Finishing touches

It’s over, I’m done. With work anyway. Today at 3:05 pm CST I officially finished my summer employment, teaching my last class and saying goodbye to all those kids. Some were genuinely sad, and enough of them wished me well that it was a genuinely nice parting. I gave them all my email address (all 200 of the fifth graders that is) and said they could email with any questions any time. I fully expect to get an email 10 years from now asking for help with college admissions. In fact, I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get one.

We had a cold stretch last week, and over the weekend especially, but the weather’s back to above freezing. Pretty balmy actually. Still, today it was 71 and sunny in Hanoi, and that’s pretty hard to complain about.

Now it’s the weekend, and time for all those last’s people talk about, last dinners, last concerts, last waltz’s. Lasts. Many of them (the dinner and concert specifically) will be tomorrow, just hours before I head south. The concert should be good. A bunch of my favorite punk bands (punk in Beijing?) are playing, and the crowd is fun and friendly. Should be a good way to say a temporary goodbye to the city.

Thing is, I’ll be back in less than a month (though for about 40 hours it looks like) to get my stuff in order, pack my bags and officially head back stateside. After that…who knows. I’ll be back, sure, though when and for how long I don’t know. I certainly find that I am much less enamored of Beijing than I was last summer. That happens, I guess, described best by a friend of a friend as Getting Over it. I’m so over Beijing, he said, and while I may not be there quite yet, perhaps I’ll end up there one day.

It’s a fun town, dynamic and historic at the same time, interesting to live in, full of events and people of interest, but there are a lot of other cities in the world, and I don’t think I’d mind giving another one or two a run for their money. Why not?

And so, I’ll leave off here, heading out to Hanukah services on the east side of town, looking at all the lights go by, and thinking of red dirt roads lined by trees greener than green. That’s where I’m heading in 35 hours or so, and I’ve got the keys to the highway.

Happy Holidays.
Martin.

Catchin' Up

I’m so friggin urban right now. Metropolitan even. Really. I’m sitting in a café, with my laptop, wearing banana republic pants, a landsend shirt, and a tie. I kid you not. In my defense, I will say that the pants were purchased at salvation army this summer in New York, so I could attend a swanky upper west side cocktail party. And the shirt is hand-me-down. And the tie has sheep on it. And I’m not wearing my scarf inside. I have it over the back of my chair, along with my svelte, minimalist, llbean fleece. It’s still ridiculous. I’m a far cry from the scruffy, carhartt wearing moxie that many of you know and tolerate, if not love. The reason? I got to school an hour and a half early, having misremembered the instructions my office gave me. I thought I might…it seemed early, but I figured better safe than sorry, and I can always go to the café. They don’t have daylight savings in China. That would be too easy. Instead, they changed the time that school starts in the afternoon last week. It’s 20 minutes earlier now, so it’s not quite dark out when we finish around 5. Makes sense, right? Hardly. Out west, in Xingjian, they have to get up at 3 or 4 in the morning to get to school. I think it’s rather silly, and pigheaded of Beijing. It’s not even like they’re backward. They USED to have daylight savings time, and then decided they didn’t need it anymore, presumably because it was bourgeois or something like that. Bourgeois like wearing banana republic pants with a pale green landsend shirt. You can tell I’m a little sensitive about this.

I realize that in the past paragraph, I’ve referred to school at least 3 times. What school you may be saying? Didn’t you work for the TV station, that pinnacle of journalism, China Central Television? Yes I did. But when I returned from my seouljourn (a combination of sojourn and soul journey—the last pun on the city, I promise) I found my schedule drastically reduced. I’d always been part time. But part time used to mean 4-6 shifts a week. As of November 11th, it meant 1-3. This was not enough. So, when I ran into folks I knew at a concert that night, I asked if they knew of any teachers who had just quit their jobs. I had a job on Monday morning, and it was in my neighborhood. That’s the way Beijing works, that’s one of the reasons I love it.

So, whom do I teach? I teach about 250 kids altogether. 5 sections of 5th grade, an after school classes of 4th graders and 2nd graders, 3 classes of 1st graders a week, and an hour and a half with some 8th graders to top it off. It’s a lot of kids, and though I know their names in the context of where they sit, beyond that I’m pretty lost.

It’s great fun though, really. I think I talk too much and don’t play enough games, but it’s really fun to have a captive audience. They’re also, most of them, really sweet kids. I’ve gotten a couple presents already, and, were I to tell them I was leaving before the day of, would probably get many more. Some of them figured it out already, when I brought my camera in to school, but they were mollified when I said I wasn’t leaving just yet, and that I promised to tell them before they did. Their former teacher, a woman named Sarah, did not. Though I never met her (she left the day before I got my job after all) this lowers my opinion of her fairly extensively.

I must admit that I like my fifth graders best. They’re old enough to sit reasonably still and pay attention…but still young enough that school is cool. My 4th graders I like the least, they’re brats, and the fact that class is on Friday afternoon doesn’t help. The first graders are highly cute…but generally don’t have a clue. We jump around a lot to try to keep things simple. H was a fun letter. Put your hand on your head. Put your hand on your heart. Take off your hat. Hop. Hide. Hop. Hand on your hair. Hair on your heart. And so on. The junior high kids are fun too. Their English is really good actually, so we mostly just hang out, talking vaguely about figuring the grammar exercises out together. It was pretty embarrassing when I had to teach them modals…and didn’t actually know what a modal was. But we have a good time, and they make fun of my cell phone a lot.

Which brings me to another aspect of life as an urban 20something. Text messages (called SMS outside the confines of our great nation) now make up a large part of my social planning, surpassing email by at least a time and a half, and the actual act of speaking by, well, lets not even talk about that. That said, I still haven’t mastered the art of SMS speak, so I tend to spend a lot of time laboriously typing things out. This is made harder by the fact that my lcd no longer lights up (the kids make fun of the phone with good reason) but makes me feel better about myself, as if I were that guy who insisted that using a typewriter was better than using a computer on moral grounds.

What social planning, one might wonder. Are you not a social recluse, doomed to stay in and watch pirated DVD’s? No more. I wouldn’t call myself the must invite member of every party. But I do know people, and end up meeting up for dinner or at some happening with regular irregularity. Last spring, when faced with the prospect of a fake college cocktail party, I ran downstairs, hid in my basement, and called my friend from New York. She told me how to dress, what to talk about, and even offered to make me a fake New England prep school identity. I thought that was a little much, but taking the clothing and conversation advice to heart, went up and didn’t make a complete ass of myself. Now, I do ok, and even picked up a Chinese cell phone stalker last weekend. I talked to her for a while, and though slightly confused when she asked for my number, gave it to her. Since then, she has send me three messages, the latest of which, I quote forthwith:
yes, if you are free, you call me, have a good time

It’s rather flattering…but I don’t want to encourage it…especially because I thought she was kind of snooty at the time anyway. And, to top it off, some chick was hitting on me in the subway on Tuesday. Her opening line was pretty good, I’ll admit. I was sitting there, reading my anthropology book about the English, when she slid over, saying “excuse me, I see that you are reading…. I wonder, what do you do when you find a word that you don’t know?” Slightly taken aback, I responded, “well, I know most of them and the ones I don’t I generally pick up from context. But, I dunno, if one catches my eye I might go home and look it up later.” Things went on fairly mundanely from that point, until, apropos of nothing, she came out with, “I think you are cute, yes?” and while I tried to look politely thankful for the comment, continued on, “but I think you are too young” and got off the subway. Go figure.

This has, in essence, been my life of late. My folks were around for thanksgiving, which was good fun. I got kicked out of my bed onto the couch, but having automatic company for dinner was a nice change. It’s also the principal reason it took me so long to get caught up. Specific stories elude me at the moment, so we will leave at that, and the month of November will be considered closed, unless I remember something truly worth telling. I’ve updated the blog a bit, thanks to the google partnered beta, so now you can look at my photos without clicking on the link, though I think they would be easier to navigate on the flickr page if one wanted to browse extensively. I’ve got a little over a week left in the Big Dumpling, before I head south for most of January. And then, it’s back to the kid’s table, going to school in midland Maine.

In Which Martin Makes it Back to Beijing

Nothing much of not happened between my evening out and my trip home. Sure I walked around, saw some temples and palaces, breathed deep of the Korean air, and generally got my fill of Seoul. But not much of it is really newsworthy. I mean, I guess it depends on perspective. Back then I probably could have written a nice essay about it, but here in Beijing, a month or so on, it has faded into the happy mists of a good, if quiet, time had.

That’s not quite true. There was one fine event, the evening before I left, that is worth noting. I was walking back to the hostel, enjoying the rather brisk evening, seeing what there was to be seen, and I came upon a strange sight. The street I was walking along was split by a river (once an open sewer, now a delightful urban waterpark) and in the middle, on a platform over the water, were 20 women dressed in bright colors, moving in formation and beating drums. In the middle, and seeming to run the show was a pompous looking man with a small gong. I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed worth finding out.

Eventually the drumming and shuffling stopped, and an mc stoop up on a temporary stage. He jabbered for a while, and then introduced a singer, who began singing (as, I’ve found, singers tend to do) while all this was going on, there was a bustle of activity on the bridge. Lights had been strung up across the space, ironically between two lighting fixture stores on each side of the river, and the drumming women had put down mats on which to sit. The guests of honor, distinguishable by their dark green suits and impressive breast pocket floral arrangements, stood around and looked awkward, and then suddenly, as if my slight of hand, there was an enormous buffet spread out, and all the onlookers that had gathered swooped down upon it like so many hungry ducks at the Boston commons.

I opted to take photos instead of fighting my way into the fray, but everything worked out well in the end, as an elderly couple, noticing my lack of food, made a big deal of feeding me what they had taken (two heaping plates), and offering me a healthy swallow of soju to wash it all down. It pretty much made my night.

Next day, I took the ferry back to china. The ferry was, admittedly, one of my reasons for going. It’d been on one international ferry before (the one between Denmark and sweeten), but that was small potatoes compared to this. The trip took about 16 hours altogether, but I must admit, I spent a good number of those reading the DaVinci Code and sleeping. In that order. There were two other foreigners on the boat, one English and the other Canadian. Both were fairly unsavory in the way that middle-aged foreign guys living in Asia and keeping a woman often are. So I mostly sat on the couch, and inhaled the delicious ridiculousness that was Dan Brown. A tipsy Korean businessman on vacation came over and sat down on my couch (only wrinkling his nose slightly—I’d been wearing the same clothes for a week at this point, socks included) and introduced the 35-year-old women in his tour group. They didn’t speak any English or Chinese, but he assured me they thought I was cute. I wasn’t cute. I was smelly, scruffy, and greasy, but I smiled magnanimously, and said well thank you very much. Then they all left to go sing Karaoke and I finished my book and went to bed.

An attempted dawn awakening did not work by virtue of personal slumber, so I didn’t get out on the deck till we were well within sight of Qinqdao harbor. It was still a laborious 2 hours in, and then somewhat laughable customs later; I was back in china, home, where I could talk to people.

After an afternoon spent wandering around Qingdao, and an interminable 7-hour train ride back to Beijing, I really was home, and so were my brothers and my Da.

We'll get caught up one of these days.

More Seoul-searching (oy)

Sunday morning was Seonyudo Park, a former water treatment facility turned into an urban park. Think post-apocalyptic Zen garden. It was super cool, and for this reason, seemed to be the favorite haunt of amateur seoulite photographers, who pooled their money and got a model for the morning. There were groups of these men all over the park, taking pictures of women in western clothing, in animae inspired costumes, and dressed as catholic school girls. It was highly strange. I wandered that afternoon, trying to get a feel for the city.

Seoul is odd in that it’s probably the best signed city I’ve ever been to, with bi and trilingual signs everywhere, and big maps every 500 meters or so. These maps would be incredibly useful, except that each one has a different orientation, so that the streets shown look more orderly. I’ve mostly gotten over a childhood handicap of directional challenge, and I can read a map as well as the next guy, but forgive me for asking that be oriented on a north south axis. These maps, each one different, were oriented south-southwest, or northeast, or, I don’t know, something else. They were almost completely useless.

Monday was taken up almost wholly by the bureaucratic bullshit for which I’d gone to Korea in the first place. I went to the Chinese embassy, or rather, where it had formerly been. A very friendly but not really useful desk person told me it had moved, and gave me the new address in Korean. This was not helpful. I asked some questions, got a subway stop out of her, and left after she told me to get off the subway and buy cable car tickets. Turns out, the embassy was next to the cable car ticket office, so she wasn’t completely off her head. Waited in line, handed them my paperwork and scampered.
Back on the subway I spent more than an hour heading out back to Incheon, to secure a ferry ticket home. There were two international ferry stations, and obviously my taxi driver took me to the wrong one. The mistake was easily corrected by a 45 minute bus ride, which was actually quite interesting, as we passed all manner of things you see in an industrial port, and then I got everything figured out, and headed back to the subway.

Sunday had been gorgeous and warm, t-shirt weather pretty much. Monday night as I got off the subway to see the fish market (open 24 hours apparently) it started snowing. Crazy weather, and the fish market was mostly shut down, but still rather cool looking. Took some pictures and headed back to my hostel to make friends.

Tuesday I spent wandering more, seeing museums and generally trying to soak up as much Seoul as I could. That was easy to do, given that it rained intermittently all day, though it got nicer in the evening. That evening. I went back to the hostel early, in a move calculated to get me an invitation to dinner with the Europeans I had met the previous night. A Hungarian manager named Zita, a Belgian sax player named Bruno, and a Basque dancer who went by Laida (with the emphasis on the i). They were part of a dance troupe who’d flown over for some festival or other, and were generally friendly and out to have a good time. We started with dinner, along with two of their Korean contacts, and then wandered out into the night to decide our plan of attack. It was decided (by my suggestion actually) that we head to the university district, which was rife with bars, pubs, clubs, and of course, KTV parlors. There we met Max, the Moroccan brake dancer, and his Korean friends, ate some, drank some, and moseyed on to Karaoke. They made us take out shoes off there, but made up for it by giving us free ice cream. It was all very Lost in Translation, and I loved every minute of it. We got back to the hostel around 5, and they went to catch 40 winks before a 7:30 departure, and I settled in for a good sleep.

Hang in there, I’ll get back to Beijing one of these days.

Back in Action

So, I’ve been slacking with these posts. I have excuses, naturally, but they’re mostly of the I’ve been ungodly busy variety, so really they don’t count. In the next few weeks I’ll try to bring everything up to speed, posting short pieces every few days, just in time to go silent again while I take the mother of all road trips through Vietnam. But that’s getting way ahead of myself.

I left you, if I remember correctly, on my way out to the door to that strange and pun ridden place called Seoul. I was going because I’d never been, and to get a new visa. The visa part was the official reason for the trip, naturally, but it only played a fairly minor role. Unlike previous posts, which have featured blow by blow descriptions of various ridiculousness, I’m going to try something different here, and go with representational vignettes. We’ll see if it works.

I will say that the actual travel to Korea went something like this. Night train, transfer to bus, taxi from the bus station to the ferry ticket office, taxi from the ticket office to the airport, getting stranded at the airport because of my own stupidity, 40 minute flight into Incheon international airport. The bus ride took about twice as long as it should have, since for the first couple hours I was the sole passenger, passed out in the back seat. They just didn’t move and looked around for some more people who wanted to go from Qingdao to Weihai. I had taken the train to qingdao, and wanted to take the Weihai ferry. I could have taken the train to Weihai, or the ferry from Qingdao, but my planning had happened about 3 days before leaving and that way seemed to make sense. The ferry had changed schedules, as I’d feared it might have, but the plane ticket was only 10 percent more. That was no worries, nor was I late. The plane was though, and so I didn’t feel the need to clear customs. When I got curious about where I’d eventually have to go around 4:30 (for a formerly 5pm flight) I found customs completely shut down. Thus, I missed my plane despite the fact that it hadn’t even arrived yet. I spent 24 hours in a little nothing place, 40 kilometers outside of Weihai (itself pretty small and boring). Complete and utter boneheadedness.

Fast forward to my first night in Seoul. I’d gotten into town, made contact with my aunt and plans for getting together the next day, and found my hostel. After the obligatory email and facebook check, I set out to find some dinner, fairly hungry which I suppose was quite natural given that it was around 11 at night. That night, more than any other really, Seoul in all its new differentness looked pretty much identical to the city in Bladerunner, all alleys and neon and puddles, completely incomprehensible and overstimulating. I walked down dark alleys till I found bright ones, and then along those until I found food. The first restaurant I entered wouldn’t give me food. They didn’t serve single people apparently. I found this rather discriminatory, but pushed on, shrugging, determined to eat heartily before returning to home and sleep. The next place I tried has delighted to have me, but the two women up front very quickly realized we didn’t have an ounce of language in common. It’s ok I said, all smiles and nods, and we made it work. I asked for bim bim bap, the only dish I knew, and they shook their heads. But, they said, we do have this, and pointed up and a blurry picture menu above the kitchen. Ok said I, and gave them the thumbs up. It turned out that I’d ok’d what was probably more than a pound of deliciously marinated beef. I tried to cook it on the griddle, taking my cues from the other tables, but the two women apparently thought me incapable (as often happens) and insisted on cooking it for me. I ate all of it, wrapping the meat and kimchee in lettuce with random mystery sauces. It was great. I was very full, and very garlicy when I got back to the hostel, and went very peacefully to sleep.

More in a day or two. Peace and Love from the Big Dumpling.

Henan B, Halloween, Heading Out (HHH)

So I was taking a nap when I left you last week, if I remember correctly. Blogspot has now become Blocked Spot…so I have to go on memory and a draft that I saved to the hard drive.

In any case, it was good nap, and I woke up around 6, to check out the night market I’d heard so much about. The market took up much of central Kaifeng, virtually stopping traffic by virtue of people constantly wandering across the street. It was centered around the intersection my hotel abutted, and spread from there in the four cardinal directions, with most of the food stalls crowded around the central part. Further out, people sold everything from slippers to electronics to bamboo massage rollers. In short…nothing anyone would want to buy.

I grabbed some food from one of the plethora of vendors, and began looking for Jews. This was accomplished primarily by walking up and down the market, stopping every 50 meters or so, and asking the old men. Old men are the best, followed by old women, and lastly by everyone younger than 40. It’s a mix of knowledge and the desire to shoot the breeze with strangers.

At first, many directed me to Henan University, where they thought I could meet some foreigners. “No no,” I responded, “I’m looking for Chinese Jews.” Some expressed disbelief at this, suggesting that I must be crazy. How could there be Chinese Jews? Weren’t Jews all foreigners like myself? Gradually, as I moved farther down the line, I started getting somewhere.

I finally got acknowledgement that there were Jews in Kaifeng after maybe 15 minutes of asking, and shortly after that I was given the name of an alley ay to take a look at. That’s where the Jews live, my informant told me, and preceded to ask what I thought about the war in Iraq. He was a Muslim, and quite certainly the most informative man I talked to, always willing to stop and chat. Was there ever any conflict between the Muslim’s and the Jews, I asked. How could there be, he replied, after all—everyone was Chinese.

His directions were confirmed by two other independent sources, and so with an address in my notebook, I went to back to the hotel to watch X-Men on TV.

In the morning, I set off to find the Jews, scoffing at the guy with the Pedi cab who wanted to take me right there. After all, I had an address, and a map; I could find them no sweat.
This proved easier said than done. Finding the general area was no problem, it was right around the former synagogue cum hospital. But finding the narrow alley named Jiao Jiang Hutong (teaching scriptures lane) proved harder than expected. I resumed my strategy of the night before, and soon was getting increasingly closer, judging by the specific-ness of the directions. All in all it probably took around two hours to find Chui Suping The Jew of Kaifeng.

She was a little old lady, not particularly special in any way, and not, it turns out, Jewish either. Her husband, since deceased, had been Jewish, but she was ethnically Han Chinese, just like 90% of the other people in the world’s most populous country.

Still, with all the Jewish tour-groups coming through Kaifeng, the presence of a Jew was a necessity, so Mrs. Chui took the burden on herself to become the city’s professional Jew. She sells Chinese paper cuts with the Star of David amid Chinese lotus patterns, and I suspect she makes a killing. But she was not what I was looking for, not the last in a line stretching back into the Northern Song Dynasty and across the silk road to Persia. After a couple questions and a picture or two, I took my leave.

However, amusingly enough, in the old lady’s house, I met a NYT reporter, also looking for Jews in Kaifeng. Her question was why Jews like Chinese food, and Mrs. Chui had provided the answer. Because it’s good, obviously.

In any case, we hung out for the afternoon, and in general had a good time eating street food and swapping stories.

There are other Jews in Kaifeng, ethnically anyway, and there are some younger ones that have even begun holding evening services on Friday nights, if reports are to be believed, but finding them wasn’t easy. After all, they look Chinese, they act Chinese, and they do nothing to distinguish themselves from any of Kaifeng’s other residents. Not only that, but the idea of a Jewish community is completely alien. I might as easily have been searching for the community of people with attached earlobes.

It took another couple hours of canvassing the streets, asking every likely looking individual, to find another Jew. Some asked if I was looking for Muslims, which was a common misconception apparently.

This makes some sense, given that both Jews and Muslims wear head coverings, both pray facing the same direction, eat hallal food, and are ethnically distinct yet physically identical to the Han Chinese.

Others knew that there had been Jews in Kaifeng but swore up and down that they were all gone from this earth. In short, I was getting nowhere, and then a fruit seller told me to go to Xing Hua Yuan Street and ask for a couple named Rui. They had died, apparently (as had every other Jew in Kaifeng it seemed) but somebody mentioned that I should look for someone named Ai, who used to live in the neighborhood. Through more asking I found out that Ai had moved out of the low houses into a nearby apartment building, and through even more asking, and much climbing of stairs I found the correct apartment.

Mr. Ai, for he turned out to be a man, seemed delighted to let me in, and not at all surprised that I was knocking on his door. Around three or four highly bull headed or well informed people make it to his apartment a year, as opposed to three a four visiting Mrs. Chui a day at the peak of tourist season.

He was the real deal, such as it was. The product of a Jewish father and a Han mother, he proudly admitted to being Jewish, and when asked if his 6th grade son was Jewish as well, he response was “of course!”

However, that seemed about as far as it went. He remembered his father talking about three festivals, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover. But that was it. His household registration card listed him as Muslim, because the authorities said that there weren’t enough Jews to warrant their own category.

He had a Star of David on his otherwise empty dining room wall, but this was a gift from foreign visitors, not a family heirloom, as was the Israeli flag on the TV. He was just a day worker really, but he knew he was Jewish, and I think he was proud of it.

And that was it. We got some dinner and I got on a night bus, sleeping fitfully all the way home, and went to work on Thursday afternoon. End of trip.

Since then, I had some friends visiting, which was fun, and ridiculous, and expensive. I learned a bit more about the Night culture of foreignerville, which is a story, but one for another time.

And then, it was Halloween, which was fairly ridiculous. I got invited to somebody else’s party…and showed up before it was time to be fashionably late. Which left me dressed all in brown, awkwardly holding a tree branch, talking to the hostess’s mother. It was good fun though, and gave me a chance to practice my cocktail party skills. They had halloween peeps, which made the whole thing worth it in and of itself. By 11, the apartment, hidden off in a dark corner near the north 2nd ring road, was full of people from all over. I met two aussie crashers who'd just seen people walking in, a danish guy who'd quit his embassy job because it was boring, and even couple people who'd heard of maine. There were even a couple chinese kids there. It was loud for maybe 15 minutes, and then people started filtering out, heading to the clubs for the official party of the year. It was a good time, but more work on weekend nights cut it short. Oh well.

This week was just work, but I leave tonight for my “Seoul Journey.” I’ll take a train to Qingdao, then a bus to Weihai, and the ferry from Weihai to Incheon, where I’ll get on the “Seoul train.” If it all works, I’ll be there Saturday morning sometime. If it doesn’t I get stuck in Shandong Province for 2 days. Worse things have happened. Well. Look for an update in maybe two weeks, or something like that. Stay good. Martin.

Trip South: Part A

So I’ve past the Sunday deadline, and I’m feeling that this may be the beginning of increasing laxness in the predictability of these posts. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll get back on track next weekend. Who knows? In the past too weeks I have started working nights. Not evenings, but nights. My shift starts at 12 and goes to 8. That’s what it says anyway. In reality, I can get there around 1 or 1:30 and no one says boo. The first weekend I did it, (yes, weekend nights…it’s a bit sad) I tried diligently to stay awake all night, spending a good amount of time randomly surfing, and even calling home. The problem was that despite the fact that I needed to be there, aside from around 20 minutes at 2, I had no work to do till around 5:30 at the earliest. This idea of staying awake while being paid to work, I realized, was silly. So this past weekend, I brought in some headphones and put my head down on a dictionary for a couple hours of sleep, between the 3 o’clock news and the beginnings of the 8 o’clock editing. It’s been working out well, and I’ve been much happier with the arrangement, accept of course, that its no fun in general to say “so hey, this is a great party guys…. but I have to go to work.” Ah well. I shouldn’t complain.

Last week, I finished work on Monday morning and didn’t start again until Thursday afternoon. So I put myself on a train and headed down to Henan province. The people sitting across the way took the piss out of me for sleeping through the entire 8-hour train trip, but hey, I needed to sleep.

I hit Zheng Zhou around 9:30, and opted to spend the night instead of heading onwards to Kaifeng, figuring that the earliest I could get there would be around 11 or later, and that’s generally not the best time to get to a new town. So I got myself a hotel room, and spent an enjoyable evening walking around Zheng Zhou. I’d read that the municipal planners left the old city walls up as a kind of park, and so I decided to walk the couple klicks over to check them out, and then walk along the walls back towards the train station. These were not great feats of stonework and masonry, but old, beaten earth hills more than anything else, with a path on top. It only occurred to me after I was already there that purposely seeking out the one dark empty place in a city late at night might not be the best idea.

But then I realized that was New York talking, and that this was china after all. I encountered no problems, though by the hushed giggling I heard I might have interrupted a few couples fun.

Though the city was by a large an open one, full of wide boulevards and brightly lit streets, I managed to find the one dark part of town on my way back, and in it, a realio trulio red light district. Lining the streets were hair salons (a common front in china) with frosted glass window fronts positively oozing with a red-pinkish glow. It was great, I laughed a lot.

Next morning, I got up early to the din of the street out my window, and took a bus about an hour and a half to Kaifeng. Kaifeng was the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, before it was invaded by the Jurchen Invaders (a common term) and the crown prince fled southwards, setting up, rather predictably, the Southern Song Dynasty. But as with any city whose heyday was more than a thousand years ago, it’s kind of a dump at the moment. Most of the architecture is late Qing or early Communist, and both genres are in the mid-stages of decrepitude. It was the kind of place that seemed like it was perpetually grey, and whether or not this is in fact the case, it held true for the duration of my stay.

That first day I spent my morning walking up through town, getting a feel for the place (see above) and learning the layout. In the afternoon I shelled out an enormous fee (around 10 dollars) to go see a Song Dynasty Theme Park, mostly because it had a Jewish history museum hidden inside. The park itself was the definition of Chinese bad taste, and the museum was a worthless collection of photocopied documents (really) and a couple of fuzzy, blown up pictures.

The story with the Jews goes like this. A bunch of Jewish merchants arrived in china around 800 CE, having come along the Silk Road through central Asia from Persia. Maybe they were tired of traveling by this point, because they decided to stay, and, because they’d brought no women of their own, to marry the local girls as well. This excuse has since been used by many other foreign guys when it comes to Chinese girls, but what can you do. They settled in Kaifeng, then the capital, and generally made a good life for themselves, finding their niche in Chinese society. They thrived for almost a thousand years, but by the 1800’s the community has succumbed to forgetfulness and assimilation, and when the yellow river flooded Kaifeng, it washed away most traces of Jewish life, along with the synagogue. It was the descendents of these Jews that I’d come to find, and the reason I’d spent so much to go see the dinky museum.


I was not in the best of moods upon leaving, being somewhat hungry and still jetlagged from a weekend of night shifts, so I went and got a hotel room and took a nap.
*** ***
The rest of my stay in Kaifeng (all 24 more hours of it) will have to wait for another day. I’m writing about it independent of this, and it’s late, so you’ll just have to bear with me.

Since I’ve been back in Beijing, I’ve attended a great dinner party of real, interesting, and generally cool people, and a couple Colby kids have come down from their program in Harbin to spend a week in the City. So I have houseguests, and it’s a lot of fun. Many new pictures (about 2 weeks worth) are up, and I’ll try to finish the Kaifeng adventure as soon as possible. Heart. Martin.

Rooftops, Bars, and Marathons-oh my

This past week was characterized in large part by failures and victories of varying degrees. I guess that really describes any period of time, but what are you going to do? I had a couple days off mid week (my schedule is highly erratic and frequently subject to change) and decided to spend them pretending to be the freelance journalist that I keep pretending I am. So on Wednesday, I took a bus, walked, took a subway, walked, and took another bus a couple hours out of town (it could have been simpler if I had just taken the bus to the subway in the first place, but I was trying to find a different bus stop) to go try to talk my way into a daoist temple that was under construction. The problem was that it wasn’t. The snipped I’d read online had been incorrect, and refurbishment had been completed prior to national day. So instead of just buying a ticket and checking it out anyway, I wandered off to find another temple under construction. There was one, actually, just down by the parking lot, and I spent about an hour talking to a variety of people in my best freelance journalist manner, explaining carefully that it was just because people were not allowed in that I wanted to be let in. They understood, but they also didn’t let me in. So I got back on the bus and took a nap on the way home. Abject failure.

Thursday I decided to figure out how to go to bars alone. To this end I got in a cab (something I try not to do unless it’s really necessary) and went to San Li Tun, which used to be the center of western drinking in Beijing. It’s a has been now, populated by tourists, pimps, and pushers. I walked around a bit, but there wasn’t a place that I actually wanted to try to spend any time in, so I started home. But then I ran into people I knew. This happens frighteningly frequently for a city this big, but then again there are only 5 neighborhoods where foreigners go drinking generally speaking, so maybe it’s not that weird. My friends brought me into a club (and even got me in for free) where a finish electronica musician was playing…and he actually turned out to be really good. So that was fun, and I’ve decided that I don’t actually want to go to bars alone (if for no other reason than that beer is marked up to around 20 times its real price) so I guess that counts as a win.

I also talked to one of the pushers for a while, which was an interesting experience. I had previously thought that getting drugs in china was quite difficult, but since being here everyone I’ve met has told me that all one needs to do is go to San Li Tun and talk to a black guy. After walking around for a night in the area, I was inclined to agree with the rule, and went so far as to ask of the guys (who was from Nigeria I think) about it. He didn’t get mad, but replied with a 5-minute outpouring of mile a minute jive. I caught one of every four words or so, and had to employ my nodding skills usually reserved for toothless Chinese grandparents (who are almost wholly unintelligible). So that was interesting, and I’m thinking about looking more into the phenomenon.

Friday I went walking around the old hutongs south of Tian An Men Square. This in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Beijing, and much of it is currently in the process of getting knocked down, which is really a damn shame to top most damn shames. It’s not really that hard to explain my fascination with hutongs. They feel real, in a way that much of Beijing, and most modern, shiny, cities for that matter do not. They’re narrow, dirty, and old. Full of old people and children, real people going about daily life. After around 45 minutes of walking and talking (not at the same time) I found myself at the back gate to one of the construction sites. They hadn’t started digging holes yet (one of the reason for many of the demolitions is that the city planners are putting new pipes underground…. not little dinky ones either, these are Pipes) so it was effectively just an area of cleared rubble surrounded by abandoned houses. Naturally, I climbed up on the roof of one of these, and spent about an hour clambering over rooftops and into empty buildings. I took a bunch of pictures…but then managed to delete them all, one of the most annoying things I’ve done in a long time. Many I was able to take again, but some are lost forever. I guess that’s how it goes sometimes. Being up on those rooftops was an interesting mix of exhilarating (I mean, how often do you get to climb around on rooftops) and about as sad as it gets. It was interesting, and it was lonely, and I think I’ll go back on a clear night sometime soon.

This weekend, I’ve been working the graveyard shift, which is rather awful not so much because of the hour but because there’s virtually no work to do. But we call ourselves a 24 hour English station so there’s a live broadcast at 3 am, and then nothing till 8. If I had work to do I could stay awake no sweat. But just sitting around is rather rough, though not, I guess, in the grand scheme of things. This morning I was going home to go to bed, snoozing on the bus, when it stopped, and didn’t start again, about a kilometer from my home. Nobody got off the bus, and really it seemed like everything was normal. I went back to sleep but 15 minutes later we still hadn’t moved. Cursing under my breath, I grabbed my bag and got off…to see a sea of stopped cars and busses. Nobody was going anywhere in on our side of the road. Somewhat mystified I started walking, until I got to ZhicunLu (called by us the third and a half ring road {because, naturally, its about halfway between the north third and the north forth ring roads}) that was blocked off by a line of cops and army guys. Down the road ran scores of people, huffing and puffing and looking very much like the marathon runners that they were. It was ridiculous. I had to go and stand in a throng of people inching its way over a single overpass, pushing the kids in front of me and getting elbowed from behind by old ladies. Not really what I wanted to be doing after a night of sitting in the newsroom.

Otherwise, life continues. Work is work, and free time is taken up sending lots of emails pretending to be a journalist. I’ve been talking to a bunch of train enthusiasts recently, and might go up to Manchuria to see some of the last big steam engines in the world. Tomorrow morning I head down to Kaifeng, where a community of Jews settled in the Song Dynasty. Should be a good trip. Until later then. Peas and carrots, --martin.

CCTV: The land of mystery and wonder

It strikes me that this might be a good time to talk about what I actually “Do” at work, since, after all, that takes up a good part of my time. I work, as I’ve mentioned before, in the newsroom of CCTV International (channel 9). This means that the shows I edit are watched almost exclusively by really bored or jetlagged people in hotels that don’t get CNN or the BBC. There’s really no other reason to watch it.

But, be that as it may, it provides employment, experience, and even (occasionally) a bit of fun. Here’s how it works. First, stories are written by Chinese writers. The term writer here is used loosely, because what they actually do is copy and paste stories from the wire (AP, Reuters, or Xinhua) or translate them from other Chinese stations. Very little original writing gets done. However, they are writers. After the script is initially written, it gets passed up for an overhaul by myself and my coworkers. We generally trim stories, and make them sound like English. A good part of what I actually correct is original material from AP and Reuters. I don’t know why they should need correcting (they do have a bit of a reputation) but there it is. Sometimes stories are easy; sometimes they need to be completely re-written. Worst are the stories filed by other bureaus, which we (that is, the foreign copy editors) generally cry about. They’re that bad. Here’s a good example:

Officials with the State Development and Reform
Commission, Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Science
and Technology and Ministry of Finance shared their
views and policy guidelines on the industry’s
structure readjustment, production surplus,
internationalization process, efforts to save energies
and develop new energies, and so on. People from
Chinese and multinational automakers also aired their
opinions on the above issues and briefed on their strategies.


I deleted the whole thing. After we edit a story we pass it up for final inspection by the political editors. There are four of them or so, all over 60, and wise by virtue of years. It is essentially their ass if anything gets said that the government doesn’t like, so they edit very closely, though mostly on stories about Taiwan and similarly sensitive issues.

This is one of the more annoying things about working for a state media outlet; we have to say “Taiwan compatriots,” and “Countries and regions” and God help you if you call the rebels “leftist.” Every institution has semantic rules I guess, ours just happen to be very clunky. How can you say that China warned the Taiwan government when you don’t recognize that China is separate from the Taiwan government, which you also do not recognize? The answer is to go by cities, as in, “Beijing criticized comments by Taipei today etc etc etc.” Still, it’s awkward and annoying.

Another, smaller, part of the job is doing voiceovers for sound bites and sometimes stories. That is, if there’s a clip of some geezer saying that China and Japan might have a chance at good relations if Abe doesn’t go to the Yakushi Shrine, and it happens to be in Chinese, the technician/writers will often get one of us to come speak for him. I have been the voice of Wen Jaibao, and Jackie Chan, and many many people that nobody has ever heard of. Economics ministers and vice chairmen of committees on agriculture. Stuff like that. Sometimes we’ll voice a whole story. This is good fun unless it happens to be a sports story, in which case it will (I’ve never seen one that wasn’t) be chock full of completely unpronounceable names, that you generally have to guess on. Times like these I feel as though I’m Bruce Campbell in “Army of Darkness” forgetting the magic words. Luckily skeleton armies don’t burst forth from the studio every time I mess up a name. The best part of voicing stories is undoubtedly the end, when, after a dramatic pause, I get to say “Martin Connelly, CCTV” in my deepest, newsiest voice. I’ve been working on this voice, and it almost sounds semi decent these days. It’s all good fun. So that’s it. That’s what I do.

The station itself is actually enormous, though it's easy to forget working in the newsroom. I can go down the hall and peek into the gallery of one of the biggest production spaces I've ever seen (exclusivelly for gala events) and watch them go on when there's nothing in the que, which is pretty cool. And don't ask what's on the other 18 floors of the building. I have no idea. I'm not sure anyone does.

The rest of my time I spend doing this and that, trying to start freelancing (which is lots of work, and much like divining for water without the aid of a forked stick) and wandering around the old city. Old Beijing is rapidly getting knocked down to build newer, taller, buildings, and it’s really a shame. I love the narrow alleyways. They’re always full of old folks and babies and guys out of work and I can’t walk through them without having a nice conversation with someone interesting. Today, for instance, I met a guy who teaches Traditional Chinese Medicine at the hospital. He said he had lots of students in his acupuncture class, which makes sense I guess.

I’ve been seeing mahjong parlors for the first time, some even with electronic tables. I think I might try to learn the rules and go out some time. Ridiculousness would probably ensue. Will report on that if it ever happens. In the meantime, the weather has turned and it was sweater weather today, which was great. Fall is beautiful…and that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, peas and carrots, martin.

Typical Days

To clarify, I don’t spend all my time having amazing adventures around Asia. I spend most of my time at work editing copy for the English news, commuting to and from work (which takes about 50 minutes each way), and hanging out in my apartment, usually in my boxers, hardly the rockstar lifestyle.

Commuting is nice actually, as more recently I’ve been riding my bike. It’s a pretty straight shot down the west third ring road, and the weather has been great, mid 20’s during the day and high teens at night. And I feel like I’m actually doing Something, as opposed to just sitting around. I’ve noticed some cool places that are still open at 9 or 10 when I’m biking home, and one of these days I might stop to check them out.

Days off I’ve been spending wandering around mostly, and going to wudakou at night. Wandering around is always cool. Yesterday I went to the south west of Beijing, an area I’ve never really explored before. There wasn’t really much going on, but it was cool to go where foreigners normally don’t go—after all there’s nothing to see. I was looking, sort of, for the Muslim district centered around Ox Street. I’ve been eating lots of Muslim food recently (usually at XinJiang restaurants) and I had vague ideas about getting some lunch. There was also supposed to be a pretty cool mosque, though I never found it. What I did find was a huge green building with onion domes, which turned out to be an office, the official department of Islamic Affairs in China.

There are all sorts of quasi embassies around. The night before I went to dinner with a friend at the XinJiang Provincial Bureau compound. Each province apparently has it’s own embassy compound type of thing in the city, so they can keep up with central party policies I guess. A very strange idea.

My friend David (or Zhao Long really), is a good sort. He works for the sports news, and just became the guy in charge of weekly Olympic features. Apparently, CCTV9 is going to spend 7 minutes a week (minimum) for the next two years talking about Olympic developments. They’re pretty into the whole thing. But David is a good guy, 25, exceedingly modern. He has something like 4 cell phones and feels comfortable saying unpatriotic things about the Chinese government.

But he has big issues with Gong Li. Gong Li, the actress. She was Zhang Yimou’s muse for years (he has problems with Zhang Yimou too, for desecrating Chinese history), but last year she starred in Memoirs of a Geisha. This, according to David, is unforgivable. Not only did she portray a Japanese woman, but a Japanese woman of the Profession. I just think it’s funny, but David was deathly serious, and I couldn’t convince him that she was an actress, not a government official, and that her job was to be people she wasn’t, which is sort of the definition of acting. No dice. They’re still not on speaking terms.

But I’ve been eating lots of Muslim food, which is pretty much where the whole thing started. I could cook, and will cook, but in the meantime, I’ve become a regular at a restaurant down the street, where I’ve been having lunch at least three times a week. I always get the same thing, and while I feel I should probably branch out, it’s so good that I’m not sure if I want to. My lunch consists of a “small” serving of Chao Mian Pian, or, stir fried noodle pieces, a small grilled naan bread, and a pot of tea. The Chao Main Pian is an enormous dish, full of noodles, peppers, some lamb, onions, tomatoes, and Chinese Garlic Shoots (which we don’t have for some reason back stateside). The grilled naan is the closest thing the Chinese really have to bread, and it doesn’t even count because it’s not really Chinese. And the tea is tea. It’s great, and fills me beyond completely. The whole thing costs a $1.15.

Wudakou is the student bar district north of me about 15 minutes by bike (but only because of traffic). Situated between Peking University and Qinghua University, there are tons of bars and cheap outdoor food places. It’s much cooler and cheaper (especially with the lack of taxi fare) than anywhere else around. That said, I’ve been spending most of my time wandering into places and standing by a column, looking at everybody else who has classmates and wondering if the homework would be worth it.

I’ve been hanging out at D-22, one of the premiere rock clubs in the city, which would be great if I were really into rock and punk and all that. I started because my friend Lindsey, currently in the states for Halloween Season, took me there, and new lots of people, and it was lots of fun. Solo is slightly less so, but I figure if I keep showing up I might get to know some of the kids who hang around there, which would be fun, and besides, experiencing new cultures is the name of the study abroad game, right? Chinese culture I know, but not Chinese Punk Culture.

Yesterday, standing by the subway waiting to meet a friend for dinner (for all my whining I do actually know a couple kids in the city) I met Sam somebody, who saw my Moxie T-shirt and decided I might be me. He’s a friend of a friend, and the whole thing was about as random as it gets, so that was cool. I’m trying to decide if it was more random or less than meeting the same cute British girl 3 days apart in completely different locations in New York this summer, though to be honest, they were both free events. However, both days I was shat upon by inconsiderate birds, and since that didn’t happen last night, I think that the meeting with Sam was more fortuitous.

I might stop the random play by play style sometime, and try to write About China, instead of about myself, but we’ll see what happens. New pictures from this weekend’s wanders are up. peas and carrots. martin.

Sitting on Top of the World

China is seldom a boring place. One can always make a decision to stay in and watch movies, I guess, something I do do a fair bit, but as soon as you step out the door, something random and strange often happens. Take, for instance, last weekend.

I was woken rather too early Saturday morning by a call from some old family friends, who, after establishing that I didn’t have set plans for the day, said that I positively must go over to their restaurant for lunch, and then go out and play. This is the terminology. Qu qu war. Go on an outing might be a slightly more dignified translation, but it really comes down to the same thing. Groggily I agreed, and after a suitable increment, got on a bus and headed over to their restaurant, on the east third ring road. Lunch was good, if rather standard. There are about 6 dishes that are normal and tame, and these are eaten rather exclusively by most foreigners. That’s what we had. I’m hoping to branch out a bit, but every time I try, I get offered sheep feet or cow stomach, and extremities and innards aren’t really what I’m looking for. Still, it was good. Lamb, chicken, some green vegetables. Can’t complain certainly. That I was sat down with the daughter beforehand, and that it was suggested to get to know her better is basically part of the territory.

We started off on the adventure around two, and I promptly fell asleep because I was full of food, and because it usually makes car trips go faster. Though a trifle antisocial, I find it to be a pretty good policy. When I woke up, we were pulled off the road at an intersection, and the husband was galloping off to ask where we should go. We roared off down the littlest road, only slightly paved, and I wondered where we might be going.

It’s amazing how quickly China reverts 20 years or more. Just 45 minutes outside of Beijing, we were in the countryside and life looked a lot like I would imagine it has for the last 50 years or so. Maybe the people were less hungry, and maybe they had television in their low brick houses, but on the face of things, everything was the same. Men in work clothes squatted by the side of the road, sometimes working on army style jeeps and trucks, sometimes just starting out, watching the city cars drive by. Slowly the mountains got taller, until, quite suddenly, they were quite tall, all above 4000 feet certainly. The rivers cut narrow paths through them, and the road became a ledge, hacked into the rock. From time to time we would see an old temple in the distance somewhere, overgrown and sad looking. The houses turned from brick to stone, which made good sense considering much of Beijing’s slate comes out of these mountains.

We kept driving, and driving, and driving. The sound track was horrendous: 5 cds of Chinese pop that kept repeating. From Chinese Spice Girls to Chinese NSYNC. Absolutely egregious. We kept driving. We backtracked and tried another road. We went through the same town 5 times. We were lost. Finally, on our way home, our tail between our legs, we saw a sign that proved to be salvation…of a sort. 8 kilometers to Bai Cao Pan. That is what we’d been trying to find the whole time, maybe. 8 kilometers passed…then 16, then 24. We saw another sign for Bai Cao Pan. It, too, said 8km. We kept driving. By this time it was 7 or so, and we were winding up an especially tall mountain, passed huge trucks lining up to take coal into Beijing. We kept winding, and it got darker, until, maybe 45 minutes after the first sign, we got to a gate.

The gatekeeper lived in a small room behind the gate, and he was wearing his pajamas, watching the news. I guess his work day was pretty much over. We paid the entrance fee, and followed his directions, which were again, to keep going another 8 km up a dirt road. We saw not one wild rabbit but two, and I almost felt like I was back in Maine, except, of course, for the Chinese pop, which continued to blare from the speakers behind my head.

I might point out that by this point it was completely dark, and we certainly couldn’t see the view from the mountaintop. I did point this out actually, and the response was, oh, don’t worry, we’ll see it at sunrise. I had been Shanghaied. Beijinged. Whatever. They weren’t going to bring me home. Maybe they’re just joking I thought. They weren’t joking. You didn’t have anything to do tomorrow did you? The asked. We checked into the hotel at the top of the mountain, the highest point in the Beijing municipality. Standing 2173 meters, I was taller than Mount Washington, and checking in to a hotel.

My Chinese friends were kind of annoying. They’re not bad people. Just perpetual 12 year olds. I have no issue with twelve year olds who are twelve. I just don’t like it when they’re disguised as adults. As one who has tried fairly consistently to be older than I am for many years, I find the opposite somewhat trying of my patience. But they’re not bad people. And I tried to be friendly. They exclaimed how close the stars were, and this and that, and shouted off the top to see if there was an echo, heedless that people might be sleeping.

We went to the restaurant under the hotel, and there ordered far too much not very good food. It’s hard to find bad food in China, but they had, and they complained about it. The this was to that, the that too this. I was still full from lunch, but it was interesting to try the rabbit stew, something I’d never had before. It wasn’t particularly good, but might have had something to do with the restaurant. Following dinner and more remarking on the celestial proximity, we repaired for an early bed, which suited me fine.


Waking up at 4 though, did not. For starters, it was cold, and I had no socks. Why would I have needed socks for an afternoon’s outing? It was also dark. Very dark. One could even say it was darkest, being the time before dawn. I have written before about sunrises. I don’t like them. They are seldom dramatic, often cold, and usually not worth waking up for. I’ll go watch the sunset anytime, but the sunrise, I have always said, should be reserved for when one has been up all night anyway, hopefully in the company of a good friend. The sunrise was also at 6.

Still, we went out on the observation deck, and paced back and forth. And back and forth some more. Finally, towards 5:30 or so, other people started filtering out, our neighbors from the previous night. When the sun finally did rise, it was, actually, rather dramatic, maybe made more so by the two hours of waiting that had preceded it.

It meant that we could leave the observation deck for one thing. And it got warmer fast. We puttered around the mountain top until breakfast opened, and then, after slurping down the rice porridge (not rice pudding), and eating the steamed bread, pretty typical in the rather blah Chinese breakfast scene, we went off to find Bai Cao Pan.

I had thought we were already there, but no, it was apparently 5 km or so down the ridge, on a fairly decent path. I tightened my Birkenstocks, and off we went. Bai Cao Pan turned out to be an enormous alpine meadow, which, in the summer time, was said to be full of blooming wildflowers. Right then, it was mostly brown, but that didn’t stop the Chinese from running, frolicking, and yelling at each other from great distances. When I go hiking, mountaintops are sometimes the spot of a little frolicking, but they are never the location for yelling. Mountaintops are quiet. Hiking is quiet. In China, it’s not quiet. I lay down on the boardwalk and tried to tune them out.

The hike back took a bit longer, since it was mostly uphill. It wasn’t bad, but mom, by far the most annoying under normal conditions, had a hard time with it, and was pretty dramatic about it. You all go on, she said, just leave me here. This and more, including many small screams at trees that looked like animals or some such. It took a while, but we did make it back, settled with the hotel, and were on our way, heading home.

For another five hours. We went back a different way than we had come, started by an aborted attempt at a mountain shortcut. It would have worked, but Beijing had gotten heavy rains the previous week (the same snow that I got in Mongolia) and nobody had bothered to clean up, or even report the presence of rock slides that had taken out the road. Back, winding down the mountain we went.

Our path back to Beijing went south and then northeast, instead of just northeast, to get around some bumpy roads we’d been on the day before. It took us through a series of valleys, named, quite imaginatively, one through thirteen . They were carved by a wide river, and each time we crossed a bridge, we went down a number. There was an old temple that seemed the primary attraction in number ten, but numbers six and four were better known as the location of wedding photographs. Couples would pose standing in the shallow river, or next to the karst formation, as if they’d been married in somewhere far more romantic than the Chinese suburbs. The scenery, I’ll admit, was quite beautiful. It looked like Guilin, or, for that matter, highland Laos. Karst, or limestone, formations basically make up what we think of as Chinese landscape painting, those strangely shaped finger’s coming out of the mist. The thing is, it’s not really that stylized. That’s what they look like. So it was nice to drive through.

In number four we did like the locals and drove our car down into the river to wash it off, a highly random occurrence, but then again, with our track record it was hard to be surprised. I managed to not go horseback riding though, and, following our bout of car washing, we kept driving towards Beijing.

Beijing is both a city, and a municipality, which is to say that like Washington D.C, it exits without a state, doing it’s own thing. Taxation without representation. However, unlike D.C. the municipality is rather large. In all our driving we had not left it, though we had come close. It is in this manner that one can both be in the countryside and Beijing concurrently, and be driving toward Beijing at the same time.

The Chinese countryside, when it doesn’t not looking like photos from a history book, remains possibly the most consistently bizarre place I’ve ever been. As we drove, we passed enormous concrete African animals, an elephant and a giraffe, marking the entrance to some tourist park or other. A little down the way was a hideous building that looked like it had been modeled on Versailles by a blind architect. Later, we passed large lots full of seemingly random stones, which turned out to be on sale for people’s rock gardens. Most were larger than myself, and while I may not be a giant among men, I would imagine to rocks to have been rather heavy. We finally made it back around four, after another full run through of the CD collection, and I managed to talk my way out of dinner, returning home to recuperate.

Which, I guess, is a good place to stop for now. Cheers.

Mongolia, again.

So, I’m back from Mongolia, sitting in my Beijing apartment, feeling like I suppose all the other twenty somethings living in this crazy city feel. A mixture of stuck in a rut, and free to do absolutely everything. It’s a funny city like that. But Mongolia. Mongolia is different. For starters, unless you take a plane, it takes forever to get to Mongolia. I guess that’s true about most places, but at least once you get to most countries, getting around is relatively easy. There are trains and busses and they have tickets and schedules. When they say they will leave at 8:15, they generally do, or within a couple minutes at the very least. Not so for the wild Mongolian west. Out of the 9 days I was traveling, I spent approximately 120 hours on modes of transportation, and another 20 hours or so waiting to leave.

The funny thing about having been to Mongolia last summer though, is that I knew what to expect, I just had fairly awful luck, even by Mongolian standards. I took the train from Beijing, which should have taken about 30 hours and ended up taking an extra four, because, well I don’t really know why actually. We slowed way down to a crawl through the steppe for quite a while, and it sure as hell wasn’t so people could take better pictures out of the windows. But for all that, it was fairly luxurious since I had a berth to myself, so I napped a fair amount, finished my book, and shot the breeze with Stephan the Australian business consultant. He was a good guy, and traveled with a picture drawn for him by his four-year-old son, which he’d taped up above his bunk, much to the amusement of the sour-mouthed customs folk at the border. As far as I was concerned it made him a decent person, someone worth talking to at the very least.

After finally coming into the station, I spent the afternoon in Ulaan Bataar with a British couple on their way home from a year teaching in Korea, seeing the state department store, Sukhbaatar square, and wandering around a bit. It was nice to see the place through fresh eyes, though I’ll still stand by the assessment that UB is a dirty boring useless city. Beijing may be dirty, and the air might be enough to make you choke at times, but it is never boring and certainly not useless. Beijing is great, UB not so. So after a quiet night I shouldered my pack and went down to the black market to find a van going to Kharkhorin and a sweater. Why didn’t I just pack a sweater you might wonder, and well you might. I had, in fact, packed a couple shirts and a fleece jacket, more than should be enough in the beginning of September. But when I woke up the morning of the 7th, my first full day in Mongolia, I looked out the window to see a suspicious white substance (well, grey actually) covering the ground and buildings near by. They said it was unseasonable, but I’m not sure I believe them. Add cold to the list of Mongolia’s many attributes. So I had to buy another layer, preferably something both very definitely Mongolian and something that I’d wear again. I settled on a camel hair sweater, and it’s pretty snazzy if I do say so myself.

Finding the van wasn’t particularly hard since they line up waiting to head off to various parts of the country, and not only did I have the name in normal script, but in Cyrillic as well, thanks to the wonders of the internet. Eventually the driver of one vehicle, a blue Russian army van called a Porygong, said yes. We were to leave at 3:00, a mere 4 hours in the future, so I wandered around the market, and back to the van, and back around the parking lot. I wasn’t doing much but killing time and taking some photos to be honest, since I’d already bought my essentials and anything else would just weigh me down. They play a lot of pool in Mongolia, on crooked tables arranged outside of resturants mostly, and there were a lot of guys playing outside of the market in the snow. I found this funny for some reason. Not wanting miss an early departure, I ambled back to the van about 2:30 and sat down to wait.

The van didn’t roll out of the parking lot until 5:45. Until that time I played the point and say game with a little girl, who increased my command of Mongolian at least 100 fold. Admittedly, being able to say mouth didn’t come in handy later in the trip -- but still, I now have a working dictionary of nouns, which is a start, I guess. Though we started at 5:45, we certainly didn’t leave then. That would have been unprecedented. First we had to drive around town, dropping people off and picking people up, sometimes looking in two or three locales for particular individuals, or finding them somewhere and taking them somewhere else to get their luggage. Then we had to stop to buy pine nuts, and then again to buy gas. It was 9 o’clock by the time we got on the road, for what is usually a 6-hour trip. Doing the math, I realized this put me getting to Kharkhorin around 3 in the morning, 4 if I was lucky, which is pretty much the worst time to get anywhere.

To add insult to injury, just as we were finally heading out of town, the driver’s wife, who was acting as manager of the endeavor, turned back and said to me, Kharkhorin no. I first expressed my surprise, then my disbelief, and lastly, very obviously, my exceedingly large displeasure. She made it clear that we were going to a completely different province, which was apparently much more interesting, and that of course I should be okay with this. I made it very apparent that I was not, and demanded to be let off the van, with my money returned. This turned out to be the crux of the matter, since my van fare had already been spent on cases of fizzy apple juice, and therefore could not be remitted. After a couple minutes of angry silence, it was decided through some mysterious phone call that we would, in fact, go to Kharkhorin.

However, just as it was my nemesis, Mongolia proved to be my savior as well. The trip took an extra, inexplicable 3 hours, and they left me off the van on the outskirts of town around 6:30 in the morning, leaving only 2 and a half hours to sunrise. Had we actually arrived at the expected time, I would have been one cold camper indeed. Why the extra time? I have no idea. Apart from the normal traffic stops where cops flicked their flashlight around and yelled at the driver for having too many people, we had no earthly reason to take so long. No spectacular breakdowns or side trips across the steppe. We were just slow.

It’s true; there were too many people, but hardly in record numbers. In a van with seats to hold 11, we were 17 including two children, hardly over the practical limit. The best I’ve heard is 23 in the same type of vehicle, not counting children. I was sharing the back seat with three other men, the Cowboy, the Kid, and the Wise Guy. The Cowboy didn’t say much, but when he did it was in a long slow drawl and often with a twinkle in his eye, as if he were secretly laughing at everybody. Mongolia is full of cowboys, and their style speaks to it, but this was pretty much the perfect specimen. The Kid was a country kid come into the city for a while to visit relatives I would guess, and though he could speak no English he could write a few words, which, due to their limited scope, didn’t actually come in handy either. We did figure out that I was two years older though, with the help of my notebook and a lot of gesturing. He’d just bought a new leather jacket, and laughed at all the jokes at my expense. Next to me for the duration of the trip was the Wise Guy, a large smelly man who took great delight in making me say that I was stupid and suchlike, playing the parrot game. He would say something and I would repeat it back, much to the amusement of all the other passengers in the van. I smiled and took it, as one has to do in that situation, but got slightly concerned when he mimed my suicide, and then laughed and gave me a thumbs up. That one is as yet unexplained.

I didn’t have a destination within Kharkhorin, so, after much gesturing the van left me off in the outskirts of town, on the equivalent of Outer Pleasant Street in Brunswick, or the KMD in Waterville. Either way it was the highway access road with lots of shops, and a couple hotels. It was this road that I paced, back and forth, back and forth, for three hours, trying to keep the cold from setting into my knees. I wasn’t entirely successful, but I did survive, and it established me as the new guy in town for all the school kids on their way to school. The moon was almost bright enough to read by, as it often is in Mongoila—and I even had a book, but that would have entailed sitting down on the cold concrete, which was out of the question. So I paced, until around 9.

At 9, slightly after the sun had come up for real, a newish looking Landcruser originally destined for Japan (based on steering wheel placement) pulled over, and a man with a brown cowboy hat leaned out of the window and told me to get in. The last time this happened to me the driver was a Chinese mobster named Jerry, I like to think so anyway, so instead of throwing caution directly to the winds, I first enquired of the Landcruser’s destination. When the couple inside said breakfast, I’ll admit it didn’t take me long to get into the car, and off we rumbled to one of the tourist ger camps on the outskirts of town.

My saviors, I never did learn their names, were friends with the owner, which meant we got free breakfast as a favor, or something like that I hope. The man driving worked up at the school, doing management and economics, and his wife was a lawyer. They were certainly the upper crust of Kharkhorin, which, despite its sleepiness and rather diminutive population, around 10,000 tops I’d guess, is a regional center. This explains why there was enough work for a lawyer, though what she actually did is quite beyond me. I don’t think there is much litigation that goes on, and I’d imagine that most wills and such are handled privately. Her English wasn’t particularly good, though it was better than my Mongolian, so I never found out.

I explained that I was looking for my friend, and, concerned, they called her number—but no dice, the phone was turned off, so after breakfast we repaired back to their ger on the other side of town.

This might be a good time to explain what I was doing ending up in a random Mongolian town at 6 am, with no guidebook, phrasebook, or discernible plans. I did have my friend Emilia’s phone number, and our one and only plan was to meet in Kharkhorin on the evening of the seventh or after. After that the plans were fairly vague, but they involved some kind of Mongolian adventure. We figured it was just as easy to meet in the countryside, and saved Emilia an extra trip to the city. Besides, Kharkhorin was a small town, so meeting each other shouldn’t have been a problem, and it wouldn’t have been, if Emilia had been there. In fact, it wasn’t even after she arrived. The whole thing worked out rather well really, though I guess that’s getting ahead of myself.

Concerned about my rather lost status, my savior in the brown hat solicitously called the Peace Corps volunteer, Ryan, who taught English in his school. What followed was a rather strange conversation where I assured Ryan that no, he didn’t know me, but that a kind gentleman had fed me breakfast and that I was looking for Emilia, the short Swede with red hair and two horses. He’d met her the previous week at the crown café he said, but hadn’t seen her since. I had a lead. I would go to the crown café. I sat in their ger for a couple more hours, being fed cookies and candies, and watching top 20 women’s videos on Mongolian mtv, and talking a bit with Brown Hat’s wife. Around noon when it became apparent that calling wasn’t going to work, I set out to wander around the town hoping to run into Emilia. I brought Doctor Zhivago, but at The Wife’s insistence, left my backpack in their ger because it was too heavy to carry around. After making a couple circuits of Kharkhorin’s economic center, which consisted of three streets, I settled down to wait in front of the crown café, the principle backpacker hangout. I spent the day there, reading Doctor Zhivago and asking about Emilia whenever someone showed up. Almost everybody had met her at some point, and I learned that she’d set off approximately a week earlier with a French guy. Towards afternoon some Czechs pulled up, and expressed their hope that she hadn’t gone to Testserleg, which they had just been through, but very quickly because it was quarantined with the plague.

They still have the plague fairly regularly in Mongolia apparently, usually around this time of year since it’s spread my marmots during marmot hunting season, which is apparently now. I guess someone in Teterleg ate some marmot at his or her grandmother’s house, but that could just be rumor. In any case, no one could go into or out of Tetserleg, and those passing through were given a receipt at one side of town with their time of entry, and had to book it to the checkpoint at the other end in order to be let out of the quarantined zone. This is fairly ridiculous in 2006

I didn’t think Emilia was at Tetserleg, at least not according to the polish guys who had been some of the last westerners to see her. They were shaky on the details, but thought she was heading north to some waterfall, in a direction quite away from Tetserleg. On the other hand, word had it that the French guy didn’t know how to ride a horse. Perhaps he’d fallen off and broken his leg? I sat and brooded.

Through the afternoon I checked back regularly on the ger where my backpack was interned, but my saviors of the morning had left apparently, locking the door. When by 8:30 or so they still weren’t back I sat down for some dinner at the crown café, well spent with a couple of crazy Québécois biking across Mongolia, and afterwards asked the proprietor if she would please tell me how to say, when will they be back? And, my backpack in locked in that ger. Armed with these key phrases I set off to find somebody who had a spare key. Luckily I found some people who’d seen me sitting in the ger that morning, and they took me off on a search all around town, including at stop at the house where a 17-year-old girl who spoke some English lived. She didn’t have a key, but they thought we should get married anyway. I guess I should take it as a complement since I obviously couldn’t even keep track of my stuff. The first thing she said after introductions was, they have gone to France. I’ll admit this practically floored me. Of all the places to go. But no, they were going, but they hadn’t left yet, they were just gone for the night. I breathed again. We never ended up finding a key, but did spend a lot of time walking through the narrow streets of the residential districts, somewhere I hadn’t been. Dogs barked a lot, Mongolian dogs are generally a pretty nasty breed, and nearly everyone has one. When strange and scary dogs barked or, worse still, hurdled toward us and the trusty mahx, possibly the mellowest German Shepard I have ever met, my betrothed would let out a small scream and clutch my arm. I don’t particularly like barking dogs either, but I did what one does and remained confident and kept my back straight.

I slept the night in the ger that the Québécois had rented for the night, out back of the crown café, finally going back after a fruitless search, and in the morning, following a large breakfast of bread and butter, jam and eggs, I set off again in search of my backpack. This time they were home, and after more thanks and some embarrassed laughing, I took my pack and hightailed it out of there. Perhaps this was ungrateful, but I was just happy to have my earthly possessions back and didn’t want to loose them again.

After a quick tour of the monastery a kilometer or two out side of town, I went back to my post outside the crown café, and about 3 o clock or so, just after the revolution had brought all the characters together for the second time, Emilia showed up, covered with dust and grinning. There were no horses in sight; they had been left at a friends place more than 100 km away. They delay was due to the ridiculousness of getting rides in Mongolia. But it was good. We had beers to celebrate. I had been waiting in the right place.

We set off for a nearby valley later that evening, taking some gear and some food, with general plans to hang out and maybe explore a bit but generally just relax and catch up on everything since may. We hadn’t gone more than 5 kilometers though, before some people at a riverside party called us over to sing and drink mare’s milk. This was more like it, the real Mongolian Experience, even if they did keep foisting bowls of milk on us, more that necessary by far. Everybody did some singing, and I put together a rendition of Row Row Row Your Boat as a round. It worked out pretty well and I think everybody had fun. No longer was I Martin, or even Moxie though; one look at the glasses, and Harry Potter was my new name. For some reason, every Asian thinks I look like Harry Potter. It’s just old hat by this point, though I personally don’t see the resemblance. I mean, I have square glasses for god’s sake.

The next day was about as lazy as they come. Some four legged beast had stolen our bread, so we walked back into town for some more supplies, and ended up sitting a good part of the afternoon by the road, enjoying the warmth and having a beer with some German cyclists. It had gone from bone cold to hot hot hot in the past three days, and everybody appreciated it. This was more the Mongolia I remembered. We went back and moved camp a kilometer at most across the river to a grove of trees which afforded a wind break and lots of fire wood, made dinner and went for an early bed, tuckered out from all the sitting around.

The next, we explored the valley though we found nothing particularly of interest, including the spectacularly boring tourists we found camping a ways up, who didn’t even offer us a glass of water or milk. This really, was why we didn’t like them. It was hot and we were thirsty. After heading back to camp for a swim in the river and a nap on the bank, we sat down to make dinner, and almost immediately were set upon by a group of 12 or 15 10th graders, out for a party. They’d lugged an enormous quantity of food and mares milk out, and decided that the other side of our grove was a perfect place to settle. Eventually we went over and made friends by sharing vodka, and spent the rest of the evening playing with them.

For dinner they made a Mongolian specialty whose name I never quite caught, which involved a 20 gallon steel milk jug full of potatoes, onions, chunks of meat and rocks preheated in the fire. The rocks served to cook everything from the inside as well as the out, searing the outside of the meat as it was boiled in the soup. I was easily the best food I had the whole trip, and it was their first time making it. How many 10th grade classes go out to cook by the river? After dinner there was lots of wrestling, and I’m happy to say I held my own against the tenth graders, beating all but the two guys bigger than myself, all though the last bout ended with what might have been the breaking of my nose. It certainly bled a bit, and wiggled more than it should have, but the following day there was only minimal swelling, so who can say for sure. On careful inspection this morning, I will say that it now seems to point a bit to the right. Perhaps it has always done this though, who can say for sure? They wanted to play the Mongolian version of Rock Paper Scissors, which works the same way except with all fingers, where the index beats the middle, the middle the ring and so on down the line. Not to be one-upped. Emilia and I taught them Bear Ninja Cowboy, acting as cultural ambassadors of the finest degree, if I do say so myself. Around dark, maybe 10 o’clock or so, the kids all picked up and went home, and we went to bed.

In the morning, when it was warm enough to get up without shivering, we broke camp and headed back into town to try to get a ride back to UB, since I was hoping to leave on a train the next day. This time the day spent waiting was much more enjoyable, sitting in front of the crown café, eating pine nuts and generally doing some more relaxing. Mongolians eat pine nuts in enormous quantities which is harder than it sounds since the shells have to be cracked without breaking the inner nut, or there’s no getting it out. It basically serves to provide entertainment during all the interminable waiting. So Emilia and I ate pine nuts all afternoon, and Ryan the Peace Corps volunteer stopped by to chat. He seemed glad that I’d found Emilia, and shared some of his Peace Corps stories, most of which involved far too much drinking at the behest of his Mongolian hosts. It’s a hard country on the body in general, dropping to –30 degrees consistently in the wintertime, with nothing to eat but mutton and noodles, pickled carrots and the occasional potatoes. And vodka of course. He said he’d gained 12 pounds over the last 15 months, though I still wouldn’t have guess he was more than 120. Still, Mongolia wouldn’t be my first choice if I ever joined the Peace Corps, but then again, that’s not really the point I guess.

Our van picked us up at 5:30, only an hour and a half after they said we were leaving, and only drove around for 2 and a half hours before heading out of town. Not only that, but it was impossibly empty, only holding 13 people when we left, which must be a record of some sort. In addition, instead of an unkillable Russian army van, it was a Hyundai, which had the advantage of bench seats instead of individual ones, which get uncomfortable when one has to sit over the gap. It seemed to good to be true, and, as is often the case, it was.

Maybe 45 minutes out of Kharkhorin the van broke down, and after about an hour of messing, the men upfront push-started it, and turned around. They didn’t head back to town, but to a very closed looking store maybe 10 minutes away with a hill in front of it. They parked on the hill, and went back to trying to fix the van. I’d decided it was an alternator problem, based on the fact that the overhead lights dimmed every time they turned the key, and that when we had driven, they’d done so with the lights off. Knowing that we had a broken alternator didn’t really make me feel any better about the situation, though I did get to bask in the glow of knowing symptoms of alternator trouble, a very manly thing to know if I do say so myself. We spent at least three hours on that hill, going to sleep and waking up again because there really wasn’t anything else to do. The other passengers seemed not to even notice, and certainly weren’t complaining, so we followed their example and tried to ignore the fact that it was 2 in the morning, it was cold, and our driver and his friends were trying to fix the alternator with scotch tape.

They gave up finally, and we started limping back to town, driving with our headlights off, at a maximum of 20 km and hour, to be met at 3:30 by another van, into which everybody sleepily transferred, and in which we roared off towards UB with headlights and everything. We got there at noon. Call me a commie but I swear that the privatization of transportation isn’t doing Mongolia any favors.

The afternoon was spent happily buying tickets, showering, checking email and heading off the black market to spent my last tugrug on sheepskins from which I hope to make a cunning and warm vest. I’m not sure about the legality of such things from the customs point of view, but I’m prepared not to make a big issue of it, hoping that when I get back to the states I might be able to do a good impression of the Man With No Name. That’s really what everybody is going for, after all. We had a triumphant dinner of Thai food at exorbitant prices and a stop at the grocery store for train essentials and then with the slamming of a car door I headed off, back to china.

I took a train the 12 hours to the Mongolian border, and then spent the entirety of the next day waiting in lines trying to cross it. Mongolian train stewardesses aren’t nearly as friendly as Chinese ones, and not only made me pay for my sheets, but woke me up to take them away in the morning. But I got back at them alright by stealing the plastic bag they came in, which, if I manage to hold on to it, will someday grace a wall in the Connelly abode. Unlike the trip up I was in a full berth, but my companions were Chinese construction workers, heading back to the border to get new visas, so the conversation was good and there were no misunderstandings.

The day of lines was fairly hellish, though maybe just really boring, as it took the border crossing theme stretched it for a good six hours, first waiting in lines to cross a checkpoint in a van, and then the Mongolian customs, back to the van to wait to cross no mans land, and then to the Chinese side, where they made us pay for our entry cards. While 75 cents is not a particularly exorbitant price, it still seemed rather excessive to pay for the privilege of standing in line and then getting laughed at because of my passport picture. Sometimes it just works out that way I guess.

I hung around the long distance bus station, got some noodles with a girl who’d just come from driving from England to Mongolia as part of the Great Mongol Rally and then got on a night bus around 3:30. The bus took just over twelve hours, spitting me out sans notebook just after four in the morning this past Friday. Which, though abrupt, seems like a good place to end this particular story. I'll get some pictures up soon, I promise.

the beerman cometh

So, I’m back in Beijing and feeling right at home. I’ve been spending lots of time in the apartment, trying to recuperate from the flight and looking for a job and generally being lazy. One of the advantages of this setup is that I don’t feel obligated to go exploring every second. This is my summer after all.

Beijing in a funny city, in some ways modern and global, certainly bustling, but also curiously organic. Not crunch south California or university of Vermont organic, but rather functioning much like an organism, or at least a collection of them. Traffic is a good example. It’s some of the worst in the world, and not getting any better. Cars clog the roads like arteries fed on McDonalds, and yet, everything seems to work. People don’t signal before changing lanes, they just change, and, for the most part, nobody gets hurt. Granted, people do, but not as many as you’d think. Its almost as if the city were a giant octopus laying on its back, waving its 8 (times at least a zillion) tentacles around, but all with some larger plan, and of course, a fedora.

When I was younger and living in this apartment (roughly seven years ago) we had milk delivered every couple days, not in cool milk bottles like they had stateside, but in plastic pouches the kind we got with our meals in elementary school, but still, it came in our mail box, and the milkman brought it. This summer, in New York, I experienced Delivery Service of a different kind, also new to me, but today, for the first time, I met, or rather, saw, a Beerman. Much like the milkman his job is to do rounds delivering his wares, but instead of plastic pouches, he arrived at the apartment of family friends lugging a crate of probably 40 600ml bottles. The men with whom I was having lunch explained that they were too busy to go get beer themselves, and that really, this was much more convenient. I’ll say. These men, the son and son in law of our dear friend Nai Nai see getting me drunk as a task fitting of aspiration. So far they’ve been unsuccessful, but only because I match them cup for cup drinking beer while they drink Bai Jiu, the vile 80 proof (minimum) rotgut that Chinese men are so enamored of. Some day they’ll succeed, but I’m trying to stave it off until absolutely necessary.

That’s about it. Aside from loosing my keys and sleeping on a couch I have no adventures to report. I need to learn how to use my camera. Truly a daunting task, I think I’ll watch pirated dvd’s instead.

maybe its time to start again

so, maybe it's trime to try and do this again, I dunno. I'm heading to china in 28 hours, and though ive been doing some wandering this summer, i'll be back in exotic lands again for another couple months and maybe I'll have something to write about. Worth another shot at the very least. I'll be headed to mongolia in a bit, and then hoping to take many short weekend trips into the oriental countryside. this is in addition to teaching english and doing a little freelance copyediting. so yeah, should be ok.

admiting defeat, of a sort

I guess I missed a month back there. What happened to March? Now it's April, and soon there will be crocuses and then it will really be spring. It's fairly obvious that I won't be able to hack the daily updates, but those aren't really necessary. It's bad to say, but life, even at a place as stimulating as colby isn't really that news worthy. What do I do? I go to class, to practice, to dinner, maybe the ocasional movie or lecture. Instead, I think i'll stick mostly to the intended title, and mutter about my wanderings. Not right now though. Soon. I will say, that the road from texas to maine is a long one.

You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.

eric looking out at sunrise on the gobi

I first heard the phrase, "The road is the goal" from a German girl, Miriam, I met on the train to Mongolia. She only knew it in German, "Der Weg Ist Das Ziel." Traveling in Mongolia, I asked Eric, a Swiss traveling companion about it: he explained that it referred to the pilgrimage along the Way of St. James, which passes through central western Europe. Intrigued, I googled the phrase when I got back to Beijing, and found that it is attributed


to pretty much everybody, from Confucius to Gandhi. It doesn't really matter; it's a good way to live. Destinations are important sometimes, but people pay too much attention to them generally. Getting anywhere should be as much about getting there as about wherever it is you might be going. College sure as hell is like that. What's a graduation other than a piece of paper and an excuse to get drunk with people you probably won't see again? Getting there, though, that's where it's at.

This all reminds me of bilbo's walking song, which goes :

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began,
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow , if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Good bit of rhyming, that.

Radio plays that forgotten song...

I like listening to the radio when I drive. You never know what you'll hear, for one thing, though you might have some ideas...Still, it's about as diverse as it's possible to be in most place. I guess not everywhere though. This summer driving through northern New Hampshire, the only station I got was coutry, before that cut out too and the search just kept going in circles. Still, it's great. You'd think that if I enjoyed it so much, then maybe the car (or cars) I drive would have better radios, radios say, where more than one speaker works, or where it doesnt randomly jump to 107.9 when you go over a bump. Still, these small barriers can be taken in stride in the quest for the great american psyche.

NPR is a world of its own, but sometimes, just not right for driving. News is not what you need to be listening to in traffic jams, or on windy back country roads. It just doesnt set the right tone. That said, you can't beat NPR, no way, no how.

On my computer, I listen to a mix of bluegrassy folky poppy regge influenced old time rock. Everything from Allison Kraus, to Eric Clapton, to the Corrs, to the wailers and Creedence. It's easy to forget, therefore, that theres another world of music out there, a world of which greater america is a part of. I can only stand to listen to the Top 20 charts for so long, and I won't tollerate hibbity hop for more than 10 minutes, but even there, it's fun to listen to how ridiculously outrageously bad some songs are.

For years, I made fun of country music. You know what happens when you play a Country record backwards, I'd say. You get your dog back, your wife back, your trailer back, and your truck too. More recently though, I've come to appreciate the genere, even if I lower the volume, embarrassed, when I go through toll booths.

It's great driving music really. Classic Rock is too boring. It just turns into static after a while. Don't even think about classical. Oldies are ok, but they get boring after a while. You don't get bored with country, or at least, not too bored. Theres a lot of diversity there. From patriotism, to boozy fun, to good old fashioned tear jerkers. And once you've listened for a while, you can sing along with the popular songs. They're catchy, they really are.

Beyond all that though, that country is so popular in rural America has to say something. This summer, I passed a bar in norther maine with a sign that said, "Thursday nights, cowgirls drink free." That's got to say something. So by listening to country music I can take a quick trip out of the collegiate bubble, and maybe get into the heads of the people around me. That's pretty cool, i think.

When you're listening to the radio, theres always the chance that you'll hear a song you remember from somewhere, or dont really remember, but remember remembering, if that makes any sense. Songs will pull out random memories, memories of other car trips or of conversations or people who I've lost touch with.

Listening to music at home is nice, but it lacks the total randomness of listening to the radio in a car. You never know where you're going to end up on the dial, or what song will come on at just the right moment. It's fantastic.

Though sometimes it does get a little old, i admit it.