China 2004

Hong Kong photo round-up

One day I packed up my stuff, checked out of the Cosmic Guesthouse, and spent the morning on metro, bus and boat to reach the Bradbury Hall hostel, on the eastern side of the Hong Kong mainland. The hostel was booked completely, so I spent some time observing a mud flat: hermit crabs, normal crabs, and little mud skippers about the size of my pinky finger. At the hostel, I saw the biggest live spider I’ve seen in my life. Crazy wild (and not so wild) life!

It was a long and tiring hike back, but the views were great and the floating fish market back in Saikung was a nice reward (as were crackers and lychee juice by the waterfront).

From then on, my simple and rational life in Hong Kong involved staying up late watching Olympics an snacking on such gems of the orient as Lactic Fanta and Tim Tams. I made it out to Delifrance once or twice for sessions with a book, back to the food court for more croquette curry with CC Lemon, trips which sometimes involved a crowded subway.

One night in Lan Kwai Fong (look at the mainland tourists! and the Wellcome grocery store took RMB!) was enough to convince me that I’m not a bar person. I resisted any urge to place my bets, preferring to snap pics of tributes to a certain So Cal artist on Western Veggie Market Street and chat it up with the friendly girl at the Panic record shop.

This one’s for Helena: look, the girl in yellow is wearing wrestling shoes!

permalink | Micah/Hong Kong | 2004.09.07-13:36.00

Saving my stalkers some time…

Today I was supposed to find a recent picture of myself, and since I’ve taken so many pictures recently I went through and put together a collection of self-portraits and mirror shots. Only one of these photos was not taken by me:

Tiananmen Square, Beijing Lama Temple, Dali Archway, Hong Kong Ferry, Lijiang SUV window, Lugu Lake, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Tianjin clock mobile, Tianjin sky tower, Wudangshan peak hotel, Beijing-Wuhan train WC, Hard sleeper, Lijiang Mu palace.

Also, food pictures are on my Xanga.

permalink | Micah | 2004.08.25-21:47.00

More Photos Uploaded

More photos have been uploaded from Hong Kong, so you can put some pictures to the words. Here are some highlights:

Beijing

Micah, John and Dwight at the Bookworm in Sanlitun.

When I retire, I’m going to buy a Hong Qi.

Ladies all over Beijing wear these socks.

I don’t know what “Please stay off the grass” has to do with ping-pong, but I like it.

“Bobo’s New Equipment”?

The Haxor Economist appears in the paper.

Checking out the b-boys, the b-boys, and also checking out the b-boys.

The children of Japanese tourists were practicing calligraphy in the courtyard of our hotel.

The National Party Regulations game show. Exciting!

Peking duck and /basi pingguo/ with Katie and her father.

Hot lemon and ginger cola at the Be There or Be Square cafe.

The Beijing western train station is impressive. The southern train station is the pits. Our bunkmates on the train were English teachers from Enshi, Hubei coming home from a vacation in Beijing. I got a good photo of Ted on the train. He can put that one on the jacket of his book.

Wuhan

In Wuhan, we ran into the most hilarious display of Chinglish I’ve ever seen. This menu advertised soft drinks, a line of salad, sandwiches (“I’ll have the three civil administrations in the corporation, on rye.”), and various desserts. It was a hoot.

We ran into a guy selling tofu out of a wodden bucket, but we went with the meat buns and sour plum punch (at least, until McDonalds opened). Wuhan truly was an oven, and a dreary oven at that. The one redeeming feature seemed to be the East Lake, which was truly huge and beautiful.

Wudangshan

Wudangshan is supposed to be the place that inspired certain settings for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. We went to a small temple which I enjoyed more for the painted-over Cultural Revolution slogans than for anything else. I enjoyed the post-temple popsicle, too.

The view on the first day was pretty good, but the weather was brutal. On the second day, the clouds moved in, the humidity moved up, and the temperature remained the same. Still, I refused the porters and their chairs, and did the three-hour climb all on my own. No big feat, really, as the vendors do this pretty much every day.

The view from the top was somewhat obscured by clouds, but still pretty amazing. I go tsome pretty neat pics, especially of the flowers in the garden. The temple at the top had a pretty good communitygrown up around it, amazing for how much of a hike it was. At the top I met Lu Tian, a teaching asitant at a university in Wuhan, and we ended up hiking down together and snacking on /liangfen/. In this picture, you can see one of the guys carrying loads up (or in this case, down) the mountain. Most of them started from this pile of sand in the parking lot, and hiked for hours up the mountain. Truly gruelling work.

Yangtze Cruise

We reached Yichang, the starting point of our Yangtze cruise, in the middle of a pouring rainstorm. I took one picture at our hotel before the lens of my camera fogged up.

I got some good pictures the next day when we boarded the boat. Most of the cargo (food) was still loaded on the old-fashioned way: porters. They had a system of bamboo sticks as counters of the number of loads each person carried. As with veggies all across China, our cabbage was stored outside, for maximum freshness! At one point, a porter offered me a chance to shoulder his load. He had two boxes of apples at each end of his shoulder bar, and I couldn’t even budge it. A one-apiece load, however, was managable. The porters got a laugh out of that.

Our boat went through some locks. Random passengers asked to take their picture with Ted (very photogenic!). I didn’t get any pictures of the actual Three Gorges Dam locks because I elected to take the dam tour, where I saw the only sprinklers I’ve ever seen in China(being used to wet down a road, no less). I like this picture of the dam construction site — but it’s like the Great Wall, nearly impossible to capture the scale of it in a single picture. Permutations of Uncle Ted and I made several tours over the four days we were on the boat. The girl with the flag was our tour guide, as was the guy standing on her right (yes, picking his nose! how embarasing). On one of the tours, we got pulled upstream like the ships in days of old. It was pretty tacky, but the tourists in the back of the boat got excited and would break into song spontaneously.

Random picture of boat man eating ramen straight from the bag.

This one’s for people who like weapons: horse spikes.

Typical breakfast on the boat. People relaxed on the boat; I got the idea that for a lot of Chinese, the cruise wasn’t so much for hte scenery or for the sights so much as for spending time with family and friends. I did as the Romans, spending an inordinate amount of time watching people play mah-jong and introducing Skip-bo to a group of girls that hung out in the forward lounge.

As much as I like local dialects… folks, please, Speak Standard Chinese.

Speaking of language, I like it when Chinese make familiar mistakes with their own language. (bingdong gezhong yinliao scratched out, rewritten as gezhong binddong yinliao)

The city of Fengdu is scheduled to be largely submerged by the rising Yangtze. Thus, it was moved to the opposite shore, above the infamous 175 meter line. In this picture, the old city of Fengdu is on the lower bank and the new city on the upper bank. The old city is largely in ruins, but still has a sizable population. Where there are tourists, there will be vendors (half the stores in town are selling film).

Hide your eyes, it’s a propaganda window!

Of course, I think of it too late: I should have looked for illegal registration paper vendor cellphone numbers in old Fendu. That would have been el colmo. (what’s a good English expression for el colmo?)

Dali

Our breakfast in Kunming before taking the bus to Dali was youtiao (churros) snipped into short lengths with scissors, and dipped into dou jiang (hot soy milk).

Dali has been developed like Disneyland, but it makes for some nice photo ops; and the old neighborhoods are not far off.

permalink | Micah | 2004.08.22-18:09.00

My Notebook

I made observations walking around Kowloon today, and wrote a few of them down in the notebook I keep in my back pocket. Here they are:

• I browsed through 1980s Hong Kong comedy VCDs in HMV today, and realized that many Hong Kong residents seem to be stuck in this era, at least in terms of fashion sense and hair styles. Mostly women.

• Hong Kong Singapore? Watching the Olympics Highlights today I caught one fo the many public service commercials that the HK government runs. This commercial was alerting citizens to the new law that beginning on August 1^st, public transit passengers on buses fitted with seat belts are required to wear the seat belts or be subject to fines of HKD 5,000 (about 640 US) and 3 months of prison time. Yikes.

permalink | Micah/Hong Kong | 2004.08.17-23:43.00

Wudangshan Day 2

On the second day, Ted decided to stay in town while I tackled Jin Ding on my own. Armed with an umbrella, a bottle of water and an iron will, I hopped into a mini-bus and was whisked away to the front gate of Wudangshan, bought the men piao (gate ticket), transferred into another bus, and was driven up to trailhead directly by a younger driver who was a little more careful about staying within the lines and making the journey a little easier on the stomachs of his passengers.

The mini-bus system is interesting. The drive from town to anywhere in the park costs 10 RMB. You start by hopping into a mini-bus in town, which fits about 6-10 people and takes you up to the front gate. At this point, you still haven’t paid anything. You then buy a ticket to get into the park (park residents pay nothing, an ID gets them in for free), and transfer onto another bus which is allowed into the park. This bus gets a receipt from a college-age girl in the parking lot that lists how many people it is carrying. About halfway to the first attraction, or about 15 minutes into the drive, the mini-bus comes across a checkpoint, at which the driver produces the receipt and each passenger is asked to pay (or not, for residents). The bus then proceeds further into the park. The process is similar in reverse on the way back into town. I figure that at some point there is a redistribution of money back to the drivers. This whole system struck me as being a particularly interesting example of economic coordination.

I reached the beginning of the trail at about 11 AM (late sleeper by default). A lot of people take the road further up to the lan che, the cable cars, which will take you up to the peak for a fee, and then they walk down the trail. That’s the wimpy way, and since I was looking to, as my friend Lu Tian said, tiaozhan ziji, to challenge myself, I started the three hour hike from the bottom, planning to take the cable cars down from the top to allow time for another temple or two. Like I said, the park has permanent residents: many of them are farmers, but many tend to the souvenir stands that dot the trail to the top. At the bottom, these are solid structures that double as houses and sell kitchy medals, back-scratchers, and towels. Further from the bottom, these shops disappear and are replaced by blankets spread out next to the trail offering tepid bottles of water (lifesavers, I must have drank five or six), orange-ade and soda, and snacks like cucumbers, hard candy and sunflower seeds. Near the peak are ladies and girls selling medicinal plants (fake, Tian claimed). In fact, nearly all of these items were sold by girls, women and elderly men. Where were the men? They could make more money serving as porters; some heckled tourists, trying to convince them to let themselves by carted up and down the hill for 100 RMB (3 hours of steep stairs, I would say it’s a fair price); others shouldered bamboo or wooden bars with sacks of sand hanging from each end and carried these up the hill to spots where concrete was needed for trail repair.

To Be Continued…

permalink | Micah/Hubei/Wudangshan | 2004.08.17-23:34.00

Lemme see…

Where was I? Ahh, Wudanshang. After the provincial museum and East Lake in Wuhan, the driver took us to Wuchang’s train station. We had a quick dinner of fried ou (lotus root) and Sprite, which I later regretted. Greast floating on warm soda is good going down, but not-so-good in the stomach. On the hard-sleeper to Wudangshan station, our tickets were for beds in separate compartments filled with those Chinese businessmen so lacking in distinguishing features that each slack-and-polo-shirt wearing, cellphone-case-on-the-belt toting man blends into the next. At about six in the morning, we were abruptly awakened and nearly thrown off the station as it rolled through the grandiose Wudansgshan station in a not so glorious village-turned-potential-boomtown. Fighting off the hawkers at the station’s edge, we headed downhill and booked a room in a nice place which just happened to be across the street from a mini-bus station. We had a little trouble with the shower: the hot water did not seem to be working. I called a fuwuyuan up to the room, and she took up a position on the squat toilet platform and turned on the shower (the water drains into a drain hole on the floor, hence the need for a little elevation). After a minute or so, she turned off the “hot” water and turned on the cold: behold, hot water. Since then, I’ve run across this same situation at two other hotels on our route. Is this some left-over from the Cultural Revolution, a la red-lights-mean-go?

Dinner that night was uneventful. Our grueling pace and sleeping on the train had done a job on Ted’s digestive system, so I ended up shouldering most of the job of putting down the food, which is usually an adventure when you don’t know exactly what you’re ordering.

The next morning, we headed up to Wudanshan itself, which is a large natural area covering several mountains and villages, hotels and taiji/wushu school, temples, lakes and mountain hideouts. The entry ticket cost 70 RMB (about 9 USD), enough to make me regret not realizing that we could have stayed at a hotel inside the park for a similar price and avoided paying the entrance fee on the second day. The drive up was on a very windy road, and Ted’s still testy stomach decided to send up an exploratory force; the driver seemed unconcerned about keeping his speed down, even when another one of the passengers also needed a plastic bag. Anyhow, Ted took a short nap, and then we spent a while exploring one of the first attraction in the park, an old Daoist temple. Its most memorable features were the large warrior god statues, the priests setting off fireworks outside the front gate, the tourist group of affluent Fujianese, the stone tablets commemorating donations (in Taiwanese and American dollars) from Taiwanese and Hong Kong devotees, and the large revolutionary slogans from the Cultural Revolution that had been painted over in red but were still visible on the outside of the largest temple structure (pictures forthcoming, these were pretty neat).

We walked across the parking lot to the road to find a ride up to the next trailhead, and Ted stopped at the little stand to buy a map and a bag of crackers. The family that runs the stand (four generations) ended up inviting me to lunch with them (fish, greens, pork, rice… delicious). The ladies run the store,and the husband drives a truck to town and back. It looked like they were dismantling an old unused part of the temple and shipping the (valuable?) bricks down into town to use in new buildings.

We caught a ride in a mini-van up to the next top parking lot, where the trail to the Golden Peak, Jin Ding, started. I impressed myself by arguing with the driver when he decided to charge us 5 RMB a person instead of 2 RMB. We tried to make our way as far down the trail as possible, but the oppresive heat, the grade of the incline, and reports that the peak was only three hours away convinced us to end our hike after only 30 minutes of walking. I ventured up a little further along the trail, but was caught by a light rainstorm, found shelter in a little cave, and then made my way back when the rain let up a little. Never mind the rain, though; by the time we got back to the trailhead, we noticed that the most popular souvenir among Chinese tourists (and readily available from most souvenir stands) was a towel to wipe away the sweat from one’s brow. We did as the Romans.

That evening back in town, I ducked into an internet bar while Ted went to bed early. Dinner was negligible, if I remember correctly.

permalink | Micah/Hubei/Wudangshan | 2004.08.17-14:20.00

Today was e-mail, tomorrow is blog.

Walking through HK today (I should have taken the bus, it’s hot and humid), I saw one black-on-white T-shirt reading fan zhan, Anti-war, and another yellow-on-black reading (in English) Is that what you fought the war for? Indeed.

permalink | Micah/Hong Kong | 2004.08.16-21:18.00

Back

I’ve been busy, so no entries for a while. And still no pictures, because most of the internet cafes here are running Windows 98. For example, the cafe manager today had to boot into BIOS and enable USB support, and then the necessary drivers weren’t there anyway. However, I did realize a couple wang ba ago that most places have local fileservers streaming Realplayer streams of recent movies. As I type this, I’m watching Jeon Jihyeon’s latest film, Windstruck, dubbed into Chinese.

I didn’t mention that before Uncle Ted arrived in Beijing, I did a few things with John and his friends from IUP. For example, we went to the DMJ China DJ contest at the Yan club, where I met Dan from Chinese Triad; Dwight, John and I had dinner at the Bookworm on Sanlitun North, and migrated to Sanlitun south for drinks at the Hidden Tree; us three also had dinner at the Mosuke Canting, the Moscow Restaurant as seen in Cultural Revolution film In the Heat of the Sun.

Back to the near present, the pace of life slowed down once Ted showed up. We browsed Wangfujing and the Foreign Language Bookstore. We walked through the hutongs behind Tiananmen. We sat in a siheyuan and watched the rain fall. On our last night in Beijing, Katie Beth and her father met us at the Tian Wai Tian restaurant just south of the Normal University for Peking duck, knocking one of the last items off my list of Things To Do in Beijing.

Our pace for the last few days, for a change, has been grueling. We overnighted direct from Beijing to Hankou on hard-sleeper bunks, a trip made shorter by chatting with a group of English teachers coming back from vacation in Beijing. Wuchang (the city next to Hankou, where the travel agency for booking Yangtze river trips was located) was a steam oven, aggravated by my over-filled backpack; it’s like the opposite of wind chill, carrying it makes the day a few degrees hotter. The folks at the agency suggested heading to Wudangshan before doing the river trip, so we bought hard-sleeper tickets for that night. Before leaving, we checked out the Hubei Provincial museum, which was basically one large exhibit on a certain Zhou dynasty tomb. The prize find was a large set of bells, and the museum’s take on them was to give an example performance on a replica of the bells. Better than the museum was our drive afterwards around Dong Hu, the Eastern Lake where locals go to fish, swim and cool off in the evenings. We theorize that it’s the one redeeming feature of this oven.

The hotel gate closes soon, I’ll continue this at another time (and hopefully catch the end of Windstruck then too).

permalink | Micah/Hubei/Wuhan | 2004.07.31-22:48.00

Meeting in Beijing

I actually arrived at the Haoyuan Hotel on Sunday before Ted did, so I went out for a walk and found him napping when I got back. For the first couple days he has been here, it’s been raining, which meant that mercifully the heat has let up.

Pace-wise, we haven’t been pushing ourselves as hard as I did as the hostel. On Sunday we went to bed early; Monday (yesterday) we took an exploratory walk through some hutongs north of Tiananmen, browsed the foreign language bookstore on Wangfujing for history and econ books, lunched at the China food court in the Dong’an Mall, and met Katie Beth and her father for dinner at Tian Wai Tian, the duck restaurant I frequented as a summer student at the Normal University. I’ll have pictures of this uploaded as soon as technically possible.

I’ve been instructed to write more stories on this weblog, but I forgot to ask how. Until I figure this out, and likely even after that point, the best stories can be found on Katie Beth’s xanga.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.27-15:05.00

Oops

The day after I tell John and Dwight that the Spanish don’t travel, I help a couple Spaniards find the USB port on a hostel computer.

Uncle Ted arrives today. We’re going to meet at the Haoyuan Hotel, just east of Wangfujing.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.25-10:39.00

Random Photos (Tianjin version)

Do we have California Beef Noodle King in California?

Channel-V VJ, Beijing mag columnist, and random Tianjin shop advertisement model.

New store fronts on old colonial-style building on Binjiang Dao.

Me, Eileen and Kathy.

Eileen’s daughter is da cuteness.

Miandi.

permalink | Micah/Tianjin | 2004.07.21-13:39.00

Random Photos

Technology Enters Into Our Lives

Kathryn and Lou

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.21-13:25.00

Saturday

I know I’m slacking on these entries, so I’m making up today.

Saturday morning I was planning on doing something with John, but he was out during the morning so I took the subway up to the Yonghegong, Beijing’s official, still functioning Tibetan lama temple. The neighborhood is full of incense shops, I wonder how they all survive. Margins must be high, and costs low. I had a bean-paste shao bing while I waited 10 minutes to make yet another call to John’s place. The temple was nothing much to see (hence the lack of pictures), the only item worth mentioning is the giant statue of the Maitreya Buddha, which is three stories tall and carved out of a single tree. I’m sure the fact that it has a narrow building built around it makes it look more impressive as you can only see it by looking straight up.

The subway whisked me away to Xidan to purchase the Chinese guidebook for five bucks USD, and as it was lunchtime I stopped into the Korean place in the Times Square food court for an iron bowl of Korean bibimbap goodness (no picture, I was feeling very “watched” and a little self-conscious). As I left, I walked past the line of people waiting to go into the cinema to catch Zhang Yimou’s latest. I wonder how soon it will be available under the Jianguomen underpass.

Back at the hotel for an afternoon nap, I picked up some toilet paper at the corner store, got my clothes back from the cleaners down the street, and met Catherine, our new roommate from Canada. I finally got a hold of John, and so invited Catherine to go along with us to a concert that night. First, we met at the Wudaokou subway station for a Korean dinner which was absolutely fantastic. It’s great to dine with John, he’s a great conversationalist and ultra-polite. The ghostly hand in that last picture was our waitress, who did us the kindness of grilling and cutting up all of our meat.

We caught a taxi to the western gate of Tsinghua and walked about 200 meters straight south to a little alleyway where the Loup Chante cafe was hosting Jimo Xiari in concert. Kaizer Kuo had recommended them, so I wasn’t disappointed, and John really liked them too. But mostly, we were pretty happy to discover this little cafe right next to the Tsinghua campus. The staff were excited about the music, and had plans for the cafe (live music, Tarantino films), and the atmosphere was very homey (used furniture, low couches, local art). A few of John’s friends ended up swinging by near the end, they had been at the Zhang Yimou film showing.

I stepped out for some fresh air at one point, and realized that the fresh air was inside the bar. It was pretty humid outside.

Conversations

• Heard on the bus a conversation between an old Western-Chinese man who had joined the People’s Army decades ago, and a few recent immigrants from Western China. The conversation was half in Mandarin Chinese, half in the Uighur dialect. They all agreed that the reason to be in Beijing was that the money is here.

• In the Yonghegong temple museum, a conversation between two girls:

  • “Who is that person?”

  • “That is lama so-and-so.”

  • “What about that American…?”

  • “That’s the Dalai lama.”

  • “Oh, right.”

Food

• Breakfast (small shop outside Yonghegong)

  bean-paste shao bing (fried cake, donut sized).

• Lunch

  Don’t remember?

• Dinner (Korean barbacue in Haidian)

  Pork chop, lamb, beef; Korean pancake with dipping sauce, random sides, melty milk pops for dessert.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.18-16:33.00

Friday

I decided to postpone my trip to Tianjin because I heard Katie Beth was leaving town soon. We met at Wangfujing at lunchtime, Katie Beth, her dad, and me, in the map section of the Wangfujing bookstore. Lunch happened at the Dong’an Shichang shopping mall, in the same food court where I got my curry chicken. After lunch, we took the subway to Jianguomen for a look at the astronomical observatory. Katie Beth’s father had done navigation for the air force, so we talked a bit about the sextants and armillaries, and how they would have been operated.

Beihai park was our next destination. We were approached by a friendly sidewalk calligrapher who traced a message of Sino-American friendship for us on the ground. Hopefully our friendship will last longer than the water stains did. While Katie Beth’s dad chatted with the calligrapher, she and I climbed to the top of the hill, the base of Beihai’s lama temple.

We reached our next destination, Houhai, by a whirlwind tour of the the hutongs on rickshaw. Houhai was nice, it has been very developed, so that the waterfront is bounded by bars and restaurants. After a little dancing, we split up and headed back to our respective hotels. I stayed up a bit to watch a movie with Cindy and Isaac on his laptop, then fell asleep.

Man reading the bus stop list.

I like the idea behind Araz’s weblog. It’s a weblog written by other people, about Araz. I’ve considered starting an “interview weblog”, where I interview people. What better to interview people about than one’s own self?

Food

• Breakfast

  I might as well stop including this one.

• Lunch (Dong’an Shichang food court, on the 5^th floor)

  octupus-arm fried “leaf” rice (it’s cooked in a lotus leaf first), and suan mei tang.

• Dinner (S’Silk restaurant on Lotus Lane, Houhai)

  spicy beef in “special tea sauce, Kunming-style mushrooms, fruit tea.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.18-16:08.00

Thursday

I really can’t remember what I did on Thursday. All I can think of is that I missed my intended bus stop that morning, ended up walking through much of Beijing, and met John for dinner up at his place on the Tsinghua University campus, and then we went out for for a Japanese tonkatsu dinner

Food

• Breakfast

  Lost in the fog of memory.

• Lunch (a small food stand in the souther half of the city)

  a styrofoam box full of different dishes: stewed pork, green beans, tomato and eggs, potatoes in broth, something involving carrots and peanuts; a box of rice, and a couple steamed buns filled with meat and carrots (I gave away the carrot bun). Total cost: 6 RMB (about 75 cents)

• Dinner (Hanri Japanese restaurant, in the Haidian district)

  Japanese-style tonkatsu (breaded pork steak in broth, topped with pickled radish), miso soup, tea.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.18-16:03.00

Beijing Linux Users Group

I’m in several pictures in the photo album for the July meeting of the Beijing Linux Users Group. In case the link goes stale, I’ve archived them here.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.16-23:06.00

Wednesday

…was a day on which I went looking for several things I remembered from Beijing in 2000 and 2002, and found them gone.

Spent a couple hours on the computer this morning trying to get photos uploaded, journal entries written, and e-mail sent out. It’s so frustrating to use the internet here, I think Brainysmurf’s recent post on reverse-culture shock (he’s in the USA for his wedding) does it some justice:

Talking to the computer reverse cultural shock: “Heh. My dial up connection in the US is faster than my broadband over there.” “Wow BBC News formats their website pretty well.” “Instapundit is even more of a doofus when you’re reading it from the US. Sweet.” “Hmm. I wonder if the authorities will do a search for this keyword. Oh wait.”

GMail has been very inconsistent, the uplink from different internet cafes varies widely in quality, and the computers around town are in creative states of disrepair. The one pleasant surprise is that every computer so far has let me install PuTTY for encrypted SSH access to my UMich and Freeshell accounts.

The first disappointment came when I walked through Liulichang and couldn’t find the store where the people had been so friendly to me when I lost my backpack in 2002. It must have been sold, or remodelled, but I’m not exactly sure so I’ll probably end up going back one more time. Second, I took the bus to Ditan, the temple of earth park, and found that the old Beijing restaurant just outside the east gate had been flattened, along with the neighborhood around it, to make a (pleasant little) green strip just outside the park walls.

I hopped on the bus back to Wangfujing for lunch, only to find that the cafeteria style food-court at whcih I had intended to eat (behind the big shopping malls) had been torn down into a parking lot. Amusingly (and I’ll upload the picture I took tomorrow), instead of tearing down all the buildings and putting up a fence around the lot, the builders chose to tear down all but the store-front walls, leaving them to enclose the lot. As a result, when you walk along the street you are seeing a false facade, and if you look in through the store windows and glass doors, you see not merchandise, but cars parked in a field. It is very surreal.

Back at the hostel, I napped, showered, and hung out with Isaac and Cindy. Isaac is studying Chinese in New Jersey, but he’s into Japanese pop culture so we shot the breeze about anime, drama and music.

For dinner, I took a taxi (felt uppity!) to meet Helena and Max at the Jazz-ya restaurant in Sanlituan. Travelling around Beijing with Helena is fun because she really got around the city back when she lived here, so she can tell you everything that has changed and the way that it used to be. It’s sad, but it’s also exciting. After shopping for shoes at the Yashuo market and square-dancing with the old folk in the cool evening, and snacking on raisin popsicles, we hit up Club Max in front of the Workers’ Stadium to catch Kid Koala in his exclusive (exclusive!) Beijing appearance. It was a great night, he played a bunch of danceable stuff, and did some more experimental tracks like a composition featuring Louie Armstrong’s trumpet, another of his mom’s favorite old movie music, and one that he dedicated to DJ Krush, which totally had DJ Krush’s moody feel. Martin, from the BLUG, was at the club so we did the whole “shout random stuff at each other, nod and smile because the music is so loud” thing. Maybe it’s just me.

Food

• Breakfast

  The Breakfast Association would be ashamed of me.

• Lunch (Wangfujing Dongan Mall Chinese food court)

  curry rice with chicken, and too-sweet suan mei tang (“tart” plum punch).

• Dinner (Jazz-ya)

  tamago omelette appetizer, the creamiest macaroni au gratin, and raisin popsicles for dessert.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.15-17:35.00

Tuesday

Went shopping in Xidan, which fffor me means the giant bookstore. They still have copies of my favorite penmanship book (Chinese penmanship, of course), my copy of which is wrinkled and water warped from overuse. I picked up a wuxia kung-fu magazine, which I’m having a very hard time getting through, it’s chock full of classical language and expressions that I just haven’t learned.

For lunch, I called up Dwight and we ate at the Be There or Be Square (BTBS) cafe in Times Square on the south side of Xidan. The cafe was pretty nice, and the hot honey lemonade was delicious, but I noted that the drink alone cost more than my entire dinner of the night before.

At that point, we met up with Helena and Max for some shopping in the Xidan clothes market, trying on watches and examining the Counterstrike T-shirts. It was so nice to see Helena again, she’s been working with Albert in Gansu province and really learned a lot from the experience. She’s really into her element in Beijing, and her excitement about the city is infectious.

At six, I ran off to Alfa, a small bar/club north of Workers Stadium for the Beijing Linux Users Group’s monthly meeting. That night, they sold BLUG t-shirts and gave away copies of Red Flag Linux developers edition. Also, there was a demo of some Oracle database software running on the Red Flag distro—they gave us a copy of the Oracle DB too. I talked with Bruce, whose wife is an IT consultant; Martin, a German journalist who runs a small agency here in Beijing; and with David, who released of Yggdrasil Linux back in 1995, the first Linux distro to appear on CD. He’s in China now, studying the language. My first run-in with a kernel hacker!

Dinner was along (my roommates Isaac and Cindy had already eaten) at a small restaurant down from the hostel.

Food

• Breakfast

  erm, forgot (to eat).

• Lunch

  crispy pork on rice, hot honey lemonade (the best drink ever).

• Dinner

  la pir (wide transparent noodles with veggies) and yang rou chuar (pork kebabs).

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.15-17:11.00

Photo Comments

New photo album, including:

la tiaozi - my lunch the other day, pulled dough strips in tomato sauce.

name board lists who has private rooms reserved at this restaurant. Mr Zhu has the Rolling Streams room today.

The Natural History museum’s emphasis on evolution carried it dangerously close to eugenics, but justified its conclusions about birth control.

Minty Fresh Sprite tastes like spearmint.

Respected readers: the newspaper is for everybody to read, please don’t take it away.

Bill Gates gives Chinese students 11 guidelines for life.

Two sections of books on Matlab. Two whole sections!

Dwight and I at the Be There or Be Square cafe.

Helena and Dwight drive a hard bargain.

Beijing Linux Users Group.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.14-00:06.00

Into the Swing of Things

I’m getting into the swing of things: this morning while I was walking to the internet cafe, I was halfway across a big intersection before I realized I hadn’t looked at the pedestrian crossing light.

But seriously, walking in Beijing takes some getting used to. Most of it is mental: increasing the look-ahead range to account for bicycles, lowering your annoyance threshhold for having to stop, wait, or change directions, overcoming the fear of crossing intersections just feet away from speeding, seemingly out-of-control taxis…

Yesterday, Monday, jet-lag had me up at 7 AM, out on the streets looking for an Internet cafe. Because it was so early, most shops were closed, including the wang ba I had intended to check my e-mail at. After walking all the way to Wangfujing, I hopped on the subway to Xidan, the commercial downtown of Beijing. I picked up the long-anticipated jianbing breakfast, an egg pancake with green onions, chili sauce, wrapped around a square youtiao, a block of fried dough. There was a small net cafe filled with kids playing Counterstrike off in a small alleyway, 3 RMB per hour. As it stands, users now have to show their national ID cards to use net cafes - foreign nationals get to keep their anonymity.

OK, this is getting long. Allow me to summarize. I spent the morning at the Beijing Natural History Museum. Their dinosaur exhibit is impressive, but their human exhibit is a little disturbing (think graphic vivisections in a ‘NO PHOTOS’ room). Another visit to a net cafe, checked trains timetables at the station, and a few phone calls later I hooked up with John for dinner at a Brasilian restaurant on the Snlitun strip. We dropped by this tiny little martini bar hidden behind a construction site—the new Beijing is full of these little sturprises—and then grabbed a taxi back to Dongzhimen station, where we parted. An hour of chatting with roommates (including panda pictures from Chengdu—cute!), a little reading, and I was out for the night.

Food

• Breakfast (at a small stand in Xidan)

  hot jianbing in a plastic bag.

• Lunch

  (Mom, don’t read this) skipped.

• Dinner (Alameda brazilian restaurant)

  toasted pumpkin salad with cheese and croutons, tiger prawn and coconut rice, tonic water.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.13-09:54.00

Public Notice

I’ve begun to upload a small number of photos, starting with the Korea and Beijing albums. Note that future photos won’t be announced, but links to them will appear on the right-hand side of this page under the Photography heading.

Korean album note: Check out the kid playing on the free Playstations.

Beijing album note: the last few pictures at the moment are of the rooftop of the Beijing Saga Youth Hostel (formerly the hostel behind the Jianguomen International Hotel). The hostel actually moved right down the street from where I will be staying with uncle Ted.

I got an e-mail from Katie Beth, hopefully we can meet up soon.

permalink | Micah/Beijing | 2004.07.11-17:15.00

Incheon Airport, South Korea

The flight over was uneventful, but several things are remarkable (in the literal sense):

• The Chinese characters in Korean for “exit” are fei chang kou, something like “super opening”, or maybe “emergency opening” if you stretch it. It reminds me of fei chang ke le, a Coke competitor.

• I sat next to a nice Korean ajuma who was returning from visiting her daughter in Seattle. She gave me her extra tube of go chu jang, spicy pepper sauce. I ordered the vegetarian meals, so my food came sooner but I felt bad about eating earlier than my row-mates. In the end, I waited for their meals to come, and ended up eating inferior (though not bland) food. Next time, I eat with everybody else.

• The plane was a 747-400. Some people like that kind of trivia.

• Incheon airport is as nice as people talk it up to be. I had heard a rumor on Sleeping in Airports that the bathroom have signs with the janitor’s phone number; in fact, it’s true, and I took a pictureto prove it.

• I caught most of the Spain-Ireland Euro2004 game on an LG Plasma big-screen in the waiting area.

Food

• Dinner (last night on the plane)

  Vegetarian penne pasta, veggie (cucumber, squash, lettuce, tomato) salad, orange juice, roll, butter.

• Breakfast (on the plane today)

  omelet, orange and grapefruit slices, apple sauce (and my neightbor’s leftover rice and go chu jang).

permalink | Micah/Korea | 2004.07.11-01:00.00

Airplane Ticket: Reserved

Trip Plan for: Mr Micah Sittig

Flight Reservation Number(s): Korean Air: XZ6IHU

Reservation Number: ZPW29G

Total fare for flight reservations: 644.70 Dollars (U.S.) including tax

Flight reservations:

Flight: KE012

From: Los Angeles Int’l (LAX), Los Angeles, USA,Terminal: B

Departing: Saturday, July 10, 2004 00:30

To: Incheon Intl (ICN), Seoul, Korea Republic Of,

Arriving: Sunday, July 11, 2004 05:00

Status: Confirmed

Flight: KE851

From: Incheon Intl (ICN), Seoul, Korea Republic Of,

Departing: Sunday, July 11, 2004 10:40

To: Beijing Capital (PEK), Beijing, China,

Arriving: Sunday, July 11, 2004 11:40

Status: Confirmed

permalink | Micah/Preparation | 2004.07.06-06:54.00