Bush”, pictures of George Bush labeled, “Public Enemy #1”. Che Guevara staring into a bright revolutionary future, Mao as a disk jockey. Hard hitting satire that’s obviously far beyond a course American cowboy understanding like mine. Non political shirts say strange things like, “Eat Your Rice, Bitch!”.

In the afternoon I decided to go for a walk on my own and within minutes I was lost. I had wanted to get away from the touristy Chiang Mai of souvenir t-shirts and massages and instantly succeeded, within minutes I was in a land of tin shacks, dog packs and strange street food that I knew would curdle my tender North American stomach. The tropical sun rocked down out of the sky and toasted my pale white skin that has been nurtured on winters of Seattle’s cold and damp. After several hours of walking in what I later discovered to be a circle that was nowhere near my hotel I swallowed my pride and succumbed to a tuk-tuk driver’s pitch. I heard thunder off in the darkening distance and if there was anything worse than being lost under the searing tropical sun it was being lost in a tropical downpour. When I got back to the hotel I discovered that I had soaked through all of my clothing with sweat. My shirt was sopped and my pants looked like I had forgotten toilet training. I had even soaked through my belt. The friendly tropical sun that on this trip has given me abundant banana, mango, mangosteen, lychee, rambuttan and especially durian had a darker side. Actually the sun has given me a darker side, perhaps there is affirmative action in my future. Or skin cancer.

Look carefully, some of those signs are in Hebrew.

Chiang Mai

2008-05-07T03:08:00.000-07:00

Chiang Mai, Thailand: When I plan my Asian excursions I often scour the Internet looking for places to stay. I look for a good price, good reviews on sites like tripadvisor.com and a favorable central location. But the hotel pictures and reviews are like dating, pictures are embellished, favorable reviewers have taste that is different from mine and what looks like a nice location on a map provided by the hotel is often inaccurate. This is one of those times. I’m here at a small resort south of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. If you look at the map on their web site it shows the location as being on the southern edge of Chiang Mai city close by to a bank, restaurants, stores and all of the comforts of city life. Not so, I’m about 15 miles out in the countryside. It’s a nice location but it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere. Our room is on the bank of the River Ping which is muddily flowing by as I write this. The owner says that a taxi into town will cost about 300 baht each way, about $9.50 at today’s exchange rate.

Is this Indo-China village living at it's finest? Nah, obviously I've got access to the Internet and my cell phone registers a good signal. The room has TV but to Eleanor's chagrin all of the available channels are in Thai. High class hotel it ain't. Eleanor originally found this place on the Internet and regrets it. On the wall near the bed she found a spider about the size of a small bar of soap and she absolutely freaked. This is semi jungle, bananas are growing on the premises.

Small lizards are hiding on the sides of buildings. The insects are being merciless with Eleanor biting her on the face and legs but they leave me along, perhaps they don't like white meat. This place seems to be bug heaven, I've seen several kinds of insects in our room that are unknown in North America. There's a noise outside; it's a tropical jungle downpour! Bugs, lizards, tropical fruit and a torrential downpours; can giant snakes be next?

The owner of the place, Lin, has been nice to us even after she forgot to pick us up at the airport. She said that she has a 2nd job in town and would take us into Chiang Mai in her pickup truck.

Bangkok: Eating Durian

2008-05-03T19:06:00.000-07:00

The refrigerator in my hotel room in Bangkok smells like durian. What does durian, sometimes called “stinky fruit”, smell like? A delicious and exotic tropical fruit? Or, "pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock"?

The durian was in the refrigerator in my hotel room for just a few hours. I bought over Eleanor’s objection and brought it back to the hotel for desert. Eleanor knows durian and religiously avoids the stuff. She won’t eat it because she can’t get close to it without gagging. The durian was good, smooth, exotic but more fragrant, complex and flavorful than I recall from my last trip to Bangkok. But I noticed the distinctive acid smell again when I opened the door to my hotel room and it’s in the fridge, maybe forever. The hotel has my credit card number. For those that can’t bear the odor or the spikes of the durian I bought this, durian in a handy sausage pack.

Bangkok - I saved the Best for Last

2007-11-29T09:05:00.000-08:00

BANGKOK

I'm back home and that means that at least I have a good idea what I'm eating and I'm free to drink tap water again. Without knowing I saved the best for last. I had been looking forward to going to China all year long but in the end two weeks in China became something of a chore. Because of language and cultural barriers getting the simplest things accomplished in my daily solo tourist routine such as getting a taxi or shopping or even something as basic as getting a meal just wore me down.

This dawned on me when I came down with a cold and went to the supermarket to buy, among other things, a small pocket pack of tissues. I caught it before I got to the cash register, what I had actually put into my basket a small, purse sized pack of sanitary napkins. Because I couldn't read the goddamn label and for whatever cultural reasons a package of sanitary napkins in China while colorful contains no visual cues, pictograms, frilly pink flowers, much of anything to give away to someone who can’t read Chinese characters what lies within. Chinese road manners made me fear daily for my life as a pedestrian, Chinese food in the supermarket was a daily mystery, or worse. Chinese restaurant menus were either unintelligible in Chinese or brutally repulsive in Engrish. I love Chinese food but what I found in the home office of Chinese food was usually unrecognizable to me as something I’d want to put in my mouth and made me fear, it turned out for good reason, for my digestive health. Chinglish was whip out my camera cute when I arrived but as my time in China went on dealing with and deciphering it became just another chore in my daily solo tourist life.

But Bangkok and I connected. Is there any place in Bangkok where you can't buy copied software and music? Pantip Plaza is 5 or 6 floors of IT crap and other than the counterfeits (and Pantip’s got plenty of phony everything) the prices are OK, but only if you've never done business with Newegg or any other Internet retailer in the US. In other words, for a US based shopper Pantip prices are lousy, at least for someone like me who can’t do a deal in Thai. There's a 7% VAT in Thailand on most everything but even so the prices are still high. I’ve had my ear’s eye on a pair of Sony ear buds. I bought a pair for about $50 in Tokyo, a city not known for hard shopping bargains. At Pantip Plaza they were either marked at $80 with a small golden genuine Sony sticker on the box or $11 without. In my experience the folks selling copied software at Pantip Plaza deliver service after the sale. The label on my “copy” of Office 2007 promised English but it refused to install because my laptop’s version of Windows XP isn't in Thai. I took it back and got it swapped for English but it meant going back to the Pantip pressure cooker. There's an ongoing constant amplified floor show on the 1st floor that reverberates through the bones of everybody in the place. I packed my MP3 player to successfully dampen the din.

Going shopping seems to pass for sport in Bangkok and there’s lots of it. I went to a fancy mall, MBK Center. Most of it is upscale goods but one whole wing is devoted exclusively to cell phones and copied software and music. They even sell the software and music in the food court. Oh, did I mention that prescription drugs are available over the counter at any pharmacy simply for the asking? Want that certain drug for men that's responsible for the bulk of your bulk email? No problemo, just walk right in and ask for it but don't ask for it by name otherwise you'll overpay. It turns out that there really are generic versions of the stuff, produced in India. You can't get it legally in the US without having Pfizer's lawyers nipping at your nuts but Bangkok ain't the US. Bangkok and I connected on other levels. Depending on where you’re going getting around can be easy and civilized, just go up and take the new BTS Skytrain or down for the new MRT subway.

Without those two the only other choices are taxi or a kind of a cross between a motorcycle/rickshaw called a tuk-tuk. Citizens of Seattle will often tell folks from elsewhere that Puget Sound traffic is among the worst anywhere. Bad yes, but it ain’t Bangkok. Bangkok traffic is a filthy, hellish Blade Runner nightmare of backed up streets and clotted intersections overseen by traffic cops wearing some kind of gray hybrid of a respirator/surgical mask. Street vendors and locals make due with disposable surgical masks. Tuk-tuks and taxis seem to run on compressed natural gas but older city buses and trucks belch blue clouds of life shortening smoke all day long. Oh, here's something from the Skytrain that you don't usually see on mass transit in the US. Some of the women in Bangkok are absolutely drop dead, heart palpitatingly pretty, like God took another crack at His failed recipe for Filipinas and got it right this time. So it’s not surprising to see a certain element in Bangkok of white men of a certain age, like mid 50’s and up with much younger local women. Some even have small hapa kids. Gray haired white guys, some balding, some with pot bellies with Thai women old enough to be their daughters or grand daughters (Less prevalent but still noticeable are older white men with young Thai guys). Perhaps she sees him as a walking wallet and with the help of a certain prescription drug for men maybe he sees himself once again as a stickman and her as a walking vagina. I've overheard some of these guys talk, some are American but many are European and Australian. They're living their dream, I guess. They’ve left their same old used to be on another continent and now they're in tropical Asia where they can spend their days drinking good Thai beer and screwing young Thai stuff. So Bangkok and I connected. It was easy, I don’t know why but not only is the defacto second language English, it nearly always makes sense. No Engrish. Bilingual signs make sense to English speaking eyes and ears. So cars are right hand drive and there’s a functional use of good English, curious since the British never colonized or ran Thailand. Then there’s the King of Thailand. It's good to be the King. I had no idea that the King was such a big deal. His picture is everywhere, he looks like a Chinese waiter and Woody Allen somehow had a son. Yes, he was born in Massachusetts and like Woody Allen he plays the saxophone. I bought 3 yellow shirts with His royal crest on the breast pocket. When they say "Long Live the King!" in Thailand (and it's everywhere, even in English) they ain't talkin' 'bout some guy named Elvis from Mississippi. Thailand’s King is like some kind of benevolent Kim Jong Il, his picture is everywhere both public and private. The King had the cover of the local equivalent of the TV Guide that I found in my hotel room. Bangkok is a great city. I barely scratched the surface, this time.

Sondisa Coffee

2007-11-18T20:33:00.001-08:00

OK, The coffee here is awful and Sondisa coffee’s URL doesn't work. In fact, Baidu has never heard of the place and Googling Sondisa Coffee just brings up this picture in this blog posting. But I like it here. There's either free WIFI of the ability to poach WIFI from nearby. The staff here is great, they even found an adapter so I could plug in my laptop. But the coffee part of Sondisa Coffee needs some work. A small cup costs a minimum of Y20, that's close to $3 US. It arrives with small container of a white substance. Milk? Melamine? Who knows, it has flowers on it and simply says, "ME".

This gives me time to reflect on Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province. Guizhou is a poor province and I can see that just by walking down the street. Peasants with their baskets cruise the streets looking for work. Or pick through trash. They gather in small groups playing cards between jobs or trash picking gigs or wander aimlessly and spit. Normally only Chinese men spit (and spit up a storm they do) but among the poor in Guiyang loud expectoration is an equal opportunity street activity. Like most of China Guiyang is a mixture of poverty and extravagance, only more so. Peasants pick through garbage cans for plastic and cardboard while BMW's, Jaguars, Range Rovers and the usual gaggle of Chinese knock off cars cruise by. There were fewer peasants on display in my previous stops of Xiamen and Nanjing.

Last night 2 young women approached me and asked in English what language I spoke. They explained to me that they were hungry and wanted money for food. This was laughable, they were well dressed and worldly enough to speak some English. In China that's a marketable skill although begging to gullible tourists might result in a quicker and easier Yuan than bothering to do any actual work. And those here who are obviously dirt poor peasants pay me, Mr. Laowai Walking Wallet, no mind.

Speaking of begging, in Xiamen I saw a man by the bus depot at the SM shopping center with his guts hanging out from a hole in his belly. I'm not sure whether this was some sort of parlor trick or not but I don't know how he wouldn't quickly succumb to a massive infection if it wasn't. It looked so awful and pathetic that I couldn't look twice.

Next stop: Kunming

Pantomine

2007-11-18T04:16:00.000-08:00

One problem with seat of the pants wandering around lost tourism is it’s for the young and I ain’t so young anymore. All this wandering around has left me flu-ish and with sore, blistered feet. So I headed back to the drug store, a place I’ll probably be turning to with greater frequency as I age. Maybe I could score some Dr Scholl’s blister pads and keep on keepin’ on. How to explain the problem? Chinese drug stores are divided into two distinct sections with a walled divider. One part of the store is usually full of patrons, it’s the part that's solely concerned with selling soap, shampoos and cosmetics.

At times it has seemed to me that half of the female population of China is employed selling clothes, fashion accessories and cosmetics to the other half. Condoms are available on both sides of the drug store wall (my favorite Chinese condom brand names: "Jissbon" and "Six-Sex"). I've yet to see a male employed in either half of a Chinese drug store. On the side of the drug store wall where actual drugs are sold are prescription drugs, over the counter drugs (conveniently labeled "OTC") and Chinese herbal remedies. I was met on the drug store side of the drug store by three female clerks. I grabbed my left foot and said, "Ow, ow!". All three hit me with rapid fire Chinese, not a word of which did I understand. I shrugged my shoulders, pointed to my left foot and held out my left pinkie finger. My smallest toe is the one giving me the biggest grief. More Chinese, no understanding. I held out my left pinkie and pantomimed wrapping it with tape.

With that I got through. One clerk took me to the part of the store where they sold adhesive tape and band-aids. There's a business opportunity in China for the Dr Scholl company. After choosing my purchases I returned to the front of the store, where upon entering I had seen a display for Viagra. It would be a shame to come all this way and go home not knowing how much OTC Viagra costs. How much? A single dose is Y125. That's just under $17 US. But like everything else in this newly capitalist world there's a discount for buying in bulk. Party time? A box of 5 Viagra tablets sets you back a cool Y499, that's around $67 US. When I popped my eyes at the price one of the clerks brought me something cheaper, some kind of kangaroo extract. I laughed. The clerks laughed. Oh, so how did my purchase work out? Tape or no tape, my toe still hurts.

Guiyang People's Square: Wal*Mart & Mao

2007-11-18T02:24:00.001-08:00

This picture shows the state of Communism in China today in a nutshell. It’s so illustrative that it was stolen from my Flickr page and used without attribution or permission by an anti Wal-Mart website called Wal-Mart Watch. So much for copyright protection.

This is People's Square in Guiyang. Off to the left and out of camera range there's the omnipresent giant Mao statue. On the other side of People's Square is a large mural showing the Forbidden City in Beijing, if you look closely in this picture you can make out Mao and Deng Xiao Ping, communist party heavy hitters of a bygone and failed era. People's Square has been hollowed out, what lives below People's Square in Guiyang is the largest, most densely packed, Wal-Mart Supercenter I've ever seen.

This is mid November and Christmas at Wal-Mart in China is in full swing. Right under Mao's atheist feet the store has plenty of fake Christmas trees and patrons are bathed in Christmas music, both secular and religious. It's doubtful that any of the patrons understand the lyrics but still, Bentonville would be up to its eyeballs in lawsuits and elitist complaints if Wal-Mart played hymns about the Virgin Mary in their US stores.

Communism stumbled on from 1949 until Den Xiao Ping wised up in 1979 impoverishing and stunting lives in China. The Communist Party and Mao and never give the Chinese people what Wal-Mart and Sam Walton give them every day: variety and low prices with no shortages or rationing. Communism in China couldn't put food on the table, millions died in famines that swept this country in the 1950's thanks to Mao and his state planning comrade geniuses. Political power might flow from the barrel of a gun but Wal-Mart stacks 'em deep and sells 'em cheap. You can't eat or wear the revolution.

Here's the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Kunming:

Chairman Mao's Revenge

2007-11-16T21:32:00.001-08:00

This picture was lots funnier yesterday, before I ate or came down with something that might make me a patient. And how fortunate for me, it's only a mile or so from my hotel here in Guiyang. Supposedly the outdoor night market down the block prepares a mean dog but I didn't (knowingly) sample any fillet of Fido or rack of Rover. I had some airline food on my way to a layover in Changsha. The flight attendants gave out little boxes of, well, I'm not entirely sure what was in there. The flight attendant said, "noodle" and it appeared to be wispy noodles with flecks of meat.

In China meat often means pork and not only don't I eat red meat I also watch what I eat very carefully here in China. But I let my guard down and scarfed down the greasy noodles. A guy's got to eat and my problem here in China is: would I rather not know what's on the Mandarin only menu or would I prefer a menu in English? Actually, that menu would be in "English", the last one I encountered in Xiamen used delectable descriptors that I never want to see on a restaurant menu again such as "Worms" and "Clam grease". This dilemma usually sends me to the supermarket. I can't read the labels there either but I know a loaf or bread or a container of sweet corn yogurt when I see one.

When I got off the plane in Guiyang my stomach and other connected organs had formed a chorus of, "Hey! Pay attention to us! Do It Now!". So after checking in I headed to the Beijing Hualian supermarket chain around the corner and bought a 2 liter jug of purified water. I'm sure that's what the label would've said in English. The label had Chinese characters and a picture of a polar bear. Oh, I also bought some already peeled fruit. Mandarin oranges, pieces of Dragon Fruit, melon, apple and maybe a little Ecoli. And maybe some melamine. There was no label and even if there was, I couldn't read it anyway.

So I was up all night pouring water into the top end of me and, well, you get the picture. Up all night wondering what I was thinking in coming here to China. Wanting to be home in my own bed, using my own toothbrush and if I had to be sick sitting on my very own throne. But that's not an option now. I'm off to Kunming on Monday and Bangkok on next Saturday before I come home to Seattle and Eleanor's fantastic and creative cooking. Mmmmm.

Next stop today was a drug store. I needed to stock up on over the counter meds like Imodium (Loperamide). There's a local drug store chain across the square, surely they'd have something for what ails me. I walked in and was met by a pretty clerk with an enquiring, helpful look. I patted my stomach and made a face. I patted my behind. I showed her my last remaining Loperamide tablet. She giggled and took me right over to the Viagra display.

Nanjing Subway Train

2007-11-14T23:12:00.001-08:00

Nanjing has gotten the better of me. The language barrier is just too thick and the city is just too vast.

I easily mastered riding the Nanjing Metro. The token machines have an option labeled “English”, just put in Y2, grab a plastic token and tap on a designated strip on the turnstile and you’re in. The stops are labeled in English too. As a form of sheer, brute force tourism I tried just getting off at stops at random and walking around whatever neighborhoods I happened upon. Most of them didn’t have much to offer except stares from the few locals so all I got for my efforts were sore feet. The air in Nanjing is awful. The weather forecasts have called for partly sunny but the rays of old Sol never make it past all of the particulates suspended in the air. The sky here is gray, visibility is severely limited. The air smells like concrete and it probably is concrete too. It can’t be conducive to good health to breathe here but the locals do it and many compound it and smoke cigarettes too. Then again, if the air here doesn’t get ya the local drivers will.

I’m batting 500 on my attempt to take cabs here. My attempt to take a cab to Carrefour last night went perfectly. An available cab drove down the sidewalk (!) and I showed the driver my slip of paper and got in. My attempt to visit a famous huge bridge over the Yangtze was a bust though. Every cabbie I showed my slip of paper too shook his head and gave me a funny look, like I had recited the Gettysburg address backward.

I was at a Metro station and there were about 5 guys on motorcycles. They looked at my slip of paper and gestured to me that I get on the back of a bike. Riding on a motorcycle with Chinese strangers in Chinese traffic didn’t strike me as part of a healthy lifestyle so I patted the top of my head to indicate my lack of helmet. They had helmets, one of them offered to let me wear his. I still didn’t think that this was a great idea so I shook my head and walked away.

Tomorrow I move on. I had wanted to go to a warm city in the south, close to the Vietnamese border called Nanning but there are no seats on the plane so Nanning is a no go. So I've got to make due with next best, Guiyang. I'm thinking of staying in a higher end hotel, I need some of the soft life. Jin's Inn has been OK but it's a bit basic. The bed isn't much softer than the floor. I bought my plane ticket to Guiyang on line this morning, I'm supposed to pick it up at the airport tomorrow. Where at the airport is going to be another problem, here's the email from the company that sold me the ticket. Where do I pick up that ticket again Mandy???

Dear Sir,

Thank you for choosing eLong!

Regarding your reservation 12391623, you can pick up the ticket from the:

您的取票地址：机场2楼东航值机柜台东航万里行窗口

Your ticketing address:Eastern Airline's Counter (Wanlixing window), F2 of Terminal, Nanjing Airport

Best regards, Mandy English Team of Call Center eLong Inc. (NASDAQ: LONG) Tel: (8610)64329999 ext. 6 Fax: (8610)64311239 E-mail: abroad@corp.elong.com Address: 2F, Block B, Galaxy Plaza, 10 Jiuxianqiao Middle Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100016

Getting lost in Nanjing

2007-11-14T01:49:00.001-08:00

Maybe my age is catching up with me. My dogs are barking. My feet hurt. I'm no stranger to walking in a big city but population wise Nanjing is 10 times the size of little Seattle and I can't read most of the signs. Oh sure, there are some signs in Roman letters but Nanjing's traffic department seems to use them sparingly. I spent today lost and hurting. This city is noisy. Driver honk their horns at everything that moves, including other vehicles. Lots of people here have scooters and they drive them wherever they wish. Sidewalk driving? No problem! The scooters also have burglar alarms. People park their scooters on the sidewalk with hundreds of other scooters. When one gets touched or a loud truck passes by all of their alarms go off together like a hospital nursery full of crying, screaming infants. There's construction everywhere; buildings, stores, a new subway line is going in a few blocks from my hotel and Chinese construction sites run two, maybe three shifts a day. It's loud, I'm lost. My feet are shouting, get the fsck off of us. NOW.

I set out this morning for the Memorial to the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre. One of my tour books had it written in Chinese but every time I showed it to a cab driver they shook their head and rattled something off that I didn't understand. I think it's closed for renovations. I really wanted to see it, in 1937 the Japanese Imperial Army took time out from their busy schedule of conquering most of Asia to make a special example of the City of Nanjing. In a few weeks of true Nazi league genocide 300,000 Nanjing locals were killed in mass murders, head chopping contests, mutilations. Countless women were gang raped by Japanese soldiers or pressed into sexual slavery in the service of the Japanese Imperial Army. Brutality and war go hand in hand but the Japanese went above and beyond in visiting suffering and misery on their conquered subjects here.

I tried walking to the memorial but my feet made me turn back. I went looking for a restaurant district instead, I couldn't find that either. So I came back to the hotel and had a bright idea. I called up a few web pages of places I wanted to see, pages with both Chinese and English. I took my laptop down to the front desk, showed the clerks the pages while I said "taxi" and few times and pantomimed writing. I think it worked, I'm about to go out into the loud night to find out.

Nanjing

2007-11-12T16:18:00.001-08:00

It turns out the Nanjing airport is about 30 or 40 miles south of downtown. And my suitcase was delivered to me wet. Dry on the inside, wet on the outside. Wet with alcohol or some kind of non water based liquid (industrial solvent?) so at least it dried quickly. Outside were the usual collection of cabbies that hounded me but a few chants of "boo yao" (Mandarin for "don't want") dissolved them. A bus was loading, I paid Y25 and boarded. On the plane into Nanjing on China Eastern Airlines every announcement was bilingual, in spite of the fact that I appeared to be the only non Chinese passenger. China Eastern also ran a few informational videos during the flight instructing people to save energy and cut greenhouse gasses by buying compact florescent lighting and driving less. No mention of flying less though.

But all the announcements on the bus were strictly in rapid fire Mandarin and naturally I appeared to be the only non Mandarin speaker. And I had no way of checking if this bus was even going to Nanjing. But it did. And it started to drop off passengers who'd need to retrieve luggage in the big storage compartment under the seating area, often just stopping in a lane of traffic because in Chinese traffic size and might makes right. Eventually there were fewer and fewer people on the bus and finally I let myself out. I hailed a cab and showed the driver a piece of paper with my hotel placed on a map. He shook his head no, gave me back my map and drove away. The next cabbie studied the map and finally looked up, smiled and shouted, "OK". Within a few blocks he made a U-turn and then charged into a dark alley at top speed. Within a few blocks he stopped at my hotel, the Xinjiekou branch of a local chain called Jin's Inn. Schmuck's luck, I was close to my destination all along.

Please read: I'm heavily handcuffed in my blogging here in China. Blogger is mostly off limits from within China, I can't see my own blog. I can post pictures to my account in Flickr but I can only see my own pictures that I've uploaded from China. All other pictures on Flickr, even my own pictures, are blocked by the Great Firewall of China. I am able to do these rudimentary blog entries by telling Flickr that'd I'd like to base a post on Blogger on a particular picture. I can then edit in a small box on Flickr but can't see the final product on Blogger. It's kind of a 21st century Samizdat. Fun stuff so please forgive any layout faux pas.

Getting Around in a Strange Land

2007-11-10T02:26:00.001-08:00

Getting from place to place when you can't speak the language is exciting and frustrating. If someone can write my destination in the local language I grab a cab. If I'm on a long walk to nowhere in particular I make note of the bus route numbers and just like at home I grab public transit when I can. A ride on a bus here in Xiamen is only 1 RMB. Even with a sinking US dollar that's a little over 4 cents. Sure, the locals stare but they stare at me where ever I go.

Crossing the Street Chinese Style

2007-11-10T02:08:00.001-08:00

Crossing the Street Chinese Style Originally uploaded by Don Qua

Where am I? After nearly 24 hours on 3 different flights I finally got off the plane, went through customs and got into a cab. The cabbie cut off other cars, passed on the right, took a few cell phone calls, scattered some pedestrians and drove on the sidewalk. That’s right, I’m back in China! I’m in Xiamen, in Fujian province.

Made in Japan

2007-05-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

Before I went to Japan last Thanksgiving Eleanor asked me to get her some small single edged razor blades on a plastic stalk. I picked them up at a 7/11 in Tokyo. Before I went back in April I asked her if she needed any more. "No thanks", she said. I get them at Daiso now".

We have dollar stores, the Japanese have 100 Yen stores. Daiso is a 100 Yen store and it's starting to show up in North America on the west coast from Richmond, BC to the Bay Area. For me the great thing about that is that it's mostly unchanged from a Daiso store in Tokyo. Most items for sale are $1.50 or $2 and most of the products are packaged exactly the way they are in Japan, in either Japanese or Engrish or both. In many cases if you don't know kanji you don't know what's in the package.

Some of the products have cultural problems. Before I went to Japan in April I stopped off at the Daiso store in Seattle (Westlake, there's another one at the Alderwood Mall) and bought some vacuum travel bags. You put your clothes in the bag, roll the air out and seal them up for a tight pack and extra luggage space. They had a bag for sale that seemed to be for underwear, the pictures showed underwear and bras going into a blue bag. When I got them home I discovered that these bags weren't fit for Bubba's britches, by American standards these bags were large blue sandwich bags. But Daiso has all sorts of Japanese cleaning supplies, cheap tools, kitchen ware. Much of the stuff is made in China for the Japanese market.

Daiso seems to have been careful to filter out many of the home market products that would have no use here but a few got through. I caught their store in downtown Seattle selling little learners signs to hang from the left rear mudflap of as car. The packaging implied that these were mandatory for new drivers. They might be there but not here. They were also selling cheap cell phone headsets. That's fine but Japanese cell phone headset connectors all seem to adhere to a Japanese standard, one that isn't used on US market phones. But many products survive their trip across the Pacific with their Engrish intact, here's a small car bag for the car that I bought at Daiso for $1.50.

When I travel overseas I love to hit the local stores. Hands down one of the best stores I've found is Tokyu Hands. I dropped a few hundred dollars there and would go back tomorrow if I could. Tokyu Hands is what Home Depot and Lowes want to be when they grow up. In Tokyu Hands I bought a replacement knob for the lid of my old Hitachi rice cooker (the original knob was cheap and had long ago stripped), some gorgeous ergonomic screwdrivers (Made by Vessel, I paid extra for the tang-thru), a pair of pliers made by a company named Lobster and another set of pliers with replaceable plastic jaw liners - pliers with a soft touch. The Japanese have a gadget for every real or imagined need so when I saw this simple tool for recycling I knew I had be the first on my block to own one. It's great! I also scored a small hand saw for yard work. In Japan it's sold as the XBeam but the US arm of Tagaki Tools or their importer changed the name here to Shark Corporation and the name of the saw to Yardshark. It looks like Crocodile Dundee's jack knife. Boy, does it ever chew through wood. Nowhere in this post have I said that anything I bought in Japan was cheap. Buying anything in Japan is never cheap, at least not by US norms. But shopping in Japan makes up in innovation and selection what it looses in price.

On the Ground in Tokyo. Again

2007-04-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

It’s too bad that I don’t get to stay in Asia long enough to learn to not offend the sensitivity of the locals. I got off on the wrong foot right away by boarding the train to town from Narita Airport. It had just come into the station. It was the last stop and everyone on board got off so I got on. And was promptly asked to leave by the cleaning lady. It seems that the train is entirely cleaned after every run. I also can never remember to not offend cashiers in Japan. Here in Japan when one pay one is never supposed to place money into a cashier’s hand. That’s why they have a small tray, hands should never touch. I always forget this like the dumb gaijin that I am. Today I found a new way to play dumb foreigner. I had retained a 160Y subway ticket from my last trip here back in late November 2006. I had read that tickets were good for 6 months. Maybe not, when I tried to exit a station the turnstile refused to let me pass and politely told me to see an attendant. I handed in my delinquent ticket where they guys behind the desk immediately noticed how stale it was. I showed them my new Suica stored value card, it’s much like the Octopus card in Hong Kong and it’s new in Tokyo. With typical Japanese efficiency they took my Suica card, deducted 160Y and sent me on my way to get lost again. I spent much of the day hopping from subway line to train line in a futile effort not to be lost. I was trying to get from Shinjuku to Akihabara but theTokyo Metro Map looks like the floor after somebody dropped a pot of ramen. Anybody who knows me knows that I’m colorblind and even in English some of the stations and lines overlap so I never knew where I was going. My Suica card took a beating today. I think I’m just going to drain it at a 7/11 and tomorrow I’ll just buy an all day pass. But that may not work since Tokyo Metro runs maybe half the train lines, the others (JR, Toei) seem to be private or belong to some other municipal or prefectural agency. They all seem to take my Suica though. Because Blogger knows I'm in Japan it insists on giving me a Japanese interface. That’s why it took a month for this page to appear, I couldn’t find the Kanji equivalent of >Publish< on Blogger. But better late than never here are pictures from this whirlwind trip. Great views of Tokyo from the Tokyo Tower.

All Hail Toyota!

2006-12-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

Sell your GM stock, they’re doomed. Ford too. When I was in Tokyo I visited the Amlux Toyota Showroom, a 4 floor showcase of everything Toyota sells in Japan. It’s a full house. It’s no secret that Toyota is stomping domestic rivals in North America. But now I see that in the North American market Toyota is playing with one hand tied behind it’s back. In Japan they sell everything from a small scooter to the Toyota Century, it lists for close to $100,000. They sell more different kinds of SUV’s in Japan then they do in the US and their US lineup is fat with SUV’s. In Japan Toyota sells small cars, large cars, even a small car with a passenger seat that doubles as a wheelchair. Great looking Toyotas with goofy Japanese car names like Alphard, Ipsum, Passo, Fielder, Ractis, Wish, Brevis, Progres (not a typo), Rush, and Spacio. All this in a small country where gasoline costs close to $5 for a US gallon. Although I saw a Japanese made Camry at the Amlux Showroom I don’t think I saw one on the streets of Tokyo. It’s commonly accepted that Japan is a small country with expensive gasoline and the Japanese drive small cars. Some do but I saw plenty of big cars, both Japanese and European, plying the streets of Tokyo. There was no shortage of large Mercedes, Audis and BMWs, even big expensive ones. I did see one Chevrolet Suburban in a parking spot on a Tokyo street and there was overhang of the marked parking space both front and rear. Another surprise was the small number of Priuses (Priii?) I saw on the streets of Tokyo. I saw some but it doesn’t seem to be the statement of fashion, environmental righteousness and virtue in Japan that Prius ownership implies in the US where gasoline costs half as much as it does in Japan. From what I sawToyota pretty much dominates the market. They have a car for every market niche and if market conditions in North America change Toyota will be waiting.

Map of the Countries I've Visited

2006-11-29T18:29:00.000-08:00

Putting the Toothpaste Back Into the Tube

2006-11-28T22:31:00.000-08:00

I wrote this on the flight from Narita to Seattle. And so it’s over. For now. Time to mentally put the toothpaste back into the tube, go home, put the ring back into my nose and get back to my same old used to be. Back to responsibilities of work and home ownership and being a 21st century civilized adult male. Oy! If I’ve learned one thing on these recent overseas trips it’s that age brings more impairment than wisdom. My feet hurt. I’m tired. No, I’m exhausted. And my feet hurt. They ache in that kind of needing to have them soaked and massaged kind of way that I’ve never experienced before. Instead of feeling my oats I’m feeling my age. I’m still not sorry that I go to a foreign countries and hit the streets brute force solo. But I fear that soon I’ll have a bigger appetite for overseas travel than my feet can carry. Asia is still calling me. I don’t know why but it still does. And I don’t want to answer that call from a window seat on a tour bus, I don’t want to be spoon fed. The only time I’ve ever taken an organized tour was back in 1984 when I went to Guangzhou because the xenophobic ChiCom (Chinese communist) government of the day said that tours were mandatory for American citizens, no solo travel was allowed. Will I go back to Asia and do it my way again? Hell yes. While I still can.

Tokyo Pix and Videos

2006-11-25T02:20:00.000-08:00

More pictures are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/37118157@N00/ Be sure to click to enlarge. I'm uploading Tokyo videos here: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=UberGweilo

Akihabara and Christmas

2006-11-24T02:01:00.000-08:00

Akihabara (or Akiba) is the well known Tokyo geek neighborhood. It’s home to gizmo, tool, electrical supply, manga and anime shops. For me it was must see JP. While there’s plenty of selection in Akihabara the prices are high, maybe 30% higher to someone used to shopping at Costco, New Egg and EBay in the US. It’s either a happy coincidence or price fixing but prices are pretty much the same from shop to shop. Whatever it’s failings the USA is a shoppers paradise. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t score anything in Akihabara. I couldn’t leave without a USB coffee warmer and a USB fan. No sign of the elusive USB butt warmer or USB butt cooler but maybe my shopping techniques are more set to shop but not to drop. I know that they’re out there somewhere in Tokyo because just about everything electronic and is. Japan’s industry is world famous for good reason. And Japan was well built with Japanese made precision tough tools. With so many lousy tools on the market back home I bought several Vessel screwdrivers. I also scored a few electrical plugs and connectors that are made for tight and/or angle installations, Home Depot and Lowes carry crap. I steered clear of the anime and manga shops. I peeked into a few and saw a staple of Japanese men, soft core pr0n comic books. I had heard that some of the women handing out flyers on the main drag of Akiba, Chuo-Dori, were dressed as French maids. It’s true but I have no idea why. One of the French maids I saw was handing out flyers for a restaurant called Melty Burger. The Japanese seem to borrow freely from other cultures. Americans borrow too but in the USA it’s because we’re borrowing from people who brought their culture to our culture when they came to the US and it gets smushed together somehow in the diversity we always hear about. Not so in Japan, aside from African and other exotic prostitutes the country is pretty much closed off from the immigration and melting pot ways of the USA. Japan is a homogeneous country, just about everybody here is Japanese. There’s a small Korean minority and the Japanese supposedly don’t let the Koreans forget who’s number one (and it's not the Koreans). So the Japanese are free to pick and chose whatever cultural elements they want, often from TV, and to interpret it any way they want. How they interpret a teenager in a frilly French maid’s outfit handing out flyers for a restaurant is beyond me, please email me with any suggestions. The Japanese have also adopted Christmas. It’s Christmas Jim, but not as we know it. For one thing, except for a small minority there’s no Christ in Japanese Christmas. Never had it, probably never will. But they go nuts with gift giving and trees, ornaments, ribbons, tinsel, Santa Claus and many of the usual trappings of the season. TV this morning was wall to wall with live shots of Christmas lights in Los Angeles and the Macy's Thanksgiving parade in New York. This year a special guest will be showing up in Tokyo, one who loves little children and knows what they want in the true spirit of the season. Michael Jackson is coming to town. Just because it has no religious significance doesn’t mean that stores treat it any differently here. At least in the US we pretend that the holiday is grounded in religion. Sometimes. But in Japan they don't even pretend. Stores play wall to wall Christmas music, some of it with quite religious lyrics. Since most of the population has no idea what the words mean the religion in some of the songs means nothing to them. Maybe the Japanese have more in common with we Americans than I originally thought.

Morning Coffee Tokyo Style

2006-11-23T15:54:00.000-08:00

This is a Doutor Coffee shop. One difference from home is that coffee shops don't open until 7am in Tokyo. Another difference is that smoking is just fine in some coffee shops in Tokyo, smokers doesn't seem to carry the social stigma that they do in the US. You can light up nearly anywhere here without getting nasty looks or being considered a pariah. I sat down with my small cup of coffee ($2.20 US) and smelled cigarettes. The salaryman next to me was puffing away. And so was everybody else. The only person in the place who seemed to give this activity more than a passing thought was me.

One woman who appeared to be in her early twenties walked in wearing a surgical mask. Many people here do so that wasn't all that unusual. She ordered her drink, sat down, pulled the mask down exposing her mouth and instead of sipping her drink she lit up and began to puff away. So I guess that not everybody here who wears a surgical mask in public does it for health concerns, maybe it's just a fashion statement.

Mmmm, German Dog, Lettuce Dog and Bacon Spicy Dog.

Tokyo - Arrived

2006-11-23T04:55:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Tokyo. My hotel room may be the size of a closet but it has Internet access and one of those squirting electric "washlets".

To go or not to go, that is the question. But first I'd have to eat something and so far the food looks kinda strange. I got in late and it's raining. Good thing that there's a 7-11 near my hotel. 7-11's and nearly identical convenience stores are everywhere, at least in this neighborhood (Nihombashi). I bought some food (I have no idea what) at the 7-11, I don't think I'll ever get used to having the cashier at the 7-11 bow. The hotel clerk who checked me in also bowed. I have a feeling that there will be more bowing in my immediate future Tokyo is neat and orderly. I could see it while the plane was still in the air, in parking lots cars were parked neatly with exactly the same amount of space surrounding them. The roads were orderly. Every time I've flown in the states in the last few years people whipped out their cell phones the minute the wheels touched the ground. Not so when my plane landed. I walked around for an hour or 2 and have yet to hear a car horn. The train from Narita airport had signs on the windows telling people not to use their cell phones and I heard nobody disregarding that request. There was lots of texting going on though. Bicycles are left in the street without locks, everybody waits for the WALK sign, nom matter how dead the traffic, people place wet umbrellas into holders outside of a store and know that the umbrella will be there when they return. This bears further investigation. But I've been up for nearly 24 hours, time to crash.

Pandamonium

2006-09-19T19:23:00.000-07:00

After my breakfast of peppered peanuts and noodles I decided to head out to the Chengdu Panda Research station, just outside of town. My map said that the 302 city bus would do the job. The man at the hotel front desk who spoke some English said that I'd need to take 2 buses just to get to the 302. He wrote it all out for me but I decided that I'd be lost forever and maybe even crushed and steamed, those buses look awfully hot and packed. Some of the Chengdu buses say "City Boat" on them, others "City Bus". I don't get it. I'm all for public transportation but in China I can't read, write or speak and that makes public transportation a big problem. Besides, taxis in China are cheap. So I took a taxi. Driving in China is like the Chinese language, it's based on a philosophy that I just don't understand. And like the Chinese language Chinese driving works, sort of. The last time I was here I was in province and I didn't see a stop sign. Chengdu has stop signs but I might be the only one who's noticed them. Moving obstacles, either other cars or people are avoided in a kind of mechanized ballet that looks deadly to me, because I don't understand it. We dodged pedestrians and trucks and buses, nothing unusual for China. My driver was yacking on his cell phone when he cut off a cop. No problemo, the cop had been yacking on his cell phone too and may not have noticed. On the way I saw 3 wheeled trucks and some guy hauling large slabs of meaty ribs piled onto the back of his bicycle. Chinese driver lay on the horn so much that it's just background noise now and some drivers have taken it to the next level by installing incredibly loud truck horns in their cars. How bad is the driving? This morning when I walked in on the local TV news in the hotel's dining area they were showing a scene of burning devastation. News from Iraq? No, some awful traffic accident that involved trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and burning store fronts. Vehicular safety here must be in its infancy with no Communist Party version of Ralph Nader to prod it along. I've only seen one motorcyclist wearing a helmet, he was a cop. Kids riding as passengers on bicycles sometimes stand up and hold on to the driver for balance. In the US their parents would kill them, in China their parents are pedaling the bicycle. The panda has some problems. Their habitat has been encroached upon by China's 1.3 billion citizens. Pandas are finicky eaters too, they eat only several species of bamboo. They have a reproductive problem too. How can I put this gently, if male pandas had email they'd be awash in spam claiming the ability to help them. Male pandas just don't get the job done. But the panda has an ace up it's sleeve, it's cute and we as a species love cute animals. The panda is a bear but he's given up the eating of meat for a peaceful life of chomping bamboo, lots of bamboo. But they still have big jaws (bamboo is incredibly strong stuff) and big claws and they don't call them Giant Pandas for nothing. The red panda is so small I thought it was a fox. But it's a shrunken bear that's very endangered. More about the Chengdu research facility and pandas here: http://www.panda.org.cn/english/eindex.htm

Axis of Evil - Part 1

2006-09-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

That's Chairman Mao himself outside of the train station in Dandong. When I decided to focus much of my travel on China I knew that a must see destination would be the northeastern city of Dandong. I wanted to get as close as an American citizen can to Asia’s founding member of the “Axis of Evil”, North Korea. I’ve long been fascinated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK. The DPRK has been described as a Stalinist Theme Park. If the communism in today’s China can be described as Communism Lite, the DPRK is old school Commie Classic. Stalin’s USSR had no cell phones and neither does the DPRK, they’re banned. Electricity is a sometimes thing as is food. After a bad harvest a few years ago and resulting famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives one of the government’s slogans was, “Let’s all eat 2 meals a day”. Anyone with a fast Internet connection can watch canned broadcasts of the nightly news from Pyongyang (http://www.elufa.net/) and understanding Korean isn’t a requirement to notice that things are just a wee bit odd in the DPRK. Since the DPRK is a one party state ruled by the Korean Workers Party and the head of the party, Kim Jong Il, is known as the “Dear Leader” most of the news is about his comings and goings, such as his visits to army bases or to collective farms to dispense “on the spot guidance” and tell farmers in person what they ought to grow or not grow. Or the historic comings and goings of his father Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader” because the DPRK is the world’s first communist dynasty. In the dead of winter the news often shows office workers in winter coats and vapor streaming from their mouths because in the energy poor DPRK if it’s cold outside it’s cold inside. Does a rocky hillside have to be moved in preparation for new construction? No problem because although the DPRK lacks modern earth moving equipment I’ve seen workers on TV breaking big ones into little ones with sledge hammers and chisels while others dutifully carry off the debris in baskets. I’d love to go and see all this for myself but there are several obstacles:

American citizens are forbidden entry because although there's an armistice the US and DPRK are still technically at war.
Tourists that do make it into the DPRK are assigned minders and their itineraries are set by the government, wandering off alone and mingling with the locals is strictly prohibited.
Why give money to to aid and strengthen brutal dictators? We’re not talking Gitmo here. Read the Aquariums of Pyongyang; if you don’t catch snakes, lizards, rats and insects to eat while you’re in a North Korean labor camp you die of starvation. After a day of forced mining or logging committing the speeches of the ruling Kim clan to memory is mandatory.

OK, so I couldn't enter the country but I could get up close and peer in. To do so I had to go to Dandong. Dandong is on the Yalu River in Liaoning province and was once a staging ground for Chinese “volunteers” who fought in the Korean War against the US. Today there’s a museum there with the pretentious cold war name of Museum Commemorating the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea.

Dandong is a Seattle sized city of roughly 500,000 people and is the eastern terminus of the Great Wall of China. The Yalu River forms the border between China and the DPRK, right across the Yalu is the North Korean city of Sinuiju. I booked a "Riverview" room at Dandong’s only 4 star hotel, the Zhonglian, a room with a view, a view of North Korea.

See those 2 bridges that my riverview room looked out on? Actually it’s just a bridge and a half. The austere bridge on the left connects Dandong and Sinuiju with one reversible lane for motor vehicles and one railroad track. The half bridge on the right was built during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and was bombed during the Korean war by the US Air Force in 1950 and was never rebuilt. On the DPRK side only the footings remain. Today the “Broken Bridge” is a tourist attraction, admission 20 Yuan. My admission ticket is below.

Sinuiju has a slightly smaller population than Dandong but at night it might as well not exist, it's absolutely invisible. At night Dandong is alive with lights, cars and people on the streets or in their electrically lit homes living their lives. At night Sinuiju appears to be dead, maybe the Dear Leader sucked the life out of it. I saw no lights at all except what appeared to be somebody welding. I did see some diffused light off in the distance, I’ve since read that it’s the statue of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung which has the only artificial light in town.

Directly above and below is Dandong as seen from a boat on the North Korean side of the Yalu. It's so prosperous it even has air pollution.

There's not much to see on the Sinuiju side of the Yalu. Plenty of rusting hulks, a few propaganda slogans (this one supposedly proclaims that Kim Jong Il is the light of the sun) and not much else. If rigid communism has any benefits they weren't evident from just offshore.

Truck traffic between Dandong and the DPRK. No clue on what's in the trucks. I saw carpeting heading into North Korea and a refrigerated truck from a Japanese meat company come out.

The Great Helmsman bids you farewell.

Axis of Evil - Part 2

2006-09-10T21:52:00.000-07:00

When I was quite sure that I had seen all of North Korea that Dandong had to offer I remembered that Dandong is also the eastern terminus of the Great Wall. I certainly couldn't leave town without seeing the Great Wall so I asked the concierge at my 4 star hotel, the Zhonglian. Her English was passable, certainly better than my Mandarin but she had no idea what I was talking about. She called over a bellboy and they chatted in Mandarin about this strange laowai request. The bellboy also had no idea what I wanted. Temporarily defeated I retreated to my riverview room.

Traveling with a laptop is puts the world at your fingers, even in China where the central government has the nasty habit of censoring the web. Some things on the web were conspicuous by their absence; some blogging sites were unreachable as was the cache option at google.com. A little research revealed that in these parts the Wall was referred to as Great Wall at Tiger Mountain. I returned to the concierge with my rephrased request. She still had no idea what I was talking about. But the English speaking bellboy did. "Oh, Great Wall!", he exclaimed. He explained it all to the concierge. I had them arrange for a taxi to take me there. They told me that it would cost 130 Yuan. They didn’t seem to recognize the term “round trip” so I didn’t know whether the driver would just abandon me out there or not. She wrote my destination for me in Chinese, the bellboy summoned a cab and I was off to the Great Wall. If I worked for a government entity with a world famous attraction in my jurisdiction one of the first things I’d do is make sure that the road from the biggest city around to the attraction was paved. Once my driver and I left the Dandong city limits the road became a dusty, rutted, potholed path, only the bridges were paved.

Admission to the tourist zone cost me another 30 Yuan; I passed on paying for admission to the Museum Commemorating the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid (North) Korea. When we arrived I paid my driver, he indicted that he’d wait for me. Would he? With the language barrier I was nervous. I had a train to Beijing to catch that evening and with the place deserted if he took off I'd be marooned. The Great Wall in this region is in great disrepair so if I worked for that government entity, the 2nd thing I’d do once I got that road paved is to spruce the place up a bit, put the missing tiles back into the footpaths and put in new ladders to replace the dangerously rotten wooden ones.

Above: my driver walks back to his red cab. The parking lot was almost empty OK, so the place needed some work. But this is the Great Wall of China! I looked around, it seemed that I had the whole place to myself. But I didn't want to let that cab out of my sight. But there was still plenty to see.

When I got back to the entrance my driver was still there, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. He looked at me and asked , “Choson?”, pronounced in a fast bark, Chow-sien. I already knew that the word Choson meant North Korea and thanks to the Internet I knew that the border in this area was just a small creek; perhaps he was offering to show it to me.

He took me to the creek that forms the border between China and the DPRK and pointed out 2 armed soldiers from the Korean People’s Army in the distance. He started to shout and wave at them. At first they ignored him but they soon started walking our way with their rifles slung over their shoulders. When they got closer a woman selling tourist nick-nacks from a cart indicated that I should buy a carton of cigarettes from her (around $6 US) and throw them across the creek. The soldiers asked who I was, the driver replied that I was an American. The woman indicated that now was the time for me to hurl the carton of smokes into North Korea. I hit the shore with the carton, the soldiers pretended not to notice. But when I lifted my camera up to my eye to get the shot they noticed that and protested loudly. When they walked away without the carton the woman who sold me the cigarettes gestured that it was alright to take a picture. I had read that the soldiers would come back for the cigarettes when there was no one around. So that’s 1/3 of the Axis of Evil. I didn’t see any actual evil on either my boat buzz of Sinuiju or my encounter with the KPA but perhaps the Kim family is keeping their reservoir of evil someplace else where I couldn’t see it.

My Life as a Tourist in China

2006-08-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

I first went to China on a lark. In 1982 I was in Hong Kong with some time on my hands so I arranged a 3 day tour of Guangzhou. I made the trip on a ferry sailing up the Pearl river that was boarded by several nervous PLA sailors brandishing AK47s when we crossed into Chinese waters. I don’t much care for organized tours but when China first parted the bamboo curtain that tentative first crack after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 Americans were only allowed in as part of tour groups. My second trip to China in 2005 was on another lark. I wanted to go somewhere exotic, but not so exotic that the language rendered me functionally illiterate or where I’d be confronted by a strange kind of toilet. I’m an American after all, I have my standards. Hong Kong was just what the doctor ordered. Although Hong Kong became the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) in 1997 when the British handed it back the Chicoms in Beijing it has maintained many of its differences from the mainland under the “one country, two systems” policy. That means that unlike on the mainland cars in Hong Kong still drive on the left and have the steering wheel on the right British Empire style. Even though it isn’t widely spoken English is still one of the official languages in Hong Kong, which keeps occurrences of Chinglish down.

Hong Kong is a spectacular world city, for me it was China on training wheels. I enjoyed Hong Kong but I was restless to see what was on the other side of the border. Because even though the Hong Kong SAR is now part of the PRC proper the old pre-handover border remains. Hong Kong has its own customs and immigration services that are separate from those on the mainland. Getting to the border is as simple as boarding a KCRC commuter train and getting off at the last stop, Lo Wu. But I couldn’t cross the border without a visa. In another “one country, two systems” quirk American citizens need no visa to visit Hong Kong, just fly into the airport with a valid US passport and you’re in. But Americans do need a visa to cross the border from Hong Kong to the mainland, even to visit for just a few hours. Lots of inexpensive goods come from China but for American citizens a Chinese visa isn’t one of them. I arranged one through my hotel that cost me more than 800 Hong Kong dollars, that’s more than $100 US. But I wasn’t going to turn up my nose at a day trip to Guangdong province because of the cost. I wanted my all day pass to Chinaland. There are times in one’s life where you just have to open the wallet wide and do what needs to be done. The city on the PRC side of the border is Shenzhen, a bustling metropolis of 5 million that was just a fishing village at the time of Mao’s death. Deng XiaoPing used Shenzhen as a test bed for China’s economic liberalization that in retrospect was wildly successful. Unlike the rest of the mainland, Shenzhen lived economically under communism-lite and its industrial buildup was bankrolled by investors from Hong Kong looking to expand somewhere close to home and attracted by a cheap, Chinese speaking workforce. Wages were low by Hong Kong standards and labor and environmental laws were lax. Shenzhen stoked China’s economic expansion and made the then common “made in Hong Kong” label rare today. I passed through Chinese immigration and out of the train station into Shenzhen and was immediately almost hit by a car. Welcome to Chinese driving where use of mirrors or even eyes is optional and pedestrians have no rights, except maybe to be targets. I passed through Chinese immigration and out of the train station into Shenzhen and was immediately almost hit by a car. Welcome to Chinese driving where use of mirrors or even eyes is optional and pedestrians have no rights, except maybe to be targets. I found the place fascinating. Chinese buses with strange insect antenna-like mirrors plied the streets loudly belching out black exhaust. One Chinese bus manufacturer has the unusual name of “King Long”, which to me sounds better suited to a male porn star than to an outfit that makes mass transit vehicles. Look, here’s Deng Xiao Ping and one of the new businesses in booming Shenzhen:

Because China is the wild, wild east and anything goes, except anything contrary to the edicts of the Communist Party. Just ask the Falun Gong.

Littlesheep

2006-06-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

China may not have had any advertising during the time of Mao but they’re making up for lost time. There are billboards everywhere, subway cars adorned in NASCAR like advertising both inside and out, abundant commercials on CCTV state television and even a cable shopping channel. Many of the faces used in advertising to the Chinese people are Cantopop or Taiwanese pop stars but a significant number of the faces used in Chinese advertising are Caucasian. Why? When I brought this to the attention of an instructor of a mandatory race and social justice class at work she explained that it was just another example of white racism and white privilege. But she’s never been to China and white racism seemed to be her answer to every question in the spirit of, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Here’s an example, on trips to China I bought a bag for my laptop and a small belt bag made by a company called Littlesheep. The bags were of good quality and very reasonably priced. Here’s the tag that I clipped off the computer bag, both front and rear (click to enlarge):

The couple in the picture probably don't live in China and they don't look like 99.9% of Littlesheep's target market. But my guess is that to the average Chinese shopper they represent the good life, one filled with lots of stuff and plenty of leisure time and after decades of suffering and sacrifice caused by the economic missteps of clumsy communism who wouldn't want that? Here's another example from Shanghai that I shot in November 2005 on HuaiHai Rd, Shanghai's main fashion street

Here's the webpage of Haagen-Daz China. See anybody Chinese there? It's not just foreign companies that do this either. Here's the website of a Chinese clothing manufacturer, Vider. No Chinese faces here either. Zhonghuacar is a subsidiary of Brilliance Auto, a Chinese company that makes BMW and Mitsubishi knockoffs as well as genuine Chinese made BMW’s. It’s definitely a Chinese company, Zhonghua in Chinese means China. Does anybody have an explanation for this?

Pandas!

2006-06-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

They sure are cute but, they're bears. They eat bamboo and not much else. Before I visited the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Sichuan province I'd never seen bamboo growning before. The Chinese government has sent a few giant pandas to North America.

Pandacams: You can see the pandas at the National Zoo in Washington, DC here: http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/GiantPandas/default.cfm?cam=LP2 The San Diego Zoo has giant pandas too, you can them here: http://www.sandiegozoo.org/zoo/ex_panda_station.html

Richgate - "Kinging the Shanghai Buildings"

2006-06-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

Meet Satan, Shanghai condo developer. This poster flogging this condo project, supposedly the toniest in Shanghai, strikes me as sinister. Who else but Satan himself could get away with a name like Richgate in a supposedly communist country?

Naturally a development this gaudy and over the top deserves an equally gaudy website (in Chinglish).

Chinglish Choice

2006-05-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

I get it, leave valuables in the hotel safe or they could get stolen. Or, “be ready for lose”.

Every blog on China seems to have some obligatory Chinglish and it would be bad ju-ju for me to upset this tradition. As for just what Chinglish is check out Wikipedia's extensive entry Many humerous examples here: http://www.engrish.com/ There's no need to hunt down Chinglish in China, it's everywhere so it finds you. It's usually well meaning on the part of the writer and I still wonder why the Chinese think it's necessary to have English (or their own unique interpretation of it) everywhere. I'm glad that they do it, it means that I can read street signs and figure out where I'm going on the metro and get just a little bit less lost.

Behold! Maybe this is the origin of the phrase "Chinese Fire Drill". I found this on the inside of the door of my room at the Jin He Hotel in Chengdu.

Like most Chinglish the true meaning can be grasped after some thought. I found this one outside of a monorail station in Chongqing. It shows 3 businesses that have done well in the shopping center by the monorail. So "Tertiary Is Happy" probably means that good things come in threes. Or not.

Just a misspelling, I hope.

From Beijing: I have no clue of what they were trying to tell me. Change for parking? Since only a complete stark staring suicidal lunatic would attempt to drive in any Chinese city I didn't have to concern myself with whatever this is.

This one's from Hong Kong. English is one of Hong Kong's official languages so they ought to know better, unless I'm not up on my art and fashion and there is something called a digital perm.

Check this guy out, I shot this billboard in Chengdu. The text says, "The strongest potential makes the Chinese arrogant Men's clothing brand". Change the word arrogant to confident and it suddenly makes more sense.

This is from Dandong on the North Korean border. I found it outside a men's room. It means more than just keep the place clean.

The message is helpful, noble yet strangely phrased.

Why go to China?

2006-05-28T14:19:00.000-07:00

Why not? Friends and coworkers keep telling me that I'm brave to go to China, especially on my own. I don't feel any great sense of bravery, I go for the adventure and adventure is wherever I find it. Is language a problem? Chinese is a tough language and at my age I realize that I'll never write the great Chinese novel and I'll never master Putongua. But as an English speaker I encounter more English in China than I ever saw in France and more than I've seen in some American cities.

Worried about getting lost? Don't. You'll be able to read most street signs, subway stops and even some billboard advertising thanks to pinyin. That's the Chinese system of Romanization of written Chinese characters.

Food: Don't let the lack of chopstick training hold you back, get hungry and go to your nearest Chinese restaurant to work out with the sticks. While everyone outside of the showcase Chinese cities will most likely notice that you're a foreigner (and maybe even point and tell their friends) it's the rare restaurant in China that will automatically offer you a fork. I stayed out of hole in the wall restaurants due to health concerns and the realization that I could never communicate with the staff. I was always nervous about appearing ignorant but usually the staff would try to meet me halfway. English is taught in most Chinese schools and there is usually someone around who can show off what little English they remember.

Expect cultural food differences though. When I told someone at dinner that I didn't eat beef but that chicken was OK she summoned the waitress and ordered something in Chinese. What arrived is in the picture on the right. No, that's not chocolate. It's chicken blood.

Water: The water supply in China is not up to snuff when compared to the water supply in North America. One waterborne pathogen that takes root could result in several days of wasted vacation at the very least so why risk it? Bottled water in the US is marketed and priced as a fashion accessory but in China it's available everywhere and it's cheap too. 500 ml of pure water for the People can be had for 1¥, sometimes less. That's about .12 US. Even the fleabag hotels that I complained about usually spotted me a bottle or 2 of purified water daily.

The Cybercafe

2006-05-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

Back when communists ruled parts of Asia and central and eastern Europe shortages of everything was their trademark. In Chengdu my communist era hotel was providing a free communist era Internet connection. It was a 100 megabit Ethernet hookup but I maybe Chairman Mao was standing on the Internet garden hose. I wished I could upgrade to dialup. The solution? I went to the cybercafe. This one In China each user must sign in at the front desk with their government issued ID cards in order to be granted access. The kids running the front desk didn't know what to make of me, I couldn't read the government form and they couldn't read my passport to fill the form out for me so after forking over 3 or 4 Yuan they indicated that I could sit anywhere in the large room that I preferred.

It was a large hot room filled with adolescent youth and and hot computer equipment. It was already a hot day and this place was on the 2nd floor of a mini-mall. It was uncomfortable but I had things to do, such as finding out why I couldn't reach my Hotmail account via my own laptop. The Chinese government never admits to censoring the Internet but supposedly that's just what they did to accessing Hotmail from within China I was by far the oldest person in the cybercafe, probably 3 times the ages of the kids running the place. Grandpa Gweilo had come to town, let's all flash him our best gang signs! I left after about an hour and a half, I had gotten the information that I wanted and I could no longer take the stifling heat or my clothes sticking to my chair and my skin sticking to my clothes. When I went to leave I was surprised to be handed my change for the time unused (I had no idea how much time had purchased, I just wanted Internet access and the price was more than right).

Let's take more pictures with my new best friends!

Breakfast at the local bakery

2006-05-27T17:26:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's my own bias but I usually think of pastries and similar baked goods as European in origin. The stereotype I've subscribed to says that Asians get their starch from rice, Europeans (and by extension most Americans) get theirs from wheat and similar grains. Maybe not. In Asia I was surprised to find bakeries with elaborate cakes, breads and pastries everywhere. The format is usually the same, the customer grabs a tray and a set of tongs and selects their choice from small transparent bins. The selections are totaled and paid for at the cash register. So they have bread and pastry in Asia. Naturally there are some local variations on the usual bakery fare, how else to explain the "weiner doughnut" or the "bacon pizza bun" that I found at the Yamazaki bakery outlet in Kowloon:

Then there's Breadtalk. They're based in Singapore but have franchised stores in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. They're upscale, efficient and just a bit exotic. Behold the Firefloss:

This isn't the floss that you use to clean teeth: it's shredded processed muscle fiber.

Strange Taste Horsebeans?

2006-05-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

What are Strange Taste Horsebeans? I picked up a small package of them at a rest stop on a bus trip from Chengdu, Sichuan to Chongqing. They're strange alright; crunchy, sweet, hot and salty in succession. Not bad. A nice change from tortilla chips and dip or Cheez Doodles. But what's with the name? It's like this all over China. English is in, it's fashion, it's the way that the Chinese think that they can communicate with all non Chinese speakers. But the differences between Chinese, a language based on characters and English, a language based on letters combined with the easy availability of inaccurate Internet based machine translations make for awkward Chinglish. Horsebeans are more commonly known in English as broad beans or Fava beans. Sounds better already, no? The "strange taste" is indeed a unique taste. Chongqing's Unique Tasting Fava Beans, now those might sell in the export market because the product ain't bad and there's nothing currently like it on this side of the Pacific.

Chinese radios

2006-05-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

Some people buy stuffed animals or other tchotchkes as souvenirs when they travel. Me, I buy radios. Last year when I was in Dandong I bought one of these for about $25 US:

Yes, the front of the radio is in Chinese. On this trip I came home with another Tecsun radio, this one was $53 at Carrefour: This one's in Chinese too. A review is here I'm not sure why I do this, maybe I'm just a collector in denial. There's certainly not much worth list to on the radio these days and it can be argued that shortwave listening has been rendered obsolete by satellite communication and the abundance of audio streams available on the Internet. I dunno, I just like 'em.

What trade imbalance with China?

2006-05-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

PJ O'Rourke is one of my favorite writers, in this article he questions the accepted notion of America's trade imbalance with China:

But there is no such thing as a trade imbalance. Trade can't be out of balance because a balance is what a trade is. Buyers and sellers decide that one thing is equivalent to another. Free trade is balanced trade. You might as well have free love then claim your partner had sex but you didn't. And a certain American president did claim that. Maybe Monica Lewinsky is in charge of America's China policy.

Click here for the entire article

Gasoline

2006-05-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

When I was in China in May 2006 the price of gasoline was significantly cheaper than it is in the US. The price of premium gasoline was about $2.40 US for a four quart US gallon, almost one US dollar cheaper than home. It's said that the Chinese government keeps the price of fuel artificially low to stimulate their domestic economy. It appears that the difference will narrow a bit since gasoline prices in China are set by the central government and that central government has decided on a price hike. Which means that they're still selling fuel at a loss.

Enron

2006-05-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

Everything's for sale in China, even pandas. Back when Enron was flying high they got all warm and fuzzy and invested $5000 in a giant panda. I've been searching the web, so far no leads on when Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are hiding little Enron the panda.

Fashion! For Men! China Style!

2006-05-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm back home nearly everything I read makes sense. I can walk into just about any restaurant and make sense of the menu, no more taking the waitress to the tables of my fellow diners so I can grunt and point. Unfortunately for me even the conversations of passersby now make sense. At least all of the T-shirts slogans I see make sense. All of them except mine. When I ran out of clean shirts in Chongqing I went on the hunt for the goofiest, most inane T-shirts I could find. A fool's errand? Not in China, everybody wears them. I now have a golf shirt that says,

Golf: The Purpose of the golf link to urnamen is to adsance the game of golf

None of these shirts was purchased in shady knock-off joints, they were all bought at a French based chain Carrefour.

I'm going to be getting some strange looks this summer because I'm going to be a walking billboard for men's fashion in China.

(Below) I took this picture in Guangzhou in 1982. Notice the English on most of the shirts.

Let the Good Times Roll

2006-05-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

Mao is right on the money, quite literally. He's on every denomination of Yuan notes so Mao is near and dear to everybody in the new China. He's in the textbooks of their kids and there's often a big statue of him in their town squares. In Chengdu a massive Mao gazes over the development of a new multi-block high end shopping plaza and the new subway that's being built to get Chengdu's citizens to the goods that they want from that new multi-block high end shopping plaza and back home again. In Dandong a giant Mao salutes the Real Love disco.

Mao wouldn't recognize the place. China has outgrown orthodox "workers control the means of production" communism because China has proved conclusively that communism just can't accomplish the basics of providing the food and fuel average folks need, let alone the luxuries they desire and dream of. In sidestepping communism it has brought prosperity to many of it's citizens. It's true, China still has 800 million rural, dirt farming peasants. It used to have more and plenty of urban peasants too. Even the Bang-Bang army in Chongqing bear their heavy burdens because as bad as it is it's better than life down on the farm. The ocean of good old classic iron fisted state planning in the world has dried up into a small dirty little puddle. That kind of good old time classic communism can only be found in garden spots like North Korea and Cuba and it's subjects are kept penned in physically and ideologically by fences and censorship. On the big collective farms that those countries are ideological purity is sprinkled liberally with power shortages, unemployment and famines. China had wide spread famines that starved millions to death in the late 1950's and 1960's, thanks in no small part to that guy on the banknotes.

In today's China food is cheap and all of the stores I saw are overflowing with quantity and quality. Chinese food stores have apples from New Zealand and Washington state, bananas from the Philippines and almonds from California. The English language China Daily from May 16th said that doctors here are running into something never before seen on a large scale before in China; type 2 diabetes. Many of it's citizens never had it so good and they want the good times to continue to roll. China's system is one not seen by the world before. If it ain't communism then what is it? It isn't democracy in the sense of voting for the candidate and party of your choice and the right to stand up on a soapbox in Tiananmen Square and say that the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China is ideologically hypocritical and full of crap. There's only one political party permitted, the "Communist Party", even if it's communist in name only. Coca Cola had cocaine in it way back when but even though the coke is gone from Coke it remains the name of the brand. In China perhaps the name "communist" is just traditional, part of China's branding.

So maybe it doesn't matter what the party in power is called or what it does just as long as it delivers the goods and they don't piss off too many people in the process. China does that sometimes, since the central government owns all the land they can decide that a new mega-mall or chemical plant or condo project is going to be built where your house is now. Be gone in 30 days because the bulldozers are coming they'll tell you and give you a paltry payoff while others get rich with the kind of in your face corruption that Enron could only dream of. China's new industry needs electricity and much of it comes from burning dirty coal. When the state electricity grid decides to build a new coal fired power plant in your neighborhood you don't have much recourse beyond living with it or moving someplace else. Is the ruling Communist party delivering the goods? In my travels it appears to me that they are. Traditional classic communism usually took a country with lots of nothing and made sure that the nothing was spread around equitably. This usually resulted in every body having an abundance of nothing and nothing else. China's been there, done that. There are no cell phones in North Korea, they're banned by the ruling Worker's Party. Cuba has a few because nobody has money for such a luxury. China has more cell phones than there are people in the US, over 300 million and increasing rapidly. I was in Guangzhou for a few days in 1982., there were next to no cars and everybody wore the same clothes and cheap black cotton shoes. Everything looked worn out and run down. The Chinese don't have to read their history books to find out how bad things were in recent Chinese history (assuming the government would accurately print that history where some 80 million died due to Communist Party ineptitude and indifference), they lived through the famines, the scorning and punishment of intellectuals and the purging of innovators or those with contrary ideas. It's recent enough for many to have lived through it, they know what depravation and unbridled state power are like.

The Chinese people want air conditioners, cars, good food with variety, computers, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks Coffee, Wal-Mart and they want to go on vacations overseas. Oh, and they want fashion and they want it in abundance. If there's one English word I saw over and over on store fronts, the sides of cars and motorcycles and emblazoned in glitter across teen aged girl's chests it's F*A*S*H*I*O*N. They don't always spell it properly but they pursue it at the makeup counters, jewelry and clothing stores with a single minded gusto that suggests that they're making up for lost time and they want to enjoy the party before some bubble headed bureaucrat with more ideology than brains changes his mind. So I saw T-shirts with English gibberish ("World's Greatest Lovers, We Don't Move!", "#1 Killboy" on a 5 year old), women of all ages tottering around in high heels and lots of young people of both sexes with dyed hair.

Bang-Bang: In Their Own Words

2006-05-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

Click here for interviews with some members of Chongqing’s bang-bang army.

Chongqing, bang-bang!

2006-05-20T09:41:00.000-07:00

In 1997 the central government in Beijing carved off the piece of Sichuan province where Chongqing (pronounced Chong-ching) is located and made it the municipal equivalent of a province. So most everything about Sichuan cooking applies to Chongqing, which means that edible things can be chili hot and everything is saturated in oil. Yesterday I slipped and fell down about 5 stairs. Today I did it again and I've got a nice welt on my left arm and a scrape on my right wrist. There is so much oil in Western China that they're spreading it on sidewalks and stairways? The chilies melted the soles of my shoes? Ever since I've arrived in China people have been staring at my feet, specifically my shoes. I guess that they're fashion conscious. I'm wearing a pair of Asics Kayano running shoes because they're comfortable. They're made somewhere in China by a Japanese company but possibly only for export.

Chongqing municipality has about 31 million people of which at least 10 million live in Chongqing city. The central government in Beijing has been pouring billions into this city to make it the industrial, business and cultural hub of western China, sort of China's Chicago on the Yangtze river. Chongqing is where Ford, and Suzuki build cars, A large Chinese company named Lifan builds motorcycles and cars here. Chongqing has a monorail (more on that later), skyscrapers and they've done up their sidewalks and stairways in tile. It's been raining and to my running shoes that wet tile might as well be glare ice. Gotta be careful out there before I come home with my black and blue butt in a sling.

Planning means a lot to any of these trips of mine. What to pack, where to stay, where to go, what to do. For the Chongqing leg of this trip I blew it. For one thing, I underestimated the size of the place, it's massive. Chongqing is known as one of the three furnaces of China because of the heat but it's been wet and in the low 60's. I packed shorts and short sleeve shirts. The hotel I picked turned out to be cheap for a reason, it was a run down fleabag, a fleabag with a free blazing Internet connection. I used that Internet connection to reserve myself a room up the street at the Marriott with real A/C (it's very humid).

Back in Seattle I'd reserved myself an airline ticket from Chongqing to Shanghai and arranged to pick it up at a place I thought was nearby my hotel. Was I wrong, I took a cab clear across town and even though I don't speak much Chinese somehow I knew that the cabbie was saying, "It's around here someplace" when she turned me loose. I looked and looked, I went into businesses and presented the address in Chinese. Nobody knew where the place was and I had no idea what I was looking for. In Shenzhen I picked up my ticket at an airport kiosk, last year it was at the airport at a bank. I screwed up but the Chinese people came to the rescue, they all tried to help me or somehow told me that they didn't know. I started stopping people in the street, old men who perhaps lived in this neighborhood for years, a neighborhood that I'm sure doesn't see too many folks who look like me. I had a 2 hour window to score the ticket and it was ticking away fast. One of the locals took it upon herself to call the place that had my ticket, find out where they were and to take me there. It was nowhere near where I was looking, maybe 7 blocks away, up a dark flight of slippery stairs in and an office. If she hadn't done that I'd still be looking for that damn ticket to Shanghai. So in return I bought her lunch and then she showed me around town a bit. That's not the way I usually see a city, my way is to just plop myself down and hit the streets but seeing a city through the eyes of a local is better. We took the cable car over the Yangtze river and had a grand old time in Chongqing. She relied on her 6 years of rusty high school English which she's never used and I on a few Chinese words aided by pantomime. Planning what to pack means planning what to wear. I bought some shirts before I left but I've run out of clean ones. I considered letting the Marriott wash them but they wanted more for one shirt than it costs for a nice dinner for two so I took a different route to cleanliness. I went to Carrefour and spent the money on new shirts instead.

In the US Walmart stomps the competition but these guys give Walmart fits in the rest of the world and they've been wise not to face Walmart down on it's home turf. They stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap and globalization be damned the Chinese love it. Carrefour is a French company but all the signs in the place are in English and Chinese. I was walking around in there when I saw an employee pulling a pallet of boxes and an old woman got in her way. It sounded like she was chewing the old woman out but when the employee saw me she broke into a big forced smile and started to say "lalalalala" in mid chew-out. I might be the only round eye she's seen in awhile and I could be from the home office in France.

In Carrefour I was able to buy some domestic clothes and some T-shirts with the word Xiongbalang! on them. These were about $1.15 each. I turned down shirts advertising "Seattle Hornets" whoever they are. In Chinese shirt sizes I'm and XXL, that's 180 in metric. Chinese pants are trickier for a Westerner to purchase. I was able to quickly figure out my size but in China it seems that the size of one's waistline determines the length of the pants. I couldn't find pants in my length so if the weather turns cold again the hunt will continue in Shanghai. I later found out that a tailor is on duty in the store for alterations.

A big bustling city like Chongqing needs rapid transit that goes beyond cheap taxis and buses so Chongqing built a monorail. Not a toy for tourists or a political cause célèbre that's going to be a model for the nation like in Seattle but real rapid transit that for now hugs the Jiangling river. Unlike Seattle Chongqing's monorail runs for about 18 stations (more are being built) and the first 3 or so are underground. Chongqing's monorail is simply a train that runs on a different kind of track, a concrete center is hugged by rubber wheels instead of a bed with steel rails. From the inside of one of the cars it's impossible to determine that it's a monorail instead of a train that runs on tracks. There doesn't seem to be any of the Seattle romanticism over the style of the train, it's just a train that uses a different technology. The fare is cheap, anywhere from about .25 to .75 US per ride depending on the distance. Service is frequent, about every 5 minutes.

Chongqing is also famous for it's "bang-bang" people, mostly men. Bang-bang (pronounced closer to bong-bong) means stick or bamboo and is possibly where English gets that word. The bang bang army can be seen everywhere in Chongqing carrying their ropes and bamboo poles if they are looking for work or if they've found work bearing large loads hanging from the pole that they balance on their shoulders. It looks back breaking but they do the work that is often done in other Chinese cities by people on bicycles. Chongqing is too hilly for bicycles so the solution is a combination of Chinese ingenuity and Chinese overpopulation. The bang-bang army consists of uneducated recent rural arrivals in the big city who work for peanuts as beasts of burden. I saw them carrying all sorts of things; couches, chairs, tables, giant baskets of fruit. It's awful work and they're looked down upon by the locals I saw this myself, every time my friend who helped me find my plane ticket would see one of these guys she'd sing out, "Chongqing, bang-bang!" and laugh and point. Maybe it's a cultural thing but I didn't get it, these guys looked like the lowest of the low to me and to mock them struck my pampered American sensibilities as cruel. My cubicle life suddenly looks just a little less dim by comparison.

Sichuan - Bus from Chengdu Chongqing

2006-05-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

I took the bus from Chengdu to Chongqing, roughly the distance from Seattle to Portland. What was I thinking! I had read that the buses were modern and that a new expressway had been completed between the 2 cities. Well, the expressway isn't done yet. Construction outside of Chengdu cost us at least an hour. I also have a headache, maybe because when we arrived in the station in Chongqing the guy sitting in front of me jumped up, grabbed his bag from the overhead compartment and swung it right into my face. That's him filling up the left side of the picture above. He left a nice faceprint on the inside of the left lens of my glasses. I don't think that he even noticed, I know the Chinese term for excuse me and I certainly didn't hear it. Just another cultural thing which I may get to later.

I thought that I'd be sitting on a comfortable brand new bus with clean windows that would allow me to happily snap pictures of the Chinese countryside. What I got was an ratty old coach with grimy windows. I was sitting on the aisle and the insides of the windows had dirty curtains drawn so everybody could see the TV. It's been years since I took a Greyhound bus but I'll bet that even in anything goes USA that they don't run violent slasher movies on their intercity coaches. Both were Hong Kong cop movies in Cantonese, which means that my fellow passengers had to read the subtitles. Bonus for me, the 2nd feature was subtitled in Chinese and English. Do I even have to mention that I was the only westerner on the bus? I put on my MP3 player because my fellow passengers were busy shouting into their cell phones. I fell asleep but awoke when the bus stopped at a rest area for lunch.

No golden arches at this rest stop, there was plenty of hot fresh food but it all had that red oily breath of fire look of Sichuan cuisine so I passed. I bought a bowl of noodles topped with crushed peanuts for 4Y (maybe .35 US), wolfed them down and then it was back on the bus. The Chengdu - Chongqing Expressway is a toll road. It looks like the designers didn't consult engineers anywhere else, those acceleration lanes to get on to the toll road are awfully brief. All of the signs are bilingual, sort of. I saw the sign "Many Accidents Happnd This Neighborhood" too many times. An overpass is a "flyover". And just like on an American Interstate there were giant billboards pushing cosmetics, cars and various companies. There was one ad for a plumbing company of a naked little boy peeing in a giant arc into their western style toilet. I saw some scenery, terraced farm plots and what might've been rice paddies.

After checking into my hotel (more on that later) I went for a walk to scope the place out. Chongqing and Seattle are sister cities. http://www.scsca.org Seattle is damp and cold, Chongqing is steamy and hot. Both Seattle and Chongqing have a monorail, sort of. Seattle's isn't running due to an accident, Chongqing's is partially underground. http://www.cqmetro.cn/

It started to rain (that sister city thing again) so I ducked into a restaurant. They gave me a menu, which naturally I couldn't read. The dog ate my homework, hopefully Fido wasn't for dinner. I was hungry, other than my small bowl of noodles at the rest stop I had a snack of a envelope of "Chongqing Strange Taste Horsebeans". I'm not making that up, I'm going to try and get some to bring back. Sweet, salty, spicy and hot, sort all at different times. Not knowing what to do I took my waitress to the other tables and inspected what the locals were having. I ordered a plate of sautéed greens and a bowl of some kind of tofu. I don't eat red meat but I overlooked the pork, I've learned that in China there's oink in everything. It was good but while I was eating I had the feeling that I was being watched. I looked up from my meal and found 4 waitresses and the owner staring at me, obviously entertained by Grandpa Lauwai on the chopsticks. We all had a good laugh, even though they were laughing at me. I don't know what I was doing wrong (other than stumbling in there in the first place). I didn't ask for a fork, I didn't mishandle the sticks and get rice all over the table. I thought that I was doing a good job getting the food from the plate and into my face. We all had a good laugh and the big meal was insanely cheap.

I don't like my hotel. But as I'm sure the Great Helmsman Chairman Mao once said, "you get what you pay for". And I haven't paid much for this place, about $28 a night. The Chinese Internet booking service I used said that this was a 4 star hotel and although there are more expensive rooms here there are cheaper ones too. The Internet is a wonderful thing. There's a Marriott down the street that promises luxury, as in A/C that'll freeze meat and a clean bathroom. I got onto the Marriott web site and got myself the weekend special. I'm off to wriggle out of my reservation.

Hotpot and a Communist Era Hotel

2006-05-19T17:44:00.000-07:00

Sichuan Province is famous for hotpot. To eat hotpot you sit at a table with a large burner in the center that heats spiced oil with floating chilies. You order the ingredients and then cook to taste, being sure to dip into a bowl of garlic flavored chilified oil before putting your chopsticks into your mouth. Or, if you're a spice wimp like me, they'll float a smaller pot of boiling water in the boiling oil. The water for my dinner contained a small whole fish, scallions, some small bean-like fruits and various spices. I ordered some small mushrooms, bean curd skins and some other vegetable that I had never seen before. I was told that the menu was in English and technically it was. I passed on "cow spinal column" and I almost ordered "American tender boot" just so I could see what it was. The menu was full of English that had been massacred, sliced, diced, pureed and heavily spiced. Since it was dark and I was only out cruising for dinner I didn't have my camera.

Chengdu is full of fractured English, even Helen Keller could find examples of Chinglish here. Why someone would call a clothing store "Lesbian and the Life" is beyond me, just like the guy who sat at the table next to mine at the hotpot restaurant wearing a T shirt that said, "Jew Jeans" or the man out for a walk with his wife and their one government approved child wearing a black T-shirt that said, "Glitter Bitch". I've taken a few pictures of it but to take many more would be pointless, it's everywhere. The locals must think that it's cool otherwise why would they bother?

The Chinese hotels that I've stayed at before were a step up from the old commie era hotel where I'm staying now in Chengdu. They would cater to western palates with coffee, eggs and other breakfast items that we pampered westerners prefer. There wasn't even the pretense of western breakfast this morning. No coffee but I did have my choice between hot milk and a hot white fluid that I think tasted like soybean milk. There were also 3 different kinds of congee, some cookies, spicy salted beans, heavily salted peanuts and various fried buns and vegetables. I also ate something that was vaguely chowfun-like. Nothing was labeled in any language. I'm not sure what it all was but an hour later I was alternating between thinking that it was pretty good and wanting to hurl. I think it was all the oil, they're big on oil here and I have a low oil threshold. There must be some kind of edict handed down from the Communist Party in Beijing that all food consumed in Sichuan Province must be fried or at least passed through some oil, preferably chili infused oil I seem to be the only Westerner who stumbled into this hotel. For less than Motel 6 prices I'm getting a slightly run down commie era hotel. If there's A/C here it ain't working. Some of the hutong roofs are strewn with rubble, during the night someone decided to loudly shovel some if it. Perhaps it was done on one side and needed to be turned. To get hot water turn the sink spigot to the left, the shower control to the right (even though the left of the control says HOT in English). No fridge, no safe.

The people in town have pondered me a bit as I passed by but very few have shouted "Hello" or "lauwai" but I did attract the attention of the local pimps who had access to girls who could show me a massagy good time. I must look like a high roller. The hotel staff though speaks no English and when I arrived they treated me as if I had just emerged from a flying saucer. The mattress is the typical Chinese sheet of drywall. Internet connectivity here makes me long for the good old days when I had dialup. I'd like to send pictures but my LAN connection chokes on anything bigger than text. But it's nice to know that some things in life can be depended upon, I'm somehow still getting all of my spam. There's a wireless router hiding being an Intel Centrino ad at the front desk, I may go down there and lurk for awhile if it's not just for show because I can't pick it up in my room.

This afternoon I did a deal with one of the two government owned phone companies. At least I think I did. I was walking though a part of town that seemed to specialize in cell phone stores. Some people sat on the sidewalk selling old cell phones, others kept trying to hand me 8.5 X 14 pieces of paper filled with columns of numbers. They looked like large bookie sheets. Then it dawned on my tiny pea brain, they were selling cell phone numbers. Since I've learned that under the New Communism everything is negotiable I turned down a cell phone number at 100 Yuan (about $12.50). We bargained via calculator and settled at 50 Yuan but when he tried to add in an extra 30 I walked away. I may look funny but that doesn't means that you can take advantage of me. A woman who had been watching the deal go sour approached me and indicated that she'd do the deal for 50 Yuan. I agreed but she wanted me to chose a phone number. Fung Shui? They're temporary telephone numbers, they're all the same to me. She took me down a grimy alley filled with used cell phones and dealers, she took me right to her Mr. Big, the phone pimp. Mr. Big looked about 16 but he spoke some English. He assured me that I could call the USA. He recorded my number and who made the sale and I was back out on cell phone street. Seeing that I had no idea how to use my new service I stopped in at my new phone company, China Unicom. More language problems. They said that I could not call overseas until they recorded all of the information from my passport and then I had to wait 24 hours. Bureaucracy? Secret police? I agreed. The people with the sheets of phone numbers kept coming into to the phone company to try to sell the phone company's telephone numbers to it's customers. Maybe it's just business. And under the New Communism business cannot be stopped. When I was in Dandong in November I bought a SIM for my cell phone from a street vendor, no Mr. Big involved. The street vendor never told me about checking in with the phone company, probably because she didn't speak English. After I got home I read that the Chinese government had put a stop to such street sales citing security concerns. And while China Unicom did record all of my information (my papers were in order) it was only for the green light to place overseas calls. I was free to use the card within China before I voluntarily visited the phone company.

While walking around this morning I bought yak milk. Why did I buy yak milk? Because I could, that's why. I bought a 250 ml box of the stuff, I may bring it home if I can figure out a way to keep it from rupturing inside my luggage. It's not every day that one can buy a box of yak milk. When I'm walking the streets vendors are constantly trying to hand me advertisements, for what I don't know. I usually point to the Chinese printing, then to my eyes and shake my head, pantomime for I CAN'T READ so your ad is wasted on me. It usually works.

I just went to the lobby and tried the wireless, my laptop reads it loud and clear. Unfortunately it's hooked up to the same sorry Internet connection I have in my room so it doesn't work. Or it does work, but only with Chinese web sites. http://www.google.com.cn/ works fine, http://www.google.com/ is dicey. All the guys on the hotel staff come over and played with my laptop, which I'm convinced is just fine. And Hotmail won't come up on my laptop or their PC in their business center, which makes me suspect the heavy thumb of the government. This hotel has some odors that I've never experienced before and now it's going to have some more. When I was on my way downstairs to try the wireless I noticed that the entire hallway on this floor, except for maybe 20' around my room, the carpet was covered in sheets. The sheets squished and darkened when I walked on them. I could hear a woman sobbing loudly in a utility closet while others tried to comfort her. I'm not sure what happened but it can't be good.